Trace (Trace 1)

by Warren Murphy

“So long. I’ll call you when my plans are firmed up,” Chico said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Trace said as the telephone clicked off in his ear.

  9

  Trace’s Log:

  Tape Number Two, Devlin Tracy in the matter of Frederick Plesser et al. It is seven P.M., Tuesday, in the twilight of my life and what the hell do you do in Harmon Hills when you face another empty evening?

  Well, not much longer. Thank whoever’s in charge that there’s nothing to this Plesser business. That’s one very good thing and it is going to get me out of here tomorrow. It’s also a very good thing, because if there was something to the Plesser matter, and I was instrumental in getting old G-F Insurance to send money to the Plessers, I might have Widow Plesser and Daughter Plesser and Son-in-law Plesser come to visit to thank me, and that might just make me die. Can you die of an overdose of sauerkraut smell?

  With luck, I will never see them again. People that ugly shouldn’t be given money anyway. It encourages them to go on, and I’d like to think of the Plessers marching down to a lake or ocean or something and wandering out, like Norman Main. Yeah, I know it’ll hurt the sales of Pepsi and the Enquirer, but the junk drink and junk information cartel be damned. Some things in the world we have to support because they add to our overall sense of beauty and order. Commerce has to take a back seat.

  So there are two more tapes in the master file.

  The first one is my interview with the Jukes…oops, the Plesser family and their dog, Devil. They’ve got a lawyer now ’cause they think we’re cheating them. But Old Man Plesser wasn’t feeling good. His doctor said he was just getting old. Christ, I can’t blame him. Five minutes with that family and I felt old. Old and dead. His company paid for him at the sanatorium. Cause of death was a bad heart, but the Plessers don’t believe it. Ahah, they said that about Elvis Presley too and we know, don’t we, just how much truth there was in that.

  You know, it’s a terrible thing when the only picture anybody has of you smiling is in your coffin. I may be an alcoholic—anyway, Chico says I am, and she’s always right about things—but when they carry me off, some people are going to remember me smiling. At least little smiles. If they want big smiles, they’ll have to go look at my ex-wife. My death should be worth a year’s guffaws from her. They’ll have to shield her teeth with Polaroid filters so they don’t blind passersby.

  Well, anyway, the Plessers did me a favor. They warned me to watch my ass because Meadow Vista’s hired killers will be coming after me as soon as they know I’m in town.

  Groucho, you’ll be glad to know I turned down a bribe. You see, all I’ve got to do is convince you to send the Plessers a hundred thou and Calvin will take care of me. That probably means he’ll send me a six-pack and a gift certificate for two at Burger King. Don’t worry, Groucho, I didn’t take the deal.

  What do I have between me and my Calvin?

  Nothing, if I can help it.

  And on tape two we have Lt. Frank Wilcox, who doesn’t put any stock in anything the Plessers say. I don’t know if his wife does or not, but I think if I wanted to call her up some midnight and ask her to spend time going over her views with me, she wouldn’t mind. And she does make good coffee.

  Anyway, Wilcox has a high regard for the sanatorium and for Dr. Matteson. Nothing there.

  And we finish up our selections of the evening with the Tommy Dorsey of Tort, Lawyer Nicholas Yule. He says the Plessers have dower rights, whatever the hell they are. But he doesn’t know about any pressure on Plesser or anybody doing him in, he just knows his clients ought to get money, send it to him first, so he can take his cut. Groucho, I think we can settle this whole matter cheap. You give Yule a contract to play at the next two office parties, and I think he’ll hand up the Plessers on a silver platter. If you don’t want him at two parties, you give him one and I’ll get him booked for a night into the Araby Casino lounge. Think it over, Groucho. This may be our big chance.

  Yule says that I better worry about Mitchell Carey because maybe he won’t get out of the hospital alive. ’Cause Plesser didn’t. He was trying to be cute with me, but dandruff and trombones ain’t cute. Yule’s an idiot. But he has pretty company.

