When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (6 page)

“And no nookying afterward?” Trace said. “I can’t believe that anything breaks up clean that way.”

“Well, maybe once in a while, but they weren’t regular together, sleeping together anymore. That’s why my room looks like shit moved in to stay. That used to be my studio, where work was. Tony had one bedroom and I had one, then we got Jennie in here and she got my bedroom and I had to move into the studio with all my stuff, and everything it fucked up.”

“Women are always doing it,” Trace agreed. “So where were you when Tony got iced?”

“Iced. Good word,” LaPeter said.

Trace did not know if he should be complimented or insulted by having his vocabulary praised by one who talked like this.

“One of my very favorites,” he said. “So where were you during the ice job?”

“Like that one too. Ice job. I was at a concert in the Poconos. Megan’s Friends. You ever hear of them?”

“Of course. And I’ve heard of the Beatles and the Stones and Janis and Pegasus.”

“I never heard of Pegasus,” LaPeter said.

“I just made it up to see if you were still listening,” Trace said. “Where in the Poconos?”

“At the theater in Stroudsburg they were. A friend of mine works for them down there, with the sound system, so I wanted to see how it all works. I’m into sound systems, I guess you figured out.”

“You’re joking. Really?”

“Yeah. That’s why I got all that equipment in there,” he said, pointing vaguely toward the bedroom that housed his noisemakers.

“Was Tony into sound equipment too?”

“No. Into junk he was. Gadgets. Phone machines and things. Tape recorders. Bugs. Stupid stuff. He liked toys.”

“Who’d you go with?” Trace asked.

“I told this to the cops, the family and everybody, you know, and they checked out everything, and if I need like an alibi, I got like an alibi because I went with these guys and that’s what the cops got told by them.”

Trace took a small notebook from his pocket and pushed it and a pen across the table toward LaPeter. “Write their names down there in case I need them.”

LaPeter wrote slowly, laboriously, and Trace said, “Were tickets expensive?”

“What tickets?”

“For Megan’s Friends? Were they expensive?”

“Yeah. Twenty-five bucks and they weren’t either good seats.”

“Everything else was sold out, though, right?” Trace said.

“That’s what my friend said, the one who works there. I wasn’t going to go, but Tony lent me the money at the last minute, so I went with my friends. Those are the names there.” He pushed the paper back.

Trace put the notebook and pen back in his pocket without looking at the list. “So what do you think happened to Tony?”

“I think he got killed.” LaPeter chuckled softly.

“Why did you do it?” Trace asked.

“What, what?”

“Calm down. I just wanted to get your attention again and see how you’d act and stop you from acting smart. Now why do you think he got killed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try harder. Who hated him?”

“Nobody hated Tony. He was just, well, he was just Tony. He was okay.”

“You ever meet his parents?” Trace asked.

“Just at the funeral.”

“What family did you talk to?”

“Huh?”

“Before, you told me you talked to the cops and the family about where you’d been when Tony was killed. What family did you talk to?”

“I told the father. He was up here after the funeral to talk to me. Him and a couple of guys, like big guys.”

“Look like ugly twins?” Trace asked, and LaPeter nodded. “And Armitage wanted to talk about the murder?”

“I don’t know,” LaPeter said. “Like he wanted to talk, but it wasn’t the murder so much. He wanted to talk about Tony and his other friends and stuff like that, more than the murder.”

“Did Tony belong to any clubs or anything like that?”

“No. I don’t think so. He was in a prelaw program, and not much for clubs he wasn’t. Neither was I. Why?”

“Because of that mask he was wearing,” Trace said. “I thought it might have been an initiation or something. It wasn’t that?”

“No. I don’t know of anybody that’d initiate Tony into anything. He didn’t join things.”

“You never saw that mask before?”

LaPeter shook his head.

“Would you say you two were close friends?” Trace asked.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“How close?”

“To what compared?”

“Well, was he your best friend at school here?”

“Yes.”

“Now we’re getting to it. Was he the best friend you ever had in your whole life? The bestest goodest friend any boy ever had except for his dog?”

“No. Ernie Wisniewski was my best friend ever. He taught me how to jerk off.”

“Were you Tony’s best friend in the school?”

“I don’t know. Tony had friends. He had money and people wanted to be his friends, so he let them be.”

