And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2) (3 page)

It was only midmorning, but the electric sign outside the bank reported the temperature at 91 degrees. It would get close to 110 before the sun set on this August day, Trace knew.

The downtown streets were already cluttered with tourists, most of them underestimating the sun and wearing walking shorts as they went in and out of the small stores selling the hand-carved silver jewelry that was Las Vegas’ third major attraction, after gambling and sex.

R. J. Roberts was twenty pounds too heavy and two days too dirty. His hair looked unwashed, but that might have been because it made a matching pair with his moustache, a sparse little cluster of brownish weeds that sat on his upper lip like a hair transplant that hadn’t taken yet. He was sitting behind his desk wearing a loud red plaid shirt. A brown suit jacket was tossed over the back of a chair in the grubby second-floor office. Trace took one look at him and disliked him again. If he had been a movie producer, R. J. Roberts was the sort who’d have a casting rug because he didn’t want to spend the money to buy a couch.

“Yeah, of course I remember you,” Roberts said. “It was…let’s see…”

“It was two years ago. One of your hookers rolled one of my insurance people and I took the money back from her. I’m sure she mentioned my name to you.”

“That’s not the way I remember it,” Roberts said. His teeth were yellow and Trace didn’t want to get too close to him because he could imagine what the man’s breath was like. “I kind of remember a client of mine saying she was assaulted by you, but I advised her not to pursue the case. That’s how I remember it.” Yellow smile. “Anyway, what can I do for you, Tracy?”

“Early Jarvis,” Trace said.

“What about him?”

“The company I work for carried his life insurance. The countess is the beneficiary. I’m checking that out. You’re checking out the jewel theft. My company thinks it would be good if the two of us pooled knowledge. Sort of on the theory that two heads are better than one. Especially if one of them is yours.”

Roberts hunched forward in his chair behind the desk. “I didn’t hear anything like that from my company,” he said.

“Listen,” Trace said. “Ground rules. I don’t give a damn about the jewelry and I don’t give a damn about whatever deal you’ve got with the insurance company. And I don’t give a damn what kind of scam you run on them.”

“What do you mean, scam?” Roberts snapped.

“Is this going to be one of those conversations where everything is a question?” Trace said. “All right, Roberts, I’ll tell you exactly what I mean. You’re a private investigator but I don’t know how you got your license. You make most of your living by running a handful of hookers. Your hookers steal. If one of them makes a big score, you get the insurance company that’s handling it to hire you. Then you get the stolen stuff back from your girl, whoever she is, and you send most of it to the insurance company and get a fee. The rest of it you keep and sell, and split with the hooker. Sound familiar, so far?”

“You’ve got—”

“No, not a helluva nerve. I live in this town and I know most of the time what’s going on. So let’s just save ourselves all the trouble. You do whatever you want with the insurance company. All I want to do is clean up that it wasn’t Felicia who killed Jarvis, and then I’m done. You do what you want.”

Roberts shook his head. “I don’t want to work with you. We won’t get along.”

Trace shrugged his total unconcern. “Suit yourself. I can get what I need from you or I can get it from the cops. No difference to me. But if you don’t cooperate with me, the first person I go to is my company’s vice-president for claims—he’s my closest friend—and I tell him what kind of insurance dodge you run and then you know what’ll happen. He’ll tell some other vice-president for claims, all those insurance bastards stick together, and he’ll tell another vice-president for claims and pretty soon the story will get to the right vice-president for claims and you’ll be out of a job and a fee, past, present, and future. Work with me, you do what you want. Work around me and I guarantee you, you’ll get zip code. If you don’t believe me, I’ll call Walter Marks right now. He’s my boss and he has absolute faith in my word. You’ll be gone so fast, your head will swim.”

Yellow smile. “You don’t have to take that attitude, Tracy. As long as you lighten up, we could work together on this. What about fees? How do we split?”

