Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) (4 page)

He had had a small heart attack. He traveled with a psychiatrist in tow. He made commercials in favor of the Vietnam War and said that Jane Fonda had cottage cheese for brains.

Two points for McCue.

He had an opinion about everything and didn’t seem afraid to voice it. About one president of the screen actors’ union, he said, “That man is so dumb he thinks Nicaragua is in Southeast Asia.” He offered a personal reward of $50,000 for “anyone who will bring me the empty head of the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

I read about all his fights and all his antics and convinced myself that Walter Marks had conned me again. Tony McCue sounded like a five-thousand-dollar-a-day job, not five hundred.

I put the file away and decided to go to sleep. I don’t always sleep in my clothes, no matter what kind of lies Chico spreads about me, but I figured there wasn’t much reason to take them off because I was driving upstate the next day and my clothes were going to get all wrinkled anyway from driving, so what difference did it make if they were wrinkled to start with?

Sometimes I take a lot of time thinking about things like this, and Chico will say stuff like, “All the time you’ve spent allegedly thinking, you could have taken your clothes off ten times by now.” See? She’s a woman and she thinks that just because you can do a thing quickly, maybe you ought to do it. I worry more about the rights and wrongs of things.

I quoted Strindberg at her. “Women, being small and foolish and therefore evil, should be suppressed, like barbarians and thieves.”

She did not think this funny and told me that Strindberg was exceeded in stupidness only by me. I said that I didn’t think a lot of truly stupid people quoted Strindberg in the first place. She said that lately there was a lot of it going around.

The telephone rang just as I closed my eyes.

“Is this Devlin Tracy?” a caller asked.

“Yes.”

“This is Tony McCue. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why are you trying to make my life miserable?”

“I didn’t know that I was,” I said.

“Trust me. You are.”

“I don’t trust anybody who says ‘trust me.’ What do you want?”

“I want you to meet me right now.”

“You’re not my problem until tomorrow,” I said.

“It’s one minute after midnight. I’m now your problem. Somebody just told me that I couldn’t walk down the white line in the middle of Fifty-seventh Street for two blocks without getting hit by a car. What do you think?”

“I think you should wait until I get there,” I said.

“I thought you’d see it my way,” he said.

I caught a cab about three minutes before I would have frozen to death. There are two kinds of cabdrivers in New York: one kind knows every street in the city and tells you all about it; the other kind doesn’t speak any English and couldn’t get you to Central Park if you started out at the Plaza Hotel across the street. This was one of the first kind, but I tuned him out as he took me uptown to where McCue was in one of those Fifty-seventh Street places, overpriced, overpublicized, overyuppied.

There was a big white Rolls-Royce parked in front of the restaurant, smack dab alongside a fire hydrant. Naturally it was unticketed. Rollses don’t get ticketed in New York. After all, they might belong to a pimp or somebody important.

The restaurant that took up the back of the building was closed, but there were about a dozen people in the bar, clustered around a small table in the center of the floor. I sidled my way through the press and found McCue sitting at a table, across from some guy who looked like Hulk Hogan, preparing to arm-wrestle him.

“All right,” McCue said. “For the hat and coat.”

“Okay,” the other man said. Somebody was acting as referee and he’d been watching too much arm-wrestling on television because he took forever to inspect their grips and make sure everything was fair. Finally, he released their hands and said, “Go!”

If there had been an echo, it wouldn’t have died out before McCue’s hand was flat down on the tabletop.

The big guy jumped to his feet and yelled “Hooray.” He immediately walked over to a coat rack and took down a long white suede coat and a matching white suede fedora in the Humphrey Bogart style. My guess was that the hat cost more than my whole wardrobe; the coat would have covered my net worth.

McCue got to his feet. “I guess I’ve got to work out more,” he said. “Now that I’ve lost all my money and most of my clothing, somebody’ll have to buy me a drink.”

I stepped forward and said, “I’m Tracy. I knew you were going to be a deadbeat.”

