Nice Fillies Finish Last (4 page)

One of her bare arms slid around his neck and pulled him forward. The kiss she gave him tasted of gin and vermouth, with a faint tang of olives. The couch slipped, as though threatening to come open by itself. Her tongue moved against his. She groped for his hand and put it inside her wrapper. His fingers were cold from the martini glass, and she shivered as they touched her stomach.

He was trying hard to be objective. He knew she was hoping to delay him, and he knew she wasn’t as drunk or as taken with him as she wanted him to believe. He wondered if the questions about the twin double had made her suspicious, if she was trying to pin him down until her husband showed up. Still, he didn’t like to be rude. Against his will, he was responding to the movements of her tongue. His hand was in contact with the bikini. Mike Shayne, he knew, would stand up without ceremony at this point and dump her on the floor, but he had long ago faced the fact that he wasn’t Mike Shayne. She gasped something against his mouth and he felt her hand on his, directing him to the tiny hidden zipper.

And then she pushed away suddenly, her lithe body in rapid fluid motion. Twisting, she was up in an instant, pulling her wrapper together. The belt had come off, and was probably somewhere beneath Rourke. She gave him an urgent frown. The drinks had slowed his reactions, and he was still frozen in a disordered position when he heard the door open. That released him. He came forward in a partial crouch, his face serious, as though he and Mrs. Thorne had been discussing foreign policy or some other important question.

ROURKE LOOKED UP out of the corners of his eyes. The man in the doorway had come in without knocking, and it stood to reason that he was probably Paul Thorne, who had been described to Rourke more than once as being a dangerous, violent, impulsive man. He was wearing a knit shirt, and the biceps the reporter had also been told about were out there in plain sight, bulging from the short sleeves. His neck was a short, solid column, seemingly made of something more unyielding than ordinary flesh. Against the bright sky his features were indistinct. He stepped on into the trailer, which at once became seriously overcrowded, and closed the door. Now his face took shape. He would have been exceptionally handsome if his eyes hadn’t been too small and too close together. There was a mean glint in them that sent a shiver down the back of the reporter’s neck. Thorne looked from his guest on the couch to the empty martini pitcher on the floor, and on to Win, who, in the half second she had been given, had somehow managed to look cool and indifferent, a little bored.

“We were hoping you’d be back early, Paul. Mr. Rourke here is from the
Miami News.
They want to do a feature story on you. Isn’t that great? You’re just in time, he was getting impatient.”

Without saying a word, her husband picked her up by the waist in his huge hands and slammed her against the stainless steel partition separating the living area from the tiny kitchen. Her lips writhed, she was suddenly ugly. She slid into the kitchen, snatched up a butcher knife and whirled.

“Don’t do that again.”

Thorne laughed. He wasn’t as large as he had looked in the doorway, but he moved with the power and grace of a jungle animal. One of his front teeth had been broken and not yet repaired.

“What have you got on underneath?” he demanded.

“Don’t be stupid!” She flicked the robe open and gave him a glimpse of the bikini. “I’ve got my bathing suit on, or doesn’t that prove anything?”

“You didn’t think I’d be back for a couple of hours. You knew I’ve got a busy afternoon. What are you on, about the fourth batch of martinis?”

“I offered him a drink! Why not? What’s wrong with being friendly with a reporter? You don’t need favorable publicity, do you? What was I supposed to do, spit in his eye?”

Rourke had checked his clothing and decided it would do no harm to try to get out without any broken bones. He sat forward, and the couch lurched underneath him.

“Three’s a crowd,” he said with a nervous laugh. “I’ll wait outside. Call me when the argument’s over.”

“This won’t take a minute,” Thorne said without turning his head. He took a step toward his wife and put out his hand. “Handle-end first.”

She made a stabbing motion at his outstretched hand. “Handle-end, hell. Right below the belly button, if you come any closer. Don’t you know how to behave? What kind of story do you want him to write about you anyway?”

“I don’t need any help from the goddamn newspapers! You bitch, let’s have that knife before I—”

“I’m supposed to hang around all day doing housework, is that it?” she cried. “How much housework is there in a twenty-eight-foot trailer? And where have
you
been, may I ask? I don’t suppose you’ve been bouncing around in a motel with anybody, have you? Of course not. She’s too busy helping out in the hospital. The nurses are so overworked, Lady Bountiful has to come in and change the flower water.”

