When Elephants Forget (Trace 3)

by Warren Murphy

  “She was,” Trace said.

  “And Jennie’s a liar, of course.” She looked at him mockingly. “Heh, heh. ‘Working sucks. Sucking works.’ Aren’t you cute?”

  “You noticed she’s a liar,” he said.

  “She oozes lying,” Chico said.

  “I know. She’s too quick with the answers, just a little too pat. I wouldn’t trust her at all.”

  “A lot of questions, Trace, and no answers. Maybe you ought to work a different way.”

  “I don’t have any deep emotional commitment to the old way ’cause it hasn’t done me a freaking bit of good so far,” Trace said.

  “Forget the people involved,” she said. “Concentrate on the killing instead.”

  “Okay. I’m concentrating. I still don’t know anything.”

  “Maybe you would if you stopped talking for a while,” she said. “The Armitage kid was killed where they found his body, right?”

  “That’s what the police say.”

  “All right. Why there? Did somebody take him there to kill him? Was he there waiting for a bus? Maybe he went there himself?”

  “What the hell for? It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Come on, pal,” Chico said. “I’m thinking out loud. Don’t challenge me now; it’s inhibiting at this stage of the process.”

  “I’m sorry,” Trace said.

  “Suppose he went there himself. Suppose he was going there, I don’t know, to meet somebody. Maybe he got a ride with somebody and got off there to get a lift.”

  “Still, why the mask?”

  “He wasn’t going to a party?” she asked.

  “Nobody knows anything about any party,” Trace said.

  “And they don’t know if the mask was his?”

  “Nobody ever saw it before.”

  “What was he wearing again?” she asked.

  “Black shirt and pants. They were his.”

  “If he was going to a masquerade party or something, that doesn’t sound like the outfit to go with a Richard Nixon mask,” she said. She stared off at the wall and shook her head.

  “I know.” Trace touched her arm. “It doesn’t parse for me either.”

  The waitress came to tell them the kitchen was out of scungille salad. Chico ordered a shrimp cocktail and fried clams instead.

  Trace thought that before they left, he would show her the strip of pictures on the wall behind the bar. If she threw up on the spot, as he expected she might, there might be merit in his diet-through-vomiting plan.

  He told Chico he was going upstairs to see if Sarge had returned to his office. The door was still locked, and when he came downstairs, Chico said, “Sarge just called. He’s not coming.”

  “Why not?”

  “He said something came up and he was going to be busy.”

  “Why didn’t you hold him on the phone?” he asked.

  “I tried. He said he was in a hurry. He almost hung up on me.”

  Trace sat back down and sipped at his wine. “You know, it used to be that if he said something like that, I’d say, okay, he was going to be busy, in a hurry, something came up.”

  “And?”

  “And now that you’ve poisoned my mind against him, making me think my own father’s the playboy of the western world, all I can think of is that he’s got a chick on the side somewhere while my mother’s out of town and he’s too busy rolling around in bed to come and have dinner with us.”

  “To which I say, hooray.”

  “Hooray for cheating husbands? My, my, my, how the worm turns.”

  “Hooray for some nice sweet old man who’s sixty-five years old or some such—”

  “Sixty-seven,” Trace said.

  “Sixty-seven and maybe being happy for a change. Trace, stay off his case. Leave him be.”

  “I want to ask him about it,” Trace said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to see him sweat when I grill him. I want to see little beads of perspiration run down his guilty red face when he finds out the jig is up and I know all about it.”

  “You take this very hard for someone to whom Fidelity is only the name of an insurance company,” she said dryly.

  “Hold, woman. Holdest thou thy tongue, wench. That was all in the past. I have been a model of purity for God knows how long now. And now that I’ve finally gone straight, I find out my father’s twisted. This makes sense to you? Did it ever occur to you that I might have a genetic flaw, some inbred inability to stay out of strange beds? Don’t you think I should know this? Don’t you want to know it before you get involved with me?”

  “Involved with you? I’ve lived with you for three years. There have been a hundred and fifty women in that time. A hundred and fifty that I know about. Double it, triple it for the times you sneaked around and I didn’t find out about it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Trace said. “I just find the whole matter slightly repulsive.”

  “God, I hate it when you don’t drink. I hate it when you drink because you’re a lunatic, but when you don’t drink, you’re a petty, vicious, nasty, carping hypocritical nag. Buy a bottle of vodka and get ripped, will you?”

  “Not until you pay me the five hundred dollars you’re going to owe me,” he said. “Unless you want to concede and pay up now.”

  “Don’t hold your breath, ace,” she said.

  When they finished dinner, Trace asked her, “Do you want to hang out with me tonight?”

  “Might as well. It’s too late to do anything else.”

  “I know a great place,” he said. “You’ll love it.”

  When they left the restaurant, he showed her the bank of portrait photos high on the barroom wall.

  “What do you think?” he asked her.

  “That fellow, second from the right, looks pretty nice. I might like to know him.”

  “The hell with him. What about the others?”

  “Degenerates, obviously. Enough to make you want to throw up.”

  “Good girl,” he said. “You’ve made my night.”

  “How?” she asked.

