When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) Read Free Page A

with you, and listen to music and try to get you filled with passion for me so I can cop your nookie later. I quit drinking for you. I haven’t had a drink of vodka since…”
    “Yesterday,” she supplied.
    “Well, that was a mistake,” he said. “It was forced on me. I hardly ever have a drink anymore. That’s just to please you. I can’t please you and Pop too. It’s just too much obligation.”
    “Then don’t be a detective,” she said. “It’s a license, but that’s all. You already are kind of a detective for the insurance company. Do you need anything more than that?”
    “No. That’s the point. I take a case every so often. I save them a lot of money and they pay me a lot of money. I don’t have to work any more than that. I like leisure. I don’t like it as much as I used to since you made me stop drinking, but I still like leisure better than work.”
    “Then do that,” she said. “Be leisurely. Work when you feel like it or when you need the money. Tell Sarge no.”
    “I don’t want to hurt his feelings,” Trace said. “He didn’t say, but maybe the only way he could con my mother into letting him out of the house was telling her that I was going to get involved in this agency with him.”
    “Find out.”
    “I will when I go to New York.”
    “When we go,” she said.
    “Yes,” Trace agreed. “That’s what I’ll do.” He lighted a cigarette and took a long drag. “You know, everybody’s always talking about the responsibilities of being a parent. But children have responsibilities to their parents too. Maybe even bigger ones. Parents end their responsibility when you get to be eighteen or twenty-one or something, but after that, all the responsibility is on the kids. And it can last for years. It’s the nature of the parent-child responsibility.”
    “What insipid shit,” she said. “Why are you talking that crap?”
    “You think it’s crap?”
    “Most definitely.”
    “See? I was trying to be a deep thinker. It doesn’t work.”
    She took his hand and put it on her breast. He could feel her nipple, hard and puckered, through the thin eggshell-colored silk of her blouse.
    “Think about this for a while,” she said.
    “Will it make me deep?” he asked.
    “Very deep.”
    “I hope so,” he said.
    “If it doesn’t, I will,” Chico said.

3
     
    In their dark bedroom, Trace smoked a cigarette and let lazy plumes of smoke drift upward toward the ceiling. He thought that cigarettes had no taste in the dark. You had to see the smoke to taste the flavor. Maybe someone, he thought, should invent a cigarette for people who liked to smoke in bed in the dark. He thought about this for a while and decided that, for safety reasons, it would probably not have much market potential. He thought about coupling the sale of those new cigarettes with a fire extinguisher for when the bed, inevitably, caught on fire.
    He finally rejected the idea. That was all right, he thought. He had a lot of good ideas.
    Chico said softly from alongside him, “I’ve got a deal for you.”
    “I’m listening.”
    “You still drink too much,” she said.
    “I’ve virtually stopped.”
    “You’ve virtually stopped drinking when I’m looking. So instead of drinking a fifth of vodka a day, you’re drinking a gallon of wine and I don’t know how much vodka.”
    “Don’t forget the Polish beer. It may be my new favorite drink,” he said.
    “You drink too much and you smoke too much,” she said. “You should exercise. You’re forty years old and you look all right, but your heart and lungs have to be ready to give out.”
    “Does this conversation ever assume a cheerful direction?” Trace asked. “Or do we start taking bets on how many days I’ve got left?”
    “You don’t have to lift weights,” she said. “But a little running wouldn’t hurt. A little calisthenics. Anything to get your heart pumping and your blood flowing.”
    “That’s why I have sex,” he said. “If it