When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (9 page)

Trace thought she looked like a younger version of Martha Armitage. She had the same large, wide-set eyes, and although her hair tended more toward red, she had the same snow-white complexion. She was a little shorter, a little more bosomy, and had a wider, fuller mouth.

“Hi,” she said.

Trace stopped. “Hello.”

She turned to Nick. “You going to introduce me to your friend?”

“He was just leaving,” Armitage said.

“Devlin Tracy,” Trace said.

“I’m Anna Walker.” She reached forward and shook his hand vigorously. “Sure you have to leave? Nick says you’re a very interesting conversationalist.”

“I think it’s leave or be thrown off the balcony,” Trace said. “I don’t think Mr. Armitage likes me.”

“Just go, will you please?” Armitage said.

“Sure. I’ll be around.” Trace nodded to the woman and followed Cheryl out into the long hallway that led to the front door.

He stopped alongside a small Chippendale table and lighted a cigarette. While he was dropping the match into the ashtray, he noted the number on the telephone atop the table and repeated it softly so that his microphone could pick it up.

“What’d you say?” Cheryl asked.

“Sorry. Just clearing my throat. Who was that?”

“Miss Walker. That’s Mrs. Armitage’s sister,” the maid said.

They were at the door. “I guess this is goodbye, then,” Trace said.

“It seems that way, doesn’t it?” the maid said.

“What a pity.”

“Life is filled with tragedies,” she said, biting off the words with her brittle British accent. But she was smiling.

Just then, Martha Armitage came down the hall. “I’ll show Mr. Tracy to the elevator, Cheryl.”

“Very good, ma’am. I want to finish the grocery list.”

She left and Martha walked into the outside hallway with Trace.

As she spoke to him, he realized her voice sounded a little thick, muffled, and slurred.

“Was that true?” she said. “Was Tony sleeping with that black girl?”

“Yes.”

“Did Nick break them up?”

“I think so.”

“Nick is…well, he’s very bossy. He pushed Tony very hard,” she said. “
He
wanted Tony to be a lawyer.”

“What did Tony want to be?”

“I think he just wanted to be young for a while. A lot of people never are.” They were at the elevator and she seemed to be looking past Trace, gazing off into space.

She came back to him and said, “It didn’t go so well, did it?”

“He’s got a short fuse,” Trace said.

“I gather you do too,” she said.

“Sometimes. Before a morning drink,” he said.

She nodded agreement.

“I hope you won’t let him stop you,” she said. “Please try hard, Devlin. I don’t want him to be the first to find out who…who killed Tony. It’ll be real trouble.”

“I know. A memory like an elephant. I’ll try to find out. My father and I both will.”

“Patrick promised me that last night,” she said. “But I wanted to hear you say it.”

“You look a lot like your sister,” Trace said.

“Anna? Everybody says that.”

“Except you’re more beautiful.”

“They don’t all say that,” she said.

“What do they know?”

He heard the elevator approaching their floor. A woman came from the floor’s other penthouse apartment, hurrying toward the elevator. She was holding a miniature poodle in her arms.

“Thank you, Mr. Tracy, for your trouble,” Martha said loudly. “Mr. Armitage and I appreciate it.” She turned to the woman and said, “Hello, Mrs. Bentley.”

“Hello,” the woman sniffed.

The elevator door opened. The dog snarled at Trace as he backed carefully into the elevator.

The July heat slapped across Trace’s face as he stepped from the air-conditioned lobby out into New York’s humid air. He walked a few steps away from the canopied entrance to the apartment building, then leaned back against the fender of a car to wait. The fender was uncomfortably hot through the fabric of his trousers.

He lit a cigarette and thought that there should be a way to impregnate cigarettes with liquor, so that a person could smoke and drink at the same time. He gave this vision ninety seconds before regarding it as hopeless. If God had wanted there to be a product like that, He never would have invented marijuana.

He heard high heels tapping on the flagstone walk from the apartment building, and a moment later, Cheryl turned up the sidewalk toward him. He tossed his cigarette away, turned on his tape recorder again, and walked over to her. Under her arm, she was carrying a folding grocery basket.

She smiled when she saw him. “Well, well,” she said. “Fate’s been kind, after all.”

