Nice Fillies Finish Last

by Brett Halliday

  Shayne poured another slug of cognac into his coffee. “What kind of guy is this Dolan?”

  “Christ, Mike, if you’d asked me yesterday, I would have told you he was one of the pleasantest, best-adjusted people I know. It always seemed to me that he lived pretty much the way he wanted. How many people can you say that about? He probably averages one shave every couple of weeks. He has a little goatee—it tends to fade into the background when he hasn’t shaved for awhile. He changes his socks whenever he feels like it, and that isn’t often. If he’s broke at mealtime, he goes over to the trailer area and sits down to dinner with practically anybody. He’s more in tune with horses than anybody I know. I mean—somebody like Ad Kimball will work from past performance form and bloodlines and all that crap, but Joey just looks them in the eye and finds out how they feel. I always figured that the only reason he needed cash was to keep the sherry flowing. And now it turns out that he wants to own a TV set! He wants to hit big, like the rest of us. That’s the result of the publicity about those mammoth twin-double payoffs lately. I’m disappointed in him, but at the same time, if he’s really onto something, I’m not going to refuse to get in on it.”

  He sighed. “Let’s wait till a quarter after. I wish I knew where to look for him, but I don’t. He could be anywhere.”

  “You say he’s a sherry-drinker. How did he sound on the phone?”

  “Normal,” Rourke said. “He gets a buzz going before breakfast and keeps it going all day. He always knows what he’s doing. Damn it, will you stop looking at me like that? Maybe somebody came along with a half gallon, and he killed it and forgot about his appointment with me. It doesn’t sound like him, that’s all. Or maybe he got the financing from somebody else before we got here. Or maybe I’m all wrong about the guy and he was trying to hustle me. When he looked in the window and saw I’d brought somebody, he changed his mind and sneaked away. But it would really surprise me. More coffee?”

  Shayne made a face. “What do you think I am, copper-lined?”

  The revolving door squeaked, and Rourke swung around hopefully. A shaky old man in rumpled khakis took a check out of the dispenser.

  “Dolan?” Shayne said.

  The reporter shook his head. One of the attendants drew a cup of coffee and slid it across the counter to the old man. He carried it to a table in both hands. One of the bows of his horn-rimmed glasses was held together with adhesive tape. His white hair was neatly parted.

  “I know who he is, though,” Rourke said. “What’s his name? Goldy something.”

  The old man lowered his face toward the coffee, not trusting his trembling hands to lift it off the table. Rourke waited a moment more, then went over to him. After taking a deep gulp, the old-man sat back and began fitting the frayed butt of a cigarette into a filter holder.

  “My name’s Tim Rourke,” Rourke said. “I met you the other night with Joey Dolan.”

  “Ah, yes,” the old man said. “Pleased to encounter you again, Mr. Rourke. Rinngold Rutherford.” He waved at a chair. “Perhaps you might be interested in a pacer in the fourth. The trainer owes me a favor. I saved him from drowning as a young boy. He informs me in confidence that the horse is ready. It will cost you a five-spot.”

  “Sounds pretty good,” Rourke said. “What would you think about a jolt of something in your coffee?”

  “I know I’d like it,” Rutherford said simply.

  “Then come over and join us.”

  Rourke carried his cup for him. Rutherford acknowledged the introduction to Shayne with an old-fashioned bow.

  “It is a privilege. I know your reputation, of course.” He sat down between them and murmured as Shayne produced the cognac and poured a large dollop into his cup. “I see that you have excellent taste in brandy. Mr. Rourke and I have been talking about a 2:03 pacer in the fourth tomorrow evening. This evening, I suppose, as I see it is after four o’clock in the morning. This is a horse I can recommend with confidence. I’ve clocked him myself. The stable personnel are unanimous. They believe they have a winner.”

  “We’ll talk about that in a minute,” Rourke said. “Meanwhile, have you seen Joey?”

  Rutherford took a tiny sip of coffee and breathed in deeply, his eyes closed. “Marvelous. Makes the Sweeney Java really quite drinkable. Yes, I was talking to Joey earlier tonight.”

  “When?” Rourke said. “He told us to meet him here at three-thirty.”

