When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (14 page)

“I knew that’s what she was drinking,” Trace said.

“How’d you know? I thought I was pretty discreet,” Cheryl said.

“You were. But she said, ‘Cheryl, make me another orange juice.’ No one says ‘make’ an orange juice. You make a screwdriver; you pour an orange juice.”

“You’re smarter than you look,” Cheryl said. “I thought, well, the way you chatter, I thought you were sort of a halfwit.”

“It’s always good when people think you’re stupid,” Trace said. “It makes them careless. Like you’re deaf so they don’t have to whisper to keep their secrets.”

“Not bad,” she said. “I’ll remember that. There was one more thing I wanted to tell you about.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It was the night Tony got killed. It was the regular maid’s night off and I was filling in for her. Mrs. Armitage, Martha, was sitting in the television room chugging a glass of straight vodka. She was whacked out of her gourd. The phone rang in the television room and she didn’t even get up to answer it. So I did and it was Armitage. He asked me how his wife was, but I didn’t want to get her into trouble, she looked like a zombie, so I said she seemed to be all right. Then he tells me, ‘Listen, Cheryl, I want you to make sure that the apartment doors are double-locked.’ There are two entrances, you know. And he said, ‘Don’t open the door for anybody but me and Miss Walker.’ That’s Anna, the sister-in-law. I said okay, and he said, ‘And make sure that Mrs. Armitage doesn’t go out.’”

“What’d you do?”

“Well, he told me to do it right away, and in the meantime, let him talk to Martha. So I gave her the phone and I went and locked the doors. When I went back inside, she was just sitting in the chair, with this wild look on her face. She had dropped the phone on the floor. I picked it up but Armitage wasn’t on the line anymore.”

“What happened then?”

“Martha wanted to take a nap. She was really drunk now. I told her I’d help her into bed, but she wouldn’t move. It was like she didn’t know I was there. She just kept talking about napping, but she wouldn’t move. Finally, I just let her sit there by herself and I went outside. Anna came over about twenty minutes later and then she went in and was with her sister.”

“Did she say anything to you?”

The young woman shook her head. “A cold woman, that one. But she came out into the kitchen later and asked me to make tea for everybody. She put her purse down on the table when she told me and I saw she had a gun in it.”

“What time was all this?”

“It was before ten o’clock,” Cheryl said. “Because I made the tea, and after I did, Anna told me that she would take care of everything and I could go. And I did, and I was home before ten o’clock ’cause I saw
Falcon Crest
on television. Oh. Another thing. When I left, that goon who works for Armitage, he was in the hallway outside the apartment.”

“Which one?”

“Frankie? Is that his name? And the other ugly one, his brother, was sitting in a chair down in the lobby. They didn’t say anything to me, though.”

“What do you think it all meant?” Trace asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe it meant that there was something wrong, I guess, but I don’t know what. It was just that the next morning they found Tony’s body.”

“Who’d you tell this to?” Trace asked.

She shrugged. “Who’s to tell? And what’s to tell? That the lady I work for is a drunk, the man I work for is a nut? Nothing to tell.”

She finished the last sip of her coffee and glanced at her watch.

“So now you’re leaving,” Trace said. “Isn’t it kind of in a hurry?”

“No. I’ve really been thinking about it for a long time. You can keep the Big Apple. Give me Cleveland. Unless, of course, I got a better offer. You a millionaire, looking for a young wife with a great phony British accent?”

“Afraid not. My mother wouldn’t allow it.”

“I guess not. I talked to your mother on the phone before. She sounds wonderfully young.”

“She is.”

“I think it’s great that you two still sleep in the same bedroom.”

“I never told you I was a nice person,” Trace said.

“No, that’s right. You didn’t.”

Chico had already left the room when Trace returned to lay in a new supply of recording tapes. She had left him no note so he left her one that said:

“You didn’t leave me a note, but that’s all right, I hardly noticed. I will be out on this case today. Working. I’ll call before dinnertime and maybe we can have dinner together if you can fit me into your busy New York schedule of fun in the sun.”

