When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) Page 5

  Trace hit her on the head again. “One thing, Sarge,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Can we get some police reports on the killing? Like was he wearing the mask when he got killed or was it put on later? That kind of stuff.”

  “He was wearing it when he was killed,” Sarge said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I already got the reports. I was up at head-quarters this morning.”

  “Good. I’ll see you in a bit,” Trace said as he hung up.

  “When do you have to be there?” Chico asked.

  Trace glanced at his watch on the end table. “Couple of hours.”

  “Good. We’ll be done by then.”

  Trace lifted up the sheet and looked at her perfect smooth golden body. “Maybe,” he said.

  8

  The first thing that Trace noticed was that the three Playboy centerfolds had been removed from the wall behind Sarge’s desk, and the second was that two large robust green plants now stood on the sill of the front window, overlooking West Twenty-sixth Street, where the implacable July sun beat down on them.

  Atop the file cabinet was a hot plate with a pot of coffee on it, and a pile of newspapers that had been roughly stacked on the floor had been removed. Two more chairs had been set out in the office. A window air-conditioner hummed.

  “Looking a lot better, Sarge,” said Trace after he entered and looked around.

  “More middle-class, I thought,” Sarge said. “Attract a better class of client. Here are those police reports. You want coffee?”

  “No. It’s too hot,” Trace said. He took the reports, which were in a manila folder, and leaned against the wall near the front windows to read them, but before he started, there was a faint tapping on the office door and Sarge jumped to his feet and hurried to go open the door.

  Martha Armitage was a tall, elegant brunette. She was simply dressed in a white blouse and dark plaid skirt, and the garments showed her figure to be full and lush. She had large sparkling dark eyes, but her makeup looked as if it had been hurriedly applied, because Trace thought it was a touch too thick. Her lipstick, too, seemed a little excessive and Trace thought it a shame because her lips were sensual and full and needed nothing added to be beautiful. Trace got the feeling that she had applied her makeup as if she were going to a tony nighttime party at which she wanted to be the most spectacular woman there, instead of to a daytime meeting with a private detective in a seedy office in downtown New York.

  Sarge took her hands and pecked her casually on the cheek. Trace reached behind him to turn on the tape recorder under his shirt.

  “Hello, Patrick,” she said almost shyly.

  “Good to see you again, Martha,” he said. He led her to the sofa, where she sat primly, her legs crossed at the ankle, her feet together on the left side of her body.

  “Coffee?” Sarge asked.

  She shook her head, then noticed Trace by the window.

  “This is Devlin?” she asked Sarge.

  “Yes. My son.”

  She nodded to Trace. “I’ve heard your father speak of you a lot,” she said with a smile.

  “Good to meet you, Mrs. Armitage.”

  Sarge poured himself coffee and Trace noticed that he was using a real cup with a real saucer. Yesterday it had been styrofoam all the way.

  “Your office is nice,” the woman told Sarge.

  “A few more plants and furniture, it’ll be all right,” Sarge said. “I was a little surprised bv your reaction on the phone, Martha.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I thought you’d think that Dev and I were pests. But instead…”

  Mrs. Armitage glanced at Trace again. She said, “Instead, I want you to look into my son’s murder. That’s right.”

  “Why’s that?” Trace asked.

  Before she could answer, Sarge said, “I didn’t get a chance to tell you, Martha, but Devlin isn’t really my partner in this agency. He’s on assignment from the insurance company that insured your son.”

  “I see. So you’d be looking into this matter anyway?” she asked.

  Trace nodded and Sarge said, “That’s how I got into it. I help Dev on his New York work.”

  “You were going to say why you wanted us to look into it,” Trace prompted.

  “Isn’t it obvious? My son’s been murdered,” she said.

  Trace noted a faint undertone in her voice, a little hint of nervousness, of insecurity. “A lot of people still might not like private detectives around. They’d prefer to leave it to the police,” he said.

  “My son’s been dead over a month. The police haven’t found out anything yet. I don’t even think they’re looking anymore,” she said. She looked at Sarge, as if for approval, then said to him, ignoring Trace, “Nick, my husband, hasn’t been the same since the killing.” She paused, but both men were silent, encouraging her to continue. Then she looked at Trace as if explaining and said, “My husband is not an easy man.” He nodded.

  She seemed to have difficulty getting more words out and Sarge said to Trace, “What Martha means is that her husband knows a lot of people who aren’t nice people. He makes his living a tough way.”

  “A lot of us do,” Trace said. “I understand.”

  The words, when they came, spilled out in a torrent. “I want somebody to find out who killed my son and have them arrested. I want them in jail for it. I don’t want my husband to find out first. Because if he does, he’ll kill them, and then the police will be after him, and I’ve lost my son and I don’t want to lose my husband too. I want you to find out who killed Tony.”

  Trace recognized the errant look he had seen in her eyes. It was fear. Not the kind of frightened panic that came from confronting a sudden danger or obstacle, but a kind of numbing, grinding fear that came from insecurity. It was a look that alcoholics often developed, just as, he thought, women alcoholics all too often put their makeup on too heavily because it took too steady a hand to apply light, delicate daytime makeup.

