When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) Read online

  “You got any plans with this case?” he asked Trace.

  “I’ve got nothing going for me, so I think I might go back to the school and look around up there some. Maybe Tony’s roommates are worth another try.”

  “When there isn’t anything else, you do what there is,” Sarge said.

  “That’s either profound or really dumb,” Trace said.

  “Really dumb. Your mother told it to me.”

  “How is she?” Trace asked.

  “She’s okay. I talked to her today. It turns out that she’s been in Vegas more than anybody else in the club, so that gives her some kind of pecking rights. Of course, she never goes anyplace but Circus Circus and their slot machines, but they don’t have to know that. And I think she has cabdrivers go past your condo. She tells them that that’s her son’s building. I think she wants them to believe that you’re a big real-estate developer.”

  “Whatever makes her happy, as long as it keeps her out of town,” Trace said. “Was she ticked that I wasn’t in Vegas?”

  “A little, I guess. But she got happier when she figured out that Chico was gone too. So I guess it all evens out.”

  “I ought to marry Chico just to spite her,” Trace said.

  “No, you ought to do it for your own pleasure and because it’s what’s best for you. Spite only lasts a little time, but what you do about it can stay with you forever. Only do what you want to do, for yourself. The hell with everybody else.”

  “See, Sarge? You’re really going to make it as a private detective. Already I’ve got you thinking big thoughts. As soon as I can improve your cooking, hell, they’ll put you on the cover of Time magazine. Detective of the Year.”

  Sarge sighed. “Well, it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. I think I’ll go home and catch a few. I’ll be in the office tomorrow.” He drained his drink and stood up from his stool. “You want to go back now?”

  “No, I think I’m going to hang out here.”

  “You’ll be able to get home all right?” Sarge said.

  “I always have. Have a good night’s sleep.”

  “Okay. I’ll probably unplug the phone so if you call and I don’t answer, don’t act like your mother. I leave it plugged in and she wakes me up at night. I unplug it and she panics. Don’t you panic.”

  Trace nodded, and after his father left, he wondered where he was really going. Then he put it out of his mind and turned on his stool to watch the redheaded singer.

  16

  Trace heard a brief patter of applause and turned to see the singer turn off her sound system, flick off the overhead spotlight, and then walk through the small lounge toward the bar.

  She stood at the end of the bar, next to Trace’s seat.

  “You’re very good,” Trace said.

  “Thank you. It’s nice to know that somebody listens once in a while. Where’s your bodyguard?”

  “My…? Oh, that was my father. He went home. I always bring him with me when I go into tough places like this.”

  “I don’t really think you need him,” the singer said.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” Trace asked.

  “Not on duty. Thanks.” Without being asked, Brian, the bartender, put a glass of orange juice on the bar in front of her.

  Trace caught a flash of movement in the mirror behind the bar and looked up to see a young man in a white shirt without a tie come from an office door on the far side of the room. He moved to the bar between Trace and the young singer and said to her, “Last set?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. I think you ought to take it downtown this set.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Liven the place up.”

  “Paulie,” she said, with a note of asperity in her voice, as if she were a teacher repeating a lesson again for the dumbest child in the school. “I don’t sing up-tempo. These people are used to the fact that I sing slow music. Ballads. That’s what I do.”

  “Sing up-stuff, you’ll have them dancing. Drinking more. We’ve got to do something about improving business.”

  “I sing ballads. If they want Def Leppard, let them go home and watch MTV.”

  “Better be careful that one of these nights you’re not home watching MTV,” the young man said ominously. He hitched up his white suspenders and walked away.

  “Moron,” the singer said softly under her breath, then asked Trace, “That offer still stand?”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Brian,” she called out. “Dewars, rocks, splash.”

  “Art versus commerce,” Trace told her. “The story of the world.” He gestured to Brian that the singer’s drink be put on his check.

