Trace (Trace 1) (4 page)

“Funny business?”

“I don’t know,” Trace said. “You know, people die all the time, you wonder sometimes if something’s going on.”

“Naaah, I think those people up there, they die anyway anywhere. They just die up there so they don’t mess up their sheets in their houses.”

He was interrupted by a bellow from the other end of the bar.

“Hughie, you old peckerhead. Three more of these.”

“Just a minute, Trace.” He yelled out, “Coming right up.”

Trace turned off the tape recorder until the bartender was back, then turned it on again.

“You were saying about people dying at Meadow Vista.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe they’re running that place so people get left alone to die. That’s nice, kind of. When I die, I don’t want anybody hanging around me and relatives crying. Just put me someplace clean and let God turn the lights out. Maybe that’s what Matteson’s doing.”

“Matteson? Who’s he?”

“Doc Matteson. It’s his sanatorium,” Hughie said.

“You know him?”

“I see him a lot. You know, this place is like the only joint in town where you can get real lunch or dinner. Zoning. The town council thinks you let in restaurants, you’re going to get Mexicans selling tacos out of pushcarts. So everybody comes up here. I see Doc Matteson once in a while. He plays here sometimes too. He’s not a member. You got to be a hundred and fifty years old to be a member. He comes for lunch.”

“Business-lunch-like?” Trace said.

“Ladies too. Mostly ladies. Always for lunch, a lady. I think he likes ladies.”

“Is he local, this Matteson? From around here?”

“No. Just been here a couple of years. Nice fella.”

“All those people who die up there? Their families think he’s nice too?” Trace said casually.

Hughie hesitated, that split-second hesitation that Trace recognized as the first sign of awareness that a person was being pumped for information.

“Never heard anything bad,” Hughie said.

And Trace said, “Ahhh, it doesn’t concern me. I just want to stop in and see Mitch and the family and then go home. I’ll take another one of these. You too.”

Trace drank his vodka quietly, doodling on a cocktail napkin while Hughie washed glasses behind the bar. The three golfers at the end seemed to have exhausted the debating possibilities inherent in a missed putt, because now they were dissecting a trio of drives on the ninth hole. One of them was a whiff, one was lost in the trees, and the third seemed to have landed in a water fountain sixty yards down the side of the fairway. When they tried to embroil Hughie in their argument, he came back to refill Trace’s glass.

“You too,” Trace said.

“Don’t mind if I do. I can hide out here. If I stay in that little storeroom there, I’ll run out of air.”

Trace said later, “No, you know, I was talking to Amanda, that’s Mitch’s wife, and she was saying that somebody was suing Meadow Vista because somebody died and left their money to the hospital. That’s what I thought you were talking about before.”

“You know the name?”

“Yeah. Presser or Plesser, something like that. That’s it. Plesser. Mean anything to you?”

“I think I heard the name before,” Hughie said vaguely.

“Yeah, they’re suing or something. Like the sanatorium twisted this Plesser’s head or something and made him leave them his money.”

Hughie thought for a moment. He seemed to be offended at the idea of an out-of-towner knowing something about Harmon Hills that he didn’t.

Finally, he said, “Yeah, maybe I heard about that. Something about suing the sanatorium because the guy didn’t leave them his money or something.”

And Trace knew he had gotten everything there was to get out of Hughie, so he nodded, quietly turned off his tape recorder, said, “Yeah, something like that,” and when he finished his drink, he left. He signed the check and left a ten-dollar tip for the bartender.

Trace’s Log
:

All right, it’s midnight Monday and here I am at the Doddering Hills Country Club. Tomorrow I have to buy some vodka ’cause all I’ve got are these two little airline bottles I stole when Chico wasn’t looking and that’s not even going to last me any time at all.

This is Master Tape Number One, I forgot to say. I don’t think I fit into this place. First of all, I’m not eighty years old. Second, I don’t own knickers. Why did people used to play golf in knickers anyway? I would think the longer the pants, the better, so you could kick the ball and improve your lie and nobody would notice. I’m surprised that Scotsmen didn’t figure that out right away.

Anyway, I’m here and tomorrow I will go and do Bob Swenson’s bidding. I will check out the Plessers and find out if there’s anything to their complaint about the old guy being twisted into leaving his money to Matteson.

And then I’ll look in, maybe, on the Careys, and hopefully this is all going to be done and done in just a day.

And then what am I going to do? I don’t know where Chico is and she doesn’t know where I am, so there’s not much chance of us getting together. Unless she comes up here to go golfing. Somehow I don’t think that’s part of your usual tour of Memphis, Tennessee. Anyway, I don’t believe she’s on any kind of usual tour of Memphis, Tennessee.

