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

to figure anything out. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Put in the years, take the pension, and sit home and play opera records.
    What’s he got? Zilch. The countess got her jewelry as gifts. So what? When you look like she does, it would be very strange not to get a lot of things as gifts.
    The Jarvis suitcase: shaving kit, aspirins, airline magazine. A man after my own heart, traveling light.
    And Danny’s got pictures. Jarvis lying facedown near the goldfish pond in enough blood to make Quincy sick. What the hell was he wearing gloves for? I’d like to publish a book. Great Police Photos . Pictures of people lying on railroad tracks with their heads cut off. Disemboweled hookers. Dead junkies with needles still sticking in them. Mangled car-crash victims. Make it coffee-table-size. People sitting around, sucking up a cocktail, and they look at these pictures and upchuck. What the hell. If pictures of cats sell, this ought to be a runaway. Cats make me throw up.
    All right. More photos, more blood, overturned tree, dirt all over the floor, that’s what you get for having trees in houses. And Jarvis bled to death. So it might not have been a murder. Technically No prints anywhere. What did I expect? An easy one?
    Jarvis really did travel light. Wallet, couple of bucks, a photo of him and Felicia, driver’s license, American Express card. Keys to the house and the rented car. Why the hell did he leave the car on the road and not just drive up to the house?
    And where was his passport? Poor Danny didn’t even think of that, but how do you get into the country without a passport? I don’t know, but at least I thought of it. God, does this mean I’m going to become a good detective? Are people going to come beating a path to my door? Like Banacek. “Our center fielder vanished on a long fly to the outfield. Can you find him before his next turn at bat?” I don’t want to be a detective. I’m not one. I piddle around for the insurance company and sometimes for other people, but this is not what I do well. What I do well is be a retired accountant. A formerly married man. Father of two creatures. Maybe they’ll be detectives. They deserve it, not me.
    Now, my father. Sarge would like to be a detective. He’d like to be anything that gets him out of the house, away from my mother. Sarge. Please. The woman’s my mother. One bullet in the brain will do. You don’t have to make a mess of her. And don’t do it right now. They’re changing the trapeze act at Circus Circus. The last trapeze act I saw was something where there was this mechanical dummy and it was all alone on the stage, hanging from this bar. The bar went through holes in the dummy’s hands. And then, I guess by radio controls or something from offstage, it started to swing and it did handstands and flips and giant slaloms or kips and tucks, whatever they call those things and I never know what they’re talking about. Anyway, I’m sitting there with Chico and this stupid audience is applauding. I want to jump up and yell, Why are you applauding a mechanical dummy? You think it’ll make it work harder? You think it’s listening? Stop it, you morons. Save it for Wayne Newton. But Chico wouldn’t let me.
    Anyway, my mother likes trapezes and hates Chico and thinks my apartment is ugly and she’d rather be in Miami and she hates me too. I asked Sarge once why that was. He’s a very wise man sometimes. He told me that she never forgave me for my divorce. He said she had this big picture of herself, in a flowered apron, being family matriarch at Thanksgiving dinners and like that, with her grandchildren bringing her boxes of chocolate, and I screwed it all up by getting divorced.
    To hell with that.
    Felicia killed no one. You can’t prove a negative; that’s one of the rules of science. Prove that there aren’t flying saucers. You can’t do it. All I can do is prove somebody else killed Jarvis, but I’m not off to much of a start.
    I