When Elephants Forget (Trace 3)

by Warren Murphy

  As he often did when he committed a burglary, he started to wonder exactly why he was there, exactly what he hoped to find, and was annoyed when he could not answer those questions to his own satisfaction.

  He went to the tall Formica dresser in the room. There was a box of Sweet’n Low envelopes on top of it, which struck him as passing odd. He rooted around in the dresser drawers for a while, feeling uncomfortably perverted as he continued to find nothing but ladies’ undergarments. Stuck in the back of a bottom drawer, under a pile of woman’s T-shirts, he found a bankbook.

  The account was in the name of Jennie Teller and her balance was $4,809.27. All of it had been deposited in the three months before Tony Armitage’s death. There had been no deposits in the last thirty days.

  He repeated the number aloud so that his tape recorder would pick it up, then put the bankbook back.

  He didn’t know what else to look for but idly opened the box of Sweet’n Low packs. He counted twenty of the small packs inside the box, but all of them were empty. The packs had been neatly slit across the top, probably with a razor blade, and their contents of artificial sweetener poured out.

  He reclosed the box and left the apartment. Tony Armitage had lived there with the woman, but no traces of his existence were left.

  “Back again, huh?”

  “Came to talk to you some more.”

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Call me Trace.”

  “That’s right. Tracy. What’d you want to talk to me about, Mr. Tracy?”

  “Same thing. Tony’s death.”

  “Same answer. I don’t know anything about it,” Jennie Teller said.

  “When’s your break?” Trace asked.

  She glanced at her watch. “Fifteen minutes. I don’t want to spend it with you.”

  “I was going to buy you lunch,” he said.

  “Lunch comes with the job.”

  “Then you buy me lunch. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “How’s that? You going to make me rich?”

  “Even better than that,” Trace said.

  “What’s better than rich?”

  “Alive.”

  They sat at a metal table in a far corner of the diner’s big kitchen. Jennie Teller had a long-shoreman’s breakfast in front of her, even though it was past noon. Trace had coffee.

  “So how you going to keep me alive?”

  “I’ll get to it,” Trace said. “I hear you’re moving back into the old house.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where you moving from?”

  “Ho, ho. The detective is a shrewd one. Trapped me right away, tripped me right up.”

  “Can the Aunt Jemima shit,” Trace said. “You don’t do it all that well and I’ve seen it before.”

  “Giving the audience what they want to hear.”

  “What I want to hear is where you’re moving from?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “No reason, I guess, so I’ll tell you. You’re moving from the apartment that Tony Armitage rented for you.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It didn’t take a lot of work. You haven’t been staying at the house with Rufus Redneck. Tony’s old man leaned into him to break it off with you, and then right after that, you moved out of the house. You had one pair of jeans in your closet there and an old pair of boots. That sounds like a lady who’s living somewhere else.”

  “Guilty. Any law against that?” she asked.

  “No. And now, I figure that with Tony dead, you can’t make the rent, so you’re moving back with Rufus.”

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “Good. Now, I’m not telling Nick Armitage about this. He’s no friend of mine and I don’t care if you and Tony rented the top floor of the World Trade Center and played body-slide there sixteen hours a day. No skin off my nose.”

  “You’re just being my friend,” she said.

  “You’re being sarcastic, but that’s closer to the truth than you know,” he said. “So now I’m going to tell you some more things and you’re going to chime in at the correct intervals with pieces of knowledge that I should have and that will enrich and beautify my life.”

  “Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” she said.

  “You will.”

  “You are one pushy man.”

  “Jennie, I don’t have time to be sweet and charming, so I think we ought to go right to the main point.”

  “Go to it,” she said.

  “Tony was selling drugs on campus,” Trace said.

  The patronizing look in her eyes vanished. An overreaction, Trace thought.

  “He was getting them from New York and he was making a few bucks selling them around here. How’m I doing so far?”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” she said. She looked down at her iced tea and stirred it, staring as if there were something in the ice cubes that demanded her immediate attention.

  “Could I have more coffee?” Trace asked.

  She took his cup to a large urn in the center of the room and refilled it. When she put it in front of him, she automatically pushed a sugar bowl in front of him.

  “I’d rather have Sweet’n Low,” he said.

  “It’s with the sugar.”

  “One of those from your pocket,” he said.

  Her face turned ashen.

  “We both know who was helping Tony sell drugs, don’t we?” Trace said.

  She pushed her ice tea away angrily. “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this nonsense.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m sure Nick Armitage would like to hear it. Maybe it’d give him a lead to who killed his kid. I think Nick might like to talk to you about it.” She wavered and he snapped, “Sit down, girl.”

  “You’re a mean bastard,” she said, but she sat.

  “You got it. Anyway, the diner is a good place to sell drugs from. Nothing big. Students wander in and out all day long. A few bucks here, a few bucks there. Like that, right? Just slip them their pack of Sweet’n Low.”

  She looked at him and he let the silence hang heavy over the table until it became almost palpable and painful, and then she glumly nodded.