“Did you know each other before school here?”

“No. We met in a lit class when we were freshmen and we were okay, friends like, and then there was an ad in the paper for this house and we wound up, both of us going here at the same time, not knowing the other one was, and that’s how we got this place and became really good friends like we were. Are we going to do this a lot more because if we are, I’d like some more coffee? It keeps me awake.”

“I’ll be going soon,” Trace said. “What kind of drugs did you and Tony use?”

“What do you mean?”

“People are always asking me what I mean when I think I talk in perfectly clear sentences,” Trace said. “What kind of drugs did you and Tony use? Now, don’t say ‘what do you mean?’ because what I mean is, before, I asked you if you and Tony hung out together and did women together and did drugs together and you said yes, and now I wonder what kind of drugs.”

“All right, no big deal. We did grass sometimes.”

“Nothing stronger? No coke or pills or like that?”

“Just some smoke. That’s all we did. Just because I do music sounds don’t mean that I’m some kind of drughead. Those days, good-bye, are gone. You wind up like Hollywood Henderson, all bullshit and criminal charges. The world’s different now, Jack Kennedy ain’t president anymore.”

“I thought that Tony might do more drugs than that. You know…” He smiled and lowered his voice as if someone might overhear. “His father being in the nightclub business, you know, Tony might have access to drugs.”

“Not that I know about. Smoke only he used.”

“Did he sell anything maybe?”

“No.”

“You never saw that?” Trace pressed.

“Hey, we lived right here. Sure, most of the time he wasn’t around a lot and all, but I never saw nothing.”

“But you smoked pot?”

“Yeah,” LaPeter said.

“Whose pot?”

The gaunt thin youth thought a moment, then said, “Tony’s.”

“Always Tony’s?”

“Yeah. He always had smoke on him.”

“Did he have a black suit? He was found in black pants and a black shirt? Were those his clothes?”

“Cops showed me pictures,” LaPeter said. “Yeah, they looked like Tony’s regular clothes.”

“That place where he was found on the Merritt Parkway. Does it mean anything to you? Anything special?”

“Like what?” The young man seemed really interested.

“Like it’s a place where you and Tony met somebody sometime. Or where you transferred cars or had a flat. Or were stood up by some girls. Something. Anything.”

“No. Nothing like that. I wouldn’t even know the place.”

“When did Tony give you money to go to the concert? And please don’t ask me what I mean.”

“I don’t know. I told Tony about I wanted to go to the concert. About the money, I guess, I was complaining, and then that day he gave it to me.”

“The day he died.”

“Right, and he gave me twenty-five dollars and I went with my friends and then we hung out in the Poconos and we slept in a parking lot, then we came back.”

“When did Jennie know that you were going to be out of town?” Trace asked.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Just curious,” Trace said.

“I don’t even know if she knew,” LaPeter said. “I don’t think I told her I was going. I didn’t like tell her too much, ’cause, well, I didn’t see her all that much.”

“Not your friend?”

“Kind of a friend she is, but what I do isn’t really any of her business, if you know what I mean. So I don’t think I told her. Maybe Tony did.”

“Where will I find this Jennie?”

“I don’t think she’ll be here. She takes some summer classes and sleeps around somewhere else right now and I don’t know where. She works as a waitress at a diner a little bit from here.”

“What diner?”

“Cochran’s. You go out the door and you turn left and you go like six blocks and it’s there. But I don’t know when she works, if she works, or like that. You going to go there?”

“Probably.”

“Well, you see her, you talk to her, you be sure to tell her talk to me. We’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do about the rent here.”

“I’ll tell her. Show me Tony’s room.”

“Sure.” LaPeter led Trace down the hallway toward his room, but opened the door immediately to its left. The room was furnished with a bed and dresser, but the closets were open and empty and the only sign that it had ever been inhabited was a paper shopping bag near the door filled with electronic-looking gadgets.

LaPeter said, “That’s Tony’s junk. His family didn’t want it. Probably I sell it.” He picked the bag up and put it outside the door to his own room.

Trace backed away, then opened the door on the other side of the hall. “This Jennie’s room?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

The room was decorated a little more than Tony’s had been. Posters from the Alvin Ailey ballet company were on the walls. The sliding doors to the closet were open, but all Trace could see hanging up was a pair of blue jeans and a thin yellow sweater. A pair of winter boots were propped in a corner of the closet.

