“Jockey from the Coast. Beau told Lanier we needed somebody topnotch, and Whit had already hired the best around here for Ginger Peachy. Winston was flying in last night. Maybe he put up at the Inn and slept through his call. I’d better check.”
I started to wheel myself over to the phone when McLane broke in. “Hold it. Never mind. I’ll do it. Maybe I’d like to have a talk with him.”
“What for?”
“Use your head, Wyman. Maybe he did get his call, and maybe he was here on time, even a little early.”
“Oh, my God. You think he had some reason to kill Ginger?”
“Who knows? So far I can’t see that anybody had a reason, but she’s dead just the same. I’d just like to see him first, that’s all.”
“Sure.”
My stomach didn’t know whether to sink, or swim up to my mouth. This whole business was getting to me. Where was Billy? I hadn’t given him a thought since they’d found Ginger’s body. He should have been around the jockey’s room long since or even checking out Little Bit.
One thing I knew, he hadn’t come around looking for either Beau or me while we were in my place from six o’clock. Not just in from a plane trip. He’d probably had a night at the bar and was hung over.
McLane was doggedly pursuing it. “Isn’t it a little strange to bring in a rider days before the race? Thought that stakes was for Saturday. This is only Thursday.”
“Didn’t think you followed the horses, McLane. And no, it’s not that unusual. You want your jockey to get the ride and feel of the horse a few times. Get ’em to know each other. Especially when it’s an important race. If you can afford it.”
“This was to be a big one, then?”
“For green two-year-olds, yes. Couple of good horses. Better’n most. Nice possibilities.” It was an understatement.
“You said ‘if you can afford it’ — you and Beau could, then?”
“Not us — Lanier. He pays the bills. Of course, we have to convince him it’s worth it. Usually we can’t. In this case we did.”
“Isn’t it odd, too, for a filly to go against colts? I mean Ginger Peachy running against your horse—”
It hurt just to hear that name. Why did Whit have to call the horse after his daughter?
I swallowed, hard. “There you’re right, mostly. In an ordinary year colts are tougher, stronger, bigger. But Whit thought so much of that chestnut he wanted to see right away what she could do. And there aren’t so many good fillies out this way. She’d outclass ’em, and he figured she might go rank without competition.”
“Rank?”
“Flat, stale, no drive.”
“Oh.”
“Anything else, Lieutenant?” I asked. “I’d like to help you all I can. What did you get from High-and-Mighty Howard?”
“Don’t like him much, huh?”
“I don’t have to.”
“Well, he claims the Dunbar girl left his place about five.”
“Alone? The skunk didn’t even take her home?”
“He says she wanted to go alone. Wanted to take a look at her horse.”
“So that’s what she was doing there in street clothes. Seemed kinda funny. Usually she’s in riding breeches or jeans when she comes to the track.”
McLane was absent-mindedly twisting an exercise rod. “Why would she be out there and not at the barns?”
“I dunno. Maybe she was waiting for the workouts. Maybe she wanted to time everybody and compare Ginger Peachy with ’em.”
“She didn’t have a stopwatch, or we haven’t found it. Matter of fact, we didn’t find any purse, either. Sort of funny, don’t you think?”
“How?”
“Woman comes from an all-nighter, she’s had her purse along. And as you said, she usually wore casual clothes around the stables, so if she’d stopped off home, wouldn’t she’d have changed?”
“I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“Don’t really know, myself. Just puzzling it out as I go along. Another thing, if anybody’d been at the barns, wouldn’t somebody know — you, or security personnel?”
“There aren’t that many. A few stable boys. Of course, Whit has Bessie.”
“Who’s Bessie?”
“Not who — what. Bessie’s a goat. Lots of horses want company, so trainers have a dog or a chicken or something. Whit has a goat, and the darned thing’s a watchgoat, if you can believe it. Sets up a baaahing like you’d never forget if anybody goes near that horse. Except Ginger and Whit, of course.”
“So that knocks out the idea of a stranger around, I guess.”
“Seems so,” I said. “You got any ideas yet? Think maybe somebody shot her by mistake?”
He snorted. “At close range, in the back of the head? In those clothes and with that hair, nobody was going to take her for a jockey or for Bulldog Smith or anybody else. Any other dames around here somebody might be gunning for?”
I tried to think up a good possibility, but Ramon’s wife was tiny and dark-haired, Bulldog’s missus seldom came around and was built like a blockhouse, anyway, and the groupies didn’t turn up until afternoon.
The telephone clanged and I grabbed it, grateful for the interruption. “Yeah, he’s right here. For you, McLane.”
“Yeah. Okay. Got it. What caliber? Any idea yet how long? The angle? Humpf. That makes it a little interesting, doesn’t it?” He looked around at the paintings on the walls and then at me and then down at his own fingernails as if he could find the answer there as he listened to the voice at the other end of the line. I’d recognized it as that of Sergeant Happ, an old friend.
“Um. And I want you to check on a jockey named Winston” — he looked at me for confirmation and I nodded — “Billy Winston. Stayed at the Inn, probably. Planed in from the Coast last night... What? Oh, damn. How is he? Okay. I’ll be down soon. Find out all you can. Get that full medical soonest.”
He jammed the receiver down.
“What’s up?”
“Your Billy Winston got himself clunked on the head in a barroom brawl. Spent the night in Observation at the hospital.”
“So that lets him out. And explains where he was when he was supposed to be here.”
“That it does. Unless the brawl was a put-up job. But I can’t think why.” Abruptly he asked, “You much of a betting man these days, Wyman?”
It seemed a little out of context, but I answered him anyhow.
“A little here, a little there. Play poker.”
“That where you pick up the change for all this expensive stuff?”
It was the second time this morning I’d had to explain how I supported my lifestyle and it rankled a little, but I did it again. He seemed satisfied.
“Bet the horses much?”
“Some. I play my horses pretty safe, though. I’ve never been one for hunches.”
“Yeah. Even on the force you never went off half cocked or on impulse. Got to play it that way sometimes, though — by a gut feeling.”
He reminded me of Whit Dunbar and his “look of eagles.”
“You’ve got a gut feeling about this?” I asked.
“Um. And I don’t like it at all.”
“I guess none of us likes this whole thing,” I said.
“Wyman, she was shot hours before she was found, it looks like. And the angle of the bullet was down. Somebody standing over her, or somebody tall. The examiner isn’t through, of course, but he’s pretty sure.”
I gave him an astonished look. “But that means somebody was prowling around here in the middle of the night.”
“And you didn’t know it, and the goat didn’t sound any alarm. And more likely it was sometime shortly after five a.m., when she left Lanier—”