  But Trace would not tell her. First, he decided, he would have to figure out how to get her to invest her money. Then he would tell her.

  21

  They were at a restaurant off University Place that featured opera music.

  Trace said, “You’re going to love this place.”

  “Why didn’t we eat here, then?”

  “Because I don’t like the food, but the drinks are good and it’s the best entertainment in New York. And they’re not snobs here. They don’t care if I hum along, unlike some people I know.”

  “My bel canto hummer,” she said. “I wonder if God, in His infinite wisdom, knew what He was getting me into.”

  They sat at a table in the far corner of the room. Chico ordered Perrier and Trace smugly ordered white wine. When the waiter left, Chico said, “Remember, I told you, go ahead and drink vodka. If you’re going to be miserable with wine, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “When I get my five hundred from you,” Trace said. “And when I finally figure out what I’m going to do with my career. If I decide I’m going to be a big detective, I want to come in pure. No drinking hard stuff, very little smoking, exercising each and every day. Soon I’ll be running miles each morning and lifting tons of dead iron around.”

  “Exercise? You did one pushup tonight before we left the room,” she said.

  “That’s because you wouldn’t get under me for inspiration. It’s not much fun exercising alone.”

  True to his word, Trace hummed. He hummed when the bartender played the Anvil Chorus on the cash register and on an assortment of bottles, and he hummed when all the waiters, the cigarette girl, and the maître d’ took turns standing on the stage in the center of the room, singing arias.

  “That guy used to sing Carmen standing on his head. I remember that,” Trace said.

  “I don’t believe it,” Chico said.
/>   “It’s true. Of course, that was fifty pounds ago. He might have trouble standing on his head these days.”

  Another waiter came from the kitchen wearing a chef’s hat. He began to twirl pizza dough over his head, then threw lumps of the dough around the room. When people threw them back, he caught them in his mouth, all the while singing Figaro.

  Chico was laughing so hard tears ran from her eyes. “I don’t believe this place. It’s priceless,” she said.

  “See. You’re so busy dealing with the seamy underside of New York life, Bloomingdale’s and Saks, that you don’t get to see the good parts of the city. If you like this, there’s some decals up in the Bronx that you have to see.”

  “Huh?” she said.

  “Never mind,” Trace said. “You had to be there.”

  The house lights dimmed. A few moments later, the doors to the kitchen opened and four waiters, carrying candles and wearing bull masks over their heads, came charging out and wended their way about the room, singing a chorus from Carmen while other waiters on the stage joined in.

  Trace started to say something but Chico shushed him. She was watching the waiters as they moved about the room, stopping to play with young children who were with their parents among the late dinner crowd.

  He started again and she shushed him again. So he poured another glass of wine from the bottle and hummed until the waiters vanished into the kitchen and the lights brightened.

  “Now can I talk?” he said.

  “Go ahead, say something.”

  “Nothing.”

  “I figured as much. You know, think about this.” She still looked at the kitchen door. “Nobody put that mask on Tony Armitage.”

  “No?”

  “He put it on himself so that nobody would recognize him,” Chico said.

  “I don’t think that’s such a big breakthrough that you have to be rude and tell me to be quiet,” Trace said.

  “It gets you on a different track. You don’t have to think maybe about why somebody else put that mask on him. If anybody wanted to hide him or fix him up so nobody’d see him or notice him, they weren’t likely to do it by having him wear a Richard Nixon mask. Or a King Kong mask for that matter. They’d just put him in the trunk of the car. Or on the floor of the backseat. Put a bag over his head. A Nixon mask is the kind of the thing he might put on himself. Especially a college kid. And a druggie.”

  “It might be right,” Trace conceded.

  “So then, ask yourself why?”

  “All right, why?” Trace said, although his heart wasn’t really in it. He liked the music and the wine. He didn’t want to think about Tony Armitage tonight. He wanted to drink a little and hum a lot, and when Chico wasn’t looking, pour a few spoonfuls of his white wine into her Perrier water and reduce her to a state of drunken paralysis, then take her back to their room and punish her body in a sexual frenzy. Or, maybe, just kiss her good night and fall asleep holding her.

  Either sounded pretty good.

  “Why didn’t the kid want to be recognized?” Chico asked. “And recognized by whom?”

  “I like the way you always say ‘whom’ correctly. I could never be in love with a woman who used ‘who’ when she should use ‘whom.’ I used to go with a woman who said terrif. The first time, I dismissed it as an error, and the second time as a lapse in judgment. The third time, I knew I had to get that woman out of my life.”

  “You mean if I say terrif, I can be rid of you?”

  “Yes,” Trace said.

  “Terrif,” she said. “Just the breakthrough I’ve been looking for.”

  “On the other hand,” Trace said, “I don’t like the way you end sentences with prepositions.”

  “You’ve got that look in your eye. I don’t think you’d be satisfied with any sentence that didn’t end in a proposition.”

  “Hah. You wish,” Trace said. “If I get to be a big detective, that’s another thing that goes. No more wasting my precious body fluids with meaningless casual sex. From that moment on, I’m only making it with lady social workers who make me listen to their sophomoric ideas of life before giving me any, if I’m still unlucky enough to be awake.”

