Trace (Trace 1)

by Warren Murphy

  The sound Carey made was not much more than an exhalation and the words were slurred and indistinct. But Trace could pick out most of them.

  “Hundred…two hundred…dying…dying…hundred hundred…no more…take it away…more dying…dying…dying.”

  There was a long pause and Trace lifted his head. The lips were still moving, but no sound came out. Then Carey’s lifeless eyes riveted to him. There was a hiss and more sound came out of his mouth. Trace bent over to listen and suddenly he heard another voice: “What’s going on here?”

  It was a woman’s voice and Trace turned to see an elderly nurse standing in the doorway.

  “Who are you?” she said, even as she walked over to Carey’s bedside and looked down at the old man. His eyes had closed now, but he appeared to be breathing regularly.

  “Walter Marks. I’m a friend of the family. Just stopped in to see how he was doing. He was trying to talk.”

  “Visiting hours are this afternoon and you get passes at the front desk,” the woman said crisply. She was adjusting the covers over Carey’s body. She took his pulse and nodded to herself in satisfaction.

  “Is he all right?” Trace asked.

  “He’s fine. Just come back when you’re supposed to be here.”

  “I will,” Trace said as he left the room.

  Out in the hallway, he could find no men’s room, where he could change the tape in his recorder. He went into a door marked EXIT and walked up the steps to the next floor. A sign outside the door read: THREE EAST. NO ADMITTANCE. Trace pushed open the door and was facing a uniformed guard.

  “Yes, sir?” the guard said.

  Trace smiled sheepishly. “My aunt Lulu’s eating cigarette butts again. I was just checking the place out.”

  “Sorry, sir, this area is restricted. You’ll have to arrange a visit at the front office.”

  “Sure,” Trace said. “How come it’s restricted?”

  “Special patients,” the guard said brusquely. “Ask at the front desk.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Outside the door to Three East, there was a pay telephone on the landing, and Trace decided to call Sylvan Glade to see if he had any messages. He searched through his pockets until he found a dime, but when he tried to dial the number, an operator came on and told him the call was twenty cents.

  “I thought a short call was a dime.”

  “It’s twenty cents in New Jersey. Deposit another ten cents please.”

  “I’m just calling down the block.”

  “The call is twenty cents. Please deposit another ten cents.”

  “I don’t have another dime. Can I mail it to you? Send you a stamp?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  “You’re no fun,” Trace said as he hung up. His dime was not returned.

  In the parking lot, Trace noticed a Mercedes Benz parked next to his rented Ford.

  Visible through the right front windshield, lying on the dashboard, was a yellow piece of cardboard marked PARKING.

  The windows of the Mercedes were open and Trace reached in and filched the parking pass.

  He turned and saw a uniformed maintenance man sweeping the sidewalk behind him. The man’s uniform hung on him as if it had originally been purchased to hold two like him. Trace wondered if he had noticed anything, and he tossed the parking pass into his car and walked over toward the man, who smiled a gap-toothed grin at him.

  “Got a light?” Trace asked.

  “Sure.” The man rested his push broom against his wheeled trash can and dug an old Zippo lighter from the shirt pocket of his uniform.

  Casually Trace said, “I was just over in the East Building and I got lost. What’s on Three East anyway?”

  “Hey, heh, you don’t want to go there, son,” the man said. He flicked the lighter and held it up so Trace could light his cigarette.

  “Why not?” Trace said. “What’s there?”

  “That’s the nuthouse,” the man said with a cackle. “For the crazies. You go in there, maybe you never come out, heh, heh.”

  “Are they dangerous? They’ve got a guard up there.”

  “Everybody’s dangerous around here,” the old man said.

  “What do you mean? Who’s dangerous?”

  “They’re all dangerous.” The man looked around to make sure no one was watching him. He leaned his face close to Trace’s. His whiskey breath could stop a horse coming out of the starting gate.

  “They put saltpeter in the water so you can’t get it up,” the old man said.

