Nice Fillies Finish Last

by Brett Halliday

  “If you don’t mean money, what do you mean?”

  She shrugged helplessly. “I wish I could tell you. Maybe its only a matter of face, or prestige. Maybe Larry didn’t want to let her do it and she made him. Certainly it was a dumb move. There’s more going on in that marriage than meets the eye. They aren’t a relaxed couple at the best of times, but tonight they’re both wound up to the point where, if things don’t go according to schedule—and how often does that happen?—there’s sure to be fireworks. Mike, would you be a good sweet man and tell me what your role is in this?”

  “Why should I?”

  “I thought you’d say something like that. Well, I may be making a mistake, but what the hell? Claire’s carrying a gun in her bag.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You think I’m imagining things, do you? I saw it! She knows I’m an old friend of Larry’s, an old and good friend. What if my trainer’s right? What if Fussbudget wins? She’ll think Larry and I arranged it to make her look foolish, and it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody gets shot. I don’t want it to be me, and I don’t want it to be Larry. I’m being melodramatic, but why else would she bring a gun to the races? You tell me.”

  “Mrs. Moon, are you having an affair with Paul Thorne?”

  Lines like brackets appeared around her mouth. “Exactly what do you mean by that?”

  “Does that mean the answer’s no?”

  “Damn right the answer’s no! You’d do better to put that question to Claire. I admire the man’s looks, but I would no more let him—Have you ever looked at his fingernails? He has too much of a horse smell for my taste.”

  Shayne finished his drink impassively.

  She put both hands on the table and said quietly, “All right. But will you please not tell Larry? That was a rather low blow, my friend. I shouldn’t have sounded quite so horrified. It’s nothing important, but if Larry heard about it, it would offend his esthetic taste, as it offends mine, in a way. I’ve been a friend of Larry’s since before he married Claire. As soon as they break up, I intend to take a very cold aim and see if I can bring him down. That’s no secret. I’ve given him fair warning. You can go now. I’ll pay for the drinks.”

  “They’re on me,” Shayne said with a grin.

  “You could be quite nice if you weren’t such a bastard. I really looked bad on that one, didn’t I?”

  The crowd was drifting back from the betting machines. Shayne spotted Domaine, at a circular table with his back to the track, studying a program. Claire, beside him, was smoking one of her little cigars, looking coldly elegant, untouched by the common passion of the people around her. Shayne stood still, which set up a slight eddy. It caught her attention. He moved his head toward the door. She frowned and nodded, then laid her half-smoked cigar in an ashtray and spoke to her husband.

  Shayne returned to the betting gallery, which was feverishly lighted by the great neon signs: CASHIERS, SELLERS, $10 COMBINATION, $2 STRAIGHT. Would-be bettors at the ends of the lines ducked from one line to another, trying to find one that was moving fast enough so they could get their money down before the bell clanged. Claire sauntered out after him, not hurrying. Faint lines around her mouth showed her tension.

  “Is Tim Rourke all right?” she said urgently. “I called the hospital and they acted very strangely. They said they couldn’t give out any information. Why? What’s happened?”

  “They probably couldn’t find him. As a matter of fact, he’s here. He doesn’t feel so hot, but not because of the pills you gave him. Can you get away for awhile?”

  “Away?”

  “Yeah. I need some help. It’s too complicated to go into. What about the Moon horse in the ninth? Has that made any change in your plans?”

  “No. Larry thinks she’s trying to be funny. Paul knows the horse well and says there’s nothing to worry about. How long would I have to be gone?”

  “Maybe an hour.”

  She thought and nodded. “I’ll tell him I ran into some friends, and they want me to watch the next few races with them. We’re getting on each other’s nerves. I’ve done everything there is to do. Larry’s going to buy the tickets.”

  “Is it OK for him to buy them himself?”

