Once a Mutt (Trace 5)

by Warren Murphy

  Westport, Connecticut, a hundred minutes away, didn’t have a hotel, not a real one with many floors and elevators and candlelight dining on the top floor, so Trace had called to reserve a room in the Ye Olde English Motel.

  He hated motels. He was forty years old and many years had passed since motels had been fun, since they had represented a warm bed, a warm body, and a warm farewell. And usually, a quick head-down walk through the parking lot so no one would see the woman’s face.

  Now he was more interested in room service, and motels never had any. He was interested in talkative bellhops, and motels didn’t hire bellhops. He was interested in finding his room waiting for him, but motels always told you that the room wasn’t ready yet and if you would just wait four hours in the lobby, they would have it done right away.

  And now motels had computers. Trace was convinced that computers were the biggest timewaster that the hotel industry had ever been inflicted with. It used to be that when he reserved a room, he just had to show up, sign the registry, and let them take a print of his credit card. Now, a clerk took his name, then spent endless minutes having the computer search for vacancies in the motel’s south wing, then north wing, then rooms with a view, and then finally announce that Mister Devlin Tracy had not made any reservation and there were only sixty-three rooms available but he couldn’t have any of them. Computers might make some things work smoother but motels weren’t among them.

  Trace had had the good sense to stop at a liquor store on the Post Road for a bottle of Finlandia. It was evening and he had already chalked the day up as a total loss, so he took off his clothes and sat in the chair by the window looking out over the highway, and read the file that Walter Marks’ office had compiled on Nadine and Helmsley Paddington.

  Mrs. Paddington had been born Nadine Grand in Honolulu, the only child of a career naval officer and his wife. Her parents had died in an automobile accident while the family was living in Tampa, Florida, and Nadine was a senior in high school.

  She had no other relatives and lived alone for the remainder of the school year. Then she sold the family home and used the proceeds, and the military insurance her father carried, to send herself to Great Britain to study at the Royal College of Veterinary Medicine.

  There she met Helmsley Paddington. He was a native of Minneapolis and his parents too had died just a few years before. According to one of the Xeroxed news clippings enclosed, he was an Eagle Boy Scout but no great scholar. He spent his summer vacations from school working on a dairy farm and as a volunteer at the county’s animal shelter. He wound up in Great Britain after having won a scholarship from the Minnesota 4-H Clubs for outstanding community service.

  Neither graduated from veterinary college. Instead while they were both in their second year, they invented a device for turning dog droppings into compost, efficiently and without odor. The Doo-Right, the name they gave it, was a great success in a land of dog lovers and subsequently throughout the world. It led to a string of pet products marketed under the Paddington name.

  The couple married and stayed in England for ten years, then moved to West Hampstead, New Hampshire, where they lived in a big estate on a lake. Their home was called Paddington’s Com-Pound and was filled with dozens of dogs of every description.

  When he first saw the thick pile of newspaper clippings, Trace thought that the Paddingtons were simply publicity hounds, but reading them changed his mind. It was true that the Paddingtons had vigorously courted publicity, but in each story about them, they managed to insert a strong endorsement for kindness to animals and a commercial for whatever cause they were promoting that day.

  They loved animals, they said, pure and simple. They raised money to stop the slaughter of the harp seal. They gave money to save dolphins, to save seals, to stop research vivisection. They headed up an effort to stop the sending of live animals into space, calling it “cruel and unusual” punishment.

  Trace shook his head and poured another drink. Apparently humans didn’t count, he thought, because there was no effort on the Paddingtons’ part to stop people from going into space.

  After reading the clippings, Trace thought there must have been as many reporters as dogs at the Paddington Com-Pound most of the time. But if there had been any friction between the couple, none of the stories showed it. Invariably, the Paddingtons were described as inseparable, held together by love and their commonality of interests, and as much as Trace wanted to dislike them, because he thought that all zealots were nuts and these two obviously had won degrees in animal zealotry, the stories always showed an honest, sincere, and loving couple and he found himself liking them.

  And then the stories had stopped. The last big interview was dated 1978 and the clippings after that, instead of being full-blown feature stories, were more often on the order of a single paragraph that said basically that the Paddingtons had become reclusive, or that the Paddingtons could not be reached for comment.

  One of Walter Marks’ legal beagles had done some research into the Paddingtons’ wealth. When they left England, they had sold their interests in the Paddington Pet Line to a small conglomerate, Metrogeneral, Ltd., in return for shares of stock.

  On paper, the stock deal had made them rich because their shares were worth on the open market approximately three million dollars and dividends alone amounted to more than two hundred thousand dollars a year.

  But seven years earlier, just about the time of Paddington’s disappearance, Metrogeneral stock had taken a beating. The price of its shares had dropped by 90 percent and it had stopped paying dividends.

  The Paddingtons, the financial report said, still held their shares of Metrogeneral stock.

  What it meant, the report said, was that the Paddingtons’ three million dollars in shares had shrunk in value to about three hundred thousand dollars; and their regular dividend income of two hundred thousand dollars a year had been turned off when Metrogeneral cut out paying dividends.

