Murder at the Racetrack (26 page)

But, though the Fox and his Cub could not but have heard, they were so interested in what they themselves were discussing
that Mrs. Damworthy might as well have been whispering.

“But weren’t it hard to get in there?” the Cub was asking.

“Hard? Nah. Piece o’ cake. Screwdriver at the edge o’ that rotten old door, an’ Bob’s yer Uncle.”

“An’ after that all you ’ad to do was move the hands o’ that clock there on for five or six minutes. And now we’re all set.”

“All set to make damn fools of ourselves it’d be, you berk. The hands on for five minutes? They had ter go back five minutes.
Back. Didn’t they?”

“Oh. Oh yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Back. Back. But what if the old geezer noticed it when he come in this lunchtime?”

“Notice? Old idiot like that wouldn’t notice if that big old clock of his fell off the wall right on his daft head.”

•    •    •

Plenty there for the old ladies to discuss, however little they knew what the Fox and his Cub had been talking about.

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Finders told Lady Bentt, who had squeezed down beside her today, “the young man said he moved back the minute
hand of some clock somewhere. One of the boys at school played that trick once, and we all were let out ten minutes before
we should have been. Yes, and I remember now. It was Peter Parker, the little monkey.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Mrs. Alford trumpeted. “It was that Stanley Sillitoe, and wasn’t he pleased with himself. Till you told Teacher,
Lily Smith.”

“I never. I never,” Lily Emery (who had) exclaimed indignantly.

“No, it wasn’t Stanley,” Mrs. Beastock joined in. “I can see him now, climbing up on a desk to do it. It was Jack Parsons.
Always in trouble he was.”

“I never liked that Jack Parsons,” Mrs. Finders announced. “Anything he said to me was dirty. And that’s the truth.”

“Oh no,” Mrs. Capper put in, almost indignantly, “Jack Parsons was the nicest boy in the school, he really was.”

“Of course, I was never at the school in the village,” Lady Bentt piped in now, perhaps feeling that the subject should be
changed. “But I know all about tricks like that, even the girls at the school where I was used to play them.”

Her intervention did indeed change the subject. All six of the other ladies on the benches were avidly interested in Lady
Bentt’s former life.

•    •    •

So the Fox and the Cub had been standing directly behind the benches for some minutes before Mrs. Alford, happening to turn
round to ease her ample form, spotted the pair of them. She promptly issued a huge splashy whisper.

“It’s them. I hope they aren’t listening to what we’re saying.”

It was a good thing, however, that the two Teddy Boys were so engrossed in the conversation they had been having that for
them the old ladies on the benches might not have existed. Not even, when after Mrs. Alford’s sploshed-out warning there had
come an abrupt end to the chattering, did the sudden silence attract their attention.

“Yeah, but…” the Cub was going on, voice prickly with anxiety.

“But what? You know, pal, you really aggravate me sometimes.”

“But— But, well, how can we be sure your brother’s waiting on the other side of the street from the place in Kemp Town?”

“How can we? How can we? How d’you think we can? Ain’t the whole point of it all that there’s a phone box just beside ’im?”

“Oh yeah. Never thought about that. But all the same he might of gone for a cuppa or something.”

“Then why don’t you bloody go an’ ring him up an’ ask ’im?”

“Ring up the phone box?”

“That’s right, stupid, the phone box. They got a phone in them, ain’t they? With a phone number? What you think we took down
the number o’ that one for? Why d’you think you got a handful o’ sixpences in your pocket? Go on, scram.”

The Cub walked hurriedly away.

Seven pairs of aged female eyes watched him go.

“Did I hear—I’m getting a bit deaf, you know—that he’s going to the phone box round the corner behind the church?”

“Which way did he go? I missed seeing.”

“I’m sure it’s nice of him to ring up his friend in Kemp Town, wherever that is.”

“I tell you one thing, that lad’s up to no good. I know about Kemp Town. It’s the nastiest place in Brighton. The late Mr.
Damworthy told me that once.”

“And let me say I don’t think much of the way the big one talked to the smaller one. He was rude. Yes, he was.”

“No, I think it was the younger one who was rude to the older one.”

