Read And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2) for Free Online

called the police. And when they got there, he was dead. You can’t tell with head injuries, she said. People do nutty things. Anyway, here’s some more photos.”
    He slid a stack of eight-by-tens across the desk. They showed the inside of the countess’s living room with the stone panel on the fireplace hinged outward, exposing the safe door. A cocktail table was overturned. A large Fiberglas pot on the left side of the fireplace had been knocked over and a six-foot-tall treelet was lying on the floor, dirt from its roots strewn about the floor. There were photos of the open sliding doors that led to the patio.
    “No prints, I guess,” Trace said.
    “None.”
    “What was on Jarvis’ body?” Trace asked.
    Rosado looked through more papers. “I’m not allowed to let you look at official reports, you know.”
    “I know that. But if you read them to me, it saves me the trouble of sneaking back here at night and stealing them.”
    “Yeah, here we are. He had his wallet, twelve dollars in cash, a driver’s license, a photo of him and the countess, and an American Express card. That’s all.”
    “Anything in his pockets?”
    “Just his house keys and the keys to the car he rented. About eighty cents in change.”
    “Good,” Trace said.
    “Why good?”
    “Where’s his passport?”
    “His passport, his passport.” Rosado shuffled through more papers. “No passport.”
    “How’d he get back into the country?”
    “Damned if I know. Can’t get in without a passport, can you?”
    “No. You in charge of this case, Danny?”
    “Well, we’ve pretty well deep-sixed it. You know how it is. If you don’t solve it in two days, you don’t solve it at all. But technically I guess I’m still in charge. And I’ve got some guys out on the street, watching for the jewelry, but nothing yet.”
    “Okay, I’m going to nose around some, maybe see the countess today. Anything I get, I’ll let you know.”
    “Okay,” Rosado said agreeably. “And if anything comes up on this end, I’ll tell you. Together, maybe we can beat that pimp out of his fee.”
    “A worthwhile ambition,” Trace said.
    “And Bjoerling was still a better tenor than Caruso,” Rosado said.
    “He wasn’t even a better tenor than Mario Lanza,” Trace said. “And, hell, everybody was a better tenor than Mario Lanza. Liberace’s a better tenor than Mario Lanza.”
    “Prettier too,” Rosado said. Dinner soon?’
    “After this week. Chico’s doing some convention work for my insurance company. When we finally get all those lunatics out of town.”
    “Okay.”
    “But I’ll be talking to you before then,” Trace said.

5
     
    “Son, if I see one more nickel slot machine, I’m going to cut my wrists. And trapeze acts at Circus Circus. If I knew your mother had a trapeze fixation, I never would have married her. I’ve got a mind to saw through some of those ropes.”
    “I told you to keep her away from that place,” Trace said. “Where is she anyway?”
    “Ladies’ room. I think they give away free packs of Kleenex. This is the third time for her in an hour.”
    “Maybe all the excitement under the big top has unsettled her kidneys,” Trace said.
    The two men were seated at an otherwise-empty large table in the back of the main banquet room in the Araby Hotel. The tables on either side of them were empty also, but there was a high drone of voices in the room from five hundred other lunchers who sat in tables of ten, in front of a long head table, elevated three feet above the main floor. Robert Swenson sat in the middle of the head table, flanked on one side by Walter Marks and on the other by Chico.
    She saw Trace and waved. He made a circle of thumb and index finger and gave her the okay sign.
    Trace’s mother returned to the table. Without greeting her son, she said to her husband, “That woman didn’t give us much of a table, did she?”
    “Hilda,” her husband said, “that woman’s name is Chico. By the way, this is