Once a Mutt (Trace 5) (4 page)

He thought he smelled something burning. He saw that the ashtray, filled with butts, was smoldering. He stubbed out the cigarette he was holding, then tried to use the butt to put out the other burning cigarettes. But they were slipperier than eels, and all he managed to do was push them out of the low-sided flat ashtray onto the bed. He burned his fingers trying to pick them up. Finally, he got them all together and took the ashtray inside the bathroom and flushed its contents down the toilet.

Then he took the plastic wastepaper basket from the bathroom and under the tub faucet ran an inch of water into the bottom. When he was satisfied it didn’t leak, he brought it back and stood it on the floor next to his bed.

He looked at it and it made him more miserable than before. It was like being back in the army, sleeping in a barracks, with a butt can filled with wet sand hanging from a nail. A community ashtray.

He was forty years old and here he was, lying in a motel room, using a water-filled garbage can as an ashtray. Why not crystal? Waterford. Baccarat. It was all Chico’s fault. She had reduced him to this by her parsimony.

He got up and in the Formica-topped desk in the corner of the room found a postcard that showed a picture of the motel in hideous Technicolor. The dogwood trees had been in bloom when the picture was taken and it looked bright and cheerful. Trace knew he had missed the dogwood season by three months. All he was going to have was July sweat and exhaust from trucks passing the motel on the Post Road.

He addressed the card to Chico and in the space for a message wrote: “Dear Chico. You will never soar. You will always only walk. Trace.”

He looked at his message approvingly. Already he felt better. Striking back was always good for depression. If I’m not near the one I hate, I hate the one I’m near. Was that a song?

He read the message again, aloud this time. Its words seemed nasty and trivial to him.

Good, he thought. That’s what he wanted to be, nasty and trivial.

Inside his wallet, he found a corroded old twenty-cent stamp that he had taken from a
Time
magazine renewal notice and put it on the postcard. Then he left his room to walk over to the motel’s lobby to find a mailbox. He hoped the mailbox was inside the cocktail lounge.

He wanted a drink with ice.

A heavy iron gate closed with a chain and a padlock separated the Paddington home from the rest of the world. Trace thought it was probably to protect the world from the maniacal packs of curs that roamed the grounds day and night.

He parked his car alongside the high stone wall next to the gates, but heard no dogs barking, and when he looked through the gates, he saw no dogs anywhere in the sloping lawns that led up to the house.

He saw no people either, and he looked around for a bell or buzzer. Finally he found a button almost buried in the cement that anchored the gate into the stone walls. He pressed the button for a long time but could not hear it ringing anywhere and still saw no one at the house, which was set back fifty yards from the gate behind a roadway wide enough for two cars.

He kept pressing the button. Finally he stopped and shouted, “Hey. Is there anybody alive in there?”

There was still no answer, so he tried the button again and then shouted some more.

Maybe he could go over the wall. Sure. And Mrs. Paddington could pick just that moment to let her hundred starving Dobermans out for a walk. No, thank you. Maybe an air drop. Maybe he could get a helicopter to set him down on the Paddington roof.

He leaned on the button again and then shouted again. Maybe he should have telephoned first.

The garage was open and Trace saw two cars parked inside: one was gray; the other, a foreign station wagon, was red.

Then he saw a man coming out of the garage and walking slowly down the driveway. He was wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans and he was fastening his belt as he came toward the gate. Trace would never have called the expression on his face one of unalloyed joy. On the other hand, he might not have called the thing on the front of the man’s head a face either. The skin was red and the jaw jutted forward. His brow sloped back into a hairline that had probably receded from embarrassment because his hair was black and knotty. While his face was sharp-featured, nothing seemed to go with anything else, and if people wound up looking like their pets, this man kept vultures. In a long-ago adolescence, he had probably suffered from acne—although, Trace thought, “suffered” was the wrong word. People suffered from acne when other people made fun of them. That had never happened with this person. Even when he was not around, kids would have said, “Yes, Gargantua, yes, he has real nice skin. And a sweet gentle disposition. Gargantua is the salt of the earth.” He probably never even knew he had acne. Maybe he thought everyone else was wrong and who was to say nay?

The man was as big as Trace and he had the sloping shoulders and stringy arm muscles of the very strong, who don’t have to lift weights to prove it.

Trace put his age at around forty but wasn’t sure because he had very little experience with Cro-Magnon man.

He had a scowl on his face. Somehow it made him look more appealing than having blood dripping from his mouth, which Trace thought was the most likely alternative. His eyes, fixed on Trace like a marksman’s sights, were beady.

Trace reached under his jacket and turned on the small portable tape recorder that he always carried, taped to his skin under his shirt.

