Too Old a Cat (Trace 6) (10 page)

“I thought you’d be staying in a hotel,” Hilda Tracy said.

“Naaah,” Trace said.

“You’d probably be a lot more comfortable in a hotel,” his mother said.

“We thought that too, at first,” Chico said sweetly. “But then we thought about your house being unoccupied for a whole week. Burglars could get in and take everything. That lamp over there with the clock in the lampshade, for instance. We know you’d be crushed if anything happened to that treasure. That’s when we decided to stay.”

“Good thinking, girl,” Sarge said. He turned away from his wife and winked at Chico, who was still smiling sweetly, looking at Trace’s mother, her own smile up as a shield to deflect the waves of hatred that came from the older woman.

“Neighbors could always watch,” Mrs. Tracy said sullenly, knowing she was losing this discussion.

“Would they care about that lamp with the clock in the lampshade as much as we do?” Chico said softly. “I don’t think so. Honest, Mrs. Tracy, we don’t mind. That lamp’s new, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I bought it in Atlantic City last month when our club went down on the bus.”

“It’s a real treasure,” Chico said. “It captures the flavor of the real Atlantic City.”

Trace stepped on her foot under the table.

They were at the dinner table in Sarge’s house, and for the occasion, Mrs. Tracy had taken out her box of best paper napkins. The food was pot roast, so overcooked that the meat had turned gray, mashed potatoes that had been punished with an electric mixer for so long that they resembled semen, and green beans that were so stringy the residue could have been used to weave rope.

Trace noticed that none of this seemed to matter to Chico, who still ate as if this were the award-ceremony dinner for the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris.

“Yes, it’s a nice clock,” Mrs. Tracy said. “And we’d feel terrible if anything happened to it.”

“I personally would be shattered,” Sarge said. “I don’t know where I’d muster up the strength to go on.” He poured beer from a can in front of him into a water tumbler, surprisingly made of glass, not plastic.

“There are a lot of little treasures around here,” Mrs. Tracy said. She sat at the end of the table, as far away from Chico as she could possibly get without calling in a surveyor. “You’re going to stay and watch them for us? That’s definite?”

“Yes,” Trace said. “Definite.”

“I’ve made up a little list of things around the house.” She glared at Chico, then looked at her son. “So you’ll know where to find everything.” She reached into the pocket of her shapeless house dress and pulled out a sheaf of papers. From the end of the table, Chico could see typing on the pages.

Mrs. Tracy handed the list to Trace, who opened it up and pretended to peruse the contents of the four typewritten pages.

“That’s real good, Mother,” he said. “I’m sure it’ll come in handy if we have to find…well, say, the ashtray with the roulette wheel in the base. Never know when we might feel like playing roulette.” Chico stepped on his foot this time.

“Exactly,” Mrs. Tracy said. “That’s why I made up that list. So you’ll know where everything is.”

“And you’ll know if anything is missing,” Trace said.

“Or broken,” his mother said. “Sometimes things get broken.” She glared at Chico, who swallowed her mouthful of food and said, “And stolen too. I bet that ashtray with the roulette wheel in the base would bring a pretty penny with some fence.” She gestured with her fork. “You haven’t told anybody you’re going out of town, have you? I wouldn’t be surprised if the street outside is lined with burglars, just hoping they’ll find this house unprotected.” She smiled at Trace. “Good thing we’re staying here, Trace.”

“Sure is,” he agreed. “I think maybe one of us ought to be on guard all the time. Maybe we can take shifts doing guard duty.” He folded the papers and stuck them into his pants pocket. “It’s not just the ashtray with a roulette wheel in the base. There’s a lot of stuff. A ceramic Indian head matchbox holder from Honesdale, Pennsylvania. A collector’s item if ever I saw one.”

“I’ll take the first shift,” Chico said. “Maybe we should rent a guard dog?”

“A pair of them,” Trace said. “Killer Dobermans.”

Hilda Tracy didn’t quite understand what was going on around her, but some instinct told her it was time to change the subject. “It’s nice having dinner like this, Devlin. Do you remember the nice times we used to have at dinner with Cora and your two children?”

