And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2)

by Warren Murphy

  “What’s his name? Hubbell?”

  “Hubbaker. I think he’s a secret agent for the insurance company that insured the jewels. Let me know if you run across him today.”

  “Got it.”

  “And there’s a private eye in town named Roberts who’s on this case too. He’s a hairball. Watch out for him.”

  “Got it,” said Sarge.

  “Good. Go get ’em, Tiger.”

  His father drained his coffee, wrote down the names of Hubbaker and Roberts in his notebook, snapped it shut, and rose from the table.

  “Maybe this’ll be the start of a new career,” Sarge said. He clapped a big heavy hand on Trace’s shoulder. “You and me, fighting crime. Patrick and Devlin Tracy. Confidential investigations. We never sleep. Crooks’ll tremble at the mere mention of our names.”

  “Or we could work the other side of the street,” Trace said. “Open an accounting firm. And steal.”

  “I’ll do that too. I’ll do anything to get out of the house. I’m off to see Rosado.”

  “All right. If you’ve got any messages for me, filter them through Chico at the convention. Otherwise, I’ll see you back there, maybe around five. I think they have cocktails today at five.”

  After Sarge left, Trace called police headquarters and spoke to Rosado.

  “Dan, my father’s on his way down to see you. He’s working with me on this Jarvis case. I’d appreciate it if you’d help him out with anything he needs.”

  “I’m not going to give him a gun permit,” Rosado said.

  “No, God, no. Don’t give him a gun permit.”

  “Anything else he can have. Who’s going to argue with a man whose hands are deadly weapons?”

  “Thanks, Dan. He used to be pretty good, you know. He might still help.”

  “We’re dead-ended. We can use all the help we can get.”

  “It’ll be good to give him a chance to work again too,” Trace said.

  “Trace, it’s all right. This is your friend you’re talking to. I met him yesterday, remember? I know he’s going stir-nuts hanging around this town playing slot machines. It’s a nice thing for you to let him work.”

  “Don’t let on you know,” Trace said. “This is one I owe you.”

  “You can buy me a Bjoerling record for my collection. I don’t have Trovatore.”

  “I refuse to promulgate mediocrity in the world,” Trace said.

  “Go screw yourself.”

  Trace heard a voice inside Roberts’ office, so he waited across the hall where Roberts couldn’t see his outline through the frosted-glass windows that overlooked the hallway.

  “I don’t care, dammit, that’s the way things are,” he heard Roberts say. He was talking on the telephone; there was no answering voice.

  Then Roberts said, louder, “Just do what she says,” and Trace heard the receiver slam down.

  He waited a few seconds, then began to whistle loudly and stepped toward the door. He rapped once, hard, and walked inside.

  Roberts looked up from behind his dirty desk.

  “Hello, Tracy.”

  “How’s it going, R. J.?” Trace said with unfelt warmth.

  “Win a couple, lose a couple. Sit down. You want a drink or something?”

  “No, thanks. I was just wondering if you’d heard anything on the street yet about the countess’s jewels?”

  Roberts shook his head, and folded his hands on his notebook. “Like they vanished,” he said. “I’ve got lines out all over and I haven’t felt a quiver. I’m telling you, Tracy, this is out-of-town work. You find out anything?”

  “Nothing yet. I was up at the plotzo yesterday and looked around. Nothing.”

  “You talk to Spiro?” Roberts asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d you think of him? I figured, maybe an inside job,” Roberts said.

  “I don’t know,” Trace said. “Little thieves are always little thieves. The way they make more money is to do more little thefts, not one big theft. They deal in quantity, not quality.”

  “How’d you know he’s a thief?” Roberts asked.

  “Just a guess,” Trace said.

  “He’s got a little record. Nickel-and-dime stuff. Did six months about four years ago, then started hopping cars and keeping clean. He’s a Greek. Greeks never steal anything big.”

