When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (4 page)

Trace’s Log:

Tape Recording Number One, Devlin Tracy in the matter of Tony Armitage murder, one A.M. Thursday, Plaza Hotel in my least favorite city in the world, the Big Wormy Apple.

Although it’s better than usual. My mother’s out of town.

Chico is sleeping in the other room and, dammit, I am going to have a cigarette, or maybe a lot of them. I’ll cut way down tomorrow, enough to win my bet.

But I’ve figured out something really important. If you’re listening, Groucho, no, this doesn’t have anything to do with the Armitage case. I said important, really important.

I’ve figured out why people always gain weight when they quit smoking. This is a breakthrough. Fatties around the world may someday thank me for this.

See, it takes time to smoke a cigarette. You figure, fishing around in your pocket for your smokes, then finding an ashtray and a match, and then lighting it, and flicking it, and stubbing it out, maybe it takes you like two minutes a cigarette that you’re really involved in the act of smoking.

So what, you say? Hah! Just wait and listen. So I smoke, on my good days, maybe four and a half packs. Ninety cigarettes. You take two minutes a cigarette times ninety, and you’re talking about 180 minutes. Three hours.

That’s three hours that you used to be occupied doing something and now you don’t have anything to do with that time. It’s enough time to take up a hobby or something, but most people who quit smoking don’t know this and don’t anticipate it. So they wind up with all this extra time, but they don’t really know they’ve got it and they’re bored and they don’t quite know why, so because they’re not doing one natural thing, like smoking, they just automatically start doing another natural thing, like eating. And then, whammo, fat, diabetes, heart disease, and ugliness.

This is the way it works. I can tell you out of personal experience and pain, and I think all those organizations that try to tell you how to quit smoking ought to warn you about this. And whoever is listening to this tape, in case I’ve gone to my final reward, I want you to know that this is a gift to humankind. I don’t expect royalties or any financial consideration at all. Consider it a donation from one real sweet guy that everybody liked and respected, and if you don’t believe me, ask Walter Marks, who sent me to New York to get involved in this stupid case.

So where are we? All right. I’m just into town and already I’ve been to see Nick Armitage. This is a fast start on a job and I hope Groucho is duly impressed.

Armitage looks like a weight lifter and Sarge says he’s got a reputation as a bad guy, so I’m going to keep an eye out and not cross him. At least, not any worse than I already did. I don’t know why he sent his two bookend bodyguards to follow us from the restaurant. Maybe my name, Luigi Rascali, didn’t fool him. It was probably Chico’s fault. He probably looked at me and said, Sure, this guy’s Luigi Rascali, but there’s no way that little Oriental woman is named Miss Mangini. It’s all her fault.

Everything’s her fault. Tomorrow, I’ve got to drink less, and smoke less, and exercise, and stay away from fast women. Well, at least I don’t have to do gourmet cooking. I’ve pretty well decided not to go into Pop’s detective agency with him. If I did, my mother would just find a lot of excuses to be on the telephone with me, busting my chops. It’ll be a miracle if Sarge can make the agency pay. It’s tough when you have to have an unlisted phone for your business to keep your wife out of your hair.

Speaking of which, I hope Sarge got her telephone call tonight. I don’t want her nosing around my apartment in Vegas and finding out I’ve gone to New York, and then calling Bruno, the ex-wife, and letting her know that I’m here, because as sure as God made green, yellow, and red apples, she’ll be here, sniffing around, whining and complaining about something. I can’t take that.

I’ve got to win this bet with Chico. Losing is just too horrible to contemplate. Having to call What’s-his-name and the girl. I can’t do that. No way can I do that. Never.

Sarge says he knows the Armitage kid’s mother. Well, maybe he can find something out there I’m pretty proud of myself and I know Groucho will be too. I need a private detective agency to help on this case, and by hard long negotiations I got one to help us for a hundred and twenty-five a day. They wanted two hundred, but I got them down to one-twenty-five. I’m nothing if not economical.

And that brings us to expenses. Hotel bill and the car I rented for tomorrow and so forth are on credit card. Counting tip, and twenty-dollar bribe to Pierre, the maitre d’ who thinks his name is George, Chez Nick cost me a hundred and forty. My usual one hundred and fifty expenses for the day for miscellaneous stuff. And one-twenty-five for the detective agency. That adds up to…let’s see, four hundred and fifteen dollars. I’m starting to like this case better already.

