And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2) Read online

  “You lived in town before that?” Trace asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What were you doing for a living?”

  Spiro hesitated slightly. “Mostly odd jobs,” he said.

  Trace changed the subject quickly. “The night that Jarvis called you from the airport, how did he sound?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did he sound nervous or in a hurry or anything?”

  “He was always in a hurry. But, no, I guess he didn’t sound nervous or anything. He was like he always was.”

  “What did he say? Wait. Before you answer. Where were you when the phone rang?”

  “In the kitchen. I was just getting ready to watch a movie.”

  “What movie?” Trace asked.

  “Mildred Pierce. It’s my favorite movie. It just came on.”

  “I think Joan Crawford always overacted,” Trace said. “You were alone?”

  “You better believe it,” Spiro said quickly. “This is a good job and I wouldn’t have anybody here ’cause Jarvis and the countess say don’t have anybody here. See, I only spend nights here when the countess and Jarvis was away; otherwise, I stay at my own place. I wouldn’t go messing up my job by fooling around here.”

  “Okay. Spiro, I just want you to know I’m not accusing you of anything or anything like that. I just want to try to get this whole thing straight in my mind.”

  Spiro nodded, and Hubbaker, who had been watching from the couch, said, “So you were in the kitchen watching television when the phone rang.”

  “Hey, Baron,” Trace said, “if something comes up about heraldry or falcon-training, pitch right in. Otherwise, I’ll do this.”

  “Sorry,” Hubbaker said.

  “So you were in the kitchen and the phone rang,” Trace said.

  “Yeah. So I reached up and grabbed it and said ‘hello.’”

  “Did you say ‘hello’ or ‘Countess Fallaci’s residence’ or something like that?”

  “No. I just said ‘hello’ ’cause this isn’t the only house phone. The countess’s other number, she has a tape machine on it, but if I answered that one, I’d say ‘Fallaci residence,’ but the phone in the kitchen’s like my work phone so I just said ‘hello.’”

  “Okay. And what then?”

  “It was Jarvis and he said—”

  “Be exact,” Trace said. “Word for word. Try to remember. You said ‘hello.’

  “Okay. I said ‘hello’ and let’s see, he said, ‘This is Jarvis. Come and get me at the airport. I’m waiting at the middle door of the terminal.’”

  “Yeah?” Trace said.

  “And that’s it?”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said, ‘Okay, I’ll come right now.’”

  “And what’d he say?” Trace asked.

  “He said, ‘And wait for me if I’m in the men’s room or something,’ and then he said thank you and that was funny ’cause he never said thank you. He didn’t have any manners, that man,” Spiro said, shaking his head.

  “Okay. You left right away?”

  “Right away. I went right away.”

  “Did you lock the front gate when you left?”

  “It locks automatically. You open it with a key or a beeper thing, but it’s got springs and it closes automatically unless you tie it open. Like now, I got it tied open. I keep it open during the day.”

  “So you went to the airport. What, then?”

  “Jarvis wasn’t there. I waited for him and he wasn’t there. So I parked and went inside and looked for him, but I didn’t see him, so I had him paged.”

  “Who paged him?”

  “I asked at the American Airlines desk. They paged him but he didn’t come, but I was afraid to leave, so I waited a long time before I came back here.”

  “How long?”

  “A couple of hours it must’ve been, because when I got home Mildred Pierce was off.”

  Trace had thought all the while that Spiro was shifty-eyed, unable to look at him, because the young man’s eyes seemed to dart left and right. Now he realized that they darted more to the right than to the left, and he glanced out toward the pool and saw why. National Anthem was lying on her back on a kapok mat, with her legs up above her head, pedaling an imaginary bicycle.

  “That girl can pedal it all over town,” Trace said. “So when you came back, was the gate still closed?”

  “Yeah. Like I said, it closes automatic. So I came in and I didn’t see anybody or hear anything and I went over to the kitchen and turned on the television. I missed Mildred Pierce.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then, later, I decided to go to bed, so I started to walk around the house, just to check, you know, like I always do, and I came in here and I tripped over Jarvis’ bag.”