“You’ve got a better memory than I do,” Trace said, “especially pertaining to my ex-wife. The last time I remember us eating here, she threw a knife across the table at me.”

“No, no, no,” Sarge said. “You’ve got no memory at all for the high points of your life. The knife was the time before the last. The last time was when she put the sour-cream dip in your coffee.”

“That’s right,” Trace said. “How’d I forget that?”

Mrs. Tracy looked at the small Eurasian woman at the other end of the table. “Don’t listen to them,” she said. “We were a close-knit family then. There was a lot of love at this table.”

“A lot of hate, too,” Trace said. “Bruno, my ex-wife—”

“Her name is Cora,” Hilda Tracy said. “I wish you wouldn’t call her names that aren’t hers.”

“I’ve got a lot of names for her and they all fit her exactly.”

“I’ll bet,” Hilda said.

“Bet red or black and you can use your roulette ashtray,” Sarge said.

Trace and Chico went for a walk before dessert was served, after Chico warned Trace that it was his mother’s special cheesecake, made of spackling compound, and they had forgotten to bring a chain saw with them from Las Vegas.

They walked down the quiet shadow-dappled street of Sarge’s neighborhood in Queens, just a few miles from the bridge to Manhattan.

“Didn’t I tell you she’d have a list?” Chico said. “She thinks I’m going to steal her collection of plaster statuettes.”

“You don’t deserve this, Babe, you know,” Trace said. “I’ve been thinking…”

“Oh, oh. Sounds like trouble to me,” she said.

“Listen to me. I’m doing this for you and you’re doing this for me, right? Well, I wouldn’t blame you if you did pack it all in and just take a powder. First, we’re supposed to be partners in Sarge’s business and he doesn’t have enough business to matter a damn. And then you put up with this bullshit from my mother. Chico, you don’t need all this and I’d understand if you took off.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me?” Chico asked.

“No, but…”

“No buts. First of all, maybe we can make something out of Sarge’s business. Who knows? Let’s try. Second, your mother is the least important person on earth to me. My mother’s Japanese, and if your mother thinks she can lay Jewish guilt on me, she’s off the wall. My ancestors were spreading guilt when your mother’s were wandering the desert in search of sugar diabetes. Forget her. Third, Trace, I want you to do this. I think working with Sarge might be just the thing to get you off the dime and back into the real world. I don’t expect you to stop drinking and I’m not expecting miracles. But I think maybe something good will come out of it. And fourth, and most important, I want to do it. Because
I want a fucking gun
! When do I get it?”

“I talked to Sarge about that tonight,” Trace said. “Being a private detective isn’t as easy as we thought. First of all, there are forms and investigations, and you’ve got to own property, and fingerprints and bullshit. The easier way to go is to be operatives with Sarge’s firm. That just costs six bucks and get your prints taken. Only thing is, then, we can’t be officers in the firm.”

“Screw all that. How do I get my gun?” Chico asked.

“It’s the same in either case. Fill out some forms, send in some money, tell them we protect people and property, and then wait for six months until the cops get off their butt and send you the license to carry. Sarge says he can probably get them to speed it up.”

“If that’s the best we can do, that’s the best we can do,” Chico said. “Maybe I’ll carry one illegally in the meantime. But we’re staying and that’s that.”

“If you say so. Should we move into a hotel?”

“No. What the hell. Let’s stay here. It’ll give your mother something to think about while she’s on the cruise. Let her think I’m redecorating like she did when we let her stay in our place.”

They stopped at a tavern three blocks from Sarge’s house and Trace drank vodka while Chico, who could not drink, sipped at a ginger ale. When they got back to the house, Hilda was wearing a nightgown that looked as if it had been commissioned for Mother Goose.

She said to Chico, “You’ll sleep in the guest room.” And to Trace: “And you’ll sleep on the sofa.”

“Yes, Mother,” Trace said.

“Sneak up later,” Chico whispered in his ear. “We’ll do loud boom-boom and make her nuts.”

“She already is nuts,” Trace said.

Jenkins, chauffeur to Theodore Longworth, lived in a third-floor walkup in a neighborhood heavily populated by streetwalkers and the people who lived off them: pimps, pushers, and police.

