“Or else you can write Richard Nixon’s Tragic Battle Against Herpes,” Trace said.
“That’s good too. That’s the way it works,” Elvira said. “So, anyway, I told Marylou that I wanted to know if there was anything in her computers about Mrs. Paddington, and she just typed it on her computer, but first she did something with a telephone—like the computer was talking on the telephone, you know, with the phone lying next to the keyboard—and then just a few seconds later, there was writing on the little television screen they have on the computer.”
“What’d the writing say?”
“It was two different stories. Marylou printed them for me.” She fished in a silver clutch bag and brought out a piece of paper with ragged, computer-perforated edges. Trace reached for the paper, but Elvira pulled it closer to her and moved the candle on the table so she could see.
“They’re both from eight years ago. The one says, ‘In case anybody’s wondering, that handsome man who’s turning up at all the fancy restaurants with a string of starlets is none other than Helmsley Paddington, who made his bundle in pet products. Word is he may be planning to sink some of that bundle into a film project. Or maybe he just likes pets?’ There’s that question mark again. And here’s the other one. ‘Diners close by to the dark corner table at the posh Lazarus restaurant the other night had it all wrong when they thought they heard groans of ecstasy coming from the table. The way it was explained to us was that Helmsley Paddington, the pet-food jillionaire, and Shirlaine MacFonda, Hollywood sexpot, were just comparing animal calls. They met while both were working to save the whales. It wasn’t heavy breathing, just whale impersonations. Thar she blows.’”
Elvira looked at Trace proudly and handed him the paper.
“How’s that?” she asked.
“That’s good stuff. Our detectives didn’t find anything like that at all.”
“Not too many people think to look in the supermarket news,” Elvira said.
“I just wish I knew what to do with it,” Trace said.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Boy, are you dumb,” she said. She finished her drink and waved to the waitress for another round at the table.
“Don’t you see,” she said. “Paddington didn’t die in any accident. His wife murdered him because he was playing around. You don’t have to pay up if she killed him, do you?”
“No. But you don’t have any easier solution, do you?”
“What do you mean?” Elvira asked.
“It’s tough solving a seven-year-old murder. You have anything that’ll save my company money without me having to work so hard?”
Elvira snapped, “Well, that’s the last time I ever do anything for you.”
“Hold on,” Trace said. “Just joking. This is real good stuff. It gives me a whole new line of attack. I’m proud of you.”
“Do I get a private detective’s badge as your helper?”
“Would you settle for a decoder ring?” Trace asked. “Really, this is good stuff.”
“Okay. Then that might not be the last time I ever do anything for you.”
“I hope not,” Trace said as he pocketed the paper with the stories on it.
Elvira was as beautiful with her clothes off as with them on, but back in bed with her at his motel room, Trace couldn’t help feeling sorry for the woman.
She kept telling Trace “I love you,” tossed casually into the conversation to avoid rebuff, and then waited for him to say the same thing back to her.
Trace wondered why some women, often beautiful women who seemed to have everything going for them, had such a low sense of esteem and self-worth that they needed random men telling them that they were loved. Were they starved of affection as children by their parents? Or was it unfeeling husbands?
It would have been very easy to say “I love you” back to Elvira, Trace thought. That was all she hungered for. It would have been easy to say and totally dishonest.
So he said it.
“I love you too,” he said. What the hell. He owed her something. And maybe he would need her again. She was probably rich; maybe she had ten thousand dollars lying around in play money. Anyway, she could keep her eyes open and see if she could learn something about the Paddingtons. To hell with honesty; self-interest came first.
Elvira wasn’t ready to let it go at that, unfortunately.
“No, you don’t,” she said.
“Okay,” Trace said.
“No, really.”
“Whatever you say,” he said.
She tried another tack. “You’re really good. I love making love to you.”
“And I love making love to you,” Trace said, repressing a sigh.
