When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (7 page)

Trace looked up. The man standing at their table was one of the two men he had seen sitting upstairs, talking to Armitage the night before, and who had then followed him and Chico back to the hotel. He was wearing another striped three-piece suit and was standing close enough so Trace could count the acne scars on his face.

The other man was standing, with his back to the bar, ten feet away, watching them. When his eyes met Trace’s, he smiled and cracked his knuckles.

“Not really. Thanks anyway,” Chico said.

“People usually come here to dance. I thought maybe your friend here was too old to dance.” He nodded at Trace but didn’t look at him.

“No,” Chico said again. “I just don’t feel like dancing.”

“I bet you could dance real good with me if you wanted to. I’ll get them to play slow music, so we can hold each other.”

Chico turned away from him, toward Trace.

“Come on, lady,” the man said again. He turned to Trace, “Come on, old-timer, help me out.”

“The lady said she didn’t want to dance.”

“That was with you. Not somebody younger,” he said.

“Buzz off, beanbag,” Trace said.

“What? What’d you say?”

Before Trace could answer, Chico slid out from her seat. “Come on. Sure, we’ll dance. Right now. Let’s get it on.” She grabbed his arm.

He tried to pull away, but she held tight and yanked him toward the floor. “I’ll be back to continue our conversation,” the man said to Trace in a half-shout.

“I’ll wait for you,” Trace said. He saw the other man leave the bar and come over toward his table. He stood there looking down at Trace.

“I heard what you said to my brother.”

He was wearing an identical suit and his face was as swarthy and as scarred. Maybe they were twins, Trace thought.

“Well, if it isn’t Tweedledee. Or are you Tweedledum? Or don’t you remember?”

“I heard what you called my brother. I don’t like smartasses. You better stand up.”

“What for? You’re just going to try to knock me back down, so why get up?”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll hit you while you’re sitting down.”

Trace sighed. “Well, then, I guess maybe I ought to get up.” He started to his feet, just as Chico returned.

“Time to go, Trace,” she said.

The man at the table turned toward her, and as he did, Trace punched out his lights. A hard left in the belly doubled him over and then a chopping right hand onto the side of the temple pitched him forward onto his knees. He hit the floor, the top half of his body lying across the seat of a chair.

“Your right hand’s getting better,” Chico said as she took Trace’s arm and led him away.

“That one was pretty good,” Trace said. “Where’s his clone?”

“Last I saw him, he was rolling around on the floor, holding the family jewels.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. I kneed him in the groin. Hard. Teach him not to try feeling up a dancer,” Chico said. “But I still think we ought to get out of here before the cavalry arrives.”

“
Hai, Michiko-san
,” Trace said.

On the steps going upstairs, leaving the loud raucous music behind, Trace said, “On the whole, I think we might plan on eating elsewhere tonight.”

“It’d better be soon. I’m starved,” she said. “Fighting always brings out my appetite.”

Upstairs, Trace told the maître d’, “Pierre, please cancel our reservations tonight. And my best regards to your brother, George.”

They started to walk back toward their hotel, but when a cab came down the street, Trace hailed it.

“In case our friends follow us,” Trace explained to Chico.

The driver grumbled when Trace said he wanted to go to the Plaza. “For Jeez sakes, buddy, it’s only six blocks.”

“That’s right. In only six blocks, you won’t have us to kick around anymore.”

“You don’t make no money on no six-block fare,” the driver said.

“Usually you make more than you do with an empty cab. Look at it this way. Don’t consider us fares. Just think of us as old friends that you just happened to meet on the street and we’re spending a few happy moments together before we all go our separate ways again, okay?”

The driver said, “Aaaaaah.”

Trace said to Chico, “Some people just can’t stand being cheered up.”

“Cheer me up by feeding me. God, I’m hungry.”

“Must be two hours now since your last feeding,” Trace said.

“Don’t complain. Think how tough it would be if I were a drinker. God, that’d eat up the money, wouldn’t it?”