  “For the first half. Other people are lined up to make the exchange before the eighth and collect when it’s over, if all goes well.” She held up her crossed fingers. “Mike, at dinner all of a sudden Larry started talking about things we did together when we first knew each other. He actually seemed quite sentimental, and I don’t know how to explain it. He’s taken a half-humorous tone with me for a long time, as though I’m a barely competent actress he’s watching on the stage. At one point he took my hand. He doesn’t do that kind of thing when we’re by ourselves, let alone in a public restaurant. Molly Moon turned several different shades of pink. She has designs on my husband, I believe. Probably she’d be a better wife for him than I am. And the really surprising thing—don’t ask me to explain it—is that he’s started worrying about letting me meet Paul alone at the motel after the races for the payoff. Why don’t we put the money in the mail? Well, for one thing it’s riskier. Paul would yell bloody murder if we made a change in plans this late. He’d suspect something.”

  “Sure. He’s got that loan shark on his neck. That was probably a twenty-four-hour loan.”

  “Larry doesn’t know about that. Why should he suddenly decide that Paul’s too flakey and unpredictable to deal with face to face? It didn’t bother him last night or this afternoon.”

  Shayne worried his earlobe. “Let’s see how it develops. Do your best to look casual.”

  When they returned to the clubhouse, the horses in the third race were scrambling for positions on the rail at the first turn. Mrs. Moon was back at the bar, working at a new drink. Everybody else was watching the horses, but she watched Shayne, her eyes hard, her mouth unsmiling. Larry Domaine took his binoculars down for an instant to smile at Claire when she slid in beside him. When the race was over, she said something to him and he nodded.

  “I got quite a meaningful look from Molly Moon,” Claire told Shayne when she joined him. “She doesn’t like me, I fear. Where are we going?”

  “Now don’t jump. To the Golden Crest Motel. I’ll explain on the way.”

  They went down the long ramp and along the apron in front of the stands, passing in front of Rourke. Win Thorne was pushing off from the paddock rail as they came past. She looked from Shayne to Claire, who had briefly dazzled her husband in spite of being so thin. She made some comment under her breath.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m planning to do,” Shayne said after helping Claire into her husband’s Cadillac. “It won’t work if Domaine insists on making the payoff by mail, but let’s go ahead with it anyway. You may have to tell him there’s a loan shark involved, and Paul’s insisting on getting the money tonight. I’ve still got a key to room 17. We’re going to plant a mike under the bed in your room and run a wire through to a recorder, so when you and Thorne start talking we can get the dialogue on tape. I want to work out your end of it beforehand, so we’ll get the kind of statement we want.”

  “Mike, do you think Paul killed Joey?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  He turned toward Fort Lauderdale, and they drove for a time in silence. She glanced at him, starting to speak, then turned abruptly to look out the rear window.

  “Mike,” she said excitedly, “somebody’s following us!”

  CHAPTER 16

  ADJUSTING THE MIRROR, Shayne picked up a pair of headlights. He put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with the dashboard lighter, watching the headlights and the speedometer as well as the road ahead. There wasn’t much traffic, and in a moment he was doing eighty, without strain. The headlights behind him stayed the same size in the mirror. He zoomed past a slower car; the headlights followed. He slackened speed, and the car behind him kept the interval.

  “Let’s not worry about it,” he said. “We have the speed t
o lose him, but we don’t want any trouble with the troopers. I’ll take him through town.”

  “It’s a cab,” she said, peering back. “A Yellow Cab. That’s good, isn’t it? You’ll be able to tell when he’s not there.”

  “An experienced cabdriver can be a hard man to shake. Turn around, Claire, and let me handle it.”

  He made the turn toward the ocean. Instead of continuing across Route 1, he turned north again and led the taxi into Pompano Beach. He drifted up to a green light, then accelerated hard as the light changed and went through on the yellow. At the next corner he cut through a gas station, sliding past a car drawn up at the pumps, shot into a parking area in front of a shopping center, down a lane between parked cars and out by a different exit.

  “I think that does it,” he said, watching the mirror.

