When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (16 page)

They were at a restaurant off University Place that featured opera music.

Trace said, “You’re going to love this place.”

“Why didn’t we eat here, then?”

“Because I don’t like the food, but the drinks are good and it’s the best entertainment in New York. And they’re not snobs here. They don’t care if I hum along, unlike some people I know.”

“My bel canto hummer,” she said. “I wonder if God, in His infinite wisdom, knew what He was getting me into.”

They sat at a table in the far corner of the room. Chico ordered Perrier and Trace smugly ordered white wine. When the waiter left, Chico said, “Remember, I told you, go ahead and drink vodka. If you’re going to be miserable with wine, I don’t want to hear about it.”

“When I get my five hundred from you,” Trace said. “And when I finally figure out what I’m going to do with my career. If I decide I’m going to be a big detective, I want to come in pure. No drinking hard stuff, very little smoking, exercising each and every day. Soon I’ll be running miles each morning and lifting tons of dead iron around.”

“Exercise? You did one pushup tonight before we left the room,” she said.

“That’s because you wouldn’t get under me for inspiration. It’s not much fun exercising alone.”

True to his word, Trace hummed. He hummed when the bartender played the Anvil Chorus on the cash register and on an assortment of bottles, and he hummed when all the waiters, the cigarette girl, and the maître d’ took turns standing on the stage in the center of the room, singing arias.

“That guy used to sing
Carmen
standing on his head. I remember that,” Trace said.

“I don’t believe it,” Chico said.

“It’s true. Of course, that was fifty pounds ago. He might have trouble standing on his head these days.”

Another waiter came from the kitchen wearing a chef’s hat. He began to twirl pizza dough over his head, then threw lumps of the dough around the room. When people threw them back, he caught them in his mouth, all the while singing
Figaro
.

Chico was laughing so hard tears ran from her eyes. “I don’t believe this place. It’s priceless,” she said.

“See. You’re so busy dealing with the seamy underside of New York life, Bloomingdale’s and Saks, that you don’t get to see the good parts of the city. If you like this, there’s some decals up in the Bronx that you have to see.”

“Huh?” she said.

“Never mind,” Trace said. “You had to be there.”

The house lights dimmed. A few moments later, the doors to the kitchen opened and four waiters, carrying candles and wearing bull masks over their heads, came charging out and wended their way about the room, singing a chorus from
Carmen
while other waiters on the stage joined in.

Trace started to say something but Chico shushed him. She was watching the waiters as they moved about the room, stopping to play with young children who were with their parents among the late dinner crowd.

He started again and she shushed him again. So he poured another glass of wine from the bottle and hummed until the waiters vanished into the kitchen and the lights brightened.

“Now can I talk?” he said.

“Go ahead, say something.”

“Nothing.”

“I figured as much. You know, think about this.” She still looked at the kitchen door. “Nobody put that mask on Tony Armitage.”

“No?”

“He put it on himself so that nobody would recognize him,” Chico said.

“I don’t think that’s such a big breakthrough that you have to be rude and tell me to be quiet,” Trace said.

“It gets you on a different track. You don’t have to think maybe about why somebody else put that mask on him. If anybody wanted to hide him or fix him up so nobody’d see him or notice him, they weren’t likely to do it by having him wear a Richard Nixon mask. Or a King Kong mask for that matter. They’d just put him in the trunk of the car. Or on the floor of the backseat. Put a bag over his head. A Nixon mask is the kind of the thing he might put on himself. Especially a college kid. And a druggie.”

“It might be right,” Trace conceded.

“So then, ask yourself why?”

“All right, why?” Trace said, although his heart wasn’t really in it. He liked the music and the wine. He didn’t want to think about Tony Armitage tonight. He wanted to drink a little and hum a lot, and when Chico wasn’t looking, pour a few spoonfuls of his white wine into her Perrier water and reduce her to a state of drunken paralysis, then take her back to their room and punish her body in a sexual frenzy. Or, maybe, just kiss her good night and fall asleep holding her.

Either sounded pretty good.

“Why didn’t the kid want to be recognized?” Chico asked. “And recognized by whom?”

