And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2)

“Come on, Trace,” the countess said. “Let’s trick.”

Trace kissed her hard. She slid into his arms as easily as a family car rolling into the house garage.

“You serious?” she said.

“I never joke about important things,” Trace said.

“Then let’s make this a very important thing.”

While Felicia slipped out of her clothes with her back toward him, Trace reached under his shirt and yanked the tape recorder and surgical tape from his waist and stuck the activated machine in his jacket pocket. Then he hung it over a doorknob so that the microphone was aimed at Felicia’s bed.

Then she turned toward him, and he looked at her waiting, beautiful and naked, her lips half parted, her eyes half glazed, and it was time to get down to business….

TRACE: AND 47 MILES OF ROPE

The body of Early Jarvis, about fifty, was found dead early this morning in the desert home of Countess Felicia Fallaci, where he worked as a servant.

A safe in the countess’s home was found open and empty, and police believe Jarvis may have surprised a burglar and been injured in a scuffle. Officers at the scene said that Jarvis apparently bled to death after being struck on the head

What, if anything, was missing from the safe could not be determined since Countess Fallaci was on vacation in Great Britain and could not be reached immediately.

The stereo was playing soft rock at hard volume. Some persons danced in the center of the large living room. Others stood in twos and threes and talked loud to be heard over the general din.

“Hey, I heard some kind of nutty long-range forecast coming over here. It might snow this winter.”

“Come on, what are you smoking? It never snows in Las Vegas.”

“Don’t argue with me. Argue with the weather people. Maybe the almanac people. They said it, not me.”

“Hear this? It’s supposed to snow this winter. How much is it supposed to snow? They tell you that?”

“The way it always snows in Las Vegas. One line at a time.”

“I got called to the school by the nun.”

“What about?”

“About Margaret. The nun said that they were having, music class and all the kids in the class had to stand up and sing their favorite song. And when Margaret’s turn came, she got up and sang ‘Push, Push, in the Bush.’”

“What’d you say?”

“What could I say? I said, What’s the matter, she get the lyrics wrong?”

“So what do you do with some eighteen-year-old kid who comes to visit you in Las Vegas? A snotty little creep. So I take him to a saloon, what else can I do? Just like his old lady, he sits there swilling it down and I think maybe I ought to say something to him, ’cause he’s my kid, or at least the old lady says he is. So we’re watching a hockey game and Wayne Gretzky is playing.”

“Yeah?”

“So this kid’s looking at the screen and I says, That’s Wayne Gretzky; when he was eighteen years old, he was the greatest hockey player that ever lived. And this snot says, So what? So I says, And you’re eighteen years old, you cheap bastard, and you won’t even buy a drink. Go back to Minnesota.”

On the other side of a counter pass-through, in the kitchen, two men were standing within earshot of these conversations. One was Devlin Tracy. He was six-foot-three and blond, and there were laugh wrinkles in the corners of his eyes, even when he wasn’t laughing. He gave the impression of being a man who knew the world was crazy and had decided to become part of the problem, rather than the solution.

He towered over the other man, who reached five feet only with a full stretch. His name was Walter Marks; his lips were stretched continuously into a look of disgust, and his narrow eyes shifted around quickly as if the world were filled with hired gunmen, all of whom had his photograph.

“I’ve never understood why you hate me,” Devlin Tracy was saying. “I treat you with the utmost kindness. Despite everything.”

“What despite everything?” Walter Marks said. “What? What?”

“I’d rather not talk about it if you wouldn’t mind. I just don’t think it’s fair to repay my kindness with vicious hatred the way you do,” Devlin Tracy said.

“I don’t think it’s hating you because I won’t invest money in your stupid schemes. The last thing were those stupid automobile signs that you could read in mirrors. And before that, what was it before that? Oh, yeah. The CB Bible of the Air. ‘Fisherman, fisherman, this here is Palm Leaf, Old Buddy. Beware the Ides of March.’ “

“It wasn’t the Ides of March. That was
Julius Caesar
. It was Passover.”

“Whatever it was who the hell would buy that?” Marks said.

Tracy shrugged. “I don’t know. People buy Lola Falana records, I’m told. You never know what might make it.”

He waved over the pass-through toward the living room, where a voluptuous brunette in a miniskirt and white patent-leather boots stopped dancing with her partner momentarily and tossed a very large bump and grind in Tracy’s direction.

Her dancing partner was a distinguished, white-haired man in a three-piece pinstripe suit. He looked like what he was: the president of an insurance company. He grabbed the girl’s hand and yelled out to the kitchen, “Hey, Trace. Tell her to save some of that for me.”