  Rutherford slid his glasses down his nose and focused on the big clock. “Joey Dolan is not one of the world’s most punctual men. Still, there’s nothing to be gained by being annoyed with him. Joey is Joey. At his age, he’s unlikely to change the habits of a lifetime.”

  He pursed his lips in thought, then opened them to take another swallow of coffee. “I, too, you understand, am not a slave to the clock. I consider it no friend of mine. Joey has recently fallen on hard times, and he has been forced to accept a position as hot-walker for the Domaines. He was walking a filly who did quite badly in the sixth, I’m afraid. Finished well out of the money. After he brought her in, we shared a bottle and a few reminiscences. By that time it must have been—oh, two.”

  “Then what?” Rourke prompted as the old man’s attention wandered.

  “Then he went to bed. We parted behind the Domaine barn. Joey is strongly averse to spending money for a mattress in the bunkhouse, and so am I. The climate is generally salubrious, and even the most luxurious hotel can’t provide its guests with a bed that is more comfortable than a pile of loose straw, especially if you are lucky enough to finish the evening reasonably well oiled.”

  “What condition was Joey in?”

  Rutherford took another sip of the loaded coffee. “Joey always manages to navigate, and his observations never make anything but excellent sense. However, if you have driven all the way from Miami to meet him, it would be unfair to conceal that, when Joey and I said good-night, he was floating. His plan was to bed down on a cot in the Domaine tack-room. This was strictly against the rules of that stable, Mr. Larry Domaine being one of the most persnickety owners in the business, but Joey has this wonderful indifference to rules. He opened a window and floated through. He urged me to accompany him, but I felt obliged to turn down the invitation.”

  His hand was now steadier, and he was able to raise his cup without bending to meet it. “I don’t know how long it’s been since I tasted such a splendid coffee royal. Truly superb. After leaving Joey, I found a comfortable corner in another stable, but I had scarcely fallen asleep when, I’m sorry to say, that they rousted me out. Yes, the inhuman bastards rousted me out. I was tempted to join Joey at Domaine’s, but common sense told me to think about it over a cup of coffee. I have a business connection with Mr. and Mrs. Domaine. I cash tickets for them from time to time, and the condition of the relationship is that I have no contact with any of their facilities or people.”

  He finished his coffee, tilting his cup at a steep angle to be sure he had it all. “About that pacer in the fourth. Did I mention that my usual fee is five bucks?”

  Shayne took out a five-dollar bill. Folding it lengthwise, he slipped it under his own coffee cup.

  “Wake Dolan up and tell him Tim Rourke is waiting for him. Can you get into the tack-room?”

  “As far as that goes,” Rutherford said, his eyes on the bill. “At this time of night nobody’ll bother me. I take it you aren’t planning to pay me in advance?”

  “No.”

  “Then you can expect me in five minutes.” He paid for his coffee and went out. Rourke said slowly, “Joey phoned me at around two-thirty, Mike. If he went to bed in the Domaine barn at two—”

  “Rutherford’s not that good a witness, and he’s not wearing a watch. You’d better get the name of that pacer he’s talking about, or I have a feeling the trip will be wasted.”

  “He sold me a horse the last time I saw him,” Rourke said gloomily. “It finished seventh.”

  The counterman called that he had just brewed a fresh u
rn of coffee. Rourke went for two more cups. This time the coffee tasted more like coffee.

  Rutherford came through the revolving door, and headed straight for them. His hands were fluttering again.

  “I apologize for keeping you waiting,” he said, sitting down.

  Shayne emptied a water glass and poured him a straight shot of cognac.

  “Thank you,” Rutherford said. “Much as I enjoyed that coffee royal, the coffee does tend to blur the impact.” He emptied the glass in one long ecstatic swallow. “That is grand liquor, Mr. Shayne. Well, Joey wasn’t there. His cot was set up. He had a feed bag stuffed with straw, which he was going to use as his pillow. And the funny thing was—his toothbrush was there on the beam. Joey is no fanatic about most things, but he definitely makes it a fetish to brush his teeth practically every night, no matter what time he goes to bed. He not only wasn’t in the tack-room, he wasn’t in the Domaine barn at all. I looked in two other barns where he has privileges. He wasn’t there either. I don’t know what to make of it. If he changed his mind and decided to sleep elsewhere, why didn’t he take his toothbrush?”

