When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) Page 9

  “What woman?”

  “Martha Armitage. The one Sarge set up the meeting with.”

  “You don’t know why she rubbed you wrong?” Chico shook her head. Her long black hair splashed about her shoulders.

  “No.”

  “You’re not terribly smart, are you?”

  “As a general rule, no, but specifically in this case, what are you talking about?”

  “How did Sarge treat her?” Chico asked.

  “He went downstairs and borrowed plants for the office, for crying out loud. He swept and threw out the old newspapers. The Playboy girls came off the wall. He went and bought a real coffeecup.”

  “Sounds like a boy getting ready for a date, doesn’t it?” she said.

  He looked at her for a long while before wrinkling his brow quizzically and asking, “What are you getting at?”

  “Sarge and Martha Armitage,” she said.

  “Oh, come on, Sarge is my father.”

  “Since when’s your name Jesus and his Joseph?” she said.

  “Nonsense. She’s too young for him anyway. I don’t know where you get these ideas,” Trace said.

  “Have it your own way,” Chico said with a lighthearted shrug of the shoulders. “It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  They fell silent when the waiter came with their food. There were two appetizers, a shrimp cocktail and fried mushrooms.

  “The shrimp cocktail goes to Madame?” the waiter asked.

  Chico nodded. The waiter put down the plate, then stepped over to put the mushrooms in front of Trace.

  “I’ll have those too,” Chico said. “He’s on a diet,” she explained.

  “Very good, ma’am,” the waiter said, setting down the dish.

  After he left, Trace said, “So just what do you have to base that ridiculous theory on?”

  “If I start to answer you, you’re going to complain that I’m talking with my mouth full again.”

  “I will not.”

  “You always do.”

  “This time I won’t,” Trace promised. “Talk. Eat but talk.”

  “Okay. Yesterday at the Plaza, when Sarge mentioned that woman’s name—what’s her name, Martha?—I saw his face. I saw right away from the look on his face.”

  “What kind of a look?” Trace asked.

  “It wasn’t a macho look,” Chico said. “That’s what you’d usually see with some guy when an old flame’s name was mentioned. It’s the way men are. They always talk about being able to keep secrets, but what they mean is that they don’t say anything. They don’t have to. Their faces give everything away. Everybody knows everybody that any man has ever slept with. That’s a fact and that’s the way men are. You too. I always know. But Sarge is…well, he’s a better man than most. There was kind of an embarrassed look on his face when her name came up, maybe a little guilty. It was different, but it was just as foolproof. He and whatever her name is were a thing, sometime, somewhere. I’ve seen that look two hundred times.”

  “Got guilt on his face? He ought to have guilt on his face. If you’re right, he was cheating on my mother.”

  “Hey, pardner, save that,” Chico said. “I’ve met your mother. I’d be on Sarge’s side for anything up to and including homicide. Want a shrimp?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” she said as she plunked the last in her mouth and pulled the plate of mushrooms toward her. “I’m going to ask you now if you want a mushroom.”

  “I don’t,” Trace said. “You’ve just told me that my father is a philanderer and now you’re trying to talk me into a mushroom?”

  “One. I didn’t say that Sarge is a philanderer. I said he had an affair with Mrs. Armitage. Two. I want to know now if you want a mushroom because I know you and you’ll ask for one just when I have only one left and I hate to give the last one away.”

  “I won’t ask for any,” Trace said. “You’re sure, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sure. It’s my special field of study,” she said. “And today, that whole act in the office—plants, clean cups, sweep—what do you think that was all about?”

  “Well, I don’t like it,” Trace said.

  “It’s not for you to like or not like. What the hell’s wrong with you? Did you think you were the product of immaculate conception? Don’t you think your father ever crawled into the sack with anybody?”

  “I don’t have your cavalier attitude toward extramarital sex, I guess,” he said.

  She sputtered mushroom bits over the table. “You sanctimonious hypocrite,” she said. “I can give you the names of at least a dozen married women you have bopped in the last twelve months.”

