When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (3 page)

“I didn’t know private detectives had molls,” she said.

“I’m breaking new ground,” Sarge said.

“Whenever you two are finished,” Trace said. He took the newspaper clipping from his inside pocket and handed it across to Sarge.

As he took it, Sarge asked Chico, “Don’t you think he ought to join up with me?”

“Why would you want him?” she asked.

“Just father and son, it’d be nice.”

“Well, if it’s true that private eyes are all deep thinkers, I don’t know,” she said. “Trace is about as deep as a rain slick.”

“I’ll teach him, though,” Sarge said. He looked toward the far side of the bar for a moment, wistfully, and said almost to himself, “Your mother said I was just throwing away good money. If I had to work, I should get a job in a bank somewhere as a guard.”

“That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” Trace said. “Even from my mother.” He glanced at Chico and she shook her head slightly as they shared the same thought. His mother was a thoughtless, hardhearted, unloving emasculating kvetch.

“Read that clipping,” Trace told his father. “Come on, I don’t have all year.”

Sarge read the clipping quickly, then handed it back. “I saw this story,” he said. “I know the family. Armitage’s got a bad reputation. A bad guy with a bad temper.”

“Well, that’s what I’m working on. And I need your agency.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s going to be a lot of legwork in this,” Trace said. “And I don’t have any contacts in New York. I need you on this.”

“This one of your insurance cases?” Sarge asked.

“Yeah, we had the kid’s policy. How do you know the family?”

Sarge looked across the bar as he answered. “I know the kid’s mother, Martha, from a long time ago, when I was a cop in Brooklyn.” He turned back and looked down at his beer.

“Think she’d remember you?” Trace asked.

“I imagine so,” Sarge said. “I guess so.”

“Then I double need you. You’re an in to the family. You ever meet this guy?” He looked at the clipping. “Nick Armitage?”

“No. But I’ve heard of him.”

“The paper kind of hints that he might be a mob guy. Do you know anything about that?”

“I think he moves dope. He used to move a lot of it,” Sarge said. “But maybe he’s gone straight. I could find out.”

“How straight would he be, owning a night-club?”

“Not too,” Sarge said. “But I’d find out.”

“All I’ll pay you is a hundred a day plus reasonable expenses.”

“My usual fee is two hundred a day,” Sarge said.

“How the hell do you have a usual fee when you haven’t had a client yet?” Trace demanded.

“If you set your price cheap, people don’t appreciate the work you do. I thought that was one of the things I taught you when you were little.”

“Okay, okay. How about a family discount?”

“For you, a buck and a quarter a day. Nothing less.” Sarge nodded at Chico. “Unless she works with me. Then I’ll do it for nothing.”

“Nothing doing,” Trace said. “She’s on my team. I need her brains.”

“I’m not working with anybody,” Chico said. “I’ve come to New York to shop. Bloomie’s gets my brain and body and soul.”

“A hundred and a quarter a day,” Sarge said.

“You’ve got it,” Trace said. He nodded for a moment, then grumbled, “Maybe I will go into business with you. You’re a goddamn thief, and it might be my only way to get rich.”

Sarge turned down their invitation to join them for dinner.

“I’ll pass. I want to be home when your mother calls from Las Vegas. She worries if I’m not home.”

“When does she call?”

“Never know. Usually late. She forgets about the three-hour time thing.”

“Horseshit,” Trace said. “That woman forgets nothing. She calls that late just to wake you up and annoy you and bust your chops. I know that woman.”

“Afraid I do too,” Sarge said. “I think I’ll be home when she calls. In case she calls early.”

“Have it your own way. I’ll see you in the morning.”

He left them and Trace told Chico, “First thing we have to do is find excuses to keep Sarge out all night. Screw this pussy-whipped bullshit about being home in case my mother calls.”

“Don’t bet that hand too high,” Chico said.

“Why not?”

“How long’s she supposed to be gone for?”

“Eight days and seven nights,” Trace said. “You know, somebody ought to offer a special gambler’s package. Eight days and six nights. The last day you’re there, you’ve lost all your money and you can sleep in the gutter.”

“Mess around with her phone calls and she might come back early,” Chico warned. “She might get here before we leave.”

Trace thought about that for a moment, then nodded. He called out softly after Sarge’s departing figure, “Hurry home, Sarge. Hurry. Man the telephones. You’re the last best hope of civilization.”

Trace told Chico that she was much too beautifully turned out to waste, so he would take her someplace fancy for dinner. She was impressed until they got into a cab and Trace told the driver to take them to Chez Nick.

