When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) (10 page)

“I love that woman,” Sarge said. “I truly do. Don’t let her get away, son.”

“More her choice than mine,” Trace said. “If she ever decides to change career fields, maybe the two of us’ll have something to talk about. Anyway, I saw Martha Armitage today.”

“Oh?” Sarge turned on his seat to look at his son.

“I went up there to talk to the husband. How’d she get involved with him anyway? He’s a nasty bastard.”

“Don’t know. Just somebody from the neighborhood, I guess. A kid’s romance, and then it gets to be a marriage and then somehow he gets to be connected and rich. It happens that way sometimes, even to nice ladies, and before they know it, they’re mobster’s wives.”

“Enough to make a woman drink,” Trace said casually.

“Yeah. I guess so,” Sarge said.

“How well do you know her?” Trace asked.

“I think I told you. I met her once on a case. You sound really interested, Dev.”

“I met her sister too. Anna Walker?”

“I don’t know her.”

“She was up at the apartment. I saw her and Nick in a clinch.”

Sarge sipped at his beer. “That’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the kid’s murder, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Trace said. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

“I’ve got bad news,” Trace said.

Chico was lying naked on the large bed in the bedroom of their hotel suite. Her long, tapered fingernails were drying under the fifth coat of blood-red nail polish, and she waved them about her head like an out-of-synch orchestra conductor. The movement of her hands and arms created corresponding waves of motion in her breasts which Trace found very erotic.

“Please stop staring at my tits,” she said.

“You need only cover them to prevent that,” Trace said.

She reached for the edge of the sheet and he said, “Don’t you dare. Will you stop worrying about whether or not I like you shamelessly flaunting your body and listen to me? I said I’ve got bad news.”

“Well, try this for bad news,” she said. “The answer is no. No matter how you beg and plead, I am not getting involved in this murder matter of yours. I already did more than I wanted to when I kneed that gorilla last night at the disco. No more. I am in New York on vacation. This town is made blessed by the fact that your mother is absent from it. I intend to enjoy these days. I will not work. Repeat, will not work.”

“For your information, that isn’t the bad news I had in mind,” Trace said.

“Oh? What is?”

“I wanted to tell you that I would not be able to spend this evening with you. I have to go out with Sarge. I didn’t want you to be hurt or feel left out or neglected. I wanted to make sure that you wouldn’t be bored.”

Chico began to giggle. She was a tiny woman and all of her was tiny, in perfect proportion, but for each day of the last three years, Trace had found her more beautiful than the day before. Except for her giggle. It was the dirty snicker of someone with an evil mind.

“Bored?” she said. “Because you won’t be with me?” The giggle became a deep-throated laugh.

Trace felt that his potential absence from her side did not actually call for such hilarity. “I don’t see what’s so terribly funny,” he said.

“Trace. I am perfectly capable of amusing myself in New York City.”

“But you won’t have as much fun as you’d have with me,” he said hopefully.

She laughed again. “That is one of the most idiotic statements I’ve ever heard you make,” she said. “For instance. I love to go to the ballet. The last time you went with me and snored through the entire performance.”

“I told you. Somebody must have put something in my drink before the show.”

“Yes. Alcohol. You drank eight doubles during dinner.”

“I was tense. I needed relief,” he said.

“You didn’t have to spell relief v-o-d-k-a-d-o-u-b-l-e.”

“I didn’t snore loud,” he said. “It was just a little snore.”

“And then, remember, we went to the opera? Remember the opera? You insisted upon singing along.” She waved her arms over her head again. Her breasts moved. He wanted to jump on her. “You mistake Pavarotti for Mitch Miller. ‘Sing Along with Luciano.’ I thought you were going to get us arrested.”

“I regard opera as one of the last strongholds of participatory democracy,” he said. “And I don’t sing. I hum. I like to hum along.”

“Let’s analyze that,” she said. More arm-waving, more breasts. Chico had always felt that her breasts were simply too small. She had always demanded to know the chest sizes of all the other women he slept with. She was sure that he went to other women, only in search of pneumatic fulfillment. The fact was that he thought her bosom was, like the rest of her, perfect, but as many times as he told her this, she refused to believe him. Frustrated, he finally realized that a late-blossoming bosom in childhood could scar an adult for life.

“You say you hum,” she went on. “That’s more or less true, only because you can never remember lyrics. The words to every aria are not ‘Oh, dolce, oh, screamo, insufferato.’ You hum. The trouble is, Trace, that your range is only three notes. And they’re not consecutive. You hum an A, a D, and an F.”

