When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) Read online

“Mmmmmmm.” Her voice was softer now.

  “You don’t really seem to care,” he said, “so let’s just drop it.”

  He turned to walk away, but she grabbed his wrist. “All right,” she said. “Let’s hear all about it.”

  “And I turned down the pathetic pleas of a sex-crazed singer. And a sexually frustrated lady accountant. And I walked off alone into the night. Alone. All by myself. To come home to you. Horny and unfulfilled.”

  She let go of his wrist. “I understand,” she said softly. “I’m glad you came to share this with me.” She was falling back asleep.

  “I’ll be in when I do my tapes,” he said.

  “I’ll be here,” she tried to say, but she was asleep before she finished the last word, sipping out her tiny little wee ladylike snore.

  17

  Trace’s Log:

  Tape Recording Number Three in the matter of Tony Armitage, Plaza Hotel, New York. It is late Friday night—hell, make that very early Saturday morning—and I am tired. What kind of day was it? What did Walter Cronkite used to say? A day like all days, filled with the events that alter and illuminate our time. And…You Were There.

  And I wish I hadn’t been.

  I have been everywhere, seen everything, listened to thousands of words, and I don’t know anything. If something doesn’t happen soon, I’m going to try to rouse Tony Armitage in a séance and ask him to explain it to me.

  So. Enough self-pity. On with the show. Try to forget for a while that I’m not smoking or drinking or sexing nearly enough to keep body and mind together.

  I like the Armitages’ apartment. I wonder if they sublet the living room in the summer to the Cosmos for soccer workouts. However, I don’t like Nick Armitage. I think the feeling’s mutual. He told me to leave and forget the insurance, that someday he would find out who killed his kid and take care of it his own way.

  He and his wife are peas in a pod. They know all the same things: that Tony wasn’t allowed in Nick’s nightclub; that nobody knew why Tony was wearing that mask and neither of them ever saw it before. He didn’t like my knowing that Tony was sleeping with Jennie for a while or that he told him to cool it.

  And no, dear sweet Tony didn’t use drugs, according to his father, who also had the ill grace to call Chico a slope. It was nice anyway to let him know that “the slope” dumped one of his two muscles in the disco the other night.

  And it was also nice to find out that Nick is very unbrotherly with Anna Walker. Illicit lovers shouldn’t kiss and leave doors open so insurance snoops can see.

  That was the one good thing from the visit to their apartment. The other was Martha telling me that Nick pushed Tony very hard and it was his idea that Tony be a lawyer. Am I wrong or is it a pattern that Italian gangsters always want their sons to grow up to be lawyers? Is this to save legal fees later on? Or simply an attempt, against overwhelming odds, to teach the kids the difference between right and wrong, legal and illegal? I’ll have to think this through carefully sometime when I’m not so tired.

  And I went to the grocery store today for the first time in years, but it didn’t do me any good because Cheryl, the British maid, wasn’t going to tell me anything and she turned me down for lunch and told me if I wanted to see her again, I could wait for her on a street corner. But she was lying when she said that all she knew about Tony was that he seemed like a sweet young man. Why lie? Why wouldn’t she talk to me?

  Is this what happens when you get to be forty? When women look at you and know you don’t smoke or drink nearly enough and are, therefore, no fun at all to be with? In my salad days, I would have gone through Cheryl like a dose of salts. Ahhh, sweet, flown youth. Good-bye forever.

  I didn’t tape lunch with Sarge. Just as well. It’d make me cry. First he has an office with an unlisted phone so my mother doesn’t pester him. Then, when he goes out at night, he has to leave a note on the door so she won’t get the neighbors to pester him. What a life. If ever I get married again, I’m going to have written rules of conduct. For the wife, anyway. I’ll kind of make my stuff up as I go along. Anyway, Sarge checked his cop contacts and they all say that Nick isn’t on anybody’s shit list. And Nick didn’t even go to the murder scene with the Connecticut cops. I don’t know.

  Sarge said he met Martha Armitage once on a case, but he didn’t volunteer any more about it, and I guess I just don’t want to hear about it because I don’t ask him and I should.