“I’ll pay you back,” he said. He shook my hand. He had a good strong handshake, the kind that seemed to go with a good strong face. You’d have to live on another planet not to recognize him, because his face was everywhere. McCue had made a career out of playing average-guy heroes, and the face was perfectly designed for that: wide-set, intelligent eyes, a straight nose, strong chin, and stubborn mouth.

“You do drink, don’t you?” he said.

“Some claim it’s what I do best.”

“Good. Let’s go sit over there. At least you’re not some damned tee-totaler. I never had a keeper before, at least he doesn’t have to be some bluenose bastard.”

We sat down at the bar and I said, “One thing. Why’d you call me?”

“I had dinner here tonight with the two producers of this goddamn film I’m working on and they told me about the insurance policy. I guess they got your name from the insurance company. Anyway, after they left, I stayed and drank and started to resent you, so I found the agency number in the phone book and I figured you might as well start earning your keep because I needed you. Do you know I lost four hundred dollars arm-wrestling with that gorilla and then I lost my hat and coat? You arrived just before I promised him my firstborn. He beat me fifteen times in a row.”

“Shouldn’t the first five losses have given you a clue to stop?” I said.

“I thought my better conditioning would tell in the end.”

The bartender made us drinks: vodka on the rocks for me—because I didn’t think he’d bring me a vodka omelette, hold the egg—and for McCue, he packed a glass filled to the brim with ice, then poured in straight gin until the liquid was level with the rim of the glass.

“When are you going upstate?” I asked him.

“Tomorrow. You want to drive up together?”

“No,” I said. “We don’t know each other well enough yet. It’s one thing to meet some guy in a bar, ’cause you can always leave, but in a car for eight hours, that could be a trap with no escape. I went cross-country with my wife once and that was the end of our marriage. And it was only our honeymoon. We’d better meet up there.”

“That makes sense,” he said agreeably.

The big guy, now wearing the white hat and coat that used to belong to McCue, came over and handed McCue a ring of car keys.

“These were in the pocket,” he said.

“Thanks, you cheat,” McCue said.

The man seemed real sincere. “No, no,” he said. “No cheating.”

“Of course you cheated. You’re stronger than me,” McCue said with a grin. “I hope it rains mud on you.”

The man grinned back, they shook hands, and the man left.

We had another drink and I finally said, “I’ve got to get some sleep. Can you drive?”

“Naturally. Did you ever know a drinker who wasn’t a better driver drunk than sober?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Who?”

“All of them,” I said.

McCue cadged twenty dollars from me for a tip for the bartender and left with a lot of promises to come back. He was wobbling a little as we walked to the Rolls-Royce.

He offered to drive me home.

“I’m not sure yet that you can drive,” I said.

“Neither am I. So driving you home will be good practice before I fool around with something valuable like my own life.”

As we got into the car, a police car came whooping down the block past us.

McCue fumbled with the keys for a while, got the car started, and headed west on Fifty-seventh Street. He seemed to drive all right. Up ahead, there were a lot of flashing lights in the street.

“Something’s going on,” he said.

“Seems that way.”

“I love police shit. Let’s see what it is.”

Instead of turning south and getting the hell away, like I would have done, he pulled into the block with all the police vehicles. He was finally waved down by a cop who motioned him to make a U-turn. McCue grudgingly obliged and then stopped and said, “Why don’t you see what’s going on?”

“Oh, bullshit. I don’t care what’s going on.”

“Well, then, I will,” he said.

Just what I needed. McCue getting arrested for drunken driving with me in the car. Groucho would not be happy. Good-bye, five hundred dollars a day.

“Stay where you are,” I said. “I’ll go see.”

I walked down the block to where a cluster of people seemed to be standing around a white glob in the street. As I got close, I recognized the white glob. It was the body of a man wearing a white coat. A white hat lay ten feet away from the body. McCue’s hat and coat.

About a block farther down Fifty-seventh Street, there were more cops and I could see now that there had been a collision between a car and a cab. An ambulance was parked down there.