“You gonna get out or not?” the driver snapped as he stopped across the street from the Plaza.

Trace told the driver that normally he was a big tipper, but since the driver was so rude, Trace was tipping him only a small amount. He asked Chico, “What’s five percent of two dollars and forty cents?”

“Twelve cents,” she said.

“All right. Two forty and twelve. Two-fifty-two. Driver, do you have change of a nickel?”

“No.”

“Well, here. Take the whole two-fifty-five.”

“Thanks a lot, pal,” the driver said sarcastically as he took the money.

“Hold on. You got a receipt? This is tax-deductible.”

The driver snarled again and drove away.

Trace yelled after him, “I’ve got your license plate, mister. You won’t get away with this.”

Chico said, “Why do you bust people’s chops like that? Is it because you’re not drinking and smoking so much anymore?”

“No. It’s New York. It brings out something in me. They’re all such assholes in this city. They’re surly and rude and stupid, but they believe their own press agents. The Big Apple. Wow, man, like wow, so they think they’re better and smarter than anybody else, and that’s crap. They’re jerk-offs and I like to remind them of it once in a while. Just repayment for all the poor little people from Dubuque that they terrorize.”

“Enough of the big thoughts for the evening,” she said. “Feed me.”

“My delight and my pleasure,” he said.

They walked a block and a half away from the Plaza to a small corner restaurant. Trace left Chico to order for both of them while he found a telephone and called Sarge’s home. When there was no answer, he called his father’s office. No answer there either, and on a hunch, he called the restaurant downstairs from the office, but Sarge had not been in since lunchtime, he was told.

When he returned to the table, Chico had finished the rolls in front of her and was eating Trace’s. The woman ate like a tapeworm farm, Trace thought, wondering how she did it and still managed to stay tiny and thin. She had been a dancer most of her life, and exercise kept her body supple and strong. But a normal person could exercise twenty hours a day and still get obese on Chico’s diet. It must be genetic, he thought, some secret message stamped into her genes that dictated that her furnace burn hotter and brighter than anyone else’s and burn up food before it turned to fat. Maybe he would get her to pose for a before-and-after photo, to promote his new diet plan using those pictures of all those degenerates he had seen on the wall of that restaurant near Sarge’s office. Get a picture of some fat Japanese woman and call it before. Take a picture of Chico and call it after. It’d make him a million.

“Couldn’t reach Sarge,” he said. His voice must have sounded depressed, because she said, “Not much of a day for you, I guess.” Her voice was sympathetic, but not so much that she would let go of the last of the rolls she held in her hand.

“Not much,” he agreed. “It started off bad with Sarge getting me up in the middle of the night, just when I thought I was going to make it with you. And then there was that woman. She just rubbed me wrong somehow.”

“What woman?”

“Martha Armitage. The one Sarge set up the meeting with.”

“You don’t know why she rubbed you wrong?” Chico shook her head. Her long black hair splashed about her shoulders.

“No.”

“You’re not terribly smart, are you?”

“As a general rule, no, but specifically in this case, what are you talking about?”

“How did Sarge treat her?” Chico asked.

“He went downstairs and borrowed plants for the office, for crying out loud. He swept and threw out the old newspapers. The
Playboy
girls came off the wall. He went and bought a real coffeecup.”

“Sounds like a boy getting ready for a date, doesn’t it?” she said.

He looked at her for a long while before wrinkling his brow quizzically and asking, “What are you getting at?”

“Sarge and Martha Armitage,” she said.

“Oh, come on, Sarge is my father.”

“Since when’s your name Jesus and his Joseph?” she said.

“Nonsense. She’s too young for him anyway. I don’t know where you get these ideas,” Trace said.

“Have it your own way,” Chico said with a lighthearted shrug of the shoulders. “It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

They fell silent when the waiter came with their food. There were two appetizers, a shrimp cocktail and fried mushrooms.

“The shrimp cocktail goes to Madame?” the waiter asked.

Chico nodded. The waiter put down the plate, then stepped over to put the mushrooms in front of Trace.