  “So you were making a couple of bucks and so was Tony, and it was nice and enough to pay for the apartment where you and Tony shacked up after the old man told him to drop you. And now the nose candy’s gone because Tony was the supplier and the rent money’s gone and you’re moving back in with LaPeter.” She looked woebegone and he reached across the table and touched her hand. “Jennie, I don’t give a damn. It’s no skin off my nose, nothing that I care about.”

  “I’m glad,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “If you cared about it, you might really have gotten nosy and dug around.” She essayed a small smile and he patted her wrist and smiled back.

  “When Nick told him to drop you, Tony told people he was going to get even with his father.”

  “So?”

  “Was it just the drugs or did he have something else planned?”

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “Dammit, Jennie, don’t keep answering questions with questions. Like anything.”

  “I don’t know. Honest, I don’t know.”

  “He wasn’t planning to expand his drug dealing?”

  “He never mentioned it.”

  “I thought that might be a reason for getting him killed,” Trace said.

  “No. Truth. He never mentioned it. He was just moving a little stuff. You’re right. It paid the rent. It was like selling to just friends. There was no real drug dealing, nothing that would get him chilled.”

  “Were you really out of town that weekend?”

  “I was gone the whole weekend.”

  “Could it be checked?” Trace asked.

  “I’ve got a hotel receipt from Atlantic City. I was there with half a dozen people. You want their names?” She started to sound confident again.

  “No. I believe you. Something ha
ppened the night before Tony got killed.”

  “Well, I was away. I wouldn’t know,” she said. She stopped and Trace waited. “Like what happened?” she said.

  “Something that upset his family. You don’t know what that was?”

  “No. Did the family say what?”

  “They’re not talking to me a lot,” Trace said. “Tell me, was Tony a big romance in your life?”

  She hesitated and he said, “The truth.”

  “All right. The truth. He was a guy that I lived with in the house with that crazy redneck and his stereo systems. Tony had money, all the time, and I never had any. So we played house. I got another year of school to go here, and then two more years of graduate school at least. I don’t have two nickels to rub together. And Tony did.”

  “That why you got into the drugs with him?”

  “Had to make some money someway.”

  “You could keep working here,” Trace said.

  “At minimum wage?” she said. “Anyway, working sucks.”

  “Sucking works,” Trace said.

  “I don’t do that kind of work,” she said.

  “Peddling drugs isn’t a lot different,” he said. “And it’s dangerous. Too many people know. Too many records. You put money in the bank and someone wonders how a counter girl in a diner can get a lot of money together. You talk to the wrong people or the wrong people talk about you.”

  “I’m done with it,” she said. “The supply’s all gone and I’m not interested anymore.”

  “I hope you’re in time,” Trace said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That black guy who was in here the other day? The one who wanted to throw me out?”

  “Yeah. Barker’s his name.”

  “I saw him the next night going into Nick Armitage’s office in New York.”

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “Afraid so. Does he come around much?” Trace asked.

  “Only a couple of times,” she said. “Not in a while.”

  “Were you romancing him?”

  “No. He wanted to, but I wouldn’t,” she said quickly, searching Trace’s face, as if looking there for reassurance.

  “Did he know what you were doing here? With the little sideline business?”

  “No. I never told him. We were never that close.”

  Trace shrugged. “Then you’re probably all right. Maybe the best he could tell Nick was that you’re clean.”

  “I hope so.”

  “If I find out different, I’ll let you know,” Trace said.

  20

  Trace and Chico were waiting for Sarge at the restaurant below his office. Chico had spent the day shopping.

  “I don’t understand how somebody can spend the day shopping,” Trace said.

  “You could if you put your mind to it,” she said.

  “What do you do when you shop?” he asked.

  “That is well up, even on your elevated list of dumb questions. What do you do when you eat?”

  “Eat is usually a transitive verb,” Trace said. “Transitive verbs are specific. Shop is an intransitive verb. By definition, they are vague and dangerous. Tell me what you do when you shop.”

  “You shop,” she said.

  “What is it that you need that you shop for?”

  “You might not need anything,” she said.

  “You can spend a day walking around, looking at things that you don’t need or want and usually can’t afford?” he asked.

  “That sounds about right.”

  “That’s idiotic,” Trace said. “My mother may not have much to recommend her…” he began.

  “Hear, hear,” Chico said.

  “But she knows how to do one thing.”

  “If you’re going to tell me that that woman knows how to shop, I’m going to pour Roquefort dressing in your hair.”

  “That woman really knows how to shop.”

  “Where’s the Roquefort dressing?” Chico asked.

  “She goes to Shoppers’ City and she finds whatever is cheap and she buys it.”

  “Suppose she doesn’t need it,” Chico said.

  “She buys it anyway. You never know when you might need it.”

  “Suppose, to interject some humor into this insipid conversation,” Chico said, “suppose she found something that was too ugly, even for her so-called taste, something she really didn’t like. What would she do then?”

