“Dev, I’m here,” he heard Sarge call.
“Coffee’s on. I’m taking a shower.”
Later, he sat with his father over coffee in the kitchen and Sarge handed him a copy of the rental agreement Jarvis had signed for the airport car. “His own American Express card,” Sarge said. “And I’m getting the flight manifest for the night he came into town. American Airlines. But his name won’t be on it.”
“You sure of that?”
“Yeah,” Sarge said. “I think he was flying incognito. And you’ve got to ask yourself why.”
“I’ve already been asking myself that.”
“Only one reason why somebody would fly under a false name. So if somebody checks the records, they won’t find his name. I think we’ll find Edward Stark listed in the passengers but no Jarvis.”
“Why wouldn’t he want anybody to know he flew into Vegas?” Trace asked. “He lived here. No big secret about going home, is there?”
“I don’t have an inkling, son,” Sarge said.
Sarge had his big red notebook on the kitchen table, and when he looked at it, Trace remembered that Roberts had a similar notebook on his desk, and it gave him an idea.
“I want you to go see that detective named Roberts today,” Trace said. “Find out if he’s holding anything back from us.”
“Can I lean into him?” Sarge asked.
“Well, not to excess. I don’t want him squawking to anybody. Don’t expect him to be too happy with us, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“You know, he’s a detective, but he’s more of a thief. He’s a pimp and he runs hookers. Last night one of them clipped a friend of mine for three grand. I made him give it back.”
“I can see why he might be annoyed with you,” Sarge said. “I’ll make him first stop, then I’ve got some other stuff that I want to do.”
“Okay. Did you get a chance to talk to Mother about the apartment here?”
Sarge looked around. “She said she came up here just to straighten up. I don’t see anything that she did.”
“We put it all back,” Trace said.
“Oh. Anyway, I told her I didn’t think you wanted her straightening up.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said, ‘Nonsense, what are mothers for?’”
“What, indeed?” Trace said.
Sarge had another cup of coffee, then left to see Roberts. Trace glanced at the rental agreement Jarvis had signed at the airport.
In there somewhere there ought to be a key. Why did Jarvis call Spiro and then rent a car and drive to the house himself? Okay. Simple. He wanted Spiro out of the house. But why? What was the point of all of it? And why had he parked on the road instead of going into the driveway and up to the house?
Trace took his time dressing and hooking up his tape recorder, and before he left the house, the telephone rang.
Sarge’s voice sounded crackly and excited.
“I guess you really got that guy’s money back last night, didn’t you?” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t think you went a little off the deep end?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“’Cause Roberts is dead. Somebody cut his throat,” Sarge said. “You didn’t do it?”
“Of course not. What’d you do?”
“I got here and I knocked. There wasn’t any answer, but the light was on, so I opened the door. It was unlocked and he was at the desk, with his head forward. I thought he was sleeping, but then I saw the blood on the blotter. Ear to ear.”
“Did you call the cops yet?”
“No.”
“Good. Wait till I get there. Lock the door and wait for me. Don’t touch anything.”
“Son, you’re talking to me. How long will you be?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Okay,” Sarge said.
“No, make it fifteen. I have to go to the bank first to deposit a check.”
Trace didn’t often deal with the freshly dead. Most of his work involved people who’d been dead for some time and it was up to him to figure out how they died. So his stomach did an unusual nip-up when Sarge let him into Roberts’ office and he saw the investigator’s blood-soaked throat-cut body slouched forward over his desk blotter.
Sarge, for his part, looked as if he could put death on bread and make a sandwich of it.
“You didn’t touch anything, did you?”
“No. What’s the matter? Your face is a funny color.”
“Sarge, you sent me to accounting school. You didn’t raise your boy to be a soldier. Blood in the morning doesn’t exactly thrill me.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Sarge said.
“God, I hope not.”
Trace looked around on Roberts’ desk, carefully not touching the body, but he saw nothing significant. What was he looking for anyway? A message written with a bloody fingernail? “The killer is…”
“I didn’t see anything either,” Sarge said.
“No weapon around?”
“No.”
Trace saw the red notebook on the desk and opened it, after first wrapping a handkerchief around his hand. It contained only one page of numbers with dates along side them, but no names. The numbers were in the three-hundred and four-hundred range, all divisible by ten, and Trace suspected that they may have been a listing of the night’s receipts from Roberts’ small squad of prostitutes. The last date was the previous day’s.
The detective had probably never left the office after Trace had seen him. At least he had not gone anywhere to change his clothes. Still using the handkerchief, Trace opened the file cabinet and found a folder marked Jarvis.
He opened it and looked inside. It still contained the two yellow pieces of paper that it had on the first day Roberts had shown it to him. And the clipping showing Felicia wearing some ofv her jewelry. In the bottom of the file, though, was another piece of paper, small and white. On it was penciled one word: “Records.”
What the hell did that mean?
“Anything there?” Sarge asked. “What are you looking for?”
