When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (17 page)

“And I told you once before that you can tell your insurance company to stuff their money. I don’t need it.”

“You never know,” Trace said. “Most people could use an extra half-million usually. Keep it around to tip the paperboy. Or in case the money-laundering saloon downtown goes up in a fire.”

Armitage stared at him angrily for a moment, then looked at Anna Walker. Trace saw her shrug.

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Armitage. But I don’t give a damn about your business or how you run it. Just your son.”

“We want to be left alone,” Armitage said.

“So you can just forget that somebody murdered your kid? Just wash it off, forget it. What do you call it? A business loss? A deduction you don’t need anymore? Is there a special line on your ten-forty: murdered Kids, removed from dependency status? What the hell kind of father are you anyway?”

“What do you know about it?” Armitage said. “You’ve got no right to judge. You don’t know what I’m doing or not doing.”

“Yes, I do. The only thing you were doing was having that black guy keep an eye on Tony’s old girlfriend in Connecticut, and he didn’t find out spit. You haven’t done a damned thing else. Tell me about the kidnapping.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Good,” Trace said. “Tell it to the cops.” He rose to his feet and turned toward the front door of the apartment. He wanted a drink really badly now and he hoped Armitage would try to stop him. He would not mind hitting the man.

He was almost at the door when Anna Walker’s voice, soft and calm, reached him.

“At nine o’clock that night, Nick received a telephone call at his private office,” she said.

“Don’t,” Armitage snapped.

She ignored him and went on. “The man on the telephone said that Tony had been kidnapped and Nick had to come up with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He had to take it to that spot on the Merritt Parkway. He delivered the money as he was instructed and came home to wait for word from Tony. The next morning, Tony’s body was found at that spot. The money was gone. Those are the facts, Mr. Tracy.”

Trace came back into the room and went to the bar to pour himself a drink. He splashed a lot of vodka into a glass as he asked Armitage, “Why didn’t you tell this to the police?”

“Would it have made any difference? They didn’t find the people, did they?”

“Would it have hurt to have them look?” Trace asked.

“I didn’t trust them to look very hard,” Armitage said. “They had a killing to investigate. Why complicate it?”

“What do you think happened that night?” Trace asked.

“I think some kidnappers got Tony and beat me out of money and never planned to release Tony. Probably because he could identify them. And I think they took him there with them to pick up the money and then they killed him.”

“Why was he wearing that mask, do you think?” Trace asked.

Armitage just shook his head. He was staring into his whiskey glass, as if it were a lens, looking at a country long ago and far away.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. His voice trembled a little.

“Haven’t you ever thought about it?” Trace asked.

“Maybe they didn’t want him to be recognized or something.”

“Who called with the ransom demand?” Trace asked.

“Some guy I never heard before.”

“He called you at the club?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say? Exactly?”

“He said something like, ‘Just listen and don’t talk. We’ve got your son and if you don’t want him chilled, you’ll do just what we say.’ And he told me to get two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash and he told me where to drop it along the Merritt. That spot where the litter basket is.”

“Why did you believe him?” Trace asked. “It could have been a hoax.”

“I thought that for a minute,” Armitage said. “But he called on my private line and nobody has that except family. I was waiting to hear from Tony because we were supposed to get together for dinner that night. I told him he wouldn’t get anything unless I knew Tony was all right, and he said, ‘You’ll find that out soon enough.’ So I hung up the phone and ten minutes later Tony called. He said he was being held prisoner and that I should do what they said or they’d kill him.”

“How did he sound?”

“He sounded upset. How the hell do you think he sounded?”

“So you came up here then and got the money—” Trace started.

“I didn’t say that,” Armitage snapped.

“You didn’t have to. You came up here and got the money and delivered it. Did you wait? Did you hang around? Did you see anybody?”

“No, no, and no. I did what they told me. It was my son, remember, that they were holding. I dropped off the money and I beat it. Then I went back to my apartment. Anna was there with Martha. We waited for a message but there wasn’t any message except from the cops in the morning that Tony was dead.”

“Where were your two bodyguards during all this?” Trace asked.

“I had them watching the apartment. I didn’t want anybody to try anything with Martha. And that’s all I know.”

“Well, maybe just a couple of other things,” Trace said. “Who has your private office number?”

“Just family, I told you.”

“Who knew that Tony was supposed to have dinner with you that night?”