“I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by,” Trace said. “Did you know that eighty-one percent of all the women who go grocery shopping in this neighborhood are mugged? And it goes up to ninety-two percent if they’re pretty? With you, that makes it a certainty. You’re lucky I’m here to protect you.”

“I won’t be able to pay you,” she said.

“Your company is payment enough.”

“Keep it up. I love it.”

As they strolled down the street, Cheryl asked, “Just what is it you do, Mr. Tracy?”

“My friends call me Trace,” he said. “I’m an investigator. I’m looking into Tony Armitage’s death.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about it,” she said.

“Well, then, we’ll just walk. Did you see Tony much at the apartment?”

“Not generally,” she said. “But I work days and I guess he’d be in school most days.”

“I guess. Did you like him? When you did see him?”

“He was nice,” she said.

“Friendly?” Trace asked.

“Yes.”

“Overfriendly?”

She hesitated, then said, “No. Not at all. I have this terrible suspicion that I am being, how do you Americans say it, pumped?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to give that impression,” he said. “I’m just trying to find out what kind of a young man he was.”

They turned left at the corner. “He seemed to be a nice, friendly young man,” she said. “I didn’t know him well,” she said, but her eyes called her a liar.

“Like his father,” Trace said, but the young woman did not comment.

The supermarket was in the middle of the block. Cheryl said, “I’ll have to leave now. I have a lot of shopping to do.”

“I was going to offer to take you to lunch,” he said.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Dinner?”

“Perhaps sometime,” she said.

“Good. That’s better than a ‘no.’”

“Have a nice day, Mr. Tracy,” she said, turning away.

He touched her arm gently. “How do I reach you?” he asked. “For dinner?”

“Just wait in front of that car by the apartment. I pass by every day,” she said with a smile.

“Fine,” he said. “If you need me, I’m in room thirteen-seventeen at the Plaza.”

“Very good.”

“It’s Devlin Tracy,” he said. “Call me Trace.”

“I’ll remember,” she said, and walked into the store.

Sarge was at the bar in the restaurant below his office. The dining room was filled with a lunchtime crowd from a fashion-design school a block away, and Trace grumbled that it looked like a punk rockers’ convention.

“Keeps you young,” Sarge said. He was eating a roast-beef sandwich on rye and had a large mug of beer before him.

“I’m used to Las Vegas,” Trace said. “Pushup bras, see-through blouses, black mesh stockings and garter belts. Wholesome Americana. This ripped sweat shirt and painters’ pants kink is more than I can take. It’s downright unwholesome.”

“Downright upright,” Sarge said. He introduced Trace to the bartender and said, “This is my son. He wants to throw out all the degenerates in the place.”

“Not until my notes are paid off. Please,” the bartender said. He was a wiry man with a bushy mustache and warm, but watchful, owner’s eyes.

“Well, okay,” Trace said. “Just until then.” He ordered a glass of wine and Sarge said, “Still not drinking?”

“Still just beer and wine. I’ve got a bet with Chico.”

“You impress the hell out of me. I always worried about your drinking.”

“It’s a pain in the ass,” Trace said. “I keep waiting to see some dramatic proof of how not drinking vodka anymore is improving my health. Making me stronger. Making me live longer. And I don’t see anything. My pulse is still as fast as a cheap clock ticking. I still wake up in the morning with sewage in my mouth.”

“I know,” Sarge said. “And every two days you run across an article that says a little drinking is good for you. Keeps the blood flowing, helps your circulation, prevents stroke. It made me take the pledge.”

“What pledge?” Trace asked.

“I pledged not to read any more articles,” Sarge said. “Anyway, I’ve got the booze under control now, so I don’t feel too bad.”

“How’d you do it without going buggy?” Trace asked.

“It didn’t have anything to do with what was good for me. It was what was good for the rest of the world. I found out I was turning into a Wild West cowboy, rip-roaring, rooting-tooting drunk. And I was afraid that some night I’d turn into a rooting-tooting
shooting
drunk and get somebody dead that didn’t deserve to be dead. Although that might be hard in this city. So that’s when I quit for real.”

“It’s been a long time,” Trace said.

“Ten years now. And once in a while I cheat—I think a man’s got to be allowed to cheat once in a while—but when I do, I drink home so the only person likely to be a victim is your mother. And that woman’s indestructible, as you know.”

“How is she, by the way?” Trace asked.

