Nice Fillies Finish Last

by Brett Halliday

  “Stop it.”

  “And then when everything wasn’t just so—” He was starting to shout again. “What kind of a lay were you looking for? Some three-quarters pansy, who’d say may I, honey, do you mind, sweetheart? You drove me out of my head with your complaints, and when I couldn’t put up with that mouth any more and smacked you, what did it make me? A big dumb gorilla.”

  “Paul, I’m warning you.”

  “If you didn’t like the way I was, what did you sleep with me for?”

  “You’ve always distorted everything, and you’re still at it. Here’s the thousand. Count it and get out of here.”

  “You hated me from the word Go. You couldn’t be satisfied with getting me beat up and knocked out of the business, back to scratching for a living on that goddamn farm. Not you, not Claire Domaine who gets her picture in the paper. You could have used somebody besides Rutherford and I never would have known who was murdering me. But you wanted me to know. That was the main part of it.”

  “What about Rutherford?” she demanded.

  “Goldy Rutherford! I was there on the table getting my leg tied up, and the nurse says to the doctor, ‘Did you hear that Rutherford just cashed a winning ticket in the twin?’” And the doctor gives a big laugh. So does everybody. Even the mutuels office knows Rutherford is a Domaine beard. You’re on thin ice there, baby—they’re all wondering why you used somebody that obvious.”

  “You’re mad. I haven’t talked to Rutherford since—”

  “Since last night. Sure, sure. There are eight tickets still out. How many have you got?”

  “Keep your hands out of my bag!”

  A chair scraped and went over. Shayne tensed and took hold of the shower curtain.

  “And here it is!” Thorne exclaimed. “Twin double, six and eight! Another twenty-two grand. So you didn’t have any dough on Fussbudget! Put that down.”

  There was a hard thud. Then the sound came that Shayne had been waiting for. The gun banged, for an instant there was silence.

  “Listen,” Thorne said, “I didn’t mean to do that, Claire. All I want is my split. Claire, baby, I wouldn’t shoot you. What did you have to bring a gun for, for God’s sake? I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  There was no answer.

  Thorne’s voice was suddenly uncertain, the voice of a shaken small boy. “I didn’t want to do all those things to you, Claire. I’ve got to go now. You understand why I can’t stay, don’t you? It was an accident, but people wouldn’t believe it. I’ll call a doctor. You’ll be all right.”

  The door opened and closed.

  Shayne stepped out of the shower stall. Claire lay on her side on the floor beside the bed. The gun was near her hand. She moved her head, and made a whimpering sound. Shayne saw the mark on her forehead where Thorne had hit her just before the gun went off.

  Hearing a key scrape in the lock, he faded back into the shower. Footsteps entered the room.

  “Good evening, darling?” Domaine’s voice said. “Having trouble?”

  CHAPTER 19

  THE FOOTSTEPS softly crossed the carpet.

  “Larry,” Claire whispered.

  “I see you’re still breathing,” her husband said. “That’s unfortunate. Did you think I was going to stand by and let you sleep with half the male population of southern Florida?”

  There was a rustling noise, followed by a quick shot.

  Shayne burst out of the bathroom and struck in a blur of motion, getting the gun in one hand and back-handing Domaine very hard with the other. Domaine went over the double bed and off it on the other side. Claire still lay on the carpet, frozen, her eyes wide with shock. There was a black powder burn on her forehead. She had just been shot by two men in succession, but it almost seemed that the one she was most afraid of was Shayne.

  He gave her a warning look and went after her husband, who was coming to his feet. Another openhanded blow from Shayne sent him sprawling into the armchair.

  “Goddamn it,” Shayne said in savage self-disgust. “I had you tabbed as a talker. I thought you’d want to torment her a little before you shot her.”

  Domaine reached up, his hand trembling badly, and removed his pince-nez, which miraculously had stayed clamped to his nose after two blows. “I was in a hurry. She’s dead, of course?”

