When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (15 page)

“You got it. Anyway, the diner is a good place to sell drugs from. Nothing big. Students wander in and out all day long. A few bucks here, a few bucks there. Like that, right? Just slip them their pack of Sweet’n Low.”

She looked at him and he let the silence hang heavy over the table until it became almost palpable and painful, and then she glumly nodded.

“So you were making a couple of bucks and so was Tony, and it was nice and enough to pay for the apartment where you and Tony shacked up after the old man told him to drop you. And now the nose candy’s gone because Tony was the supplier and the rent money’s gone and you’re moving back in with LaPeter.” She looked woebegone and he reached across the table and touched her hand. “Jennie, I don’t give a damn. It’s no skin off my nose, nothing that I care about.”

“I’m glad,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “If you cared about it, you might really have gotten nosy and dug around.” She essayed a small smile and he patted her wrist and smiled back.

“When Nick told him to drop you, Tony told people he was going to get even with his father.”

“So?”

“Was it just the drugs or did he have something else planned?”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Dammit, Jennie, don’t keep answering questions with questions. Like anything.”

“I don’t know. Honest, I don’t know.”

“He wasn’t planning to expand his drug dealing?”

“He never mentioned it.”

“I thought that might be a reason for getting him killed,” Trace said.

“No. Truth. He never mentioned it. He was just moving a little stuff. You’re right. It paid the rent. It was like selling to just friends. There was no real drug dealing, nothing that would get him chilled.”

“Were you really out of town that weekend?”

“I was gone the whole weekend.”

“Could it be checked?” Trace asked.

“I’ve got a hotel receipt from Atlantic City. I was there with half a dozen people. You want their names?” She started to sound confident again.

“No. I believe you. Something happened the night before Tony got killed.”

“Well, I was away. I wouldn’t know,” she said. She stopped and Trace waited. “Like what happened?” she said.

“Something that upset his family. You don’t know what that was?”

“No. Did the family say what?”

“They’re not talking to me a lot,” Trace said. “Tell me, was Tony a big romance in your life?”

She hesitated and he said, “The truth.”

“All right. The truth. He was a guy that I lived with in the house with that crazy redneck and his stereo systems. Tony had money, all the time, and I never had any. So we played house. I got another year of school to go here, and then two more years of graduate school at least. I don’t have two nickels to rub together. And Tony did.”

“That why you got into the drugs with him?”

“Had to make some money someway.”

“You could keep working here,” Trace said.

“At minimum wage?” she said. “Anyway, working sucks.”

“Sucking works,” Trace said.

“I don’t do that kind of work,” she said.

“Peddling drugs isn’t a lot different,” he said. “And it’s dangerous. Too many people know. Too many records. You put money in the bank and someone wonders how a counter girl in a diner can get a lot of money together. You talk to the wrong people or the wrong people talk about you.”

“I’m done with it,” she said. “The supply’s all gone and I’m not interested anymore.”

“I hope you’re in time,” Trace said.

“What does that mean?”

“That black guy who was in here the other day? The one who wanted to throw me out?”

“Yeah. Barker’s his name.”

“I saw him the next night going into Nick Armitage’s office in New York.”

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Afraid so. Does he come around much?” Trace asked.

“Only a couple of times,” she said. “Not in a while.”

“Were you romancing him?”

“No. He wanted to, but I wouldn’t,” she said quickly, searching Trace’s face, as if looking there for reassurance.

“Did he know what you were doing here? With the little sideline business?”

“No. I never told him. We were never that close.”

Trace shrugged. “Then you’re probably all right. Maybe the best he could tell Nick was that you’re clean.”

“I hope so.”

“If I find out different, I’ll let you know,” Trace said.

Trace and Chico were waiting for Sarge at the restaurant below his office. Chico had spent the day shopping.

“I don’t understand how somebody can spend the day shopping,” Trace said.

“You could if you put your mind to it,” she said.

“What do you do when you shop?” he asked.

“That is well up, even on your elevated list of dumb questions. What do you do when you eat?”

“Eat is usually a transitive verb,” Trace said. “Transitive verbs are specific. Shop is an intransitive verb. By definition, they are vague and dangerous. Tell me what you do when you shop.”

“You shop,” she said.

“What is it that
you
need that you shop for?”

“You might not need anything,” she said.

“You can spend a day walking around, looking at things that you don’t need or want and usually can’t afford?” he asked.

“That sounds about right.”

“That’s idiotic,” Trace said. “My mother may not have much to recommend her…” he began.

“Hear, hear,” Chico said.

“But she knows how to do one thing.”

“If you’re going to tell me that that woman knows how to shop, I’m going to pour Roquefort dressing in your hair.”

“That woman really knows how to shop.”

“Where’s the Roquefort dressing?” Chico asked.

“She goes to Shoppers’ City and she finds whatever is cheap and she buys it.”

“Suppose she doesn’t need it,” Chico said.

“She buys it anyway. You never know when you might need it.”