I turned to walk back to the car when I heard a voice yell, “Hey. You. Wait a minute.”

I turned around to look into the rock-hard face of Detective Edward Razoni. He was a New York City cop that I had bumped into on another matter. He was a madman, ill-tempered, and to make him even more perfect, he hated me.

“Tracy, right?”

“That’s right. What happened?”

He waved an arm at the white lump on the ground. “Why is it that everytime we find a body, you’re somewhere around? Why do you do this to me?”

His voice was as hard as his face.

“God sent me to you,” I said.

“A more suspicious man than me might think you were a killer.”

“It’s not my ex-wife, is it?” I said.

“No, it’s a man.”

“Then I didn’t kill him,” I said. “What happened?”

“We know you didn’t kill him. That car down there did.” He waved toward the accident. “Ran him down and then beat it and plowed into a cab. What are you doing here anyway?”

“Just out for a pleasant evening on the town.”

“Well, why don’t you get out of here? You make me sick.”

His partner, a big black guy named Tough Jackson, came up. He has some sense anyway. “Hello, Tracy. What are you doing here?”

I was kind of pleased that he remembered me. It’s nice to be remembered by somebody besides bartenders and other degenerates.

“Just driving around, saw the lights.”

“Hit-and-run. Nothing to it. Unless you know the guy.”

“Yeah, take a look,” Razoni said. He walked me over to where the body lay with its head split open. Still I could recognize the face. It was the big guy who had arm-wrestled McCue.

I shook my head. “Never saw him before,” I said. “Guess I’d better be on my way. See you.”

“Don’t make it too soon,” Razoni said.

I got into the passenger seat of the Rolls and McCue peeled off with a screech of rubber. With a gang of cops standing around. The silly bastard was suicidal.

“So what was it?” he said as he raced toward the corner.

“Accident. A pedestrian got hit.”

“That’s all?” he said, looking at me.

I said, “Watch the road, please, and head downtown. You knew the dead guy.”

“Who?” he said. He looked at me again.

“The guy from the bar who won your hat and coat. He’s dead.”

“Hit by a car?”

“Yes.”

“I bet the coat is ruined,” he said.

“Unless tire tracks come in as a design,” I said.

“It looked like you know the cops,” he said.

“I did.”

“Did you tell them who the guy was?”

“No. And I didn’t mention you.”

“Why not?”

“I would be very happy if your name doesn’t get in the papers for the next two weeks,” I said. “Besides, it was just your hat and coat. You don’t know anything about it.”

“It was a good coat,” he said.

“Tire tracks on it,” I said.

He drove downtown in silence. When he let me out in front of Bogie’s, which was closed for the night, he said, “You could at least have picked up the hat. That was a good hat.”

In the morning while I was waiting for the kid to bring the rental car around—I had asked for something nice in blue—I telephoned Chico and woke her up. I like doing this, but since I’m not up early very often, I don’t get much chance. I try, though, ’cause if I get to her before she has her usual triple breakfast, she’s weak from hunger and she can’t argue with me too well.

I told her where I was going and what the job was and how I had met Tony McCue the night before, and she seemed to consider it awhile before answering. I knew she was thinking about food.

“What’s McCue like?” she said finally.

“I don’t know. I saw him lose at arm-wrestling, I saw him worry about losing a good hat, and I saw him drink. I think he puts his pants on one leg at a time.”

“Come on, Trace. He’s a legend in our time. You have to do better than that.”

“All right. He’s very handsome. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“You’re getting closer. Anything else?” she asked.

“No. Wait until I start nursemaiding him. Then I’ll give you all the dirt,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Now, when you get up there, I want you to stay away from all those Hollywood chippies.”

“Why?”

“Because they all got AIDS from Rock Hudson,” she said.

“It’s okay, Chico. The only woman in Hollywood I’d take a run at is Zohra Lampert and she’s not in this movie. You’re safe.”

“It wasn’t
my
safety I was worried about. Did you find an apartment yet?”