  “That was different,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not my father.”

  “I give up,” she said.

  “You’re spoiling my meal. What did you order for me anyway?”

  “A grilled cheese sandwich.”

  “I hope you didn’t get tomato on it. I hate tomato on grilled cheese. Only Philistines mix tomatoes and cheese.”

  “No tomato.”

  “What are you having?” he asked.

  “I’m having a steak and things.”

  “Okay. Let’s stick to food and drop that other subject.”

  “Fine. I’d much rather eat,” Chico said.

  Trace had a terrible desire to order a double vodka on the rocks, but he ordered a carafe of wine and drank it by himself while watching Chico eat. He nibbled at his cheese sandwich but had lost his appetite.

  When they got back to their room, Trace again called Sarge’s home and office numbers but got no answer.

  “No answer from Sarge,” he said. “I’m starting to worry.”

  “So he’s out. He’s a big boy,” she said.

  “What did you mean by that?”

  “Mean? I mean that he is big and grown up and why are you worrying about him as if he’s a child?”

  “Because, dammit, he’s probably out getting laid. With women he picks up on the street. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I’m sure it’s no good.”

  Chico sighed. “I’m going to sleep,” she said.

  Trace sighed, too. “Maybe I will later. If I can.”

  12

  Trace’s Log:

  Tape Recording Number Two in the murder of Tony Armitage, Plaza Hotel, midnight, Thursday.

  Something hangs heavy on my heart, Miss Crabtree. I feel about as much like making this report as I do running and weight lifting and doing pushups and gourmet cooking and not drinking enough and not smoking enough to even sustain a morning cough. My life has gone to hell in a hand basket.

  Trusting other people’s judgment is not good. Like I trust Chico’s judgment and she says Sarge and Martha Armitage had an affair, and I guess she’s right and I don’t like it one little bit.

  And where is he now? He’s never home anymore when I call. While my poor mother is suffering away the days and nights in Las Vegas, losing money at her specified rate of two dollars in nickels each and every hour, no more than five hours a day.

  I’m very disappointed in you, Sarge.

  I guess somehow I never thought of my father being involved with anybody physically. Except my mother. And that doesn’t count. That’s a romantic act, I don’t know, kind of on a par with docking a steamship in New York. A series of intricate maneuvers to be accomplished as rapidly and with as little excitement as possible.

  I guess I’m overreacting. Do other people think about one of their parents making it with somebody? I don’t know. Maybe people don’t. Maybe I’m just one of the few, cursed by being half-Jewish, condemned to a life of worrying about things that are none of my business. Maybe it’s part of my becoming a big thinker with big thoughts about life and love and parenting and family.

  My two kids. What’s-his-name and the girl. Do they ever think of me in bed with somebody? Do they ever consider that I’m off rutting around with some Eurasian beauty? Yeah, I’m sure they do. I think
that Madame Defarge doesn’t miss a chance to tell them that their father is a degenerate. Maybe they’re too young to care about degenerates. How old are they anyway? I don’t know. The girl is something and What’s-his-name is older. Or at least he’s bigger, the last time I saw him. I wish I knew their birthdays, if they have birthdays. Maybe they’re a year older on January first, like horses. I’ll have to ask my mother. She keeps track of trivia like that. What else does she have to do beside being a cuckoldette?

  I’m going to put this out of my mind. I’m not going to think of my father, the philanderer. Instead I’m going to do what I’m supposed to be doing here. Working.

  So I met Martha Armitage today at Sarge’s office. I’m glad I was there because if I hadn’t been, they probably would have groped each other on the office floor. Splinters would serve them right.

