Trace (Trace 1) (10 page)

“She came to see me with that story, that she was afraid that something might happen to Mr. Carey because she saw that Plesser story in the paper. I told her to butt out, that nothing was going to happen.”

“What’d Mrs. Carey say?” Trace asked.

“Nothing. She just sat and listened.”

“I don’t think she’s all that well herself,” Trace said. “Did you tell the kid you were representing Matteson?”

“No. That would really have made her bonkers.”

“Shouldn’t you have told her?”

“It’s none of her business. Listen, Trace, Mrs. Carey’s like an aunt to me. Her husband and my father were close friends all their lives. When I was really little, their house was practically a second home. Then they had Buffy. She came very late—”

The waitress came back with two more drinks, which she set on the table. “Frankie bought you these.”

“Thanks,” Jeannie said, and waved to the bartender, who nodded back. “Do you know what that little bitch did?” she said.

“What little bitch?”

“That Muffy or whatever her name is. The first time I saw her, she wasn’t in town a week, and I was out at the Careys’ house and she almost chased Amanda from the room. Then she starts pumping me about having Mr. Carey declared incompetent and how do you draw wills. Jesus Christ, like she had already taken over. Is that nerve or what?”

“I’d say it’s nerve,” Trace said. “Mrs. Carey was telling me the business is closing down or being sold or something?”

“Being sold. Mr. Carey made plans for the sale before his stroke. I’m handling all the arrangements. You know, it’s funny, he called and told me about selling and I went up to his house to talk to him about it and he kept calling me Littlejean like he did when I was little, and I know he kept thinking about whether or not I’d be able to handle a big sale like that but he was going to go through with it because of loyalty to my father. I hope he lives to see that I handled it well.”

“He’s not getting any better,” Trace said.

“It’s tough after a stroke,” she said.

“Not because of Dr. Matteson?” Trace asked.

“Forget it,” she said. She nibbled at the hamburger and said, “I think I’m getting drunk. I’ve talked too much.”

“Exactly my plan,” Trace said. “What are you doing for dinner?”

“Waiting for an invitation.”

“Will you have dinner with me?” he asked.

“On one condition.”

“I hate women who impose conditions. What condition?”

“We eat at my house. I love to cook.”

“Okay. I’ll bring the wine.”

“Bring red,” she said.

Dexter, the clerk, called out to him as Trace walked through the lobby of the Sylvan Glade Country Club toward the steps to his room.

“I have a message for you, Mr. Tracy,” he said. As he fumbled through papers under the desk, he asked, “And how are you finding our town?”

“Very nice. A lovely town.”

“Do you think your principal will approve? That is, if you’re allowed to say.”

Principal? Trace realized Dexter was talking about the Vatican. “I think I’m going to give them a report that will have you blushing,” he said.

Dexter smiled. “Oh, I hope so.” He handed Trace a pink message note. “That Chico person,” he said. “You must have spoken to her. She was very polite this time.”

“I told her you were my right-hand man,” Trace said. “Thanks, Dexter.”

He read the note as he walked away. It said simply, “Will call tomorrow,” and Trace thought it was significant that she had left no return telephone number.

He took a shower, then lay naked on his bed and called Walter Marks’ office at Garrison Fidelity.

“Mr. Marks’ line,” the vice-president’s secretary said.

“This is Devlin Tracy. Let me talk to Groucho,” he said, as he always did.

“Just a moment. I’ll see if he’s in,” the secretary said, as she always did.

Trace didn’t have the energy to argue with her, but he wondered why secretaries always made that particularly nonsensical statement to callers. Anyone with half a brain knew that the secretary would know whether or not her boss was in. Therefore, she was saying, in essence, I’ll see if he wants to talk to you. Didn’t it embarrass secretaries to come back on and say, He stepped out, can you leave a message? It would embarrass anybody with any sense.

Therefore, secretaries did not have any sense. A neat little syllogism, perhaps not so elegant as the ones his Jesuit professors in college had taught him: God created everything in the world, including evil; anything created by God has a worthwhile purpose; therefore, evil has a worthwhile purpose. This, Trace had found out early, was part of an intellectual package deal. You had to accept that and then the second part of the package, namely: only God can understand why He has done certain things; we are not God; therefore, we cannot expect to understand everything God has done.

Trace had suggested to his professor a new syllogism: only Jesuits can pretend, with a straight face, to believe Jesuit theology; I cannot swallow this crap with a straight face; therefore, I am not, and never will be, a Jesuit.

The priest-professor had responded in turn: only those who understand will graduate this school; You do not understand; therefore you will not become a graduate of St. Luke’s College. Q.E.D.

