Too Old a Cat (Trace 6) (23 page)

Trace’s Log
: Sorry, folks. I’ve got a lot of things I’d love to tell you, but I work for the Mafia now and they’re not too hot on their people making tape recordings.

Try to understand.

J. J. Gildersleeve was on page one of the
Times
attacking the inept New York City police.

“It was bad enough,” he told a reporter, “that the police have been totally unable to solve the murder of our great leader, Swami Salamanda. But now, Sister Glorious has been murdered too and the police still have taken no action.”

He warned that thousands of Salamanda’s followers will be in the city this weekend “and they will demand action from the New York City police.”

Sarge, Chico, and Trace had coffee in the office and Trace received a phone call telling him to appear forthwith at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Chico volunteered to drive him, and when she let him off, Trace recognized J. J. Gildersleeve walking into the building. “They must have called him too,” Trace said.

Chico looked at Gildersleeve’s back and nodded. “Hurry up, get out,” she said. “I’ve got things to do.”

“Stay out of trouble, will you please?” Trace said.

“Of course. Don’t I always?”

In a rough, street-Irish kind of way, Retired Police Sergeant Patrick Tracy and Captain Marvin Mannion resembled each other. Both were red-faced and white-haired, although Sarge was much the bigger of the two men. But each had the same laugh crinkles at the corners of the eyes, the eyes of men who had seen a lot and had realized that if you were going to last, you had better learn to laugh.

It would have taken no imagination at all to picture each of them in a heavyweight blue uniform, swinging a nightstick out on a walking beat, being the terror of local neighborhood toughs.

That was, in truth, how both of them had started, in the same graduating class from the New York police academy. But while Tracy had stayed in the patrol division, finally becoming a sergeant and supervising men who walked a beat, Mannion had lucked into a good arrest and turned it into an appointment as a detective. Starting there, he had parlayed some solid skills as a detective, a rough-hewn kind of integrity, the tenacity of a bulldog, and an underappreciated political sense to move up the ladder until he had been promoted to captain and sent to the commissioner’s office.

Some felt he actually ran the department because the police commissioner was a civilian and he trusted totally Mannion’s judgment about what was happening in the department. The commissioner was the technical boss, but in the police world, which was broken down into “us” versus “them”—with them being anyone who wasn’t a police officer—he was barred from close contact with the thirty thousand men he commanded. Mannion was his eyes, his ears, his adviser and confidant, and the one man in the department that the commissioner knew he could rely on for the plain, unvarnished truth.

Although they had been on the force during the same thirty years, Sarge and Mannion were not close, never drinking friends, but each had known of the other. At several times in their careers, cases had brought them together and they had worked well, hit it off well, did their work, talked about getting together afterward but never had. It was probably that they were too much alike.

Sarge had thought he might feel out of place in Mannion’s office, but while Mannion had moved up in the hierarchy, he had not gone far from his roots. His suit was as cheap and rumpled as Sarge’s, and his desk as marred with cigarette burns. Piles of papers were stacked seemingly without sense or order on a long bank of file cabinets behind his desk.

Mannion came from behind the desk to greet him. “Pat, how are you?”

“Good enough, Marv. But I’m disappointed.”

“Why’s that?” Mannion said as he steered Sarge to a chair before his desk.

“Big shot like you. I thought you’d be wearing silk jackets and T-shirts like all the real cops do nowadays. Come on, make me feel good; tell me you’ve got a red Corvette parked outside.”

“There go your illusions, Pat. I’ve got a ’79 Subaru wagon.”

“No wonder this city isn’t as crime-free as Miami,” Sarge said as Mannion sat behind the desk.

“So what are you doing these days? You don’t look like the fishing-at-the-Jersey-shore type to me.”

“No. I’m running a little p.i. agency.”

‘How long you been doing that? Why didn’t you let me know?”

“About a year,” Sarge said. “I’m doing all right, so I figured I’d save you for when I was ready to move into a welfare hotel. But the agency’s why I’m here.”

“Anything I can do,” Mannion said.

“It’s the Alcetta case,” Sarge said.

For a moment, Mannion looked blank, then snapped his fingers. “There was a Tracy involved in that. Found the woman’s body the other night.”

“My son,” Sarge said. “He’s probably coming into the agency with me.”

“He a cop?”