In the Master File, there’s a tape of my conversation tonight with Hughie, the bartender. Sorry, Groucho, don’t jump to conclusions. I didn’t go there to drink. But when you get to a strange town and you want to find things out fast, always find yourself a bartender. What they don’t know, they make up, so you always feel fulfilled.

Hughie doesn’t know anything bad about Meadow Vista, except a lot of people die there. Well, they deal in old folks. I bet a lot of people die at Hughie’s bar, arguing about solar flares and Russian putts. Problem is, at Hughie’s bar nobody notices they’re dead.

And Dr. Matteson might be a womanizer. That doesn’t mean anything by itself ’cause a lot of people are womanizers. I used to be one, until an hour ago, when I decided to go straight. Stay with me, God, until this passes away.

But womanizers tend to spend money, sometimes money they don’t have. I’ll keep that in mind.

I always thought that places named sanatoriums were for nuts, not for sick people. I hope not. I don’t want to have to go and visit some ha-ha house. It’s too dangerous. Who’ll come and sign me out when they won’t let me go? Not you, Groucho. I know that.

This whole thing better not be complicated. If I stay in Jersey too long, my ex-wife Bruno’s going to find out about it and I’m in trouble.

Okay, expenses for this wild-goose chase. Air fare and car and gas on credit card. Room and tonight’s restaurant bill on credit card. Five-dollar tip to the skycap at the airport and fifty dollars for drinks and tips at the bar downstairs. Oh, and five-dollar tip to the desk clerk who helped me with my luggage. His name’s Dexter and he’s a prince of a man, Groucho. You’d really like him.

The bar bill might seem a little high, but I was talking to some Harmon Hills old-timers to find out what makes this place tick. So that’s sixty dollars total for the day. That’s too low. Let’s call it sixty-five ’cause I know there are some things I must have bought and I just forgot them. I’ll itemize them later when I remember them.

I think maybe that I resent Bob Swenson getting me involved in this nonsense. Just because he owns an insurance company that sometimes sends me a check, that’s no reason to impose on our friendship for personal things. I find being in New Jersey very annoying.

I wonder what Chico is doing right now. No, I don’t.

At night, as Trace had passed through, Harmon Hills had seemed a sleepy little bucolic town, but now, in daylight, he saw it as a trendy mock village with enough boutiques and specialty shops to be selling every shawl and piece of macrame ever made in Mexico.

He knew he was going to hate Harmon Hills. He hated towns with boutiques. He hated Westport, Connecticut, and East Hampton, New York, and Carmel and La Jolla in California. He liked Toledo, Ohio. He liked Las Vegas, where he lived. He could occasionally find a warm spot in his heart for Hoboken, New Jersey, but he had heard New Yorkers were starting to stream across the Hudson River to buy up Hoboken brownstones, and if New Yorkers came, could overpriced restaurants and boutiques,
très intimes
, be far behind? The city would be inundated with Mexican macrame. Scratch Hoboken.

Trace liked towns with gas stations, not auto service centers.

The man who wears the star told him how to find Sellers Street, and as he got farther away from Harmon Hills’ main drag, following the directions, he saw that there was an underbelly to the town.

He moved across some railroad tracks and was in an older section of town. The homes here were not mansions or estates; they were just houses, and most of them would have been helped by a fresh coat of paint. Lawns were frequently uncut and there were too many tricycles next to too many weed-bordered walkways. Tricycles meant toddlers and toddlers used to be infants and only the poor had children in America anymore.

He checked the address on the insurance form Walter Marks had given him. It said 42541/2 Sellers Street, and right off he felt uneasy. He didn’t like houses with half-numbers. What did they mean anyway? What kind of people lived in a place with half a number?

The house was the last one on the block. An empty lot next to it was overrun with weeds. The house itself had once been white but was now dingeing toward gray. The front of the house was surrounded by a screened-in porch, with holes in the screening, and the screen door had a green frame that reminded Trace of a rent-it-by-the-week Jersey-shore bungalow. The door hung slightly askew on its hinges.

Trace rang the doorbell and hoped nobody would be home. No such luck.

A grotesquerie of a woman rumbled through the inside door and advanced upon the screen door and Trace like a brakeless tractor trailer rumbling down a hill. For an instant, Trace thought about running, but he decided that with her head of steam, the beast could catch him. Maybe if he lay still on the ground and covered his head with his hands, he could survive. He had heard that that worked with polar bears. Maybe this thing was nearsighted too.

“Son of a bitch,” the woman bellowed. But then, just when it seemed she would crash through the thin screen on the door and bear Trace to the ground, crushing him under her weight, she managed to slam her bulk into reverse and slowly quivered to a stop just inside the screen door.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “I thought it was those goddamn kids again. They’s always ringing the bell and running away.”

The woman stood just inside the screen door and Trace saw her clearly now. She was around sixty and she wore a green and purple housedress that buttoned down the front.

One of the buttons had vanished and another was in the act of fleeing, held on grimly by a thread more noteworthy for tenacity than taste.