  “Taking a .38 slug in the brain isn’t the best way to stay healthy,” Shayne said grimly. “I’m sorry it happened like this. She was a damn fine woman. Maybe we can get both you and Thorne for it. I’ll sure as hell try.”

  “It was a gamble,” Domaine said without hope. “A fine woman! I used to think so before she betrayed me with a dirty redneck, without even a grammar-school education. She used to drench herself with perfume after one of their adulterous sessions, but she always came back smelling of horses. Nobody named Domaine has ever put up with that. I happen to believe in an old-fashioned concept called honor.”

  “Why didn’t you divorce her?” Shayne snapped.

  “Charging adultery? Naming Paul Thorne as correspondent? No, thank you. She was going to have his child! She was a whore!” He put his pince-nez back on. “It may be a morbid question, considering what has just happened, but how was she in bed, Shayne?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the detective said uneasily.

  “You’ll be named, my big-muscled bucko! I’ll name you in court. The jury will understand why I had to kill her. The child Thorne planted in her miscarried, but what if she had conceived again from her connection with you?”

  “It was a hell of a sneaky way to try to kill her,” Shayne said, “The jury may not be able to understand that.”

  “What should I have done, surprised her in bed with Thorne at Frank Brossard’s apartment and killed them both with my great grandfather’s dueling pistols? I considered it. In my great grandfather’s day, a husband’s honor meant something. If he’d been arrested at all, it would have been the merest formality. New times, new methods. You did me a favor, you know, you and Claire, with that quick roll in the hay. I’ve got the cabdriver as a witness. Wiping off her lipstick as you came out. Checking your zipper to be sure it was closed. I saw that. I’d almost decided to forgive her, but to go off like that, with someone she’d known only a few hours, a private detective—it drove me out of my mind.”

  Shayne looked worried. “I don’t think you’ll get away with it. I admit it won’t be very pleasant for me.”

  “I’ll give you money,” Domaine suggested, more confidently. “Quite a bit of money. I slipped a winning twin-double ticket in Claire’s purse. We have to leave that for the police, to establish Thorne’s motive for killing her. I have two others. One I’ve already had cashed. I’ll give you the third. There won’t be any trouble, because the police will have a solution ready-made. Thorne thinks he killed her. He has no moral stamina. He’ll babble out a confession the minute a policeman taps him on the shoulder.”

  “It’s risky,” Shayne said, rubbing his chin.

  “In what way? Nobody else heard the shots, or we’d have company by now. Twenty-two thousand dollars, Shayne, and you’ll spare yourself some unsavory publicity.”

  Shayne hesitated. “What bothers me is Joey Dolan. There might be a snag there. If anybody saw you—”

  “You figured that out, did you? Perhaps you’re not quite as stupid as I thought. Set your mind at rest. I took pains not to be seen. Claire kept a few bottles of sherry for him, which she’d dole out one at a time—a real humanitarian. I poured out part of one bottle and filled it with wood alcohol, and he never noticed the difference. I picked him up in Claire’s Mercedes and took him for a ride, to use a fine old gangster expression. I told him I wanted to talk to him about my plans for the twin double. About our plans. He’d already passed out by the time I unloaded him in Miami.”

  “We had a report he was going to Brassard’s apartment. What was that all about?”

  Domaine chortled. “You don’t mean to tell me that some anonymous informant call
ed your secretary?”

  “How did you know that?” Shayne said, surprised.

  “The anonymous informant, c’est moi! I faked the voice pretty well, if I say so myself. My late wife had alarmed me by telling me she’d been questioned by Michael Shayne, the detective, and I thought up this scheme in the time it took me to dial your office number. I wanted to get you out of the area, I even provided you with transportation. And nosing around the Belle Mark, I knew you’d come across traces of my wife and Paul Thorne. That was the one thing I needed, someone to give the police, the facts about the adultery in the first crucial moments after they found the body. I was almost aghast at my own cleverness.”