And Trace had changed his major the next week to accounting. At least, the errors in accounting were correctible. Nobody ever launched an inquisition because it took two tries to make a balance sheet come out even.

Marks came onto the telephone. “What is it, Trace? Don’t you ever call anymore?”

“We only talk when I call you; we are talking; therefore I have called you. That’s called a syllogism, Groucho. All A is B; C is A; therefore, C is B. You see what you missed out on when you passed up Catholic college. You could have found a way to make the insurance business seem noble and worthwhile. If you had done that, you’d be the president emeritus of every insurance company in America. Even Jesuits would buy insurance. Just in case they were wrong.”

“What are you talking about? Is this going to be one of those nasty conversations?”

“No. You give me 110 percent of everything I demand and I’m pretty sure we can conclude this conversation on a high note of friendship, accord, and mutual respect. Where’s Bob Swenson?”

“Mr. Swenson’s in Europe. You know that.”

“And since I know that and you know I know that, you also know that that’s not what I mean. Where in Europe is he?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to talk to him about this Mitchell Carey thing. I want to find out who told him what and why. Every time he gives you a message for me, it’s garbled and it’s worse than having no message at all.”

“I told you everything he told me,” Marks said.

“You told me everything you think he told you. There’s a difference.”

“What’s going on that’s so important anyway?” Marks asked.

“I think killers are massing at Carey’s door,” Trace said perversely, “ready to do him in, should we drop our guard. What’ve we got, a half-million-dollar insurance on him? I’m trying to save us money.”

Marks sighed. “Okay. Let me look up the number.”

He was back a moment later and gave Trace the telephone number of a hotel in London.

“Mr. Swenson is there in Room Ten-forty-two. Where are you anyway, in case Mr. Swenson calls, he can reach you.”

“I’m staying at the Sylvan Glade Country Club in Harmon Hills. But, Groucho, if you tell my ex-wife, my ass is grass. She doesn’t know I’m in New Jersey. She finds out and I leave.”

“I know about the love between you and your ex. I wouldn’t tell her anything.”

“Good. And as long as you’re so agreeable, I’ve got something else for you.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m tired of itemizing my out-of-pocket expenses every time I do something for you people. From now on, I’m putting in for a steady hundred dollars a day. Anything big I spend’ll be over that.”

“Best news I’ve had in years,” Marks said.

“Huh?”

“Just put in the hundred dollars.”

“Why?”

“Because, dammit, I just got a statement from accounting and your average out-of-pocket is $147 a day. Put in the hundred. We’ll both be happy.”

“Aaah, I hate insurance men,” Trace said.

He dialed London, charging the call to his credit card, and was surprised to find that it was late night there. He was always surprised because he could never figure out if it was later in the east or in the west. But there was no answer in Swenson’s room and Trace declined to leave a message. There was no telling when Swenson might come in and Trace didn’t want to be awakened in the middle of the night.

As Trace dressed, he whistled cheerily and then realized he was in such a good mood because he was indulging in one of mankind’s oldest, most noble pleasures: revenge. He had no delusions about where Chico was and what she was doing. She was in Memphis, Tennessee—not Egypt—and she was tipping on him with some other man. If she hadn’t been, she would have left a number where he could call her back.

It had been a good run and what did he expect? Eternity? Four years wasn’t bad.

There had been some kind love between them, the unusual love of a part-time hooker and a full-time ne’er-do-well, but friendship had come first. And now she was trampling on that friendship by lying to him. How do you lie to friends and still call them friends? It was more of a question than he could answer right now. He just knew that somehow things were different, and once things started going differently, they kept going differently. Maybe it was time to look for a new roommate.

He thought of Jeannie Callahan. Or maybe to fall in love.

The telephone rang. Maybe Chico, he thought as he walked to the bedside. It wouldn’t be Marks. Maybe Swenson.

It was none of them.

“Hello, Devlin,” said a whiny voice. “This is your mother, Mrs. Patrick Tracy of Manhattan.”

“Yes, Mother. I recognize the name,” Trace said with a sigh.

“Did you know that tomorrow is Cousin Bruce’s birthday?”

“No, Mother. Somehow it must have slipped my mind.”

Trace tried to remember Cousin Bruce. All he could summon up was the image of some middle-aged moron who was fifty pounds overweight, waddled like a duck, had a bald spot, and laughed like a hyena, sometimes at nothing more humorous than a burned-out light bulb. Then Trace realized that could describe all his cousins, all the offspring of his mother’s siblings beyond number, all named either Bruce or Barry.