  “When you were talking to him, Goldy,” Rourke said, “did he say anything about tomorrow night’s twin double?”

  Rutherford looked from Rourke to Shayne. “Do you mean to say that Joey Dolan got you up here at four A.M. to sell you a winning combination in the twin double? That Joey. A conception of such scope wouldn’t even occur to anybody else. It’s breathtaking. But if Joey doesn’t show up, and it certainly looks as though he’s not going to, give me another drink and a few minutes with pencil and paper, and I may be able to block out some suggestions for you.”

  “I don’t think so, thanks,” Rourke said.

  “In that case—”

  He cleared his throat and tugged at the end of the five-dollar bill beneath Shayne’s coffee cup. Shayne lifted the cup, and the bill disappeared into the pocket of Rutherford’s khaki shirt.

  CHAPTER 3

  TIM ROURKE expected a certain amount of needling from Shayne on the way back to Miami. But when he started to apologize, his friend merely said, “You saved yourself five hundred bucks. Forget it.”

  “I just wish I knew what happened. He certainly wasn’t stone-cold sober when I talked to him, but I can’t see him passing out somewhere when he had something as big as this on the fire.”

  “Tim, you weren’t hitting on all cylinders yourself. It’s obvious. By the time he got to the bottom of the bottle, he’d forgotten all about how easy it is to get rich betting the twin double. You’re lucky it turned out this way. Wheeling all the horses in two races runs into money. You’d make out better in the long run if you concentrated on improving your poker game.”

  “My poker game’s all right,” Rourke said defensively. “I hardly ever catch four of a kind to beat a full house, that’s all.”

  He stared moodily through the windshield at the wide strip of concrete that was flowing rapidly backward beneath their wheels. “‘Some ugly boys in this business.’ That’s one of the things he said on the phone, and I can’t get it out of my head. I wish Rutherford hadn’t mentioned that toothbrush.”

  Shayne snorted, and Rourke said nothing more. In the morning, after too little sleep, he showed up for work with a headache, an unpleasant taste in his mouth, something wrong with his nervous system, and the feeling that Shayne, as usual, had been talking sense. They had wasted a few hours, but it hadn’t cost him any money.

  He was writing a series of articles on payoffs in the construction business, a perennial subject he had handled so often that he could do it justice without being fully awake. He worked steadily until noon, getting through a pack of cigarettes and innumerable cups of coffee, occasionally making a phone call to check a name or a reference.

  A youthful reporter at the next desk wrenched a sheet of copy paper out of his typewriter and asked if Rourke had any aspirin. Rourke shook his head. “What’s the matter, headache?”

  The other reporter, whose name was Mehlmann, was leaning forward, very pale, his head on both fists. “Headache and gut-ache. Every time I go into that goddamned morgue, I can taste it the rest of the day.”

  “Don’t let MacMaster know you feel like that,” Rourke said, “or he’ll see to it you catch every morgue story as long as you work here.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Mehlmann agreed. “This is the third time in ten days. If I get one more wood-alcohol poisoning, I may drink a pint of paint-remover myself. I damn near covered this one from the facts on the police blotter. But it’s just as well I talked to the morgue people. The stiff had a copy of last night’s Surfside Raceway program in his pocket. That gave me my lead.”

  Rourke’s swivel chair squeaked as it came around. “Did they identify him?”

  Mehlmann checked his copy. “Joseph Dolan.” Looking up, he saw Rourke’s face. “What’s the matter, Tim?”

  Rourke was on his feet, clutching the corner of his desk. “Where was he?”

  “In a hallway on Fifth Street. Did I miss something? I only gave it three paragraphs.”

  He held out the yellow sheet of copy paper, but Rourke waved it aside. “I don’t want to see the damn story. Tell me what happened.”