  I didn’t even ask him tonight when we went to Armitage’s other joint, that saloon in Drugville. Well, I didn’t have much chance to ask him ’cause he only hung around long enough to save me from that moron, Ernie, and until his telephone call went through. Who’s he cavorting with tonight?

  But Sarge said something interesting. Suppose Armitage isn’t really running around wild over his kid’s death because he knows who killed the kid. And maybe it was that Dewey Lupus, the vanished manager of the tavern. It might not have turned out to be much of a security blanket for him.

  I might have found out more if I wasn’t so transparent to that girl singer. She knew that I was pumping her all night long. Still, she told me some stuff: that Tony used to sneak down there and that Paulie, the new manager, was his friend and would warn him when Nick was coming in. I wonder if they were really friends or if Tony had other reasons for going down to Alphabet City. And she told me Tony used some drugs.

  And then Wanda Whips Wall Street. If you’re listening, Chico, only fooling. That’s Anna Walker, Martha Armitage’s sister, and she is very hard and very smart, but not nearly so smart as she thinks she is.

  Sarge thinks that Armitage keeps that saloon for sentimental reasons. Scratch that. Maybe once, but not now. They pay their singer by check and Anna comes down and picks up the receipts and then takes them back to her apartment, instead of dropping them off in a bank deposit somewhere. And they’re cooking the books. She takes the receipts up to her apartment, phonies them up, shows a lot more money coming in than is really coming in, and then they make up the shortage by using the money Nick is making uptown by selling drugs in his joint. It’s a laundry operation, to turn dirty money clean.

  She told me that the missing Dewey was a drunk and a thief and left before Nick fired him. Well, maybe. And maybe not. I didn’t believe her eyes when she told me that.

  She got upset with me when I told her something smelled about this case. Probably all for the best. If I’d have hung around, she probably would have torn off my clothes and I’d have the devil’s own time explaining to Chico.

  By the way, Chico’s going to be happy to know I met our two friends again tonight, our dancing partners from the disco. The Ugly Twins. What’s their names? Oh, yeah, Frankie the Singer and Augie the Hand. God save us every one.

  And so to bed. Tomorrow, I think maybe it’s time to look after Dewey Lupus a little bit. Find out how he was going to move to the top of the world and wound up on top of the missing person’s list.

  A job for Sarge?

  Maybe, if he can find room in his busy social schedule.

  I’ve got a whole lot of tapes in the master file. I can’t remember a case when I’ve used this many recording tapes before. I must be getting stale.

  Expenses? Call them the usual. Ahh, you say, what’s the usual? I don’t remember. Say five hundred dollars. I’ll itemize them when I go into retirement. I’ll have a lot of time then.

  I know what I need. I read about one of those devices that you can play a tape recording in and somehow it plays the tape twice as fast as normal, but without making the voices all sound like Alvin the Chipmunk. I think they somehow electronically take out the spaces between the words and nibble out a little bit of the words, but not enough so you can’t understand them. If I had one of those, I could go through my tapes in half the time.

  I wonder what they cost. Probably expensive and maybe I’d better wait for a cheaper case to work on, before I buy one and try to slide it past on my expense account. Or maybe Tony Armitage had one in hi
s shopping bag of electronic junk. I’ll have to ask that hillbilly the next time I see him. Maybe I can buy it secondhand, cheap. If you want to strike a bargain, deal with a dead man.

  18

  The telephone rang. Chico reached for it, listened for a moment, then covered the mouthpiece and shook Trace to wake him. “For you.”

  “Who the hell calls at this hour?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know. What quiff are you boffing who has a phony British accent?”

  “Phony? British? Oh, I think I know who she is,” he said.

  “I’m sure you do,” she said sweetly.

  “Give me the phone.”

  “How would you like it between your eyes?” Chico asked.

  “In the open palm of my right hand will be sufficient,” he said.

  She slapped the phone down across the palm of his hand. If it had been a riding crop, it would have cut flesh and reached bone.