She was talking. “…no wonder it slipped your mind out there in Las Vegas with that woman, I guess you’ve got more important things to do than think about your family, your real family.”

“That woman’s name is Chico and you can call her that and I’d rather study remedial Swahili than think about…Who is it? Bruce?” Trace said.

His mother sniffed as if Trace had confirmed all her suspicions. “I hate it when you’re nasty with me, but never mind that. The reason I called is that we’re having a birthday party for Cousin Bruce.”

“Stop calling him Cousin Bruce,” Trace said. “Just plain Bruce will do nicely.” Who in hell had cousins named Bruce? What had his father been thinking of when he married this woman?

“I said we’re having a birthday party for Bruce. I want you to come.”

“For Christ’s sakes, Ma, Bruce must be fifty years old.”

“Forty-eight. And is that a reason not to have a party?”

“It would be for someone with some taste or decency. I can’t make it.”

“You don’t even know when it is.”

“I still can’t make it.”

“It’s next Wednesday, a week from now.”

“I’ll be back in Las Vegas then,” Trace said.

“Oh, sure. You’ve got lots of time for that woman and gallivanting around the countryside, but no time for your family,” Mrs. Tracy said.

“Mother, I’m here working. That’s the male equivalent of your shopping. Let me talk to Sarge.”

“I’ll get him. And I’m expecting you at that party.”

Trace heard her put the phone down, and a few moments later his father’s laconic voice asked, “Hello, son. What’s up?”

“Sarge, what’s gnawing at her craw now? I know she didn’t call to invite me to that baboon’s birthday party.”

“Her birthday was last week. You forgot to call.”

“I sent flowers. You know I can’t remember dates. The florist has a steady order. Every year, same time, he sends a dozen roses.”

“She would have liked a phone call.”

“Next year, I’ll call and skip the flowers,” Trace said.

“That’ll really piss her off,” his father said with a chuckle.

“Good. Serves her right. Listen, Sarge, you talk her out of being mad, but no way I’m going to Bruce’s party.”

“I wish I had an excuse not to.”

“Square it for me,” Trace said. “Tell her my oral exam for the priesthood is that day.”

“You’d better tell her that one yourself,” his father said. “I’m not crazy.”

“I know. You’re the only one of us who isn’t. Don’t drink too much.”

“You too, son.”

Trace’s Log:

Tape recording Number Three, Devlin Tracy in the matter of Plesser, Carey, and other assorted pains in the ass and aggravations in my life.

Two more tapes in the Master File, and mightily though I tried, there are going to be more. But I want to get all this stuff out of the way early because I am having dinner tonight with a beautiful woman and I don’t want my overdeveloped sense of duty and responsibility to keep intruding and telling me I have tapes to make.

I’ve got problems here. The big problem is that everything seems like a nothing, and then I’ve got that poor old man telling me that somebody’s trying to kill him. Delirium? The babbling of somebody junked up with drugs? I don’t know. I don’t think so.

So there I am at Meadow Vista and we’ve got Dr. Matteson, who sits in his office surrounded by pictures of whales and seals and Jane Fonda and listens to Gilbert and Sullivan, for Christ’s sakes. He thinks that letter openers are out to get him. Maybe mild paranoia. I wouldn’t say he’s worried by the Plesser lawsuit, but he’s annoyed by it. And Plesser, he said, didn’t want to leave the sanatorium. Having been in that sauerkraut factory of a house, I can buy that.

So Plesser asked to stay even when Matteson could have let him go. Maybe oxygen therapy works for senility and some brain damage. I don’t know. It could be Matteson’s a quack, but his idea seems logical. If you can cut off oxygen to the brain, it dies; so maybe if you saturate it with oxygen, it lives better. I know it helps with hangovers. When I used to tourist it in Las Vegas, sometimes I’d go to those hotels with the big spas and take fifteen minutes of oxygen to clear the head. Maybe.

Even if he does look like a hippie that never got off the shelf, I like Matteson. And I believe him when he says he didn’t know anything about Plesser changing his insurance policy over. Could a man who drives letter openers into his desk because they prick his fingers, I ask you, could that man lie?

Plesser just had a heart attack and died. Anybody can have a heart attack anytime, that’s what Matteson said. Well, thank you, Doctor. What about us who can’t brush our tongues? If you can’t do anything about hearts, if it’s always going to be anything can just happen, then why not concentrate on tongues? Find a medical breakthrough so I can scrub three packs of tar off my tongue every morning. And another thing. I can’t put Q-tips in my ear without gagging. Has anybody thought about doing something about this? I’ll tell you, world, medicine isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

Matteson gets a point for telling Plesser’s lawyer, that Yule, to go to hell. And I guess there isn’t any doubt that the Plesser tribe wrote Matteson that threatening letter. God punishes those who steal our insurance money or whatever it said. They wrote it. At least that’s my humble opinion and this is my tape recorder, so you’re stuck with it.

