Trace (Trace 1)

by Warren Murphy

  “You shoulda gotten all the facts before you said you was going to pay off to those quacks at that hospital. That’s why we got us a lawyer,” she said proudly.

  “That’s right,” pitched in Jasmine. “We gonna hang your ass, us and our lawyer.”

  “I can’t really help if I don’t know what happened,” Trace said.

  “What happened was that my poor husband, God rest his soul, went up to that fancy sanatorium and they killed him.”

  “Had he been sick?”

  “Of course he was sick.” Mrs. Plesser looked at Jasmine as if needing to share with someone the secret of Trace’s utter stupidity. “Don’t nobody go to no sanatorium without they being sick.”

  “What was wrong with him?”

  “What was wrong was that he wasn’t feeling good for a long time. He used to have these head pains and things and his memory wasn’t so good no more either. It was getting kind of worse all the time and he wasn’t working so good, so he stopped going to work.”

  “Where’d he work?”

  “At the auto plant over in Muckluck,” the woman said. “Forty years he was there.”

  Trace was sure he had heard her say Muckluck.

  “What did the doctor say was wrong with him?”

  “Doctor said he was just getting old. Jasmine, make me some coffee.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “That was a laugh ’cause the doctor is older than oak,” Mrs. Plesser said. “But Freddie was getting bad and the company was paying for it on the insurance so we sent him up to the sanatorium ’cause he couldn’t like dress himself or anything like that. He was, how do you say—”

  “He wasn’t competent, that’s what he wasn’t,” said Jasmine triumphantly.

  “Incompetent. That’s what he was. That’s why when they got him up there, they just twisted him around they little finger and made him leave them all his company insurance.”

  “That was how much?”

  “It was a hundred-thousand-dollar how much, that’s how much,” Mrs. Plesser snapped.

  “The company paid for that insurance?” Trace asked.

  “Yeah. ’Cause he was there a long time. It was all he had, ’cause they don’t pay pensions if you die.”

  “They pay for the sanatorium too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think happened to Mr. Plesser at the sanatorium?”

  “He wasn’t getting none better, but he wasn’t getting no worse neither. He just lay around there, but they wouldn’t let him come home. I asked him, ‘You want to come home?’ and he said, ‘They won’t let me come home, I ain’t ready yet.’ They didn’t get everything they wanted from him yet, was what it was. Then they did, and then he died.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “They said it was his heart,” Mrs. Plesser said in a tone that let Trace know what she thought of that.

  “What do you think it was?” Trace asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Probably some secret stuff,” Jasmine said. “Like they killed Elvis Presley with so he wouldn’t talk. I read about it in the Enquirer.”

  “John Belushi, too,” Trace said. “He was ready to rip the mask of hypocrisy off all the underhanded dealing in the videocassette industry.”

  “I din’ read that,” Jasmine said.

  “Must have been an issue you missed,” Trace said. “Do you have any reason to believe,” he asked Mrs. Plesser, “that the sanatorium did something wrong? That maybe they even speeded your husband’s death?”

  “Speed, my ass. They killed him,” she said.

  “Mama,” said Jasmine sharply.

  The mother glared at the daughter, her beady little eyes glistening angrily. “I ain’t supposed to say that, is what Jasmine means. Maybe you should be talking about all this to my lawyer.”

  “Did you discuss your suspicions with the police?”

  “Aaaaaah, the police.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “They’re on the take too. A poor woman can’t get no justice, excepting she’s rich.”

  “You talked to the police but they took no action?”

  “They didn’t do nothing,” Mrs. Plesser said.

  “Do you know if they investigated your husband’s death?”

  “I don’t know nothing except they didn’t do nothing. Nobody wants to do nothing to help you. You get…poor people don’t ever have a chance. Now we got nothing to live on except my social security and what Calvin brings home.”

  “Calvin?” asked Trace.

  “Jasmine’s husband. Leastways he’s working now since Papa died.”