The front desk had no messages and he called Sarge at his home and office, but got no answer.

He ransomed his rental car from the parking garage near the hotel and reflected that parking the car each day in Manhattan cost him almost as much as it cost to rent the car itself from Hertz. Somehow O. J. Simpson and Arnold Palmer had forgotten to mention that. As he was driving downtown, he thought that that might be his million-dollar breakthrough. Suppose he could sell some car-rental company the idea of providing free parking with each car they rented. Of course, it wouldn’t work in New York because the garages were always full and each of them seemed to set its own price, all of them confiscatory. But maybe they could make a deal in a city that nobody visited. It would work in Tulsa. Nobody ever visited Tulsa. Trace had spent a lifetime there one day. He was overwhelmed by the brilliance of his scheme: renting a car when you went to a lousy city and having parking included in your rental fees. Garages in Tulsa were always empty. They’d jump at the chance.

He knew right off that it was one of his better ideas, ranking right up there with the C.B. Bible of the Air, and the reversible signs for the front of everyone’s car so that a driver could move people off the road from in front of him. The one he had liked best was OUT OF CONTROL, printed backward so that drivers up front could see it in their rearview mirrors. He had tried to convince Walter Marks to invest ten thousand dollars in the plan, but Marks—a mean little man of no courage and small vision—had insultingly declined.

Not that Trace had needed Marks’s ten thousand. He had money of his own, quite a few thousand saved from his gambling days, and he had a good retainer from Garrison Fidelity insurance and somehow he managed to save them a lot of money on cases he investigated and he got a percentage of that. He could have financed the plan himself, but when he was in accounting and business school at the Jesuit college in New Jersey, he had learned the first and most important rule of business: never invest your own money. Get other people to put up the cash. Keep control, but don’t lose a nickel of your own.

He had just not had much success in getting people to invest in his plans. He thought that it might have had something to do with the fact that he drank like a fish, smoked like a chimney, and according to Chico, dressed like a creature who had found his wardrobe in a Volunteers of America collection basket. Maybe that would all change now that he was becoming sober and unsmoky. All at Chico’s behest. Maybe he would let her pick out some new clothes for him so he looked neater. And then he would repay her for all her kindness: he would borrow money from her for his next great idea.

He had already rejected the Tulsa car-rental-cum-parking scheme. To set it up, he’d probably have to go to Tulsa and he had already been to Tulsa once in his life.

But there were plenty of ideas where that came from. Plenty for Chico to invest in. He expected a little resistance. Chico was, as were many beautiful women, obsessed with the future and its perils. She was only twenty-six years old, but she was sure that cellulite, wrinkles, and varicose veins were only moments away and she wanted to have something laid by for that day when her beauty would no longer get her over on the world.

Trace, for his part, figured that day would not come for another quarter-century, if then. Chico had that luminous, always youthful Oriental skin, a shining Eurasian face, and a body that was kept young and vibrant by constant exercise.

But he would work on her. If she would put some of her money—and he knew she had a lot of it—into one of his good plans, why, the two of them could be rollickingly wealthy in just a matter of months. A year at the outside.

He turned onto West Twenty-sixth Street and parked at a fire hydrant outside his father’s office. Sarge wasn’t in the office, nor at the restaurant on the ground floor, and in the conviction that his father was more likely to visit the bar than his office, Trace left a note there for his father, telling him what he had heard about Dewey Lupus and asking Sarge to check out anything he could learn about the man, and meet Trace at six P.M. at the restaurant.

