Once a Mutt (Trace 5)

by Warren Murphy

  “Tracy?” Roscoe said.

  “Yes.”

  “Sit down. What can I do for you?”

  The real leather chairs in the detective’s office were cushioned and soft, much like Roscoe’s voice, which oozed confidence and poise.

  “I’m in town looking into an insurance claim,” Trace said. “I always like to check in with the police so you know I’m around.”

  “What claim?” Roscoe said. He was sitting behind his desk, looking at a long roll of paper that had come from a Teletype machine.

  “It’s complicated, but it involves a family named Paddington. According to the wife, the—”

  “I know about the Paddingtons,” Roscoe said. “Your company had detectives looking into that a month ago. Why you now?”

  “The detectives didn’t find out anything. I’m the last best hope for saving my company two million dollars.”

  “Are you any good?” Roscoe asked.

  “Not really,” Trace said. “But I’m real lucky.”

  “That’s the only way to win a lottery,” Roscoe said.

  “And sometimes the only way to figure out an insurance fraud,” Trace said.

  “You think there’s a fraud involved?” Roscoe asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve got a boss who always thinks that, so he sent me for one last look around. You said you know about the Paddingtons. If you don’t mind my asking, how come?”

  “How’d you get my name?” the police officer said.

  “I ran across it in the report the p.i. did for the insurance company,” Trace said.

  “Well, the p.i. working on it was my brother-in-law, C.S. So I knew what he was up to.” He paused a moment, then swiveled his desk lamp so that it shone on Trace’s face. He inspected Trace’s bruises for a moment at long distance, then said, “What’s the other guy look like?”

  “Like King Kong,” Trace said. “I guess you told your brother-in-law everything you might know about the Paddingtons.”

  “Everything, which was zero,” Roscoe said.

  “No little hints of scandal, no calls to the police at four A.M. about screaming from their place, none of that?”

  “Nothing. I told C.S. you wouldn’t even know the Paddingtons live in town,” Roscoe said.

  “Technically, they don’t, I guess,” Trace said. “Only one of them lives in town. The other one is dead.”

  “Pay the money. I don’t think you’re going to find out anything. You’re wasting your time.”

  “I figure that too,” Trace said. “But I don’t have any choice.”

  “Why not?”

  “See, I invested in this restaurant and now, even before it gets open, it’s got storm damage and I’ve got to come up with my share of money to fix it.”

  “Only people who own restaurants should invest in restaurants,” Roscoe said.

  “You’re going to tell me that seventy-five percent of all new restaurants fail, aren’t you?” Trace asked.

  “No. Is that true?”

  “It certainly is,” Trace said. “Three-quarters of them go down the toilet.”

  “Then why’d you invest?” Roscoe asked.

  “’Cause I’m as thick as shit,” Trace said.

  “Not too many guys know that.”

  “About me or about themselves?” Trace asked. “Everybody knows it about me.”

  “About themselves. Who worked over your face like that?”

  “I don’t know. I got jumped in a parking lot.”

  “In town?”

  “Yes,” Trace said. “The other night.”

  “No idea who did it?” Roscoe asked.

  “An idea, but not a fact,” Trace said.

  “If you turn it into a fact, you let me know,” Roscoe said. “There are laws against that kind of thing.” He glanced back down at the Teletype sheets on his desk, as if there were something important there that he wanted to get back to.

  “I’ll get out of your hair in a minute, Lieutenant,” Trace said.

  “No, don’t worry. It’s just that I get all the jobs that nobody else does,” Roscoe said. “Missing persons, fraud, stolen cars. I spend all day reading reports from all over. What do you want from me?”

  “Did you ever meet Mrs. Paddington?”

  “No. But I talked to her once.”

  “How was that?” Trace asked.

  “I was trying to help my brother-in-law a little, so I drove up to the Paddingtons’ house. The maid was there, the pretty one.”

  Trace nodded.

  “She told me that Mrs. Paddington was under sedation and that she’d get back to me. And she called me that afternoon and I asked her a couple of questions and didn’t get any good answers, but I gave it all to C.S. for his report,” Roscoe said.

  “Do you like your brother-in-law?” Trace asked.

  “Who likes his brother-in-law?”

  “I was just wondering,” Trace said.

  “I can’t stand him,” Roscoe said. “If I had any brains myself, before I got married I would have looked at him and said, ‘That is my wife’s gene pool. Stay away from these people.’ But I didn’t. He is dumb and borrows money and doesn’t pay it back.”

  “But you wouldn’t want his business to fail, would you?”

  “Christ, no. He’d probably move in with me. What are you getting at?”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant. I just had to satisfy myself that you weren’t holding back on me because you were afraid I’d show up your brother-in-law.”

  “I’m not,” Roscoe said.

  “I just want you to know I don’t work that way. If I found out there was something going on here, I’d make sure that C.S. got some of the credit. As long as I got the fee.”

  “That’s big of you, but not necessary,” Roscoe said. “I told you what I know.”