The cabbie grumbled about losing his place in line at the hotel and Trace understood why when he found out the restaurant was only six blocks from the hotel. The afternoon humidity had finally broken, and on the warm pleasant night, they could easily have walked, Chico pointed out to him.

“What? Walk with you? Down all these mean streets where violence dwells? Where muggers and white slavers and pimps and pornographers are just waiting to scoop you up and take you away from me. Not a chance, girl. I am your man, and to prove you’re a man, you may not live like one, but you have to be prepared to die like one.”

“What the hell does all that mean?” Chico asked.

“Listen to him, he’s right,” the cabbie said, hoping to earn a big tip.

“See?” Trace said trimphantly. “He recognizes a big thinker when he sees one. You know what they always say. You want to know anything in New York, ask a cabdriver. Or a private detective. Keep your door locked so nobody breaks into the cab if we stop.”

Trace gave the cabbie five dollars and told him to keep the change. Outside the restaurant, under the canopy that reached to the curbside, he told Chico, “It’s annoying, having this restaurant so close to the hotel. I could really have run up the expenses if it were far away.”

The tuxedoed maître d’ turned toward them from his station as they entered, and Trace jumped forward and shook his hand and greeted him effusively. “Pierre, good to see you again. How’s the family, Pierre?”

“Very good, sir,” the man said chillfully. “I’m George.”

Trace snapped his fingers. “Of course. Pierre’s your twin brother. Give him my best. Do you have a table for me and the lady?”

The maître d’ made a pretense of checking his reservation list, and when he turned back, Trace shook his hand again and put a twenty-dollar bill into it.

“I think we can take care of you. I’ve forgotten your name, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Rascali,” Trace said. “Luigi Rascali.”

The maître d’ nodded. Trace noticed a set of double doors that led to a stairwell. The doors were marked simply “TO THE DANCE.” He thought if that was the disco entrance, the restaurant’s soundproofing system was wonderful because he heard no music at all where he was standing, except the unobtrusive playing of a piano in the far corner of the dining room.

George took them to a table in a corner of the room, and when they had been seated, Trace told Chico, “I like this place a lot.”

“Why? You haven’t been here three minutes yet, Mr. Rascali.”

“Because it’s not like New York restaurants. We’re sitting by ourselves. Usually in a New York restaurant, they jam you shoulder and jowl with other people and they’re always talking about the stock market. Or what’s in
New York
magazine. Who gives a shit? And then they always order smelly disgusting food. They’re sitting so close you have to smell it, and it’s awful but they wolf it down anyway, splattering juice everywhere. New Yorkers all eat like pigs. I think they give out stars on how many people a restaurant can jam into one room without any of them being comfortable.”

Chico leaned over and said softly, “You said it’s a Mafia place. Maybe that’s why. Maybe the Mafia doesn’t like people listening in on their conversations.”

“You kidding? That’s what they like best. That’s why they do all that ring-kissing and that phony yap-yap. ‘I am honored, Don Duck, that you have chosen to grace my humble establishment with the eminence of your august presence,’ and ‘It is a mark of the high esteem in which I hold you and your family that after many years, it is good to return to such a place of warmth and friendship,’ and they go on like that forever. They
want
everybody to hear them.”

“How do they get any business done, then?” Chico asked.

“On the telephone, the way everybody else does. They come here at night and they talk all that crazy shit, and the next day they get on the phone and they call Louie McGurn-Gurn and they say, ‘Louie, go shoot Pasquale in the fucking head. Right. He owes me forty dollars and I’m tired of waiting for the cheap bastard. Plug him.’ That’s why they’re always getting arrested. The FBI has all their phones tapped, but they wouldn’t waste three cents tapping a joint like this. Nobody ever says anything that means anything.”

“I didn’t know you were such a big expert on the Mafia.”

“I know everything,” Trace said. “The real Mafia decisions, they’re made by some guy eating fried peppers out of a paper bag in a plumbing office somewhere. The stuff they do here at night is just for show. It’s to impress each other.”

It was still early in the evening but most of the restaurant’s tables were filled. The room held about one hundred diners, Trace figured, but the walls were covered with heavy fabric and tapestries that muffled sound. Even the piano player at the far end of the room was unobtrusively muted. Most of the groups that were eating were four men, no women, and a lot of the men spent a lot of time glancing across the room at Chico.

Trace was used to it, and whenever his eyes met theirs, he smiled a lot and shot his sleeves so that his cuff links showed.

“I wish I had worn my nine-pound cuff links with the engraved map of Sicily,” he said. “That’d get us some respect around here.”

The waiter seemed disappointed when Trace ordered only a beer and Chico Perrier water, and was crushed when Trace said he would pass on the wine list for now and they would just like to look at menus.

