But nothing happened.
He used the keys. The second one did it. The door squeaked when it opened, but the kitchen was silent and inky black. His palm over the lens of the flashlight let enough illumination leak out to show him past a refrigerator, a gas stove and a table — to a door. Sufficient light filtered in through curtained windows at the front of the cottage to show he was in the living room. Crossing to a door that evidently led into the front hall, he heard a board creak. He froze.
After a minute of holding his breath, hearing nothing except the hammering of his own pulse, he decided the creaking had been caused by the shifting of his weight on the floor. He listened at the door of the room on the opposite side of the hall. There was absolute quiet. It turned out to be a bedroom. With a double bed, neatly made up, empty.
There was a queer odor, something unpleasant. He couldn’t give it a name, but it reminded him of New Guinea where he’d spent those dreary months at the remount station. Or maybe it was the darkness and being keyed way up to there, that recalled the bad days to him.
He went out to the hydrangeas, brought the body in and put it on the rug beside the bed. The glimmer of light escaping from the lens in his palm reflected from a bureau mirror, glinted on a silver frame.
He moved past the dead girl, let a trickle of light fall on the photograph in the frame.
The prominent, bulging eyes of Clay Larmin stared arrogantly at him in the semi-darkness.
Down in the corner of the photograph was a scrawclass="underline" To Lola, with memories — Clay.
Keene whistled softly. Had it been that way? The only son and heir to the Larmin millions and the Larmin racing traditions — and a waitress in a none-too-respectable hot spot? That suggested a lot of possibilities — none pleasant...
He was still mulling over its possible significance as he picked his way back across the hall to the living room, out to the kitchen. The kitchen door was closed!
He knew he’d left it open. He’d had his hands too full, when he came in with the body, to do anything else. He hadn’t heard the door close, either — so the night wind couldn’t have slammed it. There wasn’t enough breeze to rustle a leaf, anyway.
That creaking! There’d been somebody in there with? him then — somebody who’d be able to identify him. Unless, of course, it had been the murderer himself.
There was also the chance the closed door was a decoy.
The unseen doorshutter might still be in there.
Keene felt his way along the wall in total darkness as he went back, let himself out the front door. He was cautious when he opened that, too. But he saw no one, heard nothing. The car was where he’d left it.
He took off his gloves, put on his shoes, drove back to the hotel.
Chapter III
Funny Business
The sun had just begun to gild the spires of the old Victorian cupolas on the grandstand as Keene crossed the clubhouse terrace. A light fog drifted lazily across the lake in the infield which losers called the Show Pool. The famous blue canoe tied to the bank swung slowly in the breeze.
A thin, harassed-looking man of about fifty, with a thick mustache dyed too black to match the iron-gray of his hair, detached himself from the little group of trainers and dockers watching the down gallops.
“Goshsake, Madden!” He opened his eyes very wide. “You have an accident, driving in?” He was Wesley Ottover, secretary of the local Racing Association.
“No.” Keene shook hands with him. “What happened to me was strictly intentional.”
Ottover studied the greenish eye, the criss-crossing of surgeon’s adhesive at the corner of Keene’s mouth.
“Somebody,” Keene said, “sent a reception committee to greet me. At the Stirrup and Saddle.”
The racing secretary made an O with his mouth. “Towbee?”
“Not in person. But he was around. I tried to reach you on the phone before I stopped in at his hangout. Young Larmin was there. He knew who I was. Whether Towbee did or not, I can’t say.” Keene didn’t bother to add that Wes Ottover was the only person who was supposed to have known the Protective Bureau man had been due to arrive last night.
The secretary took Keene’s arm. “If you haven’t had breakfast—”
“I’ll have coffee,” Keene said. “It’s all I want. My face feels as if one of the Claybrook stallions had stamped on it. What I need is briefing.”
Ottover picked a table near the rail; where they could appear to be watching the workouts. A waiter brought a white tablecloth, menus.
Ottover said, “Somebody must be getting worried, to give you a going-over like that. In a way, I’m glad, though I'm sorry you had to be on the receiving end. I was afraid they had things sewed up so tight nothing could bother them.”
“Who do you mean?” Keene watched a colt breezing handily along the back-stretch under an exercise boy.
“Towbee. And whoever’s in the fix-ring with him.”
“Young Larmin?”
“Lord, no!” Ottover was vehement. “He’d be the last person. Towbee’s big coups have all been against Claybrook entries. Odds-on favorites, at that. That’s the queer thing. All the mischief involves Larmin horses. I think Clay’s been losing scads, betting on his own starters. I know the failure of the Claybrook silks to finish anywhere near their normal form is causing a lot of ugly talk.”
“Jockey collusion?” Keene could see Earl Yolock — riding monkey-on-a-stick, high on his mount’s withers — coming into the stretch, hand-riding a big black gelding. “Skit” Yolock was Claybrook’s contract rider.
The secretary groaned. “Wish I could say. I can’t put a finger on it, Madden. On the surface, Skit’s as bothered about it as anyone. Frank Wayne, the Claybrook trainer, he’s as near to a nervous collapse as a man of his disposition can get. Clay himself is jumpy as a water-bug — hardly civil to his own mother. She, by the way, is the only one connected with Claybrook who doesn’t seem to be concerned about these cockeyed form-reversals.”
The waiter said, “Eggs, sir?”
Keene shook his head. “Coffee’s all.” His teeth ached enough, without chewing. “Mrs. Larmin, now. She’s hardly ever decent to anyone she doesn’t consider her social equal, is she? And seldom meets up with anyone she admits to that classification?”
Ottover smiled, politely. “She can’t help that high-toned lah-de-dah. It’s bred in. her. But under that crusty surface, she’s a grand horsewoman, Madden. Up to this year, she’s always been active in the management of the stables. She really ran them herself after the General died. Now she’s beginning to turn over the controls to young Clay. He’s duty bound to carry on the Larmin tradition, you know — the first family of Saratoga — at least as far as racing goes. But he doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of it. Though I must say he doesn’t interfere with Wayne, the trainer, much.”
“And the mother? She doesn’t interfere with Wayne?”
Ottover waved at a trainer who wandered past. “Not as far as the horses are concerned,” he said carefully. “Apparently it doesn’t trouble her at all when some Claybrook entry that’s been made a two-to-one favorite loses by six lengths to some fugitive from a merry-go-round. It’s ridiculous!”
“Yeah.” Keene couldn’t recall anything ridiculous about the way the back of the dead girl’s head had looked. “What you find out about Towbee?”
“Next to nothing. Plenty of cash. No background we can discover. Lives alone at the Grand Union. Doesn’t have any close friends. Spends his time here at the track from noon on — at the Stirrup and Saddle after the mutuel windows close. He must have taken close to a hundred thousand out of the tote pools — betting against Claybrook horses that were favorites in the morning line. Nowadays, no entry is a favorite unless he has some tickets on it.”