Trace (Trace 1) (12 page)

“When I bought you this, this wasn’t exactly the kind of heavenly body I had in mind,” he said.

“No, sir,” Trace had said.

His father nodded. “Your turn,” he said, and young Devlin had hesitated and his father had said, “Quick, before she’s done.”

As Trace again watched the woman through the scope, his father had spoken softly to him. “Now some people might think that what we were doing is wrong, but that’s nonsense,” he said. “That woman undresses in front of a window because she wants people to look at her. Can you imagine how terrible she’d feel if nobody outside saw her?”

Without looking up, the boy said, “So we’re really doing good?”

“That’s right, son. She do that every night?”

“Most nights. Weekends, she must go out or something ’cause the lights are out by the time I’ve got to go to bed.”

His father had nodded. “Well, I’ll try to take care of things on weekends, because I stay up later than you.” He had hesitated for a moment. “I think I saw that woman on a wanted poster at the precinct.”

“Really? A criminal?”

“I think so. But in police work, you’ve just got to be sure. A lot of people have been hanged because of mistaken identity.”

“Should we call the police?”

“I am the police,” his father had said. “I think we better just keep checking her out until I can be sure of my identification.”

“All right.”

“Don’t tell your mother anything. I don’t like to involve her in my professional duties. It could be dangerous.”

“Okay, Pop.”

“It could be dangerous for you too, but I trust you to be careful and not breathe a word of this to anyone. That way, you won’t be a target.”

“I understand, Pop. Sort of an undercover investigation.”

“That’s exactly what I had in mind,” his father said, and then added sternly, “But don’t neglect the sky either. Everything is up there.” He pointed skyward. “The past and the present and the future. Everything.”

“Sure, Pop. I just have trouble telling one constellation from another one. They all look alike to me.”

“Practice, Devlin. Practice.”

For the next week, Devlin had gotten used to his father coming up on the roof to share his views of the sky and their interesting blond neighbor.

One night, when his father was working a different tour of duty, covering for someone who was ill, the boy had seen the police squad car park down the block from their house and seen his father walk toward their building. A few minutes later, he had joined his son on the roof.

“She home tonight?” the father had asked. His breath reeked of whiskey.

“Yeah, there she is. You think she’s the criminal?”

“What criminal?” his father had said, moving to the telescope.

“You know, the one you’re looking for.”

“Oh. Hard to tell at this distance.” The man had looked for a few moments, then said he had to get back on duty. “You should be getting to bed now,” he said.

“Okay, Dad. I’ll close up now and go downstairs.”

“Don’t tell Mother I was home. She’ll think I was sick or something.”

“I won’t,” Devlin had said.

His father left, and when he saw the squad car head down the block, Devlin had stayed on the roof, watching the blonde. She was sitting in her lingerie on her sofa, facing the window through which the boy looked, reading a magazine.

Occasionally, she stretched, and it was the stretches that he waited for. But she seemed to be restless tonight, and if she didn’t undress for bed in a few more minutes, he was going to carry his telescope downstairs and go to sleep.

As he was watching, the blonde suddenly cocked her head, then got up, tossed a satin robe around her, and went to her front door. The door of the apartment was set back from the window and the boy could not see who was there.

He could see the blond woman, though; she seemed to be talking to someone for a long minute or two, and then she reached out and turned off the main overhead light. There was still a small lamp burning near the sofa.

Trace saw a big figure, a male, move toward the window, but he could see only the man’s silhouette. The man stood alongside the window, still not visible from outside, reached his hand up, and pulled the shade down. In the flash of light from a streetlight, young Devlin saw something glitter on the man’s sleeves.

He kept watching, even though he could see nothing now except vague amorphous outlines of shapes on the window shade. He saw two persons and then, as he watched, they seemed to merge into one.

A few moments later, another light came on in the apartment. It was in her bedroom, because it was the light that always went on after the blonde had undressed in front of her window. The light was on for a few minutes and then it too went off.