  It was the maid, Cheryl, who identified herself as Cheryl Britten.

  “Hello, Trace,” she said. “Sorry if I’m disturbing you.” Her accent was still veddy veddy, but her voice sounded a little shaky to him.

  “No. Not disturbing. That was my mother. She always travels with me.”

  Chico snickered, reached her hand under the sheet, and grabbed him.

  “Yes, she’s very possessive,” he said. Chico tickled him. He tried to swat her hand away with his left hand. She responded by slipping her head under the sheet and going to bivouac with her hand.

  “I’ve got to see you right away,” Cheryl said.

  “Sure. Important?”

  “Yes. I’m leaving town and I want to talk to you first.”

  “You want to meet me here? For breakfast downstairs?” Trace asked.

  “Bring her up,” Chico mumbled from under the sheet. “We can have an orgy. Tell her to bring her yardstick and her tweed suit. I’m into English disciplines.”

  Trace hit her on the back of her head.

  “No,” Cheryl said. “I’m not…well, there’s a delicatessen at Fifty-seventh and Sixth. Southeast corner. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Okay. Forty-five minutes?” Trace asked.

  “Righto.”

  “By the way,” Trace said.

  “What?”

  “My mother says your accent’s a fake.”

  “Your mother’s right,” Cheryl said as she hung up.

  Chico reappeared from beneath the sheet. “What’d she say?”

  “She said she was born in London and has the papers to prove it. The accent comes from living forty-eight years in the islands before moving here. She’s quite an old lady actually,” Trace said.

  “You lie, God, how you lie. And her too. The accent’s a fake.”

  “Whatever you say,” Trace said patronizingly, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of knowing she was right. But he knew she was right. Chico spoke a half-dozen languages reasonably well and had an ear like a spy satellite: it missed nothing and sorted out everything. If she said fake, it was fake.

  “I take it we won’t be having breakfast together,” Chico said.

  “No. Sorry. I’m really annoyed too.”

  “Why?”

  “Today, I was going to make you a big gourmet breakfast,” he said. “I was going to have the kitchen send up the fixings and a hot plate and really do it for you. The way us big detectives always do.”

  She shook her head. “What a shame that something came up. Will you cook breakfast some other time?”

  “Certainly,” he said reassuringly.

  “Will you promise to schedule it for a day that I’m sure to be out of town?”

  “Bitch,” he said. He dived at her, but she escaped for the bathroom. He heard her lock the door behind her.

  He importuned that he was in a hurry, but she would not relent. She was already stepping into the shower, she said.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said. “And I know you’re just too nice a person to leave me out here suffering.”

  “Flatulence will get you nowhere,” she said.

  “I have to take a shower too,” he called out.

  “You can come in and co-shower. There is no way you can have the shower first. No way that I am going to step out of this shower now that I’m in it, soaking wet, soapy, my breasts smooth and creamy from the excellent body soap I always carry with me, rippling with youth and vitality….”

  It sounded very good and he tried the doorknob again. It was unlocked.

  As he stepped into the shower enclosure, he said, “Move over. And keep your hands to yourself.”

  “Nothing gives me greater pleasure. I just wanted to taunt you.”

  He showered quickly, dressed quickly, and put on his tape recorder. “I’m off now,” he called through the again-closed bathroom door.

  “Good.”

  “For breakfast with that old English lady.”

  “Liar,” she said.

  “Someday, you’ll see,” he said.

  “Spread jam on her crumpet for me,” Chico said.

  Trace had noticed that there were two kinds of delicatessens in New York City: those that charged a dollar and a half for a sandwich and had surly help, and those that charged four dollars for a sandwich and had surly help.

  This was the second kind. He arrived early, before Cheryl, sat at a table, and when the waitress growled at him, he ordered, “Two menus, black coffee, and a clean table.”

  “You don’t know what you want for breakfast?” the waitress snarled.

  “An incorrect assumption,” Trace said with a bright smile. “It’s breakfast time for you, but since I just arrived from Kuala Lumpur, I’m ready for dinner. Will you ask the chef if he has pickled camels’ bladder? But it’s got to be fresh. Frozen just isn’t the same somehow.”