  A woman walked out of his office who was worth coming to New Jersey to see. Somehow, I don’t think she fell deeply in love with me at first sight. If I were going to hang around town, I’d really find out who she is. But I’m going to be gone tomorrow.

  Flying back to Las Vegas alone, while Chico’s playing around in Memphis, Tennessee. She says I’m a drunk. No, she didn’t. She said I was an alcoholic. They’re not the same. Well, she’s right. I am. And she’s a whore, and I’m not buying that she’s in Memphis, Tennessee, with her sister, and she doesn’t have a hotel room, so she doesn’t have a phone. What would Churchill have said here? ‘Madam, I’m drunk. But when I sober up, you’ll still be a whore.’ It’s too depressing.

  So are my expenses. I’m tired of itemizing everything every time I have to go on one of these stupid assignments.

  From now on, we’re starting a new system. My expenses for the day are one hundred dollars. Anything under that, I get to keep. Anything over that, I’ll itemize. Don’t complain, Groucho, I save the company millions.

  And now if you’ll forgive me, I’m going downstairs to see my friend Hughie. In the restaurant. A man has to eat, doesn’t he?

  10

  There was a guard on duty in a small booth alongside the wide iron gates of the Meadow Vista Sanatorium, but the gates were open, and when Trace slowed down his rental car, the guard barely glanced up before waving him on.

  The road curled around to the right of a three-story brick building, and when Trace followed the road into a parking lot, he saw four identical brick buildings, each three stories high, the fading pink brick ivy-covered, jutting out from the parking lot like the spike marks on a compass.

  He parked his car and followed a weatherbeaten sign that pointed to THE ADMINISTRATION BUILDING, and inside, a bright-looking young clerk pointed him down the hallway toward Dr. Matteson’s office.

  The walls in the hallway were of pink marble and the floors of a polished white stone with black swirls in it and Trace suspected that the sanatorium had been built originally by some governmental unit, because private owners and builders didn’t generally put out that kind of money for floors. Only governments never had to worry about the bottom line because the bottom line was always the same: raise taxes.

  There were two women inside the office behind the door that was labeled simply DIRECTOR. The young woman near the door looked up brightly as Trace entered. The second woman, older, was pounding away at a typewriter. She had a pencil clasped between her teeth and she typed so rapidly she sounded like a Teletype machine Trace had once heard in a newspaper office.

  Trace handed the young woman one of his cards. “I’d like to see Dr. Matteson.”

  “Do you have an appointment, Mr. Tracy?”

  “No.”

  “Can I tell Dr. Matteson what it’s in reference to?” she said. She was still smiling.

  “It’s an insurance matter regarding one of his patients. Look, do me a favor. Don’t keep smiling at me. I’m not ready for smiling today.”

  “Okay. Just wait a minute, please.” She went into an inner office and just a few seconds later came out and said, “Dr. Matteson will see you right now.”

  “I’m in luck,” Trace said.

  “I warned him that you’re grouchy,” she said, and held the door open.

  Trace slid by her into a large airy office that overlooked a grassy field that swept down to a stand of trees that bordered the edge of one of the small streams that maundered through that part of New Jersey. The view was peaceful but the rest of the office was busy. The carpet was bright orange and the walls a particularly disgusting lemon yellow, plastered with posters and prints that were vaguely modern and seemed to Trace to embrace every social cause from protecting seals to free abortion on demand to anyone, regardles
s of age, religion, or even gender.

  Piles of medical journals and newspapers were stacked on small tables around the walls of the room. A tape recorder on one of the tables was blasting Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. Three diplomas, in frames, hung askew on the wall behind Matteson’s desk.

  Dr. George Matteson was sitting at the desk in the far corner. He had a small well-trimmed beard that seemed to clash with the wild curled frizz of his hair. He wore no jacket and his shirt sleeves were rolled up to display heavy muscular forearms. His collar was open. His suit jacket hung on a plain wooden coatrack behind him, with a tie carelessly looped over the top of the rack. Trace estimated that Matteson was in his mid-thirties.