She held him tightly and did nice things with her body and oohed and aahed a lot, then tried again. “I love you,” she whispered in his ear in a paroxysm of frenzy.
“I love you too,” he said again.
This time she didn’t question it.
After she left, Trace got out the bottle of vodka he had bought at the cocktail lounge in Trumbull and sat at the small table in the motel room. He turned on the television set but left the sound off.
Then he got up and put on his underwear. He always wondered why he insisted upon wearing his underwear even though he was alone and not likely to be unalone.
He could never figure it out. Maybe it was some fear of a flash fire. If the building caught fire, he would at least be able to run out without first looking for clothes to put on. It was bad enough being a pauper, but being a pauper, standing in front of a burning motel, with kindly policemen wrapping a blanket around his naked cold body was more than he could take.
Wearily, his mouth thick with too many cigarettes, his head thick with too much vodka, he started to dictate into the golden-frog microphone on his tape recorder.
9
Trace’s Log: Devlin Tracy in the matter of Helmsley Paddington, Four A.M. Tuesday, Tape Number One.
Hello, tape recorder, old friend. My only friend.
This is what you’ve driven me to, Chico. I’m sitting here, oversmoked, overdrunk, my natural juices all gone from my body because you wouldn’t lend me the ten thousand dollars I needed when I needed it. Well, fourteen thousand.
I like to think that if you had but known what it would do to me, you might have acted differently. That you might have said, “Trace, sure, I’ll lend you the fourteen thousand. More than that if you need it. I’ll buy half your interest in the restaurant.” I really like to think that, Chico, because I’d really like to give you one more chance to show that you’re a worthwhile person.
But I won’t call you anymore. I’m finished with that. You can call and tell me if you want.
In the meantime, you’ve got me reduced to this. Drinking, smoking, rutting with a total stranger. God, I hope you hear this tape. I’m going to put it in a metal box so that if this place goes afire and I incinerate because I was busy looking for my underwear, the tape will still be there for your ears to hear. I’ll leave a message on it that it goes right to you, forget Walter Marks.
That’s right, Chico. In the sack with a strange woman, all to try to make some money from this stupid Paddington case. God, I hate this kind of work.
Tonight wasn’t all a waste, though. While I was making love to Elvira—do you hear me, Chico? Long slow sensuous love—I had this wonderful idea.
I bet I could make a lot of money if I printed up a little button that said, “I’ll tell you I love you.” No, the hell with a button. A gold-plated lapel pin. Might as well go the whole route.
You probably wouldn’t realize it because you’re so filled with yourself that you don’t think you need anybody, but this button would make men who wear it the scourge of singles bars or networking centers or wherever it is that men go now to pick up women.
Because I have found out a great truth. Most of the women who jump into the sack at the twitch of an eyebrow do it only so that someone will say to them, �
�I love you.”
So you get a lapel pin to identify the men who’ll do that and it would make a lot of men and women happy. Men because they wouldn’t have to waste money on false alarms, women because they’d know in advance they were getting what they wanted.
This is a wonderful idea, Chico, and when it is successful and I am rolling in wealth, don’t ask me for any money. If your sister’s plumbing breaks down again or your Japanese mother decides to take English lessons—and it’s about time too—don’t look to me for the money. I’m going to keep it all, every damned last cent of it, and invest it in restaurants. I know, the failure rate for new restaurants is seventy-five percent, but I’m going to change all that.
Revenge. Ahhhh, revenge. Who said that it was a dish best eaten cold? Just when you think I’ve forgiven and forgotten, I’m going to stomp down on your ass. You’ll see. You’ll get yours. My day will come. Der tag. You’ll see.
But in the meantime, I am reduced to this. Reduced to worrying about lovable Helmsley Paddington and his buck-toothed wife, Nadine, who have devoted their lives to getting rich off animals. That’s right, world. Rich. I don’t buy that love-the-animals bullshit. I think people love animals because they want to get something out of it. If you own a dog, you can’t afford a wife but you want affection anyway from some dumb brute. You own birds because they prettify the house, fish because watching them is cheaper than watching television. You own a cat because something deep inside you craves the smell of urine on ashes.
