“Now you can save the world from him,” Trace said.
“How’s that?”
“See if you can get him into the tub.”
17
Only ten minutes into the drive and Chico already looked hungry. Trace tried to take her mind off food. “So what were you doing with that musclebound dwarf so long back there?” It was the first time he’d spoken to her since leaving Tammy Collins’ apartment.
“Exercising,” Chico said blandly.
“I’ll bet. The old pelvic thrust, huh?”
“You have not only a dirty mind but a suspicious one. I’d never fool around with someone who smelled like that.”
“No?”
“Not with you in the next room,” Chico said.
“Very funny,” Trace said.
“I had him show me their bedroom too,” she said.
“I’m sure you’re not going to leave out one gory detail either, are you?” Trace said.
“I wanted to see if the little bitch had Evening in Byzantium, Trace. I was on the job, as usual.”
“Did she?”
Chico’s mouth twisted in a grimace of disgust. “No. She had some kind of red-dot special toilet water from the local supermarket. Two bucks the gallon. I found Julio very attractive, though.”
“Talk on,” Trace said. “Just wait till my rendezvous with Mandy.”
“If she uses the same deodorant Julio does, be my guest. I poured Tammy’s toilet water over his head before I left.”
“Did you really?”
“It was do or die,” she said. “And I’m too young to die.”
“Well, you brought all those attentions on yourself,” Trace said. “Don’t forget that, because I won’t.”
“Don’t I know that,” she said.
“I have to admit it. I felt some little twinge of conscience about seeing a beautiful call girl. But that was before you and Julio. Now I go with a clear mind and lance a-tilt.”
Trace turned off the main highway and Chico said, “Where are you going? You’re not trying to spirit me off to some secluded spot to practice lance-tilting for Mandy, are you?”
“You wish,” Trace said. “No, I think Mandy will handle the lance very well on her own. We’re going to stop by Collins’ farm.”
“What for?”
“It’s not too far out of the way. We might have left some traces of our visit the last time. I just want to make sure that everything’s clean.”
Chico shook her head. “This is just the way criminals behave, going back to the scene of the crime. Everybody knows you shouldn’t do that. It’s how people get caught.”
“Good,” Trace said. “Maybe we’ll catch someone.”
Though the house was exactly as they had left it, Trace and Chico walked through it again with Chico swiping with a damp cloth at anything she might have missed the last time.
Back outside, they walked toward the barn and Chico said, “That’s strange.”
“What is?”
“The barn door’s unlocked,” she said, pointing to the bolt. “We locked it when we left. I remember checking it.”
Trace backed Chico away, then took a deep breath, opened the door, and went inside.
After checking that nothing in the barn had been disturbed, Trace kicked aside some of the grass that covered the body. Collins’ body was lying in the same position it had been, looking a little worse for wear.
Then he saw something glitter through a thin layer of grass cuttings. Trying to keep from retching, he pried open Collins’ clenched fingers. Resting on the crawling palm was a woman’s necklace, a diamond butterfly on a gold chain.
Trace wiped it off with some grass and carried it outside, where he gulped fresh lungfuls of air.
“He was holding this,” he told Chico, extending the necklace.
“How’d we miss it before?” she said.
“I don’t know. It was hard to see. Maybe the light just hit it the right way today,” he said.
She shook her head. “Or else it wasn’t there before,” she said.
“It was probably there. Nothing else was touched.”
“Except the front door,” she said. “We locked it but now it was unlocked. And I looked at that body, Trace. I checked his wallet, for Pete’s sake. I would have seen a necklace if he was holding it.”
“Why do you try to make everything more complicated?” Trace asked. “Don’t I have enough problems? Why would anyone plant a diamond necklace on a corpse?”
“Obviously to create a false trail,” Chico said smugly.
“You’d better stick to seducing fireplug dwarfs,” Trace said. He pocketed the necklace.
“You’re not going to keep that thing, are you?”
“Not keep keep,” he said, “just borrow.”
“You’re real bad, Trace. First you don’t call the cops when you should. And now you’re removing evidence from the scene of a crime. You’ll go up the river for twenty years. Fifty, when I turn state’s evidence and rat on you.”
“Don’t worry. I’m going to turn the necklace over to the cops. In time.”
“How much time?” she asked.
“Enough time to find out how it got there if it wasn’t there the last time.”
“I know how it got there. Whoever murdered Collins put it there so some crazy would pick it up and take the blame from the cops.”
“I know it’s difficult for women sometimes, but please try to be logical,” Trace said smugly. “As I am. I intend to confront Mandy the Hooker with this necklace and force the truth out of her.”
“Hold her down, Trace. You always do better with women when you hold them down.”
“Don’t be jealous. It ill-becomes you,” Trace said.
“Get crabs and die,” Chico said.
From the hotel he called Mandy’s phone number again. This time, he did not pretend to be Thomas Collins but gave her his real name. Mandy said she’d love to meet him for cocktails in an hour and gave him an address near Russian Hill.
He was clipping his frog microphone to his tie when Chico walked into the room.
“How’s your mother?” he asked.
