A Stone's Throw

by James W. Ziskin

“Precisely.”

  He shook his head in dismay, as if he’d been swindled. I gave him no shrift, however, scolding him for his shameless flirting with a pretty face.

  “Since when do you hand out samples to random squatters? I’ve never seen it.”

  “It’s called marketing, El. If you knew the first thing about business, you’d understand that you have to spend to attract customers.”

  “Spare me,” I said. “She lives forty miles from New Holland. She’s never coming back here. You were trying to impress her to see where it might get you.”

  He seemed to be over her already. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  We enjoyed our pizza, and the conversation turned back to Johnny Dornan. Fadge wondered why there was no talk of the jockey in the papers.

  “Everyone’s being careful,” I said. “But have a look at the Republic tomorrow.”

  “You’re naming Dornan?”

  I nodded as I chewed. After a swallow and a gulp of beer, I explained that I’d had a long chat with Lou Fleischman.

  “He gave me permission to quote him on the sheriff’s questions. It seems Pryor was very curious about Johnny Dornan’s whereabouts in reference to the Tempesta fire.”

  “That should make for quite the feather in your cap, El,” said Fadge. “Congratulations.” He raised his glass to me. “So what’s next?”

  “Where to begin? I’ve got to find out where this Johnny Dornan came from. Joyce told me tonight that he was Canadian. And the motel clerk at the Friar Tuck said Vivian McLaglen claimed to be from Manitoba.”

  Fadge continued to chew his pizza.

  “What about you?” I asked. “You’re an expert horseman. What do you know about Johnny Dornan?”

  “Not much beyond how he ruined my parlay last Friday.”

  “Do you remember seeing him at the track last year?”

  “Yeah, he was a newcomer. I knew the name. He won a few races. I seem to recall one of my clockers saying he was kind of shifty. Some story from years ago, but he couldn’t tell me more.”

  We contemplated that dead end for a few beats, and then Fadge asked what else I had.

  “I still need to talk to Judge Shaw. The whole thing happened on his property, after all. And then there’s the car.”

  “What car?”

  “Vivian Coleman’s. Or Vivian McLaglen’s, whatever her name is.”

  “Why do you need to find her car?”

  “According to Mrs. Russell, Johnny didn’t have a car of his own. So someone must have picked him up Friday night after he retired to his room with Micheline. I think it might have been Vivian McLaglen. And I think they went to meet someone named Robinson.”

  Fadge nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “So if Vivian and Johnny were tooling around in her Chrysler Friday evening, what happened to it? Did they drive it to Tempesta to meet their murderer? Or did their murderer take them there in another car? Either way, I want to know where it is now and who left it there.”

  “Can Frank Olney help you on that? Any abandoned cars towed away?”

  “Maybe. But what if the killer wanted to dispose of the car instead of leaving it on the side of the road? Or what if he’s still driving around in it?”

  “All good possibilities,” he said. “It’s not going to be easy. Kind of like finding a needle in a haystack.”

  I finished my slice of pizza. Fadge had polished off the rest. He sat back and picked his teeth, a practice I believed should be carried out in private. But propriety had never been the big guy’s long suit.

  “Ready to go home?” he asked.

  “Not quite yet. I want to make a stop first.”

  “Where? It’s after midnight.”

  “Let’s take a little drive out to Tempesta Farm.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The radio announced the temperature was fifty degrees, downright cold for August. Fadge and I peered through the windshield at the twelve monuments guarding the entrance of Tempesta Farm.

  “Good morning, it’s one a.m.,” a man’s voice crackled over the airwaves. “Crowds cheered in Moscow as the so-called twin cosmonauts Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich made separate landings on the steppes of Kazakhstan Wednesday, capping a dramatic . . .”

  Fadge switched off the radio.

  “How can those cosmonauts be twins?” he asked. “They don’t even have the same last name.”

  I rolled my eyes at his joke. He was a confirmed newshawk who could tell you at all times what in the world was happening and where. I attributed his near-savant knowledge to the countless hours spent reading newspapers as he waited for business to walk through his ice-cream shop’s front door. Especially during the winter months.