He waited until the man was almost at the gate and then reached over and hit the buzzer button one more time for good measure.

He smiled at the man, who did not smile back.

“That isn’t funny,” the man said. Even his voice was menacing, low-pitched, soft and hissing as if he spoke only on the inhale.

“Sorry,” Trace said. “I was ringing the bell so long it just got to be a habit.”

“People oughta watch their habits. Some of them aren’t healthy.”

“But some are very healthy,” Trace said. “For instance, I’m in this habit of taking two hours of karate training every day. Now, that’s what I call a good habit. You never know who you might meet.”

“Never know,” the man said, and sipped air. “I’m in the habit of carrying an ax handle myself, for just the same reason. What do you want?”

“That’s neat,” Trace said. “Hardly anybody in my crowd carries clubs anymore.”

“What do you want?” the man said.

“I want to see Mrs. Paddington.”

“You have an appointment?”

“Not exactly,” Trace said.

“Then you can’t exactly see her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she doesn’t see a lot of people,” the man said.

“Maybe she’ll make an exception in my case,” Trace said.

“Why should she?”

“I’m from the insurance company. Something about two million dollars,” Trace said.

The man paused. Trace promised to remember that for the future: mentioning a couple of million dollars had a way of catching people’s attention and bringing civilization to the provinces.

“You wait here,” the man ordered. “I’ll see if she’ll see you.”

“I’ll wait,” Trace said. As the man walked away, Trace pressed the button again. Trace couldn’t hear it, but obviously the man could because he wheeled around and glared at Trace.

“Sorry. Just fooling around,” Trace said.

“You fool around too much.”

“Well, paaaaardon me,” Trace said.

While he waited for the man to return, he wondered how he was going to come up with ten thousand dollars. He had no illusions about earning anything except his expenses on this case and Chico seemed intransigent. He had no savings left and there wasn’t much he could do to cut down on his life-style and make it less costly. He looked at the cigarette in his hand. Maybe he could switch to generic cigarettes, the kind they sold in supermarkets in those black-and-white packages that made them look like poor people’s beans.

He discarded that idea right away. He had smoked a generic cigarette once. It was a moment he would never forget because it had answered a very large question. Trace had been thinking that there should be a way to recycle horse manure from racetracks. Supposedly it was good fertilizer, so why didn’t every racetrack in America have a manure-processing plant built right next door to it? He had thought it was only shortsightedness, and then he had smoked the generic cigarette and it was suddenly obvious that there was no need for manure-processing plants because racetracks had found something else to do with horse manure. They sold it to companies to make generic cigarettes.

Another brilliant idea shot to hell. He looked at his cigarette and threw it away. Sure, another brilliant idea. Just like the brilliant idea that had him buying 20 percent of a New Jersey restaurant and putting up every penny he had in the world, and now the goddamn ocean was conspiring to bankrupt him by ruining the building. An act of God. Sometimes he thought God was just lying in wait, ready to ambush Trace on the road to happiness and prosperity.

He looked up and saw the big man coming toward the gate and again turned on the miniature tape recorder under his shirt.

“She said she’ll see you,” the man said. His tone of voice left no doubt about what he thought of
that
decision.

“Good. I thought she might.”

He waited at the gate. The man waited on the other side. Finally, Trace said, “Well? Open the damn gate.”

“She won’t see you now,” the man said.

“No? When?”

“This afternoon. She wants time to get herself together, I think she said.”

“You mentioned the two million dollars?” Trace asked.

“I mentioned it.”

“Usually that gets me right in.”

“I guess two million dollars doesn’t mean as much to her as most. Go away. Come back at two o’clock.”

“All right,” Trace said. He started to turn from the gate, then asked, “What’s your name?”

“Ferd. Why?”

“I wanted to be sure to ask for you when I come back.” Trace said.

Trace drove around Westport looking for what appeared to be an honest saloon, then gave up the quest and went into a cocktail lounge in the center of town. He ordered Finlandia vodka on the rocks and tried to see past all the potted palms out through the main window at the business street in front. He had already decided he hated Westport. It was the kind of town where everything was neat and clean and polite and antiseptic and he thought he had seen more honest excitement, goodwill, and camaraderie in the eyes of a Las Vegas pit boss. There was an old map on the lounge’s wall and Trace read off the Indian place-names. Indians, he thought. What the hell kind of Indians would have settled in Connecticut? Nondrinking Indians, no doubt. Indians had sold most of America for booze and beads. What had they gotten for Westport? Probably a divine quiche recipe. The Quiche Tribe.

He finished his drink quickly and ordered another. For months now, he realized, he had not really been drinking. Seventy-five percent of the time, for the past six months, he had been drinking wine. Seventy-five percent. And for what? To try to please a Japanese-Sicilian half-breed who was too mean and nasty and narrow-minded to lend him money, even to make herself rich.