“Thanks a lot,” Trace told the young man. “You’ve been a big help.”

“Okay. Do what you got to do. If you find who killed Tony, then it’s a good thing to do that.”

“Where are you from anyway?” Trace asked.

“West Virginia. Why?”

“Just wanted to know. Thanks again.”

“You Jennie Teller?”

“Who you?”

“Friend of Phil LaPeter’s. You Jennie?”

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t tell me you were black.”

“Maybe he thought you’d figure it out on your own. Some people do. Right off.”

“Ho, ho,” Trace said.

The woman waited.

“So I was just talking to your roommate.”

“’Bout what?”

“About your other roommate.”

“Un-uh,” the black woman no-ed. “Already told it all to the fuzz. No more. You a cop?”

“I’m with the insurance company. Come to help the poor family pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. Money can’t do anything to ease the sorrow of a loved one’s passing, but isn’t it nice to know that you don’t have to be a burden on your family when you die? Do you have insurance? I’ll sell you some.”

“Don’ need no insurance. Ain’t got no family to be burdening. Just put me in a pine box and lower me into the ground. No muss, no fuss, no bother. And no talk. Good-bye.”

“Can I have coffee, then? While I think of something else?”

“Yo’ dime.”

She swished away to pour him coffee from the large metal urn in the center of the diner’s long counter. She swished nicely and was good to look at.

She put the cup down in front of him and moved containers of milk, sugar and Sweet’n Low in front of him.

“Forget the insurance. I just want to find out who killed Tony Armitage.”

“I tell it all to the police.” She pronounced it PO-lice. “I got nothin’ to say to you. Get it from the PO-lice.”

“I read what you told the cops. I didn’t seen it say anywhere that you two were lovers.”

“Nobody asked. I’m not talking to you no more.”

“What soured it up?” Trace pressed.

“Who said something did?”

“Your other roommate. Jack and the Beanstalk.”

“Phillie talk too much.”

“Just tell me what busted it up and I’ll leave.”

“Nothing busted it up. We met, we liked each other’s looks, we crawled into the sack. It was good for a while and then it wasn’t good anymore, so we crawled out of the sack and moved along. Don’t have to be mo’ than that, you know.”

“I know,” Trace said. “It’s one of the endearing things about feminism.”

“What is?”

“It made it so much easier to get women into the bed.”

“A typical, dumb, narrow-minded, sexist view,” she said.

“Good,” he said.

“What’s good?”

“That you finally stopped shucking and jiving and talking to me like some Harlem street urchin. I knew if I worked at it long enough, I’d get you talking English.”

“It’s a shame sometimes to shatter people’s illusions,” the tall light-skinned woman said. “They like to hear me all cool and jazzy with hidden darknesses in my daytime soul. Yassuh, yassuh, yassuh, indeed. Help send that little pickaninny to college, gets her that edjOO-cation. Gets big tips. Oooooh, thank yo’, Mr. Charley.”

“Well, stow it with me,” Trace said.

“Don’t have to, since I’m not talking to you anymore anyway.” She walked away.

Trace noticed a black man in a booth at the diner’s far end, watching him. The man was big, with a shaved skull; he looked like a brown bullet.

A young man came into the diner and sat at the far end of the counter. He must have known Jennie because she leaned over and talked to him for a few moments. She poured him a cup of coffee, then took two packs of Sweet’n Low from the pocket of her light-green waitress’s uniform and set them in front of him.

Trace concentrated on drinking his coffee. He had certainly screwed up this interview, he thought. Usually he had no trouble making people talk to him, but somehow he had rubbed the young black woman the wrong way. Dumb, he thought to himself. He had just been dumb.

He looked up as the young man took a sip from his coffee, then got up and walked from the diner. He had left several bills in front of him and Jennie picked them up, tucked them into the top pocket of her uniform, and cleaned up the space where he had been sitting.

She looked at Trace when she was done, shrugged, then walked back to him.

“You want more coffee?” she said.

“No. Here.” He took a business card from his wallet and on the back of it wrote his room number at the Plaza. “I’m there if you change your mind and want to talk to me. Might save everybody a lot of trouble.”

