His secretary brought in the coffee. Half of it was spilled in the saucers. He sipped his and I asked him, “Why are you reading all these newspapers?”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you. All our trouble’s in there.”
“I don’t know. I think ‘Never work again. The amazing, secret formula for amassing wealth while you sleep’ isn’t such a bad idea.”
He looked confused. He often did that. No movement, just a puzzled look in his eyes. He set down his coffeecup and grabbed the top paper off the pile.
“That’s not the story we’re interested in. This is the one.” He rapped on the front page of the paper a half-dozen times in quick succession: rap, rap, rap, rap, rap, rap. I was getting a headache. I wondered if squirrels had any natural predators. Owls, I guessed, and eagles, and I wished I was an owl or an eagle.
He stopped rapping and moved his finger so I could see the front page of the paper.
There was a picture of this movie actor, Tony McCue, on the front page. He had a look on his face that I had seen many times before, usually when shaving, the look of a man who is totally shit-faced from the booze.
The headline under the picture read:
TONY MCCUE PLAYS WILLIAM TELL? Hollywood Hero has Stuntman Shoot Apples from Head
I leaned over to look at the paper, but Groucho said, “You don’t have to read the story. The headline tells it all.” He grabbed another paper. “And look at this one: ‘Tony McCue dives off hotel balcony into pool.’ And this one: ‘Actor tries to slide down mountain on cafeteria tray.’”
He flipped through some pages. “It says the dumb bastard wants to start the Anthony McCue Downhill Slide Memorial Competition. Here’s another one. ‘That girl at McCue’s side is his psychiatrist.’ He travels with a shrink, for God’s sake. Listen. ‘Tony McCue beaten up in redneck bar. Slugs drunk with champagne bottle.’”
Groucho dropped the papers, put his head into his hands, and looked down. He didn’t have a bald spot and I thought that was nice because a bald spot would have ruined the perfect dull symmetry of Walter Marks.
“Why me, God?” he said.
I fished around in the stack of papers.
“Here’s a good one,” I said. “‘Tony McCue drinks bottle of booze at bottom of hotel pool.’ “
“This man is a menace,” Marks said.
“I don’t know. He sounds like my kind of guy.”
“Wonderful,” Marks said. He looked up and smiled. “Just what I wanted to hear.”
“What?” I’ve learned always to be suspicious when Groucho says something is wonderful. That usually means it’s good for him and awful for me, and I wasn’t put on earth to make things good for him and if God wanted things awful for me, he would have made me Iranian.
“I said wonderful,” he explained. “You like him so much, he’s yours.”
“You’d better explain this to me,” I said. “Slowly.”
“Drink your coffee,” he said. “Tony McCue is ready to begin filming a movie in upstate New York. Some kind of mystery. What we have done is to write a six-million-dollar insurance policy on his life with the producers as beneficiaries. The movie will take two months to shoot and we have to keep him alive for two months. That’s your job.”
“Not a chance.”
“Why not?”
“Because I was in upstate New York once. I came down with pneumonia and I got bitten by a catfish. I’m not spending two months there, not for you, not for Garrison Fidelity, not for Tony McCue, not for a Hollywood producer, not for the history of cinema as we know it in our lifetime.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Trace,” he said.
“It’s how I get my exercise. That way and moving quickly out of the path of people, like you, who wish me ill.”
“I have never met a person who takes the offer of a paid job as such a personal affront,” Groucho said.
“Don’t deny that you hate me and want me dead,” I said.
“Have you ever thought of getting professional help, Trace? You’re a paranoid.”
“Just because I’m a paranoid doesn’t mean that you’re not trying to have me killed.”
“Look. Try to concentrate. Drink your coffee. I am not trying to have you killed. I want you to go to this town…” He looked at a sheet of paper on his desk, “Canestoga Falls. I want you to hang out for ten days, two weeks. See what’s going on. See what kind of shape this lunatic McCue is in. Keep him alive. Don’t let him kill himself. If he’s okay, you come back. If he’s real nuts and self-destructive, you let me know and I’ll make arrangements to send other people up there to watch him.”
