Brett Halliday - Nice Fillies Finish Last

“I didn’t really go into it, Tim. Apparently he went to sleep where they found him. No identification, no money. A little chin beard, five or six days’ stubble everywhere else. He’d been picked up for vagrancy a couple of years back, and they had his prints. Two other bums were found dead in that neighborhood within the last week-damn fools made the mistake of getting drunk on methanol, wood alcohol. Somebody broke into a hardware store a while back, and the cops think that’s where the stuff came from. They did an autopsy on Dolan. It was methanol, all right, maybe not in pure form. Naturally everybody figured this was more of the same. When a dead man hasn’t shaved for a week, of course there’s not much pressure. Tim, does the name Dolan mean something to you?”

“Damn right,” Rourke said grimly. He stood there for another second, gripping the corner of his desk. Poor Joey, he said to himself. He should have been satisfied with small bets and an easy life. He should never have started dreaming about big money. Somebody had read about the two wood-alcohol deaths, and had thought he could drop Dolan in a hallway and no questions would be asked. But Tim Rourke had some questions, by God. He made himself a promise. By the time he was finished with this, whoever had done it would be very sorry.

His lips set, he strode to the sports side of the city room. Ad Kimball, working on his selections for the races that evening, looked up as Rourke stopped beside him. He put his head in his hands and groaned.

“I’d almost forgotten I was sick,” he said. “Then you have to come along and remind me. Have you ever tried reading a race chart with a hangover? After about two minutes, that small print starts squirming around like beetles.”

“Come over and talk to MacMaster with me,” Rourke said. “I don’t want to explain things twice.”

“Why? I don’t talk to city editors unless I have a good reason.”

Rourke picked up the phone on his desk and asked for an outside line, then dialed Michael Shayne’s number. Lucy Hamilton, Shayne’s brown-haired secretary, told him her boss was working on something on Miami Beach.

“Have him phone me at the paper if he calls in, will you, Lucy?” Rourke hung up and told Kimball, “Bring those programs. We’re going to be talking about horses.”

MacMaster, the city editor, was a bald, cold-eyed man who chewed on a dead cigar as Tim Rourke told him about the phone call from Dolan, the fruitless trip to Surf-side Raceway, Dolan’s mention of danger and his death in Miami a few hours later.

“Spell it out,” MacMaster said. “You think somebody killed him?”

“All I know,” Rourke said, biting off his words in a disgusted voice, “is that I gave up on him last night. I let people persuade me that he’d made up this twin-double fantasy to con me out of five hundred bucks. I don’t know if I was right or wrong. It seems to me I’ve got to find out.”

“OK,” MacMaster said. “Your hunches pay off about fifty percent of the time, and that’s good enough for me. I don’t have to tell you what the cops are going to say. They’re going to say, ‘Get the hell out of here and stop bothering us.’”

“The hell with the cops. They go by the law of averages. Here’s a guy with a vagrancy record. He looks like a bum and smells like a bum. He never owned a TV set or subscribed to the Reader’s Digest. Probably he never paid an income tax in his life. He has wood alcohol in him, and the law of averages says don’t give it another thought. I need some more facts before I talk to the cops. I want to go up to the track and ask some questions about those twin-double races.”

“Kimball,” MacMaster said.

The sports writer started. “Yeah?”

“What do you think of Rourke’s idea?”

“That somebody fed this bum wood alcohol because he found out about a scheme to beat the twin? Tim knows what I think. I think it’s ludicrous. Sure, thousands of people buy twin-double tickets every night. So far there’s always been at least one winner, and there can be as many as a couple of hundred. If I understand what Tim’s trying to say, he thinks that two of the four races tonight are fixed. I know,” he said to Rourke as he started to interrupt. “‘Fix’ is the wrong word. Let’s put it this way. Some person or persons unknown have reason to believe that two of the horses entered in the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth races are reasonably certain to win. Is that better? All right. If this was absolutely certain, and if Dolan knew what they were up to and threatened to give them away, in which case they would stand to lose a large sum of money, of course they might kill him. But murder’s an extreme way to handle the problem, it seems to me. In the first place, nothing is absolutely certain in harness racing. In the second place, why would it occur to Dolan to give them away? All he’d want would be to cut himself in on it. This would lower their payoff a little, but not too much. A twin-double investment takes capital. Say without Dolan there would be twenty winning tickets. With him there would be twenty-one. That wouldn’t make enough of a difference to justify a murder.”

MacMaster took his mangled cigar out of his mouth and looked at it for a moment. “Unless what Dolan found out would get them in legal trouble, or in trouble with the track. It’s worth a try. How are you coming with your picks for tonight, Kimball?”

“I’m down to the ninth race, and that’s the tough one.”

“Look at those last four races again with Tim’s theory in mind,” MacMaster said. “Dolan went to sleep in the Domaine barn, and let’s assume that the Domaine horses figure in it, whatever it is. I admit the chronology is a bit muddy, but if he climbed in the window at two and climbed out again at two-thirty to call Tim in Miami, he probably didn’t have a sudden inspiration as he was falling asleep. He must have seen something, or heard something, or somebody told him something.”

Kimball shrugged. “Just remember I’m no clairvoyant.” Seating himself on the corner of the desk, he began studying the entries. After a moment Rourke could see that he was becoming interested. He looked up a point in the Trotting Association Year Book.

“Christ, there are millions of possibilities. The Domaine stable has horses entered in the sixth and the ninth. Both of them raced at Yonkers last summer, and I’d better check the Yonkers programs to see what I can find. In the ninth they’ve got a mare, My Treat, an in-and-outer. She’s always had good potential, but she’s never delivered. If those are the crucial races, the sixth and the ninth, there’s one overlap. It wouldn’t strike you unless you were looking for something like it. A guy named Paul Thorne is driving in both races, and he used to work for the Domaines.”

“What do you know about him?” Rourke said.

“He’s young, tough, probably a little crazy, very competitive. He’s number two in the driver standings. The fans love him, because he always gives the impression of being out to win, and he doesn’t care how he does it, ethically or otherwise. He has a few horses of his own, but he’ll drive for any stable that pays his fee. Some people have started betting on him every time he goes out, which drives down the odds on his horses, and he’s been having trouble getting work. He’s always in hot water with the stewards, who want drivers to be gentlemen and move over when somebody wants to get by. He’s just waited out a fifteen-day suspension. If you want me to do some guessing, I’d guess he might be open to a deal.”

“Good,” MacMaster said. “That’s where you’d better start, Tim. Now what about these Domaines? What are they, husband and wife?”

“Yeah, and they’re in a different category from Thorne. It’s a big stable, with plenty of money behind it. There’s a stud farm and a training stable, and they’ve turned out a few champions, big money-winners. It’s a racing outfit, not a betting outfit.”