Nice Fillies Finish Last (8 page)

“You must really be hungry for that money,” Shayne commented.

“Is that what you think?” she said carelessly.

Shayne, meanwhile, had been looking for the right kind of bar, with booths and not many cars parked in front. He turned onto S. E. Twelfth St. and pulled up almost at once.

“We’re going in here,” he said. “I don’t like to talk to you in public, but I’m expecting a phone call. I want to know a lot more than I do now when we come out. I’m willing to listen as long as it takes.”

He took the key out of the ignition switch and went on, “I meant it when I said you have to talk to me. I have enough now to make a stink in the papers. Once it gets that far, it has to go the rest of the way, and the least that can happen is that you and your husband and Paul Thorne, and possibly Franklin Brossard, will be kicked out of harness racing. That’s why your husband loaned me his car—he wanted to make friends. Why he was willing to put himself into Paul Thorne’s hands, God knows. Well, I’m open to any reasonable compromise. Think about it, Mrs. Domaine.”

“I have thought about it. I’m quite aware of my predicament, I assure you.”

He looked up all around. The bar was just right, fairly noisy, with several empty booths. The corners of her mouth were down, but even so she was probably the best-looking woman who had had a drink there in weeks; there was a flurry among the unattached males at the long bar. Shayne pointed her at an empty booth and stopped at the wall phone.

He dialed his office number in Miami and paid the toll. When the answering service cut in to say that Mr. Shayne was out, he gave them the number of the phone he was calling from, to be passed along to Miss Hamilton when she phoned in. Then he told the bartender his name and ordered a double cognac and a double bourbon.

“Do you want it straight?” he asked when he reached the booth.

“I’d better have soda in this one,” she said. “The last one’s still burning.”

Shayne relayed this to the bartender and carried the drinks himself. He took half his cognac in one swallow, following it with a pull of ice water.

“Before you start talking,” he said, “I’d better tell you that when you and Thorne were in Room 18 at the Golden Crest Motel, I was in Room 17, and I used this listening device.” He showed her the little amplifier. “These are supposed to pick up whispers in a room eighteen by thirty. They aren’t that good. But Room 17 is on the right as you go in. You may remember that the bed in your room is against that wall.”

She stared down at the little gadget in horror. The color that had drained out of her face suddenly came back with a rush. She closed her eyes.

“Yeah,” Shayne said bleakly. He moved a glass swizzle stick between the cognac glass and the water glass, and pushed the glasses together. “Here’s the bed, here’s the wall, here’s the pickup. The reception was fine. That’s why I don’t like these bugs and I try not to use them. Everybody’s entitled to a certain amount of privacy. I’m the one who had the switchboard phone you, and I think you’ll remember that the call arrived in the nick of time. I’m also the one who hammered on the wall.”

“Thank you,” she said in a strangled voice.

“You’re welcome.”

Instead of pouring her small glass of whiskey over the ice in her highball glass, she drank it straight. It burned her throat and started her coughing. Shayne went back to the bar for more bourbon. She had stopped coughing by the time he returned.

“You have a way of springing things,” she said. “That’s your business, of course, and I’d probably better save my indignation for Paul Thorne. I really am grateful for that phone call. I suppose some private detectives might have let it go on in the hope of finding out something. There’s one thing I don’t believe came up in the conversation. I gave Joey Dolan a pint of sherry last night.”

Shayne leaned forward. “When?”

“Late.”

She took out a package of little cigars. Shayne lighted one for her and started a cigarette of his own.

“You’ll want to know about my evening,” she said, “I left Paul a message to meet me in Palm Beach soon after the last race. I worded it so it was clear that I wanted to talk about horses and nothing else. I broached the twin-double idea, and he was very excited about it. He showed none of that compulsive amorousness he went in for this afternoon. I’d been worrying, to the point where I took a pistol with me. I suppose you heard our argument about the pistol.”

“Yeah.”

“But he was too full of money possibilities to have anything left over. We drove for a while, talking, and came back to the track in separate cars. Joey and an old man named Rutherford were sitting on bales of hay outside our barn. I joined them. Joey was a wonderful talker when he got going. He had no prejudice against people with money.” She said this seriously, looking down at the ash on her little cigar. “I went into the office for more sherry when theirs ran out. I kept several pints of Joey’s brand in the desk, as an emergency supply. Joey knew he could always fall back on me if he had to. It gave him a sort of security.”

