And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

there.”
    “Okay. Well, this Spiro is like the gardener and the watchman and whatever, so he was staying there while they were away. Anyway, it’s late and he gets a call from Jarvis, who says to pick him up at the airport. So Spiro drives out there, but no Jarvis. He musta got tired of waiting or something. Spiro hangs around for a couple of hours, but when Jarvis don’t show up, he drives back to the countess’s. When he gets inside, he goes back to the kitchen and makes himself a drink because he wants to sit by the phone for a while ’cause he’s afraid that Jarvis’ll call and chew his ass out and tell him to get to the airport again. But for some reason—maybe he hears a noise or something—he walks around the other side of the house, you know how it’s kind of split into two sections, and there’s the living room and it’s a mess. You know that big fireplace the countess has got at the end of the room?”
    “Right.”
    “Well, her safe was under a stone panel in that fireplace, see? And the panel is open, and the room looks like there was a fight. One of the big plants, some kind of tree or something, is tipped over near the fireplace. So Spiro looks around and then he sees Jarvis’ body. The sliding doors out to the pool are open and Jarvis is laying there and he’s got his head near the goldfish pool—they’ve got freaking goldfish in their yard, would you believe that shit?—and his head is all bloody and he looks dead, so Spiro calls the police and they come.”
    “What’d they find out?” Trace asked.
    “The safe had been opened, but there weren’t any fingerprints on it. Spiro didn’t know what was in it and it was only when the countess came back that the cops find out that she’s missing a million dollars or so in jewels. But there’s no prints. They said that Jarvis got his head bashed in, but Spiro could see that. And that’s what they got and that’s all. Oh, yeah. Jarvis rented a car at the airport. Cops found it parked out on the road near the house. They don’t know why he parked there and neither do I.”
    You find out anything else? What about Jarvis? Trace asked.
    Roberts lit a cigar before answering. Like everything else about him, it was foul-smelling. “Nothing yet. I looked around town for anything on him, but there wasn’t anything. He didn’t gamble and he didn’t bop around with women. He spent all his time out at the plotzo. That’s what the countess calls her place, she kept calling it a plotzo. You know what a plotzo is?”
    “I think she means a palazzo. It’s Italian for palace,” Trace said.
    “Yeah, maybe that’s what she meant,” Roberts said. “But this ain’t no palace, though. It’s just a nice big house with a high wall and a gate, but it ain’t no plotzo.”
    “Nobody you heard of wanted to kill Jarvis? No gambling debts or loan sharks or anything like that?” Trace asked.
    “Nothing I can find out yet. Like I said, he was always out at the plotzo.”
    “All right,” Trace said. “You hear anything on the street about the jewels?”
    “No,” Roberts said. “I should have, too. I let everybody know that I was working on this. Now, if it’s a townie who hit the plotzo, he read the papers. He knows it’s a million dollars the insurance company’s going to have to cough up and he knows if he tries to go on the street, this is a murder rap maybe and nobody’s going to want to mess with him So he should get hold of me and I’ll get him a few dimes on the dollar and he doesn’t have to fence and the insurance company saves a lot and the countess gets her jewels back and everybody’s happy except the cops but fuck them, who cares? But I ain’t heard nothing from nobody. I can’t understand it.”
    “Maybe whoever took them was from out of town,” Trace said.
    “Maybe, but there’s a lot of word out on these now, these jewels. They were pretty special pieces, I guess. There was a diamond terror with a lot of