The woman had the fat droopy under arms that went with chronic obesity and having a kitchen in your cellar. Her face was garishly made up with mosquito-blood lipstick and sky-blue eye shadow. She had used eyeliner to paint extra lines at the outside corner of each eye, a style Trace thought had died with Cleopatra. Her hair was lifeless, like straw, blotched rather than bleached to a shade that Trace thought could only be described as burnished shit.

“I’m sorry, sir or madam,” Trace said. “I’ll come back some other time.”

“Hold on,” the woman snapped. She pushed open the screen door and stared at him. “Who are you?”

“I’m from the Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company. I’m looking for Gertrude Plesser.”

“Yeah, me. From the insurance company, hah? You talk to our lawyer?”

“No. I should have. I’ll do that right now. Right this minute. I’ll see you.”

Trace turned but was caught up shortly by the woman’s drill-instructor voice. “No. You better come in and talk to me. The insurance company, hah?”

Trace wanted to explain that it wasn’t the insurance company’s fault, whatever it was, but even if it had been, he wasn’t the insurance company, but just a poor hired hand, downtrodden just as she had been all her life by the forces of untrammeled capitalistic greed and big business.

He didn’t have a chance to say anything because she grabbed his upper arm in a big paw and jerked him up the stairs.

She led Trace through an inside door, through a living room that featured a mouse fuzz rug as its principal decorating attraction. Then they were heading down a hallway toward a kitchen in the rear. Trace could see its yellow-and-brown flowered wallpaper far off, as in a vision.

As they drew nearer, the sound of acid-rock music pummeled his ears. The house smelled vaguely of sauerkraut, and Trace cautioned himself not to let the exposed skin of his body touch any surface.

Inside the kitchen, at a table with a black-and-white enameled top, chipped at the edges, sat Thing Two.

But for twenty years, it might have been the twin of the vision who had met Trace at the door. Daughter Plesser was just as large, just as over-made-up, and just as fashionably dressed, except that her housedress was black and red. She had an enormous hand curled around a quart bottle of Pepsi-Cola, and she was drinking from the bottle.

“This here guy’s from the insurance company,” Mother Plesser announced. “What’d you say your name was?”

“Marks,” Trace said. “Walter Marks. Remind me to give you my home phone number when I leave.”

“Yeah. Move Jasmine, and let Mr. Morris sit down there.”

“Marks,” Trace said.

The daughter rumbled unwillingly for a few moments, like a volcano trying to make up its mind, then lurched upward out of the kitchen chair, like a bubble rising through thick tar.

Mrs. Plesser sat at one side of the table, and Trace guessed he was supposed to occupy the other seat. When she glared at him, he sat.

“You want something to drink?” the older woman said. “This is my daughter, Jasmine. Jasmine, get the man something to drink. And turn off that radio.”

“You want Pepsi-Cola?” the daughter asked Trace sullenly as she switched off the radio atop the refrigerator.

Trace looked at the bottle clutched in her hand, a bright red band of lipstick about its rim, and shook his head no.

“No, just had a Pepsi for breakfast,” he lied.

“Like something else? How about some coffee?” Mrs. Plesser said. “Jasmine, make the man some coffee.”

“No, thanks, Mrs. Plesser. Actually, I don’t really want anything.”

“All right,” Mrs. Plesser said.

Jasmine looked relieved and Trace thought that she was probably down to her last nine cases of Pepsi and didn’t want to share them with anybody. He glanced toward the stove, but there was nothing on it except a layer of grease. So where was the sauerkraut smell coming from?

“I don’t mind telling you, we think it was a dirty deal we got from you,” Mrs. Plesser said ominously.

“Well, that’s why I’m here.” Trace tried a smile. “I just want to get all the facts for my company.”

“You shoulda gotten all the facts before you said you was going to pay off to those quacks at that hospital. That’s why we got us a lawyer,” she said proudly.

“That’s right,” pitched in Jasmine. “We gonna hang your ass, us and our lawyer.”

“I can’t really help if I don’t know what happened,” Trace said.

“What happened was that my poor husband, God rest his soul, went up to that fancy sanatorium and they killed him.”

“Had he been sick?”

“Of course he was sick.” Mrs. Plesser looked at Jasmine as if needing to share with someone the secret of Trace’s utter stupidity. “Don’t nobody go to no sanatorium without they being sick.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“What was wrong was that he wasn’t feeling good for a long time. He used to have these head pains and things and his memory wasn’t so good no more either. It was getting kind of worse all the time and he wasn’t working so good, so he stopped going to work.”

“Where’d he work?”

“At the auto plant over in Muckluck,” the woman said. “Forty years he was there.”

Trace was sure he had heard her say Muckluck.

“What did the doctor say was wrong with him?”

