“Can’t help it, Wes. I won’t be a party to this rooking racket any longer. You know as well as I do that if the Stakes were to be run on the up and up, Skit would bring Friskaway down in front. But I just learned the word’s been passed around Hubba Dub’s fixed to come in first. I’ve had my name tied in to enough queer-looking races in the last couple of weeks. I — will — not — permit — Frisky — to — start! That’s final.”
Keene stuck a cigarette between his battered lips. “Who passed the word around, Mister Wayne?”
The trainer waggled the cigar stub from one side of his jaw to the other. “You ought to know better than to ask me that.”
“Who else would I ask?” Keene tilted his chair on its hind legs. “You made the crack. Where’d you hear it?”
Wayne spat out a shred of tobacco. He glowered as if he wanted to tell the representative of the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau where he could go and what he could do when he got there. But the trainer changed his mind.
“My contract rider, Skit Yolock, told me. He picked it up in the steam room at the jockey house.”
Keene let the chair come down on its front legs. “Where’s Yolock now?”
“At the barns.”
“Before we hop over to see him—” Keene stood up — “you might want to cancel the request for scratching the Claybrook entries.”
“The devil I will!”
“You might. In the first place, the stewards probably wouldn’t find you had sufficient reason—”
“Nobody can make me start a horse I don’t think is in condition!” Wayne spat, without the excuse of a tobacco shred.
“In the second place, you’d expose yourself to suspicion you wanted to balk any investigation of fixing at this track.” Keene opened the door suddenly. At her typewriter desk, Jane Arklett looked up, quizzically. “Let your entries start. We’ll try to see they get a fair break. If they don’t, we’ll nail the party who keeps them from getting it.”
Wayne grunted. “You must be a magician, then.”
Keene touched the brim of his felt. “I pull something out of the hat every now and then.”
The stenographer smiled sweetly. “See you later, Mister Madden?”
“Yeah,” he looked at her steadily. “I expect so.”
Driving to Horse Haven in Keene’s Buick, Wayne sat grumpily beside the man from the Bureau. Ottover stayed at his office.
“Do you know Miss Arklett well?” Keene asked.
“Since she wore rompers.” The trainer wasn’t inclined to be chatty.
“Seems like a nice kid. Makes friends easily.”
Wayne uttered an unintelligible gargle.
Keene Madden used the needle again. “She burned her boy-friend, being friendly-like with somebody else at that chi-chi joint out by the Lake last night.”
“You talking about my employer, Madden?” Wayne’s tone was definitely disagreeable.
“I’m talking about Clay Larmin. Yeah. Arklett girl started to get cozy with a gambler. Fellow with a beard, name of Towbee. Have you heard of him?”
Wayne swore like a seven-year Marine.
“Yeah,” Keene said. “That’s a good description of him. Young Larmin didn’t care for her new acquaintance much, either.”
“Jane's a fathead, speaking to that crumb at all. Towbee has cost the Larmins a sizeable fortune in the last three weeks. My personal opinion is, he’s responsible for most of the monkey business that’s been going on at this meeting. I can’t understand Jane’s attitude.”
“Maybe she was just ribbing Larmin. Anything that Larmin loses will be her loss in the long run, won’t it? She’s going to marry him, isn’t she?”
“ 'Fraid she is. She’s too good for—” Wayne made a quick switch, glancing quickly at Keene to see if he noticed it — “for most any of that horsy set. She wasn’t brought up on a bottle, not the way most of them seem to have been.”
“When are those wedding bells supposed to ring?”
“Ask her. Or him. I’m no yellow-sheet columnist!” Wayne meant it to sound rude.
Keene wondered why the trainer was so touchy about the subject.
At the barns, the smell of horses was sharp in the morning damp. The familiar stampings and nickerings were soothing to Keene’s still-aching head. It was the slack hour after the colts had been cooled out. There wasn’t much activity around the Claybrook stalls. There were a couple of grooms working with brushes and combs. No one about was small enough to be a jockey.
A short, blond man with a balding forehead and a lifeguard’s tan waved greeting to Wayne. He wore a tee-shirt and faded levis tucked into rubber boots.
“I didn't find anything of any importance, Mister Wayne,” he told the trainer. His voice had a trace of Texas. “That Ruy Blas might be getting a touch of coronitis in the right foreleg. It seems a mite sensitive. But it won’t hurt him to get a race in him. The others look to be ready.”
“Ready to get rooked out of a win purse!” Wayne retorted. “Thanks, anyhow, Bill. I just wanted somebody’s opinion besides my own. I don't trust my own judgment any more. Shake hands with Mister Madden, from the Protective Bureau. Bill Sutterfield’s our track’s chief veterinary, Madden.”
The vet scrutinized Keene slowly. “Glad to know you. I guess Frank told you we could use a little help around here.”
“I’ll need some, myself,” Keene said, “if I’m to get to the bottom of this business. You got any ideas?”
“None I can back up.” Sutterfield looked uncomfortable. “Frank thinks we’ve got an epidemic of stimulation.”
“What do you think?” Keene asked.
“I have to go entirely by the records.” The chief vet picked his words carefully. “Those records are our own saliva and urine tests, which are certified by chemists who don’t know the identity of the horses from which the numbered samples were taken.”
“No positives?”
“None at all. Of course, we only check horses that finish in the money, but they’re the ones that’ve been driving Frank and Wes Ottover out of their minds.” The vet stooped to pick a piece of straw from a stall, chewed on it morosely. “More important, to me, are those cockeyed time records. The horses that’ve been beating Claybrook entries never run more’n a half-second or so better than their best clocked trials. That cancels out the hop-up possibility, y’see. There’s no point stimulating a horse unless you can get more speed out of him.”
Wayne used his Marine vocabulary again. “That’s a fact. The bitter truth is, our entries do worse than their speed trials show they should. Half a second, or even second slower. That’s enough to lose any stake race, if the handicapper’s on his job.”
“Maybe,” Keene suggested, “a bunch of the jocks have been holding pep rallies the night before a race to decide who deserves to ride into the winner’s circle.”
“Not Skit Yolock,” Wayne snapped. “I know that boy as well as if I was his father. He’d rather cut off a hand than use it to pull a mount.”
Sutterfield looked down at his boots. “I thought some of the poor showings might have been due to screwy shoeing. But Frank’s had all his entries shod out at the Larmin place, the last week — and that hasn’t improved matters.”
“Yolock around?” Keene asked.
The straw between the vet’s teeth stopped wiggling, but he said only, “I think he’s gone.”
One of the grooms called, “Mist’ Yolock say he goin’ home to take his nap.”
“Why would he take a nap,” a high, thin voice retorted shrilly, “when he isn’t accepting any mounts this afternoon?” It was Clay Larmin.
Wayne grumbled, “Mister Madden insists — you met Mister Madden, Clay? — he insists we go right ahead and run all three horses.”
The young man’s small mouth twisted nastily. “Who’s giving orders for Claybrook, Frank?”