Once a Mutt (Trace 5) (6 page)

“Not all of it. If Bart dies, I’ll need it to maintain this house. To keep the pitcher full, so to speak.”

“Good thinking. You’re a very bright woman.”

“Bright and fortunate,” she said. “My cup runneth over.”

“All of them,” Trace said, glancing down at her bosom. Then he glanced down the long flow of grass rolling away toward the road. He could see the Paddington gates and home across the street.

“Are those all your questions?” Elvira asked.

“That’s all I needed to know,” Trace said. “How about those people who live over there?” He pointed toward the Paddington house.

“What about them?”

“Do you think they’ll help me with my survey?”

“You tell me. What kind of answers did they give you when you were there before?”

“Oh, you saw me,” he said.

“I remembered the car. You don’t see many dark-blue cars anymore. What did they tell you?”

“Nothing, really. Mr. Paddington is dead and they have a million-dollar insurance policy and they’re trying to collect on it. I was just wondering what kind of people they are.”

“You’re not really doing a survey, are you?” Elvira asked.

“No,” Trace said, surprised at his own outburst of honesty. “I’m checking their insurance claim.”

“Are you a detective? God, are you going to rip my clothes off and shove a gat into my belly unless I come clean?”

“More like an investigator,” Trace said. “Hold the gat idea.” He sipped at his drink and saw she was smiling at him. “You know anything that might be helpful? About your neighbors?”

“I don’t know. Aren’t you private eyes supposed to pay your stoolies for important information?”

“It’s usually negotiable,” Trace said.

“Then negotiate.”

“How about dinner tonight?” Trace said.

“That’ll do for a start,” she said. “I’ve never seen Mrs. Paddington. I read about her in the newspapers a few weeks ago, how her husband died and she was having him declared dead. That’s all I know. The woman who works there is named Maggie Winters, I think. Did you meet her?”

“No,” Trace said.

“Oh. Well, she’s pretty if you like the blond peasant sort. The only other person I see there is the big gorilla. The one you were talking to earlier today.”

“You’ve been here all day?” Trace asked.

“All day, every day. At least during the summer. I see all and know all,” Elvira said.

“But you don’t know anything about the Paddingtons?”

“Nothing. And I know the gossip about everybody.”

“How do you do that if you’re always on the lawn?” Trace asked.

“Well, not literally always. I have to go to the hairdresser and the weekly facial and aerobics classes, so I get out a bit. But nobody knows anything about the Paddingtons.”

“I wish I could find somebody who did. You know what they do for a living?” Trace said.

“Something to do with dog shit, the newspaper said.”

“Not in so many words,” Trace said.

“Not exactly, but the meaning was clear. Anyway, you can tell me all about it at dinner.”

“Sounds good,” Trace said.

“And I’ll see if I can find out anything about the Paddingtons.”

“That sounds good too,” Trace said.

“Are you staying in town?”

“Ye Olde English Motel.”

“What a dump,” Elvira said. “What room?”

“Three-seventeen.”

“I’ll call you at seven-thirty tonight and pick you up,” she said.

“I could pick you up,” Trace said.

“No. Somebody might see us and besides…”

“Besides what?”

“I wouldn’t want anybody I know to see me in a dark-blue Ford.”

At least Trace approved of the caliber of women in Westport, he thought as he waited in Adam Shapp’s law office, pretending to read a magazine and watching the lawyer’s receptionist.

She was barely out of her teens and her skin seemed to sparkle. Probably in an effort to look more mature, her hair was pulled back tightly from her forehead and tied up in a bun and she wore large praying-mantis-like eyeglasses. But if the impression she wanted to give was one of all business, it hadn’t worked because she reminded Trace of one of those before-and-after scenes from a thirties’ movie where the librarian, prim and proper by day, rips off her glasses, lets down her hair, and at night stomps the stage at Minsky’s, bumping and grinding to the tune of “Let’s Do It in the Road.”

It wasn’t just Westport either. All towns with a lot of money seemed to have more than their share of good-looking women. Was that cause or effect? Trace wondered. Did beautiful women naturally tend to towns where people were wealthy? That was cause. Or did women in rich towns have more time to spend making themselves and their children beautiful? That was effect.

No way of knowing, Trace decided. That was the way life was. You passed through it and there were a lot of things that you wondered about and were never able to get answers to. Like why store clerks with acne were always rude. Why Alka-Seltzer fizzed when it got wet. How anyone ever learned to speak German. You left the world as dumb as when you arrived. The only difference was that you wore clothes when leaving.

