When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (12 page)

“I’ll be back. I like this place. Have you got a car?”

“Yeah. I’m parked just a few doors down.”

“I’ll walk you out there.” Trace looked at Brian, who was beginning to tote up customer’s checks from the now-closed dining room. “Brian, I’m taking the lady to her car. I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be here until Wanda comes.”

Trace hoisted the singer’s guitar case. He was surprised at how light it was. “Wanda?” he said to her.

“The lady who comes in for the money at night,” Alicia said. “Tough lady. We call her ‘Wanda Whips Wall Street.’ Brian’s butt is suet if he’s a dollar off.”

“Is Wanda her real name?”

Alicia shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

He walked with her to her car, a ratty old Dodge Dart with so much body rot it looked as if it ought to be a lobby display at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.

She put the guitar in the trunk and he stood with her while she unlocked the driver’s door.

“It’s been nice meeting you,” she said. “You have a good time?”

“I did,” he said.

“Did you find out everything you wanted to know?” Her smile was bright in the overhead streetlight.

“Was I that obvious?” he asked.

“No. Of course not. Everybody comes in and asks me five hundred questions a night,” she said. “What’s it all about?”

“My father and I, we’re looking into Tony Armitage’s murder. We’re investigators.” He turned on the tape recorder again. The singer opened the door, sat behind the wheel, and lowered the window. He closed the door behind her.

“I figured it was something like that,” she said. “Was I any help?”

Trace shrugged. “Every little bit helps.”

“You working for the family?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Anything I can do…” she said, leaving the sentence unfinished.

“Did Tony use drugs?” he asked.

“Grass and coke, I think. Anyway, I saw him with them once in a while.”

“What’d you think of him?”

“He was a boy. I think his father scared him a lot,” she said.

“Did he get the drugs down here, do you think?”

She hesitated a moment. “I wouldn’t know,” she finally said.

“You know, when we left the bar,” Trace said, “I was glad that you weren’t inviting me home. And now I’m sad about it.”

“Maybe some night when you’re not working,” she said. “When I know you’re with me and not with what I know.”

“You’ve got a deal, lady,” he said.

She reached her arm through the open window and pulled Trace’s head down to the window. She kissed him hard, pulpily. She had a nice mouth, Trace thought.

She released him, rolled up the window, started the motor, and drove off. Feeling very noble, Trace walked back into the bar.

He was the last customer left. It was one of the things he had always liked about working for himself. When he had made his living as a gambler in Las Vegas, he worked when he wanted to. Now, with the insurance company, he worked when he wanted to. It allowed him to drink whenever he wanted to. He never had to be home at any special time. He could close any saloon he was in, and he often did.

But, God, now what was he going to do, now that he had virtually, almost, damned near given up drinking for Chico? He might as well have an office job if he wasn’t going to drink. Go back to being an accountant.

He felt a tinge of annoyance. While he was suffering with big questions and problems like this, Chico was back in their hotel room, sleeping. Did she care that he was going through an identity crisis? If she were any kind of friend, she’d be here with him, talking him over this rough spot, helping him to endure in his good intentions. But that was the way with women. Fair-weather friends. Never there when you needed them.

Paulie, the manager, had joined Brian at the cash register, and was putting cash into a bank-deposit bag. Trace called the bartender over and ordered a Finlandia vodka on the rocks. “Make it a double.”

“Welcome back to civilization,” Brian said as he poured the drink.

“You mind if I close out your check now?” Brian asked. “We’ll be closing soon.”

“Sure,” Trace said. “Just back me up with another drink. And then when you want to throw me out, just nod and I’ll go peacefully.”

“Fair enough.”

Brian poured an old-fashioned glass almost full of Finlandia. “Let me know when you’re ready for rocks,” he said. He gave Trace a check for twenty-eight dollars and Trace gave him two twenties and told him to keep the change.

The vodka tasted good. It had been how long…two months…since he had had a drink of vodka, except for a couple of small ones that had been forced on him by social circumstances or by friends he couldn’t stand to insult. Not once in those couple of months had he stopped wanting a real drink. So he was allowed this one. He had already proved that he could stop whenever he wanted to. The couple of drinks tonight wouldn’t really matter, he thought. They would be kind of a reward for really being good and on the wagon. Tomorrow, he wouldn’t drink anymore.