Oh, by the way, there’s a tape in the master file. It’s my brief meeting with Nick Armitage at his restaurant tonight. I have a hunch I’ll be seeing him again. Good night to all of you from all of us here in Gotham. Devlin Tracy signing off.

Trace woke up to find Chico kneeling astride his body. She was naked and beautiful and he pulled her down to him and kissed her for a long time.

“You come here often?” he asked.

“That’s kind of up to you, isn’t it?” She rested her cheek on his shoulder. “It was nice of you to get a suite of rooms, really nice.”

“Suites for the sweet,” he said. “Besides, Groucho’s paying for it. Money is no object.”

“Until you try to collect,” she said.

“Live dangerously.”

“I will. I’m calling room service and having breakfast sent up. Do you know how long it’s been that I didn’t have to get up and make you coffee and a piece of toast and a quarter of an egg and watch you pick at it, then go inside and throw up?”

“I haven’t been doing that since I stopped drinking. Almost stopped drinking.”

“That’s why I almost stopped nagging you. You want breakfast in bed?”

“I thought you were going to have food sent up?”

“You have a lewd and lascivious turn of mind,” Chico said. “I was talking about room-service breakfast in bed.”

“Is our bed big enough for your breakfast? Will we get a suckling pig and five thousand pancakes to fit on this mattress?”

Chico was gone and on the telephone, and Trace went back to sleep. When he woke, he was covered by a food tray. Chico was eating from another tray while she sat on the edge of the bed. Crumbs flew into the air from her direction.

With her mouth full, she said, “Eat. Eat. You’ve got to go to work today.”

“Yeah. The Mysterious Case of the Richard Nixon Mask Murder. When I’m a big detective, it’ll be the one case that everybody remembers and talks about.”

“Shouldn’t you solve it first?”

“Oh, I’ll solve it,” Trace said. He nibbled at the corner of a piece of cold toast and decided, once and for all, that he didn’t like toast. Intellectually, he regarded this as a big breakthrough. All his life, he had been trying to eat toast because everybody was always putting it on his plate, starting with his mother, who always burned hers and then scraped the charcoal from it with the edge of a kitchen knife. And because everybody always put toast on his plate, he had always assumed that he liked it and should try to eat it. But now he had faced up to the truth. He hated toast. He liked a bite of Danish once in a while and sometimes a hard seeded roll with a lot of butter. But he hated toast.

“From now on, hold the toast,” he told Chico, waiting for her to ask him why.

“Sure,” she said cheerily, without argument. “More for me. Why was he wearing that Richard Nixon mask?”

“I don’t know. You think it’s important?”

“It would seem like it, wouldn’t it?” She was chewing away remorselessly at her food, as if she were a mouse and she had to tunnel her way through a mountain of food to get home by nightfall. “Was he wearing the mask when he got killed?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I guess they can tell those things when they do autopsies and stuff. If the murderer put the mask on him, then it means one thing.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know yet,” Chico said. “Don’t interrupt, I’m thinking. If the murderer put the mask on him, it means a ritual, a joke, a warning, I don’t know. But if he was wearing the mask on his own when he got killed, then it means something else.”

“What something else?” Trace asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything about this whole thing yet, except that stupid clipping you’re carrying around. Maybe he was wearing a disguise, maybe he was going to a masquerade party, what do I know? It just means something else if he put the mask on himself. I think.”

“I guess that’s logical, so I guess I’ll have to find out, won’t I?”

“Put your little mind to it.”

“Big mind, please. I’m going to be a big detective someday. Maybe.” He took the tray off his body and set it on the end table. “Aren’t you done eating yet?” he asked.

She had a faint smile on her lips. “Not quite yet.”

“Stay away from me, you wild, disgusting beast,” he said. “I’ve got to exercise.”

The telephone rang.

“Saved by the bell,” Trace said.

“You think so?” Chico said, and vanished under the covers.

Sarge said, “What are you up to, Dev?”

“Fighting off a kamikaze assault on my virtue,” Trace said. “Why?”

“I thought you were coming down here to the office. Don’t fight, surrender. I would.”

“Get out of there, you animal,” Trace yelled.

“What?” Sarge asked.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Trace said. “What’s up?”

Chico giggled, and Trace slapped the back of her head through the blanket.

“I got to thinking last night about Martha,” Sarge said.

“Martha?”

“Martha Armitage. So I called her.”

“What’d you do that for?” Trace asked.

“I figured it would be all right. I thought, What the hell, her husband’s probably out working at the nightclub. If a man answers, I hang up.”