Armitage thought a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think anybody did. We made the date that afternoon on the telephone. He was going to call back at nine.”

“What happened to Dewey Lupus?”

“Anna told you and I’ll tell you again tonight. He was a thief and a drunk and that kind always winds up getting lost someplace. He quit before I had a chance to fire him, that’s where he is. And you and your father nosing around about it isn’t going to change that. I don’t like you hanging around.”

“What are you going to do, Mr. Tracy?” Anna asked.

“With reference to what?”

“Are you going to the police?”

“Not yet. I don’t have anything to tell them yet.”

“Then….”

“I’m just going to keep looking,” Trace said.

“I don’t want you looking. I want you out of this,” Armitage said.

“In life, you don’t always get what you want.”

“We’ve answered your questions now, Mr. Tracy. Will you answer one of ours?” Anna Walker said.

“Try me.”

“How did you find out about the kidnapping? We thought—”

“You thought that the only other people who knew about it would be the kidnappers,” Trace said.

She nodded.

“I’m sorry. I learned this from inside your camp. I don’t think it’d help anything to tell you exactly how I learned it.”

“I understand,” she said. “I’ll walk you to the door.”

“First things first.” He turned back toward Armitage, who was still sitting on the sofa nursing his Scotch.

“Where’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Your two trained apes, Frankie and Augie, the Happiness Twins.”

“I sent them home. Why?”

“I didn’t want them sneaking up on me from behind when I leave here.”

“They went home, I said.”

“Me, too,” said Trace.

When Trace returned to the Plaza, he went directly into the bedroom and woke up Chico.

“You were right. Tony
was
kidnapped.”

“Good. Did you figure out who did it? Who killed him?” she asked groggily.

“No.”

“We will,” she said.

“We?”

“I’ve decided to help,” she said thickly.

“I’ll let you get your rest, then,” he said. “I’ve got to do my log.”

“Okay. Leave it out for me so I can hear it,” she said.

“I will.”

“There’s a present for you on the living-room table,” she said as he was leaving the room.

The present was a pint bottle of Finlandia and a note from Chico. “Trace. I bought this a couple of days ago. Have it if you want. It won’t count against our bet.” She had signed her name in Japanese symbols.

He kissed the note and poured a drink.

Trace’s Log:

Very early Sunday morning. The one bird in New York City is already up peeping and the left-wingers are skulking to the newsstands to buy the
New York Times
to get this week’s party line and I ought to be in bed, so this will be very short.

Chico, I’m leaving this out for you and so I’m presuming you’re listening to this while I’m sleeping, and since I never tell you in person, “close up and personal,” as Howard Cosell says, let me tell you that I think you are a very exceptional lady. You are beautiful and funny and smart and you’re economically self-sufficient. About the only thing wrong with you is that you really don’t put your money to work for you in the best way, and perhaps one day soon, you and I will talk about that and see what we can do to make you more secure in your old age.

You know what happened when I met Cheryl, the cashiered maid, ’cause you listened to the tape in the restaurant tonight. Martha’s a drunk, Tony was pissed because Nick told him to break up with the black chick, Tony had a secret apartment near the school, and that business with Martha talking about napping, which turned out to be kidnapping. And Tony got drugs from Paulie, the manager downtown who was a waiter then.

And you listened to the Jennie Teller tape. I should have spotted that she was selling a little dope when I was at that diner the first time and she gave that kid Sweet’n Low from her pocket, instead of from the sugar bowl. Being sober too long, I find, clouds one’s mind so that one cannot see. That’s the only reason Lamont Cranston lasted so long as The Shadow. If he had ever tried that trick on a bunch of drunks, they would have seen him right away. By the way, this vodka is good, but next time, please try to put the bottle on ice. So anyway, I found the Sweet’n Low packets in Jennie’s room and the bankbook with the big balance from the time she and Tony were living together. I guess she’s just been selling the leftover drugs since then. And she confirmed that Tony was going to get even with the father. Was he going to deal more drugs? I don’t know. Maybe he was going to open a competing restaurant and disco.

Anyway, then you and I went to dinner and to that opera club and we had fun even if you were rude to me and didn’t let me talk when I wanted to.

I’m leaving you the tape of my pleasant kaffee-klatsch tonight with Anna Walker and Nick Armitage. It will explain everything about the kidnapping, or at least everything they told me, and I still don’t know whether I believe them about anything or not.