He would start another two months without a drink of vodka and maybe at the end of those two months, he would celebrate again with a couple of pops. He calculated quickly what day two months would be. This was the twenty-first of July. Would it be September 21? No. July and August had thirty-one days each. Make it sixty days instead. September 19. On September 19, he would drink again.

Just another reward for good conduct. Like these two drinks tonight. Tomorrow, he would forget them. He would jump out of bed and do his half-hour’s exercise and eat a breakfast that was heavy in bran and complex carbohydrates, and not smoke either. Chico would be very proud of him. He had the willpower of a Buddhist monk.

He bummed another cigarette from Brian.

The manager had just walked into the office with the bag containing the day’s receipts when the front door opened and a woman walked in.

It was Anna Walker, Martha Armitage’s sister. So she was Wanda Whips Wall Street.

She nodded to Brian, looked at Trace without real interest, and walked into the manager’s office without knocking.

“Going to have to chase you, Trace,” Brian said. He pointed to the office door and added softly, “Wanda.”

Trace nodded. “I’ll be on my way.” He picked up his glass, nursed it a little with small sips, and turned on his chair. When the woman left the office, she was stuffing the cash bag into her large leather pocketbook. She saw Trace looking at her, smiled a not-sure smile, then walked over to him.

“I know you, don’t I?”

“Just hello and good-bye,” Trace said.

“That’s right. At Nick’s apartment. You’re the insurance man.”

“Devlin Tracy,” Trace confessed.

“Is this part of your investigation too?” she asked. She snapped her pocketbook tightly closed.

“Not really. I was out for a night’s carousing with my father, and then he got tired and went home. I was just getting tossed out.”

“How fortunate that you wound up in Nick’s place,” she said. “Do you have a ride?”

Trace shook his head. “Pop took the car.”

“Where are you?”

“The Plaza,” he said.

“I’ll give you a lift. I’m heading in that direction,” she said.

“You needn’t bother. I can get a cab.”

“No bother, and no, you can’t. Cabbies don’t come down here at night. They have a tendency to get dead.”

“Then, thanks. I accept,” Trace said. He tossed down the rest of the drink, nodded toward Brian, who had been watching them talk to each other, and walked with the woman toward the door, which he held open for her.

“A vanishing art. You can tell you’re not from New York.”

“What’s that?”

“Good manners,” she said.

“It’s eighty-seven percent of my charm.”

“I’m supposed to ask about the other thirteen percent?” she said.

“My vast personal wealth,” Trace said.

“All that, and handsome too.”

“I just wanted you to know that I’m financially secure. You don’t have to worry about me mugging you for the night’s receipts.”

“I wasn’t too worried,” she said.

“I’m bigger than you. Not meaner, maybe, because I’m a pussycat. But bigger.”

“I didn’t come alone.” She led him toward a large Cadillac parked two doors down from the bar. Two men sat in the front seat and one of them hopped out when he saw Anna Walker coming toward the car with a man.

“It’s all right,” she said.

Trace recognized the man as one of the two he had tangled with the night before in Chez Nick. The man backed toward the rear door to open it for Anna, then saw Trace’s face.

“Hey, it’s you.”

“It usually is when it’s wearing this suit,” Trace said.

“You two know each other?” the woman asked Trace.

“We had the same dance instructor,” Trace said.

“A wise guy,” the man told Anna. “Caused trouble last night at the club.”

“See how stories get around?” Trace said. “As I recollect it, I was sitting quietly, having a glass of wine—wine, mind you—when this person and his friend suggested I was too old to dance. Then one thing led to another, and pretty soon they both wound up on the floor.”

“Very funny,” the man snarled.

“Please open the door, Frankie,” Anna Walker said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “About this guy.”

“I do. It’s all right,” the woman said again. There was a sharp edge in her voice this time, so Frankie nodded and opened the rear door. Anna entered and Trace started in after her. Frankie tried to slam the door on Trace’s foot, but Trace pushed his foot against the passenger armrest and propelled the door back hard with his foot. It hit Frankie in the stomach.

“Careful of the door,” Trace said as he pulled it closed behind him.

