Pigs Get Fat (Trace 4) (4 page)

“That’s what I told her.”

“What I don’t understand is how any of this involves you. Or Gone Fishing, for that matter.”

“Gone Fishing?”

“Garrison Fidelity,” Trace said.

“Oh. The insurance company. That’s a good one. Well, anyway, I didn’t know what I should do. Maybe I should call the cops or maybe I should butt out. But two hundred thousand is a lot of money. Anyway, the policy was so fresh I didn’t want anyone to think I was a patsy for some kind of scam. That’s when I called Walter.”

“Groucho,” Trace corrected.

“Sorry. Groucho. So I was just kind of looking for guidance. You know, I don’t want to be the cause of having Judith Collins get the whap whaled out of her by her husband either.”

“How did my name come up?” Trace asked.

“Wal—Groucho said that maybe an investigator should take a look at it, just in case there was some kind of fraud involved. He said there’s a lot of ‘Quick-policy/accidental-suicide’ going around.”

“Groucho’s suspicious,” Trace said. “He thinks Indira Gandhi was an insurance fraud.”

“So he told me maybe he’d send out an investigator and then he called and told me you were in the area and it was lucky because you were Garrison’s best man and he’d ask you to stop in.”

“He said I was their best man?” Trace asked.

“That’s what he said. And I can see how he’d think that,” Mabley said.

“Why?”

“Because you seem to be right on the ball. Like a guy knows the score and how to get things done,” the insurance agent said.

“Skip all that, it’s making me sick. Tell me about this Collins. What’s he do anyway?”

“He’s a real-estate man. It’s a pretty big firm around here, Collins and Rose. I was surprised that Collins didn’t have any insurance before this.”

“How old is he?” Trace asked.

“Maybe forty-five or so. Your age. Forties. It’s on the application.”

“Forties?” Trace said. “My age? I’m just forty. Just barely. Only seven months ago was my birthday. I’m so fresh at forty I still think of myself in the thirties.”

“Well, you don’t look it,” Mabley said.

“And I hate your stupid jacket,” Trace said.

“No, no,” Mabley said. “It’s not that you look old. It’s just that you’re a big investigator and all, and you couldn’t have that much experience and still be so young, you know.” He seemed happy with that excuse, so he repeated it. “I didn’t think you could be so experienced and young too.”

“Yeah, okay,” Trace said. “This real-estate firm, you say it’s doing well?”

“It’s hard for a real-estate company not to do well in California,” Mabley said. “I think I should’ve gone into real estate instead of insurance. God isn’t making anymore real estate, you know. Especially around here.”

“Who is Rose?”

“Collins’ partner. I never met him.”

“Okay. What do you know about the Collinses?” Trace asked.

Mabley shrugged. “Nothing really. I mean, I met them when they came in for insurance that Saturday morning, but that’s about it. I talked to her since then, when the policy came, is all.”

“That’s another thing. Why’d you deliver the policy to them? Don’t you just mail it?”

“I figured with all Collins’ real-estate deals, it might be good advertising to deliver the policy personally. Every real-estate deal needs title insurance and stuff like that, and I figured maybe I could get a foot in the door,” Mabley said.

He finished his drink, wiped the pink froth off his lips, and looked Trace in the eyes. Trace didn’t like his eyes. They looked like the eyes of a whiny dog.

“So can you help me?” Mabley asked.

“What help do you need?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe I missed something. Maybe I should have forced the wife to go to the police. Maybe you could talk to her.”

“I hate to talk to wives,” Trace said. “You already did the right thing by calling Groucho. At least he knows you’re not trying to skin the company.”

“Should I call the police?”

“I don’t think it’s any of your business,” Trace said.

“Don’t you think Mrs. Collins should call the police?”

“And that’s none of my business,” Trace said. “Things should just be left alone. They’ll sort themselves out in time. They always do.”

“I don’t know,” Mabley said. “I’m kind of surprised with you. I expected—”

“Expected what?” Trace said.

“Somehow, I don’t know. I expected you to go see Judith and tell her to call the police or find out she’s lying or something, and then the whole matter would be cleared up.”