  “I wouldn’t mind so much,” the young woman said, “if commerce made any sense. But this isn’t commerce arguing with art. This is stupid arguing with sense. That’s what you get when you let waiters rise above their station in life. Pfff. They call him a manager.”

  “An overachiever?” Trace said.

  She snorted. “He was an overachiever when he learned to use the potty.”

  Trace reached under his jacket and turned on his tape recorder. “I guess he hasn’t been here long,” he said.

  “How’d you guess that?”

  “Because you’re here. If he’d been here long, I don’t think you’d have been.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” she said. She thanked Brian as he put the drink in front of her, then turned back to Trace. “They came up empty of a manager about three weeks ago and so they get this giboney to fill in. And now he thinks he’s Conrad Hilton.”

  “He was a waiter?”

  She nodded and Trace asked, “Why’d they pick him?”

  “Who knows? They could have picked Brian here. He makes sense and people like him and he’s honest. Instead, they get that thing. Thanks for the drink.”

  “Anytime. Who’s they? The ones who picked him?”

  “I guess it was the big boss himself. Armitage.”

  “Armitage?” Trace repeated.

  “Nick Armitage. He owns a big nightclub in Midtown. Chez Nick.”

  “Sorry,” Trace said. “I’m from out of town. I never heard of it. If he owns a big nightclub, what’s he got this place for?”

  “I think this was his first bar or something,” she said. “Sentimental reasons, I guess.”

  Trace chuckled. “Sentiment? In a saloon owner? That’ll be the day. You ever meet him?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes he stops in for a bite to eat or something. His son used to be here a lot. Paulie, that’s the manager, and his son were friends. Maybe that’s how he got the job.”

  “They’re not friends anymore?” Trace asked.

  “The son died. Got murdered. Didn’t you read about it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Trace said. “I live three thousand miles away.”

  “Yeah, well, he was found shot alongside a highway in Connecticut. He was wearing a Richard Nixon mask.”

  She apparently decided that she had talked enough and looked down at her drink. Trace realized that she was older than he had thought at first. He put her age in the late twenties.

  “Hey,” he said, “I think I remember reading about that. The Richard Nixon mask. Yeah. They ever find out who did it?”

  She sipped at her drink. “I guess not. I never heard anything more about it.”

  “So that guy was this guy’s friend.” Trace nodded toward the manager’s door.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I guess that is how he got the job. Were they real close?”

  “Kind of. I think Paulie sort of kept an eye out for the father. The way I hear it, the father didn’t want the kid here drinking or anything, so if Paulie heard that Mr. Armitage was coming down, he’d tell Tony and Tony’d beat it quick. You think if I told Mr. Armitage that, he’d fire this nerd?”

  “Might be worth a try,” Trace said. “How’d you get along with the last manager?”

  “Like a charm. He managed. I sang
. He left me alone. So he was talky once in a while and you had to listen to him, but he wasn’t bad.”

  “Sounds like a good manager. I guess he got a better offer.”

  “I don’t know. One night, he just didn’t show up for work.”

  “No notice? That’s a helluva way to quit,” Trace said.

  “Different strokes, I suppose.”

  “You think he’d at least stop back in and say hello,” Trace said. “How long’s he been gone?”

  “About a month ago, I guess. Let me think.” She played on the fingers of one hand with the fingers of the other. “Yes, just a month ago.”

  Trace imitated her, pressing his fingers together. “I could do that and I still couldn’t remember what happened yesterday.”

  “I’ve got a good memory,” she said. She suddenly bolted down the rest of her drink and said, “Back on. Break’s over. You going to stay awhile?”

  “Wouldn’t leave now,” Trace said.

  “Good.”

  “Don’t forget to take it downtown now,” Trace said with a smile.

  She smiled back and said, “Dirge time. Waiters don’t tell me what to sing.”

  There were only a couple of customers left at the bar when Brian came down to refill Trace’s glass.

  “You’ve got one vote for manager,” Trace said.