“We don’t. You get paid for what you do; I get paid for what I do. I’m not interested in robberies. The only reason I’m here is because I’ve got to find out something about the jewels before I can find out anything about who killed Early Jarvis. You tell me and we’ll share information. Sort of one hand washes the other.” The image was instantly repellent to Trace. The thought of engaging his hand with Roberts’ mitt in any kind of cooperative endeavor was vomitous.

“All right,” Roberts said. “That sounds fair enough.” He turned to a file cabinet, opened a drawer, and was pulling out a thin folder when the door to his office flew open and a woman’s voice yelled, “All right, what’s this shit?”

The woman standing in the doorway was tall and blond and too-tan because her face had started to wrinkle and was showing every one of her forty-plus years. She was wearing a costume of some kind of zebra pattern knit with a short-sleeve top that showed a lot of cleavage and skin-tight long pants that Trace thought would cut off the circulation to a normal person’s feet. If that hadn’t already been taken care of by her shoes, transparent glass-looking numbers with heels a full five inches high.

She wore night-time makeup—a lot of blues and greens around the eyes—and it did nothing to soften the angry scowl on her face.

Roberts spun around, tossed the folder on the desk, and snapped, “Goddammit, bitch, I’ve got business here.”

The woman looked at Roberts and at Trace a long while before her face relented a little.

“I’ve seen you around,” she said to Trace.

He nodded. “How are you, Lip Service?”

“Not as good as I could be. Come to talk some business.”

“Outside,” Roberts said. “Outside. I’ll talk to you outside.” He got up and thumped toward the open office door. “I’ll be right back,” he told Trace, and grabbed the woman’s arm and took her into the hallway. He closed the door after him, but Trace could still hear parts of their conversation. Through the frosted glass of the window, the two together merged into the outline of one foggy lump of humanity, and Trace remembered Shakespeare’s “beast with two backs” and thought this was more like a beast with no brains.

“What is it…why she running…?”

“…does it better than you.”

“…doing it seven years…just toss me off like that?”

“…no tossing off. Easier to get along with…like her better.”

“…cut their goddamn throats, they like me fine.”

“…done…all there is to it…no more complaints.”

“…ain’t telling that bitch nothing.”

“…working? Stop complaining.”

“…tossed aside like an old rag.”

“…talk later…business now…yeah, right…tonight.”

Through the frosted glass, Trace could see the lump of humanity disengage slowly into two lumps and then half of it moved away down the hallway. Roberts stayed fixed in one spot for a moment, then opened the door and came back inside.

Yellow smile “Sorry about the interruption,” he said. “She’s having some problems she asked me to look into and she’s getting a little impatient. You know. Women.”

And because that polite fiction served Trace’s main purpose, which was to get out of Roberts’ office as rapidly as he could without contracting a social disease, he nodded and said, “Clients are pains in the ass sometimes. So fill me in on Jarvis.”

Roberts oozed himself back into his chair, moved aside a red spiral-bound notebook, and opened the file folder. It contained only two yellow sheets of paper and the detective shuffled them a long time before starting to recite.

“Okay. It happened on the twenty-seventh. That’d be two weeks ago. The countess and Jarvis were in England, she was on vacation and he always traveled with her. He wasn’t feeling good, the countess said, so she told him to take a couple of days off, but instead he said he wanted to come home and see his doctor. She told me it was all right with her. I got all this from her when she got back. And also from the cops, but they don’t have much. So, anyway, Jarvis flies back. Next thing is that Spiro…You know where the countess lives?”

“Yeah. Big place outside town,” Trace said. “I’ve been there.”

“Okay. Well, this Spiro is like the gardener and the watchman and whatever, so he was staying there while they were away. Anyway, it’s late and he gets a call from Jarvis, who says to pick him up at the airport. So Spiro drives out there, but no Jarvis. He musta got tired of waiting or something. Spiro hangs around for a couple of hours, but when Jarvis don’t show up, he drives back to the countess’s. When he gets inside, he goes back to the kitchen and makes himself a drink because he wants to sit by the phone for a while ’cause he’s afraid that Jarvis’ll call and chew his ass out and tell him to get to the airport again. But for some reason—maybe he hears a noise or something—he walks around the other side of the house, you know how it’s kind of split into two sections, and there’s the living room and it’s a mess. You know that big fireplace the countess has got at the end of the room?”