“Insurance investigator,” Sarge said. “He’s all right, though. He’s going straight.”

“Let’s see,” Mannion said. “He was, well, I guess
you
were representing Alcetta in a divorce investigation. Is that what it was?”

Sarge nodded. “But now Old Man Alcetta has asked us to see what we can do for young Angelo,” he said.

“We’re off the record, right?” Mannion said. When Sarge nodded, he said, “Sonny Alcetta is a two-bit punk and it looks like we got him cold.”

“It might not be that easy,” Sarge said.

“How’s that?” Mannion asked. He leaned back and lit a cigarette. “You want some coffee?” he asked.

Sarge shook his head. “Now, this is confidential from my side, too, right?”

Mannion squinted at him through a wreath of cigarette smoke and nodded.

“When Old Man Alcetta talked to my son, he made it pretty clear that Alcetta’s got an alibi for the day the woman was killed, but he’d rather not have to use it.”

“We’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it,” Mannion said.

“You don’t believe that, Marv,” Sarge said. “You know what’s going to happen. If you bring Alcetta in on just circumstantial evidence, if it ever gets to a trial, the family’s going to bring in two hundred witnesses, half of them priests, who are going to swear the kid was doing a novena in Chicago the day of the murder. Then they’ll get somebody who’ll take a fall and say he used the kid’s car to frame him. You’re going to come up empty.”

“Another killer walks,” Mannion said. “That’s probably what drove you off the job. It’s what makes me upchuck most mornings before I drink my coffee.”

“It doesn’t have to be this time,” Sarge said. “Maybe.”

“I’m listening.”

“This was the deal my son made with the old man. If we find out the kid’s innocent, we tell him. If we find out the kid’s guilty, we tell the police.”

“You really expect that he’d let you do that?” Mannion said.

“You know me, Marv. I think you know what I’ll do,” Sarge said.

Mannion stubbed out his cigarette and leaned over the desk, resting his chin on his hands.

“Yeah, I guess I do. So what can I do?”

“Those two guys who work for you. Razoni and Jackson. They’re working this case for you?”

Mannion simply stared at him without confirmation in his face.

“Tell them to give us a hand, that we’re on the same side,” Sarge said.

“What do we get out of it?”

“We have access to the Alcetta family. Your guys can help us and we’ve got an idea of where to look from the police end. We’ll find out if Alcetta’s phonying any kind of alibi up. One hand washes the other.” Sarge leaned forward over the desk, so that his face and Mannion’s were only a foot apart.

“Before you say no, Marv, think about it. You got that guy in the paper this morning, rapping the force because they haven’t made an arrest yet. My son’s already been called up to the DA’s office and you know some asshole assistant district attorney is going to try to get a quick indictment so he can get his ugly stupid mug on the six-o’clock news and later Alcetta gets off. The DA won’t care, he got his headlines, but the department gets a black eye and some damned killer gets free. Let’s find the real killer. If it’s Alcetta, we’ll help you nail him. If it’s not and we find out who is, we give him to you. We need help, though. Think about it before you say no.”

“What made you think I was going to say no?” Mannion said. “You got it, Pat. What else?”

Sarge squinted his eyes. “Wait a minute. Just like that?”

“It sounds like a good deal to me,” Mannion said. “What’s to argue about?”

“Why do I get this feeling that I’ve just played into your hands?” Sarge asked.

“Because you’ve got a suspicious nature,” Mannion said. “You going to be in your office today?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll have Razoni and Jackson contact you there. Where is it?”

“On West Twenty-sixth Street. They know where it is. They were there the other day.”

“Okay,” Mannion said. “Just one thing.”

“What is it?” Sarge said.

“Nobody knows about this. Nobody. You, me, Razoni, and Jackson. Nobody else. Nobody talks to the press. Nobody talks to the Alcetta family. My ass is in a bind, Pat, if this gets out.”

“Not a word,” Sarge said.

The captain rose from the desk and the two policemen shook hands. Marv walked around the desk and escorted Sarge to the door.

“Thanks, Marv,” said Sarge.

“Maybe something good’ll happen,” Mannion said.

“I just wish I knew why I think you put one over on me.”

“Sleep on it,” Mannion said. “Maybe it’ll come to you.”

Mannion closed the door behind his old companion, went back to his desk, and told the radio room to have Razoni and Jackson call in immediately.