  “So even if Dolan’s death is put down as a murder,” Shayne said slowly, “they’ll think Thorne did that one too.” He let a faint note of excitement enter his voice. “I think we might get away with it!”

  “Of course we’ll get away with it. Who’s worried about Dolan? Nobody. My wife’s death should be a big enough story to blanket everything else. Sex, passion, a crooked twin double—the papers will lap it up.” He took out his wallet. “I was worried unnecessarily, I see. You aren’t the law-and-order fanatic I took you for. Here’s the ticket. Get somebody else to cash it for you.”

  “OK, Tim,” Shayne said in his ordinary voice. “You can come in now.”

  Domaine half-rose and looked quickly at the bathroom. “Tim Rourke? You can’t trick me that easily, Shayne. He’s in the hospital, with severe scalp and face lacerations. He couldn’t possibly—”

  Tim Rourke and the nurse came in together. Domaine cowered back and gave Shayne a look of hatred.

  “Damn you. Damn you.”

  “Everybody tells me you’re a chess player,” Shayne said. “I play poker. This was what is known as a bluff.”

  “I didn’t understand a damn word!” Rourke said excitedly. “Domaine’s the one who killed Joey? Why!”

  Shayne went to the phone. “I think it’s about time we had a few cops. He killed Joey because Joey heard something last night, and saw the owner of the stable with a hypodermic syringe, giving My Treat an injection.”

  “Yeah, but Mike—that comes back to what we’ve been saying. Why would he have to kill Joey? Why not just cut him in?”

  “Domaine wasn’t stimulating the mare, to make sure she won. He was using a depressant, to make sure she lost. That’s the only way to explain what happened. Joey had no way of knowing what was in the syringe. When you see an owner doping a horse, you have to assume he’s out to win some money. If he wanted the horse to lose, he’d simply tell the driver. But Domaine wasn’t doing this for money. He was trying to kill his wife and her lover. Were you planning to get married to Molly Moon if it worked, Domaine?”

  “No,” Domaine said stiffly. “If she told you that she was lying. My honor was at stake.”

  “If that’s going to be your defense,” Shayne said dryly, “good luck with it.”

  He picked up the phone and Rourke cried, “Mike, will you hold it one minute? He was tampering with a horse. How would that kill his wife and her lover?”

  Shayne weighed the phone for an instant, and put it down. “His wife was sleeping with Paul Thorne. Most of that wasn’t her fault. I’m even beginning to think that Domaine, the great chessplayer, set that part of it up as well as the rest. He hammered her down until she couldn’t defend herself against a professional stud like Thorne. The psychiatrists will be talking to him, and we’ll ask them what they think. Once it was underway, she couldn’t break loose. Thorne saw the affair as a chance to start his climb in the world. How did Domaine find out about it? Maybe from Brossard. Maybe Win Thorne told him—she was anxious to break it up.”

  He looked at Domaine for comment. A little smile had appeared on Domaine’s lips. He said coldly, “Go to hell, Shayne.”

  “Look at him, Tim,” Shayne said. “This has its compensations. If the plan had worked, nobody would ever have known how brilliant it all was. It wasn’t Domaine’s fault that it didn’t work. One thing went wrong—Joey Dolan picked last night to sleep in the Domaine tack-room.”

  “That’s absolutely all,” Domaine said softly. “Everything else went off like clockwork.”

  “But what was the plan!” Rourke wailed.

