Too Old a Cat (Trace 6) (16 page)

“Naaah,” he said with a soft smile. “It’s from an old poem my mother used to say.”

“‘Tough Alley’?”

Jackson smiled again. “You’re Sicilian and Japanese. Don’t tell me you’re black too?”

“I just know the poetry,” Chico said, shaking her head.

Jackson nodded. “Well, so long, miss. So long, Tracy. Remember. Call me if anything comes up.”

“I will,” Trace said.

The door closed behind Jackson. Trace sat down at the desk and smiled at Chico.

“So did you have a nice day?” he asked.

Chico finished reciting and said, “An old street poem. Somehow I don’t think that Detective Jackson is anybody to mess with.”

“Me neither,” Trace said. “That’s why I’m glad you didn’t really pull your gat and blow his partner away.”

“That’s a fine how-do-you-do,” Chico said. “I come back to the office here and I see two big lugs terrorizing the man I tolerate; so at risk of life and limb, I jump into the fray, throwing my own personal safety to the winds to try to save him, and what do I get? Ridicule.”

“Look at the bright side,” Trace said. “On the job only one day and already you’ve threatened to shoot a New York cop. Some people probably don’t have that experience for weeks…months even.”

She giggled. “It probably would have gone down all right if I hadn’t run into that Razoni character. He must be the only guy in New York who isn’t afraid of a woman with a gat.”

“Stop saying gat,” Trace said. “And take off that trenchcoat. Where’d you get that trenchcoat anyway? What are you wearing it for? It’s the middle of the summer, for crying out loud.”

“I was going to buy a tape recorder like you use,” Chico said. “You know, to tape all my suspects when I talk to them. But when I went into the store, I saw this darling coat and I knew I had to have it. It’s got deep pockets for carrying equipment.”

“God help me,” Trace said. “We’ve been in this business one day and already my partner’s going cuckoo and I run into the nuttiest cop in all of New York. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow’s going to be like.”

Chico was hanging up her coat. “Don’t knock it,” she said. “I brought back our first case.”

“I heard all about it,” Trace said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. Groucho called and said you threatened him with your gat. Have you done anything today besides terrorize the denizens of New York and wave your gat at everybody?”

“Hey, whatever works,” Chico said airily. “We got the case, didn’t we?”

“Good. You handle it,” Trace said.

“I intend to. You’re the expert at this, though, phony insurance claims and all. Do you have any advice for me?”

“I mean, you’re serious now?” Trace said.

“Deadly serious. I want advice from the old master.”

“All right. Don’t turn in your expense sheet until I go over it first. Groucho likes to cut your expenses in half, so what you have to do is triple them before you turn them in. This is the only way to show a profit.”

“Actually I was hoping for something a little more technical in the way of advice,” Chico said. “Like how do I trail people, worm my way into their confidence, stuff like that?”

Trace leaned back, looked at the ceiling, and tried to remember how he did things. “If you’re going to trail anybody, it’s best not to do it naked,” Trace said. “People have a way of noticing you if you’re naked. And don’t dress like Magnum P.I. I know a private eye who dressed like Magnum P.I. once and got arrested for looking suspicious. Let’s see. What else? You worm your way into people’s confidence the way you wormed your way into mine. Be sneaky and devious. Let them talk. Don’t be afraid of dead air.”

“What do you mean, dead air?”

“Well, sometimes,” Trace said, “you ask a question and the guy gives you an answer, see, and then he stops. Now, most people ask another question right away, but that’s wrong. What you do is just sit there and wait. People get nervous if they’re not talking or listening, so if they give you an answer but you just wait, they start adding to their answer. That’s where you get them ’cause most people only figure out their lie one sentence in advance. You get them talking four or five sentences and then they’re out of their script, and that’s when you got them. And smile a lot. Everybody talks to a woman who smiles a lot.”

“That’s it?” Chico said.

“You asked me for what I know. That’s what I know.”

“Three years working on insurance claims and that’s all you know?” Chico said.

Trace hadn’t noticed before how short her skirt was. Maybe, God willing, mini-skirts were coming back. She had beautiful legs.