“Plenty to go around,” Trace yelled back, and the brunette moved into the white-haired man’s arms again and ground herself against his body.

“Looks like Bob’s having a good time,” Trace said.

“Disgusting,” Walter Marks said. “Who is that creature?”

“She dances in the show at the Araby Casino,” Trace said. “Her name’s Flamma. She does the Dance of the Seven Veils. Hold the veils.”

Marks said, “Mr. Swenson’s had a little too much to drink. Is he…you know, is he going to get into trouble with her?”

“I hope so,” Trace said. “That’s the way I set it up.”

“He’s got a family back in New York.”

“I don’t think he’s going to take Flamma back with him,” Trace said.

“I’m not worried about him taking her back. I just don’t want him to take anything else back that she might give him. I knew this party was a mistake. When they decided to hold the insurance convention in Las Vegas this year, I said, Uhoh, it means that we’ll be around Trace and that means we’ll all be getting into trouble. I knew it. The convention doesn’t even start until tomorrow and already Mr. Swenson’s acting like this. I’m going to have to watch him every minute.”

“Hey, Groucho. Bob’s free, white, twenty-one, and owns his own insurance company. Let him be.”

A petite Oriental woman, wearing a long blue evening gown cut low off one shoulder, stepped into the small kitchen, elbowed Trace aside, and began washing glasses. Her long black hair splashed about her shoulders as she stood at the sink, hair as black as a mine at midnight, as shiny as hard coal. Trace stepped behind her, pushed her hair aside, and kissed the back of her neck.

“Good party, Trace,” she said without turning.

“Enjoy it now, Chico. My mother and father are coming pretty soon.”

“Where are they, anyway?”

“My mother wanted to see the trapeze act at Circus Circus first.”

“For that, she passes up your almost-birthday party?” Chico asked.

“Some things in life are important, more important than other things.”

The young woman turned from the sink. Her face was smooth and delicately featured with large dark eyes set intelligently wide apart in her face. She smiled a dazzler at Walter Marks.

“Can I make you a drink, Mr. Marks?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” he said stiffly.

“He’s not drinking for two,” Trace said. “He’s worried about Bob.”

“Mr. Swenson? He’s all right,” the young woman said.

“How can you tell?” Marks asked.

“He just offered me two dollars to go into the bedroom with him.”

Marks looked pained. “Ohhhh,” he said.

“Did you take it?” Trace asked.

“I told him to make it five and I’d go home with him.”

“Don’t give it up for less than ten,” Trace said. “He’s rich.”

“I know. He told me. He told me anytime I wanted to get rid of you, he’d set me up right,” Chico said.

“Don’t believe his promises. He’s an insurance man. He’ll tell you anything,” Trace said as the girl breezed out of the room with a tray of clean glasses, destined for the bar in the far corner.

“How can you talk to her like that?” Marks asked Trace.

“We live here together. Shacked up. Roommates. What am I supposed to do, give her heavy-breathing phone calls and anonymous notes under her cereal bowl?”

“But…Well, never mind,” Marks said. “I want you to—”

“I know. You want to talk business. I told you that you hate me, Groucho. Here I am, having a party for a few friends—”

“It looks like, what do you call it, Walpurgisnacht,” Marks said.

“I admit, all you insurance types here do lend a kind of decadent air to the festivities, but it’s only four days to my birthday and you want to ruin this celebration with business.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the trouble with you, Groucho. You’ve never learned to enjoy yourself. You’re surrounded by Las Vegas royalty and you want to talk about some stupid insurance policy.”

“Royalty has fallen on evil times,” Marks said.

“Las Vegas royalty. Those two blond twins out there talking about the kid. They’re the most famous hookers in Las Vegas. Maybe the most expensive in the world. Twenty-five hundred dollars the pair. One night’s rental. And a waiting list ever since OPEC and the sheikhs decided they like Nevada sand better than Arabian sand. And they took the night off, two thousand five hundred dollars‘ worth, to come here expressly to meet you. That’s right. I told them you were coming, and you can’t take even ten minutes off from business. They’ll be crushed. And let’s see. That fat thing over there, you see him, complaining about his son?’

“The disgusting dirty one?” Marks asked.

“Ahah, you think he’s dirty and disgusting, but that’s just a disguise.”

“Spaghetti stains on a dirty white shirt is a disguise?” Marks said.

