Brett Halliday - Nice Fillies Finish Last

“Sure. He’s got that loan shark on his neck. That was probably a twenty-four-hour loan.”

“Larry doesn’t know about that. Why should he suddenly decide that Paul’s too flakey and unpredictable to deal with face to face? It didn’t bother him last night or this afternoon.”

Shayne worried his earlobe. “Let’s see how it develops. Do your best to look casual.”

When they returned to the clubhouse, the horses in the third race were scrambling for positions on the rail at the first turn. Mrs. Moon was back at the bar, working at a new drink. Everybody else was watching the horses, but she watched Shayne, her eyes hard, her mouth unsmiling. Larry Domaine took his binoculars down for an instant to smile at Claire when she slid in beside him. When the race was over, she said something to him and he nodded.

“I got quite a meaningful look from Molly Moon,” Claire told Shayne when she joined him. “She doesn’t like me, I fear. Where are we going?”

“Now don’t jump. To the Golden Crest Motel. I’ll explain on the way.”

They went down the long ramp and along the apron in front of the stands, passing in front of Rourke. Win Thorne was pushing off from the paddock rail as they came past. She looked from Shayne to Claire, who had briefly dazzled her husband in spite of being so thin. She made some comment under her breath.

“I’ll tell you what I’m planning to do,” Shayne said after helping Claire into her husband’s Cadillac. “It won’t work if Domaine insists on making the payoff by mail, but let’s go ahead with it anyway. You may have to tell him there’s a loan shark involved, and Paul’s insisting on getting the money tonight. I’ve still got a key to room 17. We’re going to plant a mike under the bed in your room and run a wire through to a recorder, so when you and Thorne start talking we can get the dialogue on tape. I want to work out your end of it beforehand, so we’ll get the kind of statement we want.”

“Mike, do you think Paul killed Joey?”

“I think it’s possible.”

He turned toward Fort Lauderdale, and they drove for a time in silence. She glanced at him, starting to speak, then turned abruptly to look out the rear window.

“Mike,” she said excitedly, “somebody’s following us!”

Adjusting the mirror, Shayne picked up a pair of headlights. He put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with the dashboard lighter, watching the headlights and the speedometer as well as the road ahead. There wasn’t much traffic, and in a moment he was doing eighty, without strain. The headlights behind him stayed the same size in the mirror. He zoomed past a slower car; the headlights followed. He slackened speed, and the car behind him kept the interval.

“Let’s not worry about it,” he said. “We have the speed to lose him, but we don’t want any trouble with the troopers. I’ll take him through town.”

“It’s a cab,” she said, peering back. “A Yellow Cab. That’s good, isn’t it? You’ll be able to tell when he’s not there.”

“An experienced cabdriver can be a hard man to shake. Turn around, Claire, and let me handle it.”

He made the turn toward the ocean. Instead of continuing across Route 1, he turned north again and led the taxi into Pompano Beach. He drifted up to a green light, then accelerated hard as the light changed and went through on the yellow. At the next corner he cut through a gas station, sliding past a car drawn up at the pumps, shot into a parking area in front of a shopping center, down a lane between parked cars and out by a different exit.

“I think that does it,” he said, watching the mirror.

He turned another corner, tires squealing, then another, and slipped into the first open parking space. He cut his lights and waited.

“Who could it be?” Claire said anxiously.

“I don’t want to find out,” Shayne answered.

Turning on his lights, he drove to the beach and took A1A south to the motel. He kept one eye on the mirror, saying nothing.

Parking, he reached into the back seat for the paper bag containing the tools he had taken out of the locked chest in his Buick. He also brought out the bourbon bottle. He held it up to the light to check the level of the whiskey. It was still a third full.

Claire had gone ahead to unlock Room 18.

“God, that was a ride,” she said after he closed the door and turned on the lights. She looked around at the anonymous furniture, the big double bed and the blank TV screen. “Mike, all of a sudden I don’t like the idea of being alone in here with Paul Thorne. I wish there was a connecting door we could unlock.”

Shayne emptied the paper bag on the bed. “I brought your husband’s bourbon so you can give him a drink. If you’ve got forty-odd thousand bucks to give him, he shouldn’t make any trouble. Who knows? He might even relax for a minute. It won’t last, but maybe while he’s counting his money and having a drink with a lovely woman, he’ll forget how mad he is about being a poor hill boy surrounded by glamorous people who inherited their dough, if that’s the main thing that’s been bugging him.”

“Fine,” she said. “He’s relaxed. Now what do I do?”

“Now you ask him, in a very friendly way, about Joey Dolan. What we’re doing here, Claire, is testing a theory. I’ve only exchanged one sentence with Paul Thorne, and I may have figured him all wrong. But I’ve heard a lot about him, and it seems to me that if he killed Dolan, and did it so ingeniously that he can’t be touched for it, he’ll want to brag about it to somebody.”

He moved the TV set out from the wall. Using a small brace and bit, he began to drill through the baseboard, nearly flush with the floor.

He went on, squinting to keep cigarette smoke out of his eyes, “And I think you’re the one person he’ll want to brag about it to. In a way, this should make you even. Be thinking about how to bring up the subject. We’ll run a rehearsal on the way back to the track. After winning all that money, you’ll be excited, naturally. You were scared for a while, but now you’re pleased with yourself, pleased with the horses, pleased with Thorne.”

“I hope I can say it so he believes it.”

Shayne ran a wire through the hole to the next room. After tying in a small button microphone, he screwed the microphone to the underside of the bed, ran the wire down the leg of the bed and pressed it out of sight against the edge of the wall-to-wall carpeting. Then he pushed the TV set back into place. Claire was sitting in the single armchair, smoking a small cigar while she watched.

“Mrs. Moon tells me you’re still carrying that. 38,” Shayne said. “Let’s see it.”

He put out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, she took it out of her bag and gave it to him. “I suppose it was a stupid idea,” she said. “It didn’t seem to impress him much this afternoon.”

“You were lucky, Claire. When there’s a gun in a quarrel, the odds are good that it’ll go off. That wouldn’t have solved any of your problems.”

After ejecting the cartridges he clamped one of them into a small portable vise he had brought with the other tools.

“Get me a cake of soap from the bathroom.”

He pried the slug out of the cartridge case and pressed the cartridge down hard on the soap. The sharp rim drilled out a neat core, which he trimmed and tamped down.

“You don’t have to go to all this trouble, Mike,” she said. “I can leave the gun in the car.”

“No, you had it this afternoon, and if you don’t have it tonight, he might wonder why not. Don’t rely on just one approach. Friendliness may not work. If it doesn’t, try getting him mad.”

“That won’t be hard.”