  The smell of sauerkraut was stronger in the room. Trace could hear the water boiling on the stove for coffee, but nobody bothered to do anything about it. He could imagine water boiling away in this kitchen, then empty pots standing over flaming gas burners until they melted, or turned brittle and shattered when plunged into water.

  “Do you have a picture of Mr. Plesser?” Trace asked.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes in matters like this, it helps me to have a feel for the person. Like I’m not dealing in statistics but with a real human being.”

  Mrs. Plesser mulled this for a moment, then told her daughter, “Get them pictures of Papa.”

  When they came, Trace decided he would rather have been dealing with statistics. Mrs. Plesser took a small pile of photos from her daughter and handed them across the table to Trace one at a time for him to admire.

  They were typical examples of the style of photography known as 1930s backyard art deco. There was Plesser, flanked on one side by his wife, on the other by his daughter, looking for all the world like a very slim volume pressed between two blowup bookends. All three of them stared resolutely into the sun, but it didn’t take fright shadows down his face to reveal the late Frederick Plesser as a man of something less than striking beauty. His face looked like an undernourished ferret’s and his thin hair was plastered down on his head. He was scrawny, with a protruding Adam’s apple, and his clothes hung on his frame as if he had spent six months shrinking away inside them.

  Each of the pictures was the same group: Plesser surrounded by wife and daughter.—What did you wear to the party, Mr. Plesser?—My wife and daughter and a look of grim despair.

  If Plesser had ever smiled in his life, there was no indication of it in any of these photos, Trace thought as he looked at each of them.

  And then the prize of the collection was handed him. These looneys had actually taken a picture of Plesser lying in his coffin. It was a washed-out-looking Polaroid print and Trace thought that what it really needed to be perfect was to be rendered on black velvet with granular paint by some artist in Tijuana.

  “That’s the last one of Papa,” Mrs. Plesser said.

  “I should expect so,” Trace said.

  He looked at it and didn’t know what else to say. Should he tell them that the deceased looked good? That he looked like Randolph Scott? All men over fifty in their caskets looked like Randolph Scott.

  But there was something else in the photo, some antic whim of a funeral director who either didn’t know the dear departed or who had a sense of humor. Frederick Plesser was slightly smiling, a skill that seemed to have evaded him in life.

  “He looks nice,” Trace said because that’s what everybody said when viewing a cadaver. He handed the picture back and Mrs. Plesser stared at it for a moment, as if to make sure they had gotten the right man.

  “Undertaker did a good job,” she said. She shuffled the pictures together and wordlessly handed them over to her daughter, who took them and left the room, presumably to return them to the crypt.

  “Well, you’ve really been a big help to me,” Trace said. He was afraid if he stayed longer, he’d be looking at locks of hair and relics from the body. “I’ll be going now. I want to—”

  He stopped as he heard a crash against the front screen door, then the baying of a hound, and the
n the galloping of hooves down the hall toward the kitchen.

  A moment later, he was shrunk back against the wall. A black dog, with saliva glistening on his fangs, as big as an understudy for The Hound of the Baskervilles, had his massive head next to Trace’s chest and was growling.

  “Devil, back off,” Mrs. Plesser screamed.

  “Quick, the tranquilizing darts,” Trace yelled.

  “Devil, back off,” Mother Plesser yelled again.

  The dog didn’t budge and he didn’t stop growling. He didn’t even pause for breath.

  “Devil, goddammit,” Mrs. Plesser shouted. Trace thought maybe he was deaf. “Turn on his hearing aid,” he hissed.

  Mrs. Plesser and Jasmine started yanking on the beast’s spiked collar, but it stubbornly held its ground. Its red-rimmed eyes never left Trace’s face. The growls grew deeper in its throat. Its tail hung down.

  Trace heard whistling in the hall. Somebody was whistling a tune. Here he was in danger of being eaten alive and somebody was giving a whistling concert in the hall. Stop. All music should cease until the life-and-death crisis had passed.

  A man came into the kitchen. He was just a few inches over five feet tall but wiry and strong-looking. His black hair was thin, greasy, and uncombed, and he had a straggly black beard. He wore a plaid lumberjack’s shirt and farmer’s overalls and light-brown ankle-high brogans.

