Стюарт Стерлинг - The Galloping Corpses

“Bill claimed it was fool-proof,” Jane said, dully. “He was the only person around the track who could get away with keeping drugs on him all the time.”

“That’s right. Nobody but a licensed veterinarian.” Keene gave the man’s pockets a look-see. “Important thing was, nobody else would be able to get at those saliva and urine tests, to learn what he’d been giving Claybrook horses on those morning inspection trips through the barns. He could substitute samples from other horses, and nobody’d be any wiser. He’d been working that deal down in Florida when they caught him before.”

“That’s where I met him. In Miami.” Jane wandered around the living room restlessly. “I got burned up about Clay's being afraid to call his soul his own, on his mother’s account.”

“Must have been kind of rough, not being able to tell people you were man and wife.”

The girl nodded. “That’s how Bill came to get the idea he could — cozy up to me. Just to goad Clay into doing something about cutting loose from those darned apron-strings, I began to act as if we weren’t married.”

“Do tell!” Keene murmured. “Then Sutterfield thought he had a hold over you, hah?”

“Yes. He followed us north. Kept coming to see me, those nights when Clay had to be at ‘dear Mama’s’.” She flung her hair back from her forehead in a gesture of utter weariness. “I tried to break it up, more than once. Honestly, I did. But Bill had it all schemed out.”

Keene sighed, stood up, straddled the veterinary's limp figure. “You wouldn’t tell all that to the police lieutenant, when he gets here?”

She put her thumbs to her temples as if her head was about to burst. “I won’t have to, now, will I? As long as you don’t say anything.”

“I will, though. I’ll have to There’s a lot of gore to be accounted for. A lot of cash, too.” He felt of the packet he’d taken from Santos-Towbee, wondered how thirsty the man locked up in his office would be.

Jane said, “I can't do anything about the money. I didn’t get any of it. I didn’t want any of it.”

“That's the first thing you’ve said that I completely believe.”

She pretended not to understand.

He put it plainly. “Girl from a nice, respectable middle-class family falls for a boy whose parents have laundry blueing in their aristocratic veins. Boy’s mother balks at taking commoner into royal family. Girl, naturally, gets sore as the devil.”

She came over behind him, put one arm around his shoulders. “I believe you actually do know everything!”

“Have to be a guesser in my line of work. I’d guess she was mad enough to make mamma-in-law pay through the nose, after she did finally rope her blue-blooded mate into a ceremony. Might even have had some wacky notion she could slice enough off the Larmin fortune to cut her husband’s mother down to size. Or at least bring her to terms.”

She leaned her cheek against the back of Keene’s coat. Her hair tickled his neck. “I didn’t figure it that far. I simply wanted to hurt her. Instead, I hurt Clay.”

“Hell!” He turned, so he had to step away from her. “You hurt everyone you touch. You’d have watched Sutterfield plug me a few minutes ago, without a squawk — only you were afraid I really sent in that report.”

Tears streamed down her face. She didn’t weep audibly.

“I had sent it in, too,” he said. “You can read the copy if you want to. It puts the whole thing in your lap, Mrs. Larmin. Right' from the beginning. Clay knew it. The Gretsch girl knew it. He wouldn’t tell on you. He cared too much. But the girl who’d been in love with Clay before you got to him, she couldn't see him suffer without trying to correct it. What she wanted to tell me, there at the Stirrup and Saddle, was how you’d engineered the entire business.”

She began to blubber.

“Don’t bother with it,” he said harshly. “Save all that salt water for the jury. Maybe you can soften them up, make them think you were the injured party.” He touched his own scalp. “Me, I don’t feel that way. I was an injured party once, myself.”

There was a tap at the hall door. He raised his voice.

“Come and get it, Lieutenant.”