“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You’re just lucky I didn’t turn you in to the police. Let the three of you spend the rest of your life behind bars.”
“Devvie, it’s not asking too much for you to stop by to see your children. Maybe you’d like them to visit you in Las Vegas?”
“Definitely not. Las Vegas is no place for children. Even if they are muggers.”
“Do you remember when you saw them last?”
“Yes. At my mother’s, Thanksgiving Day, three years ago. The date is emblazoned in my memory. I could tell they hated me. You poisoned them, Cora. You poisoned them against me.”
“Nobody’s poisoned them. Come and see them.”
“No. I was just leaving town. I’ve got a plane to catch in twenty minutes.”
“I feel like driving out there to see you and bring them with me.”
“All you’ll see are the wingtip lights on my departing airplane. How did you get this number?”
“From your mother.”
“I knew that woman hated me,” Trace said.
“You’d better tell me right now. You’re never going to see your kids again?”
“I know what you’ve got in mind. It’s like The Manchurian Candidate, isn’t it? You’re going to say to them, What’s-his-name, Girl, this is your father, and like a bell, it’s going to bong off in their heads, ‘father,’ and they’re going to bear me to the ground by the sheer size of them and stab me like Caesar. Confess, damn it. That’s what you’ve got planned, isn’t it?”
“Devvie, you are the sickest, most evil-minded, rotten bastard son of a bitch I have ever met.”
“Trying to be nice to me now won’t change a thing,” Trace said. “I’m leaving town.”
“I’m really sorry for you. You’re sick, and you’re making a big mistake.”
“I’ve only made four mistakes in my entire life,” he said.
“I guess I’m supposed to ask what they are,” she said.
“Yeah. You. What’s-his-name. The girl. And the clap. I was lucky there. I got rid of the clap.”
His ex-wife hung up, but Trace knew it wouldn’t end there. She would be on his trail now, forever, like Inspector Javert.
He needed a drink. He needed a car. He looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty A.M. He needed a night’s sleep. He thought of Cora. He needed to be up and done with this whole matter and out of this town before she made good on her threat.
Dexter was on the desk when Trace called downstairs, and the clerk said he knew a very good garage that would pick up Trace’s car, pump air into the tires, and deliver it to the country club.
“You’re being very helpful,” Trace said.
“Nothing but the very best service for our treasured guests,” Dexter said.
He was on his way out the door when the telephone rang.
“Hello, Tracy, this is Nicholas Yule.”
“Yeah?”
“Is your name really Tracy?”
“Yes.”
“My clients said it was Marks. You told them your name was Marks.”
“I lied. I lie a lot.”
“Oh. I was wondering what your company’s planning to do.”
“About what?”
“About the Plesser matter. I was hoping I could save Fidelity Garrison some embarrassment.”
“It’s Garrison Fidelity, and don’t worry about their being embarrassed. They’ve got me working for them; they’re used to it.”
“If you can tell me without violating your professional oath…” Yule began.
“I didn’t take an oath,” Trace said.
“Okay. Are you going to recommend to your company that they settle with my clients?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve talked to the lawyers for the other side and they don’t think you’ve got a case.”
“You’ve been talking to that Callahan woman?”
“As often as possible,” Trace said.
“Have you talked to the people at the sanatorium? Dr. Matteson? Those people?”
“Yes,” Trace said.
“And what do you think of them?”
“I like them all a lot,” Trace said. “Nurse Simons reminded me of my mother.”
“They’re really not to be trusted, you know,” Yule said. “Those people would do anything.” He hesitated. “I’d take anything they tell me with a grain of salt, if I were you.”
“Thank you for the advice.”
“Listen, you going to be in town for a while?” Yule asked.
“A little bit more.”
“Think about it,” the lawyer said. “We could probably make a deal that’d make your company very happy and would satisfy my clients.”
“Okay, I’ll keep it in mind,” Trace said.
