Nice Fillies Finish Last (12 page)

“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.”

“Don’t just accuse him of killing Joey. Make fun of him for doing it in such a fruity way. Poison’s a woman’s weapon. If you get him mad enough to remember your gun, I don’t want it to be a gun that shoots real bullets.”

He prepared three blank rounds and reloaded the .38, spinning the cylinder to bring the first blank in under the hammer. He gave it back to Claire.

Then they picked up the room, putting everything Shayne had brought, except the bourbon, back in the paper bag. Claire cleaned the ashtrays. He looked around a last time, to be sure they hadn’t forgotten anything, then turned off the lights and, going to the window, looked down at the parking strip. He swore under his breath.

Claire came over beside him. “What is it?”

“A Yellow Cab, that’s all. It could be a coincidence, but I doubt it, somehow.”

“Where?”

“Not out in front. Up next to the gas station.”

She took a quick breath. “Are you sure it wasn’t there when we came?”

“No. But we’d better play percentages and assume it’s the same cab that was following us before.” He drew on his cigarette slowly. “It must be somebody who knows about this motel. After we lost him in Pompano Beach, he came past and saw the Cadillac.”

Her hair brushed against Shayne’s shoulder. He could hear her breathing softly. Her perfume was sharp and somehow disturbing.

“It can’t be Thorne,” he said. “He couldn’t leave the track. I think his wife saw us leave. If that’s who it is—” He swore again. “He’s going to suspect we’ve been bugging the room. That’s not a specialty of mine, but he won’t know it. He’ll be on his guard. He might even refuse to meet you here at all. So there goes a good idea down the drain.”

A spark of light appeared as the driver, in the front seat of the cab, pulled at his cigarette.

“I wonder if you’re thinking the same thing that I am, Claire,” Shayne said.

“I can’t think at all,” she said desperately. “My brain isn’t functioning.”

He turned toward her in the darkness. “See if you can get it to function. Try to think of some other reason why we might be spending half an hour alone in a motel room.”

He could feel her breath on his face. After a moment she said softly, “It’s functioning, Mike.”

“It could have happened like this. I called you out of the clubhouse and said I had to talk to you alone. I knew you hadn’t checked out of this motel. When we got here—yeah, this would fit—I held the bottle of bourbon up to see how many drinks were left. It might be fairly convincing, if you look a little disheveled when we walk out. If I’m wearing some of your lipstick.”

“Mike, good heavens. I don’t mean it’s such a horrifying thought. It’s just such a change of subject.”

Shayne laughed. “I’m not suggesting that we actually do anything. I just think we ought to put on a small act. Give me your lipstick. I’ll see what I can do in the dark.”

“No, you couldn’t make it look authentic, Mike. I have no objection to kissing you. I might even enjoy it.”

She took the lapels of his coat and came in against him. “But I have a funny feeling. This whole thing is window-dressing, isn’t it? The microphone, the questions you want me to ask Paul. Eighteen thousand people saw us leave the track. You pulled out of the parking lot as though you had all the time in the world. And you weren’t really trying too hard to lose that cab, were you? That was more window-dressing.”

Shayne put an arm around her lightly. “Claire, will you trust me?”

“I don’t know,” she said in a muffled voice. “Here we are, in a motel room with the lights out. Of course we’re making love. What else could we be doing? But how is that going to help?”

“I can’t tell you yet,” Shayne said. “You’re right, there’s a certain amount of sleight-of-hand in this, but that goes for everything else. Everything’s faked. Nothing’s the way it seems. Dolan wasn’t killed because he blundered onto a betting scheme. He didn’t go anywhere near the Belle Mark last night. Your husband didn’t loan me his Cadillac because he was sorry Brossard ran me off the road. And that’s the way it goes, all down the line. This whole twin-double deal is a hoax. Take my word for it, and do what I tell you. You have to talk to Thorne alone and ask him those questions about Dolan, and if I told you everything I’ve found out and everything I guess, you couldn’t make it look real. I hoped that all the dodging around we did in Pompano Beach would convince you. It’s true, I was a bit slow at the crucial turns, but I didn’t think you noticed.”