“I didn’t talk to her yesterday, but she’s fine. She couldn’t reach me last night, so she called seven neighbors and made them all come over to the house to make sure that it wasn’t on fire or that I wasn’t lying dead in the kitchen.”

“What did you do?”

“I knew she’d do that. She always does. So I left a note on the door.”

“What note?” Trace asked.

“It says, ‘Dear neighbors, I am all right. I am just out. Patrick Tracy.’”

“That should take care of it.”

“No,” Sarge said. He bit into his roast-beef sandwich, washed it down with beer, and said, “No, it never does. After your mother calls the seven neighbors who are still talking to her, she decides that they’re trying to shield her from the truth, so she calls the police precinct to report me missing or dead. Mind you, this is all by long distance from Las Vegas. She carries a Rolodex with her of the people she can call to harass me.”

“What do the cops do?”

“I’m an ex-cop. They cover for me. If I’m going to be out, I let them know, and whatever time Hilda calls, they tell her I was just there but I left and I’m helping them out on a case.”

“And she buys that?” Trace asked.

“What choice does she have? The only alternative is for her to fly home, and if she did that, she might miss the million-billion-zillion dollar jackpot on the nickel slot machine.”

“I tried calling you last night too,” Trace said.

“You should have tried the police precinct. They would have told you I was just there but I left.”

“Where were you? What’d you do? Have a big date?”

“Some big date,” Sarge said. “You asked me to nose around with the cops about Armitage. See if anybody’s got it in for him. So I prowled around the city last night talking to every cop I still know who isn’t senile.”

“So, what’s going on?”

“Nothing. Armitage is running his nice, neat small protected narcotics business in his club. Nothing big, nothing troublesome. Everybody knows it but everybody leaves him alone. He apparently has a pretty large payroll wearing blue. But nobody’s been mad at him, nobody’s been moving in, and he hasn’t been trying to take over anybody else’s business. There wouldn’t be a reason for anybody to hit the kid as a lesson to him.”

“That’s right. And you said the mob wouldn’t do that anyway,” Trace said.

“Not the mob. But remember, Armitage is mostly dealing cocaine and you’re not talking the mob anymore. You’re talking Colombia and Venezuela and all those countries, all those Latins, and they’re all nuts. They’d blow up a school in session to erase a blackboard. But as I said, no sign of that. Everything’s peaceful.”

Trace waved for another wine. He asked the owner if he had any scungille salad.

“Not today.”

“I told you, son, they never have it. That’s why it’s the cheapest thing on the menu.”

“Next week, we’re advertising squab for a dollar,” the owner said. “That’ll take your mind off the scungille.”

When the wine came, Trace asked his father if he had any word about what Nick Armitage might be doing.

“That’s one of the things that’s funny,” Sarge said. “Armitage always had this reputation as a guy who takes out his own garbage, without anybody’s help. But there’s no word out on the streets about anything he’s doing about the dead kid. Nobody’s looking for the killer for him and there’s no money out on the street for a tip and not even a sign that he gives a damn. I heard he wouldn’t even go with the Connecticut cops to see the murder scene.”

“Maybe he didn’t like the kid,” Trace said.

“He’s got to save face, though,” Sarge said. “Hell, he could hate the kid, but it was his kid and somebody dropped him and he’s got to even the score. A very Italian trait. Well, you know that, you live with half an Italian.”

“It’s the Japanese half that makes me miserable,” Trace said. “I was up in Connecticut yesterday. I saw some guy hanging around one of the kid’s roommates, and I think he might be one of Armitage’s men. I’m not sure, but I think I saw him in Nick’s club last night.”

“Well, that’s something anyway. Does the roommate know anything, do you think?”

“I’ve got to keep working on it. She wouldn’t talk to me,” Trace said. “So that’s all you did last night?”

“Yup.” Sarge gulped his beer and pushed the empty glass back across the bar. “Do it again,” he said to the bartender.

“Make it fast,” Trace said, “or he’ll steal your plants again.”

“We only leave the dead ones out for him to steal. He’s harmless,” the bartender said.

Trace told Sarge about his trip to the dead youth’s college, and then his and Chico’s adventures the night before in the Chez Nick disco. Sarge was laughing aloud when Trace finished telling him how Chico had left one of Armitage’s hired muscle men writhing in pain on the dance floor.