“Right.”

“Well, her safe was under a stone panel in that fireplace, see? And the panel is open, and the room looks like there was a fight. One of the big plants, some kind of tree or something, is tipped over near the fireplace. So Spiro looks around and then he sees Jarvis’ body. The sliding doors out to the pool are open and Jarvis is laying there and he’s got his head near the goldfish pool—they’ve got freaking goldfish in their yard, would you believe that shit?—and his head is all bloody and he looks dead, so Spiro calls the police and they come.”

“What’d they find out?” Trace asked.

“The safe had been opened, but there weren’t any fingerprints on it. Spiro didn’t know what was in it and it was only when the countess came back that the cops find out that she’s missing a million dollars or so in jewels. But there’s no prints. They said that Jarvis got his head bashed in, but Spiro could see that. And that’s what they got and that’s all. Oh, yeah. Jarvis rented a car at the airport. Cops found it parked out on the road near the house. They don’t know why he parked there and neither do I.”

You find out anything else? What about Jarvis? Trace asked.

Roberts lit a cigar before answering. Like everything else about him, it was foul-smelling. “Nothing yet. I looked around town for anything on him, but there wasn’t anything. He didn’t gamble and he didn’t bop around with women. He spent all his time out at the plotzo. That’s what the countess calls her place, she kept calling it a plotzo. You know what a plotzo is?”

“I think she means a palazzo. It’s Italian for palace,” Trace said.

“Yeah, maybe that’s what she meant,” Roberts said. “But this ain’t no palace, though. It’s just a nice big house with a high wall and a gate, but it ain’t no plotzo.”

“Nobody you heard of wanted to kill Jarvis? No gambling debts or loan sharks or anything like that?” Trace asked.

“Nothing I can find out yet. Like I said, he was always out at the plotzo.”

“All right,” Trace said. “You hear anything on the street about the jewels?”

“No,” Roberts said. “I should have, too. I let everybody know that I was working on this. Now, if it’s a townie who hit the plotzo, he read the papers. He knows it’s a million dollars the insurance company’s going to have to cough up and he knows if he tries to go on the street, this is a murder rap maybe and nobody’s going to want to mess with him So he should get hold of me and I’ll get him a few dimes on the dollar and he doesn’t have to fence and the insurance company saves a lot and the countess gets her jewels back and everybody’s happy except the cops but fuck them, who cares? But I ain’t heard nothing from nobody. I can’t understand it.”

“Maybe whoever took them was from out of town,” Trace said.

“Maybe, but there’s a lot of word out on these now, these jewels. They were pretty special pieces, I guess. There was a diamond terror with a lot of stones.”

Terror? “A tiara?” Trace said.

“Right. A diamond terror and like two big diamond necklaces like queens wear. Wait. Here’s a newspaper picture of the terror and one of the necklaces.” He shoved a clipping toward Trace, who saw Felicia Fallaci bedecked in jewels and smiling beautifully. The caption said the photo was taken at a charity ball for homeless children at which she had made a surprise appearance.

“They took that picture just before she went to Europe,” Roberts said. “If those pieces show up, they’d be spotted right away.”

“The thief’d just remove the stones and sell them piecemeal,” Trace said.

“Yeah, probably.”

“Anything else I ought to know?” Trace asked.

“That’s all I got so far. I talked to the countess, but she don’t know nothing and she said there wasn’t anything going on at the plotzo, like people trying to stake out the joint or a lot of salesmen or surveyors showing up when they didn’t used to show up. So she wasn’t a lot of help.”

“Basically,” Trace said, “if you don’t get a call from the thief, you don’t have anything.”

“That’s about it,” Roberts said. “If you find out something, then you could probably be a big help to me. Listen, Tracy, I got no problems with cutting you in for a piece of my fee. You help me, I help you.”

Trace nodded. “Okay. Thanks, Roberts. I’ll keep you posted.”

“You got any ideas right now?” Roberts asked.