  He glanced at her fingers, folded in her lap, and saw that they were moving spasmodically, fingertips pressing against fingertips. Trace felt like offering her a drink. He knew she would accept.

  “Is your husband looking for the killers?” Trace asked.

  “He doesn’t talk about the…the tragedy anymore,” she said. “But I know he is. You know, there was a man once.” She paused and looked off into space, as if trying to remember. When she spoke again, she spoke to a point on the wall on the far side of the room, looking at neither of them.

  “They were bad times for us. We didn’t have any money and Nick was trying to borrow money to open a tavern in Manhattan. He went to the bank manager to try to get a loan, and the man laughed at him because Nick didn’t have any collateral. Well, Nick got the money somewhere else and he wound up making a lot of money. But he never forgot that man at the bank, and one day, years later, I read in the paper that the man had been arrested in some scheme to defraud the bank. When I told Nick about it, he said, ‘I know,’ and I knew right then that somehow he had set it up to happen that way. Nick has a memory like an elephant. He doesn’t forget. I know he’s looking for those people who killed our son.”

  “You keep saying people,” Trace said. “Were there people? Or could it have been just one person?”

  She shrugged. “A figure of speech, I guess. It could have been just one person.”

  “Any idea what one?” Trace asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell us about your son. Was he a good student?”

  “I’ll have that coffee now, Patrick, if you don’t mind,” the woman said. She stopped wringing her hands in her lap, but it seemed to Trace as if it had taken her a conscious effort of will to stop.

  As Sarge poured coffee for her into another clean cup, she said, “Tony was a good student. A B student. His first couple of years up at Fairport, he got A’s, but this last year he slipped a little.”

  “Kids d
o,” Trace said. “They discover women, social life, partying.”

  Mrs. Armitage nodded and took the coffeecup from Sarge.

  “Did your son live on campus?”

  “There isn’t any campus housing,” she said. “He lived in a small private house off campus, with two roommates.”

  “Do you have their names?” Trace asked.

  “Yes. Phil LaPeter and a girl, Jennie Teller.”

  “Two guys and a girl,” Sarge said.

  “All very unromantic,” Mrs. Armitage said. She took a slow sip of coffee. “When I heard about it, I thought, Oh-oh, trouble. Jealousy, fights, arguments.”

  “And now your son is dead,” Trace said.

  She stopped as if she had been hit, and carefully put her cup back onto the saucer. “No. It wasn’t anything like that. The three of them were just friends. I don’t know who might have done it,” she said again, softly. “I don’t know. That’s what I want you to find out.”

  “What about your son’s habits?” Trace asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  Trace shrugged. “You know. Was he a big drinker? Did he use drugs? Did he travel around with a lot of bad company?”

  She shook her head. “Tony was going to be a lawyer. Nick didn’t even let him come to the nightclub. He didn’t want him hanging around that kind of atmosphere. He’d get upset if Tony ever showed up.”

  “And drugs?” Trace asked.

  “There was, I don’t know, some kind of drug. There were traces found in Tony’s body. But he didn’t do that on his own. Whoever killed him must have given him drugs,” she said. “He was a good boy, Mr. Tracy.”

  Trace listened desultorily as Sarge asked a few more routine questions, then finally looked at his own son with a question mark on his big red Irish face.

  Trace said, “Just one question, Mrs. Armitage.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you have half a million dollars’ insurance on your son?”

  She seemed to wince and took a deep breath before answering. “Tony wasn’t our only child, Mr. Trace…Devlin. We had another boy before him. He died when he was a year old. Nick said that if God ever played a dirty trick like that on us again, somebody was going to pay for it. After Tony was born and grew up a little bit, Nick took the insurance on him.”

  “I see.”

  “I guess that’s all for now, Martha,” Sarge said. “Did you drive?”

  “I took a cab.”

  “I’ll walk with you to one,” he said.

  As they were leaving the office, Mrs. Armitage paused, then turned back to Trace. “Do you think we’ll be seeing each other again?” she asked.

  “Probably,” Trace said.

  “I…I don’t want my husband to know what you’re doing for me, or that I ever talked to you.”

  “I understand,” Trace said. “We never met.”

  “Thank you, Devlin,” she said.

  Sarge took her arm and led her out.

  When they were gone, Trace moved out of the sunlight that poured through the window, and sprawled on the couch, reading the reports in the folder Sarge had given him.

  There were photocopies of a string of reports, including a number from Connecticut. It surprised Trace for a moment to see Connecticut State Police printed on the top of the forms, until he remembered that Tony Armitage’s body had been found in Connecticut. He had been thinking of this as a New York case.

  Trace remembered Chico’s question from the morning and rapidly read through the reports. Young Armitage had been wearing the mask when he was killed. He had been shot in the heart at close range with a .38-caliber pistol, and death had been instantaneous. The mask had been partially removed from his face, but it was splattered with blood, and intricate analysis showed that it had been on his face when he was shot. The mask was a common-enough kind, made of latex, sold in novelty shops nationwide, and there was no identifying mark to determine what store it might have come from.

  The Connecticut reports were very thorough, Trace thought, and they used very unpolicelike phrases such as “consistent with” and “raised implications.”