  “His great grandfather could have got away with a double killing in the heat of passion, but things aren’t that simple today. The first thing Domaine did was loan Thorne some money to start his own stable. That was to give the guy a taste of success so he’d miss it more when he didn’t have it. Domaine sold him a couple of lemons. Then Thorne’s one moneymaking horse was killed. Brossard was involved in that. So was Joey Dolan. I saw the film patrol and I couldn’t spot what happened, but I think Brossard will explain it to us as soon as he hears that the boss has been arrested for murder. After that, Domaine pulled a few strings and got Thorne suspended. By this time Thorne was in a serious financial jam, and he needed a big win. Domaine proposed an apparently sure-fire coup. Everybody thought it was a plan to beat the twin double. Actually it was a plan for a double murder. His wife had been doing his betting for him. I think originally all Domaine had in mind was to set up a winning combination and then lose with it by drugging his mare. But then Mrs. Moon told him about Fussbudget. He bought three tickets substituting Fussbudget for My Treat as the winning horse in the ninth race. An old man who is known as a Domaine agent cashed one of them. In the course of their affair, Thorne had given Claire excellent reason to hate him. Naturally he would assume that this was a deliberate scheme, worked out by her, to maneuver him into position so she could sandbag him. By using such an obvious agent, she had wanted to make him realize who was doing it to him. One thing we don’t know is how Domaine talked her into carrying a gun. She thought it was her own idea, but I doubt it.”

  “Claire respected my intelligence,” Domaine said smugly. “She was always responsive to suggestion, bless her.”

  “Domaine could be pretty sure what would happen if he could manipulate these two hopped-up people into a room alone. It almost happened this afternoon, even before Thorne thought he’d been double-crossed. It didn’t matter to Domaine which one turned out to be the killer, and which one the victim. At one point tonight he got cold feet and nearly called it off. If that had happened, we could never have nailed him for Joey’s murder. So I rigged up something with Claire to stir up his sense of honor again. I brought her here for an hour or so, and part of that time the lights were off. I couldn’t tell her we were really setting a trap for her husband, or she wouldn’t have been convincing in her scene with Thorne. I made her think the reason we came was to bug the room.”

  “That surprised me, Mike,” Rourke said. “You’ve never gone in much for that crap.”

  “Nothing actually happened,” Shayne explained to Domaine. “The lipstick on my face was put there for your benefit. I knew it had to be you in the cab.”

  Rourke said, “But last night, Mike, I still don’t see why he had to drug the mare. He could have worked out something with Brossard.”

  “He was looking forward to a big murder trial, either Claire’s trial for the murder of Thorne or Thorne’s trial for the murder of Claire. Everything had to be airtight. He couldn’t let anybody else in on it. Not only that, if Brossard hadn’t been trying, Thorne might have spotted it. As for Joey—tonight, if the killing had gone off on schedule, Joey would know that Domaine had been doping his horse to lose. They could take urine and saliva samples to prove it, and the whole careful fabric would start to unravel. So Joey had to be killed.”

  “Who fired those shots?” Rourke said. “I couldn’t make out.”

  “Thorne fired the first one. Then Domaine slipped in to make sure she was actually dead. She was still breathing, so he put the gun against her forehead and fired again.”

  Miss Mallinson spoke for the first time. “Mike Shayne, how can you sit there calmly telling us about your clever trap? Oh, it was clever, all right! You got him to confess one murder by lettin
g him commit another. I don’t understand you!”

  “Well, you’re a nurse,” Shayne said wearily. “Take a look at the corpse.”

  He lifted the phone and gave the switchboard the number of the Broward County Sheriff’s office. Claire Domaine sat up. As her face appeared above the edge of the bed, bruised and powder-stained, but unmistakably alive, Domaine crouched back in his chair and began to stammer.

  “Wh—wh—wh—”

  He leaped up suddenly, clutching his temples, and screamed like a horse, a shrill, penetrating scream that transfixed everybody in the room. He was rigid for a moment, then slumped to the floor in a faint.

  “Mike, there’s a twin-double ticket on the bed!” Rourke exclaimed. “Six and eight! That’s the winner!”

  Claire came shakily to her feet and looked down at her unconscious husband. “It’s Mike’s,” she said in a dead voice. “That’s his fee for catching the murderer of Joey Dolan.”

  “You may have to twist my arm,” Shayne said, “but I think in the end I’ll probably take it.”

  A voice on the phone said, “Sheriff’s office, Deputy Sheriff Swanson.”

  Shayne’s grin faded. “This is Michael Shayne. I’m in Room 18 of the Golden Crest Motel on A1A. I have a killer for you.”