Trace (Trace 1)

by Warren Murphy

  When the door closed behind her, Trace said, “How do you get away with that?”

  “What?”

  “Having women bring you coffee. I thought it was against the Constitution or something.”

  “It is,” Wilcox said. “Except she’s my wife. She brings me coffee home, why not here? She complains to the police union and I have her out doing traffic duty in the swamps.”

  Trace sipped hard at the coffee. “The Plessers say they’ve got a lawyer.”

  “You meet him?”

  “No,” Trace said. “Yule or something.”

  “Yule. Wait until you meet him. You’ll understand he’s the perfect lawyer for this case.”

  “I guess I ought to talk to him before I pack this whole thing in,” Trace said.

  “You go out the front door, make a right and down about three blocks. He’s in the middle of the block, upstairs over the drugstore.”

  Trace sipped a little more of his coffee, then rose and thanked the lieutenant for his help.

  “Anytime.” When Trace was at the door, Wilcox said, “If you find out anything, let me know.”

  In the outer office, Wilcox’s wife was sitting at a desk, looking through a pile of blue-sheeted police reports.

  She looked up at him and Trace smiled and said, “You make good coffee.”

  She smiled back. “I do a lot of things well.”

  Trace’s day was made halfway up the narrow flight of bare wooden stairs leading to Nicholas Yule’s second-floor office. He heard a door at the top of the steps open, looked up, and saw a woman starting down the stairs. She was a tall redhead, with widely spaced large brown eyes framed by thick dark lashes. Her nose was thin, straight, and, Trace thought, perfect, and her lips, coated only with a light-colored gloss, were full and wide. She had high cheekbones and a complexion that looked so healthy it seemed to glow. She was wearing a white-linen suit, and as she came down the stairs, the jacket of the suit parted to display a gold chain belt, cinched tightly around her narrow waist. He stopped on the stairs, first to marvel at her, then to move aside to give her room to pass.

  She saw him, but her face did not respond in any way. Was she happy to see him? Angry? Preoccupied? He couldn’t tell, and as she reached him on the stairway, he smiled and said, “Come here often?”

  She looked hard into his eyes and snapped, “Not anymore, if you’re going to be here,” then brushed by him and continued down the stairs.

  She went through the door and out onto the sidewalk without looking back, and Trace sighed. Was this what they meant by two ships passing in the night? But couldn’t she at least have sounded her whistle when she passed? For a moment, he had the urge to forget Nicholas Yule and chase after the woman, harass her, importune her, beg her to take him home and make him a pet, but instead he turned and kept going up the stairs.

  Before he opened the door, he heard a sound from inside. A trombone was playing “Nola” at top volume and he thought it was unusual music to be played in a lawyer’s office. Muzak had certainly changed since the last time he had noticed it.

  But when he went inside, he found it wasn’t Muzak. A thin man with a balding head sat behind the lone desk in the office, his feet up on the desk, playing the trombone. The man was small, wore thick-lensed glasses, and looked as if he’d been dressed by a vote of the fans. He had on a red plaid shirt, a blue plaid tie, and green plaid pants. He wore white sweat socks and heelless Indian moccasins. Even from ten feet away, Trace could see that his shoulders were dotted with dandruff.

  He looked at Trace, nodded, and kept pursuing “Nola” to the end, while Trace waited just inside the door.

  Finally, the man stopped.

  “I’m looking for Nicholas Yule,” Trace said.

  “What for?”

  “Business,” Trace said stubbornly. Start off by talking to trombone players and soon you’d be talking to everybody.

  “Okay,” the man said. He put the trombone down onto the desk. “My rates are two hundred dollars a night. For that, you get four hours. We’ve got a piano, drums, bass, and I carry the lead on the trombone. We know a lot of ethnic stuff, so you tell us who’s likely to be there, what kind of people, you know, and we can do whole Irish sets or “Hava Nagilah” or polkas or Neapolitan favorites or whatever. I only do a few German. You can’t get a better band at any price, and I do the vocals too, and that saves you the cost of a fifth man. When’s your party?”

  “Are you Nicholas Yule?” Trace asked.

  “Who’d you think I was?”

  “I thought you were a lawyer.”

  “I am. I’m also the best musician in three counties. You want music or you want law?”

  “Law,” Trace said.

  “Law sucks,” said Nicholas Yule. “But if that’s what you want…have a seat.” The little man got up and carried his trombone across the small room and put it in a black cardboard trombone case. Trace sat down and looked around the office. There were two things on the walls: a diploma from law school and a bank calendar that was opened to the wrong month. A pile of file folders sat on the lone desk in the office, and half of them seemed to have fallen onto the linoleum floor. Most of the desk space was taken by a daily racing form.

  Yule came back, rubbing his hands, and sat at the desk, facing Trace. He moved the racing form aside, “Now what can I do for you, Mr.—”

  “Tracy.” He handed the lawyer one of his business cards. “I’m here about the Plesser case.”

  Yule looked at the card and nodded. “Well, it’s about time you people have come to your senses. When you send the check, send it to me. I have to deduct my fee first, you know.”