  “Oh, the dirty dogs,” Trace said.

  “Been doing it for years now.” He looked around again and fired another blast of breath toward Trace. “Don’t tell them I said anything.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And I won’t tell them you stole Doc Matteson’s parking pass,” the old man said.

  “Thanks,” said Trace.

  “And stay out of Three East.”

  “I’ll try,” Trace said.

  12

  Shaken emotionally by his bedside meeting with Mitchell Carey and the old man’s strange words, Trace stopped at a small roadside bar a half-mile from Meadow Vista Sanatorium and ordered a vodka on the rocks.

  The tavern was empty and the bartender was busy watching a televised game show and seemed uninterested in intruding in Trace’s drinking. He tossed down his drink rapidly, called for a refill, and went into the men’s room, where he untaped the recorder from under his shirt and unhooked the wire leading to the golden frog microphone.

  He took the recorder back into the bar. The bartender had refilled his glass and, having decided that Trace was going to be more than a one-drink customer, apparently figured he would help enrich his customer’s life with joy and camaraderie. And talk.

  “What’s that, a tape recorder?”

  “Yeah. You’re missing your show.”

  “I hope you’re not with Candid Camera,” the bartender said. “I didn’t wear my best shirt.” He smiled at Trace.

  “Go watch your show.”

  “Ahhh, I hate this show. It’s stupid. They get these two families on, see, and then they try to get them to—”

  Trace coughed in the direction of the man’s face, then said with agitation, “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. You’d better go wash your face off right away.”

  “Whatsa matter?” The bartender put a tentative hand to his cheek.

  “Honolulu herpes,” Trace said. “I’ve got it and you can get it just by breathing the same air as me. Christ, I’m sorry. Quick, wash. I’ll leave you my card. If you get it and your wife wants to know why, I’ll tell her it was innocent.”

  “You’ve got a hell of a nerve coming in here.”

  “If you want to waste time talking, that’s your business. But I’m telling you. Wash. Right away.”

  The bartender glared at Trace for a moment, then walked to the other end of the bar, ducked under the counter, and walked quickly to the men’s room.

  “Gargle too,” Trace called.

  Alone in the bar, now quiet except for the insipid yelping of a television emcee who thought, quite mistakenly, that he was charming, Trace rewound the tape recorder and turned up the volume.

  It started playing in the middle of his interview with Nurse Simons and he fast forwarded it to the end of that section. Then he heard Carey’s voice.

  “Hundred…two hundred…dying…dying…hundred hundred…no more…take it away…more dying…dying…dying.”

  Then there was a pause and then the old man’s voice started again. Softly, in the background of the tape, Trace could hear the voice of the nurse who entered the room. “What’s going on here?”

  But the microphone was close to Carey’s face and his words came out clear, even though faint.

  “They’re killing me,” the old man said. “Help me. Help me.”

  Trace played the strip of tape back again, just to be sure.

  “They’re killing me. Help me. Help me.”

 
Trace finished his drink, then popped the tape out of the recorder, slid it into his jacket pocket, and inserted a fresh tape. A few minutes later, the bartender came out of the bathroom and Trace walked toward it.

  “I don’t want you touching nothing in there,” the bartender snapped.

  “Nothing that belongs to you.”

  Inside the men’s room, he restrapped the tape recorder to his waist and hooked up the microphone again.

  He washed his hands carefully. Who knew what strange diseases the bartender might have?

  When he went back outside, he drained the last drop of his drink and put a ten-dollar bill on the bar.

  The bartender was sitting at the far end, warily, near the cash register.

  “I don’t want your money,” he said.

  “This money’s okay. I’ve had it treated.”

  “I don’t want it. I might get something. Idea of some guy comes in here with something and doesn’t—”

  “I’ll leave the money. Use it to pay somebody you don’t like.”

