The Last Private Eye (2 page)

“Carl called me up this past Wednesday,” she said. “He said he'd read in the paper that I was working in Louisville now, and he asked me if I remembered him from the interview. He said he had a story for me, one that would—his exact words were ‘blow this town wide open.' I tried to get him to tell me more, but all he would say was that if certain things didn't work out he would tell me some news that involved the Derby and some very famous people.”

Kate paused. She looked at Rhineheart as if she expected him to ask her something. When he didn't, she said, “You do know that Cresthill Farm has a horse in this year's Derby, don't you?”

Rhineheart nodded. Cresthill's Derby entry was a lightly raced and highly publicized three-year-old named Royal Dancer. The Kingstons had bought the horse a few years back at the Keeneland yearling sales and had paid a couple million for him. If Rhineheart remembered correctly, Royal Dancer had won a big stakes race in Florida earlier in the year, but had raced only once since then, lost, and was considered something of a long shot for the Derby.

“Did Walsh mention any names?” Rhineheart asked.

“No. He refused to say anything else. He gave me his phone number and his address and promised to call me the next day—Thursday. But he didn't. So I called him. His wife answered, her name is Rhonda. She said Carl had left the night before and hadn't come back. She seemed really upset. She promised to call me when Carl returned, but she didn't. I phoned her on Friday. There was no answer, Mickey. I went over to their apartment but no one was home. I talked to the manager of the apartment building, a girl named Karen Simpson. She said she hadn't seen Carl Walsh or his wife for a couple of days. Carl hasn't been to work either. I talked to his boss, the head trainer at Cresthill, an Englishman named John Hughes. He told me Carl was scheduled to come to work at six-thirty Thursday morning, but he never showed up. I hate to sound melodramatic, Mickey, but Carl Walsh seems to have . . . disappeared.”

Rhineheart said, “And you want me to find him?”

Kate Sullivan nodded.

“Why me?” Rhineheart asked. “Why not some bigger agency? Some high-powered corporate security outfit with a lot of resources?”

Kate smiled. “I'm not old friends with any big-time security outfits.”

“You didn't come to me because we went to grade school together, did you?”

“Don't worry,” she said, “I asked around about you. You come highly recommended, Mickey. The station's legal counsel, Warren Fisher, said you were the best private investigator in Louisville.”

Warren Fisher was an attorney Rhineheart had helped out of a jam once.

“He also said—and I'm quoting—that you were ‘one tough dude.”'

Rhineheart took a sip of his drink.

“He also said—nicely, I might add—that you weren't entirely lacking in self-confidence.”

Three for three, Rhineheart thought. Not bad for a lawyer.

“Will you try to find Carl Walsh for me, Mickey?”

Rhineheart thought about it. Cresthill Farms. Jet-set thoroughbred breeders. A Derby horse. It was a whole different league from the one he usually played in, but he didn't have any doubts he could handle it. And it sounded like the kind of case that wasn't likely to put him to sleep.

“I'll give it a shot,” he said. “On one condition.”

“What's that?”

“You stop calling me Mickey. It makes me feel like I'm back in the eighth grade and about to get my knuckles rapped by one of the nuns. Call me Mike, or Rhineheart, or anything. Except Mickey.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't realize.” She smiled at Rhineheart. “What about Michael? Is that okay?”

“Fine.”

“Warren Fisher said to ask you about your fee.”

“My fee,” Rhineheart said, “is two hundred a day, plus expenses. Plus,” he added, “I'll need a retainer. A thousand.”

Kate didn't bat an eye. “No problem. The station is backing me fully in this. They've agreed to cover all your expenses. A check from the news department will be in the mail Monday morning.”

“Good,” Rhineheart said. “Now tell me why you haven't called the police in on this.”

“I considered it,” she said. “I gave it some serious thought. Then I decided not to. For one thing I'm not sure how efficient the police are in this kind of matter. For another, I can't rely on their keeping me informed. You see, Michael, I want Carl Walsh found, but I also want an exclusive on whatever story there might be. You understand that?”

Rhineheart shrugged. “Sure.” Kate was ambitious. She wanted to do a good job. There was nothing wrong with that.