  He turned another corner, tires squealing, then another, and slipped into the first open parking space. He cut his lights and waited.

  “Who could it be?” Claire said anxiously.

  “I don’t want to find out,” Shayne answered.

  Turning on his lights, he drove to the beach and took A1A south to the motel. He kept one eye on the mirror, saying nothing.

  Parking, he reached into the back seat for the paper bag containing the tools he had taken out of the locked chest in his Buick. He also brought out the bourbon bottle. He held it up to the light to check the level of the whiskey. It was still a third full.

  Claire had gone ahead to unlock Room 18.

  “God, that was a ride,” she said after he closed the door and turned on the lights. She looked around at the anonymous furniture, the big double bed and the blank TV screen. “Mike, all of a sudden I don’t like the idea of being alone in here with Paul Thorne. I wish there was a connecting door we could unlock.”

  Shayne emptied the paper bag on the bed. “I brought your husband’s bourbon so you can give him a drink. If you’ve got forty-odd thousand bucks to give him, he shouldn’t make any trouble. Who knows? He might even relax for a minute. It won’t last, but maybe while he’s counting his money and having a drink with a lovely woman, he’ll forget how mad he is about being a poor hill boy surrounded by glamorous people who inherited their dough, if that’s the main thing that’s been bugging him.”

  “Fine,” she said. “He’s relaxed. Now what do I do?”

  “Now you ask him, in a very friendly way, about Joey Dolan. What we’re doing here, Claire, is testing a theory. I’ve only exchanged one sentence with Paul Thorne, and I may have figured him all wrong. But I’ve heard a lot about him, and it seems to me that if he killed Dolan, and did it so ingeniously that he can’t be touched for it, he’ll want to brag about it to somebody.”

  He moved the TV set out from the wall. Using a small brace and bit, he began to drill through the baseboard, nearly flush with the floor.

  He went on, squinting to keep cigarette smoke out of his eyes, “And I think you’re the one person he’ll want to brag about it to. In a way, this should make you even. Be thinking about how to bring up the subject. We’ll run a rehearsal on the way back to the track. After winning all that money, you’ll be excited, naturally. You were scared for a while, but now you’re pleased with yourself, pleased with the horses, pleased with Thorne.”

  “I hope I can say it so he believes it.”

  Shayne ran a wire through the hole to the next room. After tying in a small button microphone, he screwed the microphone to the underside of the bed, ran the wire down the leg of the bed and pressed it out of sight against the edge of the wall-to-wall carpeting. Then he pushed the TV set back into place. Claire was sitting in the single armchair, smoking a small cigar while she watched.

  “Mrs. Moon tells me you’re still carrying that .38,” Shayne said. “Let’s see it.”

  He put out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, she took it out of her bag and gave it to him. “I suppose it was a stupid idea,” she said. “It didn’t seem to impress him much this afternoon.”

  “You were lucky, Claire. When there’s a gun in a quarrel, the odds are good that it’ll go off. That wouldn’t have solved any of your problems.”

  After ejecting the cartridges he clamped one of them into a small portable vise he had brought with the other tools.

  “Get me a cake of soap from the bathroom.”

  He pried the slug out of the cartridge case and pressed the cartridge down hard on the soap. The sharp rim drilled out a neat core, which he trimmed and tamped down.

  “You don’t have to go to all this trouble, Mike,” she said. “I can leave the gun in the car.”

  “No, you had it this afternoon, and if you don’t have it tonight, he might wonder why not. Don’t rely on just one approach. Friendliness may not work. If it doesn’t, try getting him mad.”

  “That won’t be hard.”

  “Don’t just accuse him of killing Joey. Make fun of him for doing it in such a fruity way. Poison’s a woman’s weapon. If you get him mad enough to remember your gun, I don’t want it to be a gun that shoots real bullets.”

  He prepared three blank rounds and reloaded the .38, spinning the cylinder to bring the first blank in under the hammer. He gave it back to Claire.