“She’s fine. Fully recovered. You’re going to see Mandy?”
“All in the line of duty. I promise you I won’t enjoy a minute of it.” He took a Polaroid photograph of the butterfly-shaped necklace and put it in his pocket.
“You never look this good for me,” Chico said.
“I always look this way. Exactly this good.”
“The hell you do. All I ever see you in is rippedy jeans and hair grease.”
“Don’t knock the jeans. It took years to get them to look like that.”
“Maybe I should go with you,” Chico said.
“I don’t think so.”
“She’ll be able to snow you with her sex appeal,” Chico said. “You’ll need a cooler head around than either of yours.”
“Couldn’t do it, Chico. This might be a dangerous mission.”
“Right,” Chico said. “I can tell by your combat-ready silk handkerchief.”
“Don’t be that way. If it makes you feel any better, I want you to know I’ll be thinking of your pinched little food-stuffed face during every ecstatic moment.” He kissed her on both cheeks and saluted. “We who are about to disrobe salute you.”
“Keep it zipped, Trace,” she warned.
“I will.”
“If you don’t, I’ll know.”
“How will you know?” he asked.
“I always know.”
Trace blew her a kiss and left. She was right: she always knew.
18
The name on the doorbell said M. REESE. Trace was admitted to the apartment by a maid, white, middle-aged, sow-faced, wearing a black nylon uniform and practical white ripple-soled shoes.
He was invited to make himself confortable for a few minutes in a living room whose opulence made the Araby Casino high-rollers’ room look like a Social Security office. Throug
h mirrors, the living room seemed to stretch for blocks, showing off a lot of modern furniture and several huge arrangements of exotic flowers. Trace touched one. The flowers were dried, and he thought that was a good symbol for a high-priced hooker: exotic and dried.
Mandy Reese swept into the room like Loretta Young staging a comeback. She wore a Grecian-style gown gathered over one shoulder with a clasp of diamonds and pearls. She was a stunner, attractive enough for magazine covers, with large gray eyes and full lips and the kind of patrician nose that Trace decided had never smelled sauerkraut.
Trace started to speak, but she raised a finger to her lips to shush him while she went to the bar and poured both of them drinks in cut-crystal glasses. She hit a button and soft romantic music enveloped them from hidden speakers all over the room.
When she handed him the glass, Trace said, “Thank you. Nice place.”
He sipped the drink. It was Scotch, but good Scotch and therefore bearable.
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s home, with all the comforts. Such as beds, for instance. Do you know it costs me two hundred dollars an hour to rent this place? Then there are extras, like bathtubs and rooms for body rubs and saunas. Living here for an hour, if I turn on all the extras, costs me about three hundred dollars.”
She gave Trace a dazzling smile. Her voice was soft and Trace thought maybe New England. He figured he was probably mistaken: if she had really been from New England, she would already have had his money in her garter belt or wherever she kept it.
Trace took out his wallet and placed three one-hundred-dollar bills on a mirror-topped coffee table.
“Is this for me?” she said. Her eyes smiled right along with her mouth.
“Yes,” Trace said.
“A gift for me?” she repeated.
Trace was beginning to wonder why he had bothered to turn on his tape recorder. Mandy Reese was obviously taping this conversation herself, just to prove that she had not solicited anyone for purposes of prostitution. Just in case the matter ever reared its ugly head.
“Yes, a gift for you,” Trace said. “Given willingly and with no hint or promise of future considerations. Out of the goodness of my heart, which is monumental both in size and in its capacity for compassion.”
Mandy Reese laughed. She laughed easily, a woman very confident of herself. She scooped up the three bills, put them in a little stone vase atop the tiled fireplace, then turned and said, “It’s always good to get all that out of the way. Now what kind of partying do you want to do?”
“Sit and let’s enjoy this drink,” Trace said. He waved an idle hand around the apartment. “You seem to make a pretty good living in a town with San Francisco’s reputation. Just imagine how you’d do in the Klondike.”
“Give me those long winter nights every time,” she said lightly. “But you’re right. Forty percent of the men in this town are gay. The other sixty percent are broke. But then there’s some married ones who are straight and have money. Those are my kind of friends,” she said.
“Police?” Trace asked. “Aren’t you pretty visible?”
“They wouldn’t bother me. I mean, this is a town where they’ve got he-ing and he-ing going on right on Main Street at High Noon. You think there they’re going to bother me for promoting a little old-fashioned he-ing and she-ing?” She sat on the sofa next to Trace and crossed her legs, exposing a creamy-white thigh.
“Speaking of he-ing and she-ing, what are you up for?” she asked silkily.
“Basically, I’d like to talk.”
“Sure. For sixty minutes, we can talk about anything from Petrarchan sonnets to quarks. I’m yours, Devlin. Talk away.”
“Call me Trace,” he said.
She put her right hand gently on his left thigh. “Whatever you want, Trace. Whatever.”
“I was hoping you’d feel that way. Basically I wanted to talk about insurance.” He looked at her and watched her face change from candlelight to molten steel.
“If you want to talk about insurance, perhaps you should talk to my partners,” she said. She started to rise from the couch, but Trace grabbed her wrist.