He allowed himself another cigarette—even though he was trying to cut down—and an unaccustomed smile. He had not liked his two top detectives being sent to Siberia because of some big-shot television executive with high-level friends. Now, perhaps, they could keep working on the case without officially working on the case. Nobody had to be the wiser.

Of course, it all depended on Patrick Tracy keeping his word and his mouth shut, but Mannion had always played hunches. He had a hunch that he could trust Tracy’s word.

He hoped so.

If not, he was in real big trouble.

From the newsstand in the lobby of the Hotel Palmer in midtown, Chico dialed the hotel’s number.

“Hello,” she said. “Would you please connect me with Mr. Gildersleeve’s room?”

She heard the phone ring a long time and then the operator came back on. “I’m sorry. Mr. Gildersleeve doesn’t answer.”

“What room is that?” Chico asked. “Is that four-eighteen?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t give out that information. May I take a message?”

“No. That’s all right. I’ll call later,” Chico said.

She hung up the telephone, bought and ate a candy bar as she looked at the headlines of the newspapers in the small stationery shop. Gildersleeve’s picture was on page one of the
Post
.

Being a detective wasn’t as easy as she thought. Things that you took for granted just couldn’t be taken for granted. Like how did you find out what room someone was staying in when hotels would never tell you that. If Trace were around, he’d probably bribe a bellhop, but she didn’t think she could pull that off easily. Maybe if she had a gun, she could threaten someone and make them tell her. No, that wouldn’t work either.

She looked around the stationery store, then wandered to the greeting-card rack and bought a birthday card that came in a long thin pink envelope. It was one of the new wave of cards that equated insults with humor and said, “You’re only as old as you look.” On the inside, it continued, “And you look like shit. Old shit.”

The card cost two dollars. Chico paid for it and with a pen from her purse wrote on the envelope, “Mr. J. J. Gildersleeve, Hotel Palmer.”

She sealed the card and brought it to the front desk. She told the clerk, “I’d like to leave this for Mr. Gildersleeve, please.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and took the card.

Chico walked across the lobby, sat in a chair, and watched the clerk. He put the envelope on the counter while he answered a telephone call. After a long conversation, punctuated with much laughter, he hung up, took the envelope, and slipped it into one of the little rectangular mail slots in the large rack behind him.

She waited until the clerk was busy with a customer at the far end of the counter before walking over. The bright-pink envelope was clearly visible in the room slot marked Number 624.

The door to Room 624 was open and the maid was inside. Chico was a little disappointed because she had hoped to try opening the door with a credit card. But maybe, she thought, it would be better to practice that one at home before taking it on the road.

She breezed into the room as the maid was making the large double bed, dropped her purse in the chair, and said, “Dear, would you mind terribly if I asked you to come back in five minutes? I’ve got some important business calls to make.” The young maid nodded and smiled when Chico pressed a five-dollar bill into her hand.

“I really appreciate it,” Chico said. She closed the door behind the maid and locked it, then looked around the room. She knew that police detectives called searching a room a “tossing,” and it certainly would be easier to toss a hotel room than an apartment. She searched the night tables on each side of the bed, but found nothing except a Gideon bible and two New York City phone books, one with white pages, the other with yellow.

In the center drawer of the small desk across the room, she found only a guidebook to New York City, a folder with hotel stationery, and a small note pad. She held the note pad at an angle, looking at the top blank page to see if she could read any impressions that might be on the paper, but couldn’t see anything.

“So much for the movies,” she mumbled to herself softly. She skimmed the pages of the guidebook. None of them had been dog-eared, but as she skimmed the pages, she saw an advertisement circled. It was for the E-Z Rider auto-rental agency. She jotted down the address on a piece of paper in her purse, then replaced the book inside the drawer.

The waste-paper basket produced nothing but Kleenexes.

A leather traveling bag was on the floor of the closet. Chico opened it and looked inside. The bag appeared empty, but she felt around with her fingers and touched something. She brought it out. It was a rose petal. A yellow petal. She put it in her purse.

She closed the door behind her and put out the sign for the maid to make up the room immediately, then rode down in the elevator.

She walked to the front entrance of the hotel without looking back. So she did not see J. J. Gildersleeve standing at the front desk, talking to the clerk, and she did not see the clerk point at her and she did not see J. J. Gildersleeve follow her toward the front door.