“Okay, so?”

“I told her that I was involved in looking into her son’s death. She seemed excited by that.”

“She remember you?”

“Yes. Anyway, she’s coming down here today.”

“Here where?”

“To my office, at one o’clock.”

“Good. One o’clock. I’ll be there,” Trace said.

“If he’s done,” Chico said, her voice muffled by the blanket.

Trace hit her on the head again. “One thing, Sarge,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Can we get some police reports on the killing? Like was he wearing the mask when he got killed or was it put on later? That kind of stuff.”

“He was wearing it when he was killed,” Sarge said.

“How do you know?”

“I already got the reports. I was up at head-quarters this morning.”

“Good. I’ll see you in a bit,” Trace said as he hung up.

“When do you have to be there?” Chico asked.

Trace glanced at his watch on the end table. “Couple of hours.”

“Good. We’ll be done by then.”

Trace lifted up the sheet and looked at her perfect smooth golden body. “Maybe,” he said.

The first thing that Trace noticed was that the three
Playboy
centerfolds had been removed from the wall behind Sarge’s desk, and the second was that two large robust green plants now stood on the sill of the front window, overlooking West Twenty-sixth Street, where the implacable July sun beat down on them.

Atop the file cabinet was a hot plate with a pot of coffee on it, and a pile of newspapers that had been roughly stacked on the floor had been removed. Two more chairs had been set out in the office. A window air-conditioner hummed.

“Looking a lot better, Sarge,” said Trace after he entered and looked around.

“More middle-class, I thought,” Sarge said. “Attract a better class of client. Here are those police reports. You want coffee?”

“No. It’s too hot,” Trace said. He took the reports, which were in a manila folder, and leaned against the wall near the front windows to read them, but before he started, there was a faint tapping on the office door and Sarge jumped to his feet and hurried to go open the door.

Martha Armitage was a tall, elegant brunette. She was simply dressed in a white blouse and dark plaid skirt, and the garments showed her figure to be full and lush. She had large sparkling dark eyes, but her makeup looked as if it had been hurriedly applied, because Trace thought it was a touch too thick. Her lipstick, too, seemed a little excessive and Trace thought it a shame because her lips were sensual and full and needed nothing added to be beautiful. Trace got the feeling that she had applied her makeup as if she were going to a tony nighttime party at which she wanted to be the most spectacular woman there, instead of to a daytime meeting with a private detective in a seedy office in downtown New York.

Sarge took her hands and pecked her casually on the cheek. Trace reached behind him to turn on the tape recorder under his shirt.

“Hello, Patrick,” she said almost shyly.

“Good to see you again, Martha,” he said. He led her to the sofa, where she sat primly, her legs crossed at the ankle, her feet together on the left side of her body.

“Coffee?” Sarge asked.

She shook her head, then noticed Trace by the window.

“This is Devlin?” she asked Sarge.

“Yes. My son.”

She nodded to Trace. “I’ve heard your father speak of you a lot,” she said with a smile.

“Good to meet you, Mrs. Armitage.”

Sarge poured himself coffee and Trace noticed that he was using a real cup with a real saucer. Yesterday it had been styrofoam all the way.

“Your office is nice,” the woman told Sarge.

“A few more plants and furniture, it’ll be all right,” Sarge said. “I was a little surprised bv your reaction on the phone, Martha.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought you’d think that Dev and I were pests. But instead…”

Mrs. Armitage glanced at Trace again. She said, “Instead, I want you to look into my son’s murder. That’s right.”

“Why’s that?” Trace asked.

Before she could answer, Sarge said, “I didn’t get a chance to tell you, Martha, but Devlin isn’t really my partner in this agency. He’s on assignment from the insurance company that insured your son.”

“I see. So you’d be looking into this matter anyway?” she asked.

Trace nodded and Sarge said, “That’s how I got into it. I help Dev on his New York work.”

“You were going to say why you wanted us to look into it,” Trace prompted.

“Isn’t it obvious? My son’s been murdered,” she said.

Trace noted a faint undertone in her voice, a little hint of nervousness, of insecurity. “A lot of people still might not like private detectives around. They’d prefer to leave it to the police,” he said.

“My son’s been dead over a month. The police haven’t found out anything yet. I don’t even think they’re looking anymore,” she said. She looked at Sarge, as if for approval, then said to him, ignoring Trace, “Nick, my husband, hasn’t been the same since the killing.” She paused, but both men were silent, encouraging her to continue. Then she looked at Trace as if explaining and said, “My husband is not an easy man.” He nodded.

