Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) Read online

  “So far, so good,” I said. “Just the way they teach it at Famous Detectives’ School.”

  “So I go down alongside the house, between the house and some high hedges, heading for the back yard. Nobody can see me because the hedges are so high, so I’m safe, and I stop alongside the windows to listen if I can hear anything.”

  “Squealing? Oohs and ahhs?” I said.

  “Right. But there isn’t any, so I get to the gate leading to the back yard and I’m wondering about going in, or maybe I should go up and ring the doorbell and ask for directions, and if the woman doesn’t answer or if she’s in a bathrobe, then I know I’ve got her.”

  “Why didn’t you do it? It sounds smart to me,” I said.

  “I was going to. Then I heard a sound.”

  “A squeal? An oooh or an ahhh?”

  “More like a little grunt, from the back yard. So I go up to the gate, and would you believe it, there’s the two of them on a picnic table in the back yard and he’s porking her, right there on the picnic table, right out in God’s good golden sunshine.”

  “Sounds real romantic. What’d you do?”

  “Don’t you want to know what she looked like?” he asked me. “It makes a better story.”

  “Sarge, what did she look like?”

  “She was beautiful, son. Long red hair and a wonderful body and just beautiful.”

  “What’d you do then?”

  “I used my handy-dandy little camera and I sneaked a dozen pictures of them flagranting the delicto and then I got out of there.”

  “The guy didn’t spot you? You didn’t get punched in the face or arrested or something?”

  “Hey. I said the guy was big. I didn’t say he was that big,” Sarge said.

  “After you left, you lost the camera?” I said.

  “No.”

  “The film was exposed to the light.”

  “No,” he said.

  “I don’t understand then what’s making you look like a commercial for Alka-Seltzer.”

  “Because I’m on the job for fifteen minutes and it’s done. A hundred and a half a day for a divorce and I wind up with some round-heeled bimbo who’s screwing the first guy she sees. I thought we had at least a week’s. work out of this job.” He finished the beer with one gargantuan pull on the bottle that made it seem like he was going to suck the color off the inside of the brown glass.

  “And now I’m stuck,” he said. “I don’t want to be lying to a client, telling him I didn’t find out anything when I already did. All the private eyes I used to run into on the job would do that, just keep their meter running as long as they could, and I hate that ’cause it’s cheating. I don’t want to do it. But I don’t think it’s fair either that I’ve got this case nailed down inside a half-hour. See? I told you. A moral dilemma.”

  “No big deal,” I said.

  He didn’t hear me. He said, “Why couldn’t I draw an ex-nun who’s got to be wooed and wined and seduced slowly, not somebody who’s getting pronged by some delivery boy right in the middle of the back yard?”

  “Maybe it was rape,” I said hopefully. “Rape doesn’t count. You’d have to give her credit for a rape.”

  “I thought of that. Until she started cooperating in other ways. I remember that old joke. Feel sorry for her, her mother went down on the Titanic. This was the mother.”

  “As I said, it’s no big deal. You’re making a mistake in logic. You’re forgetting that one swallow does not a summer make.”

  “I saw her swallow too,” Sarge said. “And I’ve got it on film.”

  “But it’s not enough. You give just this much to the husband and you’re going to find out in divorce court that the woman was on medication today that affected her judgment, or she met this delivery boy who was her long-ago first boyfriend, the one who first plucked this innocent flower, and in a moment of madness, she succumbed to him again and it’s a terrible thing that she did and she’ll regret it for the entire rest of her life and she doesn’t want to be divorced from her husband, the only man she ever really loved. She knows that now, even if she didn’t know it when she was playing Holland Tunnel for the muscle-bound zinnia salesman. It could go on like that in court.”

  “What are you getting at?” Sarge said.

  “Just this. You’ve got to make sure. You got a picture of the flower truck’s license plate?”

  “Of course. I’m not stupid.”

  “Fine. You’ve got to find out who he is. Where he’s from. Has he got a rape record? Then you’ve got to find out if this is just an isolated incident or if she’s putting out for everybody within ten miles of the World Trade Center. No isolated incidents allowed. I think you’ve got to park yourself outside that house and track the traffic. I think you’ve got to see if other people come, or if Flowers comes again.”

  “He came once. I saw him.”

  “Once is not enough,” I said. Sarge looked doubtful and I said, “Sarge, you sent me to Jesuit college. Don’t you think I know something about mental reservations?”

  “About lying too,” he said. “All right. I’ll give it a couple more mornings, but then that’s it. I won’t run the fee up on our client, no matter how much we need it.”

  “We don’t need it anymore,” I said. “I’m making us rich.”

  “You’ve stopped drinking,” Sarge said.

  “Please. One Chico Mangini in the firm is enough. I’ve got us a big job from the insurance company.” I told him what it was about and he said, “Five hundred dollars a day for nursemaiding a drunk? Sounds like work you were born for, boy. How long do you think it’ll run?”

  “I figure I might squeeze a couple of weeks out of it anyway,” I said. “Just until Chico gets back here.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “This arrived just in time, then.” He held up the piece of paper. “Your gun permit.”