“I didn’t. I just had a kind of prickly feeling.”

They were still standing together, with Claire clinging to him in the dark as though she had to hang onto something or she would slide to the floor. Footsteps approached along the outside gallery. She froze until they passed.

“I’m in a breakable condition right now, Mike,” she whispered. “But I have to trust you. I don’t have any alternative. Tell me one thing. Do you think I poisoned Joey?”

“Hell, no.”

“Truthfully? Because you might think that the only way I could really close the door on Paul Thorne, so he’d never bother me again, would be to win a big sum of money for him. He still has that stupid letter I sent him, and if he feels pressed enough I know he’ll use it. Not for any rational reason, just for the pleasure of smashing me. Would I let an insignificant drunk like Joey stand in my way?”

“Yes, Claire,” he said seriously. “I think you would.”

She slipped her arms around his neck. “Then we’re really on the same side?”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

Her wrists locked and she pulled his face down. Her mouth opened to his and they came together hard. She made a small sound of surprise and alarm, as though she didn’t know what to make of what had happened.

“Mike, I’ve been so frightened.” She kissed the corners of his mouth. “Now I have something I can count on. Mike, hold me. Tighter.”

His embrace tightened, but he could hear a clock ticking inside his head, the same clock that operated the time announcements on the big number-board in the infield at the track. They had wasted too much time in Pompano Beach. The twin-double betting must have closed and the sixth race was underway. If Paul Thorne won it, the machinery would be in motion.

She went on kissing him, and it seemed for a moment that the clock would stop. The bed was only a step from the window. They turned together, without words. Her knees struck the edge of the bed and she sank down on it, drawing him after her. Her mouth and tongue never left him. Her hard, frozen surface had splintered into a thousand fragments, and it might never be put back together again. The jacket of her suit had opened. She was far from skinny, he found; the people who thought so were out of their mind. Her hand was inside his shirt, moving against him.

An instant more and they would have reached a point from which there would be no turning back. Then a siren wailed on the highway. It had nothing to do with them, but it brought the outside world into the motel room for long enough so Shayne heard the ticking again. This time it was coming from his own watch. He turned his arm and looked at the time.

“Please, Mike,” Claire whispered. “I want you to. I know it’s unfair. I don’t mean anything to you. But if you were inside me for a moment, I think I could get through the rest of this awful night. I’ve kept myself—so separate from life. All at once I feel—”

He said gently, “We have to get back. We have to do everything exactly right, or there won’t be one chance in ten thousand of finding out what happened with Dolan.”

“Ten minutes. Five.”

He kissed her and began to move away. She held on.

“Mike, I’ll try to do what you told me, but it’s going to be so scarey. Even without any bullets in the gun. Everything’s changed. I was so blithe about it this afternoon—I thought all I had to do was show the gun to him and he’d start being sensible.” She let him go, her hand sliding along his arm. “Six hours ago I thought I could take care of myself. Up to that point I always had. One kiss from you, and I turn into the kind of female who throws herself at men to get them to take over her problems.”

Shayne smiled in the darkness. “We came pretty close there for a minute.”

“Didn’t we? It crossed my mind that there was really only one way to get the after-lovemaking look, and that was to make love. The next thing I knew I’d stopped thinking. You do everything so well. I knew this would be no exception.”

She pulled him down and kissed him lightly. “God, my life’s a mess.”

“I think it may be less of a mess after the dust settles,” he said. Reaching out, he turned on the bedside lamp. “How much of your lipstick do I have on?”

She looked him over critically. “Mike, none!”

Rolling over, she took out her lipstick and used it on herself, then kissed him carefully. The result satisfied her.

“Now you look like a satyr. You’ve been kissing a married woman in a motel, you scoundrel.”

She stood up, brushing the wrinkles out of her skirt “Well?” she said, pivoting. “Have we been using the Golden Crest Motel for immoral purposes, or not?”

