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

foot, waiting for me to open it. She’d follow me around until I opened my mail.
    So I used to make her crazy by going into the bathroom and locking the door behind me. I knew she’d be outside listening, so I’d make a big point of ripping open the envelopes with a lot of noise. It was always some stupid business crap about somebody having reserved a special Visa card just for me, but I’d tear up the envelopes into confetti-size pieces and throw them in the waste-paper basket and hide the letters inside my shoe.
    Then, when I’d walk out of the bathroom, Bruno would make believe she was just strolling by and she’d throw her arms around me, as if she was overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of love for me, and she’d frisk me, trying to find out what pocket I was hiding my secret mail in.
    I think I was the only American in history who hoped that one day, even in peacetime, he’d get a letter that said, “Greetings, your ass has been drafted.” No such luck. Who needed a war anyway? I was surrounded by enemies. Bruno. What’s-his-name and the girl. God.
    Why am I doing this? What is this lust for reminiscence? I know. Anything is better than working. Come on, Trace, do your duty to God and your country, obey the Scouts’ law, keep yourself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.
    But first a drink and a cigarette.
    Okay, I’ve vamped till ready and I’m still not ready, but I’ve got to do this anyway.
    Why? Chico says that Walter Marks is up to something. It must be a very short thing for him to be up to it. Haha, Trace, there’s been no one wittier than you since Noël Ca’ad. What’d Groucho say? “I’ve got the bastard now.” Chico heard him, and who else could he mean but me? And Swenson told me the same thing when he woke me up today. I don’t need this crap.
    I think I handled R. J. Roberts beautifully. I didn’t hit him. I didn’t rip off his plaid shirt and strangle him with it. I didn’t grab him by the hair and march him off to a public bath for ablutions.
    On the other hand, I didn’t get any information out of him either—at least not anything that I couldn’t have gotten by reading the papers. But negative information is information in a way. Now I know a thousand things that don’t work.
    It’s nice and consoling to think that even an unprincipled bastard like R. J. Roberts has labor problems. Lip Service, his head hooker, is obviously being eased out. It’s got to be tough, hooking, turning forty, watching the wrinkles start to show. What do you do when you reach the end of the line and you still haven’t gotten anywhere, especially in a town without one visible stretch mark? Someday I’ll point this out to Chico. She’s got fourteen years left.
    Hell, in fourteen years, that woman will own the western world. As well as me.
    Anyway, I didn’t think it was possible for Roberts to be embarrassed by anything, and I was right. He wasn’t embarrassed at all by Lip Service coming in to bitch at him for getting somebody younger to run his stable of whores. “Stable” might be exactly the right word in this case.
    So what does Roberts know? He knows that Jarvis called Spiro from the airport, but he wasn’t there when Spiro arrived. And Roberts said he hasn’t heard anything about the jewels being fenced, and as a working fence, he’d be in a position to know. So maybe he’s right. Maybe it wasn’t a local thief who hit the plotzo. The insurance company hasn’t heard anything yet either from any thief, and I’ll have to ask Groucho to stay in touch with them for me.
    How do people like Roberts stay out of jail? I’d suspect that he’s got a very large budget item called incidental expenses and it greases a lot of palms.
    And then, on that same tape we’ve got Dan Rosado. Danny’s my friend, but he’s a lousy detective. I always get this feeling too that he knows that. He can’t figure anything out and he’s reached a decision in life: he doesn’t want