Trace (Trace 1)

by Warren Murphy

  “I’ll get him. And I’m expecting you at that party.”

  Trace heard her put the phone down, and a few moments later his father’s laconic voice asked, “Hello, son. What’s up?”

  “Sarge, what’s gnawing at her craw now? I know she didn’t call to invite me to that baboon’s birthday party.”

  “Her birthday was last week. You forgot to call.”

  “I sent flowers. You know I can’t remember dates. The florist has a steady order. Every year, same time, he sends a dozen roses.”

  “She would have liked a phone call.”

  “Next year, I’ll call and skip the flowers,” Trace said.

  “That’ll really piss her off,” his father said with a chuckle.

  “Good. Serves her right. Listen, Sarge, you talk her out of being mad, but no way I’m going to Bruce’s party.”

  “I wish I had an excuse not to.”

  “Square it for me,” Trace said. “Tell her my oral exam for the priesthood is that day.”

  “You’d better tell her that one yourself,” his father said. “I’m not crazy.”

  “I know. You’re the only one of us who isn’t. Don’t drink too much.”

  “You too, son.”

  16

  Trace’s Log:

  Tape recording Number Three, Devlin Tracy in the matter of Plesser, Carey, and other assorted pains in the ass and aggravations in my life.

  Two more tapes in the Master File, and mightily though I tried, there are going to be more. But I want to get all this stuff out of the way early because I am having dinner tonight with a beautiful woman and I don’t want my overdeveloped sense of duty and responsibility to keep intruding and telling me I have tapes to make.

  I’ve got problems here. The big problem is that everything seems like a nothing, and then I’ve got that poor old man telling me that somebody’s trying to kill him. Delirium? The babbling of somebody junked up with drugs? I don’t know. I don’t think so.

  So there I am at Meadow Vista and we’ve got Dr. Matteson, who sits in his office surrounded by pictures of whales and seals and Jane Fonda and listens to Gilbert and Sullivan, for Christ’s sakes. He thinks that letter openers are out to get him. Maybe mild paranoia. I wouldn’t say he’s worried by the Plesser lawsuit, but he’s annoyed by it. And Plesser, he said, didn’t want to leave the sanatorium. Having been in that sauerkraut factory of a house, I can buy that.

  So Plesser asked to stay even when Matteson could have let him go. Maybe oxygen therapy works for senility and some brain damage. I don’t know. It could be Matteson’s a quack, but his idea seems logical. If you can cut off oxygen to the brain, it dies; so maybe if you saturate it with oxygen, it lives better. I know it helps with hangovers. When I used to tourist it in Las Vegas, sometimes I’d go to those hotels with the big spas and take fifteen minutes of oxygen to clear the head. Maybe.

  Even if he does look like a hippie that never got off the shelf, I like Matteson. And I believe him when he says he didn’t know anything about Plesser changing his insurance policy over. Could a man who drives letter openers into his desk because they prick his fingers, I ask you, could that man lie?

  Plesser just had a heart attack and died. Anybody can have a heart attack anytime, that’s what Matteson said. Well, thank you, Doctor. What about us who can’t brush our tongues? If you can’t do anything about hearts, if it’s always going to be anything can just happen, then why not concentrate on tongues? Find a medical breakthrough so I can scrub three packs of tar off my tongue every morning. And another thing. I can’t put Q-tips in my ear without gagging. Has anybody thought about doing something about this? I’ll tell you, world, medicine isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

  Matteson gets a point for telling Plesser’s lawyer, that Yule, to go to hell. And I guess there isn’t any doubt that the Plesser tribe wrote Matteson that threatening letter. God punishes those who steal our insurance money or whatever it said. They wrote it. At least that’s my humble opinion and this is my tape recorder, so you’re stuck with it.

  Anyway, I’d feel better about Matteson if he had different posters on the walls. He’s got pictures for Save the Seals. Come on, cut me a break. They started that lunacy in California, where else? So they save the damn seals and the water is six feet deep with seals. Then what happens? Wherever you’ve got seals, you’re going to have sharks. Suddenly, the waters are flooded with sharks. They’re eating seals and they’re eating people too. So we save a couple of goddamn seals and people are getting killed. I hate environmentalists.