  “Then, thanks a lot, Lieutenant.” Trace got up to leave and Roscoe said, “You staying around town long?”

  “Ye Olde English Motel. A couple of days.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Las Vegas,” Trace said.

  “You are lucky,” Roscoe said.

  “Sometimes,” Trace said. “Sometimes.”

  Trace was hungry, so he walked from police headquarters to a restaurant on the corner. It was much too bright and filled with plants.

  He asked the hostess for a table away from the plants.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I don’t trust them. They suck up my carbon dioxide before I’m done with it.”

  She sat him in the back with a bemused look and a menu. As she walked away, he told her, “If Paul Newman comes in, tell him I’m busy and want to be left alone.”

  He hoped that Newman and Robert Redford wouldn’t come in. He hated being pestered when he ate and he knew that Newman would start insisting on making everybody’s salad dressing and Redford would go from table to table, begging money to save Montana or something. The last thing he needed today were more pests.

  He picked at a cheddar cheeseburger, had a couple of drinks, paid his bill, and telephoned Elvira. He had no driving sex urge now, but he believed in planning ahead. If the urge didn’t show up, he’d pretend he had a headache and back out.

  Elvira’s voice on the telephone sounded as if she were talking on a shortwave radio. He asked her about it and she said that she was talking on the radiophone from her front yard.

  He thought of her in her tiny bikini and was very glad he had called.

  “Are you coming over?” she asked.

  “Am I invited?”

  “I’m waiting for you.”

  “Good. I’ll be right there,” he said.

  “And I’ve got big news to report,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Come over and I’ll whisper it in your ear. Vodka all right?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Elvira was in place on her beach towel, her breasts bigger, her legs more sweepingly lush, her smile even more dazzling than Trace had
remembered.

  She lifted her face to be kissed. He leaned over and brushed her lips lightly.

  “That’s a pretty poor excuse for a kiss,” she said.

  “The neighbors. I don’t want to ruin your reputation.”

  “I love it when you’re thoughtful. Let’s go inside and fuck.”

  “You already poured me a drink. Mind if I sample it?”

  “Go ahead. You’ll pay for it later,” she said. “I found out about the mortgage across the street. Hey, what happened to your face?”

  Trace sipped at the drink in the lawn holder. It was still vodka and Kool-Aid. “I walked into a husband,” he said. “What about their house?”

  “Mrs. Paddington bought the house seven years ago. It was two hundred thousand dollars. She put down forty thousand. Her monthly mortgage including taxes is nineteen hundred dollars. She’s never been late on a payment.”

  “The house is in her name?” Trace said

  “Right.”

  “How’d you find all that out?”

  “I’ve got a friend at the bank,” she said. “He told me.”

  “That was real good,” Trace said. “That was your big news?”

  “Oh. No. They went out.” She pointed in the direction of the Paddington house.

  “Who did?”

  “All of them, I guess. I saw the big goon and the peasant girl. Mrs. Paddington must have been in the backseat. They were using that Mercedes with the smoked windows, so I couldn’t see too well.”

  “When was this?”

  “About an hour and a half ago or so,” Elvira said.

  “You see anything else? Anything unusual?” Trace asked.

  “I saw a picnic basket. The woman, Maggie Winters, she had one of those big Styrofoam coolers and she put it in the trunk and then she put a picnic basket there too.”

  “If you were a gambling person, would you say they were going on a picnic?” Trace asked.

  “I’d give odds,” Elvira said.

  “How long does it take to go on a picnic?” Trace asked.

  “When you take a car, it takes you to get there and to get back and all the time it takes you to eat potato salad.”

  “Couple of hours, right?”

  “Sure.”

  Trace got to his feet. “I’ll be back in a little while,” he said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To look around.” He saw the small cordless telephone on the large teddy-bear towel, next to Elvira’s feet.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’m going to call you in a couple of minutes with the Paddingtons’ phone number.”

  “Breathe heavy at me. I love it,” she said.

  “No. I want you to stay here, and if you see their car coming back, I want you to call me quick. Ring twice and hang up. Then dial again. Ring twice and hang up.”

  “And you’ll know enough to split, right?” Elvira said.

  “You catch on real quick,” he said.

  “I want you to know you’ll pay for this.”

  “How’s that?” Trace asked.

  “I’m not used to taking second place to a burglary.”

  “I’ll see if I can steal you something nice,” Trace said.

  The gate was locked with a chain, but on the south side of the Paddington property, Trace found two bent bars in the high spike-topped fence and was able to slide between them.

  He ran to the garage and found the door unlocked. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him. The interior of the garage was bright and airy from a bank of windows that ran along the entire back wall. The red Saab station wagon was parked in one of the two car berths.

  A door on the side of the garage was unlocked and led to a screened breezeway that separated the garage from the house itself. He tried the house door but it was locked. Through the window, Trace saw the kitchen. It had the look that kitchens always had when people were out of the house. There were no coffeecups on tables, no pots on the stove. He hoped there were no burglar alarms on the door.

