Free And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2) by Warren Murphy

true. Your mother’s not going to be there tonight, is she?”
    “If the food’s free, my mother’s going to be there,” he said.
    “Oh, God,” she said. “Someday I’m going to take up your father’s offer and run away with him.”
    “He won’t let you listen to his tapes either,” Trace said.
    “Hey. You’re lighting another cigarette,” Chico said.
    “A necessary prerequisite to smoking it,” he said.
    “You’re smoking too much.”
    “Listen, I’ve almost quit drinking for you. Have you been put on earth to harass me?”
    “I don’t want you to get cancer.”
    “I don’t believe in cancer,” he said.
    “What do you mean, you don’t believe in cancer?”
    “Them freaking rats get cancer from everything. Alcohol, tobacco, saccharin, asbestos, blue cheese. Did you ever think that maybe rats are just cancer-prone? Or maybe they’re allergic to laboratories? Maybe laboratories give cancer. Call Sloan-Kettering. I’ve just had a flash.”
    “Just watch the cigarettes,” she said.
    “Hai, Michiko-sama,” he said.
    Still in a lotus position, she put her hands in front of her on the floor, then lowered her head until it rested on the floor between her hands. Slowly she worked her body forward and then moved it upward, until she was balanced in a headstand, her legs still in lotus configuration.
    “Can National Anthem do this?” she asked.
    “She’d better not. If her boobs fell out of her leotard, she’d-crash through into the apartment downstairs,” he said.
    She rolled forward lightly, onto her feet, and walked to the bathroom. “There you go with the big-jug remarks again,” she said. “Got to shower. Duty and lunacy call.”
    While she was in the shower, Trace went back to reviewing the days’ tapes. Sometimes he caught something the second time around that had gone over his head the first time. More often, he didn’t.
    It was a lousy and a slow way to work, he often thought, but it was the only way he knew. And Chico was right. Making tapes of everything not only let him review them; it let her review them later if he needed help. He usually did.
    He had just finished listening to the last of the tapes when Chico came out of the bedroom, cloaked in a floor-length golden gown that intensified the bronze color of her skin.
    “God, you look splendid,” he said honestly.
    “Thank you.”
    “Hey, I’m sorry I got under your skin,” he said. “If this job hostessing is getting to you, just quit it if you want. It’s no skin off my nose, you know.”
    “Thanks, Trace. I appreciate that. But I signed on for the duration and I’ll stick with it. You coming over later?”
    “After I’m finished with my report,” he said.
    “Good. You can keep your mother off my back.”
    She kissed him and left.
    When she was gone, he poured himself a glass of vodka, put an operatic tape into the stereo, and placed a fresh tape into his own small recorder.

9
     
    Trace’s log:
    Tape Recording Number One, 7:15 P.M., Monday, Devlin Tracy in the matter of Early Jarvis et al.
    So we’ve got a murder and a million-dollar jewel heist. Why is my life filled with this kind of trivial bullshit? I’m almost forty. I’ve got only three more days to live in the thirties and I should be partying with all the other wonderful folks who infest the insurance industry, and Groucho has got me doing this instead.
    I should have been born rich instead of handsome and sensitive. Then I could tell Groucho to stick it. I could grab Chico and take her off and buy her her own shogunate somewhere. I’m mad at her. That’s the first time she’s ever done that, listen to my tapes, just because I left the recorder out while I was going to the bathroom.
    My ex-wife, Jaws, used to do that. Not tape recordings. She’d open my mail. When I bitched about it, she stopped opening my mail, but she’d run to the door every day to get the mail and then she’d hand it to me and stand there, shifting her weight from foot to