She handed him a piece of paper that had
MEMO FROM THE DESK OF KATHLEEN SULLIVAN
written across the top. “Carl Walsh's address. My telephone numbers at home and at work. This”—she pointed to an entry—“is John Hughes's phone number and address.”

“You got any strong feelings about where I ought to start on this?” Rhineheart asked. It was a standard question he put to all his clients.

“I wouldn't dream of suggesting how you go about your job, Michael. All I ask is that you keep me informed of your progress. I'd like daily reports, if that's possible.”

“Sure,” Rhineheart said. The truth was he made reports when he felt like it. Usually, as few as possible.

He asked Kate if she had a press pass for Churchill Downs.

“Yes.”

He held out his hand. “Give it to me.”

“But—”

“If I'm going to knock around and ask questions, I'll need access to the stable areas at the Downs.”

“But won't they—”

“They never look at the names on them,” Rhineheart said. “If you need a replacement, tell your station manager you lost yours.”

She dug the pass out of her purse and handed it to Rhineheart. “You come on awfully strong, Michael. Are you as tough as you seem to be?”

Rhineheart smiled at her. “Tougher,” he said. He finished off his drink, laid some bills on the table, stood up.

“It was good seeing you again,” she said.

“Like old times,” Rhineheart said. “Any last-minute instructions?”

“I can't think of any,” she said. “And you'd probably just ignore them anyway.”

She was right. “I'll be in touch, Kate,” Rhineheart said, and walked out of the place.

CHAPTER THREE

On the way to Carl Walsh's apartment Rhineheart tried to recall what he knew or had heard about Duke Kingston. An ex-coal baron from eastern Kentucky, Kingston, the story went, had married money and in the course of a decade or so had become respectable. He had built Cresthill Farms into one of the finest racing stables in America. Cresthill horses had won most of the big stakes races in the country, but none had ever won the Derby. Kingston's desire to win the Kentucky Derby was legendary. There was nothing he wouldn't do, it was said, to see his colors in the winner's circle on the first Saturday in May.

Rhineheart didn't know if that were fact or racetrack rumor or what it had to do with a stable hand named Carl Walsh. Maybe in the course of things, he would find out.

Walsh lived in a squat redbrick apartment building that sat on a quiet, tree-lined street in the city's South End. Rhineheart parked his car—a beat-up '76 Maverick—out front, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and found Walsh's apartment at the end of a narrow, empty corridor.

He knocked on the door, waited, knocked again, waited a few minutes longer, then took out a credit card and went to work on the lock. Thirty seconds later, he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

The place was a one-room studio apartment with a shag carpet, a bathroom off to the left, and a small kitchen area in an alcove near the front door.

An unmade double bed divided the room in two: sofa, end tables, an armchair, and glass-topped coffee table on one side; night table, dresser, and a small walk-in closet on the other. A portable TV sat next to a phone on the night table.

Rhineheart gazed around the room. Nothing looked out of place. Not exactly. There were no obvious signs that the apartment had been searched, but he could tell that recently it had been taken apart and put back together. Systematically and methodically. By pros.

Operating on the notion that he might find something they had overlooked and on the principle that you had to begin somewhere, Rhineheart went into the bathroom and began looking through the medicine cabinet. He found a bottle of aspirin, a Gillette razor, a Lady Bic razor, a packet of throat lozenges, a can of Edge shaving cream, a tube of lipstick, a bottle of mouthwash, a box of Band-Aids, a tube of toothpaste, a thing of eye makeup, a plastic bag full of hair rollers, an empty shampoo bottle, a jar of Vaseline, a tube of lip ointment, and a small bottle of Absorbine Jr.

The bathroom hamper contained dirty towels.

The bathtub was dry. There was no soap in the soap dish.

He left the bathroom and walked back into the main room. Stacks of old
Daily Racing Forms
sat on the coffee table alongside back issues of
Cosmopolitan
and
Playboy
and
People.
He flipped through the
Forms
and the magazines, but found nothing significant, no clues or secret messages hidden between the pages.

Rhineheart ran his hands down the back and sides of the sofa and the chair. No loose change. Nothing.