“I don’t have any trouble,” she said. She took the card.

Trace said, “LaPeter says talk to him about the rent.”

“Thank you. I will.”

“When you call me, if a woman answers, don’t hang up. That’s only my mother. We always travel together.”

“That’s sweet,” she said, and slipped the card into the top pocket of her uniform along with her tips. “Tell her not to wait up for my call.”

The black man rose from the booth and walked down the counter to them.

“Jennie. Everything all right?”

“Sure, Barker, sure.”

“This face bothering you?” he asked, nodding toward Trace but not deigning to look at him.

She shook her head.

“Then why he jawin’ so much?” Barker demanded.

“He just one of those who like to talk.”

“That’s right,” Trace said. “I’m just one of those who likes to talk.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” the black man said.

“Too bad,” Trace said. “We might have had a nice conversation and wound up being real good friends. Friends are forever, don’t you think?”

“I think you some kind of wise ass. Ain’t you, boy?”

“That’s right. Boy,” Trace said.

Barker started toward him, but Jennie stretched across the counter and grabbed his sleeve.

“He’s leaving, Barker. Right now.”

Barker looked at her, then at Trace. Trace took out his wallet again and dropped a dollar onto the counter, then took his time about standing up.

“Well, if he’s leaving…” Barker said.

“For now,” Trace said. “Just for now. See you, Jennie.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Don’t you come back here,” Barker said.

“I’ll see you again too,” Trace said to him.

Driving back up the Merritt Parkway, Trace opened his pack and counted his cigarettes. There were six left. He had smoked only fourteen so far that day, when normally he would have smoked forty by then. He was very proud of himself and stopped at a roadside pay phone to call Chico and tell her.

She answered the phone after a couple of rings and told Trace she’d been in the shower.

“I only smoked fourteen cigarettes so far today,” he said.

“Is that good?”

“That’s a reduction of two-thirds in my normal amount.”

“All right. Fair. I expect better tomorrow,” she said.

“Pain in the ass,” he said. “Hold on.” He lit another cigarette for spite. “Hear from Sarge?” he asked.

“No. And no messages.”

“Did you spend a lot of money today?”

“Not too bad. Less than I’d spend back home. Eighteen guys tried to pick me up at Bloomie’s. That’s the biggest singles bar in the world, Trace.”

“Any of them get lucky?”

“All eighteen. I made a dollar eighty. Six of them are still here.”

“Are we going to have dinner tonight or did you already make a date?”

“We’ll have dinner, you and me. I don’t think any of these guys would be prepared to see me eat at this stage of our relationships.”

“I’ll be there in a little while. Clear the room before I get there.”

“We’ll all be done by then,” she said.

Chico insisted that Trace exercise some more before they went to dinner, but he held the day by insisting that twelve pushups were certainly ample for a man who had not exercised in fifteen years. He promised to do thirteen the next day.

Sunset had brought another break in the day’s stifling heat and they walked the half-dozen blocks to Chez Nick. The maître d’ smiled at them as they came in and Trace said, “Pierre, it’s good to see you again.”

“It’s George, sir.”

“That’s right. Pierre’s your twin brother.”

“Do you have a reservation tonight, Mister…Mister…”

“Tell him my name,” Trace told Chico because he couldn’t remember the name he’d used before.

“Rascali,” she said. “Luigi Rascali.”

“Right,” Trace said. “We don’t have reservations yet.”

“I’m afraid there’ll be a little wait tonight,” George said. “Perhaps an hour.”

“That’s fine,” Trace said. “We’ll wait in the disco. I find the music very soothing before meals.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Good,” Chico said as they walked down the stairs. The thumping sound swelled as they got nearer the bottom double doors. Trace thought it was like being a bacterium traveling toward the nerve of a tooth. “I love discos,” she said. “I’m even dressed right.”

“You planned this, didn’t you? You checked and found out there would be a long wait and so you wore your Disco Dolly dress so you could drag me on the floor and embarrass me, in front of my inferiors. Tell the truth.”

“You’re a suspicious thing,” she said. Trace pushed open the doors. His ears were pounded by noise that seemed to come from everywhere. Lights flashed around the walls and the ceiling and the floor. Throbbing along in counterpoint to the thump of the electronic music was a general din of people shouting, trying to be heard.

