Afterward, while Carlin and Gerardo trudged back toward the campground, I followed Trudy and Sultan into the staging area, a large indoor enclosure with a dirt floor. Trudy swung out of the saddle and landed on bent knees, her boots sending up a cloud of dust. She was detaching the blue ribbon from Sultan’s bridle when I stepped up beside her and extended my hand for a shake.
“Great ride,” I said. “That bit with the mailbox . . .” I kissed the tips of my fingers and made a kissing sound. “Bravissimo.”
“Seriously?” She had a torch-song voice, rich and warm and throaty. “Bravissimo? Who says that?” But she looked pleased. She gave me an appraising look, then turned her attention to Khanh. “I’ve never seen you two around.”
There were several hundred people in attendance, and at the larger shows, there could be thousands, but I didn’t ask her how she could have expected to remember everyone who ever came to a show. I might have been forgettable, but Khanh was not.
I said, “Someone told me you might be able to help me find a good starter horse.”
“They told you right. You looking to show, or trail ride, or what?”
“I’d like to show. I like the Big Lick, but I’ve heard you can’t win if you don’t sore.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fifteen years ago, maybe.”
“It worries me though. There was that undercover film on YouTube. A top trainer, cooking chemicals into horses’ legs, pressure shoeing . . . If he had to do all that to win, what’s everybody else doing?”
“Soring is a shortcut,” she said. “A way to make an inferior horse do something it was never made to do. I don’t deal in inferior horses. Ergo, no need to sore.”
Ergo. You had to like a woman who could drop that into a casual conversation.
I said, “You show in the Big Lick classes, right?”
“I do, and I come out in the ribbons more often than I don’t, but that’s not all I do. Take Sultan here . . .” She gave the gray horse a pat. “He’s not a Big Lick horse—doesn’t have the movement—but he’s the best damn versatility horse I ever rode.” She gave him an affectionate rub behind the ears. “Trail, pleasure, he even jumps a little.”
“You train him yourself?”
“Since he was a foal.”
“And your others?”
“Mostly I just buy proven winners. Good show horses, good breeding stock. I start with the best, so I can breed the best.” It sounded like a marketing slogan, but she seemed sincere.
“Then you don’t know if they’re sored or not.”
“Don’t know, don’t care.” She gave a self-conscious laugh. “That sounds awful. What I mean is, I check them for scars. My vet checks them. I don’t buy anything that doesn’t look clean. I don’t know how they learned the Big Lick. All I know is, once they come to me, they live like royalty.” I opened my mouth to answer, closed it as she plowed on. “And before you get on your high horse, let me point out that it would be pretty hypocritical, coming from a man in leather boots.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Defensive much?”
“I know the look,” she said. “You’re a crusader. But if your delicate sensibilities can’t handle the Big Lick, show flat shod. Nobody’s twisting your arm.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Who’s this mystery person who steered you my way, anyway?”
“Carlin Underwood.”
She snorted. “That explains the delicate sensibilities. It would be a cold day in hell before you heard a good word about me from Carlin Underwood.”
“Bad blood between you?”
She tilted her head and gave me a long look, as if to determine how close to the Underwoods I might be. She shifted her gaze to a roped-off area at the back of the building, where three men in jeans and work shirts were conducting inspections for a long line of sullen-looking riders. We watched as an inspector with a Magnum, PI mustache shook his head and wrote something on a clipboard. Then Trudy heaved a sigh and said, “She’s a wrecking ball.”
I lifted an eyebrow.
“You asked about Carlin, so I guess you know about Zane. She got inside his head. Turned him against . . . everyone. Against his friends, against his parents. It broke their hearts. He didn’t even come to his father’s funeral, and you can bet little Miss Carlin had a hand in that.”
“A lot of people seem to share your opinion of her. You heard about the barn fire?”
“Everybody’s heard about that.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Carlin will do anything to get attention.”
“You think she set the fire?”