Like a lot of investigative work, searching a place was a pain in the ass. Even if you knew what you were looking for. And he didn't.

On one of the end tables, he noticed a pack of matches lying there in plain sight for everyone to see. The purloined matchbook? He picked it up. The cover advertised the Red Wind Motel on Dixie Highway. Weekly Rates. On the inside of the cover someone had written
Room 24.

Rhineheart stuck the matchbook in his pocket and walked over to the other side of the room. Hanging on the wall above the dresser were two framed color photographs. One was a shot of Walsh and a pretty frizzy-haired blonde. They were standing on the deck of a houseboat, their arms around each other, smiling at the camera. The words
Love, Rhonda
were scrawled in pen across the bottom of the photograph.

The other picture was one of those standard racetrack photographs: a shot of the winning horse, his owner, the owner's entourage, the trainer, the jockey, the horse's groom, and whatever stable help happened to be around.

The horse in the photograph was a rangy chestnut. There was no identification or date on the photo but Rhineheart was sure it was a shot of Royal Dancer taken after his stakes victory in Florida earlier in the year. There were eight to ten people standing posed in a semicircle around the horse. In the middle of the group stood Duke and Jessica Kingston, looking well dressed and rich and handsome. Rhineheart had heard she was a real beauty, but you couldn't tell a whole lot from the photo.

On the far left of the frame Carl Walsh stood looking solemnly at the camera.

Rhineheart went over to the dresser and began going through it drawer by drawer. The top drawer contained men's clothes, jeans, T-shirts, socks, underwear. The second and third drawers were full of women's stuff—sweaters, scarves, lingerie, all the same size. Walsh's wife had left her clothes behind. She must have left in a hurry.

The next two drawers were filled with letters and papers, gas bills and rent receipts, canceled checks and old pay stubs. Rhineheart rummaged around and came up with a pay stub dated March 12 from Saint Anthony's Hospital. It showed that Rhonda Walsh had cleared $213.23 that week.

The bottom drawer contained half a dozen programs from the recent Keeneland meeting and some uncashed mutuel tickets. On the back of one of the tickets was a telephone number written in ballpoint. It was a 548 number, which was a South End exchange. Rhineheart stuck the ticket in his pocket and wandered into the kitchen.

He opened drawers and cabinets, looked in the refrigerator. There were two full bags of garbage under the sink. He spread some newspaper out on the kitchen floor, dumped out the bags, and slowly and carefully went through the eggshells and empty milk cartons and food scraps. At the bottom of the pile he found something; a penciled list of words and initials on a stained and blotted sheet of lined paper.

It read:

DR. G
10:30 Wed.

Lewis
WC

LANCELOT

Rhineheart smoothed out the sheet of paper, folded it, and stuck it in his pocket. He had no idea what any of it meant. He put the garbage back in the bags, washed his hands in the kitchen sink, then went into the main room, picked up the phone, and dialed the number of the Red Wind Motel.

The desk clerk answered.

Rhineheart asked the clerk to connect him to room 24.

“Just a minute, please.” The phone rang half a dozen times. The clerk came back on the line. “I'm sorry, sir. Mr. Sanchez seems to be out. Can I take a message?”

“No thanks.”

Next Rhineheart tried the 548 number. The phone rang twice, was picked up, and a man's nasal voice said, “Yeah?”

Rhineheart recognized the voice. It belonged to a small-time bookie he knew named Marvin Green. Marvin said, “C'mon, c'mon, what do you want, who is this?”

Rhineheart hung up and checked his watch. It was 4:15. He had been in the apartment a full hour. It was time to go. Rhineheart went into the bathroom, got a dirty towel, and wiped off everything he had touched. Then he walked over to the door and let himself out.

CHAPTER FOUR

Downstairs, on the first floor, the second door on the left had a brass plate that had
MANAGER
on it. The young woman who answered Rhineheart's knock had shoulder-length black hair, sexy eyes, good breasts, a slim waist, nice hips, and long shapely legs. She was wearing a red T-shirt, no bra, and skintight cutoffs. The trained investigator's eye for details, Rhineheart thought. Once again it had come in handy.