“It’s all you need to know,” Trace said. “Let Sherlock Holmes figure out things by analyzing pipe ashes and nonsense like that. None of that means anything to us. All we ever have to work with is what people tell us, and if you talk to enough people long enough and often enough, you’re going to start hearing conflicting stories. And that’s when you got them, Babe. Time out. Something’s on the TV.”

Trace turned up the sound on the small black-and-white set perched on the corner of his desk, and Chico came around to stand behind him and watch.

The well-known face of Theodore Longworth was on the screen. He was delivering an editorial about Swami Salamanda’s death.

“…certainly the killer or killers of Swami Salamanda should be caught. But what of the other five persons murdered in New York City over the weekend? Should not their murders be solved too? It is simply not right for the police department to throw massive resources into the murder investigation of Swami Salamanda—ignoring these other five killings—simply because Salamanda had the habit of making the headlines. John Donne said that ‘Each man’s death diminishes us all,’ and that is true. Unfortunately, our police department seems to think that some deaths are more equal than others. This is wrong. There were six killings this weekend and New York City would be served better by having three of them solved than by having Salamanda’s murder solved and the rest of them go unsolved. That’s our opinion here at UBC. Ted Longworth reporting.”

Trace turned the sound back down softly but left the picture on.

“More bullshit,” he said. “Who cares?”

Chico went and sat on one of the folding chairs alongside the desk. She crossed her legs. Yes, they were wonderful legs.

“Anyway,” she said, “want to hear about my case?”

“If I can look up your skirt,” he said.

“Look away,” she said. Her purse was on the floor and from it she took a pile of papers and put them on her lap.

“Another thing,” Trace said. “Don’t carry around too many papers. It confuses the mind and it doesn’t leave room in your bag for your gat. I don’t know how you’re going to get a Browning automatic rifle in there the way it is.”

“Very funny,” Chico said. “Just shut up and listen. This is in Teaneck. That’s in New Jersey. This woman, let’s see, Debbie Doblemeyer. Her husband took out a life-insurance policy on her three weeks ago.”

“How much?” Trace asked.

“Fifty thousand. And one week ago, her car went off the road and she got killed. Marks wants us—our firm, that’s got a good ring to it, doesn’t it?—to look into it.”

“Look away,” Trace said. “What does the husband do for a living?”

“He’s a druggist. Runs a store in a mall somewhere.”

“Look away, but it was an accident.”

“How do you know that? You don’t know anything about it.”

“He’s a druggist, he makes a lot of money. If he were going to kill his wife for dough, it’d be a lot of dough. Fifty thousand he can probably borrow against the value of aspirins in his store.”

“Is this the way you solve all your problems?” Chico asked. “By making snap judgments?”

“Not snap judgments,” Trace said. “Rough cuts. Sarge taught me that. I say it’s an accident.”

“Well, I say it’s murder, and I say the hell with it,” Chico said.

“Have it your own way,” Trace said with a shrug. “How you going to do it?”

“I’m going to do what you do. I’m going to go talk to people, friends, cops, things like that.”

“The funeral home where she was buried. They’ll probably have a list of people who visited at the wake. Double-check that against the phone book and you’ll find some people in the neighborhood who’ll talk. Skip the next-door neighbors. They never talk. But the people across the street will.”

“Why’s that?” Chico asked.

“Everybody hates the people who live across the street,” Trace said. “Cops are tough, though. Usually you can’t get to see their reports, but if and when you do, they don’t tell you anything. But if you find the cops who handled the case, they’ll usually be helpful. The ones who were at the accident, I mean. But you’ll need identification because they’re always afraid of talking to the wrong people and getting their ass in a sling.”

“I’ve got identification. I had business cards printed today when I was in seeing Marks.”

Chico fished back into her purse and brought out a small box, the size of two cigarette packs stacked side by side. She took a card from the box and handed it to Trace.

MANGINI AND TRACY

Private Investigations
249 West 26th Street, N.Y.C.
Michiko Mangini, Call
: 555-0288
Agent
Ask us. We’ll find out
.

There was a silhouette of a smoking gun in the corner of the card.

“Pretty neat, huh?” Chico said.

“Love the billing,” Trace said.

“Strict alphabetical order,” Chico said. “M comes before T.”

“Which T is that, by the way? Is that T for Sarge or T for me?”

“That’s T for both of you,” Chico said. “I didn’t see any need to clutter up the card with a lot of excess verbiage.”