“You think she’s lying?”

Mabley shook his head. “No. If you meet her, you’d see. Just a sweet little woman. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Why don’t you go see her?”

“I’m on vacation,” Trace said.

“It’d only take you a few minutes.”

Trace thought about the afternoon convention program and Octopus, Its Gastronomic Role in a Changing World, and said, “Give me her address.”

When they left the restaurant, it had started to rain.

“You walked, didn’t you?” Mabley asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll drive you back to your hotel.”

Mabley’s car was a doctor-sized gray Lincoln with more electronic equipment than most houses. Trace had ignored it on the way to the restaurant but now he hated it.

“Car by Radio Shack,” Trace mumbled as he picked up a pair of galoshes encrusted with dried red mud from the front floor and put them in the back.

“I didn’t know people still wore galoshes,” Trace said. He remembered being forced to wear them as a child; it had never occurred to him that an adult might put them on voluntarily.

“Got to protect Mr. Gucci,” Mabley said, pointing toward his patent-leather loafers. “I had to change a tire.”

That settled it, Trace decided. No more chances for Michael Mabley. The galoshes were bad enough, but any man who’d wear patent-leather loafers with someone else’s initials on them was no friend of his. Walter Marks could have him.

But a deal was a deal and he was going to talk to Mrs. Collins, before Gone Fishing had to shell out a couple of hundred grand. He figured he’d give her ten minutes. After all, Walter Marks had said “please” to him.

The Collins home was at the end of one of those dead-ended streets that gets called a court. The roadway is concluded with a circle, around which houses are packed with just enough room beside them for a driveway with car.

It was an arrangement, Trace thought, that benefited nobody but the builder, who was able to jam more houses into less space. On second thought, maybe it also benefited people who wanted to have an address on a court.

In the middle of the circled roadway was a dot of grass big enough for a flagpole. The pole was there, but no flag, which didn’t surprise Trace. Probably all these California types couldn’t agree on what kind of flag to put up now that there were flags for whales and poetry and marihuana legalization. Perish forbid that anyone should think of putting up an American flag.

Trace walked past an early-70’s Plymouth Duster parked in the driveway and rang the doorbell of the Collins home.

Judith Collins was 90 percent of the way toward being a beauty, and Trace had never before realized just how important the other 10 percent was.

She had natural red hair, but she wore it wrong. It hung limp and lifeless around her face, without curl or wave, and Trace had always felt that red hair should be blowsy and breezy to look natural. Redheads were made by God to look as if they had just crawled out from under the sheets with a football team. Mrs. Collins’ mouth was full, but she wore no lipstick and so her lips just seemed to fade into her face. Her nose was turned-up pert and her eyes large and green, but they were just there. A little makeup would have made them worth traveling to see. If ever a woman were a candidate for one of those beauty magazine make-overs, it was Judith Collins.

Trace put her age in the last thirties. About the same age as his. Screw Michael Mabley.

The women kept the screen door closed when she opened the front door.

“Yes?” she said.

“Mrs. Collins?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Tracy. Mike Mabley suggested I talk to you.”

“Mike Mabley?”

“The insurance man who wrote the policy for your husband. I’m with his company.”

“Oh.” She hesitated. “All right. Why don’t you come inside?” She fumbled with the screen door for a while and Trace realized that it had two locks on it.

The house was as mousy and bland as its mistress. The living room looked as if it had been transported, whole, from the display window of a furniture store that still sold a sofa and two chairs for less than three hundred dollars, and would, if you bargained hard, throw in a couple of wood-grained Formica end tables. The rug was a vague tan tweed color and the furniture, upholstered in an equally vague blue, was placed in a precise straight line against one wall. There was a fireplace, bordered with imitation brick and filled with electrical equipment designed to enable fiberglass logs to produce a light that looked red when viewed through cellophane. The few framed prints on the walls looked as if they came from a Sunday-newspaper magazine. Trace expected to find a print of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The only attractive and personal touch in the room was a three-foot-by-two-foot tapes-try of a unicorn hanging unframed on the far wall.