“A perfect D chord.”

“D minor, idiot. Be that as it may. I do not mind one fractional bit of an infinitesimal iota that you will not accompany me wherever I choose to go tonight. There is ballet, opera, dance recitals, all the things that they don’t do in the desert in Nevada, so you can do whatever you like with Sarge. As long as you stay sober. I like you a lot more now that you’re sober.”

She looked up from her nails and saw that Trace had taken off his shirt and was unzipping his trousers.

“Why are you taking off your clothes?”

“Why do you think?”

“I think that
you
think you’re going to climb into bed here and jump my bones.”

“I think you’re right,” Trace said.

“Not a chance.”

“Why not?”

“I have just bathed and powdered and perfumed myself.”

“I don’t care if you’re clean,” Trace said. “I can deal with that.”

“I would have to do all that again,” she said.

Trace snickered. “I just wanted to show you how self-centered you really are. The reason I’m taking my clothes off is so that I can exercise. It’s time for me to do my daily half-hour of aerobic exercise. Dancing in place. Calisthenics. All part of my self-improvement program.”

“You mean those thirteen times you fell down this morning and called them pushups, that wasn’t all?” she said.

“That was just part of it. This is the new me. I’m not drinking anymore. I haven’t had a cigarette since I came back to this room and I’m already two packs behind my daily average. I’m exercising like a whirling dervish. I’ve sworn off self-abuse. I haven’t scored a woman for the longest time, except for you, and I wouldn’t have you now on a bet. It’s the new me, Chico.”

“Some people will do anything for five hundred dollars.”

“Some people will do anything not to have to call What’s-his-name and the girl,” Trace said. “Suppose the ex-wife answered the phone. What would I do then? What could I say? ‘Hello, Bruno, let me talk to Thing One and Thing Two? This is their alleged father’? No way I’m going to lose that bet.”

He lay down on the floor to do a pushup. He got halfway up and fell forward onto his face. “But I’m not joining Sarge’s firm,” he gasped, lying on the floor, panting. “I can’t do all this stuff and think big thoughts too. And I’m not really that hot for gourmet cooking either.”

He tried another pushup. This time he was able to straighten his arms completely before he collapsed and fell onto his face.

“Come on, Trace,” Chico said cheerily. “I’m proud of you. On your feet and do toe-touches. I’ll call out cadence for you. Come on. Stand up. You’re terrible at pushups.”

“I lack incentive. If I had something under me besides this rug, I might amaze you.”

“Don’t hold your breath. On your feet.”

He slowly rose to a standing position.

“All right,” she said. “Bend over and touch your toes.”

He bent over once. His fingertips reached halfway between knee and ankle.

“I can’t touch my toes,” he sniveled.

“Practice. You’ll get better. All right, now straighten up and reach high over your head. Don’t just hang there like that, you look like a rag doll with an empty belly. Come on. Up, down, up, down, one, two, three, four. Up, down, dammit, not just down.”

“I’m stuck. I can’t go down and I can’t get up.”

“Your back?” she said.

“Yeah. Help,” he said softly.

She rose from the bed and walked to him. She put her right hand flat, palm side down, on the small of his back and cradled his chest across her left arm. Suddenly, he straightened up and threw his arms around her.

“A miracle. A miracle. Call Lourdes,” he yelled exuberantly. “The power of your healing body next to mine.”

He squeezed her tight to him and tried to kiss her.

She turned her face away. “Conniving, horny mutt,” she grumbled.

“Tell the truth. You love being wanted,” he said.

“Not by you,” she said, but she turned her face back and let Trace kiss her.

Later, feeling good, Trace called Walter Marks, the insurance company’s vice-president for claims, at his home.

“Hello, Groucho.”

“Where the hell have you been, Tracy?” Marks demanded.

“Doing what you told me to do. Working on that Armitage case. It’s just what I thought. The case is riddled with Mafia types. I haven’t questioned anyone yet who doesn’t look like a gunslinger. I hired a detective agency to protect me. You’ll be happy to know I’m still safe and sound.”

“Overjoyed,” Marks said sarcastically. “I’m sure you’re more than a match for the Mafia. Hit them with your expense account. That would crush anyone.”

“You don’t think they’re anything to worry about?” Trace said.