“I like the way you always say ‘whom’ correctly. I could never be in love with a woman who used ‘who’ when she should use ‘whom.’ I used to go with a woman who said terrif. The first time, I dismissed it as an error, and the second time as a lapse in judgment. The third time, I knew I had to get that woman out of my life.”

“You mean if I say terrif, I can be rid of you?”

“Yes,” Trace said.

“Terrif,” she said. “Just the breakthrough I’ve been looking for.”

“On the other hand,” Trace said, “I don’t like the way you end sentences with prepositions.”

“You’ve got that look in your eye. I don’t think you’d be satisfied with any sentence that didn’t end in a
prop
osition.”

“Hah. You wish,” Trace said. “If I get to be a big detective, that’s another thing that goes. No more wasting my precious body fluids with meaningless casual sex. From that moment on, I’m only making it with lady social workers who make me listen to their sophomoric ideas of life before giving me any, if I’m still unlucky enough to be awake.”

“Good. Then take me home. Now that I know I’m safe, no need to spend the night out, watching you hope that I’ll pass out.”

Trace went into the bedroom to tell Chico there had been no messages at the desk from Sarge. She was already in bed.

“Can I whip you up something in the kitchen for breakfast?” he said. “An avocado soufflé, maybe?”

“You know,” Chico said, “I’ve read novels about big fancy private detectives. It’s not that they cook complicated things.”

“No? What is it, then?”

“No, they cook things like omelets or fried bacon.”

“The hell you say.”

“True,” Chico said. “But what they do is they make a big deal of it. They sprinkle tarragon on top of their omelets. Or they coat the underside of the bacon with mustard before they fry it. Stuff like that. Bullshit stuff that only fools people who’ve never really stood in a kitchen cooking.”

“Lady social workers,” Trace suggested.

“Exactly. People too involved with the big, the really, really big issues of life.” She spoke those words with her jaw jutting out, her lips tightly compressed, in a wicked parody of a Westchester County private-schoolmarm. “People who can’t be involved with food or its preparation because it’s not creative, or who feel guilty about it because as long as one person is starving in India, they’re supposed to hate escargot.”

“You may have something. As I was told today—and I’m always willing to pass along a compliment—you’re smarter than you look.”

“Thank you. Come to bed. Savage me.”

“Okay,” he said.

He was using alcohol to wash away the adhesive tape that held the tape recorder around his waist, when Chico sat up in bed as if she were a zombie called back from the grave.

“Trace, I think I’ve got it.”

“I’m glad you told me
before
sex.” He kept rubbing at the tape marks. “Got what?”

“Remember what the maid told you about Martha Armitage? She was drunk and her husband talked to her on the phone the night before the kid was killed and she was talking about napping. Napping. And then Anna Walker came over?”

“Yeah, so?”

“And then when the maid left, those two gunmen were hanging around, in the hall and in the lobby. Trace, they were standing guard.”

“What for?”

“Because she wasn’t talking about napping. She was mumbling about kidnapping. Suppose Tony Armitage was kidnapped. Does that make any sense?”

He set the alcohol bottle on a dresser, then sat down on the edge of the bed and kissed her forehead.

“It sure does,” he said. “It sure does.”

“Hello, darling,” the woman said.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Trace said.

“Who is this?” Anna Walker demanded.

“Devlin Tracy. You didn’t know that?”

“What do you want? It’s three o’clock in the morning.”

“If I wanted the time, I would have called the special number. Only twenty cents to reach out and touch a tape recording.”

“I was getting ready for bed. Talk or good-bye.”

“I have to talk to you, Miss Walker.”

“About what?”

“About a kidnapping in Connecticut a month ago.”

There was a long silence on the telephone and then Anna Walker’s voice again, much less imperious, said, “Can you come over? Say in a half-hour?”

“Say fifteen minutes,” Trace said. He waited thirty seconds, dialed again, and her phone was busy.

No, he didn’t want coffee. What he really wanted was a drink, a large drink. He told Anna Walker the first but kept the second to himself.

She insisted. “Come on, it’ll only take a moment. Conversation goes better with coffee.”