“His Jarvis file. It’s the same as it was the other day, except for this.” He showed Sarge the piece of paper.
“Records. What does that mean?” Sarge asked.
“Got me.” Trace returned the papers to the folder and put it back in the cabinet. “I guess we’d better call Rosado,” he said.
“We don’t have to, you know,” Sarge said.
“What do you mean?”
“We could just leave here and forget about it. No one’s ever got to know that we found the body. Let the cleaning lady find it.” He looked around the dingy office. “I think she’s due for another pass-through in December. Meanwhile, we can go wherever this guy lives…used to live…and ransack his place. See if we find anything.”
“Can’t do that,” Trace said. “With my luck, it’d go wrong.”
“Just a thought,” Sarge said.
Trace used his handkerchief to lift the telephone. “Sarge, you call me from here?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you get prints on the phone?”
“I used a handkerchief, dummy, like you’re doing.”
“Okay.”
Trace called Dan Rosado at police headquarters.
“Hello, Trace. How’s it by you?”
“By me, okay. By R. J. Roberts, not so good.”
“Why not?”
“I’m at his office. Somebody cut his throat.”
“Is he dead?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be right over. Don’t touch anything.”
Trace hung up the phone and said to his father, “Let’s make it simple, Sarge. They come and we tell them the truth. You came here to talk to Roberts, you found the body, you called me, I came and called the cops.”
“They’re gonna be pissed. I should have called them right away.”
“Tell them I told you not to.
You’re a stranger in town. I’ll tell them I thought you were having a senile delusion. If they get mad, they’ll get mad at me. And Dan doesn’t stay mad long.”
“You rotten Irish bastard, Trace, what do you mean you didn’t call us right away?” Rosado’s face was red and the veins in his neck were pulsating, like living snakes he was somehow in the process of swallowing.
“See, Sarge,” Trace said. “I told you he wouldn’t get mad.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Tracy,” Rosado said. “Trace doesn’t know any better because he doesn’t have a brain in his head, but you used to be a cop. You should know how to act.”
“Instead of yelling at my son, you ought to be catching the killer,” Sarge said.
“Give me his name and address and I’ll have my men pick him up on their way back from lunch.”
“Give me some time, maybe I’ll do just that,” Sarge snapped.
“I’ll give you some time. I’d like to give you both some time. Three to five years for meddling, no time off.”
“Dan, I think you’re in danger now of overreacting,” Trace said.
“You really think so?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Let me get a grip on myself.” Rosado gazed off into the distance as if summoning up some mystic spiritual energy. “There we are,” he said calmly. “All together now.”
“Good,” said Trace.
“I should still book your ass,” Rosado screamed.
18
“All right, Trace. You know I’m your friend. You know I’d like not to have to file charges against you.”
“I know that, Dan. Your friendship is one of the few constants in my life. I just wish you’d stop yelling at me.”
“I’m trying not to yell. I’m really trying. But it’s difficult sometimes when someone you’ve come to know and trust and regard almost as a brother is so obviously lying to you.”
“Come on, Dan. You know I didn’t kill anybody.”
“I know it and you know. Probably everybody who knows you knows it. But will the district attorney know it? Will the grand jury know it? See, there are a lot of imponderables in this kind of business. So why did Roberts write you a three-thousand-dollar check?”
“Because he owed me the money,” Trace said. “I told you that.”
“And you went to see him at what time?”
“At one A.M. I lent him the money in cash on Monday. He said that he wanted it just for the day, something about possibly buying information in the Jarvis case. He said he would have it back for me Monday night. But he didn’t call Monday night, so I called him yesterday and caught him in the office and I went down there at one o’clock. He said he didn’t have the money in cash and I told him I’d take a check, so I took it and left.”
“You don’t know what he used the money for?”
“No,” Trace said.
“Wouldn’t that have been a question you’d ask him? Here you are, you’re both working on the same case and he’s going to buy three thousand dollars’ worth of information. Doesn’t it seem logical that you’d at least ask him, ‘What’d you get with the three thousand dollars I lent you?’” Rosado asked.
“It probably would have been logical,” Trace said, “but I wasn’t into logic last night. I was fighting with Chico. I was not at my emotional best. I think my biorhythms must be at a critical point. You don’t have a biorhythm calculator, do you? We could check.”
“Dammit, Trace, I’m not interested in your biorhythms.”
“I bet yours are bad too. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have the same chart. This is definitely not one of your emotional up days.”
“So he wrote you a check and you left?”
“That’s right.”
“Where’s the check?”
“I deposited it this morning.”
“Before or after you knew he was dead?” Rosado asked.
“After. Sarge told me and I stopped at the bank on my way downtown. Then I went to Roberts’ office and called you immediately. I didn’t even waste a single second lifting up that telephone to call you, as all good citizens should.”
“That is the single dumbest stupid story I ever heard in my life,” Rosado said.