“Shut up, damn you. That’s over and you know it.”

“Do I?” she screamed, dancing forward. “And you never really cared about her, did you? You were just in it for the money, to squeeze a few horses out of her before she got sick of you. You lying bastard. You saw her again last night. Don’t you think I know that perfume? I ought to by now. Those damn little cigars she smokes?”

“I said to shut up.”

“And what if I feel like having some sex in the middle of the day? Tim’s not like you. He’s got a little consideration for the way a person feels.”

Her husband kicked out at her ankles. As she dodged back he feinted at her with one open hand.

“And he wants to know about the twin tonight,” she cried. “And did you use to drive for Domaines. What did you want me to do, turn him loose in the barns?”

He feinted at her again and as the knife came up his other hand came up beneath it. He caught her wrist and with a quick wringing motion shook the knife out of her fingers. She kicked at his groin with one bare foot. He jabbed her almost playfully in the jaw. It was more of a push than a blow, but it dropped her to the floor without a sound.

Rourke, having finally forced the couch to let him go, was on his way to the door. He was fumbling at the knob when Thorne swung around and cuffed him lightly. Rourke stopped trying to open the door.

“I hate like hell to slug a woman,” Thorne said ruefully, “but you don’t know Win. You may think she was fooling with that carving knife.” He shook his head. “She would have stuck it in me if I’d given her the chance. It’s happened before. She punctured one of my lungs. She probably soaked up quite a few martinis, didn’t she?”

Rourke straightened his tie. “We only had a couple. She was telling me about that accident you had. What was the name of the horse? Don J.”

Thorne tossed his head in a way that made Rourke think of a spirited horse. “Don’t remind me. Things were just beginning to break right for me when that happened.”

Rourke motioned at Thorne’s unconscious wife. “We’d better do something about her.”

“Aah,” Thorne said. “It’s a policy of mine—bat them around now and then, it’s the one way to keep them in line. She’ll be OK.”

Reaching out suddenly, he pulled Rourke off balance and sent him spinning into the interior of the trailer. Rourke crouched, watching warily to see what came next.

“I don’t pretend to be any great brain,” Thorne said. “I’m trying to figure something out, and it may take a minute. You’re a reporter, she said. From the
News.”

“I’ve got a press card if you want to see it.” Rourke knew he was sweating, but he didn’t want to show Thorne how nervous he was by wiping his face. “We want to run a piece about what actually happens in the course of a race, how you get the most out of a horse, the things you have to look out for, and so on.”

“What was that about the twin?”

Rourke smiled weakly. “Just talk. It happened to come up.”

The flesh around Thorne’s little eyes contracted and he yelled, “Goddamn it, what do you mean, drinking my gin and necking around with my wife?”

Rourke tried to look surprised and amused. “Was that what you thought when you came in? No, no. You’re barking up the wrong tree. She had a bit too much to drink and she tripped. That’s all in the world that happened.”

Thorne sneered. “I happen to know that kid. Am I supposed to be blind, that I don’t notice the top button on your pants is open? The only thing that surprises me, she didn’t have the radio on.”

He moved toward Rourke, completely filling the space between the furniture. The contest, Rourke could see, was going to be strictly one-sided. Thorne outweighed him by forty pounds, and it had been years since Rourke had had any exercise except pecking at a typewriter.

“If you try to get back at me by putting something lousy in the paper,” Thorne said, “I’ll come after you, and I’ll find you, don’t worry. I can’t let you get away with feeling my wife just because you work on a paper. Win wouldn’t like it and she wouldn’t understand it. We’ll make up, but there’s got to be blood and a couple of teeth on the floor when she conies out of it, or she’ll think I don’t give a goddamn.”

His eyes narrowed, and all at once Rourke realized that he was only using his wife as the pretext. Rourke had made the mistake of asking about the twin double, and Thorne was going to see to it that he didn’t ask any more questions until after the payoffs. That look didn’t mean the kind of friendly punch in the head he had given his wife. It meant a beating.