  “Do you really want to go tramping through the wet grass in the middle of the night?” he asked.

  “If those twins can circle the planet for four days, we can brave the elements for twenty minutes. I want to have a look around. The caretaker’s house and the dormitories are over there.”

  “Over where? I can’t see a thing.”

  “Don’t be a coward. There’s a full moon. Besides, I know where to go. I’ve been here before, remember?”

  “And you’re not afraid of getting arrested for trespassing?”

  “No.”

  “Or murdered in a burning barn?”

  “A little,” I said. “But that’s why I brought you along for protection. Come on. Let’s go.”

  We climbed out of my Dodge, and, armed with a flashlight in one hand and my purse and Leica slung over my shoulder, I led the way onto the property. A cool breeze blew through my hair and ruffled the panels of my skirt. I buttoned my jacket. Fadge was wearing a dark wool sweater that made him look like a bear walking upright. We reached the site of the burned-down barn, which was still cordoned off by several sawhorses and a handwritten sign that read, “Crime Scene. Keep Out.”

  “Are we going in there?” asked Fadge.

  “No, I’ve already been through the barn. Let’s have a look over there,” I said, indicating a structure on the front stretch of the oval training track about a hundred yards off.

  As we approached, we could make out a shadowy, wooden building, leaning slightly to one side, capped by a turret of sorts and a pitched roof. There was a large open porch, fenced in by a railing. Some of its posts were rotting in place, while others had simply dropped out of line and lay dead on the deck like fallen teeth. The wind whistled through the large windows, whose glass panes, mullions, and transoms had long since been smashed by vandals. The silhouette gave the impression of a skeleton, the mortal remains of a great beast that had expired eons before but still sat stubbornly in place to remind all that once it had lived.

  “Kind of spooky,” I said, my teeth chattering in the cool air.

  “This is the judge’s stand,” said Fadge as we came to a stop before it. “They used to hold a race day for the mill workers and farmers. Back around the turn of the century. Matinée Races, free to all. Everyone came out with the family to see the horses. There was cotton candy, popcorn, and peanuts. And five or six races. This judge’s stand is where Sanford Shaw himself watched over the proceedings and awarded the winning jockeys.”

  “It looks as if it’s about to fall down.”

  “It’s condemned,” he said, pointing to a weathered sign plastered on the door.

  “Let’s move on. There’s that long oval building over there. What’s that?”

  “The indoor track. For winter training. And that must be the dormitory next to it.”

  Two hundred yards west of the judge’s stand and the finish line of the main course, the indoor training track stretched 150 yards or so on the straightaways. The walls of the low-slung building were buckling under the weight of the roof. And like the other outbuildings on the property, its faded gray boards, punished by weather and years of neglect, were a pale reflection of their former glory.

  We slipped into the dormitory through a door that had fallen off its rus
ted hinges. The smell told us right off that animals had appropriated the living quarters once reserved for stableboys, farmhands, and blacksmiths. A mustiness mixed with odors of wet hay, excrement, and putrefaction of flesh. Some unfortunate beast had died inside the building, and not too long ago, either. A surfeit of skunks had set up housekeeping somewhere in what had used to be the kitchen. We couldn’t see them but knew they’d been there.

  “You don’t suppose that’s a dead human decaying in here, do you?” I asked, holding my nose.

  “No. I think that’s what’s stinking up the place,” he said, pointing to a large festering mass about thirty feet across the room. I aimed my flashlight at it, but even so we couldn’t tell for sure if it was a deer, a bear, or a buffalo. Two things were certain, though. One, whatever it was, it was dead. And two, we weren’t going any closer to investigate.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Let’s get out of here before I’m sick.”

  I hightailed it for the door, stepping out into the fresh air. After a moment, I wondered what had become of Fadge. I peered back through the door in time to see him puking up his pizza almost as quickly as he’d ingested it an hour earlier.

  “Are you okay?” I asked once he’d staggered from the vomitorium.