Then he drove up to Fairport. He had trouble restraining his laughter when he drove through the Bronx and saw the latest in lunatic New York City programs. Somebody had gotten the bright idea that one way to dress up New York was to take the crumbling old buildings of the Bronx and put decals on them. The decals were supposed to depict scenes of solid, middle-class life. They were slapped on the buildings, over gaping glassless windows that had long been broken by vandals, and were supposed to make it look as if there were plants in the window, people in the abandoned apartments, and life going on as usual. Typical for New York, he thought. Solve the slum problem by sticking decals on it. What would you expect from a city whose police department gave classes for the elderly in how to be mugged and survive?

The small home where Tony Armitage had lived with LaPeter and Jennie Teller seemed to serve as a background sound module for the street it was on. The street could have come from any college town. It was packed with head shops and stereo repair parlors, designer boutiques, and karate studios. And thumping over it was the musical racket coming from the small house.

This time the front door was locked and Trace banged on it with both fists and one foot for a full two minutes, before he heard the lock being turned.

“Oh, it’s you, what’s your name?” LaPeter said, looking like a bamboo pole with hair.

“Tracy. Who were you expecting?”

“That girl said she’s moving her stuff back in, she is. I figured it was her.”

“So she’s not here now?”

“Maybe working,” LaPeter said.

“Thanks,” Trace said. He turned to leave, then stopped. “Why do you have that music on so loud all the time?”

“It’s my work,” LaPeter said. “I fix stereos for people or give their sound systems more power, I give them. Can’t do it without turning up the volume.”

“Thank you. I’ve misjudged you.”

“How’s that?”

“I thought you were just crazy and deaf.”

LaPeter seemed to take umbrage at that. He said, “
I’m
not the one who does W. C. Fields impersonations.”

“I can attest to that,” Trace said, waving his hands over his head, pulling his head down into the collar of his shirt, and rolling his eyes wildly.

“I love it,” LaPeter said. “I love it.”

Trace drove to the front entrance of the college campus and found the small green garden-apartment building that Cheryl said she had once visited with Tony Armitage. He stopped his car, glanced at the doorbells, and found one that listed the name of Teller. He rang the bell a long time but got no answer, then drove to the diner where the black woman worked.

He stopped in the parking lot, left his motor running, and walked to the restaurant’s door. He saw Jennie Teller working behind the counter, which was packed with diners, so he went back to his car and returned to the green apartment building.

Like most apartment buildings occupied mostly by college students, the security was negligible. The front door was unlocked, and while he passed two people walking up the stairs, neither of them asked him what he was doing there.

If Jennie Teller had a deadbolt lock on her door, she hadn’t used it that day. It only took him a few seconds to slip open her front door, step inside the apartment, and close the door behind him.

He waited inside the door for a few moments, listening for sounds, just in case the woman had a roommate, but the apartment was silent.

He was in a bright living room whose furnishings were bland and spare. Some dance posters and two African masks hung from the walls. The furniture was varnished rattan, with nubby tweed cushions, and Trace decided that the apartments came already furnished. Except for the wall hangings, nothing in the apartment looked as if Jennie Teller would have bought it, and if Tony Armitage had rented the apartment as a little love nest, the chances are he would have chosen a furnished apartment. To the right, he found a small kitchen and, on the left, Jennie’s bedroom. The closets showed him that she lived there alone. Only woman’s clothes were hanging up.

As he often did when he committed a burglary, he started to wonder exactly why he was there, exactly what he hoped to find, and was annoyed when he could not answer those questions to his own satisfaction.

He went to the tall Formica dresser in the room. There was a box of Sweet’n Low envelopes on top of it, which struck him as passing odd. He rooted around in the dresser drawers for a while, feeling uncomfortably perverted as he continued to find nothing but ladies’ undergarments. Stuck in the back of a bottom drawer, under a pile of woman’s T-shirts, he found a bankbook.

The account was in the name of Jennie Teller and her balance was $4,809.27. All of it had been deposited in the three months before Tony Armitage’s death. There had been no deposits in the last thirty days.

He repeated the number aloud so that his tape recorder would pick it up, then put the bankbook back.