  “I didn’t really go into it, Tim. Apparently he went to sleep where they found him. No identification, no money. A little chin beard, five or six days’ stubble everywhere else. He’d been picked up for vagrancy a couple of years back, and they had his prints. Two other bums were found dead in that neighborhood within the last week—damn fools made the mistake of getting drunk on methanol, wood alcohol. Somebody broke into a hardware store a while back, and the cops think that’s where the stuff came from. They did an autopsy on Dolan. It was methanol, all right, maybe not in pure form. Naturally everybody figured this was more of the same. When a dead man hasn’t shaved for a week, of course there’s not much pressure. Tim, does the name Dolan mean something to you?”

  “Damn right,” Rourke said grimly. He stood there for another second, gripping the corner of his desk. Poor Joey, he said to himself. He should have been satisfied with small bets and an easy life. He should never have started dreaming about big money. Somebody had read about the two wood-alcohol deaths, and had thought he could drop Dolan in a hallway and no questions would be asked. But Tim Rourke had some questions, by God. He made himself a promise. By the time he was finished with this, whoever had done it would be very sorry.

  His lips set, he strode to the sports side of the city room. Ad Kimball, working on his selections for the races that evening, looked up as Rourke stopped beside him. He put his head in his hands and groaned.

  “I’d almost forgotten I was sick,” he said. “Then you have to come along and remind me. Have you ever tried reading a race chart with a hangover? After about two minutes, that small print starts squirming around like beetles.”

  “Come over and talk to MacMaster with me,” Rourke said. “I don’t want to explain things twice.”

  “Why? I don’t talk to city editors unless I have a good reason.”

  Rourke picked up the phone on his desk and asked for an outside line, then dialed Michael Shayne’s number. Lucy Hamilton, Shayne’s brown-haired secretary, told him her boss was working on something on Miami Beach.

  “Have him phone me at the paper if he calls in, will you, Lucy?” Rourke hung up and told Kimball, “Bring those programs. We’re going to be talking about horses.”

  MacMaster, the city editor, was a bald, cold-eyed man who chewed on a dead cigar as Tim Rourke told him about the phone call from Dolan, the fruitless trip to Surf-side Raceway, Dolan’s mention of danger and his death in Miami a few hours later.

  “Spell it out,” MacMaster said. “You think somebody killed him?”

  “All I know,” Rourke said, biting off his words in a disgusted voice, “is that I gave up on him last night. I let people persuade me that he’d made up this twin-double fantasy to con me out of five hundred bucks. I don’t know if I was right or wr
ong. It seems to me I’ve got to find out.”

  “OK,” MacMaster said. “Your hunches pay off about fifty percent of the time, and that’s good enough for me. I don’t have to tell you what the cops are going to say. They’re going to say, ‘Get the hell out of here and stop bothering us.’”

  “The hell with the cops. They go by the law of averages. Here’s a guy with a vagrancy record. He looks like a bum and smells like a bum. He never owned a TV set or subscribed to the Reader’s Digest. Probably he never paid an income tax in his life. He has wood alcohol in him, and the law of averages says don’t give it another thought. I need some more facts before I talk to the cops. I want to go up to the track and ask some questions about those twin-double races.”

  “Kimball,” MacMaster said.

  The sports writer started. “Yeah?”

  “What do you think of Rourke’s idea?”

  “That somebody fed this bum wood alcohol because he found out about a scheme to beat the twin? Tim knows what I think. I think it’s ludicrous. Sure, thousands of people buy twin-double tickets every night. So far there’s always been at least one winner, and there can be as many as a couple of hundred. If I understand what Tim’s trying to say, he thinks that two of the four races tonight are fixed. I know,” he said to Rourke as he started to interrupt. “‘Fix’ is the wrong word. Let’s put it this way. Some person or persons unknown have reason to believe that two of the horses entered in the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth races are reasonably certain to win. Is that better? All right. If this was absolutely certain, and if Dolan knew what they were up to and threatened to give them away, in which case they would stand to lose a large sum of money, of course they might kill him. But murder’s an extreme way to handle the problem, it seems to me. In the first place, nothing is absolutely certain in harness racing. In the second place, why would it occur to Dolan to give them away? All he’d want would be to cut himself in on it. This would lower their payoff a little, but not too much. A twin-double investment takes capital. Say without Dolan there would be twenty winning tickets. With him there would be twenty-one. That wouldn’t make enough of a difference to justify a murder.”