And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2) (11 page)

Trace glanced at the bar, saw a man who was indeed staring at them, and waved to the man. “Don’t worry about him, Sarge. He’s my bookie.”

“I thought we were going to have to fight our way out of here,” Sarge said.

“No. Just pay the bill, the way we do in most places.”

“So I didn’t get anything on the missing passport, but I think that’s a big lead about Jarvis flying to New York.”

Trace nodded. “I’ll talk to the countess about it. That’s good work, Sarge.”

“So how was your day? You learn anything?”

“Just that those jewels aren’t on the street. Whoever lifted them hasn’t dumped them around here.”

“You’re the one who told me this is a town of smart guys,” Sarge said. “A lot of people could have bought up that stuff and you’d never know.”

“Somebody would know. That’s a lot of money and money always talks. Roberts hasn’t heard anything either.”

“Who’s Roberts?”

“The p.i. I told you about. He’s got lines out in the street, but he hasn’t heard anything either.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I double-checked him, Sarge, with somebody I do believe. No sign of the jewels yet.”

“When you going to question that countess?” Sarge asked.

“I don’t know. Today I guess.”

“I never questioned a countess before,” Sarge said wistfully.

“Your life’s not over yet either,” Trace said. “I’ve got something else I want to talk to her about.”

“Okay, I’ll leave it to you. I’m going back to the airport tonight. Check the late-night people, see if they saw Jarvis.”

Trace looked at his watch. “Sounds good to me. I wonder how Mother is.”

“You really know how to ruin an afternoon,” Sarge said. “She’s always fine, that woman.” Suddenly he asked, “You going to marry Chico?”

“I don’t know. Probably not,” Trace said. “Why?”

“Don’t,” Sarge said.

“Not even if I love her?” Trace asked.

“Especially then,” Sarge said. “You know, before we got married, your mother and I were friends, like you and Chico are. But then we got married, and I don’t know, somehow your mother put her friend’s head away and put on her wife’s head.”

“She loves you, Pop. You know that.”

“Sure. She loves me. Like a wife. But she doesn’t even like me. Not like a friend. Trust me, Devlin. Make a woman your wife make an enemy for life.”

“I don’t know if Chico’s got a wife’s head to wear,” Trace said. “And I don’t have any husband’s head at all. I proved that already in my last marriage.”

“If that’s true about Chico, don’t let her get away,” Sarge said.

“Sarge, you know how she makes her living. Even despite that?”

“Even despite anything,” Sarge said.

“Felicia, this is Trace.”

“Hello, darling. Where’s my money?’

“I’m working on it Did Jarvis have a regular day off?”

“Yes. He was off on Thursday.”

“What did he do on his day off?”

“I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it. Are you playing
cherchez la femme?
A jilted lover killed him? What’s going on?”

“What if I told you that he flew to New York and back every Thursday?”

“I’d say I’ll be damned.”

“He did. Why do you think he did that?”

“I don’t know. A girlfriend?”

“He never stayed overnight,” Trace said. “Just flew in and out.”

“Platonic,” she said. “Plato lives.”

“Yeah, but I’m told he’s in retreat. Does the name ‘Edward Stark’ mean anything to you?”

“No. Should it?”

“That was the name he flew to New York under.”

“Trace, I don’t know what it’s all about.” Then she laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Jarvis was with me for years. I’ve learned more about him in the few weeks he’s been dead than I did in all those years.”

“How long was Jarvis with you?” Trace asked.

“Fifteen years. I met him in Italy right after I broke up with my husband, the count. I needed somebody and Jarvis needed work.”

“You didn’t know anything about him when you hired him?”

“I still don’t know anything about him,” Felicia said. “Jarvis never talked. He said he didn’t have a family, but I don’t know his home town or where he went to school or whatever. I didn’t even know that he had insurance, or that I was the beneficiary, until that insurance agent in town who wrote the policy called me. And now you’re telling me he’s hopping all over on airplanes. Why that name, Stark? Why Stark? Why New York?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did,” Trace said.

“So do I, if it’d get me my money from your company.”

“I want to come out and look at Jarvis’ room. I forgot it the last time I was there,” Trace said.

“Come tomorrow. I’ll get rid of everybody and we can roll around in the hay.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll come tonight.”

“Are you rejecting me again?” she asked.

“No. I’m just trying to get you your money,” Trace said.

“Come whenever you want,” she said. “Bring a check.”

Driving back to his condominium, Trace felt satisfied. He hadn’t seen his father looking so happy in a long time, and finding out that Jarvis made it a practice to fly to New York every week was a good beat. It had to mean something, and it didn’t bother him that right now he had no idea what it meant.