“One more thing,” Yule said.
“What’s that?”
“Did you get a chance to ask them at the country club if they need a band?”
“I’ll do it today,” Trace said.
“Let me know,” Yule said.
When Trace entered his office at the sprawling plant of Carwin Enterprises on the edge of the small town, the first view he got of Wilber Winfield was of his rear end. The man was on the floor, crawling around, apparently trying to reach something under his desk.
“Can I help?” Trace asked.
“Feef,” Winfield said without turning.
“What?”
“Vropp ma feef.”
Trace got down on the floor to help look.
He finally found it. It was a beautiful set of false teeth, sitting up on the rug as majestically as an ox skull resting on the dried bed of an old salt lake.
“There they are.” Trace tapped Winfield on the shoulder and pointed. The man turned to him. He wore thick eyeglasses whose lenses looked like they had been cut in slabs from champagne-bottle punts. The glasses exaggerated the size of his eyes and it gave Trace the impression that he was watching a man drowning slowly, helplessly, inside a goldfish bowl.
Winfield picked up his teeth, then sat on the floor, his legs extended like a fat little child, and inserted the dentures into his mouth.
“There,” he said triumphantly. He clicked his teeth together, apparently to verify that they still made sound when clicked together. “Now what can I do for you?”
He was still sitting on the floor, a fleshy, well-fed man in his sixties, with thinning hair combed sideways across the top of his head, thick glasses, and false teeth. He was wearing a suit, but Trace noticed that he was also wearing ankle-high shoes.
“You mind if I sit down when we talk?” Trace said. “In a chair?”
“No. Go ahead. Over there, son.” He pointed to a chair a few feet in front of his desk, and then, as if remembering who he was and where he was, he got to his feet and walked to the swivel chair behind his desk.
“My eyes aren’t so good anymore and I dropped the damn choppers. I do it a lot and they always wind up rolling behind the leg of the desk or something where I can’t see them. Who’d ever think teeth would roll like that?”
“Peanut butter,” Trace said.
“Huh?”
“Like when you make peanut-butter-and-jelly and you drop it, it always lands peanut-butter-side-down. Didn’t you ever notice?”
“That’s because of the density of the peanut butter compared with the bread. It makes it heavier and the heavy side gets to the bottom. What you got to do, son, is, work over a counter, not over the floor. That way when you drop the bread, it doesn’t have enough space to turn over in before it hits bottom. Save a lot of peanut butter that way.”
“I like to work over the floor,” Trace said. “Maybe I could make peanut-butter-and-jelly while I was kneeling down. That’d cut the distance.”
“You still liable to drop it when you stand up. Kneeling’s not the answer. Work over the counter. Me, actually, I don’t have that problem ’cause I can’t eat the crap ’cause it cemen
ts my dentures together.”
He folded his hands over his chest for a moment, looked off into space through his big fish-eye lenses, then nodded as if he had considered it and could find no logical flaw in his argument. “Anything else? What is it—Tracy?”
“Yeah. Tracy. Actually I didn’t come in to talk about peanut butter.”
Winfield was looking right past him. “Look at that,” he said. “Peanut butter.”
Trace turned and saw a cuddly, rounded blonde in a tight pink sweater standing at a file cabinet outside Winfield’s office.
“Peanut butter?” Trace said.
“That’s my new secretary,” Winfield said. “I’d like to lather her up with peanut butter and go to work on her.”
“Your dentures’d get stuck.”
“What a place to get stuck,” Winfield said. “Not much chance, though. I heard her making fun of me the other day, calling me a dirty old man. You were saying why you were here.”
“I’m with Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company. I’m checking on your partner, Mitchell Carey.”
“He didn’t die, did he?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Be like him to die and nobody tell me. Nobody tells me anything. This place runs itself and nobody tells me anything. That’s why I’m talking to you, ’cause I don’t have anything more important to do.”