He looked away from the receptionist and took up a back copy of a psychology magazine. It flipped open to a page in which a postcard had been inserted, soliciting readers’ answers to a survey. Trace read the survey question:

“If you were the President of the United States and the U.S. was losing a war and the only way you could avert defeat was to launch a nuclear strike, knowing that such a strike would prompt a retaliatory response, would you use nuclear weapons?”

What a stupid question, Trace thought. What kind of war was the U.S. losing? What would happen to the U.S. if it lost the war? How could you make a decision without knowing the answers to those questions?

He got up and took a pen from a wooden cup on the receptionist’s desk and came back to fill in the card.

He marked the box that read, “Yes, I would use nuclear weapons.” Beneath it was a space for “Explain your actions.”

“Because I like to kill people,” Trace wrote.

He thought about it for a while, then filled in the name of Michiko Mangini and their address in Las Vegas. Maybe they would send someone to interview her and annoy her. That would serve her right.

Suppose they sent her a free subscription for having the best answer? If they did, he’d make sure the subscription was transferred to him. He’d start watching the mail just to be sure. He hadn’t been paying enough attention to the mail lately.

“Mr. Tracy.”

Trace looked up and the receptionist said, “Mr. Shapp will see you now.” Trace nodded, put down the magazine, but stuck the postcard in his pocket. He walked toward the heavy mahogany door in the rear of the office.

“Mr. Tracy?” the receptionist said again.

“Yes?”

“The pen, please?”

“Oh. Heh, heh.” He took the ballpoint pen from his jacket pocket and handed it back to her. “Just forgot, I guess.”

“I’m glad I remembered for the two of us,” she said.

Snotty little twerp, he thought. Thinking that he would try to steal a cheap ballpoint pen.

Adam Shapp was younger than Trace had expected. The tall blond man who hadn’t seen thirty yet was standing at his bank of office windows, looking out over the Post Road. As he turned, Trace saw he was wearing a three-piece gray suit with a Phi Beta Kappa key hanging from the vest. He was tan and his light-blond hair was trimmed neatly and he had light ice-blue eyes. He looked as if he should be playing at Wimbledon, not hanging around a law office.

He smiled as he stepped forward to shake Trace’s hand. He was almost as tall as Trace and looked to be in a lot better shape. He was probably rich too, Trace thought. Young and rich and tan and smart and handsome. The boy from Ipanema. Hell, he probably had inherited a bank in Ipanema. He probably never had had to raise ten thousand dollars in a hurry to keep a restaurant deal alive to secure his future. Trace had a powerful urge to punch him, even while the lawyer’s hand was extended in friendship. Aaaah, he was probably a black-belt karate expert too and Trace would wind up getting his ass kicked. He settled for shaking his hand.

“How are you, Mr. Tracy?” the young man said. “Please sit down.”

Trace plopped into a chair facing the attorney’s desk.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“No.”

“Something else?”

“What does something else consist of?” Trace asked.

“Tea. Herbal tea. Bouillon. Maybe we’ve got some diet Coke.”

“I’ve always regarded my body as a temple, Mr. Shapp. I wouldn’t put any of that junk in it.”

The lawyer nodded and pressed the intercom button. “Sandy. Black coffee, please. Yes, just one.”

He arranged Trace’s business card neatly in the center of his desk blotter, looked at it again, then up at Trace. “I expect you’re here to talk about Mrs. Paddington and her petition to the courts?”

Trace nodded.

“We’ve got a court date in…let’s see.” Shapp opened a red leather-covered date book and skimmed through the pages. “In three weeks. Mr. Paddington will be legally declared dead then. So what can I do for you?”

“I’m looking into Mr. Paddington’s disappearance.”

“You too? Your company had detectives doing that for a couple of weeks. Didn’t they find out enough?”

“I guess not,” Trace said. “Anyway, I’m like the last big gun they like to fire before they give up. Hope to frighten away the enemy troops. And if they don’t run, then we surrender.”

“It’s really kind of annoying, you know,” Shapp said as he sat down. “The case is very simple and you would think your company would stop fooling around and start writing the check.”

“They hate to part with money,” Trace said. “It’s all Walters Marks’ fault.”

“Who’s Walter Marks?” Shapp asked.

“He’s the vice-president for claims. He thinks that anybody who carries more than a thousand dollars’ insurance only took out the policy to defraud old Gone Fishing.”

“Gone Fishing? Oh, Garrison Fidelity. Okay. Remind me never to buy any insurance from Walter Marks.”

“I’ll send you a note every couple of months,” Trace promised.

Sandy, the receptionist, came in, carrying a cup of coffee, in a real cup, on a real saucer, on a wooden tray. She put it down squarely atop Trace’s business card.

“Thanks, Sandy,” Shapp said.