They stood inside the door.

Trace said, “How can you stand this place with all this noise?”

“What?” Chico said.

“How can you stand all this noise?” Trace asked again.

“I can’t hear you.”

“I know. You’ve got a banana in your ear. Never mind.” He began to pantomime. “Me. Drink. Lots of drinks. Get sick. Throw up. Hide in toilet. Quiet there maybe.”

“Let’s dance,” she said, uncomprehending.

“You dance. Me drink,” he said very slowly. “Drink. Now. Dance. Later.”

She nodded and pointed toward a raised platform at the far end of the room where there was a bar and a scattering of cocktail tables.

As they walked toward it, Trace swiped two cocktail napkins from an empty table, wadded them up, and stuck them in his ears.

They folded their bodies around a small table, and before they had a chance to take a breath, a waitress stood in front of them, demanding their order. “Wine for me. Perrier for the lady,” Trace shouted. The waitress seemed to have no trouble hearing. She nodded and walked away.

Trace talked right into Chico’s ear.

“How can you stand this noise?”

She tried to talk back into his ear, saw the cocktail napkins stuck in them, and pulled them out.

“Idiot. I grew up in them,” she said.

“Why didn’t it affect your brain?” he shouted.

“I don’t know. It’s nice sometimes to come to one of these places and do something like this. Mindless. Turn off your brain. Dance. Do drugs. You don’t have to talk to anybody because you can’t hear them.”

“People who go every night”—he waved toward the dance floor—“they’re zombies, right?”

“Right. But some of them dance real well.”

“Oh. Well, that’s all right, then. As long as they dance well, who cares if they’re vegetables or not. Chez Nick, the home of the dancing rutabaga. Really, woman, where’s your taste?”

“Trace, I dance with them sometimes. I don’t take them home to Mother.”

Their drinks came. A glass of wine and a bottle of Perrier cost twelve dollars. Trace gave the waitress fifteen.

“Nice place you bring me to,” he told Chico. “Twelve dollars for two drinks and one of them that water that Frenchmen do unspeakable things to.” He sipped his wine. “God, I hate this shit.”

“Have a real drink if it’ll make you feel better. I’m tired of your being grouchy. Have a cigarette too.”

“No way. You’re just trying to weasel out of having to pay me that five hundred dollars when you lose your bet. You notice anything going on?”

“Besides the drug dealing at the bar?” she said.

“How the hell did you spot that so fast?” he asked.

“Generation gap,” Chico said. “People my age were born with the knowledge of how to score drugs.”

Trace was watching a man at the bar. He had long dark hair and a Fu Manchu mustache. He wore bright plaid trousers and a matching vest, and a white shirt, open at the throat, with puffy ballooning sleeves.

A blonde had just walked up to him and he had slipped his hand into her purse. She, in turn, put a bill on the bar, then walked away.

Chico said softly into Trace’s ear. “Another transaction completed. I love a guy who knows how to close the deal.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

The man at the bar turned back to his drink. Less than a minute later, the scene was replayed, this time with a young man in multicolored matching pants and shirt, with an army bush jacket over them. Again, the money onto the bar, as if to buy a drink, and then Fu Manchu’s hand slipping into the pocket of the bush jacket.

Trace watched the young man walk away, but lost him as he blended with the mob of people milling about the dance floor in wild gyrations that reminded Trace of the sacrifice scene in the original
King Kong
.

“Lost him,” he said.

“Going to the men’s room,” Chico said.

“If everybody who buys stuff is in that men’s room, it’s a fire hazard.”

“That’s why they have big bathrooms in these places. Didn’t you ever notice? Well, no, you’ve never been here. They have all kinds of counter space and room, so all the nose-candy people have room to work.”

“I hate it when you know more about things than I do,” Trace said.

“Your days must be filled with nothing but unending grief,” she said.

Trace looked around the dance floor for a while, then brought his gaze back toward the bar. As he did, a door in the corner behind the bar opened and he caught a glimpse of a black man walking inside. The heavy door closed quickly behind him.

The waitress came up to their table and Trace ordered two more drinks.

“Is that the office back there?” he asked, pointing.

The waitress nodded.

“Who’s the black guy who just went in?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and walked quickly away.

Their drinks came. The music continued to crush against his skull.

“Want to dance?”