“Come on. I wasn’t born yesterday. Mafia. Pfff.”

“I’m glad you feel that way,” Trace said.

“Why?” Marks’s voice suddenly reeked suspicion.

“Because I’ve been worried. So I’ve been giving everybody I talk to your business card and telling them my name is Walter Marks. If some guys carrying a violin case come to see you, just stare them right down.”

“What? You gave them
my
business card?”

“Listen, Groucho, I have to go now. But I’ll check in every so often to see if you’re still around. Oh. Another thing. You ought to let your wife start the car in the morning before you get in it. Just a precaution. You can’t ever be too safe.”

“Welcome to Alphabet City,” Sarge said.

“So what is this place that was so important that I come to?” Trace asked his father. They had parked Sarge’s car half in, half out of a bus stop, a few doors shy of a Lower East Side tavern named The Security Blanket. A cutesy-poo neon sign with those words inscribed inside what was supposed to look like a blanket stuck out over the front door.

“What it looks like,” Sarge said. “Nick Armitage’s security blanket.”

As they got out of the car, Trace asked, “Is that old police shield in the window still saving you from getting parking tickets?”

Sarge nodded. “Except you get some of these new bastards on the force. They ticket the mayor so they can get on the six-o’clock news. Publicity hounds. You got traffic cops now who hire public-relations men.”

“You’re being bitter. Maybe they just think the job’s on the level.”

“Nobody who thinks anything’s on the level ever applies to join the NYPD,” Sarge said.

“God, what a cynical old man.”

“Mark it well. It’s the only thing I’ve got to leave you when I go.”

Trace said, “Then don’t go until you can leave something better. So why is this Armitage’s security blanket?”

“When he moved over from Brooklyn, where he was a real small-timer, this was the first place he opened in Manhattan. That must be twenty, twenty-five years ago. Then he opened a bunch of joints and now that big nightclub, but he keeps this one like he doesn’t want to let it go. It’s…I don’t know.”

“I know,” Trace said. “When I was an accountant, I used to deal with this guy who did income-tax returns for people. He’d charge them ten, fifteen dollars. Then he got into a different business and got to be a millionaire. Hell, the interest on his interest was a millionaire’s interest. And still every April fifteenth, he’d sit down and fill out people’s income taxes for ten and fifteen dollars. I asked him why once and he said, ‘They can take all the money away, but this is my skill, they can’t take that away from me. As long as I’ve got that, I always have something.’”

“What’d you think of that, Dev?” Sarge asked.

“I thought it was dopey,” Trace said. “If I were making a million dollars a year, I’d be damned if I’d be filling out somebody’s freaking income tax for ten dollars.”

“Me neither,” Sarge said. “Anyway, I guess you’re right. That must be the way Armitage feels about this place. He won’t let it go. And I thought you ought to take a look at it. Maybe somebody here knows something that you might not find out uptown. Hey, look at this.”

Two young men were walking down the street toward them. They were about twenty years old, and they wore neat tweed jackets and knit ties and button-down collars, and they looked like Jeff and John, the Preppie twins. They were jabbering excitedly at each other, all smiles and orthodontia.

Sarge said angrily to Trace, “It’s like this all the time. This is the most murderous vicious drug-dealing part of the city, and these rich kids who don’t know any better, they come over here to score drugs. They don’t even have enough sense not to go flashing a big bankroll. They think it’s some kind of gentleman’s game, buy a little nose candy for the boys back at the dormitory. Like it’s neat and civilized and they’re not dealing with the degenerate scum of the world. There’s people around here who’d kill them, who’d slip ice picks into their hearts, if they just got wind that somehow these two twits have an extra couple of hundred in their pockets or hidden in their socks. Men of the world always hide their extra money in their sock,” Sarge said.

He shook his head. “These assholes just don’t know. They think this is panty raids and giggles. There’s one or two of them killed every week or so, and they still keep coming back because you can buy anything you want down here.”

Trace knew that “down here” referred to what Sarge had called Alphabet City, a section of Lower Manhattan that covered Avenues A through D. The streets were named with letters, in contrast to New York City’s usual system of numbering its main north-south avenues.

“Cops can’t stop it?” Trace asked.

“They control it. When they see raw meat like these two, they try to chase them so they don’t get hurt. But if they really tried to stop the drug-dealing, they’d just wind up scattering it all over the city again. At least if they keep it here, they can keep hoping that someday there’s a federal grant and they can blow up these blocks and get rid of the problem once and for all.”