Rourke took a deep breath and rushed him, butting as hard as he could at the point where his rib cage came together. It was like running into a wall. Rourke reeled back as Thorne’s left fist came around. It connected with, his ear and his head rang like a bell. He snatched up the butcher knife and threw it blindly at Thorne. Whirling, he cleared Win’s unconscious body in one bound and hurled himself at the long window over the stainless steel sink. A row of cactus plants was lined up on the sill, and Rourke carried them with him as he went through in an explosion of shattered glass, his eyes closed, arms up to protect his face. He bounced off a tank of bottled gas and landed in the dirt in a welter of glass and sash and broken pots.

He rolled, came to his feet, and darted away between trailers. The emergency flow of adrenalin that had helped him through the window continued to carry him for a moment, but there was blood in his eyes and he could hardly see. He made a right-hand turn, realizing abruptly as the first wave of pain hit him that he wouldn’t be going much farther under his own steam. His one chance was to lose himself in the jumble of trailers, perhaps crawling underneath one to rest till he felt better. Then he could work his way back to the highway and see if some kindly motorist would take him to a doctor.

He stumbled and went down, his head still ringing from Thorne’s blow. He forced himself to his feet and kept going, at a dogged, shambling half-run.

Then a solid figure loomed in front of him and he collided with Mike Shayne.

MICHAEL SHAYNE had walked into the lobby of the St. Albans Hotel in Miami Beach at two o’clock exactly, the time fixed for his appointment with the go-between who had promised to bring him one step closer to the recovery of stolen diamonds worth $100,000. The man was late. Usually this wouldn’t have bothered the detective. People in the go-between’s position often have trouble making up their minds. But today, after waiting only ten minutes, Shayne phoned the insurance company and told Mort Friedman, the man he was dealing with there, that his contact had failed to appear. He would call in, probably, and Shayne asked Friedman to set up another date for the following day.

“Make it later this afternoon, Mike,” Friedman said. “This whole thing is very jumpy.”

“I won’t be available,” Shayne said briefly. Friedman wanted to know why. Shayne replied evenly that something else had come up, Friedman made an acrid comment on that, and before the conversation was over Shayne concluded that he had possibly lost a valuable retainer.

Leaving the Beach, he crossed the bay on the Julia Tuttle Causeway and picked up the northbound expressway in Buena Vista. Shifting onto the Sunshine State Parkway at the Golden Glades interchange, he continued north, holding his speedometer needle steady at ten miles over the speed limit. He was swearing to himself. Rourke, he knew, had a special nose for certain kinds of trouble. His way of working up a story was to walk in, ask leading questions, and see what happened; and more often than Shayne liked to remember, what happened was that he ended up flat on his back hollering for help. One of these days, the redhead promised himself, Rourke was going to get into some stupid jam and find that Shayne had packed a bag and taken his secretary to New York to see a few of the new shows, leaving no phone number where he could be reached.

Shayne left the monotonous parkway at the Pompano Beach interchange and began following signs. The turns to Surfside Raceway were well marked. The closer he came to the track, the surer he was that something had gone wrong. He shouldn’t have let Rourke go alone.

The big, sprawling plant was quiet, apparently almost deserted in the hot afternoon. He locked his Buick and left it at the edge of the almost empty parking area, and plunged into the stable compound on foot.

Finding Paul Thorne’s stalls, he awakened a sleeping groom, who told him he had seen Thorne going off toward the trailer park, probably to take a nap, which was the sensible thing to do at this time of the day. Going in among the trailers, Shayne was in time to see the gangling body of his friend come hurtling through the narrow window of a trailer, his arms windmilling. He lurched away. The redhead spat out his cigarette and set off after him at a hard run.

He had left a trail of blood. Catching a glimpse of him as he staggered between two trailers, Shayne sliced into the tangle and cut him off. The reporter, in worse shape than Shayne had ever seen him, floundered a few more steps and collapsed against him. His coat and shirt had been cut to ribbons. He was only wearing one shoe. There were a dozen long slashes on his face and hands, but the blood made it hard for Shayne to tell which ones were serious. His face was a grotesque mask. His breath was loaded with martinis.

“Mike?” he said weakly. “You’re on the Beach somewhere, earning fifteen G’s. You’re not here.”