Jenkins was a sixty-one-year-old former city policeman who had retired a year ago and was now collecting his pension as well as his salary for working for Longworth.

His room was filled with whiskey bottles, littered, and with racing forms, neat piles. He greeted Razoni and Jackson warmly, offered them a drink, which they turned down, and with no real display of loss condescended to drink alone. Jackson wondered how many bottles of whiskey it had taken to paint the road map of purplish veins on Jenkins’ bulbous nose.

“Mr. Longworth called and said you were coming,” Jenkins said as he waved the two detectives to seats in the sparsely furnished living room of his apartment. “He sounded upset.”

“Shit-faced is more like it,” Razoni said.

“Worried about his daughter,” Jackson said. “You saw her last?”

“Right,” said Jenkins, who seemed to straighten himself as if undergoing a roll-call inspection at headquarters. “I dropped her off at the college, usual place a block away.”

“Why a block away?” Jackson said.

“She’s self-conscious about people seeing her arrive in a limousine.”

“Then you didn’t see her go inside?” asked Jackson.

“Sure I did. I always wait awhile, then drive past the school. I always see her go in.” He left the sentence hanging up in the air.

“That sounds like you see her come out too,” Jackson said.

“Well, once in a while. Sometimes I leave the car parked and go for a walk and a couple of times I saw her go out the back door of the school.”

“You follow her? Where’d she go?”

“I followed her last week. Kids are nuts. She went to some kind of health-food place down in the East Village.”

“You ever tell Longworth about it?”

“No,” Jenkins said. “I wouldn’t rat on the kid.”

“Maybe she did that yesterday?” Jackson said.

“She went into the school and I hung around. I didn’t see her come out.”

“She say anything strange? Anything that’d make you think she was going to run away or anything?”

“No. Same Abby. Quiet. Doesn’t say much at all,” Jenkins said.

“What’s the address of the health-food place?” Razoni asked.

Jenkins told him the street. “You can’t miss it. It’s next to this meeting hall or something, and there’s plants all over the place and pictures of yogis with beards.”

Jackson looked at Razoni, who nodded. “We know where it is,” Jackson said. “You don’t seem as worried as her father does,” Jackson said. “You’ve been around, Officer Jenkins, what do you think happened to her?”

“Just between us guys on the job,” Jenkins said, “I don’t think anything bad. She probably went off to a meeting or something and ran into some school friends and stayed over and forgot to call. Kids do that.”

“I guess so,” Jackson said. “By the way, how does Abigail get along with her folks? No chance that she ran away?”

“No. Her father’s crazy about her.”

“We noticed,” Razoni said. “Is she crazy about him?”

“I guess so. She doesn’t talk much, like I said.”

“What about boyfriends?” Razoni said.

Jenkins shook his head. “Never saw or heard of any.”

“Okay,” Jackson said. “You working tomorrow?”

The burly old man snorted. “If I don’t work, how will I support the ponies?”

“If we need you, we’ll call,” Jackson said, and rose from his chair.

Jenkins stood up along with him. “Tell me,” he said. “How is it in the department these days?”

“I don’t know. How is it, Ed?” Jackson asked.

“Same old shit,” Razoni said. “A lot of liberal faggots running it.”

“Yeah. I guess it never changes,” Jenkins said. “You two work for Captain Mannion?”

Razoni nodded.

“Give him my best. We came on about a year apart and I used to run into him. Never thought he’d get anywhere. Worst-tempered man I ever saw.”

“He’s changed now,” Razoni said.

“Yeah? Mellowed?” Jenkins said.

“Right. He grows roses now.”

“You know, this day has sure come up zero,” Razoni said.

“Gee, and I thought it was about the seventeenth best day of my life,” Jackson said.

“That’s because you’re with me,” Razoni said. “But look at me, here it is, one of my few days off and I get called in to work and then I’ve got to spend the whole day with you, and first it’s find out who killed some goddamn flower-eater and then it’s forget the flower-eater, go see where the fag’s kid is, and I’m really getting tired of this day.”

“It’ll get worse,” Jackson said.

“It can’t,” Razoni said.

“If that girl Pat from the
Times
is still waiting for you at the Red Horse Tavern, it can.”