Sarge met with Razoni and Jackson at a corner table in Bogie’s. Trace and Chico had been right, Sarge thought. Razoni
was
a grumbler and complainer.

“I don’t know what the hell we’re doing here,” Razoni said. “Since when do we go into partnership with amateurs?”

“Amateur?” Sarge said. “Sonny, I was on the job when you were still stealing hubcaps.”

Razoni started to answer, but Jackson said, “We’re here because the captain told us to be here and maybe it’s not a bad idea.”

The three men finally got down to business and compared notes. There was precious little hard information to share.

The bartender called Sarge away to take a telephone call.

Chico said, “I thought I’d find you there. What are you up to?”

“Just having lunch with your old friends. Razoni and Jackson.”

“Terrific. I need to know something,” she said.

“What’s that?” Sarge asked. Chico told him and Sarge left the phone dangling and walked back to the table.

“Chico’s on the phone,” he said.

“Who?” asked Razoni.

“The woman who works with us,” Sarge said.

“I don’t want to talk to her,” Razoni said. She’s nothing but bad news.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to you. She wants to know about the roses that killed the Swami. How were the stems cut?”

“What a stupid question,” Razoni said. “Everybody’s a goddamn rose expert.”

“Did you see the roses?” Sarge asked.

“I saw them at the police property room,” Jackson said. “What does she mean about how the stems were cut?”

“Whether they were cut at an angle or just sliced straight across?” Sarge said.

Jackson closed his eyes, trying to visualize. Finally, he said, “Straight across.”

Sarge went back to the phone and gave the information to Chico. She whooped over the telephone. “Great. Sarge, I’m onto something.”

“What?”

“I’ll have it this afternoon. I’ll let you know.”

“You be careful,” he said.

“No. You be careful. Don’t let that mug stick you with the check,” Chico said.

When the two detectives left the restaurant and returned to their car, the radio was squawking.

“Car One-one-one, call your office.”

“Oh, Christ, now what?” Razoni said. “What dumb thing does Mannion want now?”

“He probably wants to give us a commendation for how well we served warrants,” Jackson said.

“Yeah. By tomorrow we’ll be meter maids,” Razoni said. He went back inside Bogie’s to use the telephone.

“Down to the office,” he said as he got into the car.

“What’s up?”

“Gault and Gorman must have gotten the photographs we sneaked to them of Abigail feeding the lizard the poison. They want to talk to Abigail and Karen. Mannion wants us there.”

“How nice,” Jackson said.

They had to wait in the hallway outside the commissioner’s office. The two precinct detectives were there. Gault had a thin complacent smile on his face.

“What’s going on?” Jackson said.

“The commissioner and Mannion are inside telling Longworth what’s what. The girls are in there too.”

“And what
is
what?” Razoni said.

“We’ve just solved the Salamanda murder,” Gault said.

“Good for you,” Razoni said.

“Yeah, we solved it,” Gault said. “So that tells you how much you know, Razoni. We made the biggest mistake detectives can make, huh? Well, we busted the case after you blew it.”

Gault’s partner, Gorman, nodded a lot, Razoni noticed. He was nodding now.

“The big men from the commissioner’s office,” Gault said. “Well, you two are one big pair of duds, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Nice to know, Gault,” Razoni said. “And here I was going to sponsor you for the detectives’ hall of fame.”

When the door opened and Mannion waved them all into the commissioner’s office, they saw Theodore Longworth sitting in a soft leather chair alongside the commissioner’s desk, a glass of whiskey in his hand. The two young women, wearing matching outfits of brown leather slacks and leather bolero jackets over kelly-green gauze blouses, sat side by side on a large sofa.

“They’re into leather now,” Razoni whispered to Jackson.

The commissioner was behind the desk. As he rose so did Longworth, who looked at the four detectives and said, “I want you to know that this entire thing is absurd. If it turns out that you people are harassing these young women, you’re going to spend the rest of your lives in misery.”

Razoni raised his hands. “Not us, Mr. Longworth. My partner and I don’t have anything to do with this case. We just serve warrants on notorious criminals like Pedro González.”

“We asked Razoni and Jackson to be here, Ted, just in case they have some background in the case that the other detectives don’t have,” the commissioner told Longworth.