“I’m honored by the faith you’ve shown in me,” Trace said. “You and Mr. Carey been friends a long time?”
“Friends sometimes, but we’ve been partners forever. He’s the worst crab-ass man I ever saw. If he ain’t dead, what are you doing here for whatever-it-is insurance company?”
“Trying to see that he doesn’t die. You know anybody’d who’d want to see him dead, Mr. Winfield?”
“You mean besides me?”
“Well, start by including you. You want him dead?”
“Yes. No. Hell, I don’t want him dead, I just want him the hell out of my life. You get him out of my life, you can keep him alive forever if you want. Stuff him and implant a motor, I don’t care.”
“You two sound like you’ve got real business problems between you.”
“You know, we ran this business thirty-five years without a contract, just on a handshake. Then five or so years ago, Mitch comes to me and says we’re not getting any younger. I say, I thought you were getting old, and he says we’ve got to put everything down on paper, this is no way to run a big business.”
Trace nodded, he hoped, sympathetically.
“So we put everything on paper. Old Elmer Callahan, he drew everything up. Son, if you ever deal with lawyers…Well, don’t deal with lawyers.”
“What happened?” Trace asked.
“Elmer works it out so that Mitch gets fifty-one percent of the company and I get forty-nine. He says this is so that we can make decisions without being deadlocked. I got some extra money for the extra one percent, I forget what it was, but something. And there was some other stuff in there about who gets what when one of us dies and like that, and I didn’t think anything about it and then all of a sudden, last year, Mitch says he wants to sell the company and retire. His daughter’s getting out of college and it’s time to retire, he says. I tell him I don’t want to retire; he wants to retire, go ahead. I’ll keep sending him checks and he says, no, that won’t do, because there’s capital gains and some bullshit to think about and I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about; so anyway, he goes ahead and tells little Jeannie, old Elmer’s dead now, he tells her to start selling out the company and he’s got us a buyer. So now, dammit, she’s doing it. What do you think of a guy who does like that?”
“I don’t know,” Trace said. “It doesn’t sound fair.”
“It’s not fair. We built this business together. Mitch is real good with planning and stuff and design, and he leaves managing men and like that to me. We worked fifty-fifty and we split fifty-fifty and now he wants to sell it and I don’t have anything to say about it. I don’t think that’s fair and maybe I should be wishing him dead.”
“If he dies, what happens?”
“Why you think somebody wants him dead?” the old man asked.
“He told me. I was up to see him and he told me.”
“What’d he say? I didn’t think he could talk.”
“He was just counting numbers and then he said they’re trying to kill me.”
“Who’s they?” Winfield asked.
“I don’t know.”
“And you think maybe it’s me?” Winfield asked.
“Is it?”
“Hell, no. I’d rather grumble than murder. You want a motive, I’ll give you a motive. If Mitch dies first, I get one-third of his stock in the company. His estate gets what’s left. If I die first, the same thing. He gets one-third of what I got, and my family, goddamn their eyes, gets the rest.”
“Would that change anything?”
“That’d change everything. If I got another seventeen percent of stock, I’d own, what, sixty-six, and first thing I tell young Jeannie, no sale.”
“What’s your company worth?”
“I don’t know, fifty, sixty million, something like that. We make a lot of money here. Say sixty million. Mitch dies, I get one-third of his, that’s an extra ten million to me. Would you murder for ten million?”
“I’m working for an insurance company. I’d do anything for money.”
“I wouldn’t. Mitch lives, I go retire. Christ, I’ll probably have to go down to Florida with my two no-good sons and their no-good wives and I’ll sit on the sand down there and look at titties and be old in two weeks and dead in six. And then those vultures come swooping up here to see everything they can get from my corpse. You want murder, those two sons of mine will give you murder. Their wives. Wait till you catch their act. If you got any of them insured, best keep an eye on them.”
“Have you seen Mr. Carey?”