“No. I was supposed to look at a half-dozen more of them last night, but then McCue called and I wasn’t able to.”

“I thought you said McCue called after midnight,” she said. She was starting to wake up.

Time to flee before I was found out. “Well, I just had this feeling something was going to happen so I thought I’d better stay around. Just in case.”

“I guess this means that when I get to New York, the first thing I’ll have to do is to find us an apartment. If you’re going to be out of town for a couple of weeks.”

“That hadn’t occurred to me,” I said.

“I’ll bet.”

“Really, Chico, don’t you worry about it. I’ll get us an apartment.”

“You’ll get us some dump that no one else would live in. And what do we do in the meantime? Maybe I’ll look in New Jersey,” she said.

“I don’t want to live in New Jersey.
They’re
there, waiting for me,” I said. She didn’t have to ask; she knew I meant my ex-wife and the two kids, What’s His Name and the girl.

“Well, we need a place to live,” she said.

“We’ll find a place.”

“Like where? A welfare hotel?”

“We couldn’t afford a welfare hotel,” I said. “The city pays three thousand dollars a month for rooms in welfare hotels. We’ll find someplace else.”

“Two things come to mind,” she said. “One. I am not staying with your mother. That woman hates me. Two. Where are you staying now?”

“With friends,” I said.

“You don’t have any friends.”

“That explains why they’re making me sleep on the front steps,” I said.

There was a long pause again before she said, “This is all too complicated for me before coffee. I know you’re lying but I can’t figure out how or why. We’ll discuss it all when we get back to New York.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I don’t trust you when you say okay,” she said.

“Go back to sleep. I’ll call you when I see what’s going on in beautiful upstate New York.”

“Don’t bring back any diseases,” she said.

“No chance of that. I’m on the straight and narrow.”

She snorted and I thought that I was tired of being misunderstood. Then the kid came with the rental car. Before I left, something started to nag at me, so I left Sarge a note and asked him to see what he could find out about last night’s accident on Fifty-seventh Street. Then I was on my way.

Packing had been easy since I hadn’t yet unpacked since getting to New York. It was the same old canvas bag that I always carry. I have more clothes than that, but they’re all back in Las Vegas and Chico is probably going to throw them away because she says that I dress like a bit player on
Miami Vice
. I said, Why not the star? and she said that I didn’t dress badly enough to be the star. The star, she said, dressed like Ed Norton.

The nicest part of the drive to upstate New York was that with every boring mile I drove, I left New York City one more mile behind. Some people might think it was a pretty drive, and maybe it is, I guess, if you’re into trees and pastures and farms and hillsides and lakes and stuff. I’m not. I like saloons, places that are dark, places without bugs, places without people I don’t know.

Canestoga Falls was a widening in the road, with a tavern, a gas station/country store, and two other buildings that I suspected might be a firehouse and a half-room school for half-witted kids. I had to decide whether to ask for directions in the country store or in the tavern. The country store didn’t stand a chance.

I ordered vodka on the rocks, but when I saw the bartender doing an engineering study to make sure the shot glass didn’t contain one drop more than an ounce, I upgraded my order to a double. Somehow a double of a one-ounce shot turned out to be one and a half ounces, and I knew the Indians who had settled this area first hadn’t had a chance when the bartender’s ancestors arrived. They were lucky to escape with their feathers intact.

Engaging the bartender in conversation basically meant asking him questions and listening to him say yes and no. Well, not exactly yes and no. People up there kind of said “Aaaay-p” for yes and “Np” for no. After I figured that out, the conversation seemed to go easier and eventually he told me that I got to “the old Canestoga Hotel” by turning right a half-mile down the road and heading down toward lakeside. There was a sign on the roadway, he said, for “the old Canestoga Hotel,” and I hadn’t even had to ask him because if I had just kept driving I couldn’t have missed the sign.

“Is there a
new
Canestoga Hotel?” I asked.

“Np.” That meant no.

