Pigs Get Fat (Trace 4)

“Mister Tracy, I’d like to hire you for one day,” Judith Collins said. “If you don’t find out where Thomas is, then I’ll call the police.”

Trace shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You seem to think that I’m some kind of real detective who can find things out like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“Then what are you?” she asked.

“I’m a bumbler. I fumble around. I never figure anything out. I just annoy people. I never catch anybody. I’m not a detective. I’m an annoyance clerk. I should work in a department store.”

Judith Collins stared at Trace for a long time. Then her shoulders shuddered as if from an explosion deep within a body that Trace suspected was very shapely beneath the shapeless house-dress she wore. She began to sob uncontrollably.

“Please, Mr. Tracy. Please.”

Trace sighed. He could never resist good manners.

Sometimes good things happened to good people. That was the way Devlin Tracy felt when he answered the telephone in his Las Vegas condominium apartment and discovered that it was Walter Marks calling.

Usually life demanded that he see Marks in person. On those too-numerous occasions, Tracy not only had to listen to his whiny little voice and see his pinched-up face, but he also had to feel the waves of hatred Marks exuded whenever they had to share the same piece of floor. But today all he had to do was talk to him on the telephone. That was obviously a good thing and Devlin Tracy knew he deserved it because he was obviously a good person.

“Mr. Walter Marks calling,” the secretary had said. “Is this Devlin Tracy?”

“None other,” Trace said.

“Please hold on for Mr. Marks,” she said.

“Certainly,” Trace said, and hung up.

He went into the apartment’s small kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee, and found a pack of cigarettes. By the time he brought them back into the living room, the telephone was ringing. Because he had just read an information flier from the telephone company that recommended that a caller ring ten times before hanging up, Trace let it ring nine times before picking up. If Walter Marks’ office was not smart enough to read the mail from the telephone company, then they didn’t deserve to talk to him.

“Mr. Tracy?” the same secretarial voice grated.

“Yes, indeed. Is this Groucho’s secretary?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Never mind. We must have been cut off,” Trace said.

She humphed a humph of disbelief. “Please hold on this time,” she said coolly.

“I’m waiting right here,” Trace said. He didn’t have a cigarette lighter. He had cigarettes now but no way to light them.

He hung up again.

The telephone rang while he scoured the apartment for a lighter. He counted the rings as he searched. It was strange—he never seemed able to find a lighter anymore. He decided it was probably because he was spending less time in bars.

Many thought that people who whiled away the hours in taverns were acting out of compulsion. But Trace spent a lot of time in bars because it was the best place to steal a steady supply of disposable cigarette lighters. He started running low on lighters after cutting down on his drinking.

The telephone had rung twelve times when he found a pack of matches in the kitchen. They were printed with the message: “You can be an artist. Draw this face.”

Trace would have tried if he could have located a pen, but his pen supply had dwindled along with the cigarette lighter stockpile. Being sober was hell on house supplies.

Eighteen rings.

Trace lit a cigarette.

Nineteen.

He picked up the telephone and said in his most cheerful, have-a-nice-day voice, “Hi! I guess Groucho wants to speak to me?”

“Hold on for Mr. Marks,” the secretary replied coldly.

Walter Marks was the vice president for claims of the Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company. Technically, Devlin Tracy worked for him as a free-lance claims investigator. However, both men knew that Trace had his job because he was a friend of Robert Swenson, the president of Garrison Fidelity. This caused Marks a great deal of discomfort because he was a small man, and like many small men, he liked to rule through terror and threats of firing. Since Trace was totally fireproof and impervious to terror, he was not one of Marks’ favorites.

“Trace?” came Marks’ nastly little voice. He spoke as if there were a penalty for separating his lips.

“Yes, Groucho,” Trace said. “’Tis I.”

“What the hell is going on there? Why do you keep hanging up on me?”

“I didn’t hang up on you, Walter,” Trace said, sipping his coffee, his mind still on that matchbook cover. Draw this face. Maybe he could have some printed up with Walter Marks’ picture on them and then the legend: Erase This Face. “I think it’s that ditzy secretary of yours. I don’t think she knows how to operate the hold button. Anyway, you’ve got me now. Do you want something or is this just free-form complaining?”

“No. Actually I called to ask you politely to start working off your retainer. Beginning today, Tracy.”

“Well, as much as I’d like to, Groucho, I’m afraid I’ll have to turn down any assignment you might be planning to stick me with.”

“What?”

“It conflicts with previous plans I have made,” Trace said.

“What plans?”

“I’m going to San Francisco for a convention.”

“There’s no insurance convention in San Francisco,” Marks said.

“Insurance is just one tiny facet of the gem that is my life,” Trace said. “This is a convention of American citizens born in Japan.”

“Look Tracy—I know you’re Jewish and Irish,” Marks said. “How’d you suddenly arrange to be Japanese?”

“Not me. Chico. Her mother is going and we’re going to go with her.”

“I find it hard to believe that I have to point this out to even a sloth like you but work should come first,” Marks said.

“Look at it this way,” Trace said. “There’s always work, never a shortage of it. But a convention, once missed, is gone forever.”

“So is a retainer,” Marks snarled. “Then you’re turning down the job I’ve got for you.”

“How quick you are on the uptake. Not even the subtlest hint can slide by you unnoticed,” Trace said.