“Until the next week, when it opens up again somewhere else,” Trace said.

“Yeah. I know.”

Trace saw the bitter hurt on Sarge’s face. He knew how his father hated criminals. He could talk like a world-weary sophisticate about smart money, about cops on the take, about the system being designed only to help the rich, and all the rest of the fashionable saloon talk of cynical losers, but Trace knew that in Sarge’s heart, the old man wanted the system to work and was upset when it didn’t. He remembered every arrest he had ever made in twenty-five years on the police force. He was proud of every one of them too.

The two Preppies were now almost up to them, ignoring Sarge and Trace, violating the first rule of life in Alphabet City by not continually checking on their surroundings—who was on the street, who was behind them. Sarge was right, Trace thought. These two were hamburger.

He heard his father growl a little deep in his throat and then step out in front of the two youths. They were of average size, but Sarge was tall and broad, and with his shock of white hair, his anger-reddened face, and hands the size of canned hams, he had a tendency to be terribly imposing.

The two young men stopped short, startled by this burly apparition that loomed in front of them.

Sarge pulled out his hip-pocket wallet and snapped it open, showing his old gold New York City police sergeant’s badge.

“What are you two doing here?”

The two hesitated. “Just walking around,” one of them finally said. His voice almost broke in the middle of the sentence.

Sarge nodded, then snarled, “Bullshit.” His face twisted in anger. “I’ve been watching you since you got here and you’re on your way to buy drugs.” The two started to protest, but Sarge snapped at them and cut them off. “Don’t deny it, you two piss-willows. I want you the hell out of here. Right fucking now before I run your asses in for vagrancy.”

“You can’t—” one started.

“And resisting fucking arrest. And assaulting an officer. My partner over there…” He nodded toward Trace, who was leaning against their car. “He saw you try to take a punch at me.” Sarge paused a beat, then leaned his face in closer to the two young men. “Listen. I’m giving you a break. There are special raids going down around here tonight. We’ve got three hundred cops in the area. Buy something and you’ll be bagged.” He straightened up again. “Now you get your little lily-white asses out of here or you’ll have to call Daddy in Westport to come and make bail for you. You understand?” The last two words were a vicious nasty snarl.

The two young men nodded. Neither spoke.

“Then move it. If I see you two again, you’re in deep shit.” The Preppies looked at each other, turned, and started to walk away.

“I said move it,” Sarge yelled. “This ain’t no fucking boulevard stroll.”

The two men started jogging down the block, away from them, and Sarge replaced his wallet. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink,” he said to Trace, his voice totally calm.

Trace pushed himself away from the car. “You did good, Pop.”

“No, I didn’t. They’ll go back to their fancy campus and tell their friends, who’ll say, ‘Why, that pig violated your civil rights, he can’t chase you off the street,’ and they’re going to wind up back here and maybe dead. Did you see them? They were wearing gold watches. Gold watches, for Jesus’ sake. In Alphabet City. God save the children.”

“Maybe you did,” Trace said. “Maybe they’ll live now and grow up just like their daddies. To be advertising writers and bank presidents.”

Sarge looked at him, then at the vanishing figures of the two young men. Mockingly, he called out softly, “Come back. Come back. I was only fooling.”

The tavern was spotlessly clean. From the outside, it looked like a local bar and Trace had expected to see a scene out of
Walpurgisnacht:
degenerates, junkies, pushers, prostitutes, pimps. But instead the half-empty bar looked as normal as any New York City bar could be. Which meant that there was no one there with hair dyed pink.

The bar ran straight along one wall of the building to a partition that led to a backroom that was a combination dining room and cocktail lounge, where a woman singer was working under a small spotlight. Trace saw that she was a small redheaded woman in jeans, sitting on a high stool in front of a microphone, accompanying herself on a guitar.

The bartender nodded at them as they came in and sat at the bar. He was barely thirty, Trace guessed, an open-faced young man, but he looked as if he had already begun to suffer from the ravages of his profession. His face was getting a little fatty in the cheeks, the skin of his neck was loosening, and the whites of his eyes, while not really red, were an unwholesome pink. Trace thought that the bartender had started to go to seed a little earlier than usual. Most of them seemed to be protected from aging by the alcohol they lived with, until about their fortieth birthday, and then they went to hell all at once. This one seemed to have a ten-year head start on degeneration.

Sarge told Trace, “I’ll be right back. Phone call.”

