Once a Mutt (Trace 5) Read online

  “And leaving Elvira?” Chico said. “She must be a beauty.”

  “She is. She’s a real beauty. And she would have lent me ten thousand dollars if she had it,” Trace said.

  “She told you that? I didn’t hear it on the tape.”

  “Not exactly, but I can tell,” Trace said. “I know good-hearted people when I see them.”

  “Particularly, I guess, when you see them real close up like you saw this Elvira. Was she good?” Chico asked.

  “I’m ignoring that question. Watch me ignore it,” Trace said. “How did you get in here anyway?”

  “I have my ways,” Chico said.

  “Tell me about them. I always have trouble getting into places.”

  “Obviously you didn’t have much trouble getting into Elvira’s place.”

  “How’d you get in here?” Trace repeated with a disgusted look on his face.

  “I waited for the maid to clean up and then I just breezed in like I belonged here. Maids never know who’s supposed to be staying in a room.”

  “You’re very devious,” Trace said.

  “But you knew that all along,” Chico said.

  “So what devious reason brought you here?” Trace said.

  “I had a couple of days off. I thought you’d be glad to see me.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Why?” Chico asked.

  “Because I’m not doing any good. I’m not finding out a thing. Pay the damned woman her damned money and let me go home and jump in Lake Mead.”

  “Sarge told me you sounded depressed,” Chico said.

  “You talked to him?”

  “Of course. He’s the only one in your family worth talking to. Present company included.”

  “You traveled twenty-five hundred miles to insult me?” Trace said.

  “Oh, Trace, you’re such a dork.”

  “Say what?”

  “You’re a dork. I came to make you rich,” Chico said.

  “You’re going to lend me the money for the restaurant, right? I take back everything I said about you on tape.”

  “The postcard too. That I’m petty and mean-spirited and a small person?”

  “Yes. All the other stuff too. Did you bring a check?” Trace asked.

  “Better than that.”

  “You shouldn’t travel with a lot of cash on you,” Trace said. “Westport isn’t safe.”

  “Better than cash.”

  Trace’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Nothing’s better than cash,” he said. “What’d you bring?”

  Chico held up the little cellophane package of green goo he had taken from Maggie’s room the day before.

  “You didn’t bring that,” Trace said. “I had that.”

  “You don’t know what it is, do you?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “A solution to all your problems,” she said.

  He insisted that she explain herself and she did, and thirty minutes later when she had finished, Trace agreed. Yes, he was a dork.

  The telephone rang even as Trace walked toward it. The caller was the man Trace wanted to talk to. Lt. Sam Roscoe.

  The policeman said, “All right, Tracy, what’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The state police just pulled a car out of a quarry about forty miles north of here. A red Mercedes. It’s registered to an Alphonse Bigot of West Hampstead, New Hampshire. He’s the one you were asking about.”

  “That’s right,” Trace said. “Did they find his body yet?”

  “No. Is he dead?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Trace said.

  “I think you’d better get down here right away.”

  “We’re on our way,” Trace said.

  20

  The intercom buzzed on Adam Shapp’s desk and he picked up the telephone, said, “Ask them to come in,” and hung up.

  “Mrs. Paddington’s here,” he said.

  Trace nodded.

  A moment later, the door to the office opened and the large bulk of Ferdinand loomed in the doorway. He was pushing Mrs. Paddington in the wheelchair.

  Despite the heat of the summer day, she was dressed in a brown tweed suit, with man’s-style walking shoes on her feet. She still wore dark glasses and the skin of her face was tan and looked leathery. Her pale hands were folded neatly in her lap. Trace looked at Chico, who nodded to him.

  Ferdinand pushed the wheelchair into the room and closed the door as Adam Shapp stood.

  “Hello, Mrs. Paddington,” he said.

  “Hello, Mr. Shapp,” she responded with her thick BBC accent.

  Trace saw Ferdinand glaring at him and Trace winked. Shapp waved a hand toward Trace.

  “You’ve met Mr. Tracy, I believe,” he said.

  “Yes, indeed,” Mrs. Paddington said. “Hello, Mr. Tracy.”

