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

the bar.
    What it had to do with was pride. Trace might be the most reluctant detective who ever lived, but right now he was a detective and this was his case, and if anybody was going to solve it, it would be him. Not R. J. Grundge or Sherlock Holmes or Groucho or even Dan Rosado. Him. Devlin Tracy. Nobody else. Case closed.
    He was musing about this when a young girl planted herself in front of him on the sidewalk. She wore a short white skirt and sweater and looked like a high-school cheerleader.
    “Mister, excuse me,” she said. “I need change of a twenty.”
    Trace looked around. Sure enough, about eight feet away, casually lighting a cigarette, was a young man, about eighteen, trying very hard not to watch them.
    “Sure thing, Sweetie Pie,” Trace said. “Anything for a pretty little girl like you.”
    He pulled some bills out of his pocket and found two tens. The girl started to hand him the twenty and he put forth the two tens when the youth with the cigarette made his move, running forward, ready to clip all forty dollars from their hands and race off down the street.
    He was too slow. Trace swallowed up the youth’s hand in his and squeezed. Hard.
    “What are two nice children like you doing, trying to run a stupid stunt like this?” Trace said.
    The girl started to back away. “I don’t know him,” she told Trace. “I never saw him before.”
    “Sure. And everybody who believes in fairies should clap.”
    The young man was squirming, trying to pull his hand free from Trace’s.
    “Sonny,” Trace said, “spend some time in the minors before you try to make it in the bigs.” He released the youth’s hand.
    The youth backed off about ten feet and snarled, “Prick.”
    “That just cost you twenty dollars,” Trace said. He pocketed his own bills and the girl’s twenty and walked up the drive toward the Araby.
    He was feeling good. Let Sherlock Holmes come to town. He might find out pretty quickly that Las Vegas had very little in common with foggy streets in London Town.
     
     
    The Garrison Fidelity hospitality suite spread out over three connecting rooms on one of the upstairs floors of the hotel. The bar was situated in the center of the three rooms, manned by a uniformed bartender whom Trace recognized because he worked generally in the casino lounge bar downstairs.
    “Hi, Trace. Usual?”
    “Just Perrier, Richie. I’m tapering off. Seen Chico?”
    “Wandering off in that direction with some greasegun in hot pursuit,” Richie said.
    “Thanks.” Trace took his drink, sipped it, hated it, and tipped Richie his twenty dollars of stolen money. He stood by the bar and looked to see who was in the room. He didn’t recognize anyone. They were mostly men with a sprinkling of women who had the happy part-of-it look of convention wives. The insurance men traveling alone would be in the other two rooms, trying to engage whatever passable-looking woman they could find in conversation.
    Trace let the conversation in the room sort of wash over him and in thirty seconds he had heard the phrase “sales quota” four times and decided to leave. He nodded to Richie, then wandered off in Chico’s direction.
    Compared to the bar room, the side room was almost empty. He saw Chico in a corner. Paolo Ferrara was leaning his arm against the wall on one side of her. His body blocked her escape on the other side. She was smiling, but Trace knew the smile well. It was the kind of tolerant mouth-wrinkle she gave to high-spending but personally obnoxious gamblers at her blackjack table downstairs. Polite enough so no one could complain; cold enough so no one could think they were going to win the dealer. Nobody did that. Not unless Chico wanted them to.
    Ferrara was being very continental. He had enough gold chains around his neck to get a sixteen-wheeler up Pikes Peak in a blizzard. He was flashing a lot of white teeth, in a very tan face, and when he glanced over and saw Trace, he didn’t even acknowledge