  Outside the bar, he looked through the glass window and saw the bartender use a napkin to pick up his glass and drop it into a garbage pail. Then he used the same napkin to pick up the ten-dollar bill, and he put it into his cash register, at the bottom of his pile of tens.

  13

  From the roadway, there was nothing to distinguish the Mitchell Carey home from all its affluent neighbors, but when Trace came up the driveway and parked in the open area in front of the large garage, he could see that the house stretched back from the visible front section in a long-legged el. The addition was easily twice as big as the section of house visible from the roadway, and inside the el there was room for a swimming pool and tennis court and elaborately manicured gardens. Trace saw a dog kennel in one far corner of the property with two beautiful black and copper Gordon setters lounging inside.

  There was no street behind the Carey house and the property rolled away to a large clump of trees. Far in the back, he saw what looked like a large pond.

  The doorbell was answered by a woman wearing a housedress of red-striped cotton and a kerchief around her head.

  “My name is Tracy. I’d like to see Mrs. Carey.”

  “Oh, yes?” the woman said, and then waited.

  Trace hesitated, then said, “I’m a friend of a friend’s. Bob Swenson. From Garrison Fidelity Insurance?”

  “Oh, Mr. Tracy,” the woman said. “How is Bob? It’s been so long since I’ve seen him.”

  “You’re Mrs. Carey?”

  “Yes, of course.” The woman took the kerchief from her head and shook loose her naturally graying blond hair. Her face was smooth, and although she had to be in her sixties, her skin was soft and unlined.

  “I’m sorry,” Trace said. “Bob’s well. He’s at a convention in Europe.”

  “He always did like to travel, that one. Don’t just stand out there. Where are my manners? Come on in.”

  She led Trace to a sitting room in the far corner of the house, large enough to seat a small orchestra and its audience. Through the large front windows, Trace could see the road that passed in front of the house.

  “Would you like tea?” Mrs. Carey asked.

  “Do you have coffee?”

  “Yes. It’ll just be a minute.”

  She left the sitting room and Trace stood up from the sofa and looked around. It was a warm, personal room with good oil paintings hanging side by side with inexpensive prints. The shelves held expensive carved jade and little cloth stuffed mice. It was a room that said real people lived there, not manikins from a magazine insert on how to decorate your home like the stars.

  On one of the shelves was a large ball of crystal, four inches thick, and Trace held it up to the light to look at it. He loved the look and feel of crystal and he was disappointed when he saw air bubbles and little imperfect dark spots inside the glass. When he replaced it, he saw on the shelf two small black wax candles and a saucer with half-burned incense cones in it.

  When Mrs. Carey came back with a tray, Trace said, “Servants’ day off?”

  “Servants? Oh, we wouldn’t have servants. What would I do in this big house if I didn’t clean it myself? And Mitchell wouldn’t think of hiring somebody to fix something that he could fix himself.”

  The woman was altogether too nice, Trace thought. She reminded him a little of one of the aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace who went tippy-toeing happily around while the bodies of the poison victims piled up inside the cellar.

  The thought brought him up short because he again remembered Carey’s words: “They’re killing me. Help me.” Did that have anything to do with this pretty little woman who was bustling about with teapots and coffeecups?

  “So tell me, how is Bob?” she asked again with a smile.

  “He’s fine. He’s on a convention,” Trace said again. “In Europe.”

  “He always did like traveling,” she said.

  Nuts, Trace thought. The woman was either nuts or the dullest conversationalist in the history of the world.

  “Bob asked me to stop by and see how you and your husband were getting on,” he said.

  “Oh, we’re fine,” she said.

  “Of course, Bob was sorry to hear your husband was ill.”

  For a moment, she paused. “Oh, yes. It’s an awful thing. He’s been so sick.”

  She sat in silence for a few moments, and finally Trace asked, “Did Bob and Mr. Carey grow up together?” The long pauses in the conversation made him uneasy. It was a trick he often used with other people, letting the air hang dead and silent; it made people uncomfortable and they started jabbering just to fill the dead air. But with Amanda Carey, he felt that unless he said something, they might just sit in silence until they decayed.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Bob and I were friends. We went to school together from childhood. Bob didn’t meet Mitchell until I married him. Bob and I were from another town, near here, but he didn’t know Mitchell. My, my, how Bob always liked to travel.”