Trace saw that the driver of the car was the other man who had accosted him and Chico in the club. The man was staring at him in the rearview mirror, until Anna Walker pressed a button on a panel next to her and a one-way glass window moved silently on a track across the top of the front seat, sealing off the two halves of the car.

She turned on a radio that filled the car with loud stereo music.

“Sorry for the volume, but there’s more privacy this way,” she said.

“Little
pishers
have big ears,” Trace said. “That’s what Mother always told me. So who are these two guys? Where’d Armitage get them, from some work-release program at Riker’s Island?”

“They’re twins. The one on the right up there is Frankie the Singer. The other one’s Augie the Hand.”

“Sweet,” Trace said sarcastically.

“Their father was a friend of Nick’s. So he put them to work. So?”

“So?” Trace said.

“So just what are you supposed to be doing around here? I know Nick wasn’t very happy to see you.”

“I’m looking into Tony’s death. It’s kind of routine before we pay off on a big policy.”

“Find out anything?” she asked.

“Not a blessed thing,” Trace said. “His roommates don’t know anything. Armitage doesn’t know anything. Neither does his wife. The people in this saloon don’t know anything or else they wouldn’t talk to me. So, maybe, since you’re the newest kid on the block, maybe you’ll tell me something.”

“What would you like me to tell you?”

“First things first. How’d a nice girl like you get involved in being a saloon manager?”

She laughed. “I’m not. I’m Nick’s bookkeeper. I just come down to pick up the receipts and go over them at my place. I’ve always done that. God, why would I want to manage a tavern?”

“Especially after the last manager vanished,” Trace said. “Maybe you can tell me about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“What was his name, Dewey?”

“Dewey Lupus,” she said.

“Yeah. Don’t you think it’s kind of odd that he stopped working just a couple of days after Tony’s murder? Maybe it’s just a coincidence and maybe it isn’t. Maybe he took off before anybody found out about what he did. Or maybe he was just put away in the old family lime pit where all bad little murderers go when they get caught.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she snapped.

“You mean those two goons in the front seat wouldn’t do that? You mean Nick Armitage wouldn’t do that? Are you telling me nobody ever killed anybody for revenge? You mean all those Destroyer books I’ve been reading were wrong? I’m crushed. I can’t believe it,” Trace said. He clapped himself on the forehead.

“You just couldn’t be wronger. The manager was a drunk. He was dipping into the register too and he probably got wind that Nick was about to can him. So he just got his pay and took off. You think he had something to do with Tony’s death?”

“I don’t know. For somebody to do murder, usually they have to not like somebody. Did Dewey have any problems with Tony?”

“Nobody had problems with Tony,” she said. “He was a good kid. My nephew, you know. I’m Martha’s sister. Well, you know that. Tony was a gem.”

“Odd,” Trace said.

“What’s odd?”

“A nightclub owner’s kid. Fancy place, big bucks, disco dollies, beautiful people gobbling up drugs in the bathrooms. You wouldn’t expect a kid growing up in that atmosphere to be straight-arrow. You kind of figure spoiled, egotistical, life in the fast lane.”

“Not this time,” she said. “You say straight-arrow. Tony was straighter than that. He was a laser beam.”

“Then why’d he get killed?” Trace asked. “Why alongside a highway? Wearing a rubber mask on his face?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” Trace said. “But unlike everybody else around here, I want to find out.”

“Just what does that mean?”

“I got the impression when I talked to Mrs. Armitage that she was worried Nick might go after the killer himself and get into trouble by taking revenge outside the law. That was my impression anyway.”

“It’s easy to get the wrong impression from Martha,” the woman said. “She’s not always able to make sense.” Trace detected a touch of disdain in her voice.

“Well, is she right or wrong?” he asked. “Does Nick care or doesn’t he care who killed his kid?”

“He cares” she said.

“It doesn’t look it. He hasn’t pressed the cops about their investigation. He’s got money, but he hasn’t hired anybody to try to find out what happened, at least not that I can tell. That’s why I was thinking about Dewey Lupus. If he
was
the guy and Nick already got him, that’d explain why he’s not worried about who killed his kid. All I keep hearing about Nick is he never forgets anything, memory like an elephant, but this elephant looks like he’s got amnesia.”