  “Where was it?”

  Spiro turned around and pointed to the steps leading down into the room. “Over there. I nearly broke my neck falling down the stairs. And then I saw the doors was open to the patio and I walked over there, by that switch, and turned on the patio lights and then I seen Jarvis laying over there by the fish pond.”

  “What’d you do then?”

  “I looked at him and touched him, but he didn’t move. And I felt for a pulse in his neck but he didn’t have one and there was blood all over, it was like a lake, and then I looked real close and I saw his eyes was open and it scared the shit out of me ’cause I knew he was dead. So I came back in here and called the cops.”

  “When’d you notice the safe was open?”

  “I didn’t even notice. I went down to the gate to open it for the cops. They came right away and they saw the safe was unlocked. And they asked me all these same questions and that’s all I know.”

  “Okay,” Trace said. He turned to Hubbaker. “I forget anything?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to ask him if he did it?”

  “No,” Trace said. “Not when I know he didn’t do it. Thanks, Spiro.”

  “Okay, man. Anytime.” Spiro got up and walked toward the exit of the room, but he walked slowly, ogling National Anthem across the pool. Then he shook his head in admiration and left.

  “How do you know he didn’t do it?” Hubbaker asked.

  “I don’t. But if I asked him, he’d tell me he didn’t, whether he did or not. Now at least he thinks I trust him, so maybe I can get him to drop his guard.”

  “Very clever.”

  “Just routine for us fancy detectives,” Trace said.

  When he went back outside, both parrots were screaming, “Polly want a hit, Polly want a hit.” The countess had taken off her bikini bottom and was in the swimming pool.

  “You have to go?” she said.

  “’Fraidso.”

  “Figure out anything yet?” she asked.

  Trace noticed that when she stood still in the chest-high water, her breasts floated. Looking down at her from his elevated viewpoint, with her bosom floating that way, Trace thought she looked like something conceived in a Howard Hughes design shop. “Not yet,” he said.

  “Make them give me my money,” she said. “I need it, especially if I’m going to keep, supporting all these parasites. Bend down here and give me a kiss.”

  Trace held onto the ladder, leaned over, and for his effort was tongued by the countess.

  “Next time, give me a call first. I’ll get rid of this crew and you and I can splash around together.”

  “Listen. My insurance company is having a hospitality thing tonight. Maybe you and your friends would like to come.”

  “Is their liquor going to be any different from my liquor?” she asked.

  “It’ll cost you less ’cause we’ll be paying for it. If you can make it. Maybe these folks would like to see how the bourgeois middle class lives. We’ve got a bank of hospitality rooms at the Araby. Just show up if you want.”

  “Maybe we will.”

  “You can try charming Groucho again. That might get you your money,” Trace said.

 
“I’ll be there.”

  8

  Trace was in the bathroom, but he came running out when he heard a shriek from Chico.

  He found her as he had left her, sitting in a lotus position in the middle of the floor, wearing only a leotard. Except tears were now streaming down her face.

  He knelt next to her. “What’s the matter?”

  She turned her sloe black eyes toward him.

  “Eeeeyou,” she squealed, and then collapsed backward on the floor, laughing, holding her sides, in such pain from laughing so hard that she rolled from side to side, trying to stop.

  She finally did, looked at him, squeaked “Eeeeyou” again, and started all over. Trace stood up in disgust and put his foot on her stomach.

  She pointed a finger at him. “National Anthem?” she said. Tears rolled down her face. She rolled out from under his foot.

  “You’re listening to my tapes. I go into the bathroom and you start listening to my tapes. You’re not supposed to listen to my tapes.”

  She was still laughing.

  “At least a half-dozen beautiful women threw themselves at me today,” he said. “How are you going to feel when you hear all that on tape?”

  “They all mistake you for a donkey?” Chico asked. “Eeeyou.” More laughter.