He didn’t know what else to look for but idly opened the box of Sweet’n Low packs. He counted twenty of the small packs inside the box, but all of them were empty. The packs had been neatly slit across the top, probably with a razor blade, and their contents of artificial sweetener poured out.

He reclosed the box and left the apartment. Tony Armitage had lived there with the woman, but no traces of his existence were left.

“Back again, huh?”

“Came to talk to you some more.”

“What’s your name again?”

“Call me Trace.”

“That’s right. Tracy. What’d you want to talk to me about, Mr. Tracy?”

“Same thing. Tony’s death.”

“Same answer. I don’t know anything about it,” Jennie Teller said.

“When’s your break?” Trace asked.

She glanced at her watch. “Fifteen minutes. I don’t want to spend it with you.”

“I was going to buy you lunch,” he said.

“Lunch comes with the job.”

“Then you buy me lunch. I’ll make it worth your while.”

“How’s that? You going to make me rich?”

“Even better than that,” Trace said.

“What’s better than rich?”

“Alive.”

They sat at a metal table in a far corner of the diner’s big kitchen. Jennie Teller had a long-shoreman’s breakfast in front of her, even though it was past noon. Trace had coffee.

“So how you going to keep me alive?”

“I’ll get to it,” Trace said. “I hear you’re moving back into the old house.”

“That’s right.”

“Where you moving from?”

“Ho, ho. The detective is a shrewd one. Trapped me right away, tripped me right up.”

“Can the Aunt Jemima shit,” Trace said. “You don’t do it all that well and I’ve seen it before.”

“Giving the audience what they want to hear.”

“What I want to hear is where you’re moving from?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“No reason, I guess, so I’ll tell you. You’re moving from the apartment that Tony Armitage rented for you.”

“Who told you that?”

“It didn’t take a lot of work. You haven’t been staying at the house with Rufus Redneck. Tony’s old man leaned into him to break it off with you, and then right after that, you moved out of the house. You had one pair of jeans in your closet there and an old pair of boots. That sounds like a lady who’s living somewhere else.”

“Guilty. Any law against that?” she asked.

“No. And now, I figure that with Tony dead, you can’t make the rent, so you’re moving back with Rufus.”

“I’m listening,” she said.

“Good. Now, I’m not telling Nick Armitage about this. He’s no friend of mine and I don’t care if you and Tony rented the top floor of the World Trade Center and played body-slide there sixteen hours a day. No skin off my nose.”

“You’re just being my friend,” she said.

“You’re being sarcastic, but that’s closer to the truth than you know,” he said. “So now I’m going to tell you some more things and you’re going to chime in at the correct intervals with pieces of knowledge that I should have and that will enrich and beautify my life.”

“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” she said.

“You will.”

“You are one pushy man.”

“Jennie, I don’t have time to be sweet and charming, so I think we ought to go right to the main point.”

“Go to it,” she said.

“Tony was selling drugs on campus,” Trace said.

The patronizing look in her eyes vanished. An overreaction, Trace thought.

“He was getting them from New York and he was making a few bucks selling them around here. How’m I doing so far?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” she said. She looked down at her iced tea and stirred it, staring as if there were something in the ice cubes that demanded her immediate attention.

“Could I have more coffee?” Trace asked.

She took his cup to a large urn in the center of the room and refilled it. When she put it in front of him, she automatically pushed a sugar bowl in front of him.

“I’d rather have Sweet’n Low,” he said.

“It’s with the sugar.”

“One of those from your pocket,” he said.

Her face turned ashen.

“We both know who was helping Tony sell drugs, don’t we?” Trace said.

She pushed her ice tea away angrily. “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this nonsense.”

“No, you don’t. I’m sure Nick Armitage would like to hear it. Maybe it’d give him a lead to who killed his kid. I think Nick might like to talk to you about it.” She wavered and he snapped, “Sit down, girl.”

“You’re a mean bastard,” she said, but she sat.