  He had been shot between midnight and one A.M.

  The Connecticut investigation had been under the control of a state police officer named Lt. Shriner, and Trace put his name in his personal memory bank to keep. He would probably have to talk to him before the case was over.

  The Connecticut cops had also taken statements from Armitage’s two roommates, LaPeter and the young woman Jennie Teller, but neither had been able to cast any light on the killing. Both had been out of town that weekend, LaPeter in Pennsylvania at a concert with a half-dozen friends who were good for alibis, and Teller at a psychology seminar in Atlantic City. Neither had seen Armitage since two days before the killing, and had learned of his death only when they returned to the campus. There were no reports that Armitage had any enemies, had been heavily into drugs, or that he had been depressed or acting strangely in the days before his death.

  The autopsy report showed that the young man had a quantity of methaqualone in his body, consistent with having taken two capsules three hours before his death. Trace recognized the drug as the generic name for Quaaludes. There were no other drugs in his system.

  The New York police reports were brief, dealing with their having notified the Armitages of the death of their son. Notification was made at the couple’s apartment on the Upper West Side, about ninety minutes after the body had been found.

  Trace snapped the folder shut just as Sarge came back into the office after having seen Mrs. Armitage to a cab.

  “Well, what’d you think?” he asked.

  Trace shrugged. “Nothing to think yet.”

  “How come you’re not smoking?” Sarge asked.

  “You noticed?” Trace asked.

  “You spent the whole meeting drumming your fingers on the windowsill. How the hell could I not notice?”

  “Christ, I didn’t even know I was doing it,” Trace said honestly. “I’m going to hell in a bucket. Do you know before I left the room today, Chico made me do a dozen pushups?”

  “Can you do a dozen?”

  “No. I did one. Twelve separate times. She said they get easier.”

  “They won’t,” Sarge said. “You ready for lunch?”

  “Yes,” Trace said.

  “Good. You grab one of these plants. We’ve got to bring them back downstairs to the restaurant.”

  “You borrowed them from the restaurant?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Why didn’t you buy some like normal people do?”

  “Because any plant I own dies,” Sarge said. “You can go into the biggest forest in the United States and find the biggest, strongest freaking oak tree in America and put a sign on it that says, This Tree Is Owned by Patrick F. X. Tracy of New York, and five minutes later the tree’s freaking leaves will start to wilt and fall off. A week later, the tree’ll be nude; a month later, it’ll be dead. It’ll look like year-old celery. I tell you, I’m a human defoliation program.”

  “It must be in the genes. I am too,” said Trace.

  “Anyway, that’s why I don’t buy plants, because if I buy them, they die, and then I’ll get pissed and want to get my money’s worth anyway, so I’ll leave them here, hoping they come back to life, and they won’t and they’ll look like shit and so will this office; so instead, if I have to impress somebody, I borrow the plants from the restaurant downstairs. The woman who owns that place, now, she can grow plants. Grab one.”

  “By the way,” Trace said, “did you charge Mrs. Armitage a fee?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m charging you. How can I charge her for the same work? It’d be unethical.”

  “It’d be good business,” Trace said.

  “Grab a plant,” Sarge said.

  9

  “Why’s that woman so nervous?” Trace asked his father.

  “Martha Armitage?�
��

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. I guess she’s just a nervous woman,” Sarge said.

  “That’s a great answer. For a bill and a quarter a day, I get ‘because she’s a nervous woman’? Should I pay you now or later?”

  They were sitting in a corner of the bar in the downstairs restaurant with the jukebox behind them and the long bar stretched out before them. Trace was drinking white wine and Sarge was sculling down a mug of beer and manfully attacking a large cheeseburger. Lugging the plants down the stairs, he had kept busy touting Trace onto the scungille salad, how it was big enough for dinner for two and the price of an appetizer for one, the best bargain in New York City, and then the restaurant was out of the scungille salad.

  “That’s the only trouble. They’re always out of it,” Sarge said.

  “That’s how they can afford to sell it so cheap,” Trace said. He spun around on his stool so he could look out the window at the girls passing the restaurant.

  Sarge nodded at his son’s wineglass and said, “No more vodka?”

  “I’ve kind of given it up,” Trace said. “I’ve been drinking for more than twenty years like a real rumdum and I’ve still got my heart and my lungs and my liver. So maybe it’s time to walk away before God sends me a due bill. And Chico doesn’t like my drinking so much. She said it was making my brain into mush. So I drink this and beer. Except once in a while I slip.”

  “How often is once in a while?” Sarge asked.

  “Every day,” Trace said. “But only a little. Not like the old days.”

  “So now you stopped. Is your brain any better?”

  “That’s what I’m worried about. It’s still mush,” Trace said. “And it kind of annoys me a little bit to give up vodka just because Chico wants me to.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s a bad precedent. What’s next? She’s already starting to badger me about my smoking. We’ve got a bet that I’ll really cut down this time. So that’s bad enough. And then, maybe I’ll have to start wearing boxer shorts because she doesn’t like briefs? Or eating whole-wheat bread. And washing my hands every time I finish reading the newspaper. It could get bad.”