“Anybody who thinks otherwise is either stupid or naive. Zane’s medical expenses must be out the roof. He was all that held their business together. God, that man could charm the pants off an Eskimo in a snowstorm. If that fire was set, I guarantee you Carlin set it. How do you know her, anyway?”
“I’m looking into the fire. Who might have started it.”
“A cop?” Her eyes flashed. “So you lied to me.”
“No, I’m looking into the fire, and I’m looking into buying a horse.”
“But mostly the fire.”
“That’s what pays the rent. But I’m private, not a cop.”
“That makes it better.” The curl of her lips said it didn’t. “Carlin told you I set it?”
“She gave me a list. It was a long list, and you were on it. But you could be right about how it went down.”
“You’d say that whether you thought so or not.”
From the set of her jaw, I could tell she’d made up her mind, and since she was right, I changed the subject. “How did Zane’s father die?”
She stroked Sultan’s muzzle, still angry but reeling it in. “Cancer. Pancreatic. It was awful, watching him just shrink away. Like he was being eaten up from the inside.” She ran her palm down Sultan’s neck. “I guess that’s how it is with Zane now.”
“That was a hell of a tragedy.”
“It was stupid. Zane was one of the best horsemen I ever met, and he broke the first rule of working with horses.”
Khanh piped in, “What first rule?”
Trudy gave her an amused smile. “Keep three quarters of an inch between yourself and the horse’s hooves.”
Khanh frowned, piecing it together.
I said, “It means don’t get kicked.”
“Well,” Trudy said, “Zane broke it pretty spectacularly, don’t you think? The Zane I knew would never have been so careless. But then again . . .” She laid her palm against the wide flat part of Sultan’s face and rubbed. “He hasn’t been the Zane I knew for a long time.”
11.
As Trudy led Sultan away, Khanh said, “Sound like she hate Carlin Underwood. You think maybe she set fire?”
“Could be. Like you said, a woman could have done it.”
“Could be anybody.” A thoughtful look crossed her face. “Could be everybody.”
“Murder on the Orient Express? I guess we can’t rule it out.”
“I not familiar Murder on the Orient Express.”
“It’s a mystery by Agatha Christie. The victim was such a despicable piece of work that everybody on the train wanted to kill him—and they did. They were all in on it together.”
“Carlin Underwood have many enemy,” Khanh said. “Make everything more hard. You think Miss Valentine right about Mrs. Underwood set fire?”
“No. That’s pretty much the only thing I’m sure of.”
“I pretty sure too. So what we do now?”
“I think I’ll take a look around the barns.”
“You not need me, I go help at TASA booth.”
Smart cookie, my sister. Maybe she could earn Gerardo’s trust, find out a little more about his work for the Underwoods and his previous employment with Trehorne.
Or maybe she was just a good person, and I had a suspicious mind. Or maybe . . . I thought of her fingers brushing Gerardo’s, her blush as she snatched her hand back.
“Tell Gerardo hi for me,” I sa
id, and grinned.
For a moment, she seemed at a loss for words. Then, with exaggerated dignity, she said, “He too young for me. Too handsome too,” and fled.
There were twenty barns in the stable area. Nothing picturesque about them, just rectangular block buildings, each with a covered sitting area and a tack room at one end, and two rows of five stalls each, built back to back with the stall gates facing outward. I wandered up and down the aisles, getting a feel for the players and a sense of the layout. Occasionally a horse would poke its head out of its stall and get a rub or a scratch for its trouble.
Each participating owner/trainer had been assigned a barn, and from the signs and banners, all twenty were occupied. Some had horses in all ten stalls, while others had only one or two. Some of the sitting areas were austere—a couple of chairs and a stack of pamphlets on an end table. Others were elaborate, with fountains, potted plants, and videos of their top horses.
Trehorne had a luxurious setup, with a red carpet, a stand of potted plants, and a wide-screen television showing videos of Rogue’s Honor and a few of his other horses. Red velvet cushions softened the lines of a wrought iron bench and matching chairs. The stalls were empty. Waiting for the USDA judges to leave, I guessed.