  “You really have the capacity to be a hateful little coolie,” Trace said. “At least National, Anthem was friendly and pleasant. She held my hand for the longest time.”

  “Probably trying to think of what came after eeeeyou,” Chico said. “And stop complaining. I always wind up listening to your tapes anyway because you can’t figure out what’s going on and I have to listen to them to make sense out of things.”

  “That was true in the past,” Trace conceded. “When I was drinking too much. But now that I’m sobering up, my brain is functioning like a fine Swiss watch. I’ll never need your help again.”

  “That’ll be the day,” she said. “You really stay sober today?”

  “I haven’t had a drink,” he said. The one in Dan Rosado’s office really didn’t count because it was forced on him and he didn’t finish it all anyway.

  “I’m proud of you,” she said.

  “Too late now after all this abuse. What are you doing home anyway? I thought you’re supposed to be a convention hostess?”

  “Don’t start,” she said grimly. “I am a convention hostess. I’ve been one all day. I baby-sat two surly little snotnoses. I helped some woman who was locked out of her room. I turned down four sexual offers. Why is it only guys named Mel attack me in Las Vegas? Let’s see. I told Bob Swenson that I didn’t want him to divorce his wife and marry me. Then I told him that I didn’t want him to adopt me and try to pass me off to his wife as a Cambodian foundling. I’ve had my ass pinched and my little tits brushed by more elbows today than I’ve had in three years of dealing at the Araby. If this is Middle America, give me gambling degenerates every time. I’m exhausted.” She looked at him and winked. “Of course, if you were a donkey, I could probably fit you into my schedule. Eeeeyou. Asses Up.” And she started laughing again.

  “Will you stop? This is serious. You really shouldn’t be listening to my tapes.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said as she raised herself back to a sitting position and twisted her legs again into a full lotus.

  “No, I’m not. You think you’ve been listening to my tapes other times, but I edit them and launder them and leave some out so I don’t upset you. A very important thing. Tapes are private and we’ve always respected each other’s privacy.”

  “Horse dookie,” she said. “Or donkey dookie, if you prefer. Respect privacy? Every time I’m out you want to know where I was and who I was with and did I make any money and was it good for me. Privacy? You don’t know the meaning of the word privacy.

  “I never open your mail,” he said righteously.

  “I never get any. I get a bill for magazines. Two book clubs. That’s it.”

  “Why don’t you ever get any mail here?” he said. “Are you getting your mail somewhere else?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “That’s a private matter.”

  “I don’t think that’s funny,” Trace said. “And I don’t appreciate your sitting there showing off, just because you’re able to twist your legs into a pretzel.”

  “Sorry,” macho man. You’re the one who wanted to play football and wound up with glass knees. Don’t blame me.”

  Trace sat on the couch and tried to look irritated.

  “Trace, old buddy,” she said, “you can take your tapes and stuff them. You can metamorphose, if you want, into a donkey. You can spend the next six months in rut with National Anthem. Do donkeys rut? Moose rut.”

  “I think donkeys kong. I think you say spend six months in kong with a donkey.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Trace, I don’t care what you do and what your tapes tell about it. I didn’t sign on here for fidelity. I know you: you’re about as constant as Old Will’s moon. You have screwed half of Las Vegas and the other half is on your schedule. You would sleep with a snake if you were sure it wasn’t dead. You are an unregenerate degenerate. You’re not faithful, you’re not loyal, and you’re not even nice.”

  “And you came all this way home just to tell me that. Isn’t that nice?” he said.

  “I told you I was exhausted. I came home to exercise.”

  She said this in a way that convinced Trace that she really believed it was a logical statement and that one thing followed the other. Actually, it probably was. She was a dancer by training, and when her head got fuzzy, she unfuzzed it by making her body work. Her wonderful dancer’s body. He looked at her again, taut and trim in her leotards. He approved.

  “Get that look out of your eye,” she said. “I’m mad at you, for openers, and anyway I’ve got to shower and get back to the zoo for tonight’s reception. Trace, tell me true. Your mother’s not going to be there tonight, is she?”

