When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (5 page)

“By the way,” Trace said, “did you charge Mrs. Armitage a fee?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m charging you. How can I charge her for the same work? It’d be unethical.”

“It’d be good business,” Trace said.

“Grab a plant,” Sarge said.

“Why’s that woman so nervous?” Trace asked his father.

“Martha Armitage?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. I guess she’s just a nervous woman,” Sarge said.

“That’s a great answer. For a bill and a quarter a day, I get ‘because she’s a nervous woman’? Should I pay you now or later?”

They were sitting in a corner of the bar in the downstairs restaurant with the jukebox behind them and the long bar stretched out before them. Trace was drinking white wine and Sarge was sculling down a mug of beer and manfully attacking a large cheeseburger. Lugging the plants down the stairs, he had kept busy touting Trace onto the scungille salad, how it was big enough for dinner for two and the price of an appetizer for one, the best bargain in New York City, and then the restaurant was out of the scungille salad.

“That’s the only trouble. They’re always out of it,” Sarge said.

“That’s how they can afford to sell it so cheap,” Trace said. He spun around on his stool so he could look out the window at the girls passing the restaurant.

Sarge nodded at his son’s wineglass and said, “No more vodka?”

“I’ve kind of given it up,” Trace said. “I’ve been drinking for more than twenty years like a real rumdum and I’ve still got my heart and my lungs and my liver. So maybe it’s time to walk away before God sends me a due bill. And Chico doesn’t like my drinking so much. She said it was making my brain into mush. So I drink this and beer. Except once in a while I slip.”

“How often is once in a while?” Sarge asked.

“Every day,” Trace said. “But only a little. Not like the old days.”

“So now you stopped. Is your brain any better?”

“That’s what I’m worried about. It’s still mush,” Trace said. “And it kind of annoys me a little bit to give up vodka just because Chico wants me to.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s a bad precedent. What’s next? She’s already starting to badger me about my smoking. We’ve got a bet that I’ll really cut down this time. So that’s bad enough. And then, maybe I’ll have to start wearing boxer shorts because she doesn’t like briefs? Or eating whole-wheat bread. And washing my hands every time I finish reading the newspaper. It could get bad.”

“Chico’s all right,” Sarge said.

“Sure. Now she is. But what happens once she gets power over me? Who knows what rotten thing she might want me to do next? I don’t trust women.”

“Not a bad rule generally,” Sarge said.

“So I don’t trust Martha Armitage either.”

Sarge did not answer but instead hunkered down over his cheeseburger.

Trace sipped his wine and glanced at a bank of photos along the top of the wall separating the bar area from the dining room. The restaurant was decorated throughout with photographs and posters of Humphrey Bogart during his film career, and Trace wondered if this strip of photos represented villains in Bogart’s movies. He thought he had never seen a more degenerate-looking group in his life. Obviously, Central Casting had been asked to send over photos of candidates for the roles of pervert, bank robber, child molester, poor-box thief. Evil was written all over their faces. Only one picture was relieved by anything resembling beauty or sanity, and Trace would be willing to believe that the man might have been framed for whatever crime he’d been charged with. But the others were guilty. No doubt about it. Guilty of crimes and guilty of being ugly.

Trace had not been hungry, but if he had been, his appetite would have vanished when he saw that row of portrait photos. He wondered if they could stop Chico from eating. If they could do that, the powers of those photos was immense. They might become the nation’s newest dieting fad, redeemed by the fact that it worked. Men, women, all would drop pounds like snake scales in molt season.

It might finally be the way that he’d make his fortune without working. Another brilliant idea.

His trouble, he often thought, was that he had just too many ideas. You didn’t get rich by having a lot of ideas. You got rich by having just one good idea and then doing something about it. Allen Funt, for example. Trace was fond of thinking about Allen Funt. As far as he knew, Allen Funt had not had a logical thought in his life, save one. Conceal a camera, catch people off guard, and call it
Candid Camera
. That was it. One idea. But it was enough and Funt was rich. Trace had too many ideas and he was poor.

