Brett Halliday: Nice Fillies Finish Last

“What condition was Joey in?”

Rutherford took another sip of the loaded coffee. “Joey always manages to navigate, and his observations never make anything but excellent sense. However, if you have driven all the way from Miami to meet him, it would be unfair to conceal that, when Joey and I said good-night, he was floating. His plan was to bed down on a cot in the Domaine tack-room. This was strictly against the rules of that stable, Mr. Larry Domaine being one of the most persnickety owners in the business, but Joey has this wonderful indifference to rules. He opened a window and floated through. He urged me to accompany him, but I felt obliged to turn down the invitation.”

His hand was now steadier, and he was able to raise his cup without bending to meet it. “I don’t know how long it’s been since I tasted such a splendid coffee royal. Truly superb. After leaving Joey, I found a comfortable corner in another stable, but I had scarcely fallen asleep when, I’m sorry to say, that they rousted me out. Yes, the inhuman bastards rousted me out. I was tempted to join Joey at Domaine’s, but common sense told me to think about it over a cup of coffee. I have a business connection with Mr. and Mrs. Domaine. I cash tickets for them from time to time, and the condition of the relationship is that I have no contact with any of their facilities or people.”

He finished his coffee, tilting his cup at a steep angle to be sure he had it all. “About that pacer in the fourth. Did I mention that my usual fee is five bucks?”

Shayne took out a five-dollar bill. Folding it lengthwise, he slipped it under his own coffee cup.

“Wake Dolan up and tell him Tim Rourke is waiting for him. Can you get into the tack-room?”

“As far as that goes,” Rutherford said, his eyes on the bill. “At this time of night nobody’ll bother me. I take it you aren’t planning to pay me in advance?”

“No.”

“Then you can expect me in five minutes.” He paid for his coffee and went out. Rourke said slowly, “Joey phoned me at around two-thirty, Mike. If he went to bed in the Domaine barn at two-”

“Rutherford’s not that good a witness, and he’s not wearing a watch. You’d better get the name of that pacer he’s talking about, or I have a feeling the trip will be wasted.”

“He sold me a horse the last time I saw him,” Rourke said gloomily. “It finished seventh.”

The counterman called that he had just brewed a fresh urn of coffee. Rourke went for two more cups. This time the coffee tasted more like coffee.

Rutherford came through the revolving door, and headed straight for them. His hands were fluttering again.

“I apologize for keeping you waiting,” he said, sitting down.

Shayne emptied a water glass and poured him a straight shot of cognac.

“Thank you,” Rutherford said. “Much as I enjoyed that coffee royal, the coffee does tend to blur the impact.” He emptied the glass in one long ecstatic swallow. “That is grand liquor, Mr. Shayne. Well, Joey wasn’t there. His cot was set up. He had a feed bag stuffed with straw, which he was going to use as his pillow. And the funny thing was-his toothbrush was there on the beam. Joey is no fanatic about most things, but he definitely makes it a fetish to brush his teeth practically every night, no matter what time he goes to bed. He not only wasn’t in the tack-room, he wasn’t in the Domaine barn at all. I looked in two other barns where he has privileges. He wasn’t there either. I don’t know what to make of it. If he changed his mind and decided to sleep elsewhere, why didn’t he take his toothbrush?”

“When you were talking to him, Goldy,” Rourke said, “did he say anything about tomorrow night’s twin double?”

Rutherford looked from Rourke to Shayne. “Do you mean to say that Joey Dolan got you up here at four A.M. to sell you a winning combination in the twin double? That Joey. A conception of such scope wouldn’t even occur to anybody else. It’s breathtaking. But if Joey doesn’t show up, and it certainly looks as though he’s not going to, give me another drink and a few minutes with pencil and paper, and I may be able to block out some suggestions for you.”

“I don’t think so, thanks,” Rourke said.

“In that case-”

He cleared his throat and tugged at the end of the five-dollar bill beneath Shayne’s coffee cup. Shayne lifted the cup, and the bill disappeared into the pocket of Rutherford’s khaki shirt.

Tim Rourke expected a certain amount of needling from Shayne on the way back to Miami. But when he started to apologize, his friend merely said, “You saved yourself five hundred bucks. Forget it.”

“I just wish I knew what happened. He certainly wasn’t stone-cold sober when I talked to him, but I can’t see him passing out somewhere when he had something as big as this on the fire.”

“Tim, you weren’t hitting on all cylinders yourself. It’s obvious. By the time he got to the bottom of the bottle, he’d forgotten all about how easy it is to get rich betting the twin double. You’re lucky it turned out this way. Wheeling all the horses in two races runs into money. You’d make out better in the long run if you concentrated on improving your poker game.”

“My poker game’s all right,” Rourke said defensively. “I hardly ever catch four of a kind to beat a full house, that’s all.”

He stared moodily through the windshield at the wide strip of concrete that was flowing rapidly backward beneath their wheels. “ ‘Some ugly boys in this business.’ That’s one of the things he said on the phone, and I can’t get it out of my head. I wish Rutherford hadn’t mentioned that toothbrush.”

Shayne snorted, and Rourke said nothing more. In the morning, after too little sleep, he showed up for work with a headache, an unpleasant taste in his mouth, something wrong with his nervous system, and the feeling that Shayne, as usual, had been talking sense. They had wasted a few hours, but it hadn’t cost him any money.

He was writing a series of articles on payoffs in the construction business, a perennial subject he had handled so often that he could do it justice without being fully awake. He worked steadily until noon, getting through a pack of cigarettes and innumerable cups of coffee, occasionally making a phone call to check a name or a reference.

A youthful reporter at the next desk wrenched a sheet of copy paper out of his typewriter and asked if Rourke had any aspirin. Rourke shook his head. “What’s the matter, headache?”

The other reporter, whose name was Mehlmann, was leaning forward, very pale, his head on both fists. “Headache and gut-ache. Every time I go into that goddamned morgue, I can taste it the rest of the day.”

“Don’t let MacMaster know you feel like that,” Rourke said, “or he’ll see to it you catch every morgue story as long as you work here.”

“Don’t I know it,” Mehlmann agreed. “This is the third time in ten days. If I get one more wood-alcohol poisoning, I may drink a pint of paint-remover myself. I damn near covered this one from the facts on the police blotter. But it’s just as well I talked to the morgue people. The stiff had a copy of last night’s Surfside Raceway program in his pocket. That gave me my lead.”

Rourke’s swivel chair squeaked as it came around. “Did they identify him?”

Mehlmann checked his copy. “Joseph Dolan.” Looking up, he saw Rourke’s face. “What’s the matter, Tim?”

Rourke was on his feet, clutching the corner of his desk. “Where was he?”

“In a hallway on Fifth Street. Did I miss something? I only gave it three paragraphs.”

He held out the yellow sheet of copy paper, but Rourke waved it aside. “I don’t want to see the damn story. Tell me what happened.”