“I’ll have those too,” Chico said. “He’s on a diet,” she explained.

“Very good, ma’am,” the waiter said, setting down the dish.

After he left, Trace said, “So just what do you have to base that ridiculous theory on?”

“If I start to answer you, you’re going to complain that I’m talking with my mouth full again.”

“I will not.”

“You always do.”

“This time I won’t,” Trace promised. “Talk. Eat but talk.”

“Okay. Yesterday at the Plaza, when Sarge mentioned that woman’s name—what’s her name, Martha?—I saw his face. I saw right away from the look on his face.”

“What kind of a look?” Trace asked.

“It wasn’t a macho look,” Chico said. “That’s what you’d usually see with some guy when an old flame’s name was mentioned. It’s the way men are. They always talk about being able to keep secrets, but what they mean is that they don’t say anything. They don’t have to. Their faces give everything away. Everybody knows everybody that any man has ever slept with. That’s a fact and that’s the way men are. You too. I always know. But Sarge is…well, he’s a better man than most. There was kind of an embarrassed look on his face when her name came up, maybe a little guilty. It was different, but it was just as foolproof. He and whatever her name is were a thing, sometime, somewhere. I’ve seen that look two hundred times.”

“Got guilt on his face? He ought to have guilt on his face. If you’re right, he was cheating on my mother.”

“Hey, pardner, save that,” Chico said. “I’ve met your mother. I’d be on Sarge’s side for anything up to and including homicide. Want a shrimp?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said as she plunked the last in her mouth and pulled the plate of mushrooms toward her. “I’m going to ask you now if you want a mushroom.”

“I don’t,” Trace said. “You’ve just told me that my father is a philanderer and now you’re trying to talk me into a mushroom?”

“One. I didn’t say that Sarge is a philanderer. I said he had an affair with Mrs. Armitage. Two. I want to know now if you want a mushroom because I know you and you’ll ask for one just when I have only one left and I hate to give the last one away.”

“I won’t ask for any,” Trace said. “You’re sure, aren’t you?”

“I’m sure. It’s my special field of study,” she said. “And today, that whole act in the office—plants, clean cups, sweep—what do you think that was all about?”

“Well, I don’t like it,” Trace said.

“It’s not for you to like or not like. What the hell’s wrong with you? Did you think you were the product of immaculate conception? Don’t you think your father ever crawled into the sack with anybody?”

“I don’t have your cavalier attitude toward extramarital sex, I guess,” he said.

She sputtered mushroom bits over the table. “You sanctimonious hypocrite,” she said. “I can give you the names of at least a dozen married women you have bopped in the last twelve months.”

“That was different,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m not my father.”

“I give up,” she said.

“You’re spoiling my meal. What did you order for me anyway?”

“A grilled cheese sandwich.”

“I hope you didn’t get tomato on it. I hate tomato on grilled cheese. Only Philistines mix tomatoes and cheese.”

“No tomato.”

“What are you having?” he asked.

“I’m having a steak and things.”

“Okay. Let’s stick to food and drop that other subject.”

“Fine. I’d much rather eat,” Chico said.

Trace had a terrible desire to order a double vodka on the rocks, but he ordered a carafe of wine and drank it by himself while watching Chico eat. He nibbled at his cheese sandwich but had lost his appetite.

When they got back to their room, Trace again called Sarge’s home and office numbers but got no answer.

“No answer from Sarge,” he said. “I’m starting to worry.”

“So he’s out. He’s a big boy,” she said.

“What did you mean by that?”

“Mean? I mean that he is big and grown up and why are you worrying about him as if he’s a child?”

“Because, dammit, he’s probably out getting laid. With women he picks up on the street. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I’m sure it’s no good.”

Chico sighed. “I’m going to sleep,” she said.

Trace sighed, too. “Maybe I will later. If I can.”

Trace’s Log:

Tape Recording Number Two in the murder of Tony Armitage, Plaza Hotel, midnight, Thursday.