  Trace stood up and smiled a long moment before answering. “Hello, Maggie,” he said.

  For a brief moment, the woman’s face froze.

  Then she said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, ‘Hello, Maggie,’” Trace repeated. He saw Ferd’s eyes dart from him to Shapp and back to Trace.

  “Don’t be upset and start rattling your chain, Ferd,” said Trace soothingly. “It’s all right. We know all about it.”

  “Mrs. Paddington,” Ferd said, “I think you should leave this place. I don’t like having this man around.”

  “That’s a good idea, Ferdinand,” The woman in the wheelchair said. “We should leave.”

  “You shouldn’t leave yet,” Trace said mildly. “Not before Dr. Bigot’s wife arrives. I’m sure you’d have a lot to talk about with her. You could tell her about the quarry, Ferd. Where you dumped the car.”

  Ferd had been backing toward the door, pulling the wheelchair with him. He stopped suddenly now, his face hopelessly racked with confusion.

  “We’re leaving,” he said, his voice soft and menacing. “Right now. Don’t you try to stop us.” He reached behind him to pull open the door, then took a step backward and bumped into Lt. Sam Roscoe, who had moved into the open doorway.

  “I’m Lieutenant Roscoe of the Westport police,” he said. “I think we should have a talk.”

  Trace moved forward in case Ferd should try to bowl over the smaller man, but Ferd just stopped. His shoulders drooped and he pushed the wheelchair back into the room. He looked down at the woman in the chair, who shook her head at him, sadly, then stood up and looked toward Trace and Chico.

  “How did you figure it out?” she said. The British accent was gone.

  “You made mistakes,” Trace said, “and it wasn’t meant to be. The Paddingtons might have been nuts but they were purebreds. You two are mutts. Especially Ferdinand. Once a mutt, always a mutt.”

  “That’s not very complimentary,” the woman said.

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” Trace said.

  “Damn it,” Adam Shapp snapped. “This isn’t Mrs. Paddington?”

  “No,” Trace said. “This is Maggie, her maid.”

  “Then where’s Mrs. Paddington?” Shapp asked.

  “She died in a plane crash,” Trace said. “With her husband.”

  Trace and Chico were in the dining room of the Ye Olde English Motel. It was the first time Trace had seen it and it was a nice room, the kind he liked, with brick walls and not too many lights, but he was not happy, because when he had tried to order a drink, Chico had told the waitress, “He’ll have a glass of rosé wine.”

  He felt like a boy kept after school for misbehaving. Sullenly he had ordered dinner, prepared to punish Chico by not eating any of it. But she hadn’t seemed to mind, and when she had finished her dinner, she switched plates with him and started to eat his.

  Sam Roscoe came into the dining room and sat at their table. He told the waitress, “Just coffee,” and when she left, he told Trace and Chico, “It’s a murder charge, too. The state police had divers all day at the quarry and they found Bigot’s body. It looks like he
was strangled.”

  “Too bad,” Trace said. “He’s never going to make it to Beverly Hills.”

  “Yeah, too bad,” Chico agreed without lifting her head. Her mouth was full of food and she was talking while chewing. Barely had she swallowed when another load of supplies was heading mouthward.

  “And Ferd’s prints were all over Bigot’s car,” Roscoe said. “We got them coming and going. They’re singing like birds now.”

  “Good,” mumbled Chico

  “Evildoers take warning. If you want to steal quiche, don’t do it in Westport,” Trace said.

  “You did a good job on this, Tracy,” said Roscoe. He pushed back from the table as his coffee arrived.

  “I couldn’t have done it without the help of my loyal Eurasian assistant,” Trace said.

  Chico finally looked up. “That’s for sure,” she said.

  “You know I’ll have to take a statement from you,” Roscoe said. “But that’ll wait till tomorrow. I was just wondering what gave you the first tip?”

  Trace looked blank, then said, “Chico, why don’t you tell him about it? I don’t like to brag.”

  Chico gulped down a final chip of breadstick and washed it down with a half-glass of milk that left a faint white mustache on her upper lip. Trace reached across the table to wipe it off with his napkin.