“This is not the usual practice,” he said, “but we thought we owed you the courtesy of hearing what these detectives have to say.” He nodded toward Gault and Gorman. The two men began to pace back and forth across the center of the room.

“Miss Longworth,” Gorman said, “where were you Sunday morning?”

“I wath at the Thwami Thalamanda athram,” Abigail said.

Razoni covered his smirk with his hand.

“Who did you meet there?” Gorman said.

“It should be ‘whom,’ shouldn’t it, Tough?” Razoni whispered to Jackson. Jackson nodded and Razoni said aloud, “He means ‘Whom did you meet there?’”

Gorman glared at him. Abigail looked unhappy.

“All right,” Gorman said. “Whom did you meet there? Did you meet Karen Marichal?”

“Yeth.”

“And did you have occasion to go to a florist shop on that street?”

Abigail looked at Karen Marichal, who seemed bored by the proceedings, preferring instead to glare at Razoni across the room.

“Yeth,” said Abigail.

“And what did you do at that florist shop?” asked Gorman. He had started out at a slow leisurely striding pace, but was now moving back and forth almost on the gallop, wheeling and spinning at each end of the room. His partner, Detective Gault, was trying to keep up with him, but couldn’t walk as fast as Gorman and kept having to wait for his partner to wheel around and come back.

“We bought a dothen rotheth,” said Abigail.

“Is that right, Miss Marichal?” asked Gorman.

Karen nodded.

“Note that she agrees,” Gorman told Gault.

“Right,” said Gault.

“He talks,” Razoni whispered to Jackson.

“And what did you do with the roses?”

“We brought them back and put them in the refrigerator,” Abigail said.

“What for?”

“For the welcoming theremony for new memberth.”

“And then during the ceremony, you brought the roses from the refrigerator, out to Swami Salamanda, is that right?”

“Yeth.”

“Where were you during this, Miss Marichal?” Gorman asked.

“The ceremony was only for new members,” she said in her cold imperious voice. “I worked at the food shop next door.”

Gorman stood in front of Abigail. “So you gave the Swami the roses and he ate one of them and died.”

“But I didn’t poithon any rotheth,” she said.

“Just answer my question. He ate a rose and died,” Gorman said.

Abigail looked in panic at her father, who sat in his chair, drinking his drink, looking sick.

“Yeth.”

“And then you fled?”

“Yeth.”

“Why?”

“Becauthe I wath afraid.”

“Afraid, Miss Longworth? If you had nothing to do with the brutal murder of Swami Salamanda, why did you run? Why were you afraid?”

“I don’t know.”

“And then you hid out in Miss Marichal’s home?”

“Yeth,” Abigail said.

“This is ridiculous,” Razoni said softly to Jackson. “We know all this.”

“Don’t stop him,” Jackson said. “He thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes. This is the big scene in the living room at the end of the story where he reveals who the murderer is.”

“Will you two be quiet?” Mannion hissed.

Gorman was talking again. “Now, Miss Longworth, Miss Marichal, I want you two to think very carefully before answering. Why did you murder Swami Salamanda?”

Trace found Sarge sitting at the bar in Bogie’s.

“Have you seen Chico today?” he asked.

“Only this morning,” Sarge said. “Then she called this afternoon and said she was onto something but wouldn’t tell me what. It took you long enough to get back.”

“Goddamn bureaucrats,” Trace said. “Gildersleeve was in and out of the place in ten minutes. I spent the whole day cooling my heels until they decided to talk to me, and then they asked me two questions and told me to await a grand-jury summons. I wonder where Chico is.”

“Let’s go upstairs and see if she left a message on the phone.”

They walked up the wooden uncarpeted steps to the second-floor detective office.

“I didn’t notice that before,” Sarge said. “What happened to my centerfolds?”

“Chico took them down. She said they made the place look shabby.”

“Not by themselves, they didn’t,” Sarge said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Trace said. “Now that we’re big private eyes for the Mafia, who knows what comes next? The Pentagon? The CIA? You can hire your own bunnies to take coats.”

The red light was flashing on the telephone-answering machine and Sarge went over, turned the volume up, and pressed a button.

“Hello, Devlin. This is Michiko. I’m home and I’ve cooked up a wonderful dinner, so I wish you’d hurry home. But please, no company tonight. Tell your friend Pat to go eat in a restaurant. See you later. ’Bye.”