“What’s going on?” Shayne demanded. A heavy sedan halted at the edge of the trailer park. A burly uniformed figure leaped out and called, “Thorne! Thorne! Come here.”

A powerfully built, man in a sports shirt stepped out of the trailer with the smashed window. Rourke made a plucking gesture at Shayne with one of his bloody hands.

“Mike, it’s true. They’re trying to pull it off. The twin. Everything we thought. That means Joey Dolan was no accident.”

A fat woman in a playsuit, her forearms dredged with flour, opened the door of the nearest trailer and looked at Rourke with horror. The reporter sat down. “I’ve had it,” he said.

Shayne whipped out his bill clip and peeled off a dollar, which he handed to the woman. She took it automatically. “Get him a towel soaked in hot water,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

He returned to the Thorne trailer at a fast walk, approaching it from the kitchen end. Looking up at the broken window, he gave a short awed whistle. The opening couldn’t have measured more than two feet one way and ten inches the other, and he couldn’t believe Rourke had forced himself through it without being greased.

He pulled up in the lee of the trailer, his ragged eyebrows together and his eyes wary.

“Beating up on your wife again, I hear, Thorne,” the cop said. “People can’t take a nap with all the yelling and screaming. Well, you know what we told you, any more trouble of any kind and you’re through here, you’re through and no kidding. This time I’m turning you over to the sheriff’s office.”

“What crap,” Thorne said easily. “Who complained, Pruneface next door? Beating up on Win! Hell, man, we disagree sometimes, but she’s more likely to beat up on me than I am on her. Win, baby!” he called. “Come out here and tell the man.”

“You aren’t going to get out of
this,”
the cop said with satisfaction. “Look at that goddamn window. What did you do, throw a bottle through it?”

Shayne hesitated only briefly. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew they didn’t want Thorne to be tied up by the sheriff for the rest of the day.

He stepped out and came up to the two men, breathing hard. “I’m afraid he got away. I damn near had my hands on him for a second, but he was too slippery. He had a car waiting. I only got the first two numbers of the license—seven, eight. Christ!” He gave a sudden hoot of laughter. “When I saw him come crashing through that window!”

“You saw somebody jump out the window?” the cop said.

“Yeah, and I thought at first it was a case of the husband walking in at the wrong time, but then why would the guy have a getaway car all set, with the motor running? Did he get away with anything much?”

Thorne looked at him, thinking. “I haven’t had a chance to check,” he said slowly. He turned angrily on the cop. “Honest to God, this is typical of you people. If you hadn’t been so fast to jump to conclusions, I might have caught him.”

A disheveled but very good-looking young woman in a wrapper, barefoot, the side of her jaw swollen, appeared in the doorway of the trailer.

“Win!” Thorne said, alarmed. “Are you OK?”

“I’m—not sure.”

Now that they had their cues, they had no trouble manufacturing a story. A small, vicious-looking hoodlum had forced his way into the trailer waving a gun. He took her purse and then, liking her looks, tried to throw her down on the sofa. She was struggling with him when Thorne walked in. The cop looked from one to the other suspiciously, obviously sorry that Thorne was off the hook, and made no objection when Shayne excused himself.

Rourke was where Shayne had left him, bleeding into a towel.

“How in God’s name did you get out that window?” Shayne asked. “It’s about big enough for a midget.”

“Don’t ask me,” Rourke said bleakly. “I shut my eyes and sailed through.” He looked down at the blood-soaked towel. “I must look like a pound of raw hamburger. But if I hadn’t made it, I’d look a lot worse. He was fixing to clobber me. I don’t mean because I was making time with his wife. Because I was interested in tonight’s twin double. He said he’s got a busy afternoon. Tail him. See where he goes.”

“Sure, as soon as I get you to the doctor.”

“I can get myself to the goddamn doctor!” He started to get up, thought better of it and sat back. “Going to rest here a minute first. Take off.”

Shayne looked up at the fat woman, who had returned to the doorway of the trailer. “Is there a hospital around?”

“There must be one in Lauderdale, anyway. I can look in the book. Does he want an ambulance?”

“Call a taxi.” He grinned at her. “There’s an angry husband not far away, and we don’t want any sirens.” She disappeared.