“Suppose, to interject some humor into this insipid conversation,” Chico said, “suppose she found something that was too ugly, even for her so-called taste, something she really didn’t like. What would she do then?”

“If the price were right, she would buy it and give it to somebody as a gift. If it was cheap enough, she’d buy two and give them both away so people could marvel at her generosity. Now, that’s shopping,” Trace said.

Chico said, “If I were back in the womb and had a choice of being an Irish Jew like you or a Japanese Italian like me, I think I’d stay the way I am.”

“I don’t care what you pick as long as you pick August again to be born in,” Trace said.

“Why?”

“Because I think it’s wonderful that your birth-stones are peridot and sardonyx. Imagine if you were born in April and your birthstone was a diamond. You’d never get a birthday gift. But, hell, I can buy a basket of peridots and sardonyxes for seventeen dollars.”

“I don’t get diamonds and I don’t get peridots either,” Chico said.

“The hell you say,” Trace said.

“The truth I say.”

“Didn’t I give you them last year? Oh, no. I’ll tell you why. I remember going into Tiffany’s on one of my trips East and asking them for the biggest peridot they had in the place.”

“What happened?” Chico asked.

“You know Tiffany’s. Always trying for the fast buck. They only had second-rate peridots and they tried to stick me with a sardonyx instead. I wasn’t going for that.”

“So you wound up getting me nothing for my birthday.”

“That’s hard for me to believe,” he said.

“It’s true.”

“I gave you nothing? Not even a sweat shirt?”

“The sweat shirt was the year before last. It was the one with Uncle Sam on it. It said, ‘Join the Army. Travel to faraway lands. Meet interesting, exotic people. And kill them.’”

“I remember that. Nothing last year, you say?”

“No. You gave me a gummed address label for my belly.”

“I don’t remember that at all,” Trace said. “Who was I trying to send you to?”

“It didn’t have an address on it. It said, ‘Caution. Danger. Keep Out. This area patrolled and protected by Devlin Tracy’s attack tongue.’”

“You never wore it either,” Trace said.

“I threw it out.”

“You dummy, what did you expect?”

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“You probably didn’t realize that there was a thousand-dollar bill stuck on the back of that gummed label. And you threw it out. What a pity.”

“That thousand-dollar bill? Was that yours? Was that from you?” she asked. She looked very cheerful.

“Why?”

“I found it loose one day in my dresser drawer. I didn’t know how it got there.”

“Shouldn’t you have offered me half?” he asked. “We share the apartment.”

“Ho. Ho. Ho,” she said. “So where’s Sarge? He’s late.”

“It didn’t stop you from ordering dinner.”

“A girl’s got to eat, doesn’t she?” Chico said without shame.

“I don’t know where he is,” Trace said. “I left him a note to meet us here and he picked up the note.”

“Has he been any help to you so far?”

“Well, he hasn’t hurt, and as long as he’s working, maybe he can help. I’ll take help from anybody on this case.”

“That bad, huh?”

“There’s nothing here. I’ve got the kid as a low-level drug dealer who didn’t like his father much. I’ve got the father washing drug money through a tavern he owns downtown. I’ve got the mother a drunk and the father banging his sister-in-law. I’ve got a missing manager from the downtown saloon. What I don’t have is a murder suspect. You want to hear my misery?”

“Go ahead. Just don’t expect a lot of responses. I want to eat.”

“Can I drink?”

“Stick with the wine. You’re doing well.”

Trace grumbled some, then slowly and carefully told Chico about his breakfast meeting with the Armitage maid, his burglary of Jennie Teller’s apartment, and then his interview with her in the diner kitchen.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Let me listen to some of it,” she mumbled through a mouth full of bread.

When he was sure no one was looking, he unbuttoned his shirt, untaped the recorder, and put it on the table. With a small personal earphone from his pocket, he let Chico listen to the tapes of the interviews.

She went “ummm” a lot before she turned off the recorder.

“Now what do you think?”

“I think you didn’t sleep with either of these women,” she said.

“Of course I didn’t. I tried to tell you that last night too, but you wouldn’t listen. If it’s not eating, it’s sleeping. You’re really just a creature of your instincts,” he said.

“I’m impressed. I don’t know what to think. Except for these, I haven’t heard any of your tapes and you haven’t filled me in a lot. Martha Armitage? She’s the one Sarge had the affair with?”

“So
you
say,” Trace said.

“Why would that girl get fired for being seen with you?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Armitage doesn’t like me. And the only reason he’s got not to like me is that I want to find out who killed his kid. The maid talks to me and gets fired.”

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?”

“I don’t need somebody else who doesn’t understand,” Trace said. “I don’t understand enough for all of us.”

Chico ignored him and was talking as much to herself as to him. “I don’t fathom why the kid was wearing that rubber mask when he got killed. That’s got to mean something, Trace. And I don’t know what that phone call was from Nick Armitage the night before the killing. The chickie with the phony British accent sounded like a nice kid.”

It was a mark of her maturity, Trace thought, that she would characterize as “a kid” a woman only a year younger than herself.

“She was,” Trace said.