  This was a breakthrough in crime detection that Trace had never heard before, but he decided to let it slide.

  “You hear anything about another detective in town?” he asked.

  “No. Who?”

  “I don’t know. I hear the insurance company’s got some hotshot jewel detective in town. I thought you might have run into him.”

  “Those bastards. They got me on this, what do they need anybody else for? Those bastards.”

  “That’s the insurance business for you,” Trace said cheerily. “Swine of the earth.”

  “What’s his name?” Roberts asked.

  “Nobody knows. He’s the Secret Avenger, right out of the Saturday-morning television cartoons.”

  “I’ll Secret Avenge him. You find out who he is, Tracy, you let me know.”

  “Sure will,” Trace lied. “And I’ll keep you posted on anything else I come up with.”

  The clerk was very pretty and very young, and her eyes were very wary. It was the kind of look that came naturally to people who worked in businesses with a high armed-robbery rate. It came extra easily to girls who were voted the prettiest in their high-school class and came to Las Vegas to take the town by storm and wound up working, a few months later, in a side-street jewelry shop.

  “I want to see Herman,” he told her.

  “May I tell him your name?”

  “Tell him Trace is here, please.”

  She nodded but gave him a smile that suggested he was a loan shark coming for an overdue payment, and went into a back room. A moment later, she came out and the smile was real. “You can go right in.”

  Herman was a man with no discernible bones in his body. His face looked like a water-filled baloon. His body was round, his arms were short thick ovals, his fingers overstuffed little sausages. He had a jeweler’s loupe in his eye and he grunted when Trace entered the small back-room office. There was a piece of black velvet on the work counter in front of Herman and it glittered with the jagged flashing of a few dozen diamonds.

  Trace walked to a file cabinet in the far corner of the room, opened the top drawer, and removed a chess set. He walked back to the work counter, cleared aside the IN basket, and set up the board.

  He moved one of the white pieces and called out, “Pawn king four.”

  Herman was holding a diamond between narrow little tweezers, turning it back and forth under his glass. Without looking away, he said, “Pawn queen bishop four.”

  Trace made Herman’s move on the board for him, and then his own. “Knight king bishop three.”

  Herman put the diamond to one side and picked up another. Still without looking at the board, he said “Pawn queen three.”

  Herman was sorting the diamonds into two piles. Playing both sides of the chess board, Trace called out each move he had made, and the jeweler, without even a glance at the board, would instantly call out his response, which Trace entered on the board.

  It took Herman eight minutes to finish examining the diamonds. He had separated four from the rest. He pushed the black velvet aside and said, “Crap, all crap. You’d be amazed at the crap we get. Hello, Trace.”

  “Hello, Herman. I thought diamonds were forever.”

  “No. Crap is forever,” Herman said. “Now what have we here?”

  He looked down at the chessboard, where Trace had just launched a queen, knight, and rook attack on Herman’s castled king. He grunted to himself and, after Trace’s next move, sacrificed a bishop to check Trace’s own king, and three moves later had won Trace’s queen.

  Trace turned his king over in the traditional gesture of surrender. “You’re slipping,” he said
. “You had to look at the board this time.”

  “The ravages of age,” Herman said. He was still looking at the chessboard. “You always attack too soon. You play like an Irishman.”

  “The old argument,” Trace said. “Nature versus nurture. What’s wrong with the stones?”

  “All dreck,” Herman said. “They come from the same rotten armpit of the world, they’re all umpty-ump million years old, and lately, all I get is bort. Stuff you should put in drills, not in rings.”

  “That’s what you get for making your living in a controlled marketplace,” Trace said. “Diamonds are off, so the geniuses who run the industry push out junk because junk always draws junk prices. When the market goes up, good stones go up more, and that’s when you’ll see them.”

  “You’re very smart, Trace. It took me half a lifetime to figure it out.”