So I think that Hemmie and Nadine, yeah, maybe they liked animals some, but basically they were in business. Quick. How many dogs does Nadine Paddington have now? Answer. Zero. With that big place in Westport and two servants, answer, zero.
So much for love, puppy or otherwise. And when Helmsley Paddington flew off, seven years ago, on a flight to save the seals, I wouldn’t bet that he didn’t have a deal to sell artificial seal coats and he was just trying to dry up the competition. And then no more of him. That’s all.
And now Nadine wants her two million dollars in insurance.
Let’s see how that scans.
Big house in Westport, standard. Two cars in the garage, one a gray Mercedes, standard. Two servants, standard.
Well, maybe not standard. Anything involving Ferd is definitely substandard. Ferd is the guard or caretaker or whatever he is, and he looks like Sergeant Slaughter, the wrestler. Somehow he took a dislike to me right away and for the life of me, I can’t understand why. Maybe he doesn’t like the way I sing “Abdul the Bulbul Emir.” Holy Mother, is it time for new material? But anyway, my charm got me in to see Nadine.
Nadine, I guess, is pretty sick. I saw a wheelchair under the stairs. She’s got pinkeye. I thought only babies got pinkeye. And I guess she’s distraught. If I had teeth like that woman and my spouse died, I’d be distraught too. But I’d still go and get my teeth fixed.
Hemmie, she said, was an exceptional man and they were as happy as clams. And then he vanished and she waited seven years for him to come home. Maybe she’s a Greta Garbo fan. She wants to be alone. Anyway, that’s why she moved out of New Hampshire, this all happened then, and went to Westport, where she lives with Ferd, ugly and nasty, no dogs, and Maggie, maid, unseen, but if she’s beautiful I’m going to pork her, Chico, because what else do I have in my life?
Anyway, I couldn’t find out anything from Nadine, except that she spent too much time in the sun when she was younger ’cause the skin on her face is all cracked like an old wallet.
I’ve got an awful lot of work to do to try to prove something in this case. I guess it’d be easier if there was something to prove. Nadine Paddington isn’t the insurance-scam type. Her husband, I don’t know. A good-looking man can twist a homely woman around his finger—I know that firsthand, Chico—but I don’t know.
Nadine’s a hermit anyway. They turned down the next-door neighbor’s garbanzo loaf, although that might not mean anything more than rampant good taste still lives.
That was neighbor one. She jogged up and down while we were talking. Neighbor two, Chico, that was Elvira, the one I slept with tonight. She and I hit it right off. She tantalized me in a bikini, and even without knowing me real well, I know she would have lent me the ten thousand or fourteen thousand dollars I need, but she was a little short of spending money this month.
A nice woman too. Her husband’s a marriage counselor and works in New York and has a mistress there. Elvira and the girlfriend have lunch together. Isn’t that cozy? I wonder what Bart, the husband, thinks about having two women comparing him over a lunch table. Jeez.
She invited me to take her out and then she told me good stuff. How Helmsley Paddington was doing the Hollywood wealthy-investor number and romancing starlets. Elvira says that’s an angle.
It goes like this. Hemmie is out sporting on Bucky Beaver, the wife. He’s not terribly discreet about it because his name winds up in supermarket newspapers. And Nadine finds out and gets so damned mad that when he goes to save the seals, she sticks a bomb on his plane and sends him to that big igloo in the sky.
Motive. An ugly woman scorned always has a motive.
Aaaaah, why am I jerking myself off? I don’t believe Nadine Paddington’s a killer. And even if she was, how am I going to prove anything about a murder seven years ago? I have trouble finding the ashtray in a rental car, now I’m going to find a seven-year-old clue? Forget it.