  That’s another sign I’m going to make for my backwards billboards on cars. Save the people first.

  Starting with me.

  Anyway, that’s what I think about Dr. Matteson, and what I think about his assistant, Dr. Barbara Darling, is I don’t know. I don’t care if what she’s doing is all the latest rage in working with old people, I think she takes just too much pleasure in yelling at them. But hand it to her, she shot me down neatly when I blew off my big mouth, and I deserved it. Anyway, she confirmed what Matteson said; she just witnessed Plesser’s signature and she didn’t even see what she was signing. Somehow if Plesser was as senile as everybody was making him out to be, he was thinking pretty well about how to be secret and change his insurance. And what’d he say? Make two people happy? She tells me that Matteson runs that sanatorium out of love for the elderly. Well, maybe. Maybe him. I don’t know about her.

  I don’t want to talk about Nurse Simons. If I ever meet her in a bar, she’ll have to buy her own vinegar and water. “Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?” God, I hate people who talk like that. I don’t like Nurse. But she gave me the same story as Darling. What an entry. Darling and Nurse. They sound like Hollywood’s last two bad summer comedies.

  So, so far, nothing, right? But then there’s Mitchell Carey. I still get chilled thinking about this big old buck of a man, lying there like a helpless child, and then seeing the torture in those eyes. What did he mean? “Hundred, two hundred, dying, dying, hundred hundred, no more, take it away, more dying, dying, dying.”

  And then he said, “They’re killing me. Help me. Help me.”

  I want to, Mr. Carey. I just don’t know how. I don’t know what and I don’t know who and I don’t know how to do it, and that’s why I’m afraid I’m going to be around here awhile, until I find out just what’s going on.

  Groucho, if I’m dead and you’re listening to this, you’ll be happy to know I almost landed in Three East. That’s the nut factory at Meadow Vista. If I do wind up there, tell Chico that I’m all right and staying out of trouble, ’cause they put saltpeter in the water. Never mind, don’t tell Chico anything. She doesn’t deserve explanations. Besides, I’ll be safe. I never drink water.

  And then there’s the Carey family. I learned a lot there. How that Bob Swenson always liked to travel. Aaah, that’s a crappy thing to say. The poor old lady isn’t all there anymore. Mitchell Carey had a stroke when he found out that Buffy got killed. I think Amanda Carey suffered worse and nobody knows it. I was thinking about that misquote of mine. “Who is Hecuba that all the swains adore her?” and she reminded me it was Sylvia, not Hecuba. So what was I thinking about? I remembered. It was a line about Hecuba from Homer. “An old gray woman that has no home.” That’s what Amanda Carey reminds me of.

  What the hell’s a crystal ball and incense doing in their house? I’ll have to ask Melinda, call her Muffy, an ersatz, no-money Muffy, and isn’t that just too cute for words. That one I can do without, and not just because she’s a blonde. But she’s the one getting Mrs. Carey worked up about Meadow Vista. She thinks I’ve done my job by coming here and being seen at the sanatorium. Now they won’t try anything. That’s just a little too smart by half.

  Newspapers can cause a lot of trouble. Muffy saw that story about the Plesser family and it got her thinking. I don’t think anybody under twenty-five should be allowed to think.

  Dammit, I’d like to know why Mr. Carey has
been going downhill since he got to Meadow Vista. “They’re killing me. Help me.” Why’d he have to say that to me? I could be out of this place.

  I’ve got another piece of tape with Jeannie Callahan, but I’m having dinner with her tonight so I’ll save it and do it later, in case anything else comes up. Chico, you listening? I hope mightily that something else does come up.

  And I hope this is all done fast. My mother knows now where I am. Damn Groucho’s eyes for squealing.

  Expenses. A hundred dollars for routine. Fifty more for expensive stuff that came up but I lost the receipts. Total, a hundred and fifty.