  “If the food’s free, my mother’s going to be there,” he said.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Someday I’m going to take up your father’s offer and run away with him.”

  “He won’t let you listen to his tapes either,” Trace said.

  “Hey. You’re lighting another cigarette,” Chico said.

  “A necessary prerequisite to smoking it,” he said.

  “You’re smoking too much.”

  “Listen, I’ve almost quit drinking for you. Have you been put on earth to harass me?”

  “I don’t want you to get cancer.”

  “I don’t believe in cancer,” he said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t believe in cancer?”

  “Them freaking rats get cancer from everything. Alcohol, tobacco, saccharin, asbestos, blue cheese. Did you ever think that maybe rats are just cancer-prone? Or maybe they’re allergic to laboratories? Maybe laboratories give cancer. Call Sloan-Kettering. I’ve just had a flash.”

  “Just watch the cigarettes,” she said.

  “Hai, Michiko-sama,” he said.

  Still in a lotus position, she put her hands in front of her on the floor, then lowered her head until it rested on the floor between her hands. Slowly she worked her body forward and then moved it upward, until she was balanced in a headstand, her legs still in lotus configuration.

  “Can National Anthem do this?” she asked.

  “She’d better not. If her boobs fell out of her leotard, she’d-crash through into the apartment downstairs,” he said.

  She rolled forward lightly, onto her feet, and walked to the bathroom. “There you go with the big-jug remarks again,” she said. “Got to shower. Duty and lunacy call.”

  While she was in the shower, Trace went back to reviewing the days’ tapes. Sometimes he caught something the second time around that had gone over his head the first time. More often, he didn’t.

  It was a lousy and a slow way to work, he often thought, but it was the only way he knew. And Chico was right. Making tapes
of everything not only let him review them; it let her review them later if he needed help. He usually did.

  He had just finished listening to the last of the tapes when Chico came out of the bedroom, cloaked in a floor-length golden gown that intensified the bronze color of her skin.

  “God, you look splendid,” he said honestly.

  “Thank you.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry I got under your skin,” he said. “If this job hostessing is getting to you, just quit it if you want. It’s no skin off my nose, you know.”

  “Thanks, Trace. I appreciate that. But I signed on for the duration and I’ll stick with it. You coming over later?”

  “After I’m finished with my report,” he said.

  “Good. You can keep your mother off my back.”

  She kissed him and left.

  When she was gone, he poured himself a glass of vodka, put an operatic tape into the stereo, and placed a fresh tape into his own small recorder.

  9

  Trace’s log:

  Tape Recording Number One, 7:15 P.M., Monday, Devlin Tracy in the matter of Early Jarvis et al.

  So we’ve got a murder and a million-dollar jewel heist. Why is my life filled with this kind of trivial bullshit? I’m almost forty. I’ve got only three more days to live in the thirties and I should be partying with all the other wonderful folks who infest the insurance industry, and Groucho has got me doing this instead.

  I should have been born rich instead of handsome and sensitive. Then I could tell Groucho to stick it. I could grab Chico and take her off and buy her her own shogunate somewhere. I’m mad at her. That’s the first time she’s ever done that, listen to my tapes, just because I left the recorder out while I was going to the bathroom.

  My ex-wife, Jaws, used to do that. Not tape recordings. She’d open my mail. When I bitched about it, she stopped opening my mail, but she’d run to the door every day to get the mail and then she’d hand it to me and stand there, shifting her weight from foot to foot, waiting for me to open it. She’d follow me around until I opened my mail.

  So I used to make her crazy by going into the bathroom and locking the door behind me. I knew she’d be outside listening, so I’d make a big point of ripping open the envelopes with a lot of noise. It was always some stupid business crap about somebody having reserved a special Visa card just for me, but I’d tear up the envelopes into confetti-size pieces and throw them in the waste-paper basket and hide the letters inside my shoe.