Shadow Roll (10 page)

I still had no idea
why
he was killed, but I was sure now that Manny didn’t just drown.  Manny Walker
was
drowned.  And if he was drowned, then the next thing I needed to know was what really happened to McBartle and Duffy.  But this time, I had to go about it with a lot more care, because this time, I wasn’t looking for proof of an accident.  This time I’d be going against what everyone was expecting or hoping or counting on.

Someone, probably connected with the track and probably Marshall Hutsell, was probably watching every move I made, pleased I hadn’t done anything to bother anyone.

Now I had.

I was easy to find.  I lived in a pink hotel.

Walking away from the low end barns, I collided with George Labold.  I knew what I was doing, I was thinking hard about how Walker got his, but I didn’t get what Labold was doing.  Jockey’s agents stuck around the trainers and the owners, working to get their clients up on the best mounts they could wrangle.

Labold didn’t bother with claimers.  Not enough money in it.

“Lost, George?”

I’d confused him.

“No.  I was… I was just… ”

“Following me around?”

That was meant as a joke.  But George didn’t look like he thought it was funny.

“Following you?  What the hell would I follow you for?”

A second later, he was off for the nearest shed row, sprinting on legs as long as Fleeting Fancy’s.

I could of given that more thought.  But all I was thinking about was three dead jockeys, a police department already calling them accidents, me being maybe no more than another Carroll Goose, a scared jock in a crummy room in a crummy part of town, and a woman called Mrs. Willingford.

Why the hell was I thinking of Mrs. Willingford?

Chapter 19

Working with Lino Morelli, I’d learned some basic facts about choosing the life of a PI.

One: you were on your own.  Unlike Lino with his police force and his politicians, there was no one to back your plays.  There were no central files you could rifle through.  No way to check fingerprints.  No way to look at photos.  Or to trace phone calls.

Two: any ideas you had were yours and yours alone.  If you didn’t have any ideas, you couldn’t hide behind the next cop saying, I agree with him.

Three: whatever you did could get you laughed at or it could get you killed.  Ditto for what you didn’t do.  You getting killed wouldn’t matter much to the cops.  They wouldn’t do anything about it.  To a cop, a PI was someone who got in the way or got themselves dead.

Four: cops had authority.  PIs didn’t.  No authority meant you had to be a smooth mover and a fast talker.

I could’ve gone on like this, but I needed to be getting on with stuff like: what the hell should I do next?  If the killer owned a horse or trained a horse or did pretty much anything with a horse, I wasn’t going to find him (or her) by asking if anyone’d done what I’d done.  In other words, did anyone borrow a horse on the morning in question?  Besides, at a track, the horse might not need borrowing—a simple taking of your own horse would do.  Trouble was, racehorses were not ponies.  They weren’t docile.  They weren’t used to being ridden anywhere but on a racetrack.  You couldn’t depend on any one of them to trot along a path in the dark carrying weight they’d never been trained to carry, or even tolerate.  OK, so it wasn’t a Thoroughbred.  It wouldn’t be a Thoroughbred.  But it could of been a stable pony or a companion to a high strung racehorse.

I decided asking around was a poor idea.

Best to move on to poking around in the death of one of the other jockeys.

Babe Duffy choked to death on a ham sandwich.  He’d been alone except for his loyal dog.  Dogs don’t talk.  No one was hiding out writing me penciled notes from cheap rooming houses about what he knew about Duffy.  I’d leave Duffy and his dog for last.

That left Matthew Mark McBartle.  Another kid who got up in the middle of the night, not a swimmer but a driver.

McBartle didn’t bunk at the track.  He was much too successful for that.  Or much too profligate.  Or maybe just vain.  He’d taken a room at the most expensive joint in town, the Grand Union Hotel.  That was the one with the parking lot the size of Madison Square.  Or the park near my place over on Staten Island.

I wondered which room was his.  I wondered where he kept his car.  I wondered how he looked to the night clerk when he crossed the lobby at 3:15 in the morning.  Had he said anything?  Did he seem unusual?  I’d heard he was alone.  Was he really?

Only way to find out was to ask.  Even if asking could get me more attention than I was sure I’d already attracted.

