Trace (Trace 1) (5 page)

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 then 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.

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.

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”