This is no fair, God, and I want you to know I’ll be keeping score from now on. Maybe you can get away with that short-end-of-the-stick stuff with Job, but not with me.
I’m not too worried about breaking the law. I think I can blame that on Chico. If the cops come, I’ll just tell them, Sure, I was out at the farm with her, just to poach my impurities in the hot tub. But you’d better check the dead guy’s wallet and stuff, I bet her fingerprints are all over it. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll break one of her bottles of Evening in Byzantium and give the cops the pieces and tell them to snort the bedroom drapes. Chico can fry, as far as I’m concerned. That’s what she gets for talking me into coming to this lunatic bin, to watch samurai movies and keep an eye on Mr. Nishimoto, the man of the wandering hands. And make sure that Emmie doesn’t commit suicide. No sense dying over spilled orange juice.
Why me, God? I don’t know, Trace.
Thank you, Groucho, for giving me Mike Mabley. Junk jewelry, Gucci loafers, little galoshes in his smelly new car to protect his little shoesies. And a grateful pat on the back to Mabley for involving me with Mrs. Collins, alias the Mud Fence. I’ve heard of henpecked, but what is she? Cock-pecked? I’ve got a good suspicion that Tom Collins—that’s right, the bastard is dead and I’m going to call him Tom whether he liked it or not—anyway, I’ve got a good suspicion that Tom Collins is a—check that was—a grade-A wife-beater.
And he owned a farm that his wife didn’t even know about, so let that answer the question of whether he was out tipping on his wife or not. He was. At least once with Laurie Anders, the resident beauty of the Collins-Rose real-estate agency, and with everybody else in town to hear Laurie and Rafe Rose tell of it.
More proof. The cuff link. Don’t laugh, big guy, it’s our hottest clue so far. We’ve got a cuff link sent to Collins’ postal box along with a neatly printed note signed Mandy. Add to that a classified ad in some handjob newspaper for a hooker named Mandy who didn’t know what I was talking about.
Point Two. So Collins’ body is at the farm, but where’s his car?
Point. I’d call this Point Three but I don’t think there was ever a Point One. Anyway, point, Chico’s nose—a deadly weapon honed on years of sniffing out food supplies—says that somebody broke a bottle of perfume in Collins’ bedroom at the farm recently. Why?
Who knows?
Who cares?
The only reason I’m involved in this at all is because of that deformed midget prick, Walter Marks, and now I’m just worried that when the body gets found, the cops’ll talk to Mrs. Collins and she’ll hand me up on a melamine platter.
Point some number or other. Mabley found an item in the paper that says the real-estate agency pulled out of a deal and that might mean they’re short on money. Rafe Rose didn’t seem exactly crushed by the thought of Collins being among the missing. Maybe it’s bad enough that Rose does most of the real-estate work and has to give fifty percent to Collins but if Collins is going south with money that belongs to the firm, Rose could get ticked enough to line-drive Collins’ skull with a baseball bat.
Laurie Anders can’t stand Collins. And neither can his wife, who stands to gain two hundred thou from his insurance policy. And then there’s the stepdaughter, Tammy, at Hollyhope College who, according to Laurie, hated Collins, too. Well, why not? I hate him myself for doing this to me.
And then there’s Mandy, the hooker. People in her line of work have been known to stretch the truth now and then. Maybe a personal visit is in order, if I can convince Chico that it’s strictly in the line of duty.
Nice way for a decent well-intentioned young man to spend his vacation, huh? I am not real happy with this turn of events, God, and if I were you, I’d look over my shoulder once in a while because you’re on my list.
My costs, thank you, Mr. Walter Marks, have been phenomenally high and much too elaborate to itemize. Know ye, therefore, that my bill so far is one thousand dollars, and that’s just in expenses. I’m sure more will come to mind as time goes on.
No, hold that. Expenses will drop dramatically tomorrow. I’m posting a sign on the hotel bulletin board: My consort, Michiko Mangini, having left my bed and board, will now be held solely responsible for any food bills incurred by her.