  17

  Jeannie Callahan lived on the top floor of a low apartment building on the outskirts of Harmon Hills. There was parking alongside the building, and when Trace rang her doorbell, she answered right away and told him to come up.

  Her apartment was at the end of the corridor, her door was open, and Trace found her in the kitchen, holding a brandy snifter and looking into the refrigerator.

  “Nice to see you again,” she said. “Where’s the wine?”

  “I forgot the wine.”

  “Good. I forgot to cook. Make yourself a drink and go sit at the table. I hope you like roast beef. I bought some at the delicatessen.”

  “I love roast beef.”

  “Rye bread all right?”

  “With seeds?”

  “Of course with seeds. Without seeds, is it rye bread?”

  “Good.” Trace went inside with his vodka and set the drink on the glass-topped dining table on which two candles of unequal size were burning, then he went to the stereo and found two albums of Charlie Parker with Strings and put them on the turntable.

  When he sat at the table, she called, “What do you like on your roast beef? Mayonnaise?”

  “God, no. That’s awful. Catsup.”

  “Nobody uses catsup on roast beef.”

  “Everybody does who knows anything about roast beef,” Trace said.

  She came into the room a few minutes later with a platter of roast-beef half-sandwiches that she set on the table. The rays of the setting sun cut through the window and made her hair glow as if aflame.

  She was just beautiful, Trace thought, almost too beautiful.

  A few moments later, she was back with another tray containing cole slaw, catsup, mayonnaise, and her drink. She sat down and watched him put catsup on his sandwich.

  “That’s really disgusting,” she said.

  “Actually it’s very logical. Roast beef is red, right? So you put red stuff on it. If you had something white, like chicken or turkey or tuna, you put white stuff on it: mayonnaise. Brown stuff like bologna or hot dogs or kielbasa slices, that takes brown stuff: mustard. Once you learn it, it makes life very simple.”

  She thought about that for a moment and was about to say something when he added, “Of course, like any other good rule, it has a few exceptions. Liverwurst, for instance. That’s brown and should take brown stuff, but it takes mayonnaise.”

  “How do you deal with the exceptions?” she asked him over the top of her brandy glass.

  “By not eating liverwurst. It’s really a good system. It’s only got one design flaw.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Cheese. It doesn’t work for cheese. You would think that cheeses take mayonnaise, but they don’t. They all take mustard.”

  “If you use light-yellow salad mustard instead of the spicy brown, you can make it work,” she said.

  “God, I love lawyers’ minds,” Trace said. “I wouldn’t have thought of that in a thousand years. Of course. Light-yellow mustard on light-yellow stuff. Wonderful. I’ll drink to that.” He leaned across the table and they clinked glasses.

  They hardly put a dent in the sandwiches, but they drank a lot, and later they sat on the sofa and looked out the window where the last faint pink fingers of the vanished sun clawed up at the sky. It reminded Trace of a drowning, of someone’s hand reaching convulsively for something, anything, to hold on to, before it settled slowly beneath the surface of the water.

  Jeannie refilled her drink and Trace said, “You’re drinking too much.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the curse of the race, you know,” she said. “God created alcohol to stop the Irish from conquering the world.”

  “My Irish father used to tell me that,” Trace said.

  “Is he an alcoholic?”

  “He’s in retirement, kind of. Once in a while, a sip of beer or a glass of wine. Or occasionally, a one-night toot. Most of the time, nothing.”

  “My father was an alcoholic too,” she said. “He was a neat one, though. He’d have his martinis for lunch and he’d sit around the house drinking his cocktails before dinner and his wine with dinner and his brandy after dinner, and then he’d have just a couple of pops during the evening and maybe a schnapps before bedtime and he pulled it off for years. Your father like that?”

  “No,” Trace said. “He was more of a rip-roaring, bingeing, empty-out-a-saloon drunk. He was a cop. He told me once he answered a call, it was some rape thing, but he was traveling with half a bag on and he pegged a shot at the rapist, but he missed and the guy got away. He couldn’t deal with that so he stopped drinking on the job, and then when he retired, he just kind of drifted into stopping drinking off the job. I think he was trying to set a good example for me, but it was too late. Doesn’t drinking bother your law practice?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t really have a problem. I drink when I want to. Like this afternoon and tonight, I just really felt like it.”