  “If the price were right, she would buy it and give it to somebody as a gift. If it was cheap enough, she’d buy two and give them both away so people could marvel at her generosity. Now, that’s shopping,” Trace said.

  Chico said, “If I were back in the womb and had a choice of being an Irish Jew like you or a Japanese Italian like me, I think I’d stay the way I am.”

  “I don’t care what you pick as long as you pick August again to be born in,” Trace said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I think it’s wonderful that your birth-stones are peridot and sardonyx. Imagine if you were born in April and your birthstone was a diamond. You’d never get a birthday gift. But, hell, I can buy a basket of peridots and sardonyxes for seventeen dollars.”

  “I don’t get diamonds and I don’t get peridots either,” Chico said.

  “The hell you say,” Trace said.

  “The truth I say.”

  “Didn’t I give you them last year? Oh, no. I’ll tell you why. I remember going into Tiffany’s on one of my trips East and asking them for the biggest peridot they had in the place.”

  “What happened?” Chico asked.

  “You know Tiffany’s. Always trying for the fast buck. They only had second-rate peridots and they tried to stick me with a sardonyx instead. I wasn’t going for that.”

  “So you wound up getting me nothing for my birthday.”

  “That’s hard for me to believe,” he said.

  “It’s true.”

  “I gave you nothing? Not even a sweat shirt?”

  “The sweat shirt was the year before last. It was the one with Uncle Sam on it. It said, ‘Join the Army. Travel to faraway lands. Meet interesting, exotic people. And kill them.’”

  “I remember that. Nothing last year, you say?”

  “No. You gave me a gummed address label for my belly.”

  “I don’t remember that at all,” Trace said. “Who was I trying to send you to?”

  “It didn’t have an address on it. It said, ‘Caution. Danger. Keep Out. This area patrolled and protected by Devlin Tracy’s attack tongue.’”

  “You never wore it either,” Trace said.

  “I threw it out.”

  “You dummy, what did you expect?”

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “You probably didn’t realize that there was a thousand-dollar bill stuck on the back of that gummed label. And you threw it out. What a pity.”

  “That thousand-dollar bill? Was that yours? Was that from you?” she asked. She looked very cheerful.

  “Why?”

  “I found it loose one day in my dresser drawer. I didn’t know how it got there.”

  “Shouldn’t you have offered me half?” he asked. “We share the apartment.”

  “Ho. Ho. Ho,” she said. “So where’s Sarge? He’s late.”

  “It didn’t stop you from ordering dinner.”

  “A girl’s got to eat, doesn’t she?” Chico said without shame.

  “I don’t know where he is,” Trace said. “I left him a note to meet us here and he picked up the note.”

  “Has he been any help to you so far?”

  “Well, he hasn’t hurt, and as long as he’s working, maybe he can help. I’ll take help from anybody on this case.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “There’s nothing here. I’ve got the kid as a low-level drug dealer who didn’t like his father much. I’ve got the father washing drug money through a tavern he owns downtown. I’ve got the mother a drunk and the father banging
his sister-in-law. I’ve got a missing manager from the downtown saloon. What I don’t have is a murder suspect. You want to hear my misery?”

  “Go ahead. Just don’t expect a lot of responses. I want to eat.”

  “Can I drink?”

  “Stick with the wine. You’re doing well.”

  Trace grumbled some, then slowly and carefully told Chico about his breakfast meeting with the Armitage maid, his burglary of Jennie Teller’s apartment, and then his interview with her in the diner kitchen.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Let me listen to some of it,” she mumbled through a mouth full of bread.

  When he was sure no one was looking, he unbuttoned his shirt, untaped the recorder, and put it on the table. With a small personal earphone from his pocket, he let Chico listen to the tapes of the interviews.

  She went “ummm” a lot before she turned off the recorder.

  “Now what do you think?”

  “I think you didn’t sleep with either of these women,” she said.

  “Of course I didn’t. I tried to tell you that last night too, but you wouldn’t listen. If it’s not eating, it’s sleeping. You’re really just a creature of your instincts,” he said.

  “I’m impressed. I don’t know what to think. Except for these, I haven’t heard any of your tapes and you haven’t filled me in a lot. Martha Armitage? She’s the one Sarge had the affair with?”

  “So you say,” Trace said.

  “Why would that girl get fired for being seen with you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Armitage doesn’t like me. And the only reason he’s got not to like me is that I want to find out who killed his kid. The maid talks to me and gets fired.”

  “It doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?”

  “I don’t need somebody else who doesn’t understand,” Trace said. “I don’t understand enough for all of us.”

  Chico ignored him and was talking as much to herself as to him. “I don’t fathom why the kid was wearing that rubber mask when he got killed. That’s got to mean something, Trace. And I don’t know what that phone call was from Nick Armitage the night before the killing. The chickie with the phony British accent sounded like a nice kid.”

  It was a mark of her maturity, Trace thought, that she would characterize as “a kid” a woman only a year younger than herself.