Half way across the Grand Union’s parking lot, the same one I’d first crossed escaping the company of Carroll Goose, moving through cars I’d only seen in advertisements, I got a big surprise.  Out of nowhere, just strolling along, I was jumped.  Never suspected it for a second; didn’t even see ‘em coming.  Two guys, one big and one small, both with that look of an inner city boxing ring about ‘em: bent noses, cauliflower ears, distorted hands, the sneer that came with a complete lack of brains.  I didn’t know what Bogie would of done, but what I did was protect myself the best I could.  I had a gun, but that was back at my pink hotel.

I was never one for fighting.  Or shooting people.  I usually got out of any fix I was in by running or riding—or talking—as fast as I could.

Not this time.  This time I barely got out a yelp before I was lying curled up on the ground.  There was blood but no missing teeth.  That was good.  Dentists didn’t come cheap.  I could barely see, barely move, barely hear.  I’d been beaten up before, but that was just kid stuff back at the old school.  This was bad.  It hurt.  It scared me.  I was ashamed.  My ears were roaring but I caught what the smaller one said, aiming a kick at my kidneys.  “Boss says you come near his wife again and you’ll get more’n this.  S’long, sucker.”

Quiet settled over me like dirt over a coffin.

All alone with a terrific view of a brand new Goodyear tire, every bit of me hurting, a mouth full of blood—I used the time to ponder.  Pondering suited a face full of parking lot cement.  Who else was I supposed to think “the boss” was if it wasn’t Joker Willingford?  I didn’t buy it.  A man as old and as rich as Joker was, an old man married to a woman like Mrs. Lois Willingford, knew what he had.  He had a showpiece.  He wouldn’t care what she got up to as long as it didn’t cost him too much and as long as it didn’t embarrass him more than just getting old all by itself was embarrassing.  Maybe I’d just gotten beaten up for not taking a tour of a cabin by a lake with Mrs. Willingford.  Maybe that’s how she worked.  Could be she didn’t like men, period.  That made me ponder what she might think of boys who snubbed her, or young kids, or up and coming jockeys.

Or—the whole Willingford involvement was a ruse to divert me from the real killer.

Flat out on asphalt, I stared at the tire some more.  Jesus, look at those whitewalls.  Nifty.  But nah.  What killer would hire two goons to kick the crap out of me so one could make a crack about “the boss”?

I said I played chess, a tedious game of anticipating an opponent’s move as far in advance as possible.  This would be one hell of a stupid move; one that would make the killer vulnerable to two professional morons.

That left only three other possibilities.  The goons had made a mistake; they beat up the wrong mark.  Or, the guys running rackets at the track would like me to go home now.  Or, the guys who’d hired me to prove Saratoga Springs was the site of three accidents, not three murders, weren’t pleased at how my work was going.  In their own way, they were telling me to stop working.  So—they spent more money on goons?  Why not just fire me?

Which rich goofball would be that crude and that stupid?  Easy.  Marshall Hutsell, rich goofball.  Hutsell hired the muscle.

No need to work out how Hustsell knew what I was up to.  A vision of George Labold idled into my mind.  If George was their snoop hired to snoop on their hired snoop, it made me sad.  To see a good agent fall so far.

If it was George.

I couldn’t lie here admiring my tire forever.  I had to drag myself up, brush myself down, wince with pain—a kidney punch really hurt, deep down hurt—spit blood until I was sure when I smiled I wouldn’t frighten the horses.

I did think I’d smile again.  But I didn’t know when.

The contents of the bar of the Grand Union Hotel called to me.

I had a look at my shoes, my pants, my jacket.  If I could get through one of its grand doors without making a scene, I was sure to find a Gentleman’s toilet and could get all gorgeous again.

Chapter 20

The gents at the Grand Union wasn’t kidding.  It was grand.  A bunch of big mirrors in big frames, fancy washbasins and gold fixtures—even a row of marbled urinals.  It had Louis the whatever chairs scattered about and real palms in real pots which someone really watered.  It had brass spittoons and free cigarettes in a big black lacquer box and free cigars in a bigger red lacquer box.  There were gold dragons on the boxes and a huge golden horse made of what looked like real gold racing across one maroon colored wall.  It had an aging black man with his own lacquered cubicle who was there just to shine your shoes if they needed it.  Mine needed it.

