Shadow Roll (25 page)

I tried but I couldn’t reach for it.  I knew if I tried, I couldn’t read it.

“Read it to me.”

Clay was standing behind her.  “You want me to leave, Mr. Russo?”

“No.  I want us all to hear what he has to say.”

Mrs. Willingford said, “The envelope says
For Sam Russo
.”  And so saying, she slit it open with one of those long lethal nails she had.  Then she began reading.

“Dear Sam,

I have to tell somebody why I did what I did.  I have to tell someone I’m not a monster.  And who better than you who saw what happened in the Philippines?

It was just chance, you see.  Chance that brought those three jockeys to Saratoga at the same time and chance that I got the job for the season.  Usually, one is riding at a track I’m at, but never all three.  I saw it as a sign.  I still do.

You know what I feel about people, Sam, and you know what I feel about horses.  Those three, no matter how much trainers thought of them or how much the public thought they were great kids, they were cruel.  They whipped whatever they rode until it bled.  I know.  I fixed up a lot of bad cuts.  They ruined their mouths.  I’d watch them race a two year old and ruin it for life.  But they’d win so often, you see, everyone overlooked what they did.  I never overlooked it.  I watched and I hated them.  I knew if I could, one day I’d make them pay.  And then this chance came along, maybe the only one I’d ever get.  So I took it.  And maybe that makes me a monster, playing God like that.  But I took it because I had to.

I’d make each one look like an accident.  And if that didn’t work, who would think of me?  I had nothing to gain.  Except to rid the racing world of brutes like those kids, the kind who’d go on for years hurting horses.

Funny thing it should be a dog that was my undoing, a dog and an old friend.  You are my friend, Sam.  And I’m yours.  I don’t know what I was thinking when I tried for you.  Nature kicking in I suppose.

Anyway, I’m sorry for that.

And I’m more sorry than I can ever say for the dog.  The dog is why I’m writing this.  The dog is why I’m finished.

If you still want to see me, you’ll find me at the lake I drowned Manny in.  You’ll have to dredge a bit.  I put a lot of stones in my pockets.

Hank Hanson, veterinarian.”

Mrs. Willingford put the letter down and looked at me.  Clay was right beside her, doing the same thing.  What could I say to them?  I understood every word he’d written.  I thought of Magpie dying with perfect grace just after she’d taken me over an embankment of Japs, machine guns blazing.  I thought of some of the guys joking as they ate their own horses.  I thought of all those photos on Hank’s bedroom wall.

OK, so three murdered kids were going on the books as accidents unless I handed over Hank Hanson’s letter.  Something in me balked at the idea.  Hank paid for what he’d done and what he’d done I’d come real close to doing too as I watched guys kill the horses who’d carried them through fire and back.

The hell with it.

I did get close to a sleek-looking woman and a few rounds of smart and sassy backtalk.

I loved Hank Hanson.  After all, he’d saved my dog’s life.

“Burn the letter, Mrs. Willingford.”

“My thoughts exactly, Mr. Russo.”

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Good Dog, Bad Dog

1

It was seven p.m. on a cold evening in early November and I was still in my striped pajamas chain smoking Luckies.  Where I was lying was on the old Murphy bed reading Gypsy Rose Lee’s
The G-String Murders
.  Not bad writing for an ex-stripper.  Maybe I should write a book?  It beat taking your clothes off for a pack of drooling mugs or getting seriously plugged three times by one of the funniest, most inventive, most adventuresome kids I once called “friend” back in the days of our old alma mater: the Staten Island Home for Children, aka the Staten Island Lock Up for Lost Little Kiddies.

Jane was lying up against my side, her knife wounds healing as well as my bullet holes, but she’d be badly scarred for life.  I could hide mine but Jane’s would always look like she’d tripped over the railing of the Central Park Zoo’s croc exhibit.

Getting shot takes something out of you.  I still had no idea if whatever that was had any intention of coming back.

My manly chest looked like a used target.  There were three fresh scars from three fresh bullets neatly spaced round where I assumed my heart was.  By some strange miracle they’d all missed the bulls-eye.

My brain still worked and my lungs still wheezed—that last part probably came from too many smokes and from running around the Philippine island of Luzon breathing the fumes of war.  My legs and arms moved when I wanted them too.  Everything worked, though I suppose I could say sleeping was a problem—I was doing maybe too much of it.

I could still talk.  Not that I’d done much talking since it happened.  Sleeping yes, talking no.

OK, so I was better off than a ton of other guys I’d known coming through an entire world war.  Ironic that back then when all those bullets were aimed my way, they missed.  Close to four years worth of ‘em and not even a hole in my hat.  And then, when the world finally settles down to lick its wounds and rebuild itself as an exact copy of pretty much what it was before the war, or maybe worse now we had the A-bomb, what happens to Sam Russo, Private Dick?  He takes three rather personal hits from a gun in the hand of one of his oldest friends.

I’d had a lot of time to think things over.  Truth was, all I’d done was survive my first real murder case as Sam Russo, Private Eye.  I got paid to go through a kind of hellish paradise.