  “How long’s your husband been ill?”

  “April sixth. Three months ago. He had a stroke. Right after we learned it happened.”

  “Learned what happened?” Trace said.

  The woman sipped her tea silently and then began to rock gently back and forth in her chair. She was humming softly to herself, still smiling at Trace, but smiling as one might when looking at a favorite painting, not expecting a smile back.

  She began to sing softly to herself and Trace could make out some of the words. “‘…prettiest tree you ever did see, and a tree in the woods and a limb on the tree, and a branch on the limb and a twig on the branch and the green grass grew all around, all around, the green grass grew all around.’”

  He was about to interrupt when Mrs. Carey said, “That was her favorite song when she was little.”

  “Whose favorite song?”

  “Belinda. Our daughter,” Mrs. Carey said. “She’s dead now,” she added with a finality that hinted that it had answered all questions and solved all puzzles.

  “I’m sorry,” Trace said, silently cursing Walter Marks for not giving him any information on the Carey family.

  “Yes. April sixth. It was an automobile accident. In Europe.”

  “And that’s when Mr. Carey became ill?”

  “He had a stroke right after it happened.” She was talking to Trace but staring past him at the large windows in the front of the room through which the high-noon sunlight poured. Softly she said, “‘And the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around.’ Do you like that song?”

  “It was one of my favorites when I was growing up,” Trace said.

  “So young,” she said, and then she seemed to snap out of it and asked Trace, “So how is Bob Swenson?”

  “He’s fine. He’s at a convention in Europe.”

  “Oh, my, how that boy likes to travel. When we were growing up, he always said that he wanted to see the whole world. It wasn’
t really any surprise when he joined the navy right after high school.”

  “How is your husband now?”

  “He’s not well. I don’t think he really wants to get better anymore. You don’t know how he loved Buffy.”

  “Buffy?”

  “Belinda. Everybody called her Buffy.” The old woman’s face brightened. “That’s her picture over there.” She pointed to one of the cabinets in the room, but Trace could see no picture.

  “Where’d that picture go?” Mrs. Carey said. “It was there.” She shrugged, as if putting the picture out of her mind forever. “Buffy’s picture was there. She’s dead now,” she said, almost as an afterthought, and suddenly Trace felt very sick about the way he made his living. When he had first gone to Las Vegas, he had gambled for a living, and while a lot of people thought that was degenerate, at least it was just him against a vast impersonal casino. Now he had to traipse his way with muddy feet through the tragic lives of other people and it made him sick sometimes. He wanted a drink.

  “Do you mind if I pour myself a drink?” he said, nodding toward the liquor cabinet.

  “No, you go right ahead. Mitchell always liked a drink when he came home from the office. That was before he became ill.”

  There were no ice cubes, so Trace just splashed vodka into a large tumbler. “Bob Swenson said you were concerned about the treatment your husband might be getting at Meadow Vista,” he said.

  Mrs. Carey looked at him, her large brown eyes wide open in surprise. She had lovely eyes, Trace thought. When younger, she must have been something to dream about.

  “‘Who is Hecuba that all the Swains adore her?’” he said softly.

  And Mrs. Carey said, “No, no, it was Sylvia, not Hecuba. ‘Who is Sylvia? What is she that all our swains commend her?’ Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

  “Yes, you’re right. I was thinking of something else,” Trace said. “We were talking about the treatment your husband is getting at Meadow Vista.”

  “Oh, it’s fine. I’m sure they’re doing all they can for him—Well, it’s all right. His business is being sold and Mitchell won’t be going back there. I guess he won’t have to worry about that anymore.” Her voice trailed off at the end of the sentence and she sipped her tea and began to hum again.