“I’m sorry. You said your name was…?”

“Tracy. Devlin Tracy.”

“Would you like coffee, Mr. Tracy? It’s ready.”

“Thank you,” Trace said. Perhaps the smell of coffee wafting into his nostrils would eradicate the faint smell of pine cleanser that permeated the room.

Trace sank back into the uncomfortable couch. He lit a cigarette and flicked it on into the large plastic kidney-shaped ashtray on the plastic end table next to him.

Mrs. Collins was back a minute later with coffee in two plain white mugs on two plain white saucers. She carried the mugs and a plastic creamer and sugar bowl on a genuine-imitation plastic rendition of an old-fashioned beer tray. Two stainless-steel spoons that looked like giveaways at some theater’s Bingo Night completed the set.

“Mabley told me what’s going on,” Trace said. “Have you heard from your husband yet?”

She seemed at first hesitant to answer. She sipped at her coffee, which she had laced with three spoons of sugar and a generous helping of milk. When she put the cup down, she looked at Trace with eyes that he thought really could have been lovely.

“No,” she said. Her voice was very soft and seemed almost to tremble.

“How long has it been now?” Trace asked.

“Five days. Since Wednesday.”

Trace sipped at the coffee, but it was too weak and he put it back down.

“Aren’t you worried?” he asked.

“I’m very worried,” she said. She hesitated for a moment, as if wondering if it would be appropriate to be outraged by Trace’s question, but her mousy little character decided that outrage was too strong to show. “Of course I’m worried,” she said.

“But you haven’t gone to the police yet,” Trace said mildly.

“I—oh, well—Mr. Tracy, my husband is a very stern man. If I told the police that he was missing and people found out, he’d be a laughingstock when he came home. I couldn’t do that.” She shook her head, agreeing with herself. “No. I couldn’t do that.”

“Suppose something’s happened, though?” Trace said.

“And suppose nothing’s happened? Thomas would just kill me if I embarrassed him.”

“Has your husband gone off before like this?”

“Sometimes he goes away on business. Conventions and like that,” she said.

“Without telling you, I mean,” Trace said.

She paused for a moment. “Never for this long,” she said. “I always know where he’s going and how long he’ll be away.”

“So this time’s different. Don’t you think that justifies a phone call to the police?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Tracy. I don’t know. How would you feel if your wife called the police on you?”

“She used to call the police on me all the time,” Trace said. “That was one of the reasons I left.”

“Well, I wouldn’t involve Thomas,” she said firmly. “He doesn’t like disorder in his life, and he certainly wouldn’t tolerate being embarrassed.”

“What
does
Thomas like in his life?” Trace asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know. The real him. I don’t know anything about your husband. What is Thomas Collins like? I know he’s a real-estate man, but what are his hobbies? Is he off hang-gliding somewhere in Alaska? What does he do when he’s not in the office?”

“Real estate is actually his whole life, Mr. Tracy.”

“Call me Trace. No hobbies? At night he sits around here and makes real-estate deals?”

“You’re joking, but that’s almost right. He reads site plans and maps and sits with his calculator and figures out cost estimates or whatever it is real-estate people do.”

“Must be dull for you,” Trace said.

“Not really. I have my art. I do tapestries, Mr. Tracy, and now there is finally some demand for my work.”

“Is that one of yours?” Trace pointed to the hanging on the far wall. The woman nodded and Trace said, “I don’t know anything about it, but I can tell it’s very good work.”

“It better be,” she said. “It has to send our daughter through college.” She seemed embarrassed at the praise, because a faint blush colored her cheeks.

“Was Thomas working on any special project that might have taken him out of town?” Trace asked.

“I don’t know. We never discussed his business.”

“He has a partner, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. Rafe Rose. Collins and Rose.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“About what?”

“About your husband being missing?” Trace said.

“Yes. I called him Friday. He said he hadn’t seen Thomas since Wednesday afternoon. I saw him Wednesday morning. He said he was probably out putting together some kind of deal.”

“Doesn’t his being absent like that gum up his office’s schedule? I mean, can the boss afford to take that much time off?” Trace asked.