Hell, that’d take care of the national deficit.
Come to think of it, Mandy sounds better than ever.
Good night, world. And God, if you’re listening, phhhht to you.”
15
Trace woke up with a ringing in his ears. There was only one reasonable explanation: the Vienna Choirboys’ hand-bell chorus was practicing in his head. Again. And they were all wearing golf shoes.
He groaned. At least his throat still worked well enough to produce some semihuman sounds.
“Eat these,” Chico said. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and she forced two aspirins into the parched slot of his mouth. Then she hoisted up his head and poured water into it from a glass. When she released his head, it dropped back onto the pillow like an cannonball.
He groaned again.
“Feel that bad, huh?” she said.
“It’s that water. I hate water. It dilutes all the vital fluids in your body.”
“The only fluid in your body is alcohol,” Chico said. “You’ve heard, ‘my blood ran cold’? Well, yours runs clear. Maybe that was how the Egyptians made mummies. Tank up people with vodka and keep them pickled for five thousand years. Sit up. I’ve ordered breakfast.”
“Can’t sit,” Trace said. He felt the aspirins dissolving on his tongue. The water flow had somehow missed them. “I hear bells. It’s the end. St. Peter’s calling me.”
“Those are bells from some church down the block,” Chico said. “Walter Marks called. He wants you to get back to him as soon as you wake up.”
“Screw him. This is all his fault. I’m never talking to him again. Screw him.”
“No, thanks. But he is your boss.”
“Just another one of God’s tests on my patience,” Trace said.
The room-service waiter came while Trace was still in bed. Chico had him wheel a table laden with enough food for a Boy Scout troop over near the window, then dismissed him with a large cash tip that she took from Trace’s wallet.
“When you use my money, undertip,” Trace told her. “I can’t eat all that.”
“Who says you have to?” She tossed him a roll. He tried to catch it, missed, and the roll hit him between the eyes. “That’s for you,” she said. “That and two sausages. The rest is mine. You like sausages, don’t you?”
“No,” Trace said.
“Good. More for me.” Chico sat at the table and started on the platters of french toast, omelets, bacon, sausage, and pastries, complaining bitterly that the hotel offered only apple and cherry marmalades with the toast. “No grape jelly anywhere,” she said.
“God, you’re disgusting.”
“I’m fortifying myself,” she said. “It’ll be a long drive to Hollyhope College today. I looked it up on the map in the lobby and we’ll be on the road a couple of hours. I know how crabby you get about having to stop for food while you’re driving.”
“Correction,” Trace said. “I’ll be on the road. You’ll be here, watching The Twenty-Seven Samurai with your mother. Anyway, how did you know about Hollyhope College?”
“I listened to your log this morning,” Chico said.
Trace sat up in bed. “I keep telling you those tapes are personal. My property. Hands off. Don’t you have any ethics at all?”
Chico stopped eating for the briefest of moments. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Seeing Tammy Collins is a good idea, but Mandy the Hooker doesn’t sound like much of a lead to me.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, if you don’t mind,” Trace said. “I’m the investigator here, surprising as that may be to you.”
“I’m not surprised,” she said, licking her fingers. “You’ve probably logged more hours investigating types like Mandy than any detect
ive west of the Mississippi.”
“Jealousy rears its sausage-filled head,” Trace said. He tried to get up out of the bed. “And I’m not a detective,” he said.
“What are you?”
“What I am, Chico, is, God help me, a man with a hangover. I don’t get hangovers, but here, I think I’ve got one.”
“I’m sorry, Trace,” Chico said earnestly. “I know what this means to your drinking career.”
“Don’t joke. This is serious. If I’m going to get hangovers, how can I drink so much?”
“Maybe God is sending you a message to slow down,” she suggested.
“It must be Get Devlin Tracy Week in heaven,” Trace said. “Why doesn’t God just butt out? Hasn’t he done enough?”
