And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2)

by Warren Murphy

  Rosado had found the autopsy report. “Doc Johnson did the autopsy,” he said. “She said it looked like Jarvis was slugged inside the house, because there was blood there, and then there was a trail leading outside to the patio. Somehow he must have gotten out there and, she says, he fell again, cracked his skull on that stupid ceramic fish, and then just lay there and bled to death. There were traces of skull matter on the ceramic thing. No indication of what else he might have been hit with. Maybe a big flashlight.”

  Trace shrugged. “Why crawl outside? When you come to, wouldn’t you just call the cops?”

  “I asked Doc Johnson that, too,” Rosado said. “She said you never can tell with head injuries because you don’t know exactly what got injured in the brain. She said she had a case once where a guy was standing at the bathroom sink and got shot in the head by his wife. Well, he picked himself up, and then lathered his face and shaved. And when he was done shaving, then he called the police. And when they got there, he was dead. You can’t tell with head injuries, she said. People do nutty things. Anyway, here’s some more photos.”

  He slid a stack of eight-by-tens across the desk. They showed the inside of the countess’s living room with the stone panel on the fireplace hinged outward, exposing the safe door. A cocktail table was overturned. A large Fiberglas pot on the left side of the fireplace had been knocked over and a six-foot-tall treelet was lying on the floor, dirt from its roots strewn about the floor. There were photos of the open sliding doors that led to the patio.

  “No prints, I guess,” Trace said.

  “None.”

  “What was on Jarvis’ body?” Trace asked.

  Rosado looked through more papers. “I’m not allowed to let you look at official reports, you know.”

  “I know that. But if you read them to me, it saves me the trouble of sneaking back here at night and stealing them.”

  “Yeah, here we are. He had his wallet, twelve dollars in cash, a driver’s license, a photo of him and the countess, and an American Express card. That’s all.”

  “Anything in his pockets?”

  “Just his house keys and the keys to the car he rented. About eighty cents in change.”

  “Good,” Trace said.

  “Why good?”

  “Where’s his passport?”

  “His passport, his passport.” Rosado shuffled through more papers. “No passport.”

  “How’d he get back into the country?”

  “Damned if I know. Can’t get in without a passport, can you?”

  “No. You in charge of this case, Danny?”

  “Well, we’ve pretty well deep-sixed it. You know how it is. If you don’t solve it in two days, you don’t solve it at all. But technically I guess I’m still in charge. And I’ve got some guys out on the street, watching for the jewelry, but nothing yet.”

  “Okay, I’m going to nose around some, maybe see the countess today. Anything I get, I’ll let you know.”

  “Okay,” Rosado said agreeably. “And if anything comes up on this end, I’ll tell you. Together, maybe we can beat that pimp out of his fee.”

  “A worthwhile ambition,” Trace said.

  “And Bjoerling was still a better tenor than Caruso,” Rosado said.

  “He wasn’t even a better tenor than Mario Lanza,” Trace said. “And, hell, everybody was a better tenor than Mario Lanza. Liberace’s a better tenor than Mario Lanza.”

  “Prettier too,” Rosado said. Dinner soon?’

  “After this week. Chico’s doing some convention work for my insurance company. When we finally get all those lunatics out of town.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I’ll be talking to you before then,” Trace said.

  5

  “Son, if I see one more nickel slot machine, I’m going to cut my wrists. And trapeze acts at Circus Circus. If I knew your mother had a trapeze fixation, I never would have married her. I’ve got a mind to saw through some of those ropes.”

  “I told you to keep her away from that place,” Trace said. “Where is she anyway?”

  “Ladies’ room. I think they give away free packs of Kleenex. This is the third time for her in an hour.”

  “Maybe all the excitement under the big top has unsettled her kidneys,” Trace said.

  The two men were seated at an otherwise-empty large table in the back of the main banquet room in the Araby Hotel. The tables on either side of them were empty also, but there was a high drone of voices in the room from five hundred other lunchers who sat in tables of ten, in front of a long head table, elevated three feet above the main floor. Robert Swenson sat in the middle of the head table, flanked on one side by Walter Marks and on the other by Chico.