Maybe I will just con Mrs. Paddington into coming out and liquor her up and make love to her. I’ll wear my lapel pin that says ‘I’ll tell you I love you’ and she’ll fall at my feet. I’ll kiss her from the side to avoid collision and I’ll wangle the truth out of her.
If I can get her out. She doesn’t go out much. That’s what everybody says, including Adam Shapp—he’s her lawyer. She types him neat little notes. Probably on paper with puppies’ pictures on it.
So that’s the case, and if that wasn’t enough to make it a terrible day, that bandit, Eddie, wants fourteen thousand to fix the restaurant. And he’s trying to sell out himself. What a pain in the balls that is. Never do business in New Jersey. I should have learned that a long time ago.
I think I’m getting ripped off and every penny I have in the world, forty thousand, is in that place. I hate the restaurant business. Seventy-five percent of all new restaurants fail.
I’m going to apply for one of those grants that they give every year to big thinkers to give them a chance to do their work without having to worry about making a living.
The Japanese declare people national treasures and venerate them. For your information, Chico, even though you’re partly one of them, the Japanese won’t declare you a national treasure. Maybe the national treasury, you cheap thing, but not a treasure.
But why doesn’t America do that? Why doesn’t someone come up and give me money and say we know you’ve got a large and really important mind and we want you to brainstorm for the next five years without having to worry about making a living. The things I could invent with such freedom. The questions I could answer. I could find out how airport restaurants can turn bread into brown toast without ever getting it warm. I have this idea for a great new product. A combination mouthwash and after-shave; one big bottle to do both things. Travelers would go crazy for it.
More big questions. Why can’t you find a mailbox on the street outside the main New York City post office? Important questions, and I could answer them if I had the time.
Never mind. I’m plugging through on this case, Chico. My day will come and you are not going to share in it. Trust me.
Anyway, I think tomorrow I’m going to do some checking up on good old Hemmie Paddington and find out if there were any skeletons in the closet that might make his wife want to murder him. How I’ll prove that, though, I’ll never know.
And I won’t have much time tomorrow. It’s five A.M. now, maybe even later, and I’ve just finished making love to a beautiful redheaded woman and it was wonderful, Chico, wonderful. She told me she
loved me. And I believe her.
Most people do, you know. Except for those who are cheap and tightfisted and think that anyone who’s nice to them is trying to borrow money.
I drank and smoked too much today. That’s the good news. Somehow I forgot to eat. I’ll think about that tomorrow.
It’s all your fault, Chico. If I do die in a fire, with or without underwear, and you get this tape, make sure the insurance company reimburses my estate for my expenses.
I did almost everything today by credit card, except tonight I spent a hundred and fifty dollars on cocktails with Elvira. You hear that, Chico? A hundred and a half. I spend money like water on people who deserve it.
And I guess I spent another fifty dollars on miscellaneous things. So make it two hundred dollars. Hell, round it off. Two-fifty. Deduct a dollar for the cheap ballpoint pens I stole today from the lawyer’s office. Two-forty-nine.
Chico, make sure my estate collects. But don’t go looking for any of it yourself, because I’m writing you out of my will. That’ll fix you.
Devlin Tracy signing off.
10
“Hi, Sarge. How goes it?”
“What’s wrong, son?”
“What do you mean what’s wrong? Does something have to be wrong for me to call my only father? How’s the private detecting business?”
“Not bad. I got a big industrial client who wants me to find out who’s stealing paper clips and I’m starting to get a few regular cases.”
“What’s a regular case?”
“You know, missing husbands, cheating wives, that kind of things. It’s starting to go real well.”
“Let’s get down to the important stuff,” Trace said. “Is it getting you out of the house?”
“Yes. Every blessed day,” Sarge said.
“Praise be God.”
“So what’s wrong?” Trace’s father asked again.
“I really resent it when people think there’s got to be something wrong when I call them,” Trace said.
Once a Mutt (Trace 5) Page 8