Something hangs heavy on my heart, Miss Crabtree. I feel about as much like making this report as I do running and weight lifting and doing pushups and gourmet cooking and not drinking enough and not smoking enough to even sustain a morning cough. My life has gone to hell in a hand basket.

Trusting other people’s judgment is not good. Like I trust Chico’s judgment and she says Sarge and Martha Armitage had an affair, and I guess she’s right and I don’t like it one little bit.

And where is he now? He’s never home anymore when I call. While my poor mother is suffering away the days and nights in Las Vegas, losing money at her specified rate of two dollars in nickels each and every hour, no more than five hours a day.

I’m very disappointed in you, Sarge.

I guess somehow I never thought of my father being involved with anybody physically. Except my mother. And that doesn’t count. That’s a romantic act, I don’t know, kind of on a par with docking a steamship in New York. A series of intricate maneuvers to be accomplished as rapidly and with as little excitement as possible.

I guess I’m overreacting. Do other people think about one of their parents making it with somebody? I don’t know. Maybe people don’t. Maybe I’m just one of the few, cursed by being half-Jewish, condemned to a life of worrying about things that are none of my business. Maybe it’s part of my becoming a big thinker with big thoughts about life and love and parenting and family.

My two kids. What’s-his-name and the girl. Do they ever think of me in bed with somebody? Do they ever consider that I’m off rutting around with some Eurasian beauty? Yeah, I’m sure they do. I think that Madame Defarge doesn’t miss a chance to tell them that their father is a degenerate. Maybe they’re too young to care about degenerates. How old are they anyway? I don’t know. The girl is something and What’s-his-name is older. Or at least he’s bigger, the last time I saw him. I wish I knew their birthdays, if they have birthdays. Maybe they’re a year older on January first, like horses. I’ll have to ask my mother. She keeps track of trivia like that. What else does she have to do beside being a cuckoldette?

I’m going to put this out of my mind. I’m not going to think of my father, the philanderer. Instead I’m going to do what I’m supposed to be doing here. Working.

So I met Martha Armitage today at Sarge’s office. I’m glad I was there because if I hadn’t been, they probably would have groped each other on the office floor. Splinters would serve them right.

I’ve got a whole bunch of tapes in the master file. Not one of them tells me a damn thing. First one is Martha, sweet Martha, flirting with my father in front of my very eyes. So she wants us to look into her son’s murder so we can find the killers before her husband does, ’cause he might get into trouble. Okay, I’ll buy that. So far so good. What’d she say? That Nick has a memory like an elephant? And he’s looking for the killers. Well, I wish he’d find them fast so we could get the hell out of here and Martha can get back the hell out of Sarge’s life. That lady drinks too much. I can tell. First it’ll be sex and then she’ll have Sarge swilling booze again the way he used to.

So Tony Armitage was a good prelaw student but slipped a little bit last year. I would too. That might have been the year that his roommate bought nine more speakers for his stereo. How the hell could anybody study with that racket going on? Tony had the right idea. Buy junk and gimmicks and gadgets. Telephone taping machines, nonsense that breaks right away and nobody wants. Anything but that screaming rock music. It’s funny, I used to kind of like rock ’n’ roll. But I must have liked the roll part because now they just call it rock and I hate it all.

Anyway, so Tony and Phil and Jennie led a very platonic existence, his mother said, which Phil told me was a lot of bullshit because Tony was porking Jennie for a while. And then it stopped. Why? Well, I’ll get to her.

Nick didn’t let Tony come to the nightclub and Tony didn’t use drugs, his mother said. And again, bullshit. Phil said that he and Tony used grass. At least, that’s what he admitted to. Who knows what else they might really have used? Maybe the murderers didn’t load Tony’s body up with that Quaalude crap. Maybe he took it himself.

Parents don’t know crap about their children. And considering the revelations of the last couple of hours, maybe children don’t know anything about their parents, and especially their wayward fathers.

Get off that, Trace. Stick to business.

Tony was wearing the mask when he was killed, but nobody knows anything about that mask.