The boy waited a few more minutes, then folded his telescope tripod and carried it downstairs to their second-floor apartment. His mother was dozing on the couch and he went right to bed. But as he lay in bed, something gnawed at his mind and he got up, dressed quickly, and taking the key from behind the door, let himself out.

He ran the two blocks to the street where the blond woman’s apartment was. He stood in a doorway on the corner, looking at the building. Parked in front of it was a police cruiser and behind the wheel was Patrolman Eddie DeRose, his father’s regular driver.

His father was not in the squad car, but young Devlin knew where he was. He knew what had glittered on the sleeve that had pulled the blinds in the blonde’s apartment. The flash had been the brass buttons on a policeman’s sleeve.

Devlin ran back home and let himself into the apartment. His mother was still sleeping on the sofa.

The next night, he was back on the roof, but the woman’s shades were drawn. As they were every night from then on. And from then on, his father did not visit the observatory on the roof, and young Devlin was forced to try to look at stars.

A month passed before his father came up to the roof where Devlin was looking at the sky, charting the stars against a map from an encyclopedia.

Without preamble, the boy asked, “That blond woman?”

“What about her?”

“Was she the criminal you thought?”

The older man shook his head. “No. You know, I went over there one night under false pretenses. Told her we heard about a burglar in the building. But close up I could see right off she wasn’t the woman. Sorry, son. I thought the two of us were going to be in on an arrest. You still watch her?”

“No. She pulls the shade down at night now.”

“Too bad,” his father said. “Well, you know, women come and women go. But the stars, they’re always there.” He pointed overhead and said excitedly, “Look, there’s Cassiopeia.”

“Where?”

“There.”

“Pop, that’s the Big Dipper.”

“I knew it was one of them,” his father said triumphantly, and went back inside.

The memories came into Trace’s mind as he stood outside the front door of Jeannie Callahan’s apartment building, looking up at the summer sky. He could still recognize the Big Dipper, but that was all. The rest of the constellations looked to him like nothing but stars spilled at random across the evening sky.

He remembered he had bought What’s-his-name a telescope on his eighth birthday. Or maybe his tenth. How old was his son? He didn’t remember. And he had put the kid on the roof of their apartment building and he had showed him how to focus the telescope and had told him to keep an eye on their neighbors, but the kid had never spotted anybody to compare with Trace’s blonde. Or, if he had, he had kept it to himself. The swine. How could anybody like a kid like that?

Trace remembered his father’s rooftop words, “Women come and women go,” and he flipped out his cigarette and strolled down the length of the building toward the parking lot and the green Ford he had rented. As he approached his car, he thought he heard something, and stopped, but the only sounds he could recognize were New Jersey night sounds—insects, a faint breeze through the trees that bordered the narrow road, and far away the sound of a train whistle.

He shrugged and walked toward the car, fishing in his pocket for the keys, which were jammed in under his tape recorder.

He was inserting the key in the door lock, reminding himself that he was in rural New Jersey now, not in Las Vegas, and he could leave his car parked without locking it, when he heard the sound again. It was the sound of footsteps and he wheeled, just in time to get a fist crashed into his jaw. The punch knocked Trace backward, and he helped it by rolling, spinning along the front fender of the car, to get a split second to clear his head and to put some space between himself and his assailant.

As he rolled straight up off the fender, he saw there were two of them. They wore ski masks and he raised his fists as they charged him; he caught one of them with a straight right-hand punch directly in the face. The man stopped as if he’d run into a wall, but the other one was on Trace, driving punches home into his belly,
rat-a-tat-a-tat
, and as Trace spun toward him and drove his own fist into the man’s stomach, the second man jumped on Trace from the back, slipping his arms around Trace, trying to stop him from punching. Trace slammed himself backward toward the car and the man let out an
oof
of air as he was sandwiched between the fender below and Trace’s 210 pounds atop him; but the second man slammed a right hand into Trace’s jaw, and even as the man beneath him released him, Trace rolled off the fender and onto the pavement of the lot. He got up quickly. Being on the ground was no way to win a street fight, but the two men turned and ran as he lumbered back to his feet.