  Unless the Paddingtons had saved a lot of money, Trace thought, it meant that the couple might well have been facing a sharp financial pinch.

  He thought about that for a while as he refilled his vodka glass. He hated the plastic glasses he found in most motel bathrooms. And there were never ice cubes to be found. Still, warm vodka in a plastic glass was better than no vodka at all, and it tasted especially good after months of trying to make it on just wine.

  The last item in the folder was a letter from Adam Shapp, an attorney, in Westport.

  The letter read:

  Claim is hereby made for payment of policy number AF12425848 in the amount of two million dollars.

  On October 17, 1978, the insured, Mr. Helmsley Paddington, of West Hampstead, New Hampshire, disappeared while on a private flight from that town to Newfoundland. No word has been received from him and this office has petitioned the Superior Court of the State of Connecticut to officially declare Mr. Paddington dead of accidental causes.

  We call for payment of the policy on behalf of Mrs. Nadine Paddington, the widow, now resident in Westport, Connecticut, who is represented by our firm.

  Trace leafed through the thick pile of papers again to see if he had missed anything, and found a sealed manila envelope.

  Inside was a one-page report from C.S. Brunner Investigators, who had been hired by Garrison Fidelity to look into the Paddington story.

  The report said that the plane did take off as reported from the lake in West Hampstead, New Hampshire, where the Paddingtons lived, neighbors having heard the motors revving up.

  The Paddington plane was on its way to Newfoundland, a distance of slightly more than five hundred miles, where Paddington was planning to take part in a protest against the slaughter of the harp seal. The plane, a twin-engine Cessna seaplane, never landed, and no wreckage was ever spotted.

  At the time of the flight, however, there was a heavy storm in the Atlantic and the normal path of the plane would have taken it right through that storm.

  “The
re is no indication,” the report said, “of there having been any trouble between Mr. and Mrs. Paddington, and it is the conclusion of this office that Mrs. Paddington’s claim is valid.”

  That was the entire report, and Trace felt good thinking about Walter Marks spending good money for detectives who wound up telling him to pay up.

  He celebrated by topping his glass with more warm vodka.

  Idly, he looked through the clippings at the reproduced photos of the Paddingtons. Helmsley Paddington had been a tall, thin man who looked very tweedy in the photographs, even in those where he was wearing jeans and an old army shirt and wrestling with some of his dogs. He had an open, uncomplicated face with thinning mud-colored hair.

  Nadine Paddington stood next to him in most of the photos, and it seemed to Trace as if she were trying consciously not to smile. She was a pleasant-looking, regular-featured woman with ashy blond hair, and wide-set intelligent eyes.

  But why didn’t she smile?

  Another picture showed why. Mrs. Paddington had a mouthful of teeth that splayed out at a forty-five-degree angle from the vertical. With teeth like that, he wouldn’t have smiled either.

  He tossed all the newspaper clippings onto a pile with the other papers, then carried his glass to the bed and lay down to smoke. The ashtray was already filled and he mumbled to himself about motel ashtrays always being designed for nonsmokers or for people who smoked one cigarette every six days. He hated that.

  Actually, he hated everything right at the moment, most of all being in Westport, having to look into the Paddington case when the guy was dead. All he was doing here was trying to figure out how to steal ten thousand dollars from Garrison Fidelity for a fee so he could pay for the restaurant’s repairs.

  It was all Chico’s fault.

  If she would have parted with some of her ill-gotten gains, he wouldn’t have had to do this. He could just have stayed in Las Vegas, waiting for the restaurant profits to come rolling in. His friend Eddie expected the restaurant and bar to gross three million dollars the first year, with a half-million of that as profit. That meant that Trace, as a 20-percent owner, would make a hundred thousand dollars as his share.

  And against that, he’d be able to write off his taxes the depreciation of the building and the purchase of new equipment and a lot of other stuff, and why didn’t Chico understand that he was on his way to Easy Street?

  No, she was tight, so tight she squeaked. And she had no vision. That was what was wrong with Michiko Mangini. She had no vision, no way to see the big picture.

  She lived in a world of petty mortals. She would never understand his dreams. She would never fly. She would always walk. Sometimes she might walk fast, but it would still be walking.

  He thought he smelled something burning. He saw that the ashtray, filled with butts, was smoldering. He stubbed out the cigarette he was holding, then tried to use the butt to put out the other burning cigarettes. But they were slipperier than eels, and all he managed to do was push them out of the low-sided flat ashtray onto the bed. He burned his fingers trying to pick them up. Finally, he got them all together and took the ashtray inside the bathroom and flushed its contents down the toilet.

  Then he took the plastic wastepaper basket from the bathroom and under the tub faucet ran an inch of water into the bottom. When he was satisfied it didn’t leak, he brought it back and stood it on the floor next to his bed.

  He looked at it and it made him more miserable than before. It was like being back in the army, sleeping in a barracks, with a butt can filled with wet sand hanging from a nail. A community ashtray.

  He was forty years old and here he was, lying in a motel room, using a water-filled garbage can as an ashtray. Why not crystal? Waterford. Baccarat. It was all Chico’s fault. She had reduced him to this by her parsimony.