  “Yeah. Chico’s came too. You didn’t tell her about it, did you?”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t talked to her.”

  “Good. Don’t tell her about it. She’s just going to shoot somebody.”

  He stood up and said, “Beats getting shot.” He walked to the file cabinet in the corner of the room and took out a package wrapped in newsprint.

  “Here. This is for you.”

  He handed me the package. It weighed a ton. When I opened it on the desk, I found inside a well-oiled .38-caliber Police Special.

  “Careful. It’s loaded,” he said.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said honestly.

  “It was my first gun when I joined the force. I want you to have it, now that it’s legal for you.”

  “That’s wonderful, Sarge. I’ll always treasure it.”

  A little later, he got ready to go home. Home, for him, is Middle Village, Queens. Home, for him, is my mother. Fortunately, that’s his problem, not mine.

  I had taken two tissues out of the box on his desk and was dusting off my shoes, a job I do once every six months whether they need it or not.

  “Want to come home for dinner tonight?” Sarge said.

  “No. Jesus Christ, where did you get these tissues?”

  “Your mother bought them. What’s wrong?”

  “Where’d she get them, Tissue City? They feel like they’re made out of crushed Uneeda biscuits.”

  “Waste not, want not, as your mother says.”

  “And says and says and says,” I said. “Give her my love. I’ll pass on dinner.”

  “I wish I could,” he said, and when he left, he made me promise to call him from upstate as soon as I had the job figured out.

  I waited until I heard the downstairs door slam shut before I unloaded the gun and put the bullets in the desk drawer.

  Then I put Chico’s gun permit and the pistol under one of the couch cushions.

  First of all, I wasn’t going to carry a gun.

  Second of all, if I did carry a gun, it wasn’t go
ing to be this relic from the O.K. Corral.

  Third, if I ever did decide to carry it, I’d have to hire someone to carry it for me because it weighed forty pounds.

  Fourth, I was on my way to upstate New York to make sure some drunk didn’t wind up killing himself for no good reason. Who’d need a gun?

  The permit and gun would be safe under the cushion because Sarge and I would never disturb them by cleaning. Chico might but only when she was convinced that Sarge and I didn’t expect her to clean.

  Later I realized I hadn’t eaten all day and I went down to Bogie’s for a sandwich. Fortunately there weren’t any private detectives or writers there, so I didn’t miss carrying Sarge’s elephant gun. Later I took a shower in Billy and Karen’s back apartment.

  Then I went upstairs again and slept on the couch. I was supposed to be looking for an apartment, but I thought I’d leave that job for Chico when she arrived.

  Sarge didn’t know I was staying here. He thought I was staying with friends. He should have known that that wasn’t very likely. I don’t have any friends.

  I spent the shank of the evening lying on the crusty old coach, trying not to be impaled on Sarge’s elephant bazooka and reading the files Groucho gave me on Tony McCue.

  McCue was born in the Midwest and had been the star of a couple of mediocre television series. He was making large amounts of money, and then, to the consternation of the business, he had packed it all in and gone to England. He was, he had said, a fraud who couldn’t act as well as Lassie, and he was going to England to learn his trade. He stayed overseas for seven years, doing stagework, avoiding cameras, minding his business, and letting his name generally be forgotten. When he returned to Hollywood, he returned with a roar, starring in four hit movies in succession and quickly moving to that top rank of stars whose presence in a film could make it a hit. He had been on top now for a dozen years, and reading the newspaper clippings about him, I decided Groucho had a reason to be worried about the insurance company’s investment.

  I don’t want anybody to think that I just generally believe everything I read in supermarket newspapers. For instance, I don’t think that Michael Jackson is the marooned commander of a wrecked alien spaceship, waiting on earth for a rescue craft to come. At least, I don’t believe all of it.

  But I do believe that where there’s a lot of smoke, there’s usually at least a little fire, and all these stories made McCue out to be a nut case. He went from fistfight to lawsuit to paternity battle. He fought with directors, producers, and costars. One day he gave his stuntman the day off and spent the whole day doing dangerous stunts on a rope hanging down the side of a mountain, until the producer found out and got him down. Then the producer fired the stuntman for dereliction of duty. This prompted McCue to walk off the picture until the stuntman was rehired. That scored him one point in my book.

  He had had a small heart attack. He traveled with a psychiatrist in tow. He made commercials in favor of the Vietnam War and said that Jane Fonda had cottage cheese for brains.

  Two points for McCue.

  He had an opinion about everything and didn’t seem afraid to voice it. About one president of the screen actors’ union, he said, “That man is so dumb he thinks Nicaragua is in Southeast Asia.” He offered a personal reward of $50,000 for “anyone who will bring me the empty head of the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

  I read about all his fights and all his antics and convinced myself that Walter Marks had conned me again. Tony McCue sounded like a five-thousand-dollar-a-day job, not five hundred.

  I put the file away and decided to go to sleep. I don’t always sleep in my clothes, no matter what kind of lies Chico spreads about me, but I figured there wasn’t much reason to take them off because I was driving upstate the next day and my clothes were going to get all wrinkled anyway from driving, so what difference did it make if they were wrinkled to start with?