He saw them turn the corner of the building and he yelled after them, “You’re in trouble now. My kids live in Jersey. They’ll never forgive you for letting me live.”

He felt himself with his hands. Nothing seemed broken or seriously injured, but his stomach felt as if people had been using it for test borings. He checked the tape recorder in his jacket, but it seemed undamaged.

He heard a car door slam heavily and a motor start up, and a moment later a car without lights sped from the back of the building, out into the street, and turned left, away from him. He could only barely make out the car’s outline, and even if he had, it wouldn’t have made any difference because he was convinced all car manufacturers shared the same set of plans so all their cars looked exactly alike. All he could see was this car was dark green and had some kind of sporty sloped back roof.

Trace’s key was still in the door lock, and as he turned it, he glanced toward the back of the car.

“Shoot,” he exclaimed. The left rear tire was flat. For a moment, he thought of saying to hell with it and going back upstairs to barge in on Jeannie Callahan, assuming he could wake her up, and impose on her hospitality, but he didn’t want to. He had said good night to her, just right, just enough, and he didn’t want to change it.

He opened the trunk of the car and hoisted out the spare tire, putting it down next to the bumper while he rooted about inside the neat carpeted trunk for the jack. He thought that it was probably a major American cottage industry, people sitting around trying to find ways to hide jacks and lug wrenches so they could never be found by anyone but an automobile salesman. As he leaned into the trunk, his knee brushed the spare tire and it rolled away from the bumper and he lunged to grab it. It wobbled to the ground, and as he picked it up, he noticed something else. His right rear tire was flat also.

“Sumbitch,” he growled, and tossed a kick at the car’s rear fender, just as an auto’s headlights illuminated him from behind. He turned but couldn’t see anything because the car had stopped only feet from him and its headlights were blinding him.

Was it the two men come back? If it had been and they wanted to hurt him, wouldn’t they have just slammed him into his own car, crushing his legs?

His eyes adjusted and he was able to see that the car was a police cruiser. The door opened and a woman’s voice hailed him. “What’s going on here?”

The woman was tall and Trace moved out of the path of the lights and saw she was wearing a police uniform.

“My tires are flat,” he said.

“Is that how you fix them? By kicking your fender?” she said. “Oh, it’s you. What’s your name, Tracy or something?”

Trace recognized the woman now as Officer Wilcox, the wife of the lieutenant he had seen when he first came to town. The woman with the roving eyes.

“That’s right. Tracy. You’re Officer Wilcox?”

“Yeah. You say ‘tires’ are flat?”

“Both rear ones. I think it was vandals.”

“From that blood on your lip, it looks like you caught them.”

Trace reached up his hand to the side of his mouth and his fingers came away sticky. He decided impulsively that he did not want to involve the police in any of this yet, so he said, “I rapped myself on the trunk lid.” He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief.

“What are you doing here anyway?” she asked.

“I was visiting.”

“Who?”

“A friend.”

She hesitated, then said, “I guess we can let it go at that.”

“Is there an all-night garage around here?”

“No. There’s no all-night anything in this town. Well, hardly any all-night anything. Best I can do, I’ll give you a lift somewhere. You can call somebody in the morning.”

“I appreciate it,” Trace said.

He turned around to replace the spare tire in the trunk, and as he did, in the glare of the squad car’s headlights he saw a small piece of paper on the ground near his flattened right rear tire. He picked up the paper and jammed it into his pocket, and he noticed that the valve cap had been taken off the tire. The tire had not been punctured; someone had just opened the valve to let the air out.

He locked the spare tire in the trunk, then put his car keys on the floor under the front seat and locked all the car doors, first making sure the driver’s front vent window was unlocked and an arm could reach through it to the door lock.

“I left the keys under the seat for whoever comes,” he said.

Police Officer Wilcox drove carefully, her eyes on the road, and Trace had a chance to admire her profile, classic and sharp. She looked to be in her early thirties, perhaps fifteen years younger than her husband.