Trace (Trace 1) (11 page)

Jeannie Callahan lived on the top floor of a low apartment building on the outskirts of Harmon Hills. There was parking alongside the building, and when Trace rang her doorbell, she answered right away and told him to come up.

Her apartment was at the end of the corridor, her door was open, and Trace found her in the kitchen, holding a brandy snifter and looking into the refrigerator.

“Nice to see you again,” she said. “Where’s the wine?”

“I forgot the wine.”

“Good. I forgot to cook. Make yourself a drink and go sit at the table. I hope you like roast beef. I bought some at the delicatessen.”

“I love roast beef.”

“Rye bread all right?”

“With seeds?”

“Of course with seeds. Without seeds, is it rye bread?”

“Good.” Trace went inside with his vodka and set the drink on the glass-topped dining table on which two candles of unequal size were burning, then he went to the stereo and found two albums of Charlie Parker with Strings and put them on the turntable.

When he sat at the table, she called, “What do you like on your roast beef? Mayonnaise?”

“God, no. That’s awful. Catsup.”

“Nobody uses catsup on roast beef.”

“Everybody does who knows anything about roast beef,” Trace said.

She came into the room a few minutes later with a platter of roast-beef half-sandwiches that she set on the table. The rays of the setting sun cut through the window and made her hair glow as if aflame.

She was just beautiful, Trace thought, almost too beautiful.

A few moments later, she was back with another tray containing cole slaw, catsup, mayonnaise, and her drink. She sat down and watched him put catsup on his sandwich.

“That’s really disgusting,” she said.

“Actually it’s very logical. Roast beef is red, right? So you put red stuff on it. If you had something white, like chicken or turkey or tuna, you put white stuff on it: mayonnaise. Brown stuff like bologna or hot dogs or kielbasa slices, that takes brown stuff: mustard. Once you learn it, it makes life very simple.”

She thought about that for a moment and was about to say something when he added, “Of course, like any other good rule, it has a few exceptions. Liverwurst, for instance. That’s brown and should take brown stuff, but it takes mayonnaise.”

“How do you deal with the exceptions?” she asked him over the top of her brandy glass.

“By not eating liverwurst. It’s really a good system. It’s only got one design flaw.”

“What’s that?”

“Cheese. It doesn’t work for cheese. You would think that cheeses take mayonnaise, but they don’t. They all take mustard.”

“If you use light-yellow salad mustard instead of the spicy brown, you can make it work,” she said.

“God, I love lawyers’ minds,” Trace said. “I wouldn’t have thought of that in a thousand years. Of course. Light-yellow mustard on light-yellow stuff. Wonderful. I’ll drink to that.” He leaned across the table and they clinked glasses.

They hardly put a dent in the sandwiches, but they drank a lot, and later they sat on the sofa and looked out the window where the last faint pink fingers of the vanished sun clawed up at the sky. It reminded Trace of a drowning, of someone’s hand reaching convulsively for something, anything, to hold on to, before it settled slowly beneath the surface of the water.

Jeannie refilled her drink and Trace said, “You’re drinking too much.”

“Does it bother you?”

“No.”

“It’s the curse of the race, you know,” she said. “God created alcohol to stop the Irish from conquering the world.”

“My Irish father used to tell me that,” Trace said.

“Is he an alcoholic?”

“He’s in retirement, kind of. Once in a while, a sip of beer or a glass of wine. Or occasionally, a one-night toot. Most of the time, nothing.”

“My father was an alcoholic too,” she said. “He was a neat one, though. He’d have his martinis for lunch and he’d sit around the house drinking his cocktails before dinner and his wine with dinner and his brandy after dinner, and then he’d have just a couple of pops during the evening and maybe a schnapps before bedtime and he pulled it off for years. Your father like that?”

“No,” Trace said. “He was more of a rip-roaring, bingeing, empty-out-a-saloon drunk. He was a cop. He told me once he answered a call, it was some rape thing, but he was traveling with half a bag on and he pegged a shot at the rapist, but he missed and the guy got away. He couldn’t deal with that so he stopped drinking on the job, and then when he retired, he just kind of drifted into stopping drinking off the job. I think he was trying to set a good example for me, but it was too late. Doesn’t drinking bother your law practice?”