  “Actually, I’m not planning yet to send any check,” Trace said. “I’m still looking into this matter. You’re representing the Plesser family, correct?”

  “That’s right, and I’ve notified your people that we’re planning to sue, and I’ve notified everybody else involved, and I’m going into court as soon as I get the papers drawn. It’s a miscarriage of justice, that’s what it is. It’s worse than a miscarriage. It’s an abortion. A willful vicious abortion.”

  “What is?” Trace asked.

  “Depriving that poor Mrs. Plesser of what is rightfully due her. She was married to that man for thirty years; she’s got dower rights to everything. You know what dower rights are?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s too complicated, but she’s got them, and if your company doesn’t pay up, it’s going to have a lot of egg all over its corporate face.”

  He seemed about to go on and Trace said, “Mr. Yule, time out. I’m not the enemy. My company sent me here to find out what’s going on and I’ve got to report back to them. When they get my report, then they’ll decide what to do. So why don’t you just tell me what’s going on.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Do you think pressure was applied to Mr. Plesser to get him to change his insurance?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh. Okay. Do you think anything strange happened to him at Meadow Vista?”

  “Like what?”

  “The family seems to think he was murdered.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re not much of an advocate for your position,” Trace said.

  “I’m not interested in facts. This is an equity matter. What’s fair. What’s fair is that Mrs. Plesser gets that insurance money. That’s what’s fair. I told your company that and I told Dr. Matteson that, but if they’re not going to pay up, then we’re going to go into court and it’s going to be this poor little old woman against the big insurance company and the big doctor, and you’re all going to look like idiots.”

  “Suppose you lose?” Trace asked. “It happens in court.”

  “They can’t take my trombone away from me. Or my voice. I have a beautiful natural tenor voice.”

  “I wasn’t really thinking of you. I meant the Plesser family,” Trace said.


  “Do you know if they sing?”

  “What?”

  “There used to be two fat sisters who sang. I don’t remember their names. Maybe I can get the mother and the daughter to put together an act. They could work with my band. Dolly and Polly I could call them. A novelty. Do you know if they sing? I’m looking for another singer.”

  “I think they do the Pepsi-Cola commercial,” Trace said. “About this case. What would you like to see happen?”

  “Your company to pay Mrs. Plesser the insurance. Send it to me first so I can get my fee. Or Dr. Matteson to turn the money over to Mrs. Plesser. He can—”

  “I know. Send it to you so you can deduct your fee,” Trace said.

  “You think I’m in this for the fee, don’t you?”

  Trace shrugged.

  “Well, I can make a lot more money leading my band,” Yule said. “And another thing. I don’t need cases. I have cases. These are all cases.” He waved his hand toward the stack of file folders on his desk, nudged them by accident, and they all fell on the floor. Trace started forward to pick them up and Yule said, “Don’t worry about it. None of them are pressing right now. I’ll straighten them out later. You come from around here?”

  “No. Las Vegas,” Trace said.

  “Oh, Las Vegas.” Yule seemed interested. “I want to get my band to Las Vegas someday. How is it there?”

  “Dry,” Trace said.

  “I mean to work.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t work,” Trace said.

  “You wouldn’t know what they’re paying lounge acts, would you?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  Yule chewed his lips and shook his head. “Why’d they send a guy here from Las Vegas instead of from around here?”

  “I’ve got friends in town. I volunteered so I could visit them. Maybe you know them. The Mitchell Careys.”

  “The old man’s sick. You know that?”

  “Yeah. I heard he’s in Meadow Vista too,” Trace said.

  “Had a stroke. He’s a friend of yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Keep an eye on him. He might not get out of that hospital”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Plesser didn’t,” Yule said.

  “You can’t just tell me that and nothing else,” Trace said.

  “Watch me,” Yule said. He smiled at Trace, who finally realized that Yule was not going to talk anymore and he got to his feet.

  “Thanks for your time, Mr. Yule,” he said. “If there’s anything else you want to tell me, anything that you know might make my company think about settling, just let me know. I’m staying at the Sylvan Glade.”

  “Nice place.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ask them if they want a band on weekends,” Yule said.

  Trace nodded and walked to the door. In the doorway, he stopped and turned. Yule was taking his trombone out of the instrument case again.

  “Mr. Yule?”

  “Yes.”

  “That woman I saw leaving here. Who is she?”

  “You don’t want to know her.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Yule answered by playing “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and Trace left.

  8

  “Mr. Tracy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know a Koko?” Dexter, the desk clerk, sniffed down the sizable length of his nose as he asked the question.

  “Yes. Nestle’s and Bosco. I like Bosco myself, but Nestle’s is easier to travel with ’cause Bosco is like a mush. I broke a bottle of Bosco once in my suitcase and it ruined all my underwear.”

  “No, no, this is a person.”

  “Koko?” Trace said. “Chico?”

  “It might have been. A woman.”

  “Yeah, Chico is a woman, all right. And if she caught you sniffing her name like that, she’d have a dirk between your ribs so fast your heart would stop before you knew you were cut. What about her?”

