“You must really be hungry for that money,” Shayne commented.
“Is that what you think?” she said carelessly.
Shayne, meanwhile, had been looking for the right kind of bar, with booths and not many cars parked in front. He turned onto S. E. Twelfth St. and pulled up almost at once.
“We’re going in here,” he said. “I don’t like to talk to you in public, but I’m expecting a phone call. I want to know a lot more than I do now when we come out. I’m willing to listen as long as it takes.”
He took the key out of the ignition switch and went on, “I meant it when I said you have to talk to me. I have enough now to make a stink in the papers. Once it gets that far, it has to go the rest of the way, and the least that can happen is that you and your husband and Paul Thorne, and possibly Franklin Brossard, will be kicked out of harness racing. That’s why your husband loaned me his car-he wanted to make friends. Why he was willing to put himself into Paul Thorne’s hands, God knows. Well, I’m open to any reasonable compromise. Think about it, Mrs. Domaine.”
“I have thought about it. I’m quite aware of my predicament, I assure you.”
He looked up all around. The bar was just right, fairly noisy, with several empty booths. The corners of her mouth were down, but even so she was probably the best-looking woman who had had a drink there in weeks; there was a flurry among the unattached males at the long bar. Shayne pointed her at an empty booth and stopped at the wall phone.
He dialed his office number in Miami and paid the toll. When the answering service cut in to say that Mr. Shayne was out, he gave them the number of the phone he was calling from, to be passed along to Miss Hamilton when she phoned in. Then he told the bartender his name and ordered a double cognac and a double bourbon.
“Do you want it straight?” he asked when he reached the booth.
“I’d better have soda in this one,” she said. “The last one’s still burning.”
Shayne relayed this to the bartender and carried the drinks himself. He took half his cognac in one swallow, following it with a pull of ice water.
“Before you start talking,” he said, “I’d better tell you that when you and Thorne were in Room 18 at the Golden Crest Motel, I was in Room 17, and I used this listening device.” He showed her the little amplifier. “These are supposed to pick up whispers in a room eighteen by thirty. They aren’t that good. But Room 17 is on the right as you go in. You may remember that the bed in your room is against that wall.”
She stared down at the little gadget in horror. The color that had drained out of her face suddenly came back with a rush. She closed her eyes.
“Yeah,” Shayne said bleakly. He moved a glass swizzle stick between the cognac glass and the water glass, and pushed the glasses together. “Here’s the bed, here’s the wall, here’s the pickup. The reception was fine. That’s why I don’t like these bugs and I try not to use them. Everybody’s entitled to a certain amount of privacy. I’m the one who had the switchboard phone you, and I think you’ll remember that the call arrived in the nick of time. I’m also the one who hammered on the wall.”
“Thank you,” she said in a strangled voice.
“You’re welcome.”
Instead of pouring her small glass of whiskey over the ice in her highball glass, she drank it straight. It burned her throat and started her coughing. Shayne went back to the bar for more bourbon. She had stopped coughing by the time he returned.
“You have a way of springing things,” she said. “That’s your business, of course, and I’d probably better save my indignation for Paul Thorne. I really am grateful for that phone call. I suppose some private detectives might have let it go on in the hope of finding out something. There’s one thing I don’t believe came up in the conversation. I gave Joey Dolan a pint of sherry last night.”
Shayne leaned forward. “When?”
“Late.”
She took out a package of little cigars. Shayne lighted one for her and started a cigarette of his own.
“You’ll want to know about my evening,” she said, “I left Paul a message to meet me in Palm Beach soon after the last race. I worded it so it was clear that I wanted to talk about horses and nothing else. I broached the twin-double idea, and he was very excited about it. He showed none of that compulsive amorousness he went in for this afternoon. I’d been worrying, to the point where I took a pistol with me. I suppose you heard our argument about the pistol.”
“Yeah.”
“But he was too full of money possibilities to have anything left over. We drove for a while, talking, and came back to the track in separate cars. Joey and an old man named Rutherford were sitting on bales of hay outside our barn. I joined them. Joey was a wonderful talker when he got going. He had no prejudice against people with money.” She said this seriously, looking down at the ash on her little cigar. “I went into the office for more sherry when theirs ran out. I kept several pints of Joey’s brand in the desk, as an emergency supply. Joey knew he could always fall back on me if he had to. It gave him a sort of security.”
“Did Thorne see you give him the sherry?”
“He came past while we were talking. Yes, I think it was just as I was bringing out the bottle. He didn’t stop. There was no love lost between him and Joey.”
“How drunk was Dolan?”
“Not too. At that time of night his way of talking was always a little more extravagant, but he was in full control.” She picked up her whiskey. “And speaking of degrees of drunkenness, I’d better start pacing myself. I know what you’re trying to do with all this bourbon. You’re succeeding.”
She poured the whiskey into the tall glass, added soda and took a long drink.
“If Dolan was in a position to spoil this twin double-I don’t know why he would want to, or how he’d go about it-is Thorne capable of killing him?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “I’ve been turning something over and over in my mind since you first threw this at me. Paul has no use for people like Joey-they’re an affront to him, in some way. Once when he was driving for us, something went wrong that he thought was Joey’s fault, and Paul knocked him down and kicked him around the barn. It was obvious to me that Joey had it in for him from then on. I always thought he had something to do with that accident, when Paul’s big money-winning horse was killed.”
“What about Thorne’s trotter in the sixth tonight?”
“Joey spotted that. Paul needs a big win, and Joey’s idea was that we should bet the horse heavily as the machines opened, which would shorten the odds. At three to one, say, Paul couldn’t hope to take out enough to solve his problems.”
“Everybody knows he has problems?”
“I think that must be common knowledge.”
“Did you have anything to do with getting him fired from your stable, Mrs. Domaine?”
“Will you stop calling me Mrs. Domaine? It sounds so hostile. My name’s Claire.”
“All right, Claire. Now that you’ve had a chance to think about your answer, do you want me to repeat the question?”