“Oh, no. I don’t really have a problem. I drink when I want to. Like this afternoon and tonight, I just really felt like it.”

“And tomorrow?” Trace said.

“If I feel like it,” she said. She put her feet up on the cocktail table, then put them down, squirmed out of her shoes, and put her feet back up. “Your father named you after relatives?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a nice name. Devlin Tracy. If it was the other way around, you’d sound like a quarterback. Tracy Devlin. But Devlin Tracy’s got a nice ring to it. Like a prime minister. ‘Prime Minister Devlin Tracy announced today…’ Names are important.”

“They sure are,” Trace said. “Mozart.”

“What about Mozart?” she asked.

“Well, his middle name was Amadeus. That’s Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It’s Latin, you know.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m not an idiot. It means God’s love. So what?”

“Suppose his middle name was German. In German, God’s love would be Gottlieb. Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart. You think that rings? You think anybody’s going to do a Broadway show named
Gottlieb
? I tell you, there’s a lot to this name business.”

She mumbled agreement and said, “You married?”

“I used to be.”

“Any steady interest?”

“I live in Las Vegas with a hooker,” Trace said.

“That must be fun.”

“It used to be. I don’t know anymore.”

“I was almost married once,” she said. “I was just out of law school and I was clerking with this firm in New York and I was going out with one of the very junior partners. Then one night I went to have dinner with his parents. Very Upper East Side. So after dinner, the father asked around for brandy. I said yes and had a brandy with my coffee and a cigarette, and his mother looked down her goddamn East Side nose at me and said, ‘I always hoped Frank would find a woman who didn’t smoke or drink.’”

“What’d you do?” Trace asked.

“I looked down my patrician New Jersey nose at her and said that actually I had always hoped to marry an orphan. Well, Frank, the asshole, he jumps to her defense and I poured my brandy on his permanent-waved hair and left. Then I went to clerk for my father.”

“Good for you.”

“You staying around town long?” she said.

Trace reached down and through his shirt turned on his tape recorder. “Looks like I’m going to be around for a couple more days.”

“More work?” she asked.

“I was talking to my boss tonight, the one I told you is the friend of the Careys, and he wanted me to stay around a little longer, just to make sure that Mr. Carey’s all right.”

“He’s all right,” she said.

“He’s not getting better at Meadow Vista. In fact, he’s getting worse.”

“Not because of anything that’s happening at the sanatorium,” she said. “He’s old, he had a stroke. Sometimes they recover and sometimes they don’t.”

“You’re sure it’s like that? No maniacs at the funny farm pulling the plug on patients?”

“None.”

“No lady lawyers who’ve been looting company funds for years and are afraid they’re going to be found out?”

“Not me,” she said. “I’m too dopey to steal.”

“No business partners who want to bump him off because he knows too much?”

It seemed to Trace that she hesitated one beat too long before answering “No.”

“Who’s Mr. Carey’s partner?”

“Wilber Winfield. Nice old guy. They’ve been together since Hector was a pup.”

“And they don’t get along,” Trace said.

She sipped at her drink, then got up and walked to the kitchen to refill it. Trace noticed that she was walking unsteadily. She kept talking from the kitchen.

“They’ve been fighting every day for forty years,” she said loudly. “They argue about everything. They love each other.”

“You can love and still kill,” Trace said.

“Hey,” she said, sticking her head around the corner of the kitchen wall. “What is all this kill stuff? Mr. Carey’s sick. He had a stroke. What kill? You’re not buying that Plesser bullshit, are you?”

“No. Sorry. I guess I’ve just got a morbid turn of mind.”

“A drink’ll cure that,” she said, and came back into the living room and snatched his glass up to refill it.

When she was back in the kitchen, Trace called out, “What’s the real reason you don’t like that girl living with the Careys?”

“I told you the real reason. I think she’s a bitch.”

“Why?” he asked.

“’Cause I think she’s a parasite, living there for months, reminding Amanda of her dead daughter. And I don’t think it’s any of her business worrying about having Mr. Carey declared incompetent or how you draw up wills or whatever. Who the hell is she?” She looked around the corner to see if he was agreeing with her. He nodded and she went back into the kitchen.