  The door seemed to be one of those with the lock built into the doorknob. Trace craned his neck against the window but could see no interior deadbolt lock on the door.

  In movies now, it would be easy. A credit card slipped into the door and it would pop open. But he had tried that three times in his life with a net result of three scratched and broken credit cards. He went back into the garage and found a toolbox on a shelf over a worktable. From inside the box, he took a small paint scraper and a hammer

  He glanced through the screening toward the front gate. No signs of life.

  He slid the paint scraper behind the molding that ran down the frame along the outer edge of the door. As usual it was held only by small finishing nails. It took only a few sliding moves of the paint scraper and the molding came loose. That exposed the lock housing and Trace used the edge of the paint scraper to reach in under the bolt and muscle it back just enough so that the door swung open.

  He replaced the door molding before doing anything else. He used his handkerchief to muffle the sound of the hammer tapping the thin nails back into the frame of the door. When he was done, he replaced both tools in the box in the garage.

  He walked into the kitchen and stood quietly inside listening. Elvira hadn’t seen Mrs. Paddington in the rear of the car, so she might still be in the house. He heard no sounds. He closed and locked the door behind him and walked to the kitchen telephone and called Elvira.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Here’s the number.”

  “God, this is exciting,” she said.

  “If you see anybody, remember, ring—”

  “Ring twice, hang up, call again, ring twice, hang up. I got it,” Elvira said. “Will you hurry back here? Committing a crime always makes me horny.”

  “Hold that thought,” he said.

  Trace hung up and then moved the lever alongside the phone so that the ring was at its loudest. If Elvira called, he should be able to hear the phone ringing anywhere in the house. He hoped.

  He glanced through the window. Still no one at the gate.

  This is the way all degradation starts, he thought. One little breaking and entry. And then it would lead inexorably to spitting on the sidewalk, then smoking on a bus, and before he knew it, he would be creasing IBM cards and referring to women as “girls.”

  Even the biggest plunge started with one little misstep. Idi Amin probably started out by neglecting to spit-shine his army shoes.

  Trace walked softly down the hallway from the kitchen, quietly opening doors as he went. Just off the kitchen was a bedroom large enough to be an apartment. It was lived in and the closets along one wall held men’s clothes, the closets along the other women’s.

  He picked up a black-and-white photograph from the large dresser. It showed Ferdinand in a dark suit, looking exactly like an ugly moose in a dark suit. Standing next to him was Maggie. Her hair was darker when the picture was taken, but she was a notable beauty by anyone’s standards, only a few inches shorter than Ferdinand and with the long silky body of a ballerina. With knockers.

  What she might see in Ferdinand was beyond Trace. He had long since matured enough that he didn’t question why rich and powerful men so often had beautiful women on their arms. But Ferdinand? A handyman, ugly and probably broke?

  Who knew what went through women’s heads? He certainly didn’t.

  He opened the drawer of a night table next to the large queen-sized bed, but there was nothing in it except cigarettes—mentholated True Greens—and women’s lacy handkerchiefs and a toothpaste-shaped tube that bore no marking.

  Trace opened the cap. The substance inside was a light green but had no odor. He took his cigarettes from his pocket and removed the cellophane from the pack. Into it, he squeezed a long strand of the green waxy substance, then recapped the tube and replaced it in the dresser drawer. He folded the cellophane neatly and put it into his inside jacket pocket.

  The other rooms along the first-floor corri
dor were a sewing room, a room used as an auxiliary pantry, and a small guest room, with a bed stripped clean.

  The drawing room, where he had interviewed Mrs. Paddington, and a large, formal living and dining room completed the first floor.

  The wheelchair was again where it had been the first time he had been there, folded up, and again Trace stumbled against it. He wiped the dust from his hands on his trousers, then went to a front window and glanced out. There was still no sign of anyone at the gate, but he didn’t know how much he trusted Elvira to keep her eyes open. She might decide to go inside to make another bathtub full of drinks, or she might work on the tan of her eyelids, or she might decide to seduce passing schoolchildren, and not pay any attention to Mrs. Paddington and her two servants returning home.

  He padded lightly up the steps to the second floor. There were three guest bedrooms, two baths, and a master bedroom with its own bath.

  All the rooms were empty. He looked around in the master bedroom. It was a chintzed, breezy big room, bright and sunny. A large dresser stood in the corner near the window. He opened it drawer by drawer. Four drawers were empty; the top two contained women’s underwear, slips and stockings, in styles that Trace felt could most charitably be called practical.

  The night tables were empty. Not even a book or a magazine inside. The walk-in closet was filled with women’s clothes, all of them with plastic dust shields over the hangers.

  He looked inside the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. All it held was a plastic bottle of aspirins and a small half-empty bottle of Natural-tone Makeup for Oily Skin.

  Trace came back out and looked through the drawers of a desk that sat by the front window. All he found was some blank writing paper and a pen. The writing paper was in a neat stack.