  “Devil, stop fooling around or I bust your ass,” he growled.

  Devil backed off from Trace, whimpered once, and dropped to the floor in terror.

  “Who’s he?” the man said to Mrs. Plesser.

  “Name’s Morris. He’s with the insurance company.”

  “Marks,” Trace corrected.

  “Shit, I ought to let Devil kill him,” the man said.

  “Stop joshing, Calvin,” said Jasmine.

  “Yeah, stop joshing,” Trace said.

  “This here’s my husband, Calvin,” Jasmine said.

  Trace nodded and Calvin said, “Good thing you wasn’t trying to mess around with Mama or Jasmine. Devil’d rip you apart.”

  “I can see that,” Trace said. He omitted suggesting that so would the Legion for Good Taste. “I was just leaving.” He started to get up from the chair but froze when Devil growled at him.

  “Devil, I kick your ass,” Calvin said.

  Devil covered his muzzle with his paws and closed his eyes.

  “You going to get us our rightful money?” Calvin asked.

  If he said no, Trace wondered, would the dog be set free to tear him apart? If he said yes, could he live with the lifetime of shame caused by cowardice in the face of danger?

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good.”

  Trace tried getting up again and this time Devil stayed quiet.

  “Those people do anything,” Calvin said. “You be careful. If they find out you’re onto them, no telling what they might do.”

  “The people at the sanatorium?” Trace asked, and Calvin nodded. “Are they violent?”

  “They killed Papa, didn’t they?” Calvin said.

  “How do you think they did it?” Trace asked.

  “Just like Elvis Presley,” Calvin said.

  “And John Belushi,” said Jasmine.

  Trace could imagine these two lying side by side in their stall at night, reading the Enquirer to each other while Jasmine swallowed cases of Pepsi-Cola intravenously so she wouldn’t have to get up.

  Trace nodded and stepped gingerly past Devil toward the hallway. “Well, I’ve got to be off.”

  “Listen, Mr. Parks, you just stop in if you need any more help,” Mrs. Plesser said.

  “Sure will,” Trace said. He started down the hall and realized that Calvin was following him. The smaller man stepped outside with him and they stood alongside Calvin’s dented, body-cancered pickup truck.

  “It ain’t right, you know,” Calvin said, “for Mama to get nothing from that insurance company.”

  “Seems unfair,” Trace agreed.

  “Sometimes women don’t understand things too good, you know,” Calvin said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just want you to know, you get us what’s rightfully ours and you and I, maybe, could do some business.”

  “I understand.”

  “We look out for those who looks out for us.”

  “Right,” Trace said. “Can you tell me something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Was Mr. Plesser happy?”

  “Like a clam. He had everything. This house, nice family. They shouldn’t oughta killed him. There’s nothing they wouldn’t do up there.”

  “Why do you think they”—Trace emphasized the word—“picked him to kill.”

  “For the insurance, naturally. They knew they could get him to switch it over and then they could just kill him.”

  “Do you think they’ve tried it to other people?”

  “I don’t know. ’Cause we’re poor, maybe they figured they could get away with it. Sometimes you wonder what the FBI’s doing, when they don’t have time to look into things like that.”

  “You asked them to look into it?”

  “They’re all on the take,” Calvin said. “Every one of them. Since old J. Edgar died, ain’t anything going right anymore in this country.”

  “You’re right about that,” Trace said, clapping the small man on the back. Then he glanced nervously toward the screen door to make sure that Devil wasn’t watching and misunderstanding the gesture.

  “What’s your lawyer’s name?” Trace asked.

  “Mr. Yule. Best lawyer in town,” Calvin said. “You gonna talk to him?”

  “Probably.”

  “Tell him I’ll be down to see him soon,” Calvin said.

  “All right. I’ll be in touch,” Trace said.

  “We’ll be waiting to hear from you,” Calvin said.

  Trace walked quickly to his car. Calvin smelled like sauerkraut too.