She seemed to have difficulty getting more words out and Sarge said to Trace, “What Martha means is that her husband knows a lot of people who aren’t nice people. He makes his living a tough way.”

“A lot of us do,” Trace said. “I understand.”

The words, when they came, spilled out in a torrent. “I want somebody to find out who killed my son and have them arrested. I want them in jail for it. I don’t want my husband to find out first. Because if he does, he’ll kill them, and then the police will be after him, and I’ve lost my son and I don’t want to lose my husband too. I want you to find out who killed Tony.”

Trace recognized the errant look he had seen in her eyes. It was fear. Not the kind of frightened panic that came from confronting a sudden danger or obstacle, but a kind of numbing, grinding fear that came from insecurity. It was a look that alcoholics often developed, just as, he thought, women alcoholics all too often put their makeup on too heavily because it took too steady a hand to apply light, delicate daytime makeup.

He glanced at her fingers, folded in her lap, and saw that they were moving spasmodically, fingertips pressing against fingertips. Trace felt like offering her a drink. He knew she would accept.

“Is your husband looking for the killers?” Trace asked.

“He doesn’t talk about the…the tragedy anymore,” she said. “But I know he is. You know, there was a man once.” She paused and looked off into space, as if trying to remember. When she spoke again, she spoke to a point on the wall on the far side of the room, looking at neither of them.

“They were bad times for us. We didn’t have any money and Nick was trying to borrow money to open a tavern in Manhattan. He went to the bank manager to try to get a loan, and the man laughed at him because Nick didn’t have any collateral. Well, Nick got the money somewhere else and he wound up making a lot of money. But he never forgot that man at the bank, and one day, years later, I read in the paper that the man had been arrested in some scheme to defraud the bank. When I told Nick about it, he said, ‘I know,’ and I knew right then that somehow he had set it up to happen that way. Nick has a memory like an elephant. He doesn’t forget. I know he’s looking for those people who killed our son.”

“You keep saying people,” Trace said. “Were there people? Or could it have been just one person?”

She shrugged. “A figure of speech, I guess. It could have been just one person.”

“Any idea what one?” Trace asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Tell us about your son. Was he a good student?”

“I’ll have that coffee now, Patrick, if you don’t mind,” the woman said. She stopped wringing her hands in her lap, but it seemed to Trace as if it had taken her a conscious effort of will to stop.

As Sarge poured coffee for her into another clean cup, she said, “Tony was a good student. A B student. His first couple of years up at Fairport, he got A’s, but this last year he slipped a little.”

“Kids do,” Trace said. “They discover women, social life, partying.”

Mrs. Armitage nodded and took the coffeecup from Sarge.

“Did your son live on campus?”

“There isn’t any campus housing,” she said. “He lived in a small private house off campus, with two roommates.”

“Do you have their names?” Trace asked.

“Yes. Phil LaPeter and a girl, Jennie Teller.”

“Two guys and a girl,” Sarge said.

“All very unromantic,” Mrs. Armitage said. She took a slow sip of coffee. “When I heard about it, I thought, Oh-oh, trouble. Jealousy, fights, arguments.”

“And now your son is dead,” Trace said.

She stopped as if she had been hit, and carefully put her cup back onto the saucer. “No. It wasn’t anything like that. The three of them were just friends. I don’t know who might have done it,” she said again, softly. “I don’t know. That’s what I want you to find out.”

“What about your son’s habits?” Trace asked.

“What do you mean?”

Trace shrugged. “You know. Was he a big drinker? Did he use drugs? Did he travel around with a lot of bad company?”

She shook her head. “Tony was going to be a lawyer. Nick didn’t even let him come to the nightclub. He didn’t want him hanging around that kind of atmosphere. He’d get upset if Tony ever showed up.”

“And drugs?” Trace asked.

“There was, I don’t know, some kind of drug. There were traces found in Tony’s body. But he didn’t do that on his own. Whoever killed him must have given him drugs,” she said. “He was a good boy, Mr. Tracy.”

Trace listened desultorily as Sarge asked a few more routine questions, then finally looked at his own son with a question mark on his big red Irish face.

Trace said, “Just one question, Mrs. Armitage.”

“Yes?”

“Why did you have half a million dollars’ insurance on your son?”

She seemed to wince and took a deep breath before answering. “Tony wasn’t our only child, Mr. Trace…Devlin. We had another boy before him. He died when he was a year old. Nick said that if God ever played a dirty trick like that on us again, somebody was going to pay for it. After Tony was born and grew up a little bit, Nick took the insurance on him.”