  “That’s because you’re Jewish and I’m only half a Jew. The Irish half of me figures out plots and conspiracies, things we’re good at. Most of the time we don’t make any sense at all, but if we luck into a real conspiracy, then; hell, you came to the right place. You know why I’m here?”

  “Actually, I thought you came in for your biweekly drubbing,” Herman said.

  “Not this time. Felicia Fallaci.”

  “I heard that that was Roberts’ case,” Herman said.

  “It is, kind of. I’m checking out the murder that went with it, but since the two of them are connected, I’ve got to check the jewels too.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Roberts tells me there’s no sign of the jewels on the street. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought he might be lying to me,” Trace said.

  “Not this time.”

  “He talk to you?” Trace asked.

  “There you are, being Irish again. No conspiracy. Ever since that business with young Jack, you’re my friend. Sure, Roberts talked to me. He asked me to keep an eye open for him, even promised me a piece of a reward if he gets one. So I’m keeping my eyes open for him. Nothing going on in town and nothing in California either.”

  “How the hell can anybody tell that?” Trace asked. “So many jewelers, so many diamond dealers.”

  “And so many big mouths,” Herman said. “One guy makes a buy and he’s got to tell his brother-in-law, but his brother-in-law hates him, so he tells everybody else and before you know it, the whole world knows about it. It’s rotten, but it’s the way our business works. It’s why we can make deals with handshakes, ’cause everybody knows everybody else’s business. If someone ran across a lot of good stuff, everybody’d know about it and so would I. Nobody. Nothing.”

  “New York?” Trace said.

  Herman threw his hands up into the air. The motion set the fat on the backs of his arms to jiggling.

  “New York is different. It’s…well, it’s New York. People change so fast, so much money changes hands. There’s a million dollars changing hands on Forty-seventh Street every five minutes. Another million would just get lost in the shuffle. Nobody hears anything out of New York.”

  “If Felicia’s jewels wound up there, they could just vanish?”

  “Off the face of the earth,” Herman said.

  “Why doesn’t every thief go to New York, then?” Trace asked.

  “The good ones do. The rest panic. They’re afraid their luggage will rip open and somebody will find the stones. Or that they’ll get mugged. Or who knows what. Most thieves aren’t very smart.”

  “So far, you can’t prove it by me,” Trace said. “I don’t have an inkling on this one.”

  “It’ll come,” Herman said confidently. “Time for another?”

  “Where were you when mercy was handed out?” Trace asked, but he began setting up the chessboard again.

  “Am I on tape?” Herman asked.

  “Yes. Should I turn it off?”

  “Leave it on,” Herman said. “Later you can play back your screams of anguish.”

  13

  Spiro lived in a two-family house on a tired old street a half-mile from the downtown business district.

  Trace leaned on his door bell and, when he got no answer, pushed the lower bell on the assumption that the owner lived on the first floor. If the woman who answered the bell was the owner, she wasn’t exactly thrilled by her status as a real-estate mogul.

  She was short and fat and aggressively packed into pedal pushers and a pink sweater. Her hair gave new dimension to the description “lifeless,” and she had a cigarette hung from her mouth that kept curling smoke into her eyes and causing her to squint.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Just in time,” Trace said. He took the cigarette from her mouth and threw it out onto the broken-cement walk.

  “Hey. Hey. What’s that for?”

  “I’m from the gas company,” Trace said, “Mr. Spirakodopolous called and said he had a gas leak.”

  “He ain’t home,” the woman said. It hadn’t been the smoke that made her eyes squint. She was still squinting.

  “Probably fled before everything blows up,” Trace said. “I’ve got to look around. If you’ve got a gas leak, it can be very serious.”

  “I told you, he ain’t home.”

  “And, lady, I thought I just told you that if I don’t check this out, this house might blow up around your ears. Is this your house?”

  “Naturally it’s my house.”

  “And where’s Mr. Spirakodopolous’s apartment?”

  “Upstairs, but he ain’t home.”