He had always regarded figuring out a case as a bone-chew. Take the smallest dog, give him the biggest bone, and if you gave him time enough, he would chew his way through it. Trace had time, and if he kept nibbling and scratching, sooner or later the bone that was the Jarvis murder mystery would break. It had always worked that way before and he was sure it would again.

So everything was going well and he felt reasonably good.

Until he got back to his apartment.

“Look at this place,” Chico said. She was waiting for him, inside the door, her hands on her hips, her black eyes flashing. He had never seen a real person express anger before by putting hands on hips. He had thought that was done only in cartoons and in movies.

“What in the hell’s gone on here?” Trace asked.

“What do you think’s gone on here?”

“We were either burgled or we’ve been victimized by an interior decorator run amok.”

He looked around the large living room. Their twin couches, which had formed a cozy conversational L in the middle of the floor, were now side by side against a wall. Coffee tables were placed squarely in front of them, so precisely centered that they might have been moved by an engineer. They were also so close to the couches that no one could sit down without scraping a knee.

Their lamps had been moved and now stood side by side in a far corner of the room where they illuminated each other. The formal dining table, which had been at one end of the long room, was now in the center of the floor. It might have been a viable idea, except that for anyone to sit at one side of the table they would have to move the cocktail tables that were behind their chairs. That, in turn, would mean that anyone sitting on the couch would have to get up.

The apartment had been turned into a series of accidents waiting to happen. Chico pointed with a quivering finger toward a far wall.

One of their paintings, a lithograph of an aged monk, numbered and signed by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, the artist, had been removed from a wall In its place now hung some kind of white glazed lavabo, a make-believe pot holding make-believe water so that make-believe people could wash their make-believe hands.

“What is that fucking thing?” Chico demanded

“A lavabo. From the Latin. I will wash.”

“Don’t give me any of your erudition bullshit. I’ve forgotten more Latin than you ever knew. I know it’s a goddamn lavabo, what I don’t know is what the hell it’s doing on our wall.”

“Who did this?”

“Three guesses,” she said.

Trace had a sinking feeling in his stomach. “No, not her. Not that sweet old lady. She couldn’t have.”

“She did. She left clues all over the place. Her cloven hoofmarks are all over my fucking kitchen. I want a knife, I’ve got to go searching for knives now. She didn’t like my knife drawer. You want a blender? I’ll tell you where the blender is. It’s in the back, under the sink, where only fucking E.T. can reach it. The glasses are now stacked by size. Small ones in front. This probably makes a lot of sense to that woman, except we use only the big glasses. You can’t get a big glass now without knocking over eight small ones.”

“How’d she get in here?” Trace asked.

“The way she does everything. She bullied her way past the concierge. Not only that, she got him to bring her up and open the door for her because she said she had misplaced her key. If you give that woman a key, Trace, you’ll find your clothes in the hall. And then she went cheerfully about her day’s activity, wrecking my fucking house. Look at this place. It looks like a religious mission in the goddamn Australian outback. Who could live like this?”

Trace opened his mouth but Chico wasn’t finished yet.

“You think she didn’t leave clues? I’ll give you a clue. Come here.” She grabbed his right wrist and jerked him toward the bedroom.

“Good idea,” he said. “We’ll hold each other until the hurt passes away.”

“Shut your face,” she said. “There. Look.”

Trace looked. On the bed were four two-inch squares of wallpaper samples, ranging from atrocious to hideous without even a moment’s hesitation at passable. And there was a note. It read:

I think your white painted walls are terrible. They’re very ugly and they’re all stained yellow with cigarette smoke. I will wallpaper this room for you before I go. With your father busy, I don’t have anything else to do because I am not made of money and can’t keep throwing ten dollarses into slot machines that never pay off, despite promises to the contrary. Besides, I think you should have a nice house to live in and it is obvious that this place needs a woman’s touch. Please pick out which one of these samples you like best.

She had signed the note “Hilda Tracy.”

Trace held the note up to the light from the window.

“It’s her handwriting, all right. I can tell by the pinched way she makes the loops in her e’s.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“I’ll talk to her,” Trace said.

“If talking to her would help, I’d talk to her,” Chico said. “You can’t talk to that woman. It’s like talking to an obelisk with a hat.”

“She’ll listen to me,” Trace promised. He knew she would never listen to him.

“She won’t listen to you,” Chico said. “All that woman understands is force. All right, she wants force, I’ll give her force.”

She picked up the telephone and dialed a three-digit number.