  I’ve got a whole bunch of tapes in the master file. Not one of them tells me a damn thing. First one is Martha, sweet Martha, flirting with my father in front of my very eyes. So she wants us to look into her son’s murder so we can find the killers before her husband does, ’cause he might get into trouble. Okay, I’ll buy that. So far so good. What’d she say? That Nick has a memory like an elephant? And he’s looking for the killers. Well, I wish he’d find them fast so we could get the hell out of here and Martha can get back the hell out of Sarge’s life. That lady drinks too much. I can tell. First it’ll be sex and then she’ll have Sarge swilling booze again the way he used to.

  So Tony Armitage was a good prelaw student but slipped a little bit last year. I would too. That might have been the year that his roommate bought nine more speakers for his stereo. How the hell could anybody study with that racket going on? Tony had the right idea. Buy junk and gimmicks and gadgets. Telephone taping machines, nonsense that breaks right away and nobody wants. Anything but that screaming rock music. It’s funny, I used to kind of like rock ’n’ roll. But I must have liked the roll part because now they just call it rock and I hate it all.

  Anyway, so Tony and Phil and Jennie led a very platonic existence, his mother said, which Phil told me was a lot of bullshit because Tony was porking Jennie for a while. And then it stopped. Why? Well, I’ll get to her.

  Nick didn’t let Tony come to the nightclub and Tony didn’t use drugs, his mother said. And again, bullshit. Phil said that he and Tony used grass. At least, that’s what he admitted to. Who knows what else they might really have used? Maybe the murderers didn’t load Tony’s body up with that Quaalude crap. Maybe he took it himself.

  Parents don’t know crap about their children. And considering the revelations of the last couple of hours, maybe children don’t know anything about their parents, and especially their wayward fathers.

  Get off that, Trace. Stick to business.

  Tony was wearing the mask when he was killed, but nobody knows anything about that mask.

  Dead, one bullet through the heart. And the mask could have come from anywhere. Shot between midnight and one A.M.

  And the Connecticut faggot cops said that Tony had no enemies, no reports of using drugs, and that both his roommates had been out of town. How convenient.

  Sarge says that Armitage isn’t really a mob guy, or at least not anymore. So he doesn’t think the kid was killed as some kind of move in a mob game. I believe him too. They wouldn’t put Richard Nixon masks on the kid. It’d be, you know, bullets in the eyes and mouth, the mark of the squealer. Anyway, Sarge is going to keep checking with cops around to see if anybody’s got it in for Nick Armitage. We’ll see. That’s if Sarge drops the romance long enough to work.

  The scene of the crime in Connecticut told me nothing. It never does. I don’t know why I bother.

  I’ve got a tape of Phil LaPeter, Tony’s roommate, impresario of noise and first person I ever met who didn’t have a first language. I will never, ever go to West Virginia for any reason. I could spend years there and not understand a word anybody said.

  LaPeter is renting Tony’s room. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. The rent’s got to be paid. They were friends, he said, and I guess so because they lived together in that house for a couple of years. So Tony played around with Jennie for a while and then it didn’t last long, LaPeter said. A couple of months maybe. LaPeter gave me the names of the people he was in the Poconos with, but I’m not going to check them. That’s FBI work. They’ve got thousands of people who can do that stuff. If he gave them to me, they’re real enough. I won’t waste time. But Tony gave him the money for the concert at the last minute. I wonder if that meant anything. Why didn’t he give it to him before when LaPeter was grousing that he wouldn’t be able to go because he couldn’t afford it?

  I don’t know.

  LaPeter met Nick and the two bookend goons from Nick’s place. What’d he say? Let me think. Nick wanted to talk about Tony and his other friends and stuff like that, more than the murder. I find that passing odd.

  And LaPeter never saw that mask and Tony didn’t belong to any clubs.

  I got the feeling that LaPeter didn’t really care all that much for Jennie, and for more reason than that her moving into the apartment cost him a room for his studio and now he has to work in his bedroom. When I saw that she was black, that explained it. I think LaPeter is a little too much of the hillbilly soil to welcome living in close quarters with a black woman.