She shook her head. “Rafe and Thomas work differently from most partners, I guess. Rafe handles the office and the day-to-day business of real estate.”

“And your husband?”

“From what I gather, he’s more involved in putting together deals. He’ll find somebody who wants to build a shopping center and someone else who owns property that would be good for a mall, and he’ll get a builder who’ll take a percentage of ownership in place of a part of his fee, and he works out a package that meets everyone’s needs. He spends many days here on the telephone rather than in the office. He says he can work just as well here as there. Better, because the phones aren’t always ringing.”

“Does your husband have an office in the house?” Trace asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you look at it? Does he keep an appointment book that might show he was going out of town?” Trace asked.

“I looked very carefully, Mr. Tracy, but I couldn’t find anything. Would you like to see the office?”

“No. I couldn’d find anything that you didn’t find. When did you see Thomas last?”

“Wednesday morning. He made himself coffee and drove off.”

“He didn’t say where he was going?”

“No.”

“Is that your car in the driveway?” Trace asked, thinking of the ancient rusty Duster.

“Yes. Thomas has a black Corvette,” she said.

“And he went to the office, ’cause they saw him in the afternoon, but no one knows where he’s gone since then?” Trace said.

“That’s correct.”

“You said you had a daughter. Any other children?”

“No, just Tammy.” She rose and walked to the cheap bookshelves that were against one wall and brought back a framed picture.

“You don’t look old enough to have a college-age daughter,” Trace said.

“Tammy’s twenty. She was born when I was very young, my first marriage. My husband died. Thomas and I have been married eight years.” She handed the photograph to Trace, who saw that Tammy looked like she would turn into the woman her mother might have been. Even in the home snapshot, her hair was a flame red, swirling lightly about her face. There was something sensuous and mocking in the eyes, and she looked to Trace like a younger version of Ann-Margaret.

He handed the picture back. “She’s very beautiful. Has she heard from Thomas?”

“No. She went back to school two weeks ago. Hollyhope College. I talk to her on the telephone most nights.”

“And she hasn’t heard from her stepfather?”

“I didn’t even mention to her that he wasn’t here. I didn’t want to burden her with it.”

“I think you should burden someone with it.”

“I couldn’t tell anybody. Not yet,” she said.

“I think you should call the police.”

“Definitely not.”

“How worried are you about your husband?” Trace asked.

“I don’t want to humiliate him.”

“When your worry about him is bigger than your fear of embarrassing him, then you should call the police,” Trace said.

“Mr. Mabley said that you were a detective.”

“I’m an investigator,” Trace said. “That’s different.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Detectives carry guns and get in fist-fights and have a philosophy of life, a moral code.”

“And you don’t have a philosophy of life?”

“Oh, I do. It goes, Don’t get involved,” Trace said.

“I thought you might get involved in looking for Thomas. Just discreetly, you understand. Ask a few questions. Then if he comes back tomorrow or the next day, the newspapers, you know, no one would be saying Thomas Collins vanished and returns. When he comes back, you could just stop working.”

“And if he doesn’t come back?”

“Then you might be able to find him. Or if you thought it was really necessary, then I’d go to the police.”

“I don’t think so,” Trace said. “There’s the matter of my expenses.”

“I don’t have much money, but I’d be glad to pay you for your time,” she said.

Trace shook his head. “You see, I’m in San Francisco on a convention, a vacation. I’m not really working.”

“An insurance convention?”

“No. A Japanese-American convention,” Trace said.

“That must be very interesting.”

“I can tell you’ve never been to one,” Trace said. “No, I’m sorry. Think about calling the police.”

“Thank you for your concern, Mr. Tracy.”

Their coffeecups were empty and Trace rose to leave. At the front door, he saw a small black-and-white framed snapshot on a table inside the door.

It was of a man with thinning gray hair blowing around his head like some leftwing lawyer’s. His nose was thin and needlelike, and his eyes were squinting menacingly.

“This Thomas?” Trace asked the woman.

“Yes?”

“I hope you get him back,” Trace said.

Just before he got into his car, he clicked off the tape recorder on his hip.