On the next aisle, a chestnut mare with a blaze stood with her head pulled hard to one side, bridle attached to her girth with a hand’s breadth of play in the rein. I’d seen this done at Arabian and quarter horse shows, and I hadn’t liked it any better then. Some trainers think it’s a clever way to teach a horse to give to the bit. They say that, by turning its head to relieve the pain of the bit on its mouth, the horse becomes more supple and effectively trains itself to give to pressure.
Some trainers are idiots.
But this was not my business. I had no idea whether the horse had been there five minutes or fifty. She was uncomfortable but not in mortal danger. There was no blood at the corners of her mouth. And maybe her owner was on his way back at that very moment to untie her. Still, the blood pulsed in my temples, and the muscles in my neck grew tight.
Trudy would have called it hypocritical, but it left a sour taste in my mouth.
I found a steward, who promised to look into it. Not as satisfying as thumping the owner with a stick, but not as likely to get me thrown into jail, or at least out of the showground.
A few rows down from the little red mare, I came to a barn with a faux marble fountain in front and a blue and silver banner I remembered from my research the night before. Silverwood Springs. Before Dalton’s death, it had belonged to the senior Underwoods. Now I supposed it belonged only to Eleanor.
A woman in black jeans and a white lace blouse sat in a stainless steel chair with a pale blue cushion, a Diet Pepsi in one hand and an unfiltered cigarette in the other. She was leathered and lean as a strip of jerky, and the lines on her face weren’t smile lines. Still, you could see the beauty she must have been once. Her features were regal, her hair dark and full with a touch of gray at the temples. A wayward strand curled across her forehead. Even if I hadn’t seen her picture on the Silverwood Springs website, I would have known her for Zane’s mother. That curl would have given it away.
I walked over to the chair nearest her and said, “Mind if I join you?”
“Not at all.” She waved away her cigarette smoke, gave me an instinctive smile. “How can I help you?”
The sitting area was decorated with potted silver-leaf plants and miniature blue roses. Above us was a ceiling fan, between us a small white table, where a stack of glossy flyers lauding Silverwood’s champions fluttered beneath a blown-glass paperweight.
I introduced myself and gave the same story as before, that she’d been recommended as someone who could help me find a show-quality Big Lick horse.
She arched a brow. “Recommended by whom?”
“Samuel Trehorne, for one.”
“Samuel is a good friend, but I wonder why he’s recommending my horses when he’s got some perfectly good ones of his own to sell.”
“I asked for a list. Told him I wanted to make some comparisons. He seemed pretty confident I’d be back.”
She chuckled. “A lack of confidence has never been one of Samuel’s faults. But you said ‘Samuel Trehorne, for one.’ Who else?”
“Your daughter-in-law. She said you were a breeder of some influence in the Big Lick crowd.”
A chill came into her eyes, and the metaphorical temperature lowered a few degrees. “Carlin finds the Big Lick classes on a par with sacrificing infants to Ba’al. If she thought you were planning to show Big Lick horses, she’d have shown you the door, not offered you a list of recommendations.”
“You don’t like her much.”
“She thinks she’s going to get rid of the Big Lick and save the pretty horses. Not the slightest concern that she’s destroying an entire industry. It’s stupidity. Like burning down your house to get rid of a few spiders in the attic.”
“And she convinced your son she was right.”
“I had one child, Mr. McKean. She took him from me. Then she turned him against me. Then she got him . . .” She took a long drag from the cigarette. “You’ve obviously met Carlin. Did you see my son?”
“I spoke with both of them.”
“Before he met that woman, my son would not have put himself in a position to be trampled to death in a stall. He knew how to control an animal. But she put those ideas in his head. Made him soft. And it got him killed.”
“Zane isn’t dead, Mrs. Underwood.”
“You said you’d seen him.”
“I did.”