“Go on, damn it,” Rourke said, looking up from the towel to find Shayne still hesitating. “If you’d come with me in the first place, this wouldn’t have happened. I haven’t won a fistfight from a guy that big in years. Mike, for God’s sake! As soon as he gets clear, he’s going to start moving. This may be the only chance we get. Don’t waste it.”

“OK,” Shayne said curtly. “Call me on the car phone so I’ll know where you are.”

He turned on his heel and stalked off. He had known something like this would happen. But from now on Rourke was going to have to get out of his own jams.

Seeing activity in front of the Thorne trailer, he pulled up abruptly and waited until the cop drove off. In a moment Thorne came out and headed for the barns, going straight to the stalls where he kept his horses. He emerged a moment later wearing a necktie and a light sports jacket, which probably meant that he had to keep an appointment somewhere else, as no one wore neckties here in the daytime.

Shayne went for his Buick. He wheeled it around near the end of the grandstand, where he could see any cars coming out of the compound. Thorne made it simple for him, appearing in a long red convertible with the top down, an easy car to follow. Shayne dropped out of sight until he heard the convertible whoosh past with Thorne getting everything the motor was able to give him in that gear.

Shayne had the Buick in motion as the convertible crossed the Seaboard Air Line tracks, heading south. At Sunrise Boulevard Thorne signaled for a left turn, and Shayne dropped back, letting a Volkswagen pass. The Volkswagen driver had trouble deciding which way to go, and Thorne was out of sight by the time Shayne made the turn. He built up his speed, taking chances in the thickening traffic, and came up with the convertible again as it waited for the light to change at the Route 1 intersection.

Shayne moved up close, following without difficulty as Thorne entered Fort Lauderdale. Thorne was clearly impatient, consulting his watch constantly, crowding slow-moving cars and racing the motor when he was stopped by a light. On S. E. Sixth Avenue, near Twenty-fourth Street, he swung into a parking slot. Without dropping any coins in the parking meter, he headed for a doorway between two stores. A sign over the door said, “Guys and Dolls, Billiards.”

Shayne snapped his fingers silently. The only opening he could see was an illegal one in front of a fire hydrant. He pulled in and left a
Miami News
card under his windshield wiper. The billiard room was over a men’s clothing store, directly across from a medical block. Shayne crossed, went up one flight and into a dentist’s waiting room. A bell sounded as the door opened, and a teen-aged girl with bands on her teeth looked up from a magazine. Shayne went to the window. When a middle-aged nurse came in, he gave her a quick look at his license and said quietly, “Police business. We’re expecting a stickup.”

“A
what?”
the girl in the braces said excitedly.

The redhead said, “Please sit down.”

He spoke in a quiet voice that carried authority. She obeyed instantly.

The dentist joined the nurse in the doorway. “There won’t be any shooting?” he said anxiously.

“I hope not,” Shayne said without turning.

The billiard room, some twenty or thirty feet away, was brightly lighted with fluorescent lamps. Only one table was being used. Paul Thorne was talking earnestly to a fat man in a blue linen coat at the cigarette and candy counter. The fat man listened, his lips going in and out. Presently he took a cigar box out of the glass case, opened it and counted out a dozen or so bills. Shayne couldn’t read the denominations, but the total was large enough to require a second count. Thorne counted it a third time.

Shayne nodded to the dentist and the nurse, and went out without further explanation. He was back in his Buick and had moved into double-parking position by the time Thorne returned to the convertible.

Thorne reversed and went north again on S. E. Sixth Avenue, turning right instead of left on Sunrise Boulevard, toward the ocean instead of the raceway. Reaching the ocean drive, he went north. Halfway to Pompano Beach, on the outskirts of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, his brake lights flared and he made a sharp turn into a double-decker motel called the Golden Crest. Shayne pulled into a gas station. While his tank was being filled, he watched Thorne leave his convertible in a depressed parking area and go up the outside steps to a room on the second floor.

Facing the door, he ran a comb through his long hair, which had been tossed about in the open car, tightened the knot of his necktie, brushed a wisp of hay off the sleeve of his jacket, and checked his fly. Then he tried the knob. Finding the door unlocked, he walked in.