“That’s right. You know, everybody’s got this idea that casino bosses are the shrewdest people in the world, but most of them are as worthless as a wet handkerchief. Like if you’re not wearing a rented shirt with frills and genuine imitation-gold two-pound cuff links, they think you’re some dumb tourist who came to make a donation to the Casino Good and Welfare Fund. The casino bosses around town laugh at this guy. He comes into their joints, a different one each night, and he buys in for five hundred or so at the blackjack table and he’s sneezing and coughing and-eating and spilling drinks, and none of the bosses wants to get too close to him ’cause maybe they’ll catch something, and he plays for a while, and then all his chips are gone and he stands up and says, You guys cleaned me out again. So he leaves, and the bosses snicker to the dealer, What a jerk. And this guy’s got a special pocket built inside his jacket and he’s made maybe eight hundred, nine hundred dollars, and he has somebody else cash the-chips in the next day and the bosses never know he takes five grand a week out of their casinos.”

“Don’t the dealers know?” Marks asked.

“Sure, the dealers know,” Trace said. “But they don’t talk.”

“Why not?”

“First of all, they hate the bosses, so they don’t tell them anything. Second of all, this guy’s a good tipper. If he gets tossed out of their casino, the dealers lose those tokes. Why should they tell?”

“Because they work for the casino. They should be loyal to their employer,” Marks said.

“Very good, Groucho,” Trace said. “
Segue
into company loyalty and into work assignments and into whatever you’ve got in your pocket for me to read and make my life miserable. All right, what is it?”

Marks reached into the inside pocket of his tightly cut charcoal-gray suit with cuffs on the sleeves and pearlescent buttons whose glimmer matched the light figure in his soft silk tie, and handed Trace a newspaper clipping.

Trace glanced at it and handed it back. “I know all about this,” he said. “I knew Early Jarvis. So what?”

“The clipping’s a little vague,” Marks said, “but there was a million in jewelry taken from this woman’s house. This countess.”

Trace shrugged. “Garrison Fidelity does life insurance. I investigate life-insurance claims. What’s missing jewelry got to do with me?”

“Just this. Jarvis was carrying life insurance with us. Seventy-five thousand. He left the money to the countess. I think you ought to look into it.”

Trace didn’t like the tone in his voice. There was something smug and self-satisfied about it. “What’s going on here?” Trace asked. “This is like a freebie you’re doing for somebody else, isn’t it? I check out Jarvis‘ death and that means I’m going to have to check out the jewel robbery too, so I’m going to wind up working free for some other insurance company that’s going to go for its lungs on a stolen-jewelry claim. Why are you doing this to me?”

“Don’t worry, Trace,” said Marks. “If you were lucky enough to find out who stole the jewelry, which I very much doubt, I’m sure the other company would pay you a nice fat fee.”

“And you wouldn’t mind? You wouldn’t bitch and try to cut my fee? I know you. I can hear you now, Groucho. ‘Trace, you already got paid from so-and-so, why are you trying to get paid from us too?’ I can hear it,”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Marks said. It looked as if he were making an effort to sound wrongfully accused, but it just didn’t work.

“Yes, you would,” Trace said, “but I’ve got your word you won’t, right?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Who’s doing what with the jewels?” Trace asked.

“There’s a local guy, some detective, he’s working on it.”

“What’s his name?” Trace asked.

“Roberts. R. J. Roberts,” Marks said.

“Aaaah, I don’t want to work with him.”

“Why not?”

“He’s stupid,” Trace said. “He couldn’t find a bull moose in a bread box.”

“Work with him,” Marks said.

“You know, the only thing that matters to us is if the countess killed Jarvis,” Trace said. “Anything else, we pay, right?”

Marks‘ face squinched up like a cat sniffing a cigarette. “Countesses,” he said. “I never met one who wouldn’t do anything for money. She probably did kill him. Seventy-five thou ain’t hay.”

Trace leaned over the kitchen counter and crooked a finger into the living room in the direction of a woman wearing a long white beaded gown. Even by the elevated standards of the women in Trace’s living room, the woman was a great beauty. She was tall and shapely with red hair, the color of the last three minutes of sunset. Her eyes were spectacularly green, appearing even more jade like in the delicate healthy tan of her face. She seemed to be wearing no makeup, but her eyelashes were astonishingly thick and full and her lips were a natural dusty-rose color.

She saw Trace gesturing to her and came out into the kitchen with her glass in her hand.

“Felicia, I’d like you to meet someone. This is Walter Marks. He thinks you’re a murderer. Can I freshen your drink?”

Countess Felicia Fallaci turned on a truly breathtaking smile and handed Trace her glass.

“Darling, if you would,” she said. “Just enough to pour over his head.”

Walter Marks started to turn blue.

Not nearly so drunk as he acted, Robert Swenson, president of the Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company, still puffing heavily from his dance-floor workout with Flamma, leaned against the wall on the far side of the living room and recovered his full glass of Scotch from behind some books, where he had hidden it.