She took another long drag, then dropped the cigarette onto the concrete and ground it out with her heel. “Zane was an athlete. A consummate horseman. And now he can’t even take himself to the bathroom. In every way that matters, he isn’t even a man anymore. If he isn’t dead, he might as well be.”
“Harsh words.”
“I loved my son,” she said, but her eyes were flint. “I changed his diapers and wiped his nose, and I’d do it again if he’d come home and forget that blonde bitch and her foolishness. You think I’m harsh? Maybe I am, but I didn’t abandon my son. He abandoned me.”
12.
She was a hard woman, uneasy with forgiveness, and while I couldn’t rule her out, I also couldn’t rule her in. She had an alibi for the time of the fire, a charity event in the next county, at Shelbyville’s Calsonic arena, but that didn’t mean anything. Like the others, she could have hired someone to light the match. I listened to a few bitter memories, then excused myself and made another circuit of the stables.
It was a major faux pas to interfere with another person’s horse. All the same, when I passed by the third time and the little mare was still pulled tightly to the left, I slipped into the stall and latched the door behind me. She was a pretty horse with a kind eye, and when I came in, she didn’t startle or even move away. She just looked resigned.
She was in a long-shanked bit that must have put a lot of pressure on the bars of her mouth, and if I’d had the owner there, I’d probably have punched him in the teeth. Instead I loosened the reins, slipped the bridle off her head, and hung it on the door of the stall. I slid my palm up under her mane, found the muscles of her neck hard and bunched.
I was rubbing the knots out when a voice behind me barked, “What the hell do you think you’re doing to my horse?”
The mare flinched, and I spun to see a guy in gray slacks and a matching jacket standing in the doorway, clenching and unclenching his fists. About my age, midthirties, maybe, a little under six feet and the kind of muscular that came, not from a gym, but from long hours of hauling hay and working horses. A black Harley Davidson bandana stamped with skulls circled his head. It looked out of place with the suit.
I said, “I reckon you forgot you had her all bound up like this.”
“It’s called training, you dickweed. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“If you think this is going to teach h
er anything but that her neck hurts, maybe you should try strapping your nose to your knees, see how you feel in a couple of hours.”
He snorted. “Hell. You’re one of those PETA nut jobs, aren’t you?”
“Not even close.”
“Whatever you are, get the hell away from my horse.”
I gave her neck a final stroke. “As soon as I have your word you won’t tie her back up as soon as I leave.”
“How about you have my word I’ll shove that saddle up your ass?”
His voice had risen, and a crowd was beginning to gather, some looking curious, others resentful.
There was a pressure in my body, a bubble of rage pushing against the inside of my skin.
Let’s do this.
I stepped out of the stall and reached behind me to shoot the latch home. He did a little boxer’s dance on the balls of his feet. I rolled the tension out of my shoulders.
There was a charge in the air, a current of violence flowing between us as if we were connected by cables. It seemed to pulse for a long moment, while he shook out his arms and did his little dance. Then he launched forward, leading with a fist the size of a rugby ball.
I jigged to the side, and the fist shot past. Time slowed, and I noticed, with the clarity that often comes with violence, that his knuckles were red and swollen, sprouting with thin black hairs. Momentum carried him stumbling past me. As he passed, I clapped a hand onto his shoulder, turned him toward me, and swept his feet out from under him. He hit the ground hard, sending up a cloud of dust, and the air whuffed out of him.
He kicked out blindly, missing me by a yard, and scrabbled to rise.
A flash of red at the corner of my eye warned me. I spun and shot out a back kick that caught a second attacker in the gut. He was a lanky man in jeans and a plaid shirt. No one I recognized. He dropped, retching, to his knees, and an ax kick to the shoulder blades finished him.
I stepped away, glanced around at the crowd. The curious had edged back, effectively turning the semicircle into a corral. Three of the resentful—a chubby guy with a wispy black comb-over, and the two men I’d seen with Junior earlier—had peeled off from the group. The blond man and the guy with the comb-over darted toward me, while Smudge hung back.
A Taste of Blood and Ashes Page 7
