Keene Madden pointed to the middle button of his coat. “I am, for the time being, if there are no objections, Mister Larmin.”
“Darn right, there are?” Little splotches of red mottled Larmin’s face.
“In that case,” Keene shrugged, “I’ll have to issue a statement that you’re blocking an investigation into the—”
He didn’t finish. A trio of men came into the cool gloom of the barn from the sunlight of the exercise paddocks. Two were in blue uniforms. The third had the stolid wariness of the police plain-clothesman.
“Now what?” Wayne muttered.
Keene said to himself: Here it comes, brother.
The man in plainclothes touched the brim of his felt, respectfully. “Mister Larmin?”
Clay Larmin seemed to shrink within his neatly crisp white linens. “What’s on your mind?”
“Would you mind coming over to the station with us, sir?” The detective was deferential. “It’s probably something that can be straightened out right away.”
The owner of the Claybrook Stables stiffened. “What needs straightening, officer?”
The detective cleared his throat. “It’s the matter of a young woman, sir. A Miss Lola Gretsch. They found her dead this morning. Our information is that you used to be on pretty good terms with her.”
“Lola?” Larmin gasped. And he sagged limply onto the litter of the barn floor.
Chapter V
Escape — By Suicide
Bill Sutterfield lounged against the bench in the saddling shed. The veterinary was watching the horses in the paddock moving in slow circles around the well-worn paths ringing the great elms. The sunlight dappled the glossy chestnut and the glistening ebony of the colts’ flanks as they moved daintily under the guidance of the grooms.
“That messy business about the girl,” Sutterfield said. “That might clear up a lot of things, Madden.”
“For instance?” Keene watched a nervous filly dancing away from Yolock. The way Friskaway was acting up, the jockey might have trouble with Claybrook’s entry in the Stakes.
The vet held out his hand, palm up. “Say Larmin wanted to get married to this kid in Ottover’s office. There’s been a lot of gabble about that. Suppose this other girl — someone he’d been playing around with before — wanted to hold him up for some kind of payoff.”
“All right. Suppose that. Then what?” Keene Madden noted Wayne in what seemed, at a distance, to be an angry altercation with the jockey who was in the emerald-hooped blouse of the Claybrook Stables.
“Oh, I’m just shooting the breeze.” Sutterfield waggled his head. “But if she had some kind of a hold on him — like maybe a secret wedding or even a kid nobody knew anything about — she might have been able to get him to handicap his own horses by having them over-exercised, or underfed or letting them drink before races. Like at one track where I worked, when an owner felt like betting on some other guy’s entry when his own horse ought to be an easy winner, he’d load the horse in a van and have him driven around all night before the race so the animal wouldn’t get any sleep and could hardly get around to the eighth pole without going wobble-legged.”
The bugle gave out with Boots and Saddles. Keene watched trainer Wayne give Skit Yolock a hand up on Friskaway.
“Nobody could fool Wayne on a thing like that, Doc” Keene said. “It would have to be worked some other way than by mistreating the horse. If the races have been rigged, that dead girl might have been tangled up in the rigging. But it couldn’t have been that simple.”
“Maybe not.” Sutterfield’s eyes lighted up as the horses fell into file behind the red-coated lead rider on their way to post. “Whatever it was, though, I hope we’ve seen the last of it. Ruy Bias in the third was the first winner Frank Wayne’s saddled in a fortnight.”
“The fix will be in the Stakes. If any,” Keene said, moving away. “Watch those samples. See you.”
He trailed the crowd streaming toward the grandstand and clubhouse. Old, young, thin, fat — open-necked polo shirts, low-cut print dresses, doggy sport coats with clubhouse tags dangling from lapels, bare midriff play-suits with binocular straps over naked shoulders. There were the two-buck Tims and Terrys whom Keene Madden was paid to protect. People who wouldn’t know a mule from a hunter, who thought the race track was a mile-long slot machine with a nag coming up every spin, instead of a pear or a lemon.
He didn’t go to the stands. The loudspeaker would give him the race, post by post. Right now the metallic voice was announcing, “The horses are at the post.”
He pushed through the crowd milling to get out of the betting ring. The Selling windows were closed. The floor beside the pipe railings was cluttered with torn-up tickets, programs, copies of the Telegraph and Racing Form.
The odds board showed Friskaway at 3–2. But the filly, Keene knew, on the basis of her last three times out should be 1–2 against the other entries lined up in the starting gate now! Somebody had been pouring it in on Hubba Dub, Number 2, now at even money.
A gray-uniformed Pink saluted Keene, let him in through the unmarked door at the side of the $5 °Cashier windows. Behind the wickets, the boys were filling in totals on their check sheets, smoking, listening to the race-caster:
“They’re off — and Popova breaks in the lead, My Hon, Friskaway, Can Doo, Hubba Dub—”
Keene went into the totalisator room. Four shirtsleeved men in green eyeshades were working the accounting machines at top speed, on the double check. A white-haired man with thick gold-rimmed spectacles and chubby cheeks saw Keene and said hello.
“Anything big?” the race track detective asked.
“Same as per usual, only more so. Gent with the trick beard and upstage specs put twenty thou on Number Two five minutes before we shut the windows.”
“Coming into the backstretch—” the hollow voice of the announcer was higher-pitched — “it's Friskaway by a length, My Hon, a head, Popova, half a length, Hubba Dub—”
“Twenty thousand fish?” Keene’s eyebrows went up. “He’s really trying for a score, isn’t he?”
“I’d hate to have that much of mine on any animal’s nose,” the head cashier said. “I got a weak ticker. The goat could bust a leg. Throw his rider. Get disqualified. I couldn’t stand it. Still, if you like that sort of thing, I guess it’s good, clean fun.”
“Not so clean.” Keene looked up at the Win Pool total. $88,612. What was it Lola Gretsch had said: “If there’s something in it for me.” There’d be plenty in it for Vince Towbee if #2 won. Quite a payoff.
“Coming around the far turn, Friskaway out in front by a length and a half. My Hon half a length. Hubba Dub, a head.”
For a second, Keene wished he’d gone out to watch the finish. This was the moment that always gave him the big kick — the furlong before the head of the stretch. He’d never be able to get that out of his blood — the surging excitement from the thoroughbreds, the riders “hoo-hooing” to their mounts as they thundered around that last turn.
He went out, gave instructions to the Pinkerton captain by the clubhouse stile.
“Into the stretch, and Friskaway’s fading. — My Hon coming through on the rail, Hubba Dub making his bid on the outside. — My Hon is neck and neck. — He’s leading. — No! No! Hubba Dub’s closing with a rush. — He’s up there. — It’s going to be close — very close. A toss-up between Hubba Dub and My Hon. — It looks like a dead heat. — I can’t call that one for you, folks. — It’ll be— Yes, there goes the Photo up on the board—”
When the red Photo light went out and the Official went on, Hubba Dub was first, My Hon second and the Claybrook filly third.