  “Sure,” she said. She turned to Roscoe and patted his hand and said, “’Evening, Lieutenant. I’m sorry if I was rude, but I hate to talk when I’m eating.”

  “If that were true, you’d be silent most of the time,” Trace said.

  “Quiet. Or I’ll have you explain it all to him, Chico said.

  Trace sipped at his coffee. He wondered if he would be able to sneak into the bar after Chico went to sleep.

  “There were hints all over the place,” Chico told Roscoe. “First thing was that nobody ever saw Maggie and Mrs. Paddington together. You didn’t, Lieutenant, and the lawyer didn’t, and Trace didn’t. When Trace went up there to see her, Ferd said that Maggie had gone to the store, but both cars were still in the garage and it’s too far out to walk to town. That smelled fishy to anybody with any sense.”

  “It’s easy for you to say,” Trace grumbled, and Chico held up her hand for silence.

  “So then Trace followed Maggie to the health spa and started pestering her. He’s like that, a real pest. But he never gave her his name. Still, when he went downstairs to wait for her, Ferd bopped him.”

  “A sneak attack,” Trace said.

  “But the thing was, why did Maggie phone Ferd to come and meet her? Why didn’t she just figure that Trace was your usual run-of-the-spa girl-chasing nerd. She wasn’t supposed to know who he was, and the whole thing only made sense if she recognized him because she’d seen him while she was impersonating Mrs. Paddington.”

  “That makes sense,” Roscoe said.

  “Don’t encourage her, Lieutenant. She gets very filled with herself at times like these.”

  “Can I tell him about the burglary, Trace?” Chico asked.

  “What burglary?” Roscoe said sharply.

  “It wasn’t a burglary. I went up to the Paddington house one day and nobody answered, but the door was open so I went in looking to make sure that Mrs. Paddington was all right,” Trace lied. “And I saw a couple of things.”

  “I don’t believe that, but I’ll make believe I do,” Roscoe said.

  “Anyway,” Chico said, “Trace saw a whole lot of things. The wheelchair was still in the same place and it had a lot of dust on it. It hadn’t been moved or used. And Trace didn’t find anything in Mrs. Paddington’s room. It’s like nobody stayed there. There was a little bottle of makeup in the medicine cabinet. That was important.”

  “Why?” Roscoe said.

  “Because it’s a special makeup for oily skin. When I was a kid, I used to think I had oily skin, so I used it once. When it dried, I looked like the mummy in an old Hollywood movie. It wrinkles up your skin and makes it look old. Trace saw that about Mrs. Paddington right away, how young her hands were and how old her face looked. When they came to Shapp’s office today, I could tell right away she was wearing makeup to look wrinkled. The hands were too young.”

  “Tell him about the green stuff,” Trace said.

  “Trace found this green stuff in a tube and didn’t know what it was.”

  “What was it?” Roscoe asked.

  “It was dental cement. I worked one summer in a dentist’s office. It’s what dentists use to stick temporary bridgework in place. Every time Trace looked at a picture of Mrs. Paddington or the one time he met her, and everybody he talked to, all anybody could think about was her big buckteeth. It was a terrific disguise. Maggie stuck in those phony teeth that she must have had made and nobody ever looked close at her.”

  Roscoe nodded. “She took them out when I was questioning her before. Said they hurt like hell.”

  “The hair color too,” Chico said. “Trace saw a photo of Maggie and her hair was darker, and some real-estate guy in New Hampshire said she was a beautiful redhead. Why would a beautiful redhead decide to become a mousy blonde?”

  “Some people like mousy blondes,” Trace said. “Gentlemen prefer blondes.”

  “How would you know?” Chico said. “Anyway, she changed her hair color to match Mrs. Paddington’s. She wore it long for herself and sprayed it up when she was playing Mrs. Paddington. Nobody in her right mind gets rid of beautiful red hair.”

  Roscoe nodded and signaled the waitress “Another coffee,” he said.