“I’m ashamed of you. You forgot all about her,” Razoni said.

“
I
did?”

“Yes. And I know you’re going to blame it on me,” Razoni said.

“True. So, since you’re going to take the blame anyway, we’ll just let her wait a few minutes more and go to that health-food store. Recognize the address?”

“Sure. It’s right next to where that dippo rose-eater got killed. Maybe all the nuts in New York have decided to move to one street. You want I should call a moving company for you?” Razoni said.

They parked again in front of the fire hydrant. The police barricade and the uniformed officers were gone from the front of the House of Love, but the side of the building was plastered with all the signs that they had seen Gildersleeve with earlier: THE SWAMI LIVES. He had told the young people to take the signs out and plaster them everywhere and apparently all of them had taken them outside and put them up on the front of the same building.

The store was in the building next to the House of Love. There was a big wooden door, also plastered with the poster that proclaimed Salamanda still lived. On either side of the door were windows, filled with plants and displays of dried fruits and burlap bags of granola.

“I figured out the crime,” Razoni said. “The lizard didn’t die from eating the roses. It was trying to eat that cereal that tastes like fish-tank gravel.”

An overhead bell tinkled when they pushed open the door of the store. Two young women stood at a counter in the back. One of them, a blonde almost six feet tall, fixed a large smile on her face and stepped forward to the two men.

“
Om shanti
,” she said in a deep, smooth voice, almost British-sounding.

“
Om shanti
,” said Jackson.

“In old Shanty Town,” Razon muttered.

“How may I help you gentlemen?” The girl was close to them now. Her perfume was sweet and seemed to give off warmth. Her teeth were brilliant white and even.

“Do you have a box of Cap’n Crunch?” Razoni asked.

Smile fixed in place, the girl shook her head.

“Sugar Snacks? Crispie Twinkies?”

“This must be your first time in the House of Love food shop,” the young woman said.

Jackson nodded.

“Then I must show you around.” She turned. A bell tinkled.

Jackson touched her arm and said, “That won’t be necessary.” He handed Razoni a plastic bag from a stack at the end of the aisle. “Here. Indulge yourself.”

“Only when I buy a horse,” Razoni said.

“That is our heaven-sent mixture,” the girl said. She pointed to another pile of packages. “And that is spiced cracked wheat.” She waved her arm toward a large display case of frozen food. “And there are our wonderful fresh vegetables straight from the earth.” She seemed delighted at the thought until Razoni said, “From where else? The clouds?”

“All pure,” she said, looking into Jackson’s eyes. “Organic. Grown with no chemicals, just with pure manure from our beloved cows.”

Razoni gasped. Jackson silenced him with a look.

“And these are pure herbal medicines. Balsa bark for colds. Devil’s smile, for cuts and wounds.”

“You got anything for headaches?” asked Razoni.

“You’re a follower of the Swami’s, aren’t you?” Jackson said.

“Yes.”

“And you’re Keri?” he said.

She looked surprised. “How do you know me?”

“We were at the mission earlier,” Jackson said. “We heard your name. We’re detectives.” He extended his hand toward Razoni for the picture of Abigail Longworth and showed it to the blonde. “Have you ever seen this girl?”

The girl raised her eyes to meet Jackson’s. “No. Does she come here?”

“We were told that,” Jackson said.

“Well, I am here every day and I have not seen this person. I would know.”

Jackson put the photo of Abigail in his jacket and took a card from his wallet. “It is very important that we locate this girl. If you see her, will you call me?”

The girl read the card. “Yes, Detective Jackson. I certainly will. Perhaps you can tell me. Have the police solved the killing of our leader?”

“I don’t think so,” Jackson said. “But it’s not really our case. I understand you served tea to the Swami last night.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Who else was there?”

“Sister Glorious, Brother Gildersleeve,” she said.

“Did you notice anything unusual?” Jackson asked.

“No. Nothing. I told all this to the other policemen,” she said.

“I’m sure you have. What is your name?” Jackson asked.

“Keri. Keri Ellison.”

Jackson nodded and delicately touched a small gold bell at the girl’s throat.

“Lovely,” he said.