  7

  Harmon Hills police headquarters had an old-fashioned colonial facade over the front of the building, but it had bars on the windows and large green lights on either side of the front door. It was cute, but at least it was recognizable as a police headquarters. The trouble with up-income trendy towns like those in Fairfield County, Connecticut, was that everybody thought he was an architectural designer, and public buildings wound up looking like places that sold Frye boots.

  Trace found Lt. Frank Wilcox in a basement office in the small building. He had read somewhere that a forty-five, a man had the face he deserved, but somehow Trace doubted if anybody deserved Frank Wilcox’s face.

  It was thin, pitted with the residue of adolescent acne, and his nose was long and so pointed that it might have served its owner as a letter opener. His eyes squinted so tightly, he might have been staring into the sun.

  If Wilcox weighed 130 pounds, it would have surprised Trace, but it was a tough kind of skinniness that made him think of a jockey.

  “Okay, Tracy, what can I do for you?” He looked at Trace’s business card again. “Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company. What’s that all about?”

  “Well, Lieutenant, what I really came to talk about is the shocking murder committed at the Meadow Vista Sanatorium for insurance money, and the terrible coverup by the local police, you, the FBI, the CIA, and the State Lottery Commission.”

  “I see you’ve been talking to the Plesser family,” Wilcox said sourly.

  “You mean you’re going to deny it? You’re not going to plead guilty?”

  “Afraid not,” Wilcox said. He smiled and showed a lot of yellow teeth with spaces between them.

  “Shoot. I thought I had this all locked up,” Trace said.

  “Nothing to lock up. You did see the Plessers?”

  “Yeah, just now.”

  “You know, I’m getting tired of them. I think I’m going to talk to the town attorney and sue their ass for libel. Or slander. Or whatever it is. Defaming my character.”

  �
��Do you have a courtroom big enough to hold them?” Trace asked.

  “We can hold the trial in a tent. You want some coffee?”

  “Police-headquarters coffee?” Trace said.

  “Give it a try. We’ve got a new pot and this is one of the few police stations in the world where coffee tastes like coffee. You ever been a cop? You a private eye or something?”

  “No. My father was a cop in New York, I guess I’m kind of a p.i. But I work mostly for the insurance company.”

  Wilcox nodded and picked up the telephone. “Two cups of coffee,” he said. “So you’re here for the Plessers?”

  Trace thought momentarily of mentioning the other reason for his visit, the worries of the Mitchell Carey family. But he seemed to have Wilcox in a good mood and he didn’t want to change it yet.

  “My office told me that the Plessers’ll probably sue,” Trace said. “Insurance companies take things like that seriously.”

  “This one you can take unseriously. Let me lay it out for you. Meadow Vista is a good place. Well-run, highly regarded. No complaints in this town. Plesser died of heart failure. That was all. He was suffering from some kind of senile thing, but he was sane enough that he didn’t want to go home. He told the staff at the hospital that if they made him go home, he’d run away, so they let him stay. They tried to treat him and maybe he was getting better and maybe he wasn’t, but he died. You saw the family. Would you leave them money?”

  “They’d just waste it on Pepsi and dog food. Was there an autopsy?”

  “No. There wasn’t any need for one. The Plessers didn’t complain until after they tried to get the insurance money and your company told them the beneficiary had been changed. That’s when they got all those murder ideas. Before that, everything was all right. After that, Plesser was already buried. For all I know, those ghouls may go down and dig him up and have their own autopsy.”

  “Did you talk to this Dr. Matteson who runs the clinic?”

  “Yeah. Nothing,” Wilcox said. “He’s a nice guy. He remembered Plesser and thought he was a nice man and he was sorry he died. He doesn’t know why Plesser decided to leave him money.”

  The door to the office opened and a tall, curvy brunette in a police uniform came in, carrying two cups of coffee. She placed them on Wilcox’s desk, nodded to him, then turned and stared at Trace. There was a soft smile playing about her lips, and when she walked past him, her leg brushed against Trace’s knee.