It was just as well perhaps, as the Fox stood there on his own listening out for the jabbering bursts of encouragement coming
occasionally from the walkie-talkie behind the public convenience, that he did not take in any of the exchange of views just
in front of him.

In less than five minutes the Cub returned, face flowing with triumph.

“Yeah, yeah,” he burst out. “He’s there all right. Picked up on the first ring, an’ he’s all ready to nip across to the place.
Soon as we tell ’im.”

“All right, keep yer hair on. Keep yer hair on.”

“Yeah, but…”

“What now, Chris’ sake?”

“Well, what if the old geezer somehow gets to know it’s finished? Before your brother can…”

“’Ow’s he gonna do that, stupid? All he got in that hole of a place of his is the
Pink ’Un,
an’ all that’s got is the lists o’ runners an’ the starting times. He’s not going to know anymore nor that, is he?”

“No. No, ’spose not.”

But then the thin trickle of sound from the direction of the public convenience took on a new, altogether more urgent note.

“Cripes, come on,” Fox yelled.

The two of them pelted off.

However, scarcely ten minutes later they were back.

“But— But—” Cub was asking, in plain puzzlement. “Why didn’t we do it?”

“Berk. You heard him saying the odds. Two-to-one on that winner. What you think we’d have made by that, fifty quid all we
got to put on?”

“Oh. Oh, I see.”

So for most of the long afternoon, while the gossips sat in their long row gossiping, the two Teds kept coming back from their
trysts at the hidden walkie-talkie, each time looking more disconsolate.

But then—it was when the last race of the day was being run—suddenly from the direction of the public convenience the Cub
came belting along fast as he could toward the old ladies’ benches, heading for the phone box just round the corner.

“Silver Blaze, Silver Blaze,” he was repeating and repeating, as if in mortal fear he would forget the name.

And, as he drew level, “thirty-three-to-one, thirty-three-to-one.”

It was at that exact moment that little, shriveled-up old Lady Bentt suddenly leaned forward and shot out the crook-handled
walking-stick that she was never without.

It caught the Cub neatly round the ankle of his right foot, and he fell with a jarring crash flat on to the sun-hardened earth
in front of the startled old dears, the sixpenny pieces from his crammed pocket spilling out in a silver shower far and wide
on the parched ground.

It took him two good sobbing, breath-seeking minutes to recover. Then awkwardly he scrabbled to his feet, took a look at the
corner of the church wall behind them, saw the sixpences and started desperately scraping some of them up, brought out chokingly
once more the words “Silver Blaze” and began a tottering attempt at a run toward the phone box.

“I’m afraid you’ll be too late,” old Lady Bentt, who in her day had gone racing at Goodwood with the best of them, called
out to him in her little piping voice. “And I

think we had better ask the policeman to go and see your friend with that walkie-talkie.” She turned away. “Mrs. Capper, if
you would… ?” Then she had a last word for the Fox’s friend, the Cub. “The man in the betting-shop there in Kemp Town will
be sure the race is well over now, so he can’t take any bets on it, even if his clock is still five minutes slow.”

John Lescroart

I
swear to God, Cal, it was like he was talkin’ to me.”

“The dead guy?”

“The dead guy, who else?”

Cal rolled her eyes, but she was faced away from her husband in the bed, and Arnie didn’t see it. Since he’d been forced to
take early retirement from the police force, she’d been fairly sure she’d recognized a decline that she’d been mostly unwilling
to acknowledge. The possibility that Arnie had even the beginnings of any type of dementia was terrifying in itself, but more
so because her own father had started down that road at the not very ripe age of fifty-six and she’d nursed him solo until
he blessedly passed at sixty-eight.

And now her own husband, also fifty-six, was talking about communicating with the dead. And this after he’d only been off
work a few months, during which there had been a proliferating number of other worrying signs. Depression. Too much drinking.
Insomnia. General lack of interest in life.

227

Or—
be honest
—she told herself. The lack of interest showed itself most clearly around
sex.
They’d been married for thirty-three years and if there had been one constant through the ups and downs of a life together
and raising a family of two boys and two girls, it was their love life. Even right up until last year, just before he got
the word about his pink slip, they were good for two, three, sometimes four times a week. They would privately marvel at the
more and more common admissions of their friends over the years, joking about getting it once a month, where they knew there
was truth in it.