And he had done it all, cutting the drinking, smoking less, even exercising every so often when he remembered, just to please Chico. Well, she didn’t deserve it, and that was that.

He took a long vicious sip of his drink and looked at his watch. It wasn’t two o’clock yet, not by a long sight. He had plenty of time left. He hated Westport. There weren’t any real bars and the cocktail lounges didn’t sell sausages or peanuts. For snacks, they didn’t put out little cheesy fish-shaped crackers. Instead, they put out cereal bowls of crap made from whole grains. Sitting at a bar in Westport made him feel as if he should order a quart of milk so he could pour it over the snackies for breakfast.

He ordered another drink. And then he got change and bought cigarettes from the machine. Strong cigarettes. That’d fix her. He would show her. And he would never exercise again. He had done forty years quite nicely, thank you, without trying to “improve” himself to please her, and he was done being pussy-whipped. No more. Never again.

He thought about this through three more drinks and then, since it was two-thirty, decided it was time to return for his two-o’clock appointment with Mrs. Paddington. He felt good. He might even eat something later if he kept feeling this good.

Ferd was waiting for him when he parked near the Paddington gate.

“You’re late,” he said, sipping air.

“But I was early this morning,” Trace said. “This makes up for it.”

Ferd said nothing. He unlocked the gate, let Trace inside, then locked it again behind them. Wordlessly, he led Trace up the long paved driveway to the big sprawling house. Trace saw no animals and hoped that it was dogs’ day off. How nice of Mrs. Paddington to arrange it on the day Trace visited. She might be a smart woman. Maybe she’d like to invest in a restaurant on the Jersey shore.

Trace sang as he walked:

The rest of it was about Ivan Skavinsky Skavar, but he couldn’t remember the lyrics. Skavar rhymed with shah and czar and far, but Trace couldn’t get the words together.

“Say, Ferd. Do you have a rhyming dictionary in the house?”

Ferd did not answer. Trace guessed that he didn’t have a rhyming dictionary. Ivan Skavinsky Skavar would have to await another day.

As he got up the driveway, Trace could see that the red car in the driveway was a Saab station wagon. The gray one was the obligatory-for-Westport gray Mercedes sedan. This one had smoked windows in the rear.

Trace thought it was a particularly stupid idea to paint cars to look like battleships. Battleships were supposed to be gray so the enemy couldn’t see them in the fog or mist, but what was the point of that with a car? If you owned a Mercedes, you wanted everybody to see it. That, he was sure, was the Westport rule.

And, come to think of it, it was a pretty stupid idea about battleships too. The fact was that navy vessels were painted gray way back when everything depended on visual sighting. But now the enemy had radar. Hell, even hang-gliders had radar. So why not cheer up things? Paint navy war vessels in bright colors, pastels, pinks, reds, and purples. Mauve. Trace especially liked mauve. He bet that mauve ships would do a lot to boost the reenlistment rate in the navy. And it would strike terror in the hearts of the enemy to see the pride of the U.S. fleet come barrel-assing out of a fog bank, painted pink and purple and fuchsia and lime green.

He wondered if the navy paid for suggestions. Maybe he could get somebody who was in the navy to put the idea in the suggestion box and then split the reward with Trace. Sixty-forty. The sixty for Trace. He had to write the idea down someplace, but he never carried pencil or paper, so he turned on his tape recorder and said, “Think about repainting battleships.”

“What?” Ferd said.

“Nothing. Just thinking aloud.” He had it on tape now. He would never lose it.

He thought Ferd was going to take him through the garage like a tradesman, but at the last moment Ferd led him up the walk and in the front door of the house. A large wide stairway on the right led to the second floor.

“Mrs. Paddington’s waiting for you in the drawing room. She’s been waiting a long time,” Ferd said.

“I’m worth waiting for,” Trace said. He followed Ferd past the main stairway and down a dark hall. At the end of the hall, his foot bumped against something and he saw a folded wheelchair propped against the stairway wall.

He followed Ferd down a cross hall and into a large room. Even though the drapes had been pulled, the room was still quite bright. Mrs. Paddington sat on the sofa, her back to the main bank of windows. She smiled as the two men came in, and Trace knew he would recognize her anywhere by those teeth. He remembered a television commercial from his youth. It was for toothpaste and it showed a cartoon beaver and the jingle was “Bucky, Bucky Beaver, here’s the new Ipana.”

“Ferdinand,” she said, “would you send Maggie in?”

“Sorry, Mrs. P. She’s gone to market.”

“Oh, I told her we’d want tea.”