The gentleman’s attendant’s name was Thomas Clay Jefferson.  He lived up to every inch of it.  If there was a single soul cluttering up a single inch of the Grand Union who could truly be said to look like a gentleman, that soul was Thomas Clay Jefferson.  He had a lot of grey in his short kinky hair and his hands would of looked good on Nat King Cole.  I didn’t know about the voice.  Not many, if any, could touch Cole’s voice.  He wasn’t pretty.  His left eye was what they called a lazy eye—sometimes it looked where the right eye was looking and sometimes it didn’t—but just the same, looking at him made me feel good.  I told him to call me Sam.  He said he’d call me sir but I could call him Clay.  I told him I was a PI.  I told him I was looking into the deaths of Saratoga’s three jockeys.  And then, while he made me look better than I have ever looked, I found myself telling him my entire life story right up to the moment I walked into his gentleman’s lounge.

I never found a better listener.  If I could of voted for him for President of these United States, I would of.

That’ll be the day.

 “They didn’t touch your face much, sir,” he said, gently removing tar from my right hand.

“Not much you can do to a face like mine, Clay.  So why the blood in my mouth?”

“You have a fine face.  Reminds me of Robert Mitchum.  Interior bleeding, sir.  You might want to see a doctor.”

“And then again, I might not.  Never had a good feeling about doctors.”

His right eye smiling directly into mine, his left doing whatever it wanted to, Clay grinned.

I said, “Not Humphrey Bogart?  And before you can say it, I know Bogie’s not a doctor.”

I almost got a laugh.

“No, sorry, sir.  Definitely Robert Mitchum.”

I was going to have to go see a Robert Mitchum film.  After this job, I could probably afford the two bits for a movie ticket.  If I lived through it.  The job, not the movie.

There are some ways in which it pays to be beaten up.  Whoever the thugs worked for, they were the cause of my introduction to Thomas Clay Jefferson.  That alone was worth it.  Clay not only listened, he talked.  Whenever the classy gents was emptied out of those who might loosely be considered gents, he told me what I would never hear anywhere else.  For one thing, the coroner was the brother of his wife’s second best friend.  This added up to a lot of people in Saratoga Springs, not rich or influential, not even connected to the horse racing industry, who knew Babe Duffy did not choke to death on his ham sandwich, not without help.  The coroner’d told his sister—Clay’s wife’s second best friend—who’d told a bunch of people, including Clay’s wife, that he had his doubts about Babe choking.  Babe Duffy could of done no more than choke, true, but he could also of had more than half a sandwich shoved down his throat and held there until he suffocated.  It was possible.  There were marks on his jaw bearing this out.  The biggest thing Clay told me the coroner said: “You know what the mayor said to me privately?  He said if you’d just write down ‘accidental death,’ it would go a long way towards helping you keep your job.”

The season paid the bills in Saratoga Springs.  No one wanted the season spoiled.

Clay was proud to report that the brother of his wife’s friend did not take this lying down.  Not as the coroner, but as a private citizen, he was saying to those he trusted (no fool, that guy): “If I ever get a chance to get up in court and answer under oath, me being the official coroner with my reputation on the line, I’d state clear as a bell that it
is
possible Babe Duffy stuffed an entire ham sandwich into his mouth and tried to swallow it whole.  But I’ll also ask: is this feasible?  Who would do something like that?  I’d say if it
was
suicide, it was the weirdest damn suicide I’ve ever heard of.  I’d also say that if it was murder, it was also goddamn strange.  I’ve never heard of death by sandwich of any kind.  Choking on a wad of gum, now that’s happened.  Choking on most anything, that’s happened too.  But who would try and cram that much food in their mouth all at once?  A person wouldn’t die, his own bodily reflexes would hack the damn thing right back out.  Same goes if it was an accident.  Basically I’d say it’s unprecedented.  And on top of that, suicide or murder or accident, that dog that he had, the one that can’t bark—a basangi? a besoobi?—didn’t take it lightly.  I was there.  I saw it.  All around the body near the mineral spring, his paw prints were everywhere.  And some seemed to show the dog being shoved backwards.  I’d tell the inquest those paw prints were cleaned up fast.  Right in front of me.  So what I’d swear to, on oath, is I only wrote ‘death by accident’ to keep my job.  But if I could have, I would have written ‘death by circumstances unknown.’  And that’s what I’d say if asked.”