  She has, by the way, been staying somewhere else. There’s nothing much in her closet at the house. Unless she spends all her time in waitress uniforms, she’s got her clothes stashed in some other apartment.

  Unfortunately, I was unable to find out where because the lady in question seemed to take an irrational dislike to me and refused to talk to me.

  She said she told everything she was going to tell to the PO-lice. Well, at least I got her to stop using that Stepin Fetchit accent with me. Maybe that’s a first small step. If I keep after it, winning her confidence slowly, maybe in five or ten years she’ll give me the time of day along with the little container of Sweet’n Low for my coffee.

  I will be satisfied, however, if she does not give my name to that big dude in the diner who wanted to crease my skull because I was talking to her. I don’t want to see him again. Although I think, maybe I did. Tonight, at Nick Armitage’s disco dump and drug supply house.

  Anyway, there was some black guy walking into the office and not five minutes later there were those two morons again, trying to pick a fight with me. The nerve of that one. Insulting my dancing. He’s lucky he didn’t see me on the floor. DISCO DEVLIN RETURNS TO ACTION. WOWS CROWD AT CHEZ NICK. ROBBINS OFFERS LIFETIME CONTRACT.

  I’d show him.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t get much of a chance to before Chico disabled him with a well-placed knee to the gentles. And I cold-cocked the other one. Somehow I don’t think Luigi Rascali is going to get a warm reception at Chez Nick’s anymore, not even from Pierre, the maître d’, or his twin brother George.

  I got the two goons on tape and Jennie Teller too.

  So then we got out of Chez Nick and I fed Chico and she filled my head with all that crap about my father and Martha Armitage, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

  I think tomorrow I’m going to talk to the Armitage family. I am tired of pussy-footing around. I’m turning this tape off and going to bed. It is two A.M. and I don’t know where my father is.

  13

  The Armitages lived in one of those Upper West Side apartment houses that rich people were always being assassinated in front of.

  A uniformed doorman detained Trace in the lobby while he called the Armitages’ apartment on the intercom.

  “It’s a Mr. Devlin Tracy. Something to do with insurance,” he said. He put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and told Trace, “You’ll have to wait for a minute.”

  “You don’t have a bottle of vodka around, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  Trace shrugged. “I thought it’d make the time go faster.” He really felt like a drink. As par
t of his self-improvement program, he had done one pushup thirteen times and delayed his first morning cigarette until after he had gotten out of bed; he had decided that the change in life-style was making him cranky and miserable. Perhaps he was trying too much too fast. Perhaps he should spend all the years until age fifty cutting down on his drinking, and then the next ten getting his smoking under control. Plenty of time after that to worry about exercise. He would suggest that to Chico when he saw her next. Then he thought of the five-hundred-dollar prize she had offered him if he stuck to the regimen. It would be the first time he had ever, in any way, gotten any money out of her. He decided he would stick with the plan a little longer.

  He heard the doorman say, “Very well. Thank you.”

  He hung up and handed Trace back his business card. “You can go right up, Mr. Tracy. It’s Penthouse Suite A.” He looked at Trace as if wondering why he had gotten through where others had failed and Trace said, “I give away free digital stick-on clocks with every insurance policy. Nobody can resist them. You want one?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Your loss. We’re down to our last seven million, and when they’re gone, that’s it. Taiwan’s not making them anymore.”

  “Oh?”

  “They’re going back to making Taiwanese.”

  “Oh.”

  The door to the apartment was opened by a pretty, young blond maid wearing a milk-chocolate-brown uniform. She had little laugh lines in the corners of her eyes and a broad expressive mouth and bright brown eyes whose makeup matched the color of her uniform. Her accent when she greeted him was crisp, clipped, and British.

  “I’m Devlin Tracy. I was piped aboard,” he said.

  “Mrs. Armitage is expecting you.” She closed the door behind him. “Would you walk this way?”

  She led him down a long hall and Trace looked at her hips and said, softly so only she could hear, “If I walked that way, I’d dislocate my hip.”