  “Oh, Alicia? Sure. She doesn’t care much for Paulie.”

  “Why not try for the job?” Trace asked.

  “Not me,” Brian said. “You get to be the manager and you start hiring and firing and worrying about stock and who’s cheating, and then you’ve got to deal with the owner. Me? I just show up, make my drinks, take the money and run. I leave this place behind the minute I walk out the door. My name’s Brian Dennehy, by the way.” He extended a hand and Trace shook it.

  “They call me Trace.”

  “That was your father in here with you before?”

  Trace nodded.

  “Not a man to tangle with,” Brian said.

  “I’m going to knock him on his butt,” Trace said, adding with a smile, “but I think I’ll wait until his ninety-second birthday. The girl was telling me the tale of the mysterious disappearing manager.”

  Brian shrugged. “Maybe somebody made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

  “I had a cousin like that once,” Trace said. “Just vanished off the face of the earth. But I knew it was happening. A couple of months beforehand, I could see him twitching around and looking off into space and like that. He was like a bomb waiting to go off.”

  Brian glanced down the bar. Satisfied that no one was waiting for a drink, he said, “Not Dewey. He was here one night, talking about how he was moving up in the world, and then he was gone. Not a worry in his mind that I could see.”

  “Maybe he was on something,” Trace said. “People get that way, they get juiced up or something, start talking about conquering the world. Was it like that, maybe?”

  “I don’t know. He was talking about Mr. Armitage moving him up, maybe going to make him manager of the uptown place. I laughed at him and told him he’d get the job as soon as I got to be the manager of the Waldorf Astoria. ‘A lot you know,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be mine. You’ll see.’ Then he never came back. Funny, you know, because Armitage used to call him once in a while and I thought maybe he was some kind of fair-haired boy. He and Armitage even went out together a couple of nights before that and…aah, who knows?”

  “Maybe all the plans got fouled up when Armitage’s son got killed,” Trace suggested. “That was right around then, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. It was just a couple of nights after that that Dewey was talking big. I remember ’cause Dewey said maybe we should close the place for the funeral and I said that was stupid, you don’t go closing saloons for funerals of silent partners’ relatives, and Dewey said, well, that maybe I was right. Where you from?”

  “Las Vegas,” Trace said.

  “Just visiting relatives?” Brian asked.

  “Mostly. And trying to avoid the ex-wife and kids,” Trace said. “Maybe if I have to meet them, I’ll do it over here. You run a nice clean place.”

  “We try to,” Brian said. “That’s why I got so bent before when Ernie started acting up.”

  “Yeah,” Trace said. “My old man’s got eyes like an eagle. He’s been a cop forever. And that’s what he was saying. He said, this whole neighborhood is swimming in dope and there just isn’t any in this bar.”

  “It’d be my ass if there was,” Brian said. “Armitage wouldn’t let it happen. He runs this place clean as a whistle. Funny story. One night, Armitage is here for dinner and some guy in the dining room lights up a joint and starts to smoke. Well, Armitage had his two…I don’t know, assistants, I guess you could call them…throw him out. Then a month later, Armitage is in again and the same guy is in, minding his own business, not doing anything, and Armitage threw him out again. He never forgets. He told me, ‘Don’t let that guy in here again.’”

  “Alicia said he wouldn’t even let his son hang out here,” Trace said. “That Paulie’d tip off the kid if the father was coming.”

  “That’s right. They were close, him and Tony.” He looked along the bar again, then left Trace to go pour a drink.

  A minute or two later, the singer finished her final set. As Trace watched, she packed her guitar in a case, then came and stood by him at the bar.

  The manager stuck his head out of the office door and called her name.

  “The eagle poops,” she said to Trace. “Excuse me.”

  In the bar mirror, he saw her talking to Paulie. He handed her a slip of paper, then talked some more. Trace saw her shake her head. Then, almost as if on a rehearsed beat, they both turned away from the other.