  “And tomorrow?” Trace said.

  “If I feel like it,” she said. She put her feet up on the cocktail table, then put them down, squirmed out of her shoes, and put her feet back up. “Your father named you after relatives?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a nice name. Devlin Tracy. If it was the other way around, you’d sound like a quarterback. Tracy Devlin. But Devlin Tracy’s got a nice ring to it. Like a prime minister. ‘Prime Minister Devlin Tracy announced today…’ Names are important.”

  “They sure are,” Trace said. “Mozart.”

  “What about Mozart?” she asked.

  “Well, his middle name was Amadeus. That’s Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It’s Latin, you know.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m not an idiot. It means God’s love. So what?”

  “Suppose his middle name was German. In German, God’s love would be Gottlieb. Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart. You think that rings? You think anybody’s going to do a Broadway show named Gottlieb? I tell you, there’s a lot to this name business.”

  She mumbled agreement and said, “You married?”

  “I used to be.”

  “Any steady interest?”

  “I live in Las Vegas with a hooker,” Trace said.

  “That must be fun.”

  “It used to be. I don’t know anymore.”

  “I was almost married once,” she said. “I was just out of law school and I was clerking with this firm in New York and I was going out with one of the very junior partners. Then one night I went to have dinner with his parents. Very Upper East Side. So after dinner, the father asked around for brandy. I said yes and had a brandy with my coffee and a cigarette, and his mother looked down her goddamn East Side nose at me and said, ‘I always hoped Frank would find a woman who didn’t smoke or drink.’”

  “What’d you do?” Trace asked.

  “I looked down my patrician New Jersey nose at her and said that actually I had always hoped to marry an orphan. Well, Frank, the asshole, he jumps to her defense and I poured my brandy on his permanent-waved hair and left. Then I went to clerk for my father.”

  “Good for you.”

  “You staying around town long?” she said.

  Trace reached down and through his shirt turned on his tape recorder. “Looks like I’m going to be around for a couple more days.”

  “More work?” s
he asked.

  “I was talking to my boss tonight, the one I told you is the friend of the Careys, and he wanted me to stay around a little longer, just to make sure that Mr. Carey’s all right.”

  “He’s all right,” she said.

  “He’s not getting better at Meadow Vista. In fact, he’s getting worse.”

  “Not because of anything that’s happening at the sanatorium,” she said. “He’s old, he had a stroke. Sometimes they recover and sometimes they don’t.”

  “You’re sure it’s like that? No maniacs at the funny farm pulling the plug on patients?”

  “None.”

  “No lady lawyers who’ve been looting company funds for years and are afraid they’re going to be found out?”

  “Not me,” she said. “I’m too dopey to steal.”

  “No business partners who want to bump him off because he knows too much?”

  It seemed to Trace that she hesitated one beat too long before answering “No.”

  “Who’s Mr. Carey’s partner?”

  “Wilber Winfield. Nice old guy. They’ve been together since Hector was a pup.”

  “And they don’t get along,” Trace said.

  She sipped at her drink, then got up and walked to the kitchen to refill it. Trace noticed that she was walking unsteadily. She kept talking from the kitchen.

  “They’ve been fighting every day for forty years,” she said loudly. “They argue about everything. They love each other.”

  “You can love and still kill,” Trace said.

  “Hey,” she said, sticking her head around the corner of the kitchen wall. “What is all this kill stuff? Mr. Carey’s sick. He had a stroke. What kill? You’re not buying that Plesser bullshit, are you?”

  “No. Sorry. I guess I’ve just got a morbid turn of mind.”

  “A drink’ll cure that,” she said, and came back into the living room and snatched his glass up to refill it.

  When she was back in the kitchen, Trace called out, “What’s the real reason you don’t like that girl living with the Careys?”