“And Jennie’s a liar, of course.” She looked at him mockingly. “Heh, heh. ‘Working sucks. Sucking works.’ Aren’t you cute?”

“You noticed she’s a liar,” he said.

“She oozes lying,” Chico said.

“I know. She’s too quick with the answers, just a little too pat. I wouldn’t trust her at all.”

“A lot of questions, Trace, and no answers. Maybe you ought to work a different way.”

“I don’t have any deep emotional commitment to the old way ’cause it hasn’t done me a freaking bit of good so far,” Trace said.

“Forget the people involved,” she said. “Concentrate on the killing instead.”

“Okay. I’m concentrating. I still don’t know anything.”

“Maybe you would if you stopped talking for a while,” she said. “The Armitage kid was killed where they found his body, right?”

“That’s what the police say.”

“All right. Why there? Did somebody take him there to kill him? Was he there waiting for a bus? Maybe he went there himself?”

“What the hell for? It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

“Come on, pal,” Chico said. “I’m thinking out loud. Don’t challenge me now; it’s inhibiting at this stage of the process.”

“I’m sorry,” Trace said.

“Suppose he went there himself. Suppose he was going there, I don’t know, to meet somebody. Maybe he got a ride with somebody and got off there to get a lift.”

“Still, why the mask?”

“He wasn’t going to a party?” she asked.

“Nobody knows anything about any party,” Trace said.

“And they don’t know if the mask was his?”

“Nobody ever saw it before.”

“What was he wearing again?” she asked.

“Black shirt and pants. They were his.”

“If he
was
going to a masquerade party or something, that doesn’t sound like the outfit to go with a Richard Nixon mask,” she said. She stared off at the wall and shook her head.

“I know.” Trace touched her arm. “It doesn’t parse for me either.”

The waitress came to tell them the kitchen was out of scungille salad. Chico ordered a shrimp cocktail and fried clams instead.

Trace thought that before they left, he would show her the strip of pictures on the wall behind the bar. If she threw up on the spot, as he expected she might, there might be merit in his diet-through-vomiting plan.

He told Chico he was going upstairs to see if Sarge had returned to his office. The door was still locked, and when he came downstairs, Chico said, “Sarge just called. He’s not coming.”

“Why not?”

“He said something came up and he was going to be busy.”

“Why didn’t you hold him on the phone?” he asked.

“I tried. He said he was in a hurry. He almost hung up on me.”

Trace sat back down and sipped at his wine. “You know, it used to be that if he said something like that, I’d say, okay, he was going to be busy, in a hurry, something came up.”

“And?”

“And now that you’ve poisoned my mind against him, making me think my own father’s the playboy of the western world, all I can think of is that he’s got a chick on the side somewhere while my mother’s out of town and he’s too busy rolling around in bed to come and have dinner with us.”

“To which I say, hooray.”

“Hooray for cheating husbands? My, my, my, how the worm turns.”

“Hooray for some nice sweet old man who’s sixty-five years old or some such—”

“Sixty-seven,” Trace said.

“Sixty-seven and maybe being happy for a change. Trace, stay off his case. Leave him be.”

“I want to ask him about it,” Trace said.

“Why?”

“Because I want to see him sweat when I grill him. I want to see little beads of perspiration run down his guilty red face when he finds out the jig is up and I know all about it.”

“You take this very hard for someone to whom Fidelity is only the name of an insurance company,” she said dryly.

“Hold, woman. Holdest thou thy tongue, wench. That was all in the past. I have been a model of purity for God knows how long now. And now that I’ve finally gone straight, I find out my father’s twisted. This makes sense to you? Did it ever occur to you that I might have a genetic flaw, some inbred inability to stay out of strange beds? Don’t you think I should know this? Don’t you want to know it before you get involved with me?”

“Involved with you? I’ve lived with you for three years. There have been a hundred and fifty women in that time. A hundred and fifty that I know about. Double it, triple it for the times you sneaked around and I didn’t find out about it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Trace said. “I just find the whole matter slightly repulsive.”

“God, I hate it when you don’t drink. I hate it when you drink because you’re a lunatic, but when you don’t drink, you’re a petty, vicious, nasty, carping hypocritical nag. Buy a bottle of vodka and get ripped, will you?”

“Not until you pay me the five hundred dollars you’re going to owe me,” he said. “Unless you want to concede and pay up now.”

“Don’t hold your breath, ace,” she said.

When they finished dinner, Trace asked her, “Do you want to hang out with me tonight?”

“Might as well. It’s too late to do anything else.”

“I know a great place,” he said. “You’ll love it.”

When they left the restaurant, he showed her the bank of portrait photos high on the barroom wall.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

“That fellow, second from the right, looks pretty nice. I might like to know him.”

“The hell with him. What about the others?”

“Degenerates, obviously. Enough to make you want to throw up.”

“Good girl,” he said. “You’ve made my night.”

“How?” she asked.

But Trace would not tell her. First, he decided, he would have to figure out how to get her to invest her money. Then he would tell her.