“You have zookeepers on your payroll?” I asked.
“No. But I can hire them somewhere, and a hell of a lot cheaper than I can hire you for.”
“I don’t have to stay up there for the whole two months?” I said.
“No.”
“I want four hundred a day plus expenses.”
“Fine,” Marks said.
“Fine? You say fine? You’ve bitched and complained and cheated me out of every legitimate cent I ever spent on expenses and now you’re telling me, just like that, fine, for four hundred dollars a day, fine? You’re saying that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re up to something. Why pay me four hundred dollars a day when you can hire keepers for less than that?”
“Because, while you don’t know it—and, of course, being a paranoid schizophrenic with a drinking problem, you would not believe it—I have great respect for you, Trace.”
“You’re right, I don’t believe it.”
“Well, I do. I find you an insufferable waste of flesh and blood as a human being, but you have a certain native cunning in matters like this that would enable you to see dangers and pitfalls that might elude a normal person,” he said.
“See? And here you thought it was never any good being a paranoid. Of course, I see dangers and pitfalls. The world is filled with them. How about the men’s room at O’Hare Airport?”
“I suppose in some way that’s logical to you,” Marks said. He got up and ran across the room. He stopped, smelled the air, waved his arms around, and pulled some papers from on top of a file cabinet. I wished I had a BB gun.
“How’d you get involved in a deal like this?” I asked. “Insuring this lunatic?”
“Big premium, little risk.” He sounded dejected as he added, “I thought.”
“Then you found out exactly what you were insuring,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“You should have canceled the policy,” I said. “You do it with widows and orphans all the time.”
“Mr. Swenson refused to do that,” Marks said.
Swenson, as I said, was the president of Garrison Fidelity and a sometime friend of mine. If I ever thought that I made Walter Marks crazy, Robert Swenson sent him over the edge because he ran the insurance company on wish and whimsy with a large dollop of hang over mixed in. I think his last coup in the industry was pioneering life insurance for heavy smokers.
A lot of things suddenly came clear.
“So you’re only doing this because Bob Swenson told you to?” I said.
“That’s right. But I’m prepared to stand by the decision as mine,” he said.
“Very noble. And I gather that’s why you’ve offered me this job too. Because Swenson ordered you to.”
“Ordered is a strong word. He suggested that you might have a certain special ability in dealing with people like Tony McCue.”
“It’s a compliment,” I said. “Repeat it to me. I love to hear compliments from your lips.”
“Actually, he said, ‘Set a drunk to catch a drunk.’”
“I’ll ignore that because I don’t believe it,” I said. “And that’s why you didn’t argue about my fee. He told you to pay me whatever I want.”
I had him, and he didn’t answer. Instead, he turned his back and pretended to be looking through the file cabinet.
> “In that case, I want five hundred a day. Plus expenses.”
He turned and shouted. “That’s robbery.”
“It’s business, Groucho. I’m a very busy partner in a fast-growing private detective agency. It’s going to be tough to fit you into our work schedule as it is.”
He surrendered faster than I’d ever seen him surrender. “All right,” he shouted. “All right. Five hundred a day. And don’t call me Groucho.”
“Plus expenses.”
He spun around. “And you itemize those expenses. Itemize every penny of them or you don’t get them. We’re not running a charity ward here or some big petty-cash fund that you can dip into anytime you want. You have to itemize, do you hear me?”
“I hear you. I’ll itemize. I promise. Every penny. Every parking receipt. Everything, Walter, everything.” I nodded earnestly. It’s good sometimes to let people save face, even if it was a face like Groucho’s. My father always told me that. He said, Give the guy a graceful way to surrender. It’s like if you’re in a saloon fight and the other guy is down; you don’t want to stand over him shouting at him because, as sure as God made insurance swindlers, the guy’s going to get up and hit you with a chair. Instead, you help him up and let him know how sorry you are and it was a lucky punch and you feel terrible and the next time it would have been a far different story and you feared for your life in front of his mighty wrath and like that, and so the guy walks away feeling better and he doesn’t try to get lucky with a chair.
