“Kalarama. I’m,” she told a white lie, “a Kalarama cat. If anything unusual happens, please tell me. I’m in Barn Five. Doesn’t have to be about a horse. Could be anything, you know, sort of strange.”
Tucker walked beside Pewter, the other barn cats eyeing them with suspicion from a distance. The corgi stuck her head in a wastebasket outside a stall. Nothing.
She repeated this, putting her head in a red grooming bucket.
“Tucker, you’re just looking for chicken, trying to pretend you’re really looking for clues.” Pewter taunted the dog.
“In the first bucket I smelled yerba maté tea, health-food-bar wrappers, orange peels, and needles that had contained Banamine.” She named a horse tranquilizer. “In this grooming bucket I smell cocaine in the little green tin marked Bag Balm.”
That shut up Pewter, who became more alert. She even climbed up the stall sides to peer in, then she backed down.
The last garbage bucket did have chicken bones, but Tucker resisted.
“Nothing here,” Tucker called up to Mrs. Murphy.
“Try the hospitality room,” Mrs. Murphy called down. “The humans don’t use it until showtime.”
Minutes later, Tucker and Pewter emerged from the resplendent navy and red room.
“Big fat zero,” Pewter called up.
“Don’t talk about yourself that way.” Tucker’s voice filled with mock concern.
“Bubble butt. Tailless wonder,” Pewter shot back, but she was grateful Tucker escorted her, keeping the other cats at bay.
“Thanks for letting us visit your barn. I’m Mrs. Murphy, by the way.” The tiger cat watched her two friends below.
“Spike.” He smiled, revealing that his left front fang had been knocked out.
Mrs. Murphy hastily backed down a stall corner to drop in front of the cat and dog. “Come on.”
“We aren’t going through every barn, are we?” Pewter, alarmed, raised her voice. “It’s already nasty hot.”
“Yes.” Mrs. Murphy ignored her, and they marched over to Ward’s barn. His green and white hospitality suite was more modest.
They repeated the process of checking each grooming tray, each wastebasket or open trunk.
Again nothing.
They walked up to Barn One, where Booty Pollard rented one half of the barn. His colors, orange and white, were uncommon in the horse world, but he’d graduated from the University of Texas and proudly used the Longhorn colors. Miss Nasty’s empty cage, filled with toys, sported a limp orange pennant with a white “T.” The cage sat outside the entrance to the suite, as it needed a good airing out. Miss Nasty was not a good housekeeper, nor was her namesake.
Mrs. Murphy prowled above the horses while Pewter and Tucker worked below.
Although hot, Pewter kept at her task. She was interested since this involved another animal. Usually she and her friends accompanied Harry as she tried to help another human. Pewter loved horses, so she continued to brave the heat. She sauntered into the hospitality tent, where blue ribbons hung from massive longhorns at the top of the canopy. The whole top of the hospitality room was filled with blue ribbons. On the second row, below photos of horses and clients, red ribbons were neatly displayed on clear fish wire strung below the photos. Immediately below that were the yellow ribbons for third place.
Some trainers grouped the ribbons by horse, but Booty grouped by position, another manifestation of his eye for design and color.
Pewter flipped up a tack-trunk hook, but she couldn’t lift the lid. She moved to a small bridle box next to the massive trunk, and that was easy to open.
“Bingo.” She dashed outside. “Found it.”
Mrs. Murphy climbed down as Tucker ran into the room. Inside the bridle box were four bottles of hair dye, neatly stacked.
“It’s the color of Booty’s hair.” Mrs. Murphy wondered why people thought other people couldn’t tell.
“Four bottles.” Pewter was excited. “Two empty.”
“You’ve got a point there.” Mrs. Murphy was intrigued. “We’ve got Booty and Charly supposedly hating each other but best friends at two in the morning. Ward loads Renata’s horse. Booty’s got the dye.”
“We don’t know that was Renata’s horse.” Tucker watched as Pewter closed the bridle box.
“No, we don’t, but the horse that Ward loaded could have been a double for Queen Esther except for color,” Mrs. Murphy replied. “That horse moved like Queen Esther.”
“Charly trained Queen Esther. Don’t you think he’d know the horse we saw was her by the way she moved? He wasn’t that far behind Ward.” Mrs. Murphy pricked her ears forward.
“I’m glad it doesn’t have anything to do with us. Not our horses.” Tucker could imagine Harry’s distress if someone stole one of her beloved horses.
“It will.” The tiger heard footsteps approaching. “Mother won’t sit still while Joan and Larry are in trouble.”
“Fair will keep her straight.” Tucker recalled the many times before they remarried that Fair tried to rein in Harry’s curiosity.
“She’s rubbing off on him more than he’s rubbing off on her. Mark my words,” Pewter observed.
Tucker sighed, eyes riveted on the doorway to the room, but the person walked by. “Two humans to protect. They can’t run fast, they can’t smell worth a damn, they can’t see very well in the dark, and they always think they know more than they do.”
“Ignorance is bliss.” Pewter saucily tossed this off as they walked back to Barn Five.
“Or death.” Mrs. Murphy injected that somber note.
I mpeccably though casually attired in her working riding clothes, Renata DeCarlo answered questions from reporters as she groomed her gray gelding, Shortro. Voodoo stood in the next stall, observing everything. Not that she groomed her horses regularly, but it made good copy. Renata understood good copy. Dreadful as this theft was, she would get something out of it. Shortro initially shied from the minicam, but then he adjusted. He had a good mind.
Joan organized flight control, since media people jammed Barn Five. She answered questions, too. When the media became too great she walked some down to the practice ring. Others shot the grandstand, panning to the show ring, where the fairgrounds crew watered all the flowers in the raised center section used by officials and judges. The organ, a staple of big Saddlebred shows, was covered. The maintenance activity at noon yielded colorful footage. Like so many middle-class people regardless of background and race, the reporters didn’t “see” laborers, the result was the same: they missed information by not questioning the barn help, which was mostly Mexican.
Fair, helping another vet who was shorthanded that day in Barn Two, ignored the stream of people traipsing through the aisle, notebooks or minicams in hand. What no one could ignore was that none of these people had a clue about how to behave around horses. The nervousness of grooms and trainers was translated by the media as anxiety over the theft of Queen Esther. It never occurred to them that their presence fed anxiety. Much as a sweating, hard-pressed groom might secretly wish for a horse to kick one of these intrusive twits out of the barn, the ensuing lawsuit would make the happiness short-lived. Now, a little nip on an arm or shoulder probably wouldn’t provoke a lawsuit, and that would please both horse and groom.