They couldn’t imagine. Once a
month?
How did they live? Kids, fatigue, blah blah blah. What was the matter with them? Cal and Arnie were both appalled—hadn’t
any of them heard of the nooner?

But since Arnie had been retired, they themselves had only gotten together three times so far, and none of them in Cal’s opinion
even up to snuff, much less worth remembering. This from the guy who, when they were first together, considered anything above
forty-five minutes a critical dry spell.

She scarcely allowed the word
impotence
to cross her brain, but it deeply worried her. He wouldn’t talk about it, had flown into a rage when she’d breathed a mention
of Viagra. There wasn’t anything wrong, goddammit, he was just
tired.

Always tired, he told her. Tired and re-tired, get it?

And this living at the racetrack. Arnie, who had never shown the slightest interest in horses or gambling or the attendant
characters who didn’t seem especially savory, now spent at least three afternoons a week at Golden Gate Fields or Bay Meadows
and came home trailing the sour smell of beer. Now her highly decorated San Francisco inspector husband was hanging out, she
imagined, with many of the very lowlifes he used to arrest.

Her inclination was to ignore this latest frightening admission about communing with the dead, but suddenly her own denial
scared her even more. At least he’d started a conversation, something had caught his interest. Cal rolled over, got up on
an elbow. “You’re scaring me, Arnie. Dead guys don’t talk. Please don’t tell me you heard him talk.”

He humphhed. “I said it was ’like.’”

“What was like it? You’ve been a cop for thirty years, I never heard you say anything like that. What was like the dead guy
talking?”

“His brother. Jason.”

“He’s got a brother now? Who is this guy again?” When Arnie had started in on the dead guy talking, she had barely heard,
didn’t want to hear.

“Les Frankel.”

“Okay, I’ve heard the name. I don’t remember he died.”

“Last week. At the track. Les was my age and died of a heart attack. I told you.”

“All right. It’s coming back. I’m listening. Jason the brother, I take it, was at the track, too?”

“No.” Arnie paused. “At the funeral.”

It was Cal’s turn to pause, but just for an instant before she sat up completely, pulling the blankets up around her legs.
She reached behind herself and flicked on the bedside light. “You were at a funeral today?”

“I told you that, too. You weren’t listening. How do you think I got to talking about the dead guy, Les?” He lowered his voice,
not really accusing her of anything directly. He might have been talking to himself. But in a bitter and angry tone.

“Naturally. I don’t have a job anymore, you still do. So what I do isn’t important.”

Suddenly, this was getting to something near the nub of it, and her eyes flashed. “That’s not fair, Arnie.”

“Pretty close, though.”

He got up, threw his own blankets off and, wearing his old man’s red plaid pajamas, yanked his bathrobe off the peg in the
wall and stalked out of the room.

Cal sat there in the dim light for a minute. Could what Arnie was saying be true? Was some of this her doing as well? Maybe,
in fact, she wasn’t taking him seriously enough anymore, the experience she’d had with her own father making her close up
to him. In fact, was she beginning to see his life now and his concerns as not as important as they once were?

Was some part of her giving him the message that she thought that the real work of raising their family was done, and now
he was out to pasture, although not put out to stud, but to wither?

She slipped out of the bed, pulled the afghan around her, and went after him.

Like the rest of the downstairs, the television room was in near total darkness. The outlines of things were only visible
because of the LED glow of the digital clock on the TV. It was 11:42.

Arnie sat in his chair and she heard his breathing and the ice tinkling in his glass. Pulling the afghan around her shoulders,
she settled into the couch across the room.

“I’m sorry. I want to hear,” she said. “What was Jason saying at the funeral?”

“Just a story.” She heard her husband take a pull at his drink. “Nothing.”

“Arn. Come on.”

He sighed deeply. She waited him out. Finally he sighed again and spoke. “Probably nothing. Things didn’t quite fit, or fit
too good. Whatever happened, it didn’t seem to have occurred to Jason, or even to Les, for that matter, that anything might
have been wrong. It’s just my guts.”