It occurs to me that the reason Nick Armitage didn’t tell the police about the kidnapping was that he didn’t want anybody to ask how he could get his hands on a quarter of a million dollars in cash at night on just a few minutes’ notice.

Still no clue why Tony was wearing that mask.

Maybe there’s something in the tapes that you can find, but I don’t have anything right now. I still think Dewey Lupus counts for something, and maybe Sarge found out something about him. If I ever hear from him again.

Actually, although I don’t have one single damned answer, I don’t feel too bad. The fact that there was a kidnapping changes the whole thing. It could bring a new investigation by police and they might solve all these riddles and save Gone Fishing some money. That should make Walter Marks happy, if any man smaller than you can ever be said to be truly happy.

I like this vodka a lot.

I am going inside now, Chico, to go to bed with you. If, by chance, you should try to seduce me during the night and I resist, remember this: it was not because I loved you less but because I loved sleep more. I am very tired. Good night to one and all.

Yes. This vodka is very good.

Oh. I’ll do my expenses some other time. Be sure to give me a receipt for the vodka. Make believe it was a half-gallon bottle.

It was noon when Trace awoke. It felt like old times. His throat was raw from cigarette smoking. The membranes of his nose were dry and his head felt as if it were packed with cotton. It hurt to move his body quickly. His teeth felt loose and the inside of his left arm itched, but he knew from experience that if he scratched it, his whole body would begin to itch, so he just lay there in bed, trying to ignore the irritation on his left arm.

It felt wonderful to be hung over again.

Alleluia. And Hallelujah, too, in case the Protestants were right.

He noticed that Chico was not in bed with him and he bellowed, “Chico. Get in here. Your man awaits. Attend me.”

There was no answer and he shouted again, then waited, and when there was still no answer, he went back to sleep some more to give her a chance to come into the room and apologize before he had to call her again.

It was another hour before he woke once more. When Chico did not respond to his renewed bellowing, he finally got out of bed and went into the living room of their suite.

There was a fresh note on the table. It read: “Trace. I think maybe I’ve got a handle on this. I’ve taken the car and am checking a couple of things out. I’ll be back before dinner. Good job on the vodka. I hope you’re back to normal.”

The empty vodka bottle was still on the table, and Trace picked it up and held it to the light. It was empty. He tried an old army trick, holding the bottle at an angle, then running his cigarette lighter back and forth beneath the glass at the bottle’s lowest point, then quickly upending the bottle. He was rewarded by a dribble of six drops of vodka into his glass.

Not bad, he thought. A man could live on six drops of vodka, if there were enough six dropses. All he had to do was to make sure he never ran out of empty vodka bottles. A noble ambition, he assured himself as he drank the six drops.

He lit a cigarette. When he finished coughing, he called the front desk to see if there were any messages for him. There weren’t.

He wondered where Chico had gone and then he wondered where Sarge was. He called his father’s office and then his home. No answer either place.

Some silent alarm bell went off inside his head. Sarge had said he was working on something good, but he had been out of touch too long. Usually when Trace came to town, he and Sarge spent most of their time together. A rare father and son, they got along with each other, genuinely liked each other, equally disdained Trace’s mother, and were more like friends than kin. For Sarge to get lost this way was highly unusual.

Trace thought of calling his mother in Las Vegas to find out when she had last spoken to her husband, but he quickly rejected that idea. The woman would pry, complain if things were wrong, pester all of New York on the telephone, and wind up coming home from Las Vegas four minutes earlier than scheduled and claim that Sarge had ruined her vacation. Forever afterward she would call it “the vacation I cut short when Patrick got lost.”

No, thanks.

He went and looked in his luggage and found two airlines bottles of vodka that Chico didn’t know about, which he always carried for emergencies, and poured both of them into his glass.

His worrying fluctuated between Sarge and Chico. Where would she have gone with the car? She was a terrible driver, her foot so heavy on the accelerator that she mashed it into a concave shape. The thought of her tooling madly around Manhattan was horrifying. He reminded himself to be sure to catch the hourly radio news to see if there had been a wave of traffic deaths among surly cabdrivers, run into brick walls by the Yellow Avenger.

And where was his father? What the hell was he up to?

Trace showered, shaved, and stepped outside the bathroom every few minutes to sip his vodka, which he had left on a small end table near the door, because he thought it was disgusting to bring a drink into a bathroom.