“Hello, Harold? Okay, this is Miss Mangini in three-seventeen. If that woman comes back tomorrow, these are our instructions. Shoot her on sight. Right between the eyes…. Don’t worry, I’ll get you a gun…. You can’t shoot her? You never shot anybody? Okay. Slice her Achilles tendons with a sharp knife. People have been known to linger for weeks that way before dying. She’ll have time to crawl off to the elephant graveyard…. No? Okay. If she bullies past you, you call the cops and have her arrested for trespassing and illegal entry. Try burglary if you want. Theft. I think she lifted a pair of my ornamental chopsticks…. Of course, I’ll press the charges. So will Trace. I’m warning you. If she gets by you tomorrow, she dies and I report you to the tenants’ management board…. You think you’ve got troubles now? I’ll give you troubles. You’ll be happy to die when I’m done with you.”

She slammed down the telephone.

Trace tossed the wallpaper samples into a waste-paper basket in the corner and flopped down onto the bed. He put his hands behind his head.

“So how you doing?” he said brightly. “Have a nice day?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Chico said. “I’m not forgetting your culpability in this.”

“What culpability?” he demanded.

“You could have been an orphan.” She stomped out of the room and a few seconds later Trace heard her grunting, and he knew it was time now to choose sides or be marked rotten forever. He rose from the bed and went inside to help her move the furniture back where it belonged.

“Do you know, I dream about that woman?” she said as she grunted, lugging a corner of the heavy sofa.

“I never dream,” he said.

“You’re lucky. I dream. She comes up to me in a dream, I always know it’s a dream because she’s talking to me and she doesn’t talk to me in real life. She says, ‘I’ve got a piano for my son’s apartment.’ I say, ‘We’ve got a piano.’ She says, ‘How much did you pay for it?’ I say, ‘Six thousand dollars.’ She goes, ‘Hah! Fifteen hundred dollars, a beauty.’”

“What happens then?” Trace asked.

“I don’t know. I always wake up in a cold sweat. You know your mother. Fifteen hundred dollars. She got it in Piano City and it’s got yellow flowers painted on it. She gets everything at some kind of city. Food City. Shoe City. Embalming at Funeral City. She’s making me into Crazy City.”

“A little more to the front on your end,” Trace directed. “That’s good. You shouldn’t let her bother you. She’ll be gone in a couple more days. You can do a couple more days’ standing on your head.”

“Yeah? That’s what you think. Try telling that sometime to somebody who’s really standing on her head. The blood pools in your head after just three hours and your feet start to die. Your toes fall off in a couple of days. I’ll never dance again. Your father will have to take me around dancing. Your mother can carry me in a pack on her back.”

“You can go to Ankle City dancing,” Trace said. “My mother’s got a discount pass.”

“We can all go to Nuthouse City,” Chico said. “We can go together. Rent a bus from Bus City, me, your father, and that woman. She can drive. We can bibble our lips—”

“Bibble? Bibble our lips?”

“You know. Bibibibibibibibble,” Chico said, running her fingers up and down over her lower lip. “We can all bibble our lips and slobber and wet our pants. We can get a room together at the Ha-ha House Your mother can decorate it She can smear dirt on the walls.”

They finished moving the other couch and Trace pushed Chico down onto it. “Sit there,” he said. He kissed her on the mouth “I don’t know how a nice girl like you ever got hooked up with this traveling circus anyway,” he said.

She sat and he put the cocktail tables back where they belonged. He heard Chico giggling, so he knew the worst was over.

“The nerve of her,” Chico said. “Trace, the woman’s a wonder. Just when I think she’s figured out every way to make me nuts, she finds a new one. How’d you manage to escape quasi-sane?”

“’Twaren’t easy, little girl.” He sat alongside her and she put her arms around his neck and kissed his forehead.

“You poor thing,” she said. “Remind me to show you some compassion in the future.”

“I will. You can count on it.”

“You know,” Chico said, “my mother wanders around like a geisha, wearing kimonos, with her hands hidden inside the sleeves. But all she ever did was threaten suicide if she thought my skirt was too short. Nothing like this. It’s like being violated.”

“Speaking of which,” he said.

“Sorry, pal. Duty calls,” she said.

“I could be quick,” he said.

“I couldn’t.” She started to laugh again.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“We forgot something.”

She pointed toward the white lavabo. Trace nodded, got up, and took the wretched thing down from the wall and carried it into the bedroom. In the closet there, he found the print that had been on the wall and he brought it back out and hung it up again.

He sat back down.

“What’d you do with it?” she asked

“Circular File City,” he said.