From now on, he was going to isolate just one good idea and then refine it and never let go of it. And this group of degenerates’ pictures as a diet aid might be just the ticket. He’d need a selling slogan: “Nobody every got fat barfing.”

Or “Upchuck your way to slimness and beauty.”

Maybe he could get pictures from a photo service. Buy the rights to reprint pictures of the ugliest people ever to walk in front of a camera. Trace looked again at the collection of portraits on the restaurant wall. No. That group was perfect. Just perfect. Except for the one face near the right side. It had to go. The man in it looked almost normal.

Sarge had retreated from his cheeseburger. “So why don’t you trust Martha?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Something. I thought you might know.”

“Can’t help you, Dev. Everything she said seemed right to me. Not knowing who might want to kill the kid. Wanting to find out before her husband finds out. It all seemed right.”

“Yeah, that was right enough. But it was her attitude or something. Something was going on there in that office that I just couldn’t put my finger on.”

“I don’t know what it could be,” Sarge said. He ordered another beer.

“You know,” Trace said, “I read those police reports and nobody ever asked if the kid was killed in some kind of hazing prank. Or some kind of thing for some lunatic club. Wearing a Nixon mask. Doesn’t that sound like a prank?”

“I guess so. But what’d those police reports say from those Connecticut pansies? The kid was wearing his mask when he was shot? Why, I don’t know.”

“Me neither. Why do you call them pansies?”

“You read those reports, you have to ask me that? They used words like ‘inferred’ and ‘apparently.’ I’ve seen them before from Connecticut. They call criminals ‘actors.’” He pronounced it in two sharp syllables with the accent on the second: act-OR. “For Christ’s sakes, you get some guy mugging some little old lady at night on a dark street, he ain’t no act-OR. What he is is a mugg-OR.”

“Oh, for the good old days, when you booked poipetrators,” Trace said.

“Damn right,” Sarge said without a glimmer of humor. “Afterward is when the world went to hell. When they started taking away our language. Do you know that in police reports now they say gay. Gay? Would you believe that? Gay?”

“What did you say? Dirty stinking faggots?”

“Dev, you do me a disservice. You know that I am a man without prejudices as long as the low-lifes of the world stay away from me. No, we did not refer to them as dirty stinking faggots. We called them exactly what the language dictates that we do: homosexual perverts. I defy you to find a prejudice in that phrase.”

“It’d take a better detective than I am,” Trace admitted cheerily. “What do you think the chances are that the kid was killed, I don’t know, as a lesson for the father? To warn him or keep him in line or something?”

“That won’t wash, I don’t think,” Sarge said. “Nick Armitage is a tough guy, from what I know, but he’s not really a mob guy. Not anymore. Maybe he was once, but not anymore. He runs his nightclub and I’m sure he moves drugs around up there, but I don’t think he’s any threat to anybody. And if he was, if somebody had a beef with him, they’d go after him. Not after his family. Families are always kept out of mob beefs. Didn’t you see
The Godfather
? Pacino went nuts when they almost killed his wife and kid.”

“Sometimes life isn’t the movies, Sarge,” Trace said. “His mother says this kid didn’t use drugs, but he had Quaaludes in him. Why? Where the hell did that mask come from? Why, why, why? I don’t know.”

“You’re not supposed to know. You’re supposed to find out. That’s your job,” Sarge said.

“Maybe you ought to nose around with your cop friends. Find out if Armitage has been having any problems with bad guys. Maybe some of your cops have heard something. Maybe—”

“Hey, Dev. I was doing this work before you were born.”

“Not quite, but you’re right. I apologize. You know what to do.”

“What are you going to do?” Sarge asked.

“I think I’ll go up to Connecticut and see what’s going on with Armitage’s two roommates.”

“Anything special in mind?”

“I don’t know,” Trace answered honestly. “I just don’t know.”

Trace called the Plaza to see if Chico wanted to go for a drive in the countryside and escape New York City’s blistering July heat, but there was no answer, so he picked up his rental car at the parking garage two blocks from the hotel and started for Connecticut alone.