“Not that kind of insurance. Not shakedown stuff. Mandy, I work for an insurance company.”
She softened and sat back down. Then she laughed. “You didn’t invest that three hundred dollars to try to get me to buy a policy, did you? If you did, you’ve got to be the dumbest insurance man in the world.”
“No. I’m an investigator with an insurance company and I’m looking into a case, and I thought you might be able to give me some information.”
“What kind of information?”
“Nothing heavy and all confidential,” Trace said.
She was silent as she took three sips from her drink. Then she relaxed back against the couch and said, “I don’t trust it, but why don’t you give it a try?”
“Fair enough,” Trace said. “Does the name Thomas Collins mean anything to you?”
“A drink that gives you a toothache,” she said.
“No, a man,” Trace said.
“No.”
“Never heard the name before?” he asked.
“Never.”
“Mandy, that’s not quite accurate. I called you two days ago using that name.”
“Trace, truth. If you asked me if I know John Smith, I’d say no and I get fifty calls a day using that name. If you called me saying Tom Collins, I wouldn’t remember it for two minutes.”
“Okay,” Trace said. “That’s logical and I apologize. Think hard now, though. Thomas Collins. Forty-ish, needle-nosed, thin white hair fluffed around his ears, real-estate man.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But I don’t remember everybody who comes here real well. What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
“Does this concern me?” she asked.
“He had your phone number on him,” Trace said.
“Balls,” she said. She stood up and paced. “Okay, I remember him. But you were talking about cuff links on the telephone. I don’t know anything about any cuff links.”
“Then you do remember my call.”
“When I think I might be getting involved in something,” she said, “my memory improves remarkably. I knew you weren’t him ’cause he had a high squeaky voice.”
“You’re not getting involved, Mandy. The police don’t even know about this, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re not going to.”
“What about the cuff links?” she asked.
“He got a note in the mail from someone named Mandy. There was a cuff link with it.”
“Wrong girl,” she said. “I don’t return presents. Even if it is only one cuff link.”
“How about a diamond necklace?” Trace said. He searched her face for a reaction, but there was none.
“If I wouldn’t return a single cuff link I certainly wouldn’t give back a diamond necklace. But the fact is I don’t have one.”
He handed her the Polaroid of the butterfly necklace.
“Ever see that before?”
“Please,” she said, handing it back. “That’s too tacky for Peoria. But it’s something that he would buy.”
“How’s that?”
“It looks like it came out of a gumball machine. That was Collins’ style.”
“Tell me about him,” Trace said. “Did he come here often?”
“The last few years, every so often, but he’s no regular. Collins was sort of a quarterly client.”
“When was the last time?”
“A couple of months ago, the early part of the summer, I guess. He invited me to go to Las Vegas and gamble with him. As if I’d be caught dead outside this apartment with that pig.”
“He was no special favorite of yours, I take it,” Trace said.
She laughed without humor. “He had no class, absolutely none. He’d come in here waving cash around like it gave him the biggest dong in California and talking about all the girls he’d been with.”
“Anyone s
pecial?”
“Special how?”
Trace sipped his drink. “I don’t know. Love relationships, maybe.”
Mandy rocked with laughter and sat down again next to Trace. “Hell, no. Showgirls, stuff like that. He claimed to be a high-roller at the Fontana in Vegas. I suppose the casino fixed him up. I can’t imagine anybody would trick with him unless somebody was paying for it.”
“He was bad?” Trace asked.
“In the sack? Strictly zero. He wouldn’t be able to get it up and then he’d get mad about it and say it was because he was with sixteen different women in the last two days.”
“Isn’t that annoying to you?” Trace asked.
Her features softened and she shook her head. “All in a day’s entertaining.” She stroked his thigh. “I know how to handle things like that. Any more questions?”
“He ever tell you that he had a farm?”
“No. Any more questions?”
“Why do you advertise in sleazy papers?” Trace asked.
“I haven’t advertised in a year. As far as my finances are concerned, you might say I’m on my feet. Any more questions?”
“Would Collins have to keep a copy of your ad around for any reason?”
She shook her head. “He always carried this little address book in his wallet. His little book of lust, he called it. He said my number was in there. Anyway, I’m in the phone book too. Any more questions?”
“A couple. He ever talk about anybody?”
“Like what? Like who?”
“Like how he got along with people,” Trace said. “Like his business, his family. Try the wife.”
“You mean besides that his wife didn’t understand him,” Mandy said with a laugh.
“Maybe something a little more original,” Trace said.
“Here. Let me fix up that drink,” she said. Mandy took Trace’s glass from his hand and walked to the bar. She was very nice to look at from behind and Trace didn’t mind the view but he thought she was taking an awfully long time to pour scotch and ice into a glass.
She was going to drug him. Trace knew it. She had poured some particularly noxious chemical into his drink and she was going to stir it until the very last granule dissolved. Then she was going to make him drink it and then she’d laugh while he struggled to stay awake before finally lapsing into unconsciousness on the couch.
Pigs Get Fat (Trace 4) Page 11