Dead, one bullet through the heart. And the mask could have come from anywhere. Shot between midnight and one A.M.

And the Connecticut faggot cops said that Tony had no enemies, no reports of using drugs, and that both his roommates had been out of town. How convenient.

Sarge says that Armitage isn’t really a mob guy, or at least not anymore. So he doesn’t think the kid was killed as some kind of move in a mob game. I believe him too. They wouldn’t put Richard Nixon masks on the kid. It’d be, you know, bullets in the eyes and mouth, the mark of the squealer. Anyway, Sarge is going to keep checking with cops around to see if anybody’s got it in for Nick Armitage. We’ll see. That’s if Sarge drops the romance long enough to work.

The scene of the crime in Connecticut told me nothing. It never does. I don’t know why I bother.

I’ve got a tape of Phil LaPeter, Tony’s roommate, impresario of noise and first person I ever met who didn’t have a first language. I will never, ever go to West Virginia for any reason. I could spend years there and not understand a word anybody said.

LaPeter is renting Tony’s room. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. The rent’s got to be paid. They were friends, he said, and I guess so because they lived together in that house for a couple of years. So Tony played around with Jennie for a while and then it didn’t last long, LaPeter said. A couple of months maybe. LaPeter gave me the names of the people he was in the Poconos with, but I’m not going to check them. That’s FBI work. They’ve got thousands of people who can do that stuff. If he gave them to me, they’re real enough. I won’t waste time. But Tony gave him the money for the concert at the last minute. I wonder if that meant anything. Why didn’t he give it to him before when LaPeter was grousing that he wouldn’t be able to go because he couldn’t afford it?

I don’t know.

LaPeter met Nick and the two bookend goons from Nick’s place. What’d he say? Let me think. Nick wanted to talk about Tony and his other friends and stuff like that, more than the murder. I find that passing odd.

And LaPeter never saw that mask and Tony didn’t belong to any clubs.

I got the feeling that LaPeter didn’t really care all that much for Jennie, and for more reason than that her moving into the apartment cost him a room for his studio and now he has to work in his bedroom. When I saw that she was black, that explained it. I think LaPeter is a little too much of the hillbilly soil to welcome living in close quarters with a black woman.

She has, by the way, been staying somewhere else. There’s nothing much in her closet at the house. Unless she spends all her time in waitress uniforms, she’s got her clothes stashed in some other apartment.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find out where because the lady in question seemed to take an irrational dislike to me and refused to talk to me.

She said she told everything she was going to tell to the PO-lice. Well, at least I got her to stop using that Stepin Fetchit accent with me. Maybe that’s a first small step. If I keep after it, winning her confidence slowly, maybe in five or ten years she’ll give me the time of day along with the little container of Sweet’n Low for my coffee.

I will be satisfied, however, if she does not give my name to that big dude in the diner who wanted to crease my skull because I was talking to her. I don’t want to see him again. Although I think, maybe I did. Tonight, at Nick Armitage’s disco dump and drug supply house.

Anyway, there was some black guy walking into the office and not five minutes later there were those two morons again, trying to pick a fight with me. The nerve of that one. Insulting my dancing. He’s lucky he didn’t see me on the floor. DISCO DEVLIN RETURNS TO ACTION. WOWS CROWD AT CHEZ NICK. ROBBINS OFFERS LIFETIME CONTRACT.

I’d show him.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get much of a chance to before Chico disabled him with a well-placed knee to the gentles. And I cold-cocked the other one. Somehow I don’t think Luigi Rascali is going to get a warm reception at Chez Nick’s anymore, not even from Pierre, the maître d’, or his twin brother George.

I got the two goons on tape and Jennie Teller too.

So then we got out of Chez Nick and I fed Chico and she filled my head with all that crap about my father and Martha Armitage, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

I think tomorrow I’m going to talk to the Armitage family. I am tired of pussy-footing around. I’m turning this tape off and going to bed. It is two A.M. and I don’t know where my father is.