As was normal, Chico seemed to order one of everything. Trace settled on a salad and a steak. He noticed a man in a tuxedo who was working the room like a politician, going from table to table, smiling, talking, shaking a lot of hands, then moving on.

The man was average height, but even the well-cut tuxedo did not hide the fact that he was lumpily muscular. His neck was that of a football player and his chest was thick. His hair was black, streaked with gray; he was well-tanned, well-manicured, and his smile was so white his teeth looked as if they had been sandblasted to an almost inhuman level. Killer Dobermans wouldn’t mind having teeth like that, Trace thought.

Trace picked at his salad while Chico polished off her spiedini appetizers, soaking up the anchovy sauce with a lump of bread the size of her fist. Then she attacked her salad. Halfway through hers, she saw Trace had not eaten the cherry tomatoes in his, was in fact nibbling his way around them, and she speared them quickly with her fork and put them into her own salad bowl.

“I was saving them for last,” Trace said.

“Too late. He who hesitates is lost,” Chico said. She quickly gulped down the tomatoes before he could argue about them. “Digestion is nine points of the law,” she said.

Trace saw the husky man in the tuxedo reach the maître d’s station and engage George in quiet conversation, while looking at the seating chart and the reservation book. When he glanced in their direction, Trace looked down at his salad. A few minutes later, the man was standing in front of their table. Trace reached under his jacket and turned on his recorder.

He waited for Trace to look up, then flashed a very wide white smile and said, “I don’t plan to interrupt your meal, Mr. Rascali. I just wanted to welcome you to Chez Nick. I’m Nick Armitage.”

“Call me Luigi,” Trace said, and extended his hand. “This is Miss Mangini.”

Chico looked up, nodded imperceptibly, and went back to her salad.

“Your first time here?” Armitage asked.

“Yes. A beautiful place. I am always pleased to be in such a beautiful place when I come in friendship,” Trace said.

“It’s beautiful now that Miss Mangini’s in it,” Armitage said.

Chico smiled. “Thank you.” She bent over her salad again.

“Have you come far?” Armitage asked Trace.

“It is never too far to come to spend an evening in warmth, among people to whom living is all.” Chico kneed him under the table, hard, and Trace added, “From Los Angeles. I was sorry to hear of your troubles.”

“Troubles?” Armitage looked puzzled.

“The tragedy in your family. I read about it.”

“Oh. Yes, thank you. I appreciate your concern.” He nodded several times slightly, more to himself than to Trace.

“A terrible thing,” Trace said.

“Yes.” Armitage gripped the edge of the table with both hands.

“And no knowledge of who committed this odious act,” Trace said.

“None. But someday,” Armitage said. He smiled broadly again and said, “If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know, Mr. Rascali.”

“Thank you. We will. And it’s Luigi,” Trace said.

“Luigi.”

After he left, Trace told Chico, “Doesn’t seem too broken up.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He looks to me like he’s on a very tight string, the kind that snaps. Please. No more of that Mafia dialogue nonsense. I almost choked.”

“Okay. I wanted to show you how it was done, was all.”

“And why’d you tell him we were from Los Angeles?”

“Because Las Vegas is too small a town. If he got curious about us, he’d be on the phone in a flash, and twenty minutes later he’d know everything there is to know about us. Vegas, everybody knows everybody. It’s got the small-town syndrome.”

Chico paused later, during their entrées, and said, “By the way, don’t think I haven’t noticed that you’re hardly smoking.”

“I’m going to win that bet,” Trace said. “Five hundred smackers for no excessive smoking, drinking, sexing, and exercise every day.”

“We’ll see. But if you want, you can smoke tonight. Start your new life tomorrow.”

Trace immediately lighted a cigarette. He noticed Armitage talking to two men sitting at a small table in the far corner of the room, near the piano. The two men were young, apparently in their late twenties and each was wearing a dark-blue pin-striped suit. Both had wavy hair and acne-pocked coarse features. And both were big. Trace noticed one of them glance at him as Armitage was talking to them.

Outside, walking back to their hotel in the pleasant summer evening, Trace asked, “How was the meal?”

“Mock French. Average. How were the prices?”

“Real French. Average freaking outrageous.”

“That’s what you get for making believe you’re taking me to dinner when you’re really working,” she said. “I knew when I saw that silly frog tie clip you were wearing.”

“Sorry about that. Thought I might as well get the lay of the land.”

When they started into the Plaza Hotel, Trace glanced back and saw the two young men in the pin-striped suits standing on the corner watching them. They had followed him from the restaurant. He thought about it for a moment, then decided not to tell Chico. At least not until he knew why they were being followed.