Trace thought of what Chico had said about tarragon omelets and he said, “Okay. With cinnamon.”

“Coffee with cinnamon?” Anna Walker said.

“That’s right.”

She left Trace sitting on one of the four sofas in her auditorium-size living room. “I’ll only be a minute,” she said.

Trace wondered how long it would take Nick Armitage to arrive. That he was coming was obvious, since Anna Walker was wasting time. She either wanted to talk to Trace, in which case she would have talked, or she didn’t want to talk to him, in which case he wouldn’t have been invited up. The coffeemaking was to buy time until someone else arrived.

Ten minutes later, the coffee arrived, but Nick Armitage still had not.

“Here you are, Mr. Tracy. With cinnamon.” She put a small tray on the end table before them. A silver service held cream and sugar. The coffee was in two fine, small porcelain cups. “I’ve never heard of coffee with cinnamon,” she said.

“A special way I have of making it,” Trace said. “I make it a lot when I have eggs and tarragon.”

He sipped the coffee. It tasted like effluent. He said, “Yummie,” and poured a lot of milk into the cup. He sipped it again and put in three spoons of sugar. He could no longer taste the cinnamon. When he went back to the hotel room, he promised himself to be sure to tell Chico that she had stupid ideas about what big detectives ate and drank.

“Now it’s just the way I like it,” he said. “When is your brother-in-law coming?”

She looked startled at his bluntness, then said, “He should be here any minute. Do you mind?”

“Not unless I have to sit here and talk about coffee and tarragon and everything else except what I came to talk about. Why don’t we get started? We can catch him up when he gets here.”

“I’d really rather wait.”

“I’d really rather not,” Trace said. He pushed the coffee away. “There are other people I can talk to,” he said. He started to rise, but she reached out and put a hand on his wrist.

“Please sit down,” she said softly. She left her hand on his wrist longer than was necessary. “Did I tell you last night that I think you have a terrible disposition?”

“I always kind of looked at myself as a pussycat,” Trace said. “But we can talk about that some other time, too. Now that we’re going to be such great friends, we’ll probably meet a lot for dinner and drinks and coffee and chatter. But right now, Tony Armitage.”

“All right,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”

He decided to run a large bluff. “I know about the kidnapping. I don’t know who.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Good. Perhaps the police will. It was nice sharing this time with you, but I’m leaving. I have to get some sleep.”

He stopped when he heard a voice from the room entrance behind him.

“I wish you wouldn’t, Tracy.” Nick Armitage was there, wearing his business tuxedo, and Trace thought that brother-in-law, sister-in-law relations had made major strides with these two since Nick obviously had his own key to the front door, which Anna had locked behind Trace.

“If we talk, I’ll stay,” Trace said. “We were just talking about the kidnapping.”

“What do you know about it?” Armitage asked.

“Enough. Now I want to know what you know about it. I want to know who.”

He was still skirting around, trying to sound definite and authoritative, but he did not want to make a flat statement that would show that he knew nothing and was only guessing. Still, the trip was already a success; both had conceded that there had been a kidnapping.

Armitage came into the room slowly. With the familiarity born of practice, he went to an oak cabinet against the far wall, opened it, and poured himself a Scotch in a water tumbler. He squeezed in a splash of soda from an old-fashioned seltzer bottle. He took a lot of time, then walked over to a sofa facing Trace, who had lit a cigarette and put his feet up onto the marble-topped coffee table.

“Who?” Trace mouthed silently.

“We don’t know who.” Armitage sipped his drink and sprawled back on the sofa. “Don’t you think we’d like to know who?” As he spoke, tendons swelled in his thick muscular neck. Was this what he would look like if he started lifting weights, Trace wondered.

Armitage leaned forward again. “Maybe it’s time that you and I talked a little bit.”

“About time,” Trace said.

“For instance, I’d like to know just what business any of this is of yours. Who the hell invited you here to look into anything? Just who do you think you are, Tracy, you and your old man nosing around, pestering us?”

“You said all that before,” Trace said. “And I thought I explained. My insurance company invited me here. They told me to look into it before they pay up five hundred very large ones.”