  “I’m fine. Just a little upchuck.”

  “More like Niagara Falls. Here. Have a stick of gum,” I said, producing a package of Beech-Nut Peppermint from my purse.

  We continued farther west, past the 350-foot-long Yearling Barn—there was a blistered painted sign over the door identifying it—and a couple of triangular grain storage huts, before finally arriving at the caretaker’s house. It looked like any other large farmhouse. White clapboard, two stories and an attic, three chimneys, and a wraparound porch. The residence was in better condition than the rest of the farm buildings, probably because it was the last to be retired from service. Lucky Chuck Lenoir had been in residence as recently as the previous year. Still, the house had seen better days, and they were pretty far in the rearview mirror.

  We stepped up onto the porch and approached the door. “It’s padlocked,” said Fadge, rattling the knob with his meaty right hand.

  “All the windows seem to be intact. And shuttered. Although the wood does appear to be rotted in places.”

  “Are you suggesting we bust in?”

  I drew a deep breath as I gazed up at the house. Everything was dark. It felt lonesome and lonely, abandoned. In a few years, this place would be as battered as the other buildings on the property. Wood needs paint or stain. Without protection, rain, ice, and sun will lay waste to it in a trice. Too bad, I thought. Such a magnificent farm had gone to seed in little more than twenty years.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “There’s nothing to see here in the dark anyway.”

  We tramped off back toward my car some quarter mile away.

  “You want to get something to eat?” asked Fadge. “Whitey’s is still open.”

  “You want to eat again? You inhaled a pizza an hour and a half ago.”

  “Yeah, and heaved it all back out fifteen minutes ago.”

  I glanced at my watch as we reached my car. It was ten past two. I told Fadge that I couldn’t stomach the idea of a trilby sandwich and fries and gravy at Whitey’s.

  “It’s like everything in life, El,” he said, popping open the passenger door and climbing in. “If you want to be good at something, you’ve got to work at it, even when the mood doesn’t strike you.”

  I sat down beside him in the driver’s seat. “Are you saying I need to train to be an eating machine like you?”

  “Precisely.”

  I noticed the glove compartment was open. “Close that for me, will you?” I asked, and he obliged. “Wait. Open it and see if anything’s missing.”

  “There’s nothing in here but your press pass, registration, and a couple of rolls of film. Is that everything?”

  I pursed my lips and shifted into drive. “Yes. Still, it’s strange.”

  We drove off down Route 67 toward New Holland. The road was empty at that hour.

  “Mind if I put on the radio?” Fadge asked.

  “Wait a minute. How do you suppose the glove compartment came to be hanging open like that?”

  Fadge said he didn’t know. Maybe it had fallen open when we left the car to explore the farm.

  I glanced at the box in front of Fadge, then back to the road. “It’s never done that before. Jiggle it a little to see if it opens.”

  Fadge gave it a try, but the latch held fast.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You’re thinking someone opened it.”

  “I should have locked the car.”

  “This is New Holland. No one locks their doors.”

  “Don’t you remember two years ago? That juvenile delinquent Joey Figlio stole my car twice because I didn’t lock the doors.”

  “Maybe it was him.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Don’t be paranoid. I must have knocked it open when I got out of the car.”

  I drove on in silence, hardly buoyed by Fadge’s reassurances. I resolved to go back to the farm in the light of day and have a serious look around. And this time, I would lock my doors.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 16, 1962

  With barely three hours’ sleep, I opted for an early start after my late-night adventure. I phoned Norma Geary at home to see if she’d made any progress on the Robinson list. No bites, and she only had nine names left. Same on her Johnny Dornan search. Nothing yet, she said, but she was running through old wire-service stories searching for Johnny Dornan’s name in the racing results. I asked her to call Bell Canada to see if there were any John Dornans in Manitoba. That would keep her busy for a while.

  I drove past Tempesta a little after seven, visor flipped down to block the low sun to the east. But even if the dark had been chased away by the morning light, I wasn’t yet ready to explore the ghostly stud farm on my own. First I wanted to have a look at the cars parked at a dozen or so motels in Saratoga County before they’d all been packed off for the racecourse later in the morning or early afternoon.