“Why do you call it ‘the old Canestoga Hotel,’ then?”

“’Cause it’s old. Aaaay-p. It’s old.”

I knew I was going to love it up there.

“You one of those movie folk?” he asked me.

“No.”

“The hotel’s closed, you know,” he said. “Don’t rent rooms no more.”

“I’m not a movie folk but I’ve got to be there for the filming. I’m sort of involved in the production.”

He thought about that for the time it took me to finish the world’s skimpiest drink and said, “Production is a good thing.”

He nodded his head sagely, and I said “Aaaay-p” and he said, “Aaaay-p,” and since we were now such good friends, I had another drink before I left.

I spotted the hotel as I drove in the direction of the lake. With some small alterations, it might have served as home for Scarlett O’Hara. It was four stories high, white wood, and it looked like there were wings on left and right with rooms. The central section was almost all glass and I suspected that it held the lobby, dining room, staircase, and whatever. The building perched on a small knoll about two hundred feet from the lake and was surrounded on two sides and the front by high iron fences. A long driveway, bordered by high-mounted carriage lights, led to the front door.

There was a gate in the middle of the front fence. It was closed and there was a guy sitting there, sunning himself outside a little guard booth. He had a ruddy wrinkled face, thinning gray hair combed in front into an elaborate pompadour. He cocked an eye toward me as I stopped the car and rolled down the window.

“My name’s Devlin Tracy,” I said.

“Nice to meet you, son. My name’s Clyde Snapp.”

“I’m expected. Will you open the gate?”

Snapp was wearing a plaid shirt and some kind of gray work pants. Even with him sitting down, I could tell he was big. He was probably in his sixties, with big large-knuckled hands, and all in all, he looked like the kind of guy you’d pick to be with you if you had to get lost in the woods.

“You from Hollywood?” he said.

“No. Are you?”

“This place is closed. Only open for people from Hollywood.”

“I’m from the insurance company. I’m supposed to be here. The producers know all about it.”

“Oh, yeah. I heard you were coming,” he said. He started to rearrange himself, preparatory to getting up from the wooden folding chair. “You’re supposed to be the one to watch after that McCue, ain’t you?”

“That’s right,” I said as he stood up and pushed open the heavy iron gate.

The hotel might have needed a coat of paint, but the gate needed nothing. It swung open easily, without even a squeak.

Snapp came back and stood alongside my door, hands on top of the car. “You gonna try to keep him alive, right?” I nodded and he said, “Good luck, young fella.”

“That sounds ominous. Think it’s going to be trouble?”

“Well,” he started, and dragged it out like it was the name of a town in Wales. “That McCue fella got here this afternoon about three o’clock. Around four o’clock, I saw him crawling around on the roof.”

He pointed toward the hotel, about fifty yards away. “That roof. Took a chance on breaking his neck, he did.”

“What was he doing on the roof?” I asked.

“I told him to get his ass down from there. Then I asked him that. He said he always liked to see the roofs wherever he was staying. He said when they came for him, they’d likely come through the roof.”

“Who the hell is ‘they?’” I asked.

“That’s what I wanted to know too. He said, I’d know sure enough when they came for him.”

“Was he drinking?”

“Somehow I suspect so,” Snapp said, nodding to agree with himself.

“Tell me, Mr. Snapp, what do you do around here?”

“Call me Clyde. I’m the caretaker. I’ve got to make sure that everything works for these movie folk. I’m the only one who knows how anything works.”

“How long’s the hotel been closed?”

“Five years. Old owner died. New owner closed it down. I been looking after things since then.”

“Is there somebody inside to show me my room?”

“No,” he said. “You’re top floor left. I didn’t know what your name was going to be, just some man from the insurance company. You’re in forty-two, right next to McCue’s room. I figured that might be a good thing, seeing as how you’re going to keep him alive and all.”

“Going to try, Mr. Snapp,” I said as I put the car into gear.

“Clyde,” he corrected. “Good luck, son. I wouldn’t want your job.”