He drove up the West Side Highway—carefully, because he always expected more sections of it to fall down—then got onto the New York Thruway and then the Cross Bronx Expressway, finally getting off at the dual exit to the Hutchinson and the Merritt parkways.

Even without seeing a sign, he knew when he had passed into Connecticut. The highways around New York City were littered with the entrails of automobiles, hubcaps, tires, old wheels, pieces of fenders, the wreckage of what was once transportation. The roads looked as if they had never been cleaned, as if some fleet of giant pterodactyls had flown over them, dropped stolen cars on the road shoulders to crack their shells, pulled out the meat, and left the husks. But somehow, the big car birds of death didn’t fly over Connecticut, and the roadways there were unlittered and clean.

The Merritt Parkway was particularly pretty, Trace thought, and totally out of date. It was tree-lined with a broad center mall between the two directions of traffic. In the early spring, it glistened with dogwood trees. It was one of the few roads in the East that Trace thought was pleasant to drive on.

But he knew that someone, somewhere in Washington, was drawing plans to make it efficient. Efficient. The big buzz word of the age. Make it efficient. Put tractor trailer rigs on it. Let them drive ninety miles an hour and terrify sane people. Get rid of the trees and flowers and the mall. Put in extra lanes of traffic. Let’s get it rolling. Onward and upward, America. Right smack dab to hell.

First, they’d make it efficient. Then it would turn out to be almost as efficient as the Connecticut Turnpike, where one of the bridges had fallen down a few years before. Or the West Side Highway in New York, which was always semiclosed because it was a hazard.

Cast one small vote, Trace thought, for inefficient. For pretty, old-fashioned, outmoded, and kind of wonderful. If you had to pick a highway to get murdered along, pick the Merritt, he thought. Good going, Tony Armitage.

He passed through one of the vaguely British-looking toll booths in Greenwich, wondered why everybody in Connecticut wanted to think they lived in England, dropped a quarter in the toll box, then pulled off to the shoulder of the road to check the police report on exactly where the young man’s body had been found.

He checked his ashtray and saw that he had smoked only one cigarette since leaving New York and was pleased with himself, because normally, the ashtray would be filled and spilling on the car’s floor mats by now. He lit another as a reward.

The spot where Armitage’s body had been found was about eleven miles down the road. It was an open spot alongside the road, an emergency stopping area, with a large mesh trash basket marked LITTER.

He pulled off the road and got out of the car to look around, but there was nothing really to see and he asked himself what he had expected. Tire tracks leading right to the killer’s house? A painted outline showing where the young man’s body had lain? He realized that it had never done him any good to visit the scene of a crime, but he did it out of habit anyway. The only thing he learned was that litter baskets somehow managed to survive alongside the road in Connecticut and he saw why: it was cemented to the ground.

He got back onto the roadway and drove along until he passed the road sign for a college whose Latin name translated roughly into English as Fat Albert’s. The next exit was for Fairport, the town and the college.

The buildings of Fairport College looked like an exhibit of American garden-apartment architecture, all new and polished and dull. The town around it was run-down and ramshackle unlike some of the neighboring towns like Westport and Weston and New Canaan.

Just off the college campus there were sleazy-looking commercial sections that seemed to specialize in karate classes and triple-X-rated videotapes. He found that Tony Armitage’s last address had been a rickety-looking one-family frame house about six blocks from the campus.

He sat in his car and put a fresh tape into the recorder fastened behind his right hip, then walked across the street and rang the doorbell. No one answered, and no one answered his pounding on the door, but Trace had not expected anyone to, because the house literally vibrated with noise. He could feel the door humming under his hand from music that was being played inside at a volume high enough to loosen the fillings in his teeth.

Trace opened the door and was in a living room that was so neat that he was instantly impressed. In his limited experience with this generation, he had found their college kids usually lived in hovels, rutting in dirt, rolling in filth, learning the skills that would enable them to apply later on for welfare.