  My list of motels included the Adirondack, Gateway, and Grand Union. And Scherer’s, Top Hill, and Turf and Spa. Then there was Design’s, Lewiston Motor Courts, Circular, and Tom’s Lodge. And that was a partial list. I hadn’t even included the hotels and boarding houses. There were too many to cover alone in one morning. But in the end, I managed to visit twenty-two motels and motor lodges in the general vicinity of the racetrack. I was looking for a black Chrysler with the license plate BYW 66. Vivian McLaglen’s car. It was a futile game of bingo. I even stopped at the Friar Tuck and introduced myself to Margaret, the helpful busybody who’d provided me with the make and model of Vivian’s car in the first place. She told me the car hadn’t returned since the previous Friday night when she’d last seen it.

  “And I’m out the eighteen dollars she owes me,” she said.

  “Do you still have her belongings?” I asked.

  “Yes, but not much there.”

  “Would you let me have a look?”

  She pinched her face and shook her head. “No. I’m not giving away nothing for free.”

  I sighed. “Can I buy it?”

  Margaret sold me Vivian McLaglen’s things for twenty dollars. That was what the missing woman owed on her room at the motel plus a little extra to cover the “irregularity” of the transaction. I confess that I really hadn’t wanted to part with any money, let alone so much, for an unknown quantity. But, in the end, my curiosity won out. It was like a wager, I told myself. Fadge plunked hundreds of dollars on unreliable horses, expecting a return on his investment. And one couldn’t reason with horses. So why shouldn’t I risk a small sum—okay, not so small—on Vivian McLaglen?

  I lugged two suitcases and a couple of bags of miscellany from the Friar Tuck registration office to my car and drove off west on Route 50. A few miles down the road, I pulled over
at a gas station. The attendant filled my tank with high test and checked my oil. I rummaged through the trove I’d bought from Margaret. As she’d described several days earlier, there were clothes—nothing unusual there—except that there was only two or three days’ worth of things to wear. I wondered where the rest of her clothing might be.

  I found some other items among her belongings as well. A couple of newspapers, cosmetics, and an almost empty pint of blackberry brandy. Really cheap stuff, I thought, recalling that a pint of the same swill was found in the rubble of the Tempesta barn. Then I asked myself if there was such a thing as fine blackberry brandy. Crumpled at the bottom of one of the paper bags were a sales slip and some Green Stamps. There was no business name or address on the sales slip, but the total suggested a liquor store and maybe a couple of pints of cheap hooch. Folded into one of the girdles inside a suitcase was an old laundry ticket. I turned it over and over, searching for a clue to its provenance. But there was nothing beyond Lee’s Fancy Chinese Laundry with a Second Street address. That could have been anywhere from New York to Honolulu. Or even Manitoba. I checked the laundry marks in her garments, but those were secret codes that surely only spoke to Mr. Lee himself. The rest of Vivian’s effects provided little help in determining where she’d gone. I had my theories, of course. But all of them ended with her dead in a burned-down barn.

  Daylight provided a reasonable sense of well-being. Of course, there may have been all manner of marauders haunting the property, but I felt safer knowing the sun was in the saddle. I parked my car in much the same spot as I had the night before, but this time I locked the doors before setting out on my mission. It was a warm day, with temperatures in the eighties. I tramped off toward the caretaker’s house, camera at the ready, hoping at the same time to find something and nothing.

  Tempesta wasn’t quite so spooky by day. The rolling pastures and weathered outbuildings gave the impression of an Andrew Wyeth painting, and I found myself humming the Pastoral Symphony to steel my nerve. Still, I couldn’t shake the awareness that someone had pried open my glove compartment the last time I’d visited the farm. I wondered if that had been the act of an opportunistic thief, a murderer, or, as Fadge had maintained, the result of some inadvertent action on his part. It was too late to back out now. The caretaker’s house loomed ahead.