  Sometimes I take a lot of time thinking about things like this, and Chico will say stuff like, “All the time you’ve spent allegedly thinking, you could have taken your clothes off ten times by now.” See? She’s a woman and she thinks that just because you can do a thing quickly, maybe you ought to do it. I worry more about the rights and wrongs of things.

  I quoted Strindberg at her. “Women, being small and foolish and therefore evil, should be suppressed, like barbarians and thieves.”

  She did not think this funny and told me that Strindberg was exceeded in stupidness only by me. I said that I didn’t think a lot of truly stupid people quoted Strindberg in the first place. She said that lately there was a lot of it going around.

  The telephone rang just as I closed my eyes.

  “Is this Devlin Tracy?” a caller asked.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Tony McCue. Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why are you trying to make my life miserable?”

  “I didn’t know that I was,” I said.

  “Trust me. You are.”

  “I don’t trust anybody who says ‘trust me.’ What do you want?”

  “I want you to meet me right now.”

  “You’re not my problem until tomorrow,” I said.

  “It’s one minute after midnight. I’m now your problem. Somebody just told me that I couldn’t walk down the white line in the middle of Fifty-seventh Street for two blocks without getting hit by a car. What do you think?”

  “I think you should wait until I get there,” I said.

  “I thought you’d see it my way,” he said.

  I caught a cab about three minutes before I would have frozen to death. There are two kinds of cabdrivers in New York: one kind knows every street in the city and tells you all about it; the other kind doesn’t speak any English and couldn’t get you to Central Park if you started out at the Plaza Hotel across the street. This was one of the first kind, but I tuned him out as he took me uptown to where McCue was in one of those Fifty-seventh Street places, overpriced, overpublicized, overyuppied.

  There was a big white Rolls-Royce parked in front of the restaurant, smack dab alongside a fire hydrant. Naturally it was unticketed. Rollses don’t get ticketed in New York. After all, they might belong to a pimp or somebody important.

  The restaurant that took up the back of the building was closed, but there were about a dozen people in the bar, clustered around a small table in the center of the floor. I sidled my way through the press and found McCue sitting at a table, across from some guy who looked like Hulk Hogan, preparing to arm-wrestle him.

  “All right,” McCue said. “For the hat and coat.”

  “Okay,” the other man said. Somebody was acting as referee and he’d been watching too much arm-wrestling on television because he took forever to inspect their grips and make sure everything was fair. Finally, he released their hands and said, “Go!”

  If there had been an echo, it wouldn’t have died out before McCue’s hand was flat down on the tabletop.

  The big guy jumped to his feet and yelled “Hooray.” He immediately walked over to a coat rack and took down a long white suede coat and a matching white suede fedora in the Humphrey Bogart style. My guess was that the hat cost more than my whole wardrobe; the coat would have covered my net worth.

  McCue got to his feet. “I guess I’ve got to work out more,” he said. “Now that I’ve lost all my money and most of my clothing, somebody’ll have to buy me a drink.”

  I stepped forward and said, “I’m Tracy. I knew you were going to be a deadbeat.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” he said. He shook my hand. He had a good strong handshake, the kind that seemed to go with a good strong face. You’d have to live on another planet not to recognize him, because his face was everywhere. McCue had made a career out of playing average-guy heroes, and the face was perfectly designed for that: wide-set, intelligent eyes, a straight nose, strong chin, and stubborn mouth.

  “You do drink, don’t you?” he said.

  “Some claim it
’s what I do best.”

  “Good. Let’s go sit over there. At least you’re not some damned tee-totaler. I never had a keeper before, at least he doesn’t have to be some bluenose bastard.”

  We sat down at the bar and I said, “One thing. Why’d you call me?”

  “I had dinner here tonight with the two producers of this goddamn film I’m working on and they told me about the insurance policy. I guess they got your name from the insurance company. Anyway, after they left, I stayed and drank and started to resent you, so I found the agency number in the phone book and I figured you might as well start earning your keep because I needed you. Do you know I lost four hundred dollars arm-wrestling with that gorilla and then I lost my hat and coat? You arrived just before I promised him my firstborn. He beat me fifteen times in a row.”

  “Shouldn’t the first five losses have given you a clue to stop?” I said.

  “I thought my better conditioning would tell in the end.”

  The bartender made us drinks: vodka on the rocks for me—because I didn’t think he’d bring me a vodka omelette, hold the egg—and for McCue, he packed a glass filled to the brim with ice, then poured in straight gin until the liquid was level with the rim of the glass.

  “When are you going upstate?” I asked him.

  “Tomorrow. You want to drive up together?”

  “No,” I said. “We don’t know each other well enough yet. It’s one thing to meet some guy in a bar, ’cause you can always leave, but in a car for eight hours, that could be a trap with no escape. I went cross-country with my wife once and that was the end of our marriage. And it was only our honeymoon. We’d better meet up there.”

  “That makes sense,” he said agreeably.

  The big guy, now wearing the white hat and coat that used to belong to McCue, came over and handed McCue a ring of car keys.