“That’s because you didn’t give me much of a chance to prepare. I mean, I could really have given you a good story if I had a lot of time to think about it. I could have given you dark hints from Roberts to me, chuckles over the telephone in late-night conversations. Meaningful chuckles, naturally. Suggestions that maybe people were lurking in hallways when I walked toward his office. I don’t know. I could have given you a lot of things. Instead, I’ve just given you the simple unadorned truth.”
Rosado turned off the tape recorder on the desk. They were in his office, facing each other across the desk, each drinking coffee.
“Okay. You don’t know what Roberts was working on with the Jarvis case?” Rosado said.
“Technically, Dan, the murder wasn’t any of his business. He was working for the insurance company on the jewel theft. Basically, he was trying to trace the stones if they came on the market. He told me that they hadn’t yet.”
“You believed him?”
“He didn’t have any reason to lie. I told him I wasn’t trying to cut him out of his fee,” Trace said.
Rosado pushed a manila file folder across his desk and Trace opened it.
“That’s Roberts’ file on the Jarvis case,” Rosado said. Trace nodded and looked at the familiar pieces of paper.
“The yellow sheets are just facts, dates, places, et cetera. What did he mean by that little white slip? It reads ‘Records,’”
Trace shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“He never mentioned that to you? Never told you what kind of records that meant? Nothing like that?”
“No,” Trace said honestly.
“All right,” the policeman said with a sigh. “I’m going to try to keep your ass out of a sling, Trace. I’m going to try. There’s no reason to slap you with murder and I’m going to try to convince the district attorney that you didn’t mean anything wrong by not telling your father to report the murder right away. Just a lapse of judgment.”
“He’ll buy it,” Trace said. “Lawyers are always having lapses of judgment.”
“But I hope we get the killer quick anyway. It’ll take off a lot of heat. You know how attorneys are. You get somebody putting heat on them and they’ll indict anything that moves. I don’t want you to get caught up in that kind of mess.”
“Thanks, Dan. I know you wish only the best for me,” Trace said. “Can I go now?”
“Yes. If you figure this one out, you let me know right away.”
“You got it, Dan,” Trace said. Slowly. With feeling.
Trace wondered where Sarge might be, but his father was waiting for him outside police headquarters in his rented car. The August heat wave was still boiling, and when Trace got into the car, he winced and said, “Ouch.”
“Don’t complain about hot seats,” Sarge said. “You’re the one who wants to live here.”
“It’s not the weather,” Trace said. “The car company took you. They always give you out-of-towners the cars with black upholstery. It absorbs all the heat. Next time, get white seats.”
“Those dirty dogs,” Sarge said. “How’d it go inside?”
“Well, let’s just say I want a drink,” Trace said.
“The three thousand?”
“That’s what was on his mind.”
“What’d you tell him?” Sarge asked.
“That I lent it to Roberts and he paid me back by check. I couldn’t hand up Swenson, could I?” Trace said.
“Guess not. I told those other detectives that I didn’t know anything about any three thousand. That I just came to see Roberts ’cause you wanted me to work with him on the robbery case. Then, when I found the body, I got confused because I’m scared of the sight of blood. Everybody knows I’m senile almost and I called
you by mistake instead of them. I told them that probably you didn’t call the cops right away because you thought I might have been dreaming and you wanted to be sure I was telling you the truth about the body.”
“Pretty good lies,” Trace said. “They should do.”
“I was a cop for twenty-five years. I spent most of my time being lied to. I learned something from it.”
Trace noticed that Sarge had a grin on his face as he pulled the car away from the curb and into downtown’s afternoon traffic.
“You look very happy, considering that your only son has just escaped booking by the skin of his teeth. Why the smirk?”
“Do you really think I’m senile?” his father asked.
“Sure. You. Me and Chico too. All of us. We’ll all be ready to go to Happydale and make pot holders out of cigarette butts. Why are you smirking?”
“Because I think I got the killer,” Sarge said.
“Who is?”
“I think it’s the baron, whatever his name is.”
“Hubbaker?”
“Yeah. Him,” Sarge said.
They were sitting in Boggle’s. Sarge was giving a good workout to a giant cheeseburger and a bottle of beer, and Trace was sipping from a double vodka and eyeing the pickles on Sarge’s plate.
“This is a sick town,” Sarge said. “Unhand that pickle.”
“Sorry. Of course it is. It was created by criminals for degenerates. What’d you expect, a choir on the corner singing the Hallelujah chorus?”
“You’ve got hookers on the street all the time. Like most places have hookers only at night. Reasonable hours. Here, you’ve got them marching around even in the morning. You know how they must sweat?”
“People gamble twenty-four hours a day. When they’re finished gambling, they get horny. Particularly if they win,” Trace said. “It must have something to do with power. Now you’ve stalled long enough. Tell me about the baron.”
“There’s that all-night restaurant across the street from Roberts’ place,” Sarge said.
“Don’t eat there. They have a special recipe for making coffee. A spoon of coffee and a pound of lard.”
And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2) Page 14