  Then they picked up the room, putting everything Shayne had brought, except the bourbon, back in the paper bag. Claire cleaned the ashtrays. He looked around a last time, to be sure they hadn’t forgotten anything, then turned off the lights and, going to the window, looked down at the parking strip. He swore under his breath.

  Claire came over beside him. “What is it?”

  “A Yellow Cab, that’s all. It could be a coincidence, but I doubt it, somehow.”

  “Where?”

  “Not out in front. Up next to the gas station.”

  She took a quick breath. “Are you sure it wasn’t there when we came?”

  “No. But we’d better play percentages and assume it’s the same cab that was following us before.” He drew on his cigarette slowly. “It must be somebody who knows about this motel. After we lost him in Pompano Beach, he came past and saw the Cadillac.”

  Her hair brushed against Shayne’s shoulder. He could hear her breathing softly. Her perfume was sharp and somehow disturbing.

  “It can’t be Thorne,” he said. “He couldn’t leave the track. I think his wife saw us leave. If that’s who it is—” He swore again. “He’s going to suspect we’ve been bugging the room. That’s not a specialty of mine, but he won’t know it. He’ll be on his guard. He might even refuse to meet you here at all. So there goes a good idea down the drain.”

  A spark of light appeared as the driver, in the front seat of the cab, pulled at his cigarette.

  “I wonder if you’re thinking the same thing that I am, Claire,” Shayne said.

  “I can’t think at all,” she said desperately. “My brain isn’t functioning.”

  He turned toward her in the darkness. “See if you can get it to function. Try to think of some other reason why we might be spending half an hour alone in a motel room.”

  He could feel her breath on his face. After a moment she said softly, “It’s functioning, Mike.”

  “It could have happened like this. I called you out of the clubhouse and said I had to talk to you alone. I knew you hadn’t checked out of this motel. When we got here—yeah, this would fit—I held the bottle of bourbon up to see how many drinks were left. It might be fairly convincing, if you look a little disheveled when we walk out. If I’m wearing some of your lipstick.”

  “Mike, good heavens. I don’t mean it’s such a horrifying thought. It’s just such a change of subject.”

  Shayne laughed. “I’m not suggesting that we actually do anything. I just think we ought to put on a small act. Give me your lipstick. I’ll see what I can do in the dark.”

  “No, you couldn’t make it look authentic, Mike. I have no objection to kissing you. I might even enjoy it.”

  She took the lapels of his coat and came in against him. “But I have
a funny feeling. This whole thing is window-dressing, isn’t it? The microphone, the questions you want me to ask Paul. Eighteen thousand people saw us leave the track. You pulled out of the parking lot as though you had all the time in the world. And you weren’t really trying too hard to lose that cab, were you? That was more window-dressing.”

  Shayne put an arm around her lightly. “Claire, will you trust me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in a muffled voice. “Here we are, in a motel room with the lights out. Of course we’re making love. What else could we be doing? But how is that going to help?”

  “I can’t tell you yet,” Shayne said. “You’re right, there’s a certain amount of sleight-of-hand in this, but that goes for everything else. Everything’s faked. Nothing’s the way it seems. Dolan wasn’t killed because he blundered onto a betting scheme. He didn’t go anywhere near the Belle Mark last night. Your husband didn’t loan me his Cadillac because he was sorry Brossard ran me off the road. And that’s the way it goes, all down the line. This whole twin-double deal is a hoax. Take my word for it, and do what I tell you. You have to talk to Thorne alone and ask him those questions about Dolan, and if I told you everything I’ve found out and everything I guess, you couldn’t make it look real. I hoped that all the dodging around we did in Pompano Beach would convince you. It’s true, I was a bit slow at the crucial turns, but I didn’t think you noticed.”

  “I didn’t. I just had a kind of prickly feeling.”

  They were still standing together, with Claire clinging to him in the dark as though she had to hang onto something or she would slide to the floor. Footsteps approached along the outside gallery. She froze until they passed.