“I want a different trainer.” Lloyd Baxter spoke with obstinacy: a matter of instinct, I saw.
Along with lunch the Stewards had given Tallahassee’s owner an entry ticket to their guests’ vantage viewing box. Lloyd Baxter was already apologizing for shedding me at the entrance when one of the Stewards, following us, changed our course.
“Aren’t you the glass man?” he boomed genially. “My wife’s your greatest fan. We have lumps of your stuff all over our house. That splendid horse you did for her... you came to rig its spotlights, didn’t you?”
I remembered the horse and the house with enough detail to be invited into the Stewards’ guests’ viewing balcony, not entirely to Lloyd Baxter’s delight.
“This young man’s a genius, according to my wife,” the Steward said to Baxter, ushering us in. The genius merely wished he felt less weak.
Lloyd Baxter’s poor opinion of the Steward’s wife’s judgment was written plain on his heavy features, but perhaps it did eventually influence him, because, after the cheering for the next winner had faded, he surprised me very much by resting his hand lightly on my arm to indicate that I should stay and hear what he felt like telling me. He hesitated still, though, so I gave him every chance.
“I’ve often wondered,” I said mildly, “if you saw who came into my showroom on New Year’s Eve. I mean, I know you were ill... but before that... when I’d gone out into the street, did anyone come?”
After a long pause, he faintly nodded. “Someone came into that long gallery you have there. I remember he asked for you and I said you were out in the street... but I couldn’t see him properly as my eyes... my sight develops zigzags sometimes...” He stopped, but I continued for him.
“You surely have pills.”
“Of course I do!” He was irritated. “But I’d forgotten to take them because of the terrible day it had been, and I hate those very small air taxis to begin with, and I do want a different trainer.” His voice died away, but his troubles had been laid out clearly enough for a chimpanzee to understand.
I asked if, in spite of the zigzag aura, he could describe my unknown visitor.
“No,” he said. “I told him you were in the street and the next time I was properly awake I was in hospital.” He paused while I regretted the cut-short sequence, and then with diffidence he said slowly, “I am aware that I should thank you for your reticence. You could still cause me much embarrassment.”
“There’s no point in it,” I said.
He spent a while studying my face as in the past I’d learned his. The result surprised me. “Are you ill?” he said.
“No. Tired. Didn’t sleep well.”
“The man who came,” he said abruptly, making no other comment, “was thin and had a white beard and was over fifty.”
The description sounded highly improbable as a thief, and he must have seen my doubt because he added to convince me, “When I saw him, I immediately thought of Priam Jones, who’s been saying for years he’s going to grow a beard. I tell him he’d look weedy.”
I nearly laughed: the picture was true.
Baxter said the white-bearded man reminded him chiefly of a university professor. A lecturer.
I asked, “Did he speak? Was he a normal customer? Did he mention glass?”
Lloyd Baxter couldn’t remember. “If he spoke at all, I heard him only as a jumble. Quite often things seem wrong to me. They’re a sort of warning. Often I can control them a little, or at least prepare... but on that evening it was happening too fast.”
He was being extraordinarily frank, I thought. I wouldn’t have expected so much trust.
“That man with the whisker job,” I said. “He must have seen the beginning at least of your... er... seizure. So why didn’t he help you? Do you think he simply didn’t know what to do, so ran away from trouble, as people tend to, or was it he who made off with the loot... er... that money, in the canvas bag?”
“And the videotape,” Baxter said.
There was an abrupt breath-drawing silence. Then I asked, “What videotape?”
Lloyd Baxter frowned. “He asked for it.”
“So you gave it to him?”
“No. Yes. No. I don’t know.”
It became clear that in fact Lloyd Baxter’s memory of that evening in Broadway was a scrambled egg of order into chaos. It wasn’t certain that any university lecturer in any white beard existed outside fiction.
While we occupied for another ten uninterrupted minutes the most private place on a racetrack — the Stewards’ friends’ viewing balcony in between races — I managed to persuade Lloyd Baxter to sit quietly and exchange detailed memories of the first few minutes of 2000, but try as he might, he still clung to the image of the scrawny man in the white beard who probably — or maybe it was some other man at some other time — asked for a videotape... perhaps.
He was trying his best. His manner to me had taken a ninety-degree angle of change, so that he’d become more an ally than a crosspatch.
One of the things he would never have said in the past was his reassessment of my and Martin’s friendship. “I see I was wrong about you,” he admitted, heavily frowning. “Martin relied on you for strength, and I took it for granted that it was the other way round.”
“We learned from each other.”
After a pause he said, “That fellow in the white beard, he was real, you know. He did want a videotape. If I knew more than that, I would tell you.”
I finally believed him. It was just unlucky that Baxter’s fit had struck at the wrong random moment; unlucky from white-beard’s point of view that Baxter had been there at all; but it did now seem certain that during the time I was out in the street seeing the year 2000 arrive safely, a white-bearded, thin middle-aged professor-type individual had come into my showroom and had said something about a videotape, and had left before I returned, taking the tape, and incidentally the money, with him.
I hadn’t seen any white-bearded figure out in the street. It had been a week too late for the Ho-ho-ho joker from the North Pole. Lloyd Baxter said he couldn’t tell whether or not the beard was real or left over from Santa Claus.
When we parted we shook hands for the first time ever. I left him with the Stewards and fell into step with Worthington, who was shivering outside and announcing he was hungry. Accordingly we smelled out some food, which he galloped through with endless appetite.
“Why don’t you eat?” he demanded, chomping.
“Habit,” I said. A habit caught from a scales-conscious jockey. Martin seemed to have influenced my life more than I’d realized.
I told Worthington while he saw off two full plates of steak-and-kidney pie (his and mine) that we were now looking for a thin man, late middle-age, white beard, who looked like a college lecturer.
Worthington gazed at me earnestly while loading his fork with pastry. “That,” he pointed out, “doesn’t sound at all like someone who would steal a bagful of money.”
“I’m surprised at you, Worthington,” I teased him. “You of all people I thought would know that beards aren’t automatic badges of honesty! So how does this sit with you? Suppose Mr. White-Beard gives a tape to Martin, which Martin gives to Eddie Payne, who handed it on to me. Then when Martin died, Mr. White-Beard decided to take his videotape back again, so he found out where the tape would be... that’s to say he turned up in Broadway. He found the tape and took it back, and on impulse he also whisked up the bag of money that I’d stupidly left lying around, and in consequence he cannot tell anyone that he has his tape back.”
“Because he would be confessing he’d stolen the cash?”
“Dead right.”
My bodyguard sighed and scraped his plate clean. “So what next?” he said. “What happened next?”