  She saw Trace and waved. He made a circle of thumb and index finger and gave her the okay sign.

  Trace’s mother returned to the table. Without greeting her son, she said to her husband, “That woman didn’t give us much of a table, did she?”

  “Hilda,” her husband said, “that woman’s name is Chico. By the way, this is your son, if you want to say hello.”

  “Hello, Devlin,” she said without looking at him. Instead, she picked up a coffee spoon and began to examine it for flaws.

  “Actually, Mother, Chico gave you the best table in the house,” Trace said.

  “Way in the back here where you can’t see anything?” she asked.

  “Yes. Way in the back here where no one can see you, either, when you walk out in the middle of the speeches. She was being kind to you. Who wants to listen to insurance speeches? Eat and leave.”

  “God bless Chico,” Trace’s father said.

  “Amen, Sarge,” Trace said.

  “You would say that, Patrick. You like her, for some unknown reason. Did you see our son’s apartment?”

  “It’s her apartment too, Mother,” Trace said.

  “You can tell, with all those terrible striped fabrics and leather all around. A woman’s touch would do wonders for your place, Devlin.”

  “It has exactly the woman’s touch I want, Mother,” Trace said.

  “Hmmmph,” his mother said conclusively. Along-side a plate two places away, she finally found a spoon that passed inspection, and used it to put sugar into her coffee.

  “Are you enjoying your vacation, Mother?” Trace asked. He winked at his father.

  “I wanted to go to Miami. Everybody I know is in Miami. But your father wouldn’t go.”

  “Exactly,” Sarge said. “Because everybody you know is in Miami. If everybody you knew was in Las Vegas, then, by God, I’d go to Miami.”

  “Everybody I know should go to a tavern somewhere. You’d go there,” she said.

  “Even the purest of us sometimes has to compromise on moral principles,” he said. “You’re right.”

  “Will you two just drink your coffee?” Trace said. “You’re enough to send me back to the bottle.”

  “Hear, hear,” Sarge said. “What are you up to these days, son? Working on anything interesting?”

  “Nothing much. Just kind of scuffing around,” Trace said.

  “I figured you were working on something because you’re wearing your microphone tie clip,” the gray-haired man said.

  “A couple of interviews this morning. An insurance dead end,” Trace said.

  “If you need any kind of help, you should call me,” his father said. “You know I’m going to be here all week and I used to be pretty good.”

  “You wouldn’t take the lieutenant’s examination,” his wife said. “You could have been a lieutenant, but you wouldn’t take the examination.”

  Trace’s father leaned over and whispered in his ear. “And it’ll get me away from this harpie for a while. A day without nickel slots.”

  “What’d you say?” his wife demanded. “What’d you say?”

  “I told Devlin that you’ve already dropped ten dollars on the nickel slots,” Sarge said.

  “If those slot machines would pay off once in a while, I�
��d be ahead. They never pay off here. Slot machines in Atlantic City pay off, but not her. In Atlantic City, you can win a million dollars.”

  “That’s a lot of nickels,” Sarge said.

  “Play the machines by the front door,” Trace said.

  “What?”

  “Play the slots near the entrance doors to the casinos. They rig those to pay off the most because it helps drag more players into the casino.”

  “Is that true?” his mother asked.

  “Would I lie to you?”

  “Why did you wait until now to tell me? I’m already ten dollars behind. I could have been a winner already. When I played in Paradise Island, I won enough to buy a piece of crystal. A beautiful piece of crystal.”

  “It looked like a glass carrot,” Sarge whispered to Trace.

  “I never win anything in this town,” Trace’s mother was saying. “I don’t know how you can stand to live here.”

  “You forget, Mother, I made my living gambling here for three years. The place has its charms.”

  “Sand and sun,” she said. “What charm?”