“Not yet. I think first I’ll go to the plotzo.”

“Hey, goombah. What brings you to these hallowed halls?”

Lt. Daniel Rosado shook Trace’s hand in a tight grip, then nodded him to a chair in the dimly lit detective’s office in the basement of police headquarters.

Without waiting for an answer, Rosado said, “I learned your trick. I’ve got vodka in the freezer. You want a pop?”

“Before lunch?” Trace said, and tried to look shocked.

“Trace, I know you. You drink before getting out of bed in the morning.”

“Not anymore. I’m tapering off.”

“You?” Rosado laughed, much too long for Trace’s taste. “How come?”

“I’m getting old. I’m turning over a new leaf.”

“You know what I found out in life?” Rosado said. “You turn over a lot of new leaves, and underneath them you still find the same old bugs.”

“Don’t undermine my courage now,” Trace said. “The first day is the hardest.”

“Horseshit. The first seven years are the hardest. Every day’s harder than the one before it. You know how miserable you feel now? You’re going to feel worse tomorrow and even worse the day after that. You’ll cut your wrists by the weekend.”

“I didn’t say I was quitting, just tapering off,” Trace said.

“Good. Then taper off later. Have a drink.” Rosado went to the small refrigerator in the office, took a pint bottle of vodka from alongside the ice-cube tray, and poured some into a plastic throw-away glass and handed it to Trace. Trace sipped at it, then set it down.

“The things I do for a client,” he said. “Now that I’ve got you all agreeable, I know you’re going to help me. Felicia Fallaci.”

“The countess?”

“Right. And Early Jarvis.”

“I thought the Inspector Clouseau of crime-fighting was working on this. Roberts, that douche bag.”

“He is. On the jewelry theft.”

“Forget ever seeing that jewelry again,” Rosado said with disgust.

Trace nodded. “Jarvis had an insurance policy with Felicia as beneficiary. I’m just checking it out before my company pays.”

“What do you need?”

“Everything,” Trace said. “I talked to Roberts. He’s almost as dumb as he is dirty.”

“I’d hate to have to live on the change,” Rosado said. “Okay. You stay here. Help yourself to the vodka if you want more. I’ll be right back.”

Rosado walked out of the office. He was a handsome man with salt-and-pepper hair, almost as tall as Trace but leaner through the chest and shoulders. He was gentle and good-hearted, often reminding Trace of the owner of an underpriced Italian restaurant who gave most of his profits to the local Opera League. They had first met while Trace was looking into a string of systematic thefts from the Araby Casino, where Chico worked, and they had spent long hours together arguing about the merits of tenors—Rosado liked Jussi Bjoerling while Trace held out for Caruso.

He was honest and funny and happily married, hadn’t had a drink in seven years, and his only professional flaw was that he was just not much of a detective. But, then, who was? Trace thought generously. Most police-department detectives were minimally talented and they didn’t have Rosado’s saving grace of being charming.

When the lieutenant came back into the office, he was holding an inch-thick sheaf of blue and pink papers, held together by a wide rubber band. He plopped it onto his desk, sat down, and sipped at his coffee.

“You want to read this stuff or you want to talk to me?” he asked.

“Let’s talk first,” Trace said. “Roberts gave me the bare bones. Time, body, blah-blah, safe unlocked, jewelry gone, what Spiro said. Tell me things I ought to know that’ll enrich my life.”

“The countess must be good in bed,” Rosado said.

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t score royalty,” Trace said.

“You mutt, you’d mount a mongoose.”

“Why do you say that about Felicia?” Trace asked.

“’Cause she had like a million dollars’ worth of jewels. It came to her as gifts along the way, she said.”

“Some people give women things. When they look like Felicia, bigger things.”

“I guess so. Anyway, the murder night. Here’s some reports from cops on the scene. Let’s see. Luggage. Here’s the autopsy. Here’s—”

“Wait a minute,” Trace said. “Go back to luggage.”

“When this Spiro ran into the living room, he tripped over a bag. Jarvis’. He must have come to the house, set the bag down in the living room, and I guess surprised whoever was breaking into the safe and got clubbed.”

