Once a Mutt (Trace 5) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Paddington story.
    The report said that the plane did take off as reported from the lake in West Hampstead, New Hampshire, where the Paddingtons lived, neighbors having heard the motors revving up.
    The Paddington plane was on its way to Newfoundland, a distance of slightly more than five hundred miles, where Paddington was planning to take part in a protest against the slaughter of the harp seal. The plane, a twin-engine Cessna seaplane, never landed, and no wreckage was ever spotted.
    At the time of the flight, however, there was a heavy storm in the Atlantic and the normal path of the plane would have taken it right through that storm.
    “There is no indication,” the report said, “of there having been any trouble between Mr. and Mrs. Paddington, and it is the conclusion of this office that Mrs. Paddington’s claim is valid.”
    That was the entire report, and Trace felt good thinking about Walter Marks spending good money for detectives who wound up telling him to pay up.
    He celebrated by topping his glass with more warm vodka.
    Idly, he looked through the clippings at the reproduced photos of the Paddingtons. Helmsley Paddington had been a tall, thin man who looked very tweedy in the photographs, even in those where he was wearing jeans and an old army shirt and wrestling with some of his dogs. He had an open, uncomplicated face with thinning mud-colored hair.
    Nadine Paddington stood next to him in most of the photos, and it seemed to Trace as if she were trying consciously not to smile. She was a pleasant-looking, regular-featured woman with ashy blond hair, and wide-set intelligent eyes.
    But why didn’t she smile?
    Another picture showed why. Mrs. Paddington had a mouthful of teeth that splayed out at a forty-five-degree angle from the vertical. With teeth like that, he wouldn’t have smiled either.
    He tossed all the newspaper clippings onto a pile with the other papers, then carried his glass to the bed and lay down to smoke. The ashtray was already filled and he mumbled to himself about motel ashtrays always being designed for nonsmokers or for people who smoked one cigarette every six days. He hated that.
    Actually, he hated everything right at the moment, most of all being in Westport, having to look into the Paddington case when the guy was dead. All he was doing here was trying to figure out how to steal ten thousand dollars from Garrison Fidelity for a fee so he could pay for the restaurant’s repairs.
    It was all Chico’s fault.
    If she would have parted with some of her ill-gotten gains, he wouldn’t have had to do this. He could just have stayed in Las Vegas, waiting for the restaurant profits to come rolling in. His friend Eddie expected the restaurant and bar to gross three million dollars the first year, with a half-million of that as profit. That meant that Trace, as a 20-percent owner, would make a hundred thousand dollars as his share.
    And against that, he’d be able to write off his taxes the depreciation of the building and the purchase of new equipment and a lot of other stuff, and why didn’t Chico understand that he was on his way to Easy Street?
    No, she was tight, so tight she squeaked. And she had no vision. That was what was wrong with Michiko Mangini. She had no vision, no way to see the big picture.
    She lived in a world of petty mortals. She would never understand his dreams. She would never fly. She would always walk. Sometimes she might walk fast, but it would still be walking.
    He thought he smelled something burning. He saw that the ashtray, filled with butts, was smoldering. He stubbed out the cigarette he was holding, then tried to use the butt to put out the other burning cigarettes. But they were slipperier than eels, and all he managed to do was push them out of the low-sided flat ashtray onto the bed. He burned his fingers trying to pick them up. Finally, he got them all together and took the ashtray inside the bathroom and flushed its contents down the