  “No ex-wife. No What’s-his-name and the girl.”

  “Must you refer to your children that way? They are your children, you know.”

  “That’s arguable,” Trace said. “Not that they’re mine, but that they’re children at all. I’ve always regarded them as particularly repugnant midgets. Now, drink your coffee or I’ll pour salad dressing on your hat.”

  Mrs. Hilda Tracy looked horrified for a moment, then bent “over her coffeecup with total concentration. Sarge leaned toward his son and whispered approvingly in his ear, “Firm, firm, very firm.”

  There was a clinking of glasses and Trace looked up as Bob Swenson began his speech of welcome to the assembled national sales force of Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company.

  “It’s a pleasure to welcome you all here,” he said, his actor’s voice resounding through the room over the speaker system. “And I think you’ll all agree with me that we owe a special vote of thanks for the arrangements to our lovely convention hostess, Miss Michiko Mangini.” He leaned over to his right and kissed Chico on the top of her head.

  She looked embarrassed. Walter Marks, watching, looked pained.

  Later, when Marks was reading off the names of everyone in the company who had sold more than a million dollars’ worth of life insurance in the past twelve months, Chico met Trace at the doorway to the banquet hall.

  “Ah, it’s the famous Miss Michiko Mangini,” Trace said. “Introduction, kiss on the head from the boss. What’s next?”

  “He had his hand on my knee all during lunch. I prefer the kiss on the head. I wish he hadn’t mentioned my name, though. Now all these insurance lunatics will be after me to find their lost children, complaining about crooked dealers, what can their wives use for sunburn?”

  “Two grand,” Trace said.

  “I still don’t know if it’s worth it,” Chico said. “How’s it going with you?”

  “Just splashing around,” he said. “Listen, if you feel really depressed, look at Sarge over there. He’s stuck with my mother. At least Swenson likes you.”

  “Trace, sometimes you have an absolute genius for making the sun shine.”

  “No extra charge. It’s the kind of wisdom we elderly develop naturally as the years go on.”

  6

  Countess Felicia Fallaci’s home was fifteen minutes outside of Las Vegas, set back from a secondary road that sliced its way through the untidy, weed-cluttered desert. It was surrounded by ten-foot-high stone walls, topped with barbed wire, as was the large iron gate cut into the walls. Today the gate was wide open and Trace drove his white Mazda up the long straight drive and parked it next to Felicia’s burgundy Rolls Royce, a Jeep convertible, and a small and totally impractical English sports car, the kind with the foot pedals so close together that one normal-size shoe could cover clutch, brake, and accelerator all at once. Which always left the question of what to do with the other foot, since there was no room for it on the narrow little sliver of auto floor.

  The front door of the house was open too and Trace stepped into a hallway that passed through into the swimming pool and patio area, located between the two main wings of the house. Without bothering to ring or knock, he walked through the hall and out toward the pool, where a half-dozen, people were lounging around on chaises.

  Trace stopped in the open sliding doors and looked at Felicia. She was at the far end of the pool, lying on her back on a padded lounge chair, wearing only a very skimpy white bikini bottom that looked garish against the warm copper tan of her body. Her bare breasts were tanned the same color as the rest of her body, and they were very good breasts indeed, Trace thought. Four other people were on lounges near her and there were two more on the far side of the pool, sitting at a table, but Trace couldn’t see them because a sun umbrella was in the way.

  “Felicia,” Trace called.

  She sat up, saw him, waved, and came toward him.

  “Hi, Trace. You bring a bathing suit?”

  “No.”

  “No matter. Take off your clothes anyway. You can climb on me and I’ll walk you around the pool. Or not walk you around the pool, whichever you prefer.”

  “Will you explain it to Chico? When she sends her family of Samurai warriors around to remove our heads?”

  Felicia sighed, a sigh that raised her bosom and lowered it again. Trace thought it was one of the two or three best sighs he had ever seen sighed.

  “Rejected again,” she said.

