Free Pigs Get Fat (Trace 4) by Warren Murphy

especially since perfume was usually as close as he got to trees, meadows, breezes, or sunlight.
    “What are you taking me to lunch for? And picking up the check,” Laurie asked. Her voice was as gentle as her good looks. She wore a beige blouse and a brown skirt that hugged her hips tightly. That was another thing he hated: balloon skirts that made women’s shapes look like tufted pin-cushions.
    “I’ve come to put you into movies,” Trace said.
    “Somebody’s told you about my kazoo solos? News really travels fast out here. Come on, sell me an insurance policy and let me go back to work.”
    “I’m an investigator,” Trace said. “Well, sort of an investigator.”
    “I saw your business card. You’re with Garrison Fidelity,” Laurie said.
    “I investigate things for them once in a while when I’m feeling up to it.”
    “And you’re feeling up to it now, is that it?”
    “Yeah. I’m looking for Thomas Collins,” Trace said. “And I know, I should look for him home but he’s not home and nobody’s seen him for a week. I thought you might be of some help to me.”
    “I haven’t seen him for a week either,” she said. “Does making it unanimous help you at all?”
    “Not much,” Trace said. Laurie had a faint smile on her face; it was the look worn by women who were beautiful, had always been beautiful, and had always been accustomed to wrapping men around their fingers. Trace did not care for it.
    “Did he tell you he was going out of town or anything like that?” he asked.
    “No,” she said, dawdling with her fork over the large chef’s salad she had ordered, an unappetizing mixture of apparently inedible objects that looked like wine-bottle corks and frogs’ entrails. She looked up again, fixing him with her clear cold eyes.
    “Is he really a missing-type person? Are the police going to find him in fifteen years suffering from amnesia and living in Dubuque?”
    “Police haven’t been called. They may never find him anywhere,” Trace said.
    “Isn’t that odd? Not calling the police?” she asked.
    “I think she’s afraid of ticking him off if he’s just away on business. Speaking of which, you double as his secretary, right?”
    “I take his messages. When he’s in the office, which isn’t very often, I do some typing for him.”
    “Would you know if he was going out of town?” Trace asked.
    “Nobody knows anything about where he goes and what he does. He doesn’t even tell Mr. Rose, so he wouldn’t tell me.”
    “You know nothing? You mean I’m spending three dollars on this rabbit food and it’s going to be a total waste,” Trace said.
    “I’m afraid it looks that way,” she said.
    “Do you think he might have gone to the farm?” Trace asked.
    “Not for a whole week,” she said.
    “Why not?”
    “I get the idea it’s a place he uses only…well, once in a while, you know, just overnight.”
    “Have you been there?” Trace asked.
    The young woman blushed for a moment, not quite as confident-looking as she had been a few minutes before, and said, “I refuse to answer on the grounds that my answers might tend to involve me.”
    “Is the farm his?” Trace asked.
    “I guess so. I never asked.”
    “You know, his wife and partner don’t know anything about it,” Trace said.
    “About what?”
    “About Collins owning a farm.”
    “How’d you know, then?” Laurie asked.
    “You just told me,” Trace said.
    The young woman took a sip of her Perrier. “And here I thought you were just another pretty face,” she said.
    “Behind this pretty face lurks a mind like a steel trap,” Trace said. “Tell me about the farm.”
    “Must I? It’s—it’s tacky.”
    “Me or eventually the police,” Trace said. “I’m a better bet. Where is the farm?”
    “Over the bridge about a half-hour. Near a place called Nicasio. It’s just a small place, a little house, a couple of outbuildings. It doesn’t grow anything.”
    “Why’d he buy it?” Trace