“Keep your eye on your pens, Mr. Shapp,” she said, and smiled toward Trace as she walked out.

“What did that mean?” Shapp asked him.

“She caught me trying to lift one of her pens,” Trace said. “I didn’t know it was such a matter of pride with her.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t go after the paper clips. The cops would have been called,” the young lawyer said. He sipped at his coffee and looked at Trace as if inviting a question.

“Will Mrs. Paddington be able to testify at the hearing?” Trace asked.

“If it’s necessary, I imagine so. It probably won’t be.”

“I got the impression she was pretty much of an invalid.”

“You talked to her?”

“This afternoon,” Trace said.

“Well, she’s obviously not in the best of health. But if your company wastes our time and she has to go to court, she’s got those two people to bring her.”

“Ferdinand and Maggie?” Trace said.

“Right. The loyal retainers,” Shapp said.

“What do you think of Mrs. Paddington?” Trace asked.

“She’s an arsonist, a cold-blooded murderer, and a pathological liar,” Shapp said. “Come on, Tracy. She’s my client. What the hell am I supposed to think about her? She’s a poor woman with a dead husband and she wants her insurance money. She’ll probably spend it all on cat food or something. Do I think she’s playing with a full deck? I don’t know, the allure of animals hasn’t ever reached me. But this is all cut and dried, so I’m going to do my job, take my fee, and be done with it.”

“Me too,” Trace said. “How’d Mrs. Paddington happen to retain you?”

“Yellow Pages, I guess. I didn’t ask. I hardly ever reject clients because they don’t come with letters of introduction.”

“You think this is just going to breeze through court, don’t you?” Trace asked.

“It’s just a formality. It’s done every day. The only thing that makes this different is your company’s going to have to cough up two million dollars. Insurance companies ought to pay. That’s what they’re in business for.”

“You tell that to Mrs. Paddington?”

“Sure.”

“You talk to her a lot?” Trace asked.

“Not much. Once in a while on the phone. She types me little notes when she wants to remind me of something. I wouldn’t call us real close.”

“How about Mr. Paddington? What do you know about him?”

“Nothing except that he’s dead,” Shapp said. “What’d he do, make his money in pooper-scoopers or something, right? And then from Mrs. Paddington, I get that he was harmless enough. Big in save the animals. His plane goes down when, what, what’s he trying to do, save the harp seal or the woolly mastodon or whatever it is? What do I know about him? That’s about it.”

“Not an animal lover? It’s hard to believe,” Trace said.

“Hey, just because I live in this sappy town, don’t think I buy all this trendy crap. Save the seals, natural childbirth, bean sprouts, tofu, raw fish, it’s all bullshit.”

“You don’t think there’s a chance that Paddington’s hiding out somewhere?” Trace asked.

“You’ve been reading too many detective novels, Mr. Tracy. First of all, the Paddingtons are wealthy. I don’t think they’ve been spending the last seven years trying to figure out how to rip off What-his-name?”

“Walter Marks. Write it down. Send him a nasty note,” Trace suggested.

“Yeah. Walter Marks. They don’t need the hassle or the money.”

“Do you know who Mrs. Paddington’s doctor is?” Trace asked.

“No. It never came up. Why?”

“I don’t know,” Trace said honestly. “Maybe somebody’ll tell me this is the tenth husband she’s buried. Something like that.”

“Good luck,” Shapp said. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you think the Paddingtons got along?” Trace asked.

“I never met him, but she thinks he was a saint. I’m surprised she didn’t build a shrine to him in the yard. Anything else?”

“How do you stay so thin?” Trace asked.

“Being young. I’ll worry about middle-aged spread in middle age.”

As Trace got up, Shapp asked, “What do you do now?”

“I don’t know,” Trace said. “I’m going to have to hang around ’cause I need to justify my existence. Unless you’ve got ten thousand dollars you want to lend me.”

“I don’t think so. Are you going to make ten thousand dollars just for looking around?”

“Only if I find something.”

“You’re out of luck, then. What do you need the ten thousand for? Or is it personal?”

“I own a piece of this restaurant at the Jersey shore. It suffered some storm damage and I’ve got to come up with repair money. You interested? I could make you a good deal.”

“Not me. I don’t trust restaurants. Did you know that seventy-five percent of all restaurants fail?”

“Is everybody I meet subscribing to the same clipping service? I can’t turn around without somebody telling me that my restaurant’s going to go belly-up.”

“Sorry. Those are the brutal facts,” Shapp said.

“I’m staying in the deal,” Trace said stubbornly.

“If you need a good lawyer to get you out of the deal, keep me in mind,” Shapp said.

Sandy was not at the reception desk when Trace left. He stole all the ballpoint pens from the penholder.