“I’ll remember this conversation.”

“I know. And you’ll write it down in your file of reasons to shitcan Devlin Tracy. But just when you think it’s worth the effort to try, you’ll remember all the millions of dollars I’ve saved dear old Gone Fishing and you’ll change your mind.”

“Don’t refer to Garrison Fidelity as Gone Fishing,” Marks snapped.

“Okay, Groucho.”

“And don’t call me Groucho.”

“Yes, Walter,” Trace said.

“I hope the fags attack you in San Francisco,” Marks said.

“I’ll stay indoors.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Probably ten days,” Trace said.

“I’ll talk to you when you get back,” Marks said.

“I’ll count the hours,” Trace said.

Trace was dozing on the sofa when the front door to the apartment opened. He opened his eye and mumbled, “Hi, Chico.”

“I don’t believe it,” Michiko Mangini answered. She was tiny and trim with long, lustrous black hair. Her eyes were large, luminous, and dark in the healthy taupe of her face.

Except for a touch of lipstick on her full bow-shaped lips, she wore no makeup. Trace knew she scrubbed it off when she knocked off her shift as a blackjack dealer at the Araby Casino. While she was working, she had to wear a silly-looking harem costume and showgirl makeup, but Chico peeled that persona away as soon as the work shift ended. She was twenty-six but looked younger; she was beautiful but looked better than beautiful. She was also a part-time hooker but they didn’t talk about that.

“What don’t you believe?” Trace said.

“It’s the cocktail hour and you’re lying there with a coffee cup in front of you. I thought you’d be shitfaced by now.”

“Don’t it warm the cockles of your Japanese-Sicilian heart?” Trace said as he swung his feet to the floor and quickly finished the last of the vodka that was in the coffee cup.

Chico was still in the doorway, transferring bags of groceries from the hallway to inside the apartment. Trace thought that her arms always seemed to be filled with groceries. She was lucky that he hardly ate anything; otherwise her shoulders would be thick with muscle and her back permanently swayed from the weight of the load.

“All set for our vacation?” she asked as she started to carry the bags two at a time into the kitchen.

“Yes,” he said.

“All packed?”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I knew if I waited long enough you’d do it for me,” Trace said.

“Only if you promise that I can leave out that stupid tape recorder,” she said.

“Of course leave it out. We’re going on vacation, right?”

“Exactly,” Chico said. “No secret conversations on tape. No work. Just play for a week.”

“Wanna play now?” he asked.

“I’d rather unpack the groceries first,” she said.

“Want me to help?”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“You always put things in the wrong place. The rice winds up with the spaghetti sauce, the smoked oysters get hidden behind the oatmeal. No, thank you. I’d rather do it myself.”

“Actually,” Trace said, “I was wondering why you bought groceries at all when we’re leaving tomorrow on vacation.”

“You never can tell,” she said darkly. “Something goes wrong, at least this way we have food to eat.”

“I talked to Walter Marks today,” Trace said.

“Did he try to ruin our vacation?”

“Of course.”

Trace marveled at how efficiently she put things away. The kitchen was only a narrow passageway, sink and refrigerator and range on one side, cabinets and counter on the other, but she always seemed to have room to store the array of bottles, cans, and jars she brought home.

“Food for starving India,” he mumbled as he walked by her in the kitchen and rinsed out his coffee cup.

“Why, for the first time in memory, are you washing your own cup?” she asked.

“I want to remove the traces of vodka before you got to it,” Trace said.

“You didn’t need to. I smelled it as soon as I walked past you.”

“Vodka has no smell,” Trace said.

“It does.”

“What does it smell like?” he asked.

“It has a distinct vodka smell,” she said.

“That’s nonsense. That’s why everybody drinks vodka, so their wives don’t notice it on their breath when they get home. You think all those millions of people are wrong?”

“Wrong as wrong can be,” she said. She teetered precariously on a little step stool putting canned goods into the back of a top shelf. “Did you ever hear of any wife anywhere who couldn’t tell when her husband had been drinking? Vodka or no vodka, we women always know.”

“God, you’re insidious,” he said.

She turned around and smiled at him. As she stood on the stool, her eyes were almost level with his.

“Remember this,” she said, “whenever you get the idea to cheat or mess with me. I always know. I know all.” Her eyes sparkled. “You know, maybe it’s a sex-related genetic difference? Maybe only men can’t smell vodka. All women can. And besides, when you sweat, you excrete it and you smell like a locker room.”

“And despite that, you’ve put up with me all these years,” he said. He grabbed her around the waist, spun her off the stool, and kissed her.

“It hasn’t been that many years,” she said. “Only three.”

“Seems like more,” he said.

Later that night, Chico packed Trace’s clothes for him, with frequent hoots at various garments she found hanging in his closet. As she usually did, she filled a large green Hefty Bag with clothing that she said she absolutely would not ever let him wear again and that she was going to donate to the Volunteers of America clothing drive.

Then she went to sleep.

Trace carefully took all the clothing out of the Hefty Bag and put them back into his closet.

Finally, before going to bed himself, he took the small portable tape recorder and its tiny microphone fashioned in the shape of a golden frog tie clip and hid it in the bottom of his suitcase.

“One never knows, do one?” he mumbled.