As the bartender approached him, Trace thought of ordering vodka. He hadn’t had a real drink in a long while, and what the hell did Chico expect of him anyway. It wasn’t part of the bet that he would stop drinking totally, only that he would moderate his habits. He thought about it for a moment, then decided reluctantly that it was too early in the evening to start on vodka. He would stick with milder stuff until late in the night and then have a vodka as a reward. The thought gave him something to live for.

“Draft beer for him,” Trace said. “I’ll have red wine straight up.”

The bartender nodded. A speaker system was mounted over the bar and the young singer’s voice filled the room. When Trace and Sarge had walked in, she was singing “Streets of London” and now she was singing “Willie McBride,” another depressingly sad song, but her crystal-pure soprano voice gave the song a beauty he had never heard in it before.

The bartender brought the drinks back. “Start a tab?”

“Sure.” Trace sipped at the red wine.

“You like that shit?”

Trace looked to his right. The man who had spoken was big, with a chain gold necklace, a marine crew cut, and a pullover sweater that bared his neck so you could see the necklace. He was big. The crew cut made him look like a marine drill sergeant on furlough.

“What’s that you’re drinking?” Trace asked, nodding at the man’s shot glass.

“Sour mash. Straight,” the man said.

“I like this shit better than that shit,” Trace said, and turned away. So much for good intentions. If he had ordered vodka, instead of being sanctimonious and drinking wine, this creature would never have spoken to him.

The man’s voice followed him. “Only fairies drink wine at a bar. Faggots.”

“Hey, Ernie,” the bartender said, “cool it.”

“Shut up. I drink here. I can talk if I want. Everybody knows faggots drinks wine. Madison Avenue fairies. Dress designers.”

“Sounds right to me,” Trace said amiably.

“Which are you?” Ernie asked sullenly. He obviously did not want Trace agreeing with him.

“I design ladies’ underwear. You’ve heard of Frederick’s of Hollywood? I’m Frederick’s of Ohio.”

“Fairy. All designers are fairies. What do you think of that?”

Trace beckoned the bartender. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Brian,” the bartender said.

“Is it that this asshole wants to hit me? Is that what it is?”

“What?” asked Ernie. “Who you calling an asshole?”

Trace raised a hand for silence. “Time out, asshole. One conversation at a time. You’re next. First I’m talking to Brian here. Does he want to hit me?”

“Does the Pope say Mass?” Brian answered.

“Who’d you call an asshole?” Ernie demanded, and since it seemed to be important to help Ernie find himself in this world, Trace turned and was about to answer when Sarge’s voice said, “He’s not calling anybody an asshole. But I am, you asshole. Now shut up your big ugly face.”

Trace saw that Sarge had his big hand upon Ernie’s shoulder and was squeezing with his thumb and fingers deep into the trapezius muscle between shoulder and neck.

“Ow, goddammit.” Ernie wrenched away, jumped to his feet, and faced Sarge.

Sarge was a lot older, but just as big and wider and burlier, and his face was a lot meaner.

“Who the hell are you?” Ernie demanded.

“Hold on, Sarge,” Trace said, getting off the bar stool.

“Why?” Sarge asked.

“You promised me that I’d get the next ugly one. It’s my turn.”

“Well, I was talking about ugly human beings,” Sarge said. “I don’t think this thing counts.”

“It’s human,” Trace said. “I heard it try to talk before.”

“Real words?”

“Yes. I definitely heard it say wine. And fairy. It said fairy better than wine.”

“Probably it’s had more practice saying fairy,” Sarge said.

“Maybe, Sarge. But it’s mine anyway.”

“What is this shit?” Ernie snapped. “Why you calling him Sarge?”

“Because he’s a cop, and after I punch your ugly fucking face off, Ernie, he is going to book what’s left of you and throw you in the can. There are a lot of fairies in there on a Friday night. You should really enjoy it.”

Ernie’s mouth moved.

“Here it comes,” Trace said. “Now it’s going to say, ‘Yeah? Says who?’ and you’re going to have to hit it to shut it up.”

“Aaaah, you two are nuts. I’m getting out of here,” Ernie said.

“A wise decision,” Sarge said. “If the nuts are here, can the fruits be far behind?”

Ernie snatched his money from the bar and left, and Sarge and Trace both sat back down.

“Boy, he had me frightened for my life,” Trace said. “I’m glad you were here to protect me.”