  “She called and said she would call again at precisely five-thirty P.M. I think I should tell you, Mr. Tracy, that she was very insolent.”

  “What did she say? Be accurate. You may be called to testify at her deportation hearing.”

  “Well, she called me Buster for one thing.”

  “She calls everybody Buster. Go on.”

  “And she—Well, very rude—She said, I think she said that I was the dumbest person she ever talked to.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told her I would not dignify that statement with a comment.”

  “Good for you. That’ll teach her.”

  “Mr. Tracy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not really here for the Vatican, are you?”

  “Of course I am. Who told you otherwise?”

  “Oh. Oh. Oh.” Dexter’s face lit up with happiness. “I hope you’re finding everything here to your liking.”

  “I certainly am,” Trace said.

  “If there’s anything you need…”

  “Thank you, Dexter.”

  It was five minutes after five, and when Trace got to his room, he showered, first placing his tape recorder and the two tapes he had made that day on the dresser.

  The telephone rang at precisely five-thirty. It was one of the things he liked about Chico; to her, five-thirty meant exactly five-thirty.

  “Where are you?” he asked her.

  “Memphis, of course.”

  “Tennessee?” he asked.

  “Don’t start. Of course, Tennessee.”

  “Listen,” he said. “This is important. How did you find me?”

  “A little Oriental guile. Why?”

  “Because if you found me this easily, Svetlana, my ex-wife, can find me too. I can’t have that.”

  “She doesn’t even know you’re in New Jersey,” Chico said. “And her name’s Cora.”

  “You don’t know what she knows,” Trace said. “That woman knows every move I make. A chance word in the lobby of our condo…a talkative bellhop. I tell you, that woman can find out. It might have gotten out and maybe something was in the social columns. Jim Bacon might have written a piece. ‘Mr. Devlin Tracy and his Sicilian fortune cookie are traveling east to New Jersey.’ I tell you, that woman subscribes to a clipping service. She turns the reports directly over to the Mafia. I’ve got a contract on my head. How’d you find out where I was?”

  “I remembered the town, so I called police headquarters and asked for the name of the hotels. I figured there’d be a couple and I’d call person-to-person for you, but the cops said there was only one and there you were. How do you stand that desk clerk?”

  “Dexter? Actually, he’s kind of charming. If you don’t mind being treated like rancid meat. He liked you a lot.”

  “Mutual, I’m sure,” Chico said. “How are you doing anyway?”

  “I’m just about all done with this thing. There’s nothing that I can see to that old guy’s death at the sanatorium, and all I’ve got to do is stop in and pay my respects to the Carey family and I can go anytime.”

  “You going back to Vegas?” Chico asked.

  “Absolutely. I don’t want to be around here, I told you. When are you coming back?”

  “Probably not for a few days,” she said.

  “Oh. How’s your sister?”

  “Sist—Oh, sure, she’s fine. We’re having a wonderful time. I didn’t know how many relatives I had down here.”

  “Want me to come down and do the tea ceremony with them?”

  “The last time I put you near my family and you wanted to do a tea ceremony, you larded up the tea with vodka and everybody threw up.”

  “Come on, I’ll behave this time,” he said.

  “No,” she said quickly. “Just me and the sister. We don’t get much of a chance to be together.”

  “So I have to fly back to Vegas alone?”

  “Don’t pout. Why not? You’ve done it before.”

  “Never by choice. All those old wo
men with blue hair, they’re lurking on those planes, just waiting for one like me. And they eat all the chicken and all I get is codfish. Ah, the hell with it. You’re not interested in my troubles. Where are you staying anyway? Where can I reach you?”

  “That’s why I called back,” she said. “I’m at a public phone. Sis and I didn’t like our motel room, so we moved out. We haven’t found another one yet, so I don’t have a number.”

  “All right,” Trace said flatly.

  “So I’ll call you, if you’re still there. Otherwise, I’ll see you back in Vegas.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Cheer up. I’ve got a question for you. How high is Mount Fujiyama?”

  “Who cares?” Trace said.

  “It’s 12,365 feet high. You know how I know?”

  “’Cause you used to live there when you were master-minding World War Two. How do I know?”

  “Because there’s twelve months in a year and 365 days in a year: 12,365. That’s the height.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Trace said. “Does it grow a foot every four years for leap year?”

  “Disregard leap year.”

  “How can you disregard one year out of four?” he asked.

  “If I knew you were going to be crabby, I wouldn’t have called.”

  “Why should I be crabby? Enjoy yourself in Memphis, Tennessee. It’s all right. I’ll sit here in this old folks’ home, drinking myself into oblivion.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the answer to everything, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’re an alcoholic, Trace.”

  “I know it.”

  “There’s no future in alcoholics,” she said.

  “The hell with the future. Live for the present, I always say. Tomorrow you may be on a plane to Las Vegas, by yourself, flying with a lot of women with blue hair who are eating up all the Muslim food.”

  “Why don’t you try not drinking for a while?” she said.

  “Why don’t you try coming back up here?”