  Alicia came back to the bar. “Nerd,” she said.

  “What’d he say?”

  “He didn’t like the last set. Much too depressing.”

  “What’d you say?” Trace asked.

  “I told him if he thought that was depressing, be sure to be here tomorrow night. I’m going to sing Schumann Lieder, my own arrangement of the ‘Volga Boatman,’ and famous Italian death arias.” She was slowly folding a piece of paper that she put into her purse.

  “Now I’ve seen everything,” Trace said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A musician getting paid by check. Will wonders never cease?”

  “I tell you, this is a strange place. They pay me by check and they send me a ten-ninety-nine at the end of the year. Can you imagine that? I never filed a tax return in my life until I started working here. Now I’m stuck, the IRS knows I exist. I’ll have to work here forever. Good-bye, La Scala.”

  “I knew that voice was too good to have learned in a saloon,” Trace said.

  “Mannes School of Music. Do you know, I always thought that good golfers were tripping over each other and that there were too many world-class tennis players. That the world was filled with ballroom dancers and piano players. But you want to see surplus, go look at mezzo-sopranos. Go out on the street and scratch any woman, and nine out of ten of them are going to scream contralto. This is a tough business.”

  “When I buy my own opera house, Alicia, you’re hired,” Trace said.

  “Is there any chance of that?”

  “Not unless I hit the New York Lotto twenty-one weeks in a row. Or my ex-wife pays back what she stole from me. She spent it on marks-manship lessons for my kids.”

  “Well, they’re both small chances, but they give me something to hope for.”

  She went to the ladies’ room and Trace wondered if he should call Chico. It was after midnight and he was concerned that she had gotten back to the room safely. But if he called her, she would know that he had been worried about her. It would give her an extra little handle on him. It would be best not to call. Let her know that he didn’t really care that much. If she wanted to traipse all over New York at night, she was on her own. He surely wasn’t going to be worri
ed about her. That’d show her. Of course. That’s exactly what he would do. He wouldn’t call.

  He got up and dialed the Plaza. The telephone in his room rang four times before Chico answered. She had been sleeping. Her voice was a quiet, groggy “Hello?”

  “This is Trace. My American Express card. Did I leave the room without it?”

  “Trace,” she repeated, as if trying to place him. “Oh, yeah. Trace. Listen, I’m back safely. I had a nice time. It was nice of you to be worried and call. Have a good time with Sarge. Oyasumi Nasai.”

  And she hung up.

  So much for subtlety, Trace thought. There was just no way to outwit the insidious little Eurasian. He went into the men’s room and put a new tape into his small recorder.

  When he came back out, Alicia looked ready to leave and Trace was happy that she had no problems about leaving without him. He hadn’t cheated all night. He had drunk only wine. He hadn’t cheated smoking either, unless one wanted to be a nitpicker and count the nine cigarettes he had borrowed from the bartender. He didn’t want to cheat with a woman tonight either.

  “That time of the evening,” she said with a smile. “See you again?”

  “I’ll be back. I like this place. Have you got a car?”

  “Yeah. I’m parked just a few doors down.”

  “I’ll walk you out there.” Trace looked at Brian, who was beginning to tote up customer’s checks from the now-closed dining room. “Brian, I’m taking the lady to her car. I’ll be right back.”

  “I’ll be here until Wanda comes.”

  Trace hoisted the singer’s guitar case. He was surprised at how light it was. “Wanda?” he said to her.

  “The lady who comes in for the money at night,” Alicia said. “Tough lady. We call her ‘Wanda Whips Wall Street.’ Brian’s butt is suet if he’s a dollar off.”

  “Is Wanda her real name?”

  Alicia shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  He walked with her to her car, a ratty old Dodge Dart with so much body rot it looked as if it ought to be a lobby display at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.

  She put the guitar in the trunk and he stood with her while she unlocked the driver’s door.