  “Good. Then take me home. Now that I know I’m safe, no need to spend the night out, watching you hope that I’ll pass out.”

  Trace went into the bedroom to tell Chico there had been no messages at the desk from Sarge. She was already in bed.

  “Can I whip you up something in the kitchen for breakfast?” he said. “An avocado soufflé, maybe?”

  “You know,” Chico said, “I’ve read novels about big fancy private detectives. It’s not that they cook complicated things.”

  “No? What is it, then?”

  “No, they cook things like omelets or fried bacon.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “True,” Chico said. “But what they do is they make a big deal of it. They sprinkle tarragon on top of their omelets. Or they coat the underside of the bacon with mustard before they fry it. Stuff like that. Bullshit stuff that only fools people who’ve never really stood in a kitchen cooking.”

  “Lady social workers,” Trace suggested.

  “Exactly. People too involved with the big, the really, really big issues of life.” She spoke those words with her jaw jutting out, her lips tightly compressed, in a wicked parody of a Westchester County private-schoolmarm. “People who can’t be involved with food or its preparation because it’s not creative, or who feel guilty about it because as long as one person is starving in India, they’re supposed to hate escargot.”

  “You may have something. As I was told today—and I’m always willing to pass along a compliment—you’re smarter than you look.”

  “Thank you. Come to bed. Savage me.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  He was using alcohol to wash away the adhesive tape that held the tape recorder around his waist, when Chico sat up in bed as if she were a zombie called back from the grave.

  “Trace, I think I’ve got it.”

  “I’m glad you told me before sex.” He kept rubbing at the tape marks. “Got what?”

  “Remember what the maid told you about Martha Armitage? She was drunk and her husband talked to her on the phone the night before the kid was killed and she was talking about napping. Napping. And then Anna Walker came over?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “And then when the maid left, those two gunmen were hanging around, in the hall and in the lobby. Trace, they were standing guard.”

  “What for?”

  “Because she wasn’t talking about napping. She was mumbling about kidnapping. Suppose Tony Armitage was kidnapped. Does that make any sense?”

  He set the alcohol bottle on a dresser, then sat down on the edge of the bed and kissed her forehead.

  “It sure does,” he said. “It sure does.”

  “Hello, darling,” the woman said.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” Trace said.

  “Who is this?” Anna Walker demanded.

  “Devlin Tracy. You didn’t know that?”

  “What do you want? It’s three o’clock in the morning.”

  “If I wanted the time, I would have called the special number. Only twenty cents to reach out and touch a tape recording.”

  “I was getting ready for bed. Talk or good-bye.”

  “I have to talk to you, Miss Walker.”

  “About what?”

  “About a kidnapping in Connecticut a month ago.”

  There was a long silence on the telephone and then Anna Walker’s voice again, much less imperious, said, “Can you come over? Say in a half-hour?”

  “Say fifteen minutes,” Trace said. He waited thirty seconds, dialed again, and her phone was busy.

  No, he didn’t want coffee. What he really wanted was a drink, a large drink. He told Anna Walker the first but kept the second to himself.

  She insisted. “Come on, it’ll only take a moment. Conversation goes better with coffee.”
>
  Trace thought of what Chico had said about tarragon omelets and he said, “Okay. With cinnamon.”

  “Coffee with cinnamon?” Anna Walker said.

  “That’s right.”

  She left Trace sitting on one of the four sofas in her auditorium-size living room. “I’ll only be a minute,” she said.

  Trace wondered how long it would take Nick Armitage to arrive. That he was coming was obvious, since Anna Walker was wasting time. She either wanted to talk to Trace, in which case she would have talked, or she didn’t want to talk to him, in which case he wouldn’t have been invited up. The coffeemaking was to buy time until someone else arrived.

  Ten minutes later, the coffee arrived, but Nick Armitage still had not.

  “Here you are, Mr. Tracy. With cinnamon.” She put a small tray on the end table before them. A silver service held cream and sugar. The coffee was in two fine, small porcelain cups. “I’ve never heard of coffee with cinnamon,” she said.

  “A special way I have of making it,” Trace said. “I make it a lot when I have eggs and tarragon.”

  He sipped the coffee. It tasted like effluent. He said, “Yummie,” and poured a lot of milk into the cup. He sipped it again and put in three spoons of sugar. He could no longer taste the cinnamon. When he went back to the hotel room, he promised himself to be sure to tell Chico that she had stupid ideas about what big detectives ate and drank.

  “Now it’s just the way I like it,” he said. “When is your brother-in-law coming?”

  She looked startled at his bluntness, then said, “He should be here any minute. Do you mind?”

  “Not unless I have to sit here and talk about coffee and tarragon and everything else except what I came to talk about. Why don’t we get started? We can catch him up when he gets here.”

  “I’d really rather wait.”

  “I’d really rather not,” Trace said. He pushed the coffee away. “There are other people I can talk to,” he said. He started to rise, but she reached out and put a hand on his wrist.

  “Please sit down,” she said softly. She left her hand on his wrist longer than was necessary. “Did I tell you last night that I think you have a terrible disposition?”