“I don’t know about your problems with God,” she said. “Here’s a deal,” she said as she got up and stole the breakfast roll from Trace’s bed. “You can see Mandy if you want, but I go along to Hollyhope College. Okay?” She demolished the roll.
“All right,” he relented. “But since you’ve eaten everything, we’ll have to stop somewhere along the way for a sandwich.”
“That’s okay with me,” Chico said. “I’m starving.”
16
Tammy Collins lived in an apartment above a gymnasium called the Body Eternal. The building was painted in Day-Glo purple, adorned with white silhouettes of impossibly endowed men and women.
When they opened the ground-level door, a smell hit them, as bad in its way as the smell from Thomas Collins’ barn.
Chico wrinkled up her nose. “B.O.,” she sang.
“Stuff cotton in your delicate Oriental nostrils,” Trace said. “You were the one who insisted on coming along.”
He led the way up the stairs, past the door to the gym on the right, to the second-floor landing. He knocked.
He thought the smell would be less pungent up here, but as the apartment door swung open, even Trace’s jaded smeller cringed in front of the ripe odor of sweating bodies, although he did his best to ignore it.
The young woman who stood before him would have been a beauty anywhere, but it seemed that she was taking both makeup and fashion lessons from her mother. She wore no makeup, her hair was uncombed, and she was wearing a shapeless caftan. She was not perspiring at all. Her eyes were her only live feature, displaying open and vibrant hostility.
Trace introduced himself and Chico.
“I know who you are,” Tammy Collins said with sullen recognition. “My mother warned me that you might come up here.”
“Has she called the police yet?” Trace asked.
Tammy shrugged. “I hope not. She ought to give him a chance.”
“A chance to do what?” Trace asked.
“To be dead.” She smiled, showing off perfectly formed, pearl-white teeth. “You don’t have to tell me what you’re thinking. The girl hated her stepfather, right, Sherlock?”
“Right, Lucretia,” Trace said.
“Touché. You specialize in sarcasm too?”
“Only when I’m hung over. I wanted to talk to you about your stepfather.”
“You’re wasting your time,” the young woman said, “but come on in anyway.” She waved them to a couch that was so stained and dirty that simultaneously, without consultation, both Trace and Chico decided they’d rather stand.
The smell was just as bad inside the apartment, now that the door was closed.
“You’re wasting your time, Hawkshaw. I haven’t talked to Daddy Dearest in months. Not since school started. And damn little before that, if I could get away with it.”
From an adjoining room came a grunt and then the deep thump of something heavy being set down.
“What’s that?” Trace asked.
“Just Julio, the guy I live with. Want to meet him?”
“I’ll pass,” Chico said, sniffing the air.
Trace pinched her surreptitiously and said, “We’d rather talk to you. Unless Julio knows something.”
Into the room walked a young man wearing bathing trunks and a wide leather weight lifter’s belt. He was the shortiest ugliest sweatiest person Trace had ever seen, except for Walter Marks. And possibly Trace’s ex-wife.
“That’s Julio?” Trace said.
Tammy nodded and Trace said, “Julio doesn’t know anything.”
“Julio Hernández, meet Dick Tracy,” Tammy said smugly.
“I don’t like flatfoots,” Julio growled.
“That’s flatfeet, stinkbomb,” Trace said mildly.
Julio moved forward menacingly, like an ambulatory haymow, one quivering muscle at a time. Trace moved away from the windowsill where he’d been leaning, but Chico stepped in between them and stood in front of Julio.
“You’ve got the best trapeziuses I ever saw. How do you do that?”
“Shrugs,” he said. “Heavyweight shrugs.” He crouched over like the Incredible Hulk so the trapezius muscles between neck and shoulder bunched up. Trace was forgotten as Julio concentrated on the really important thing in his life: his own body and what people thought of it.
“I’d love to see your equipment,” Chico said.
Julio snickered. “Come on inside,” he said.
Trace tossed a dirty look Chico’s way as she led the squat young man gently out of the room.