Anyway, I’d feel better about Matteson if he had different posters on the walls. He’s got pictures for Save the Seals. Come on, cut me a break. They started that lunacy in California, where else? So they save the damn seals and the water is six feet deep with seals. Then what happens? Wherever you’ve got seals, you’re going to have sharks. Suddenly, the waters are flooded with sharks. They’re eating seals and they’re eating people too. So we save a couple of goddamn seals and people are getting killed. I hate environmentalists.

That’s another sign I’m going to make for my backwards billboards on cars.
Save the people first
.

Starting with me.

Anyway, that’s what I think about Dr. Matteson, and what I think about his assistant, Dr. Barbara Darling, is I don’t know. I don’t care if what she’s doing is all the latest rage in working with old people, I think she takes just too much pleasure in yelling at them. But hand it to her, she shot me down neatly when I blew off my big mouth, and I deserved it. Anyway, she confirmed what Matteson said; she just witnessed Plesser’s signature and she didn’t even see what she was signing. Somehow if Plesser was as senile as everybody was making him out to be, he was thinking pretty well about how to be secret and change his insurance. And what’d he say? Make two people happy? She tells me that Matteson runs that sanatorium out of love for the elderly. Well, maybe. Maybe him. I don’t know about her.

I don’t want to talk about Nurse Simons. If I ever meet her in a bar, she’ll have to buy her own vinegar and water. “Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?” God, I hate people who talk like that. I don’t like Nurse. But she gave me the same story as Darling. What an entry. Darling and Nurse. They sound like Hollywood’s last two bad summer comedies.

So, so far, nothing, right? But then there’s Mitchell Carey. I still get chilled thinking about this big old buck of a man, lying there like a helpless child, and then seeing the torture in those eyes. What did he mean? “Hundred, two hundred, dying, dying, hundred hundred, no more, take it away, more dying, dying, dying.”

And then he said, “They’re killing me. Help me. Help me.”

I want to, Mr. Carey. I just don’t know how. I don’t know what and I don’t know who and I don’t know how to do it, and that’s why I’m afraid I’m going to be around here awhile, until I find out just what’s going on.

Groucho, if I’m dead and you’re listening to this, you’ll be happy to know I almost landed in Three East. That’s the nut factory at Meadow Vista. If I do wind up there, tell Chico that I’m all right and staying out of trouble, ’cause they put saltpeter in the water. Never mind, don’t tell Chico anything. She doesn’t deserve explanations. Besides, I’ll be safe. I never drink water.

And then there’s the Carey family. I learned a lot there. How that Bob Swenson always liked to travel. Aaah, that’s a crappy thing to say. The poor old lady isn’t all there anymore. Mitchell Carey had a stroke when he found out that Buffy got killed. I think Amanda Carey suffered worse and nobody knows it. I was thinking about that misquote of mine. “Who is Hecuba that all the swains adore her?” and she reminded me it was Sylvia, not Hecuba. So what was I thinking about? I remembered. It was a line about Hecuba from Homer. “An old gray woman that has no home.” That’s what Amanda Carey reminds me of.

What the hell’s a crystal ball and incense doing in their house? I’ll have to ask Melinda, call her Muffy, an ersatz, no-money Muffy, and isn’t that just too cute for words. That one I can do without, and not just because she’s a blonde. But she’s the one getting Mrs. Carey worked up about Meadow Vista. She thinks I’ve done my job by coming here and being seen at the sanatorium. Now they won’t try anything. That’s just a little too smart by half.

Newspapers can cause a lot of trouble. Muffy saw that story about the Plesser family and it got her thinking. I don’t think anybody under twenty-five should be allowed to think.

Dammit, I’d like to know why Mr. Carey has been going downhill since he got to Meadow Vista. “They’re killing me. Help me.” Why’d he have to say that to me? I could be out of this place.

I’ve got another piece of tape with Jeannie Callahan, but I’m having dinner with her tonight so I’ll save it and do it later, in case anything else comes up. Chico, you listening? I hope mightily that something else does come up.

And I hope this is all done fast. My mother knows now where I am. Damn Groucho’s eyes for squealing.

Expenses. A hundred dollars for routine. Fifty more for expensive stuff that came up but I lost the receipts. Total, a hundred and fifty.