  The doctor didn’t look up as Tracy entered. He was busy jabbing a stiletto-shaped letter opener down into his desk, thump, thump, thump. Trace couldn’t see what he was stabbing at because two rowdy stacks of books were in his line of vision.

  When the door closed behind him, Trace said, “Roach problem?”

  Matteson seemed to respond to the unfamiliar voice in his office because he stopped his last thrust in midstroke and looked up.

  “No, goddammit,” he said. He took the letter opener and held it by the tip and Trace glanced sideways to see if there was something to hide behind in case Matteson should be an accomplished knife thrower.

  “You ever get the feeling that the world is out to get you?” Matteson asked.

  “All the time.”

  “Well, this, goddammit, this letter opener’s out to get me. I don’t know who makes things like this. It’s got a point on it like a freaking laser beam and every time I try to open an envelope with it, the goddam point gets under my fingernail and I feel like I’m being tortured in Attica. This sucks.”

  “Is that how you’ve worked out your revenge?” Trace asked. “Using the letter opener to punish your desk?”

  Matteson looked annoyed and puzzled. “Oh. No. I wasn’t jamming it into the desk. I was jamming it into this wooden ruler. I’m trying to dull the point before it freaking kills me.” He popped his left index finger into his mouth and sucked on it. “Everytime I try to open a letter, it leaves me bleeding. Freaking thing must be made of titanium steel. It won’t get dull.”

  “Throw it out,” Trace said. “Open your letters with your teeth, like I do.”

  “I can’t. The girls gave it to me. They’ll be heartbroken. Maybe you can steal it when you go.” He picked up a business card from the desk. “So, let’s see, you’re Devlin Tracy, Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company. What can I do for you? But if you tell me you’re investigating a murder, I don’t want to talk to you. What do you want?” He dropped the letter opener and drummed his fingers impatiently on the desktop.

  Trace looked around for a chair, but there was none, so he went across the room and sat on the sofa.

  “I don’t have a chair. It encourages people to hang around and then you never get any work done. You know how hard it is to run a hospital?”

  “I’m here about Frederick Plesser,” said Trace.

  “I knew it. I just knew it. This is going to go on forever, isn’t it? I’m going to be hounded year after year for the rest of my life. No rest. No place to put my head. Until I finally confess.”

  “Confession’s good for the soul,” Trace said. “’Fess up.”

  “I’ve got nothing to confess.”

  “You mean I’ve wasted this whole trip?” Trace said.

  “Have you talked to my lawyer yet?”

  “No, who’s he?”

  “She. Jeannie Callahan. She’s got an office in town.”

  “No,” Trace said. “I’ll talk to her next if you want. I just wanted to get a sense of what you were like.”

  “Just exactly what do you do?”

  “Sometimes I check out claims for good old Gone Fishing.”

  “Gone fishing?”

  “Garrison Fidelity,” Trace explained. “We heard about the suit the Plessers are filing, and since it all looks like it’s going to wind up in court, they wanted me to check it out and find out what’s going on. Nothing sinister. No accusations. Do you mind if I turn down this damned screaming?”

  “No, go ahead. You don’t like Gilbert and Sullivan?”

  “They’re to music what hockey is to sports,” Trace said. He turned the tape player down to a faint hum.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You ever watch a hockey game? I used to watch them. I watched them for a while and then I realized I never saw a goal being scored. Then I used to watch them on the TV news, and I never saw a goal. Even on the instant replays, the slo-mo, I still couldn’t see the goal, it was all just too fast. Gilbert and Sullivan are like that. I’ve never heard one of their lyrics. It’s just an exercise with words, to see how many words you can fit into four beats. It’s a trick, like a hockey goal. Ya-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. That’s not music; it’s articulated noise. I hate Gilbert and Sullivan. You were going to tell me what’s going on.”

  “What’s going on is this—You mind if I smoke?” Dr. Matteson said.

  “It’s your office. I don’t care if you tap-dance on the desk,” Trace said.

  “I know it’s my office, but a lot of people don’t like smoking nowadays. I don’t smoke but once in a while, it’s good.”

  “If people don’t like it, let them stand outside your window and yell in to you,” Trace said.