The noise was coming from a closed door at the end of the hallway. The door bore a KEEP OUT sign. Trace knocked, and when there was no answer, he opened the door and stepped inside.

His back to Trace, a tall thin man knelt on the floor at the end of a small bed, working on a loudspeaker with a screwdriver. Trace quickly counted seventeen speakers in the room, all of them blaring “She Works Hard for the Money.” There was enough assorted sound equipment—tape decks, turntables, radios, tuners—to make Crazy Eddie feel the hot breath of competition searing the back of his neck.

Who would want so many speakers? A sound engineer? But who else? And why? Trace wondered. And while he was at it, to hell with sound engineers. Trace could not tell the difference between a supermarket record played on a seventy-nine dollar stereo system, and one played by midgets, piloting laser beams, on a system made entirely of platinum. They were all the same to him. The only people who seemed to be really interested in sound were rock musicians and they talked knowingly about balance and mix and tremulous occupulation and autofellatio or whatever the hell it was, and they all nodded a lot as if it were art, and then they turned the volume up three times too high for human ears and took dope so that they didn’t have to listen to it.

It gave Trace a headache and he was getting one now.

He walked forward and touched the young man’s shoulder. He twitched his shoulders as if Trace’s touch was the lighting of a fly and he was trying to shoo it away.

Trace clapped a big hand on the young man’s shoulder, and he turned around, looked at Trace in surprise, then rose to his feet.

He was almost seven feet tall and seemed to Trace about seven inches wide. A shock of unruly tannish hair made him look like a blade of meadow grass.

Over the din, he shouted, “It’s a hundred a month.”

Trace shouted back, “I’ll give you a thousand a month to turn off this shit.”

He looked around the room at the mixers and speakers and tape decks, then back at the young man.

“What?” the young man yelled.

Trace stuck his fingers in his ears. The young man still didn’t move.

Trace said, “I have a friend at the Connecticut Power and Light Company. I’ll have him cut your power.”

“What?”

“That means disable this fucking noise or I’ll disable you,” Trace shouted directly into the young man’s ear.

“Oh.”

The young man wasn’t too sure himself where the noise was coming from because he looked around the room a few times, checking out different units, before nodding to himself and walking over to turn off a cassette deck.

The room slipped into immediate silence. Trace could hear the air pulsate and could make out the faint swish of hair on his arms as the air molecules, still vibrating from the sound, brushed across his skin. He could hear the young man’s pulse, even from halfway across the room. He knew what it was like now to be an Indian yoga. He hoped nothing would happen to change it. Silence. It was wonderful.

The young man talked, and that ruined everything. He had a nasal whiny gulp that mixed adenoids and a terminal case of Southern accent.

“So. You came for the room, you came? A hundred a month. You’re kind of old.”

“Are you Philip LaPeter?”

“Yeah. A hundred a month, I said.”

“I’m not interested in your freaking room,” Trace said.

“Then why you here? The sign, the door, keep out, it said.”

What kind of language was he speaking? Trace wondered.

“I couldn’t read the sign. The sound waves distorted my vision,” Trace said.

“All right, I don’t need funny from you, I don’t even know who you are, doing here, what you want?”

Perhaps the way to deal with him was to respond to the last clause of the sentence, Trace thought. “I want to talk about Tony Armitage,” he said. He watched the young man carefully; there was just a touch of apprehension about his eyes as he said, “He’s dead, he got killed. That’s why I’m renting his room, a hundred a month. You here from the father?”

“No. The insurance company.”

“Oh,” LaPeter said. “We go outside, I make some joe, you want to talk.”

Trace had not heard coffee called joe since he was in the army and sergeants called it that when they were trying to impress recruits into believing that they had been in the army since the Spanish-American War.

LaPeter led the way to the kitchen, a large room in the back of the house. Trace thought that LaPeter and Armitage probably had gotten a good deal when the female roommate moved in because the kitchen was sparklingly clean, as was the living room and all the rest of the apartment he had seen, save LaPeter’s sound studio and bedroom.

“Where’s the girl?” Trace asked.

“What girl, you say, the girl?”