  “I’ll get you the menus,” she said with great disgust.

  Cheryl arrived before the menus, before the coffee, before the clean table, but just as she sat down, the waitress arrived with a cup of coffee, two menus, and a cloth that looked as if it had been stolen from a car wash. She slapped the wet rag around the table, rearranging and dampening dirt, then slammed the menus down on the table. She put the cup of coffee in the back corner of the table, near the paper napkins.

  “I don’t need the menu,” Cheryl told her. “I’ll have coffee, toasted bagel, cream cheese, and nova.”

  “Hold the camel’s bladder,” Trace said. “I’ll have the same.”

  The waitress looked upset at having been forced to carry the heavy menus so far, on a wild-goose chase, for people who didn’t really need menus. She glanced over her shoulder as if looking for the chairman of the union’s grievance committee, then grunted and walked away. She left the menus behind.

  Trace dropped them on a chair at a nearby table, took a wad of napkins from the dispenser, and dried the table. He dumped the napkins in the middle of the adjoining table.

  They heard the waitress bellow into the kitchen, “Burn lox twice.”

  “Burn lox twice,” Cheryl said. “The voice of America. Speaking of which”—she dropped her accent and in a flattish Midwestern voice said—“I’m leaving town and I wanted to say good-bye.”

  “The accent was pretty good,” he said.

  “Not bad for a kid from Cleveland, huh?”

  “Why are you leaving?” Trace asked.

  “Well, now that you’ve gotten me fired, I thought it was time for a change.”

  “Me? How’d that happen?”

  “I went in to work this morning and the head maid handed me my paycheck and said my services were no longer required.”

  “No notice?”

  “No. They gave me two weeks’ severance, and that’s better.”

  “What did I have to do with it?” Trace asked.

  “I asked the maid what was wrong with my work, and she said that Armitage said something about my hanging out with the wrong crowd.”

  “I resent that,” Trace said. “I’m wrong, but
no crowd.”

  “When I pressed her, she said I was seen with an undesirable yesterday, going to the market.”

  “Hey, kid, I’m sorry,” Trace said.

  “Don’t be. Tell you the truth, I’d just about made up my mind to go anyway. Getting into the theater here is no easy business, and hell, I’m twenty-five, I don’t think I want to go through it anymore,” she said. “But I didn’t do anything wrong and I didn’t spill any family secrets to you, and that ticks me off. I don’t like Armitage. If I had crawled into the sack with him the way he wanted, you can be pretty damn sure I wouldn’t have been fired.”

  “He was after you.”

  “I’ve been there about seven months,” Cheryl said. “For the first three months, I couldn’t get him off my tail. If I stopped short, he’d bump into me.”

  “Well, I can’t fault his taste,” Trace said.

  “If his loving sister-in-law, sweet Anna, had her way, I’d have been long gone. She must have known he was chasing me because she was always giving me the old dagger eye.”

  The waitress came with their orders. True to form, she had brought Trace an additional cup of coffee. He resisted the impulse to tell her that he could only be charged for one. The waitress looked around, snapped up the menus from the other table, then lifted the wad of wet napkins Trace had used, and carried them away between thumb and index fingers as if they were a particularly loathsome dirty diaper.

  Cheryl sipped at her coffee and Trace asked how she happened to get with the Armitages.

  “I thought New York would be a piece of cake,” she said. “After all, I graduated from the Cleveland Academy of Dramatic Arts, didn’t I? I couldn’t even find work as a waitress. Or driving a cab. Why do you wear that frog on your tie all the time? It’s ugly.”

  “It happens to conceal a secret but powerful microphone which is recording this entire conversation,” Trace said with a smile. “You were saying you couldn’t find work.”

  She smiled back and said, “So I went to a temporary agency and I put on the phony Brit accent and faked up a background and got the job with Armitage. When I found out who he was, I thought it might be real good, because, well, with a nightclub he’s kind of in show business, and I thought he might be an entrée to something. But nothing came of it.”