“Notice,” he said. “From the rear they form the number ten.”
“More power to her,” Tammy said. “Most people can’t control him. She probably saved your life.”
“I doubt it,” Trace said. “The dumber they are, the harder they fall. What’s he majoring in? Jock itch?”
“Oh, Julio doesn’t go to school. He’s training to be Mister Universe. That’s why we live here. It’s the only place in town that’ll let him keep barbells.”
“Why doesn’t he use the gym downstairs?” Trace asked.
“Julio likes to use his own equipment,” Tammy said. She sprawled back on the couch, showing a lot of very nice left leg from under her caftan. “What’s his is his.”
“Including you?”
The young woman stiffened. “I thought you came here to talk about my stepfather.”
“All right. Maybe you can start by telling me why you hate him.”
She exhaled slowly. “That would take more years than you’ve got left.”
“Just hit the high spots,” Trace said.
“Is rape high enough?”
“He raped you?” Trace asked.
“He tried, the scumbag. Just this past summer. We were alone in the house. Mother was out with that stupid Artisans’ Guild trying to sell some of her work. She has to pay my tuition herself. Anyway, he gave me a drink. It was the first nice thing he ever did. I said thank you and he started kissing me, nicely of course, like a good old dear loving dad, saying what a good girl I was. And then he grabbed me.”
“What did you do?”
“I kneed him in the nuts. Then I stayed out of the house until my mother came home.”
“Did you tell her?” Trace asked.
“Of course I did. Hey, Dick Tracy, this was just one time. That man has found more reasons to pat me on the ass and brush against my boobs than a porcupine’s got quills. But this time I told her.”
“And what’d she do?”
“Nothing. She never does anything. She lets him beat her, for Christ’s sake. He comes home with lipstick on his shirt and fingernail marks on his back, and he goes off without ever telling her anything, and she never says a word. Yeah, I told her, but she didn’t do anything and I didn’t expect that she would.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I packed a bag and moved up here. It was a little early because the school wasn’t open, but I got lucky. Found a job at the gym downstairs and that’s where I met Julio. So I make a few bucks, add it to what my mother sends me, and pay my debts to higher education. You understand why I don’t like my stepfather?”
“I’m getting the idea,” Trace said. “You said he comes home with lipstick and scratches.
He’s a skirt-chaser?”
“The worst,” she said.
“Is that hearsay? Or do you know? Do you know any names?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know any names, but I can recognize a duck when I see a duck.”
“You ever hear of a woman named Mandy in connection with Collins?”
“No, but if there is one, I hope she gives him the clap.”
“You say you’re paying your own tuition, you and your mother. Why doesn’t Collins help?”
“I heard him tell my mother one night that I’m not his real daughter, so why should he pay for her mistakes? Imagine, as rich as that bastard is.”
“Nice guy,” Trace said.
“They don’t make them like that anymore. That’s for sure.”
“What are you studying?” Trace asked.
“Business. Julio and I are going to open our own place when I graduate.”
“With what? It takes money to open a gym.”
She smiled icily. “Julio’ll be Mister Universe by then,” she said.
“Or maybe Collins will die and leave you and your mother a lot of money in life insurance.”
The cold smile never left the young woman’s face. “That would be nice too,” she said. “Especially the part about him dying. Too bad he doesn’t like my mother or me well enough to take out a policy.”
“This time you’re wrong,” Trace said. “He already has.”
A moment later, Chico, looking none the worse for wear, came from the other room, and she and Trace walked toward the door.
Before leaving, Trace asked Tammy, “You ever hear Collins mention going to a farm somewhere?”
She shook her head and rose from the couch. She could have been truly lovely, Trace realized, if there weren’t a hard bitter set to her mouth and her eyes.
“He’s hardly the farming type,” she said.
“Thanks a lot,” Trace said.
“Thank the Nip. She’s the one who saved you from Julio,” Tammy said.
Pigs Get Fat (Trace 4) Page 10