“Did Thorne see you give him the sherry?”

“He came past while we were talking. Yes, I think it was just as I was bringing out the bottle. He didn’t stop. There was no love lost between him and Joey.”

“How drunk was Dolan?”

“Not too. At that time of night his way of talking was always a little more extravagant, but he was in full control.” She picked up her whiskey. “And speaking of degrees of drunkenness, I’d better start pacing myself. I know what you’re trying to do with all this bourbon. You’re succeeding.”

She poured the whiskey into the tall glass, added soda and took a long drink.

“If Dolan was in a position to spoil this twin double—I don’t know why he would want to, or how he’d go about it—is Thorne capable of killing him?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “I’ve been turning something over and over in my mind since you first threw this at me. Paul has no use for people like Joey—they’re an affront to him, in some way. Once when he was driving for us, something went wrong that he thought was Joey’s fault, and Paul knocked him down and kicked him around the barn. It was obvious to me that Joey had it in for him from then on. I always thought he had something to do with that accident, when Paul’s big money-winning horse was killed.”

“What about Thorne’s trotter in the sixth tonight?”

“Joey spotted that. Paul needs a big win, and Joey’s idea was that we should bet the horse heavily as the machines opened, which would shorten the odds. At three to one, say, Paul couldn’t hope to take out enough to solve his problems.”

“Everybody knows he has problems?”

“I think that must be common knowledge.”

“Did you have anything to do with getting him fired from your stable, Mrs. Domaine?”

“Will you stop calling me Mrs. Domaine? It sounds so hostile. My name’s Claire.”

“All right, Claire. Now that you’ve had a chance to think about your answer, do you want me to repeat the question?”

“The answer is maybe. Indirectly. He was always brushing against me so our fields would overlap, making innocent little remarks that were loaded with double meanings. It made me uncomfortable. I think Larry caught some of it. He would have had to do something about it if Paul had stayed, and it was easier to loan him some money and encourage him to move out. Paul wanted to do that anyway. Maybe that was even the reason he kept trying to get under my skin. He may have sized Larry up and decided that was the best way to raise the necessary capital. He’s shrewd about some things.”

“It never went any further than those remarks and minor contacts, Claire?”

She met his look without flinching. “You listened to what happened in the motel. You know how I feel about him. I despise him.”

“I know how you felt about him this afternoon. You didn’t want him to make love to you. You brought a gun with you, but you didn’t use it.”

“He took it away from me!”

Shayne nodded. “I’ve taken guns away from one or two women, but I don’t try it if I’m sure they’re going to pull the trigger. I’ve been wrong on occasion, I admit. That whole scene in Room 18 was crackling with emotion. I don’t know exactly what kind. People have been killed for a lot less than eighty or a hundred thousand bucks, but I know now that there’s more to it than money, a lot more. Do you know anybody who lives at the Belle Mark Apartments?”

It was abrupt, and he could have got the same effect by throwing a drink in her face. But she recovered quickly.

“What brought that up?”

“I’ve been told that Joey Dolan visited somebody there last night. It must have been just after you gave him the pint of sherry.”

She put her cigarillo carefully in an ashtray. She seemed puzzled. “One of our drivers has an apartment there, I believe. Franklin Brossard. It’s in Miami Shores, isn’t it? I dropped him off there once. But why would Joey, at that time of night—no, it’s fantastic. If they wanted to meet, why go all that way?”

The bartender called Shayne’s name from the heel of the bar. Turning, the redhead saw the dangling phone.

“There’s my call. Another drink?”

“Yes, please.”

He signaled the bartender for another round, and was glad to hear Lucy Hamilton’s voice when he went to the other end of the bar, picked up the receiver and said hello.

“Michael, I think I have something, but first you have to answer a few simple questions. Number one, do you have a headache, even a slight one?”

Shayne grinned. “Not yet, angel. The way this is going I may have one when I wake up tomorrow morning. What’s your second question?”