He finished the vodka about the time he finished dressing. He called his father’s two numbers again and there was still no answer. Now he was more than a little worried, and he called the bell captain to get another rental car, and while he waited, he hooked up his tape recorder.

His parents lived in Queens, just across the river from Manhattan’s East Side, on a quiet tree-lined street that looked more New Jersey than New York.

Trace had not been to the house for more than two years and most of the homes on the block looked alike with identical brick fronts, but he recognized Sarge’s instantly by the large decal set in the glass of the front porch door.

It showed, in straight-on perspective, a gun facing anyone coming up the stairs and it bore the legend: “Forget the dog. Beware the owner.”

As he leaned on the doorbell, Trace glanced up and down the street, but he did not see his father’s beat-up old Plymouth.

When no one answered the door, he walked along the narrow alleyway to the back entrance. That was locked too, but there was an old unused milk box inside the back porch door—who delivered milk anymore?—and Trace found a house key taped underneath it.

He went into the house nervously, calling out, “Hey, Sarge, you here? Sarge? Hey, Pop. Where the hell are you?”

He walked through the first floor, room by room, then up to the second floor, checking all the rooms, the tub in the bathroom, feeling vaguely like a peeping Tom when he looked into his parents’ bedroom, but relieved nevertheless when he found no body. Sarge’s bed was made.

“Nothing is dead here except good taste,” he said aloud as he went back downstairs, past the diamond-shaped racks on the stairway wall in which his mother had displayed her collection of inch-long plastic dolls with two-inch-long plastic hair in many colors.

Another rack held a collection of glasses from places they had visited on vacation, most of them at the New Jersey shore, all of them ugly, usually painted red, white, and blue since their vacations in the days of Trace’s youth always seemed to coincide with the Fourth of July weekend. It was only years later that he realized that his mother had insisted upon this because she added in the extra weekend, and decided that such scheduling gave them three weeks of vacation instead of two. It had never mattered to her that this forced her husband to spend extra hours driving in the frustration of maniacal holiday traffic.

There were also displayed a lot of plastic stirrers with whistles attached, presumably for blowing at a bartender to catch his attention, so that he would know whose face to punch out for whistling at him.

He saw a set of cheap plastic ashtrays, brightly painted to resemble slightly less-cheap ceramic ashtrays. The scenes usually depicted some woman’s legs or some man’s rear end or somebody wearing a barrel. They had a lot of snappy, surefire, laugh-getting phrases written on them as well as the name of the dismal resort town in which such dismal words were regarded as humorous.

Downstairs, now that he had a chance to look at it, was much as he remembered it. There was one pattern of flowered print on one sofa; another pattern on each of two chairs; yet another pattern on the window drapes. The carpet was flowered and matched nothing else in either color or style.

There was a little pad on the end table near the telephone, but there were no notes and no message. So Sarge wasn’t here. Then where the hell was he?

“Hold it, pal, right there.”

The voice barked out from behind him, instantly recognizable as officialdom, and Trace turned slowly, his hands visible before him, and said, “I belong here.”

The policeman standing in the doorway to the kitchen was young. The cop who stood behind him, safe for the moment from crazed random pistol fire, was older.

“Yeah? Who are you?” The older one called over the young cop’s shoulder.

“My name is Devlin Tracy. This is my father’s house.”

The older cop squinted at him. “You don’t look much like Sarge.”

“My identification’s in my wallet,” Trace said. “My driver’s license with my picture. ’Course, that doesn’t look much like anybody.”

“All right, I guess,” the younger cop said. “Show us the license.”

Trace slowly handed the policeman his wallet, opened so that the license was visible. The cop nodded as he handed it back.

“What are you doing here?” Trace asked.

“One of the neighbors called. They saw you go down the alley and then not come back out. They thought you were a burglar.”

“No. I’m in town for a couple of days and I haven’t been able to reach my father by phone. I just came out here to make sure he’s all right.”

The younger cop looked at the other one and Trace snapped, “What the hell’s going on? Don’t jerk around with me. Where’s Sarge?”

The old cop stepped forward and said, shaking his head, “There’s nothing wrong. Don’t get upset, okay?”

“Swell, where is he?” Trace shot back.

“He didn’t get hurt, but he was in a little accident last night.”

“What kind of accident?”

“A car accident,” the policeman said.

“Where is he now?”