“I go up to the sanatorium once in a while. I used to go every day, but he doesn’t do anything but lie there and it gets depressing. Now I send flowers.”
“What do you think of the sanatorium?”
“It’s a horseshit place to visit, but it beats the hell out of living there.”
“I heard that Mr. Carey was getting better at the hospital.”
“That’s right,” Winfield said, “and then he went to the sanatorium and he got worse right away, like always in a coma.”
“Why do you think that is?” Trace asked.
“I think after his daughter died and all, I, I don’t know, I just don’t think he gives a shit anymore.”
“You know Dr. Matteson? He runs the place.”
“Seen him around,” Winfield said. “Seems all right to me. You got a rotten job, mister.”
“I’ve got a rotten life too,” Trace said. “Does Mr. Carey have any enemies?”
“You know, maybe you ought to talk to me.” Winfield stopped talking for a moment and gazed past Trace through the glass window. Trace turned and saw the blond secretary stretching like a cat waking from a nap. “Peanut butter,” Winfield said. “You know, I was saying, you say that maybe somebody’s trying to kill Mitch ’cause he told you up at the cuckoo-clock factory he’s in. But that doesn’t explain why you’re in town. You didn’t come here just so you could stumble over Mitch in the hospital and have him talk to you. Why don’t you talk to me?”
Trace thought a moment, then said, “It goes like this. There was some old guy up at Meadow Vista named Frederick Plesser. He died, and all of a sudden they find out that Dr. Matteson is the beneficiary of his insurance policy. A big policy. All right, so now Mitchell Carey goes up there. His wife is a friend of my boss’s. They went to school together. And that girl who’s living with the Careys, I think she got Mrs. Carey worked up, and she mentions to my boss that she’s afraid that somebody up at the hospital is going to get Carey to change his insurance or his will or everything and then pull the plug on him. So my boss asked me to check it out.”
; “What did you find out?” Winfield asked.
“Nothing. The Plesser family isn’t much.”
“I know that family since I was a boy. They never amounted to anything.”
“Right,” Trace said, “and I think he changed his insurance out of his own free will and left the money to Matteson just to spite his family. So nothing checks out. Then I talk to Mrs. Carey and Melinda—”
“That’s the girl living with them?” Winfield asked.
“Yeah. Muffy they call her. A school chum of the dead girl or something. It’s obvious that she’s pushing Mrs. Carey around and trying to run the world, but I can’t find out anything. Carey’s still up there and still alive and he’s got round-the-clock nurses now, I think.”
“Maybe you ought to go home,” Winfield said.
“Except Mr. Carey told me somebody was trying to kill him, and somebody beat me up.”
“Must’ve been one big sucker to beat you up.”
“Actually, it was two of them and they dropped a piece of paper with Meadow Vista’s name on it. And I find out that Jeannie Callahan is the Careys’ lawyer, and your business lawyer, and she’s also Matteson’s lawyer in that insurance suit, and I don’t know what’s going on. So I’m asking you. Anybody want Mr. Carey dead?”
“Try a for-instance,” the old man said.
“You, for instance, to keep control of your company?”
“It’s a possibility,” the old man said. His eyes did not even blink behind the thick lenses.
“Or maybe because you’ve been stealing from the company for years and now you’re going to be found out if it gets sold?”
“Not bad,” Winfield agreed cheerfully. “Except Mitch is a genius with numbers. I stole a dime, he’d find out in ten minutes. Anybody else?”
“Matteson, because he wants the money.”
“He won’t get anything unless he gets a will or insurance or something made out to him,” Winfield said. “Anyway, don’t you people check that out, all you insurance companies? Wouldn’t it look funny if he suddenly started showing up on a lot of insurance?”
“I guess so,” Trace said.
“Try somebody else. You’re really cooking now.”
“Mrs. Carey or Melinda. Maybe they want to inherit a lot of money and don’t want to wait. Especially Muffy. Melinda.”
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