The paradise part was being in Saratoga Springs for the racing season.  Getting to know the interesting Mrs. Willingford in a number of interesting ways wasn’t too bad either.

Hell was all the rest of it.

I’d come away from Saratoga with two new and important ideas.  The first was a life lesson: I liked my enemies better than my friends.  It boiled down to this.  Enemies were easy.  You knew where you stood with ‘em.  In a nutshell, enemies meant you no good.

But friends?  Friends were people you trusted, right?  Friends were people you could count on.  So was a friend some guy I shared the horrors of the Staten Island Home for Children with?  Or dodged Jap artillery with?  Or hung around race tracks and drank with?  Who knew?  I didn’t, not any more.  A friend tries to kill you—and almost succeeds—a person can lose sight of what friendship means.  A person can wind up saying to hell with friends.

Which brought me to the second idea I’d lugged back from Saratoga’s racetrack.  There remained one person left in the world I knew for sure was a “friend” and that person was a dog named Jane.

Jane came with the case I’d survived.  The first guy she’d loved, an up-and-coming jockey named Babe Duffy, had got himself murdered up in Saratoga Springs—and when he did, no one wanted his dog.  All those no ones included me.  Duffy’s dog wasn’t one of those cute little mutts women like to lug around and coo to.  And she wasn’t one of those big useful brutes a lug thinks he looks manly with.  Duffy’s dog was a Basenji, some sort of African dog.  She was also an acute pain in the butt.

Except for three things, name what people didn’t like about dogs and that was Jane, the African queen.

The three things were she didn’t bark, she didn’t slobber, and even when soaking wet, she didn’t smell like a dog.

She was mine now, or I was hers.  Whichever, I think she was happy with the arrangement.  It took a little doing, but I knew I was.

Two long months had dragged themselves by since the end of the Saratoga Spring’s horse racing season and with it the job I’d been hired to do—solve the killings of not one, but three young jockeys.  Those two long months were spent in Staten Island’s impressive downtown Stapleton, still in the same one room where Victory Boulevard bumped into Bay Street lying around on the same Murphy bed.

I’d solved the case but only four people knew it.  One was me.  One was the killer himself, now also as dead as his three victims, and by the same hand: his own.  One was Thomas Clay Jefferson, the walleyed colored guy who shined shoes in a rich white man’s hotel called the Grand Union.  And the last was Mrs. Willingford.

I guess you could say Jane knew it too.  It was Jane who fingered the jockey killer because Jane was there for the murder of one of the three jocks, namely Babe Duffy.  So I got shot by one killer and Jane got knifed by another.

Two killers.  One case.  This all made sense if you’d been there.

Mrs. Willingford phoned from time to time, but as she wasn’t the type to set hoof on the isolated Isle of Staten I didn’t expect to see her soon.  For one thing, there was no racetrack or horse breeding farms.  There should of been.  We had the room.  I’d of really liked to see Mrs. Willingford.  Better, I’d of liked to touch Mrs. Willingford, gaze into those hard blue eyes.  But the moment she got a load of what I called “home,” all I’d get out of it was the last of a trailing silk scarf, the brim of a hat big enough for the guy carrying the world on his back at Rockefeller Center, a whiff of
L’air du Temps
, and that would be that.

I did see her doctor.  She’d made the poor sap live in a local hotel so he could visit me daily, then weekly—now we were down to once a month and he was happily back where he belonged: in some snug three story brownstone in Brooklyn Heights tending to a rich kid’s sniffles.

Jane saw Mrs. W’s personal vet.  The vet lasted longer than my doctor.  Probably because the vet liked Jane and my guy could do just fine without me.

Once Thomas Clay Jefferson called to see how I was doing.  I said I was doing fine.  Clay said he was doing fine.  Still had the same job, though things were a mite slower without the races in town.  He said that was fine by him.  I said I was glad it was fine by him.  He said he expected me for the 1949 running of the Travers Stakes.  I said I’d be there.

Twice I’d gone to the movies over at the Paramount on Bay and both times my snub nosed Colt .38 Detective Special saw the picture with me.  Another effect of getting shot.  I might stop carrying and I might not.  Anyway, the first time was to see
Night Has a Thousand Eyes
.  I’d read the book, which was terrific, so even having to leave Jane alone—Jane was a one man dog; she didn’t approve of me doing something without her—the movie was a must-see considering Edward G. Robinson was in it.  I wasn’t all that impressed.  More often than not, the book was better.  This was one of those oftens.  The second time I sat through
The Snake Pit
, sweating out every minute of it.  Three mornings in a row now, I’d woken up thinking about the damn thing.  But who could resist a title like that?  Trouble was, it stirred up a lot of feelings I didn’t know I had—like the fear of going nuts.

And that was my life these days.  No visitors.  No hanging around in bars or coffee shops.  No going to the track down in Monmouth or the tracks over in Queens.  No nothing.

But all this was fine by me.  Except for Jane, I’d sworn off friends.

Oh crap.  Now who was knocking at my door?