“He’s in Riverside Hospital, but he’s okay,” the policeman said again.

“How okay is okay?” Trace asked.

“He lost control of his car and hit a bridge railing. A little concussion. No broken bones, no internal injuries, nothing to worry about. He’ll be getting out right away.”

“That’s the truth?” Trace asked. He stared hard at the older cop, then his eyes asked the younger one for a second opinion.

The older policeman answered. “I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that.”

“Thanks, then,” Trace said. “I appreciate it.”

Sarge wore a helmet of bandages and Trace said, “You look like a goddamn tight end for Mummy University.”

“You come here to yell at me?” Sarge said.

“No. How you feeling?” Trace went to the bed and hugged the old man, who squeezed him back with enough pressure to push the air from Trace’s lungs.

“I’m okay. They say when you’re my age, you get hit in the head and you gotta hang around for twenty-four hours or so just to make sure there’s no hidden complications. But I’m all right. I don’t even have a headache.”

“What the hell happened?”

Sarge glanced toward the bed to his right, but its occupant was sleeping noisily. “Come closer,” he said.

Trace leaned over the bed.

“I got run off the road. On purpose. Somebody tried to kill me, Dev.”

Trace looked at him sharply to be sure the old man was not joking.

“It’s true,” Sarge said. “I spotted the car following me when I left Manhattan.”

“When was that?”

“Last night, about one or two o’clock or so. I saw the car following me over the bridge. Then, when I got close to the block near the house, there’s that overpass, and the son of a bitch cut me off and tried to run me off the top of it.”

“What’d you do?”

“I banged along those railings for a while, but I finally fought it back on the road. I cracked my head on the windshield. I remember trying to look out the window to see the bastard—I was going to peg a shot at him—but he was gone or his lights were out. And then I passed out and I woke up here. I’m okay, though.”

“You don’t think it was just an accident?”

“No, it was on purpose. Somebody wanted either to kill me or hurt me or give me a warning.”

“Who?” Trace asked. “What jealous husband do you have riled up now?” And then he realized what he said might not have been as funny as all that. “Did you recognize who was in the other car?”

“No. Two guys. I saw that much, but I couldn’t see their faces.”

“Recognize the car?”

“Big old thing, plates muddied up, I don’t know.”

“The cops told me that you lost control of the car,” Trace said.

“That’s what I told them.”

“Why not the truth?”

“What for?” Sarge asked. “The guys who did it were gone, and cops have too much to do to go looking for them. And I don’t want a lot of people nosing around in my business.
Our
business.”

“You think this had something to do with Tony Armitage?” Trace asked.

“Sure. I got a lot done yesterday and maybe somebody saw me.”

Trace pulled over a chair. “Maybe you ought to tell me about the lot you got done yesterday.”

“First thing, I went up to Connecticut real early in the morning and I found a store right near where the kid lived that sold those Nixon masks. And bingo, the clerk remembered Armitage buying one. I had a picture of the kid and he recognized him.”

“Why the hell didn’t the cops find that out?” Trace asked.

“Maybe it wasn’t important to them,” Sarge said. “But it
is
important. He bought that mask himself. That’s got to mean something.”

“That’s what Chico says too. She kind of guessed that it was his mask.”

“She’s eerie sometimes, that woman,” said Sarge.

“So anyway, I get back to the city and I get your note at the restaurant and I went to some friends of mine on the city liquor squad and I got a home address and next of kin on that Dewey Lupus. I went to his apartment, but the landlord said he hasn’t seen him in a month. He skipped the rent and the landlord was getting ready to rent the place again. He said Lupus left all his stuff and I got him to let me in.”

“Find anything?”

“The apartment had been tossed, Dev. It was a mess, with everything thrown all over. I asked the landlord if anybody had been there and he said he saw two guys skulking around about a month ago, but he didn’t know.”

“Could he describe them?”

“He said they were big and ugly and they dressed like George Raft.”

“I think I maybe know who they were,” Trace said. “And you got run off the road by two guys.”

“Think they were the same?” Sarge asked.

“I think so because I was someplace last night where they should have been and they weren’t there. I think they were out taking you over the hurdles.”

Sarge shrugged. “Anyway, I went through what was left of Lupus’ apartment, but I didn’t find anything that counted for anything.”

“Think about this. We found out that the kid was kidnapped the night before he was killed. Anything in Lupus’ apartment that goes with that?” Trace asked.