  He got up and in the Formica-topped desk in the corner of the room found a postcard that showed a picture of the motel in hideous Technicolor. The dogwood trees had been in bloom when the picture was taken and it looked bright and cheerful. Trace knew he had missed the dogwood season by three months. All he was going to have was July sweat and exhaust from trucks passing the motel on the Post Road.

  He addressed the card to Chico and in the space for a message wrote: “Dear Chico. You will never soar. You will always only walk. Trace.”

  He looked at his message approvingly. Already he felt better. Striking back was always good for depression. If I’m not near the one I hate, I hate the one I’m near. Was that a song?

  He read the message again, aloud this time. Its words seemed nasty and trivial to him.

  Good, he thought. That’s what he wanted to be, nasty and trivial.

  Inside his wallet, he found a corroded old twenty-cent stamp that he had taken from a Time magazine renewal notice and put it on the postcard. Then he left his room to walk over to the motel’s lobby to find a mailbox. He hoped the mailbox was inside the cocktail lounge.

  He wanted a drink with ice.

  4

  A heavy iron gate closed with a chain and a padlock separated the Paddington home from the rest of the world. Trace thought it was probably to protect the world from the maniacal packs of curs that roamed the grounds day and night.

  He parked his car alongside the high stone wall next to the gates, but heard no dogs barking, and when he looked through the gates, he saw no dogs anywhere in the sloping lawns that led up to the house.

  He saw no people either, and he looked around for a bell or buzzer. Finally he found a button almost buried in the cement that anchored the gate into the stone walls. He pressed the button for a long time but could not hear it ringing anywhere and still saw no one at the house, which was set back fifty yards from the gate behind a roadway wide enough for two cars.

  He kept pressing the button. Finally he stopped and shouted, “Hey. Is there anybody alive in there?”

  There was still no answer, so he tried the button again and then shouted some more.

  Maybe he could go over the wall. Sure. And Mrs. Paddington could pick just that moment to let her hundred starving Dobermans out for a walk. No, thank you. Maybe an air drop. Maybe he could get a helicopter to set him down on the Paddington roof.

  He leaned on the button again and then shouted again. Maybe he should have telephoned first.

  The garage was open and Trace saw two cars parked inside: one was gray; the other, a foreign station wagon, was red.

  Then he saw a man coming out of the garage and walking slowly down the driveway. He was wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans and he was fastening his belt as he came toward the gate. Trace would never have called the expression on his face one of unalloyed joy. On the other hand, he might not have called the thing on the front of the man’s head a face either. The skin was red and the jaw jutted forward. His brow sloped back into a hairline that had probably receded from embarrassment because his hair was black and knotty. While his face was sharp-featured, nothing seemed to go with anything else, and if people wound up looking like their pets, this man kept vultures. In a long-ago adolescence, he had probably suffered from acne—although, Trace thought, “suffered” was the wrong word. People suffered from acne when other people made fun of them. That had never happened with this person. Even when he was not around, kids would have said, “Yes, Gargantua, yes, he has real nice skin. And a sweet gentle disposition. Gargantua is the salt of the earth.” He probably never even knew he had acne. Maybe he thought everyone else was wrong and who was to say nay?

  The man was as big as Trace and he had the sloping shoulders and stringy arm muscles of the very strong, who don’t have to lift weights to prove it.

  Trace put his age at around forty but wasn’t sure because he had very little experience with Cro-Magnon man.

  He had a scowl on his face. Somehow it made him look more appealing than having blood dripping from his mouth, which Trace thought was the most likely alternative. His eyes, fixed on Trace like a marksman’s sights, were beady.

 
; Trace reached under his jacket and turned on the small portable tape recorder that he always carried, taped to his skin under his shirt.

  He waited until the man was almost at the gate and then reached over and hit the buzzer button one more time for good measure.

  He smiled at the man, who did not smile back.

  “That isn’t funny,” the man said. Even his voice was menacing, low-pitched, soft and hissing as if he spoke only on the inhale.

  “Sorry,” Trace said. “I was ringing the bell so long it just got to be a habit.”

  “People oughta watch their habits. Some of them aren’t healthy.”

  “But some are very healthy,” Trace said. “For instance, I’m in this habit of taking two hours of karate training every day. Now, that’s what I call a good habit. You never know who you might meet.”

  “Never know,” the man said, and sipped air. “I’m in the habit of carrying an ax handle myself, for just the same reason. What do you want?”

  “That’s neat,” Trace said. “Hardly anybody in my crowd carries clubs anymore.”

  “What do you want?” the man said.

  “I want to see Mrs. Paddington.”

  “You have an appointment?”

  “Not exactly,” Trace said.

  “Then you can’t exactly see her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she doesn’t see a lot of people,” the man said.

  “Maybe she’ll make an exception in my case,” Trace said.

  “Why should she?”

  “I’m from the insurance company. Something about two million dollars,” Trace said.

  The man paused. Trace promised to remember that for the future: mentioning a couple of million dollars had a way of catching people’s attention and bringing civilization to the provinces.

  “You wait here,” the man ordered. “I’ll see if she’ll see you.”