“Hold on. Is there another language we can speak?” Trace said. “We don’t seem to be doing so well in this one. Latin? Spanish? I talk a little Yiddish.”

“Only English I talk.”

“Well, then, talk some,” Trace said. “The girl, Jennie something.”

“She’s been away for a while, away.”

It wasn’t quite a Southern drawl, Trace realized. It sounded more like hillbilly talk, taught to LaPeter by a Chinese grammarian.

“Do you know where she went?” Trace asked.

“Oh, she didn’t go anywhere. She’s staying off with somebody is where she went. She’s around.”

“But she’s not here, is that it?”

“Right. Like you said, right, she’s not here. Joe’s ready.”

He poured water over instant coffee, gave Trace one black without asking if he wanted cream and sugar, then sat down across from him at the kitchen table.

“So what is it that you want, can I do for you?”

“I’m looking into Tony’s murder for the insurance company.”

“You got a card with your name on it, like a card?”

“Right here.” Trace took a business card from his wallet. “My name’s the thing in the middle there with the capitals. Devlin Tracy. I’m not the Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company. That’s who I work for.”

LaPeter looked at the card for what seemed to be a long time, then turned it over and looked at its blank back. He nodded as if it contained everything he had expected to find there.

He handed the card back. “Tell me what I can do for you. I’ll do it.”

“Was Tony Armitage a good friend of yours?”

“Sure. A good friend.”

“How long did you know him?”

“We lived together here almost two years, since sophomore year, we got close.”

“Pals,” Trace said. “Drinking together, going out to eat, like that?”

LaPeter nodded.

“Doing women together, drugs, hanging out?”

“Yeah, like that. We were friends.”

“What about the girl who lives here? What’s her story?”

“She moved in last year only. Jennie. She’s going to be a headshrink.”

“You romancing her?” Trace asked.

“Not me.” His nose wrinkled slightly as if he thought the idea altogether in bad taste.

“What about Tony?”

“What about him? He’s dead,” LaPeter said.

“I know he’s dead. But he wasn’t always dead, was he? Were he and Jennie getting it on?”

“I don’t know I ought to tell you anything like that. All you got is this card, no badge. Do I have to tell anything like that to somebody, no badge?”

“No, you don’t
have
to. The problem, though, is that after me will be a lot of guys and they’ll have badges and you’ll have to tell them all over again, over and over. You tell me and maybe I’ll get this all straightened up and you won’t have to tell anybody again.”

“I don’t know if I trust you.”

“I’m hurt,” Trace said, “really hurt. In all my life, you’re the first person who didn’t trust me. Except my ex-wife. And my mother. But she doesn’t trust anybody.”

“Hey, don’t be hurt,” LaPeter said. “It’s just that, well, it’s hard, sometimes, man, it’s hard, real hard.”

Trace had no idea what the young man meant, but he said, “I can attest to that.” He wondered if he should do his Richard Nixon impersonation and repeat the line. It was the perfect Richard Nixon—imitation line. He decided to do it.

“I can attest to that,” he said again. He twisted his head awkwardly off to one side, lowered his brows, and rolled his eyes up into his head. As he spoke, he nodded as if to himself and held his mouth open as if the words would be followed by a dribble of spit.

LaPeter applauded and laughed. “I love it,” he said. “W. C. Fields. All his movies I see. Do it again.”

“I don’t want to spoil it. Everybody loves my W. C. Fields,” Trace said. “So was Tony banging Jennie or not?”

“Last year,” LaPeter said. “That was why she first moved in. They got hooked up last summer and then she was here, we were all juniors, but it didn’t last long and she stayed on anyway ’cause she pays her piece of the rent, but romances are bullshit.”

Trace tried again. “I can attest to that,” he said, and waved his arms over his head, his fingers in two V’s, again imitating Nixon.

“Love it. That’s the best W. C. Fields ever. Again?”

“No. It’d only spoil the fragile beauty of the moment,” Trace said, miffed. “How long did their romance last?”

“Like I said, not long, month or two maybe.”