“Like the names of the other partners, the senior partners,” Trace said sourly.

“Cheez-o-man. Is this the way you’re going to be from now on, picky and worrying about your billing?”

“I love the smoking gun, though,” Trace said. “It lets people know exactly what you’re up to.”

“It’s a kind of advertising. When you and I get our licenses to carry heat—”

“Carry heat?”

“Right. When we get our licenses to be packing, everybody in this firm’ll be armed. Prospective clients ought to know that. That we fear nothing.”

“Speak for yourself. I fear everything,” Trace said. “And speaking of terror, my ex-wife called me today. I told you this was going to happen—that my mother would spill the beans, and Bruno would be calling here—and first day on the job and already it’s happened.”

“What’d she want?”

“Me to come to dinner.”

“Go ahead and go,” Chico said. “You should see your kids.”

“Oh, shut up,” Trace said, and turned the sound on the television up to full volume.

An hour later, just as Trace was beginning to wonder where Angelo Alcetta was, the telephone rang.

“This is Charlie Ribs, I work for Sonny Alcetta.”

“Yes.”

“Sonny says he’ll be at your office in the morning.”

“Fine.”

“You be there,” Charlie Ribs said.

Trace hung up and said, “That’s enough threats for one day. Let’s go home.”

Trace’s Log:
Monday evening, first entry in the illustrious new career of Devlin Tracy, boy detective.

How do I let myself get conned into things like this? Here I am, in this stupid detective agency one day, and I run afoul of the New York cops already in the person of the only cop in the world dumber than I am. Something Razoni. Ed Razoni. That’s it.

And Chico is turning out to be a homicidal maniac. Maybe I’ll stay here and work with Sarge for a while at the agency, but I’ll tell you, world, when it looks like her gun permit is going to be approved, I’m going to have to give some serious consideration to moving out and setting up residence in some other town under an assumed name.

Chico’s finally asleep, dreaming, no doubt, of her first real detective job tomorrow. Christ, how you can look forward to working for Groucho and the insurance company is beyond me. But nothing bothers her. She cooked us a wonderful dinner tonight and then ate it all.

And that’s another thing that’s wrong. It wasn’t until we got into the house here tonight that I realized I hadn’t had a drink all day. I made up for that right away and I’m going to make sure it doesn’t happen tomorrow. I’ve got my reputation to take care of, you know.

So now we come to the business at hand. Angelo Alcetta. Tomorrow I’ll try to con him into giving the firm more work. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what Alcetta wants to know about his wife or why he wants to know it, but my basic rough-hewn integrity demands that tomorrow I give it a shot. As long as he pays. Maybe I’ll try to find out something dirty about her. Just to keep the company’s good name.

And who knows? I wouldn’t mind seeing Sister Glorious again anyway, because that is one of the world’s beautiful women. Close to Chico even.

Nice like Chico too. She told me something today. What? Oh, yeah. That Angelo had threatened her and the Swami too. I hope he doesn’t threaten me when we meet tomorrow. I’ve been threatened enough already.

Chico says that I don’t take things seriously and I don’t think about things enough. Hah. It is to laugh, that’s what it is. For instance, what just came to me was this wonderful idea for ending poverty in India. You see what we do, we ordain all the Indians. Make them ministers. And then send them, in shifts, to the United States. There is no Indian so dopey or so degenerate that some American somewhere will not throw money at him. This is a serious plan to solve a serious problem. Someday the world will recognize my genius.

I almost had to use bodily force to stop Chico from redecorating Sarge’s house tonight and throwing out all the knick-knacks. She has never forgiven my mother for coming to our apartment, taking down genuine oil paintings, and hanging up in their place plaster clown masks.

But the house remains secure. At least until tomorrow. At least until Chico gets a gun.

I’m going to be a lousy detective. I know it. I’m a lousy insurance investigator and in this job I feel about as useful as a puppy attacking its own paw. Dammit, I bet Sarge is having a grand old time out on the high seas.

What a day. And Hulk called and expects me to have dinner with her and What’s-his-name and the girl on Saturday. Fatto chance-o.

Good night, world. I think I’m going up and get even for the attack on Pearl Harbor. With my luck, I’ll lose this one too.