“Don’t joke! I can tell by the noises that you’re in a bar, which doesn’t surprise me. But someday I hope to convince you that the thing to do after you have an accident is to see a doctor. You can have a mild concussion and not realize it.”

“I saw a lot of doctors when I called on Tim,” he said, “but they were all busy.”

“Was he all right?”

“Sleeping like a baby.”

“Sleeping? When I talked to him, he was all wound up and giving off sparks. If he went to sleep, it must be more serious than he told me.”

“I had the same idea,” Shayne said. “It turns out they gave him some sleeping pills. What’s the news?”

“Well, I’ve been to the Belle Mark. The pictures were no problem. Mr. MacMaster, that ogre at Tim’s paper, wasn’t nearly as growly as he usually is with me. They’d already taken a shot of Joey Dolan in the morgue—very gruesome. The picture of Thorne was in his racing clothes, from a racetrack program. That’s what I consider a really handsome man.”

“Everybody out here seems to agree.”

“I don’t think he’d wear well, though. He has a discontented look around the mouth. I found the apartment house, and I thought my best bet would be to go straight to the super. I said I was working for you and showed him the pictures and asked if he recognized anybody. He thought I was trying to trap him. I offered him ten dollars, and that made him even more suspicious. I looked at the names in the lobby, but none of them meant anything to me. You probably want me to boil this down?”

“Take your time, angel. I’m always interested in your methods.”

“Now you’re being sarcastic. I took the pictures to the nearest supermarket. They didn’t mean anything to the clerks, but a lady in the checkout line thought she recognized Thorne. I had to go up to her apartment and have coffee and a really enormous piece of chocolate cake. By that time I thought this was wish-fulfillment on her part—Thorne’s the kind of man that kind of woman has daydreams about. Not at all. She’d ridden up in the elevator with him a few times. He gives off some kind of very potent electricity in an enclosed place, it seems—she was still throbbing when she told me. She thought his name was—let me see, it’s an unusual one and I wrote it down—Brossard. That’s whose apartment he went into. He had a key. She checked the directory downstairs, being a fan of strong, dark-haired, discontented-looking young men. Franklin Brossard. Then she had another piece of cake and thought about it some more, and said she really wondered if she hadn’t seen Mrs. Domaine in the elevator, too. The picture I had was a woman’s page publicity shot, and she couldn’t tell for sure. The woman she was thinking about was blonde and slender and startlingly well dressed. I accumulated some information about her shoes and perfume, but that probably wouldn’t mean anything to you. My friend never saw her with Thorne.”

Shayne was pulling his ear, looking across at Mrs. Domaine, who was staring moodily into her drink, prodding at the ice cubes with one finger.

He said slowly, “That might fit. Brossard is a Domaine driver and he could have loaned Thorne his apartment. Were you able to get any approximate dates?”

“Oh, Michael!” Lucy said in dismay, after a tiny pause. “I knew there was something I didn’t ask her. It’s
elementary,
isn’t it? She said she hadn’t seen either of them lately. I don’t know if that means one month or six. I have her phone number. I can call her and get right back to you.”

“It may not matter,” Shayne said abstractedly. “I’m having some drinks with a well-dressed blonde, and I guess you could call her slender. I don’t know about her shoes and I haven’t noticed how she smells. But I asked her about the Belle Mark and she nearly dropped her drink. Let’s see what she does when I ask her how long ago she stopped meeting Paul Thorne there.”

CLAIRE SMILED ruefully as he slid into the booth. “I’ve been getting more and more apprehensive. You look like a matador ready for the kill. Who was that on the phone?”

“My secretary.” He lit a cigarette, not to heighten the suspense but because he wanted a cigarette. “She’s been showing photographs to tenants at the Belle Mark. It seems that you and Paul Thorne have both been seen using the elevator.”

Claire’s face crumpled and she made a low sound. “You make it sound so easy. A simple matter of showing some pictures in an apartment house. I thought I was being so careful! I suppose I could deny it and say it’s impossible, but I won’t. Do you want to ask questions, or hear it in my own words?”

“Just tell it to me, Claire. I take it for granted you weren’t meeting him there to talk about harness horses.”