“I see.”

“I guess that’s all for now, Martha,” Sarge said. “Did you drive?”

“I took a cab.”

“I’ll walk with you to one,” he said.

As they were leaving the office, Mrs. Armitage paused, then turned back to Trace. “Do you think we’ll be seeing each other again?” she asked.

“Probably,” Trace said.

“I…I don’t want my husband to know what you’re doing for me, or that I ever talked to you.”

“I understand,” Trace said. “We never met.”

“Thank you, Devlin,” she said.

Sarge took her arm and led her out.

When they were gone, Trace moved out of the sunlight that poured through the window, and sprawled on the couch, reading the reports in the folder Sarge had given him.

There were photocopies of a string of reports, including a number from Connecticut. It surprised Trace for a moment to see Connecticut State Police printed on the top of the forms, until he remembered that Tony Armitage’s body had been found in Connecticut. He had been thinking of this as a New York case.

Trace remembered Chico’s question from the morning and rapidly read through the reports. Young Armitage had been wearing the mask when he was killed. He had been shot in the heart at close range with a .38-caliber pistol, and death had been instantaneous. The mask had been partially removed from his face, but it was splattered with blood, and intricate analysis showed that it had been on his face when he was shot. The mask was a common-enough kind, made of latex, sold in novelty shops nationwide, and there was no identifying mark to determine what store it might have come from.

The Connecticut reports were very thorough, Trace thought, and they used very unpolicelike phrases such as “consistent with” and “raised implications.”

He had been shot between midnight and one A.M.

The Connecticut investigation had been under the control of a state police officer named Lt. Shriner, and Trace put his name in his personal memory bank to keep. He would probably have to talk to him before the case was over.

The Connecticut cops had also taken statements from Armitage’s two roommates, LaPeter and the young woman Jennie Teller, but neither had been able to cast any light on the killing. Both had been out of town that weekend, LaPeter in Pennsylvania at a concert with a half-dozen friends who were good for alibis, and Teller at a psychology seminar in Atlantic City. Neither had seen Armitage since two days before the killing, and had learned of his death only when they returned to the campus. There were no reports that Armitage had any enemies, had been heavily into drugs, or that he had been depressed or acting strangely in the days before his death.

The autopsy report showed that the young man had a quantity of methaqualone in his body, consistent with having taken two capsules three hours before his death. Trace recognized the drug as the generic name for Quaaludes. There were no other drugs in his system.

The New York police reports were brief, dealing with their having notified the Armitages of the death of their son. Notification was made at the couple’s apartment on the Upper West Side, about ninety minutes after the body had been found.

Trace snapped the folder shut just as Sarge came back into the office after having seen Mrs. Armitage to a cab.

“Well, what’d you think?” he asked.

Trace shrugged. “Nothing to think yet.”

“How come you’re not smoking?” Sarge asked.

“You noticed?” Trace asked.

“You spent the whole meeting drumming your fingers on the windowsill. How the hell could I not notice?”

“Christ, I didn’t even know I was doing it,” Trace said honestly. “I’m going to hell in a bucket. Do you know before I left the room today, Chico made me do a dozen pushups?”

“Can you do a dozen?”

“No. I did one. Twelve separate times. She said they get easier.”

“They won’t,” Sarge said. “You ready for lunch?”

“Yes,” Trace said.

“Good. You grab one of these plants. We’ve got to bring them back downstairs to the restaurant.”

“You borrowed them from the restaurant?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Why didn’t you buy some like normal people do?”

“Because any plant I own dies,” Sarge said. “You can go into the biggest forest in the United States and find the biggest, strongest freaking oak tree in America and put a sign on it that says, This Tree Is Owned by Patrick F. X. Tracy of New York, and five minutes later the tree’s freaking leaves will start to wilt and fall off. A week later, the tree’ll be nude; a month later, it’ll be dead. It’ll look like year-old celery. I tell you, I’m a human defoliation program.”

“It must be in the genes. I am too,” said Trace.

“Anyway, that’s why I don’t buy plants, because if I buy them, they die, and then I’ll get pissed and want to get my money’s worth anyway, so I’ll leave them here, hoping they come back to life, and they won’t and they’ll look like shit and so will this office; so instead, if I have to impress somebody, I borrow the plants from the restaurant downstairs. The woman who owns that place, now,
she
can grow plants. Grab one.”