  “You’ve got a good attitude on life,” Matteson said. He lit a cigarette and took a deep inhalation and his face glowed. Trace wondered if he himself ever looked that content and happy. He lit a cigarette too and coughed.

  “I was saying, what happened is this. Frederick Plesser came into the hospital. He was suffering from general atherosclerosis that—”

  “Hardening of the arteries,” Trace said.

  “Right. Call it that. It was reducing the blood supply to his brain and that gives off symptoms like senility. At least, that’s the theory we work under. We were treating him with heavy oxygen therapy. That’s what we do here. We try to saturate the brain with oxygen to try to minimize, maybe even reverse, any damage that might have been done. Also we put our patients on a good stiff exercise program so their heart and blood system improve and they can start pushing oxygen to the brain better by themselves.”

  Trace nodded.

  “Anyway, Plesser was making really good progress. Did I tell you he was a nice man?”

  “No.”

  “He was a sweet guy. He helped out a lot around the hospital, helping other patients, talking to them. A nice man. I thought he could probably go home and continue his therapy there. We had him pretty well straightened out. But he didn’t want to go home.”

  “Did he say why?” Trace asked.

  “Kind of.”

  “Why was that?”

  “He said that he didn’t have any fun at home and he liked being here. It was still covered by his hospitalization insurance and his company, so I let him stay. And, er, Tracy, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t like I was gouging Blue Cross or anything for extra money for the hospital. The simple fact is that any other hospital in the world might have kept him in forever. I had good-enough medical reasons for letting him stay.”

  “I don’t work for Blue Cross,” Trace said.

  “Okay, just explaining. I told you, he was a nice guy, so we let him stay. He was a real help to everybody around here, and then one day, I didn’t know it, he changed his insurance policy and made me the beneficiary. One of the nurses and a doctor witnessed the change for him.”

  “And they didn’t tell you?” Trace asked. He reached into a jacket pocket and fished out a paper.

  “They didn’t know what it was. He had written this letter, see. I guess to your company and then he asked them to witness his signature and he signed it and he had them sign it, but he had the top of the letter folded over so they couldn’t read what it was. I was going to jump all over them when I found out about i
t, but they didn’t know anything.”

  “That was, let’s see, a Dr. Darling and a Nurse Simons,” Trace said, reading the names from the paper.

  “That’s right.”

  “Then what?”

  “Nurse Simons mailed the letter and everybody forgot about it and then, eight days later—that was about a month or so ago—Mr. Plesser died.”

  “Just up and died?”

  “Yes. He had a massive heart attack in his sleep. He wasn’t in intensive care or anything, so he wasn’t hooked up to any kind of monitor. He was dead when the nurse found him in the morning. She called me, but it was too late to do anything.”

  “Why a heart attack?” Trace asked. “I thought you had him on an exercise program and all.”

  “I did. A good, tough one too, dammit, but anybody can have a heart attack anytime. It happens to people, some little valve or something just gets tired and it closes down, and good night, sweet prince. He just died. And I didn’t know anything about the insurance until I got a call from somebody at your company explaining to me how claims are filed and blah blah blah. I nearly fell out of my chair, so one of your guys came around and talked to me. I didn’t know, I thought maybe he had some other insurance or something, and then those bastards decided to sue me over it.”

  “Have you met the Plessers?” Trace asked.

  “Not since Mr. Plesser’s death. I met their lawyer.”

  “Trombone McGinty? From the firm of Sleazebag and Crud?” Trace said.

  “You said it, not me. He came here and said I should just turn the insurance money over to the Plessers.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I told him I’d think about it. Then the next day I got a threatening letter in the mail and that shyster called and kind of threatened me with exposure, about running a murder mill, and who was going to be the next victim, and I lost my temper and told him to go to hell and sue me.”

  “What’d the threatening letter say?”

  “I don’t remember. I threw it out. I nearly took my finger off with this damned opener trying to open it. Something like God will punish murderers. Don’t take advantage of the sick and hurt their loved ones. Crap like that.”