“I won’t expect a penny for any expenses I don’t itemize,” I said.
He nodded and I walked toward the door. “I can see myself out if you’re finished, Walter.”
“I wish you would. My secretary has all the data at her desk in an envelope.”
“One question, though,” I said.
Groucho ran back to his desk, stopped, wiggled his cheeks, and sat down.
“Yes.”
“Why is Bob Swenson taking a personal interest in insuring this McCue nut?”
“I don’t think his reasons are any business of yours. Or mine.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. That meant he didn’t know why Swenson wanted to insure the star of some movie against cutting his own wrists and using his arteries to hang himself. Groucho was one of those people who, if he knew something, couldn’t resist showing off that he knew it.
I picked up the envelope from his coffee-spilling secretary and stopped at Swenson’s office before I left the building.
“Hello, Moneypenny,” I said to his secretary. “Is S in?”
The secretary was this tall, very extravagant, very competent thirtyish blonde who had been with Swenson for six years and whom he was banging even though he had never told me that.
“No,” she said. “He’s in Toronto.”
I hesitated a moment, waiting I guess for her to invite me for lunch or something or at least to the leather sofa in Swenson’s office, but she didn’t.
I didn’t mind. Someday she was going to see the first wrinkle alongside her eyes and realize that she was spending the best years of her life on a married man, and then she’d look for me.
And I’d have to tell her, Not a chance, lady. Because while she was pretty good-looking, too bad, there was only one Chico in the world, and Chico made her look like goldfish food.
“Too bad,” I said. “I wanted to talk to him about Tony McCue.”
“The actor?”
“Yes. Gone Fishing’s got a policy on him. I’m supposed to keep him alive.”
“Get his autograph for me, will you?” she said.
“Sure,” I said, and left. I crossed her off my list. I didn’t want anything to do with women who collected autographs.”
3
The only thing wrong with Bogie’s Restaurant, aside from the fact that it’s right downstairs from Sarge’s office and much too convenient, is the people who hang out there.
They’ve got one whole wall covered with pictures of mystery writers who frequent the place—and if that’s not enough to make you water your lawn, they’ve got private eyes who hang out there too.
You’ve got to listen to them sometimes talking to each other. It’s enough to make you think there were two more Marx Brothers, Dope-o and Jerk-o. They’re bad enough, and they’re not all. Now, Bogie’s is getting out-of-town trade too. Only about a week before, there was this private detective from Boston who stopped in. He had a quiche cookbook under one arm and he ordered some kind of Yugoslavian beer and got drunk after two sips and then wanted to talk to the bartender about the meaning of courage.
See? Drinking in New York can be a risky business, but if you’re careful and if you go to Bogie’s at selected hours, you miss the private eyes and the stupid writers and then it’s the best restaurant and saloon in New York City, even if the owners are always complaining that I drink too much for my own health.
Coming back from Groucho’s, I looked through the front window, but I didn’t see anybody who might want to talk to me so I went inside and took my usual seat in the corner of the bar near the jukebox.
Billy, the owner, was tending bar while his wife, Karen, was trying to fix the tape deck.
“The usual?” Billy said.
Shakespeare was right: conscience does make cowards of us all. I remembered what I told Chico, promising her that I would have eggs.
“Hey, you awake yet? The usual?” Billy repeated.
The usual is Finlandia on the rocks. I won’t drink Russian Vodka and I can’t stand American, and what do the Canadians know about vodka anyway? Besides, I figured it’s only fair to drink vodka from Finland because I won’t eat their Swiss cheese. I mean, if their cheese was any good, wouldn’t they call it Finland cheese instead of Swiss cheese? I buy only Swiss cheese and Finnish vodka. This helps to bring order to a confusing world.