“Doctor said he was just getting old. Jasmine, make me some coffee.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“That was a laugh ’cause the doctor is older than oak,” Mrs. Plesser said. “But Freddie was getting bad and the company was paying for it on the insurance so we sent him up to the sanatorium ’cause he couldn’t like dress himself or anything like that. He was, how do you say—”

“He wasn’t competent, that’s what he wasn’t,” said Jasmine triumphantly.

“Incompetent. That’s what he was. That’s why when they got him up there, they just twisted him around they little finger and made him leave them all his company insurance.”

“That was how much?”

“It was a hundred-thousand-dollar how much, that’s how much,” Mrs. Plesser snapped.

“The company paid for that insurance?” Trace asked.

“Yeah. ’Cause he was there a long time. It was all he had, ’cause they don’t pay pensions if you die.”

“They pay for the sanatorium too?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think happened to Mr. Plesser at the sanatorium?”

“He wasn’t getting none better, but he wasn’t getting no worse neither. He just lay around there, but they wouldn’t let him come home. I asked him, ‘You want to come home?’ and he said, ‘They won’t let me come home, I ain’t ready yet.’ They didn’t get everything they wanted from him yet, was what it was. Then they did, and then he died.”

“What did he die of?”

“They said it was his heart,” Mrs. Plesser said in a tone that let Trace know what she thought of
that
.

“What do you think it was?” Trace asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Probably some secret stuff,” Jasmine said. “Like they killed Elvis Presley with so he wouldn’t talk. I read about it in the
Enquirer
.”

“John Belushi, too,” Trace said. “He was ready to rip the mask of hypocrisy off all the underhanded dealing in the videocassette industry.”

“I din’ read that,” Jasmine said.

“Must have been an issue you missed,” Trace said. “Do you have any reason to believe,” he asked Mrs. Plesser, “that the sanatorium did something wrong? That maybe they even speeded your husband’s death?”

“Speed, my ass. They killed him,” she said.

“Mama,” said Jasmine sharply.

The mother glared at the daughter, her beady little eyes glistening angrily. “I ain’t supposed to say that, is what Jasmine means. Maybe you should be talking about all this to my lawyer.”

“Did you discuss your suspicions with the police?”

“Aaaaaah, the police.”

“What’s the matter?”

“They’re on the take too. A poor woman can’t get no justice, excepting she’s rich.”

“You talked to the police but they took no action?”

“They didn’t do nothing,” Mrs. Plesser said.

“Do you know if they investigated your husband’s death?”

“I don’t know nothing except they didn’t do nothing. Nobody wants to do nothing to help you. You get…poor people don’t ever have a chance. Now we got nothing to live on except my social security and what Calvin brings home.”

“Calvin?” asked Trace.

“Jasmine’s husband. Leastways he’s working now since Papa died.”

The smell of sauerkraut was stronger in the room. Trace could hear the water boiling on the stove for coffee, but nobody bothered to do anything about it. He could imagine water boiling away in this kitchen, then empty pots standing over flaming gas burners until they melted, or turned brittle and shattered when plunged into water.

“Do you have a picture of Mr. Plesser?” Trace asked.

“What for?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes in matters like this, it helps me to have a feel for the person. Like I’m not dealing in statistics but with a real human being.”

Mrs. Plesser mulled this for a moment, then told her daughter, “Get them pictures of Papa.”

When they came, Trace decided he would rather have been dealing with statistics. Mrs. Plesser took a small pile of photos from her daughter and handed them across the table to Trace one at a time for him to admire.

They were typical examples of the style of photography known as 1930s backyard art deco. There was Plesser, flanked on one side by his wife, on the other by his daughter, looking for all the world like a very slim volume pressed between two blowup bookends. All three of them stared resolutely into the sun, but it didn’t take fright shadows down his face to reveal the late Frederick Plesser as a man of something less than striking beauty. His face looked like an undernourished ferret’s and his thin hair was plastered down on his head. He was scrawny, with a protruding Adam’s apple, and his clothes hung on his frame as if he had spent six months shrinking away inside them.

Each of the pictures was the same group: Plesser surrounded by wife and daughter.—What did you wear to the party, Mr. Plesser?—My wife and daughter and a look of grim despair.

If Plesser had ever smiled in his life, there was no indication of it in any of these photos, Trace thought as he looked at each of them.

And then the prize of the collection was handed him. These looneys had actually taken a picture of Plesser lying in his coffin. It was a washed-out-looking Polaroid print and Trace thought that what it really needed to be perfect was to be rendered on black velvet with granular paint by some artist in Tijuana.

“That’s the last one of Papa,” Mrs. Plesser said.

“I should expect so,” Trace said.

He looked at it and didn’t know what else to say. Should he tell them that the deceased looked good? That he looked like Randolph Scott? All men over fifty in their caskets looked like Randolph Scott.