She came back with both glasses filled to the top and most of the contents reached the coffee table safely.

After she put down the glasses, she stood looking down at him, then she knelt on the couch and kissed him hard, pressing him back against the sofa cushions.

“I think I want you to make love to me, Trace.”

“Should I wait until you make up your mind?” he asked.

“No. Seize this mad moment of weakness,” she said. She kissed him again, then pulled away and surveyed him as if he were a coat on sale. “Let’s take that tie off,” she said. “You’re always wearing that tie. And that stupid frog on your tie. Your shirt, let’s get you comfortable.” She reached for his shirt and Trace let her fumble with his shirt buttons for a moment before pulling her hands away. Any more and she would notice his tape recorder.

“I think we ought to stick at what we’re best at,” he said. “I undress me.”

“And I undress me? How dull.”

“No. I undress you next,” he said.

They were perfectly matched, Trace thought. Each of them brought their glasses into the bedroom and put them on the end tables. They both made sure they had cigarettes and ashtrays, and then occasionally, they would take a break during lovemaking to sip from their drinks or smoke a cigarette.

She had her hands around Trace’s naked waist.

“What’s that sticky stuff?” she said.

“Don’t be disgusting,” Trace said. “That’s a by-product of successful sex.”

“I mean that goo on your back.”

“Oh. That’s from a mustard plaster.” He reached back and moved her hand from the sticky area where he had adhesive-taped his recording machine.

She giggled. “Shouldn’t it have been a mayonnaise plaster?”

Later, they lay side by side in the bed, smoking. Trace looked at his jacket hanging from the top of the door and could almost sense the tape recorder running silently inside his pocket.

“Trace, how old are you?” Jeannie asked.

“Going to be forty, thank God.”

“Why thank God?” she asked. “What’s so good about forty?”

“No more getting erections on buses,” Trace said. “It almost makes being forty worthwhile. How old are you?”

“Thirty-two,” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray on his naked belly, slung an arm across his throat, and fell asleep in seconds.

It was after midnight when Trace extricated himself from her grip, took a shower, and then dressed quietly in the darkened apartment.

When he was ready to leave, he knelt on the edge of the bed and kissed the beautiful redhead lightly on the forehead.

“Good night, lady lawyer,” he said softly.

She opened her large eyes. In the dark room, glints of moonlight reflected from them. “You’re leaving?” she said.

“It’s either that or come back to bed with my suit on, and I hate getting wrinkled.”

“Be quiet going out,” she said. “You’ll ruin my reputation if anybody sees you.”

“I was planning on whistling the March from
Aïda
down your halls.”

“Hold it till next time. We’ll do it together.”

She reached her arms up for him and brought him down and this time he kissed her a long kiss before walking quickly to the door of the bedroom. She stopped him by calling his name.

“Trace?”

“Yes.”

“You believe in love at first sight?” she asked.

“Maybe a little bit,” he said. “Maybe now.”

“Me too,” she said. “I feel something good about you.”

“I know,” he said, and let himself out. In the hallway, he made sure the door to her apartment locked tightly behind him, and then he walked down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor.

He lit a cigarette outside the building and looked up at the sky. It reminded him of the night sky in Las Vegas, not when looking from the Strip or Downtown: there was so much other light around that one could hardly see the sky. But from the outskirts of the town, where the city drifted away into just sand and open desert, where the roads were unmarked and unlit, the sky hung over the earth like a twinkling ceiling. It was the kind of night that made Trace wish he owned a telescope, even though he had owned one once as a child and had never been able to see much of anything through it, except a woman in a building two blocks away who liked to undress in front of her window.

His father had caught him on the roof one night, peeping-tomming at the woman. He was still in his police uniform, but he was off-duty with a beer can in his hand.

“What are you doing?” Sarge had said.

“Just looking around,” twelve-year-old Devlin had said nervously, but before he could move the telescope, his father had said, “Let me see,” and Police Sgt. Patrick Tracy had looked through the eyepiece and Trace had felt himself shrinking away as his father kept looking and going “Unhuhhh, uhuhhh” softly under his breath. Then he had stood up from the telescope.