“Thank you. It is a gift of love,” she said.

He met her eyes again. “You will call me if that girl comes here?”

“Yes.”

“Ed, pay the girl for your granola.”

“No,” Keri said. “That is all right. Accept it as an introduction to our way of life.”

“Thank you, Miss Ellison,” Jackson said.

Outside the door, still holding his bag of cereal, Razoni said, “Stop at the park. I want to poison the pigeons. And don’t think I didn’t see you hitting on that big blonde. I’m thinking about telling your wife on you.”

“Do yourself a favor. Don’t,” Jackson said.

Pat, Razoni’s girlfriend from the
Times
, had decided to wait along with her report, but she had not suffered in the Red Horse Tavern for want of company. When Razoni came through the door, she was seated in the middle of the bar with a man on each side, each trying to talk to her at the same time. The rest of the bar was empty.

Razoni stood behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. She wheeled angrily on her bar stool, then smiled when she saw him.

“Hi, sourpuss,” she said.

“All right, you two, beat it,” Razoni said.

The man on Pat’s left shrugged, picked up his drink and change, and moved down the bar. The man on the right hunched himself over his drink even more intently.

“Friend,” said Razoni, “I just invited you out. Move.”

“Go screw yourself. This is my seat,” the man growled without turning.

“One more time, friend. Beat it.”

“One more time, friend,” the man mimicked. “Go screw yourself.”

“Ed,” the young woman cautioned.

“Now, now,” he said. “Do you think I would lose my temper over something like this?”

He tapped the man on the shoulder and felt Jackson move up behind him.

The man turned slowly, as if reluctant to give Razoni the thrashing he deserved. “What do you want?” he sneered.

“My brother here wants your seat,” said Razoni, nodding toward Jackson. The seated man looked past Razoni at Jackson, looming black and huge in the darkness of the bar.

The man swallowed hard. “Well, if you really are a group. I mean, I didn’t know. I thought you…”

“Yeah, we know, friend. Up, up and away.”

Moving with more haste than seemed possible, the man had his drink and change and was moving toward the far end of the bar. Razoni and Jackson took the two vacated seats on both sides of the young woman. Pat was a short, pert, frizzy-haired brunette who looked as if she had been the cutest member of the high-school cheerleading team, all boobs and bounce, smiles and sunshine. She patted Jackson’s hand as Razoni said, “I don’t know what there is about you, Tough, that frightens people.”

“I don’t either,” Jackson said.

“It’s not your face ’cause you got a face like a pail of mush. You think maybe it’s because you’re big?”

“No. A lot of people are big. You’re big. Maybe I carry a voodoo curse or something.”

“You don’t scare me,” Razoni said.

“The curse doesn’t work on Italian detectives.”

“That’s because when I was young, my folks took me to the zoo a lot and I got used to seeing gorillas,” Razoni said.

Pat giggled.

“Did they let you feed ravioli to the pigeons?” Jackson asked.

Pat giggled again.

“Right. Ravioli and granola,” Razoni said. He looked hard at the young woman. “If you don’t want company, sit at the end of the bar. Sit in the middle and you’re either lonely or a drunk or a hooker. Nice girls sit at the end when they can.”

“Who says?” she demanded.

“I says. Everybody knows that.”

“That’s right, Pat. Listen to Ed. Everybody knows that.”

Razoni ordered drinks for them while Jackson filled in details in the notebook he always carried in his jacket pocket. He tried to concentrate, it being his habit to jot down everything: phrases he had heard, things that he didn’t understand but that seemed a little out of place. Often, later, they turned out to be important in a solution to a case. He found it hard to keep his mind on his work, though, when Razoni began to question Pat in intimate detail on the quality, frequency, and duration of her love life, so he excused himself to call Captain Mannion.

“Give him my love,” Razoni said. “Tell him I’m taking charge of everything.”

“He’ll be so pleased to hear that,” Jackson said.

As he walked away, Razoni demanded of the young
Times
reporter, “Did you find the clippings?”

She reached down to her brown leather bag, which was on the floor, its strap hooked around her ankle to discourage pocketbook thieves, and took out a manila envelope. Onto the bar she emptied from it photocopies of news clippings.