  “Not that I love you less but that I love life more,” he said.

  She threw her arms around his neck and tried to insert her breasts into his chest cavity.

  “Well, feel me up a little bit anyway,” she said and kissed him on the mouth hard.

  “How come your door’s open?” he asked “Your gate too?”

  She shrugged, one of the half-dozen really great shrugs. “Nothing left to steal,” she said. “You here on work?”

  “Yeah. You know, Felicia, I’m sorry about this, but once in a while my company gets a bug up its butt and I’ve got to check things out.”

  “Not your company,” Felicia said. “That horrible little Munchkin, what’s his name?”

  “Groucho.”

  “Marks. Right. Walter Marks. I hope he’s heavily insured.”

  “Who’s your company?” Trace asked, nodding toward the other end of the pool.

  “Usual crowd of hangers-on. Come on. If you’re not going to jump my bones, I guess I ought to introduce you. But listen, if you change your mind and want to trick, we can go inside. You piss me off, Trace. I’m a fucking countess. I can get any man I want and you keep turning me down.”

  “That’s why you keep coming back,” Trace said. “I’m different.” He looked down at her. “God, what, a set of knobs. I’m weakening.”

  “Eat your heart out, faggot,” she said, took his hand, and walked him toward the back of the enclosed patio, sealed off in the rear by a wooden wall that matched the rough unhewn wood of the stucco house’s exterior trim.

  As he walked alongside her, Trace looked past her bosom and saw the sliding doors that led to the living room, and before them the small square goldfish pond with the large ceramic fish sculpture alongside it. The pond itself was filled with plants and floating lily pads, and the water seemed green and murky. He wondered if it held any fish. He had had an aquarium as a young boy, and whenever the water turned that color, the fish went belly-up. He-heard a squawking sound near his head and looked up to see two parrots sitting in a tree.

  “Hey, they chained?” Trace asked.

  “No. They’re quite gentle,” Felicia said. “Eat right out of your hand.”

  “Yeah. Your palm. No, thank you.”

  They were at the feet of two people who lay side by side on a double-width chaise longue. The man was short and bald, but he made up for the scarcity of hair on his head by a surplus of it all over his body. Eve
n his kneecaps were hairy. The woman next to him was short and dumpy. She wore a one-piece bathing suit with a skirt and her legs looked like the “before” advertisements from a cellulite clinic. If you are what you eat, Trace thought, this woman has been eating nothing but orange peels all her life.

  “These two things are the Neddlemans,” Felicia said. “They say they’re in shipping, but basically they’re just a pair of spongers who go anywhere there’s a free meal.”

  Neddleman removed a pair of red eye-shields that had made him look like an extra from The Village of the Damned. With his right thumb and forefinger, he made a mock effort to pry open his right eye, bloodshot and rheumy. He fixed his eye on Trace, mumbled “Charmed, I’m sure” in a basso-profundo voice, closed his eye, and replaced his eye shields. His wife lowered her sunglasses and looked at Trace.

  “Actually, we are in shipping,” she said. “Felicia just has a strange sense of humor. Who are you?”

  “Devlin Tracy.”

  “What are you in?”

  Trace hated people who asked him what he was “in.” “Ladies’ underwear, when I’m lucky. Most of the time, insurance. Want to buy a sunburn policy?”

  “How pedestrian,” Mrs. Neddleman said. “Do people still buy insurance?”

  “If they’ve got something to lose.”

  Mrs. Neddleman closed her eyes.

  “Don’t waste your time talking to them, Trace,” Felicia said. “They’re absolute scumbags as people. I keep them around because both of them are named Francis. Francis and Frances Neddleman. I think that’s cute.”

  “No accounting for taste,” Trace said.

  “You say you’re in insurance?” said a man who was lying on a large towel a half-dozen feet away. He was very tan and wore the smallest bathing suit Trace had ever seen on a male. He had wavy, long dark-blond hair, swimmer’s muscles, and was good-looking. His accent was vaguely continental.