“No,” I told Billy. “Not the usual.”
“What, then?”
“An omelette. A vodka omelette. Hold the egg.”
“Sure,” he said as if it were suddenly the drink of choice in New York. His wife, Karen, is a shrink, and I thought maybe they’ve had orders like this before.
He poured vodka over rocks and put it in front of me, and I said, “When you see Chico, you be sure to tell her I had an omelette.”
“Naturally. What else?” he said, and then he walked away and let me drink in peace, which I did until I saw Sarge walking through our office entrance door and I went upstairs to meet him and tell him that Walter Marks was going to make our company rich for the next couple of weeks.
4
My father’s name is Patrick Tracy but everybody calls him Sarge because that’s what he was before he retired from the New York City police department. He’s almost seventy years old and maybe two inches shorter than me, but he’s still over six feet tall and he’s wider than me, and if you are ever thinking of messing with the man, first look at his hands. Sarge has hands…Well, if you cut two thick slabs out of a six-by-six beam, those would be his palms. His fingers look like those hot smoked sausages they sell in plastic packs in the supermarket.
Anyway, when I got upstairs, Sarge was sitting behind the desk, looking through the mail, and if faces were weather forecasts, his was cloudy with a chance of rain.
He scowled at me when I walked in, and I said, “Should I come back next week when you get a chance to cool off?”
“No, come on in.”
“Why are you looking like hell hath no fury like an ex-cop scorned?” I asked.
“Goddamn divorce case,” Sarge said. “Nothing ever goes right.”
“Tough one?”
“Tough, my ass. It’s a snap. It’s so damned easy that it’s created a moral dilemma for me.”
“It’s what us big private eyes do best,” I said. “Didn’t you ever read Spenser?”
“To hell with Spenser. You want a beer?”
“No, I’m into eggs today.”
“That’s all right. I don’t mind drinking alone.” Sarg
e stood up and walked around the desk. You could tell fall was upon us because he had finally put away his gray plaid sports jacket and taken his dark-blue suit out of the closet. He went into the small bathroom where he keeps bottles of beer in the back of the toilet tank. This is a habit I find totally disgusting, but when I called him on it, Sarge told me it was because I didn’t understand plumbing and the water that goes into the back of the toilet tank was clean. I said if it was so clean, how come the inside of the tank is brown and has hair on it? Slimy hair.
He said it was my imagination. I offered him a glass of water from the toilet tank as a toast to my imagination. He poured it down the sink and suggested that I had become a quiche-eater in my later years.
He’s probably right. Anyway, Sarge got a beer from the back of the toilet tank, twisted the bottle cap off as if it had been personally responsible for the kind of day it had been, and took a long swallow before going back around to his desk.
“Oh, the divorce. Right. I told you, this guy hires us to check on his wife ’cause he thinks she’s tipping on him. So I’m stashed outside the house this morning and he goes to work, eight o’clock on the stroke. I’m ready for the long haul. I figure we can drag this one out for weeks, hundred and fifty a day plus, and we’ll knock them dead and make Chico happy when she comes back because we’re finally making some money.”
“Good plan,” I said. “What went wrong?”
“The husband leaves at eight o’clock. Eight-o-five, this florist delivery truck rolls up and this guy gets out who’s got muscles, twenty-five years old, rolled up T-shirt, tight-ass jeans, no socks. God, I hate people who don’t wear socks.”
“Very big in California,” I said.
“I know. I guess that’s why I hate it so much. Anyway, this guy gets out of the truck and walks up to the house. He bips the bell and the door opens like a flash of light. I figure he must have been parked down the block waiting for the husband to leave and then zipped up to the house. So now I got him inside with the wife, and I don’t know who the guy is or what’s going on, so I figure I’d better reconnoiter the house a little bit. First I wait five minutes or so, just to see if maybe he really came to take an order for flowers or something or ask directions, but when he doesn’t come out, I figure it’s time.”
Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) Page 2