“What was in the suitcase?” Trace asked.

“Your police department never sleeps,” Rosado said. He flipped through the sheets and pulled out a blue one. “Not a suitcase—a little leather bag, like a gym bag,” he said. “A shaving kit, a bottle of aspirins, American Airlines magazine, that’s all.”

“Okay. What about the autopsy?”

“Here’s a picture,” Rosado said. He handed Trace an eight-by-ten color print.

It was shot from a slight elevation and it showed Early Jarvis lying facedown on the stone patio between the house and the swimming pool. His arms were extended up over his head, his gloved hands almost reaching the small goldfish pond built into the patio. His head was turned to one side and Trace could see it had been bashed in pretty thoroughly. He was lying in a large puddle of blood and there were blood smears on a ceramic fish statue next to the goldfish pool.

Rosado had found the autopsy report. “Doc Johnson did the autopsy,” he said. “She said it looked like Jarvis was slugged inside the house, because there was blood there, and then there was a trail leading outside to the patio. Somehow he must have gotten out there and, she says, he fell again, cracked his skull on that stupid ceramic fish, and then just lay there and bled to death. There were traces of skull matter on the ceramic thing. No indication of what else he might have been hit with. Maybe a big flashlight.”

Trace shrugged. “Why crawl outside? When you come to, wouldn’t you just call the cops?”

“I asked Doc Johnson that, too,” Rosado said. “She said you never can tell with head injuries because you don’t know exactly what got injured in the brain. She said she had a case once where a guy was standing at the bathroom sink and got shot in the head by his wife. Well, he picked himself up, and then lathered his face and shaved. And when he was done shaving, then he called the police. And when they got there, he was dead. You can’t tell with head injuries, she said. People do nutty things. Anyway, here’s some more photos.”

He slid a stack of eight-by-tens across the desk. They showed the inside of the countess’s living room with the stone panel on the fireplace hinged outward, exposing the safe door. A cocktail table was overturned. A large Fiberglas pot on the left side of the fireplace had been knocked over and a six-foot-tall treelet was lying on the floor, dirt from its roots strewn about the floor. There were photos of the open sliding doors that led to the patio.

“No prints, I guess,” Trace said.

“None.”

“What was on Jarvis’ body?” Trace asked.

Rosado looked through more papers. “I’m not allowed to let you look at official reports, you know.”

“I know that. But if you read them to me, it saves me the trouble of sneaking back here at night and stealing them.”

“Yeah, here we are. He had his wallet, twelve dollars in cash, a driver’s license, a photo of him and the countess, and an American Express card. That’s all.”

“Anything in his pockets?”

“Just his house keys and the keys to the car he rented. About eighty cents in change.”

“Good,” Trace said.

“Why good?”

“Where’s his passport?”

“His passport, his passport.” Rosado shuffled through more papers. “No passport.”

“How’d he get back into the country?”

“Damned if I know. Can’t get in without a passport, can you?”

“No. You in charge of this case, Danny?”

“Well, we’ve pretty well deep-sixed it. You know how it is. If you don’t solve it in two days, you don’t solve it at all. But technically I guess I’m still in charge. And I’ve got some guys out on the street, watching for the jewelry, but nothing yet.”

“Okay, I’m going to nose around some, maybe see the countess today. Anything I get, I’ll let you know.”

“Okay,” Rosado said agreeably. “And if anything comes up on this end, I’ll tell you. Together, maybe we can beat that pimp out of his fee.”

“A worthwhile ambition,” Trace said.

“And Bjoerling was still a better tenor than Caruso,” Rosado said.

“He wasn’t even a better tenor than Mario Lanza,” Trace said. “And, hell, everybody was a better tenor than Mario Lanza. Liberace’s a better tenor than Mario Lanza.”

“Prettier too,” Rosado said. Dinner soon?’

“After this week. Chico’s doing some convention work for my insurance company. When we finally get all those lunatics out of town.”

“Okay.”

“But I’ll be talking to you before then,” Trace said.