  Trace was about to order a real drink when Chico said, “And another glass of wine for him.” Trace turned around in his chair so he didn’t have to look at the treacherous little Eurasian.

  Roscoe said, “We tracked down Mrs. Bigot a couple of hours ago, and it’s like you told me. When Trace was up there, he said that Mrs. Paddington had pinkeye. But Mrs. Bigot remembered that it was Maggie who had that when they lived up there. After Trace left, she mentioned it to her husband. He figured out that Maggie and Ferd were probably running an insurance scam. He had big money problems, so he went down to try to cut his way in.”

  “And Ferd killed him,” Trace said.

  “Well, they haven’t admitted that part yet, but that’s what it looks like. They killed him and then dumped car and body into that quarry. When Mrs. Bigot didn’t hear from him, that’s when she called Trace to see if he had heard anything. She got spooked when he said no, and she went to stay with relatives, but we tracked her down.”

  “Good,” Trace said. “There was some other stuff too. When Maggie and Ferd wanted to rent that house in New Hampshire, she wrote to their lawyer, a cold, stiff kind of letter. It would have been so much easier just to telephone him. I figure that’s because Maggie wasn’t sure about what she was doing yet or if she could pull off the Mrs. Paddington impersonation.”

  Roscoe nodded. “She said that she was really scared about it for a while and that was the big reason they moved. So that no one would know them in a new town. But they were afraid to try to sell the house in New Hampshire because the bankers or somebody might recognize them, so they just rented it out and collected the rent checks.”

  “The biggest guess was the plane crash,” Chico said. “Everybody Trace talked to said that the Paddingtons were always together. Even when he was in Hollywood, supposedly bouncing around with starlets, his wife was with him. It just didn’t make sense that he’d go off to save seals or whatever it was without her. Did Maggie talk about that?”

  “Yeah,” Roscoe said. “The two of them took off one morning. Paddington was a straight guy, but apparently he was a pretty wild pilot. Maggie was with them in the kitchen when they got this idea to fly up there on the spur of the moment. Maggie heard the wife say, ‘Shouldn’t we file a flight plan?’ or something like that, but Paddington just shrugged it off. They were supposed to be back in four days. The next day, Maggie remembered, she read about big storms that were over the Atlantic, but she didn’t think to
o much about it. Four days came and went and they didn’t get any word. But they waited. They worked for the Paddingtons, so they waited. After a couple of weeks, they asked a few questions and found out the Paddingtons never got to the big seal protest. It was another couple of months before they decided that the plane must have crashed and maybe they could cash in on it. They started small at first, signing Mrs. Paddington’s name to checks, paying bills, stuff like that—small stuff, so that if the Paddingtons showed up one day, they could just say they were trying to keep things running smoothly. Finally they decided they could get away with it forever, but it’d be easier if they moved where no one knew them.”

  “They might have gotten away with it forever,” Chico said, “if they hadn’t gotten greedy.”

  “Greed is the poison of the human spirit,” Trace said unctuously. “Some persons within earshot would be well-advised to remember that.”

  “Stuff it, Trace,” Chico said.

  “Were they married?” Trace asked.

  “Ferd and Maggie? Yeah,” Roscoe said. “They came from some small town in Minnesota. Ferd was a high-school janitor and Maggie was a student and they got married after he knocked her up. But she lost the baby. She’s kind of afraid of him.”

  Trace rubbed the fading bruise under his left eye. “I can’t imagine why,” he said.

  “Anyway,” Roscoe said, “I just came over to thank you. Tomorrow, when we take your statement, Tracy, let’s not say anything about the burglary that wasn’t a burglary. My life is complicated enough as it is.”

  “That suits me fine,” Trace said.

  After the policeman left Trace said to Chico, “It all sounded so easy when you told about it. Why couldn’t I do it?”

  “Because you were drunk most of the time you were here,” Chico said. “You think you function just as well when you’re drunk, but let me tell you, as someone who’s slept next to you for four years, that’s a pipe dream.”

  “Well, that’s behind us now,” Trace said. “Moderation is my new game plan from here on in. For instance, to celebrate, I might have one vodka tonight. Just one.”