  “His gas leak’s still home. Get me the key. Hurry, woman, before we’re all incinerated.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I told you, I’m from the gas company.”

  “You got any identification?”

  “Yes. My name’s Reddy Kilowatt and you might want to stand here chatting, but I don’t want to blow up. I’m leaving.”

  “All right. Wait a minute.” She lumbered off and came back a few seconds later with a key. She handed it to Trace.

  “Now, listen, ma’am. This is very important. While I look around, please step outside and wait on the sidewalk. No point in both of us dying.”

  She had finally started to believe him. She pushed by him and walked out onto the sidewalk.

  “Wait there for me,” Trace said.

  He went quickly up the steps and unlocked the door to Spiro’s apartment. He just looked inside and knew he was too late. The apartment was two rooms: a small kitchen and an all-purpose living room-dining room with a pull-out bed. The entire place had been turned upside down. Drawers had been pulled out and their contents emptied. Magazines were tossed all over the floor. A large closet in the living room had been ransacked. Clothes were piled in a heap on the floor.

  Somebody had gotten the idea to search Spiro’s apartment before Trace did. Score one for Sherlock Holmes. He looked around and decided there was no point in looking for anything. If there had been something in the apartment, either it had been found already, or he wouldn’t be able to find it either.

  He closed the door and made sure it was locked, then walked down the stairs, whistling. Outside, he gave the landlady her key back.

  “It’s all A-okay,” he said. “No danger.”

  “What was it?”

  “It’s hard to tell sometimes since the Alaska pipeline opened. But it’s perfectly safe. Tell me, has anybody else been here today?”

  “From the gas company? No.”

  “From anywhere? Anybody come in to see Mr. Spirakodopolous?”

  “No.”

  “You been home all day?”

  “Yeah. Well, except this morning, when I went to get my hair done.”

  “And done very well it is, too, ma’am,” Trace said.

  “Your father called,” Chico said.

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said he’s made a major breakthrough in this case. He said that he wants half your fee.”

  “Wha
t’d you tell him?”

  “To hold out for two-thirds. I’ve got expensive habits and it’s going to cost him to take me away from all this.”

  “Is he still at the airport?”

  “He told me he was, but that was about an hour ago. He said he wants to meet you at four o’clock. He said pick a cops’ bar.”

  “There aren’t any cops’ bars in Vegas. This isn’t New York. In New York, you can’t go near Third Avenue and Twenty-third Street without tripping over cops. Did he say what he found?”

  “No. He’s going to call back. What should I tell him?”

  “Tell him to meet me at Boggle’s.”

  “That’s a mob bar,” Chico said.

  “Only difference is that the clientele dresses better in a mob bar. Boggle’s. At four.”

  “I’ll tell him when he calls.”

  “You see my mother?”

  “Not today,” Chico said. She turned back to the cocktail lounge bar and waved to the bartender for another Coke.

  “Not even for lunch?” Trace asked.

  “Nope.”

  “My mother passed up a free lunch?”

  “Maybe she’s on a hot streak at the slot machines.”

  “I hope so,” Trace said. “If she loses another ten dollars, I’m never going to hear the end of it. The next thing will be the gas pipe.”

  “She can take Bob Swenson with her.” Chico said. “He’s had this look on his face all day.”

  “Just because National Anthem wouldn’t play?”

  “He’s been wandering around, I think they call it mumbling darkly, about some people born to be unlucky in love.”

  “You’ve got to admit it must have been tough for him. Sleeping next to her and having her imitate Little Goody Two-Shoes.”

  “You’d really like to give her a go, wouldn’t you?” Chico said.

  “Stop it, will you? I’m sober. I’m watching my cigarettes. What more do you want from me?”

  “Total loyalty and unremitting faithfulness. You’d really like to take a run at that big cow, wouldn’t you? Just because she’s got a big chest.”

  “Not just because she’s got a big chest. It’s the challenge. To boldly go where only donkeys have gone before.”