“You look as elegant as always,” he said with a grin. “Even your hair doesn’t need combing. Be combing it anyway when we go out. We’ve suddenly realized how late it is, and we had to throw our clothes on in a rush.”

He pulled off his necktie and waited for her by the light switch. She touched his face quickly.

“You’re a comfort, Mike. I feel
enormously
better. I meant everything I said on the bed, but at the same time naturally I’m glad I didn’t succeed in taking advantage of you. I would have worried afterward. I don’t know anything about you! Except that you’re quite a guy.”

He snapped off the light, then took her hand and walked quickly to the outside stairs. The Yellow Cab hadn’t moved. Claire was laughing, taking rapid steps in her tight skirt, trying to comb her hair with her free hand.

“Whoa! Not so fast, darling. If I break a leg, we
will
be in trouble.”

“Damn it,” Shayne said between his teeth, but loudly enough to be heard in the gas station. “They’ll be sending out search parties in another few minutes.”

“Relax,” she told him laughingly. “Everything’s under control. Nobody’s that interested. Mike, baby, do something about camouflaging that lipstick.”

“Oh, God.”

When he reached the Cadillac he turned the fender mirror so he could see what had to be done. She passed him a Kleenex from the front seat, and he scrubbed at the reddish smears on his cheeks and chin.

“What kind of lipstick do you use, for God’s sake? This just makes it worse. I’ll hit the men’s room after we get back.” He added soberly, “We shouldn’t have done this, Claire.”

“Why, darling! Who suggested it, after all?”

He started the motor and came back fast. He cramped the wheel, bent forward angrily, and didn’t glance at the cab on the way out.

SHAYNE DROPPED Claire at the clubhouse entrance and put the Cadillac in its old place in the parking lot. When he came out of the men’s room after washing off the lipstick, the crowd was roaring and the public-address announcer was calling the order in which a field of trotters was rounding into the stretch. This was the eighth race, Shayne discovered from the board as he came out on the ramp. He was back just in time. He waited till the horses completed their stretch run, turned, and came jogging back toward the paddock, blowing. Then, as the crowd patterns changed, he began looking for Rourke’s head bandage.

“Mike, I was afraid you wouldn’t get here,” Rourke said, as Shayne came up to him. “I saw you and the Domaine dame take off in that big Cad. Sandra tells me Mrs. Domaine’s the one who put sleeping pills in my soup—and I didn’t want to drink that soup, you may recall,” he told the nurse. “You made me. Mike, what have you been doing? Putting on pressure?”

“I put on a little. How’s the twin-double investment?”

“Going according to plan, according to plan. Things are getting tense.”

The nurse was on the edge of her seat, clutching her bag. “I had no idea harness racing was so interesting, Mr. Shayne. The picture the horses make coming around that turn!”

“And especially when it’s your horse that’s out in front,” Rourke said.

“I see you’ve got binoculars,” Shayne said, taking them. “You had a ticket on all the horses in the eighth?”

“That’s what we decided. Thorne’s trotter took the sixth, very well behaved, didn’t work up a sweat. Paid us lucky bettors $54 for two. I had ten bucks on the nose, besides all the twin tickets on him. I cashed that $10 ticket for $270, and that gives us our capital.”

“Who do you mean by us?”

“Me and Sandra. You didn’t want in, and I’m not cutting you in when we’re three-quarters of the way home. I had Thorne’s trotter wheeled in the first half, and that brought us out of the seventh with sixteen live tickets.”

“It’s complicated, isn’t it?” Miss Mallinson said.

“It’s not complicated at all!” Rourke insisted. “What the hell, I’ll explain it again. Thorne’s trotter was Number Three. We combined Number Three with every horse in the seventh—eight separate tickets at two bucks apiece. But that would only give us one live ticket at the end of the half, to turn in for our pick, in the eighth and ninth. So we bet that same combination sixteen times. Cost $256. What’s hard to understand about that? The Number Two horse won the seventh. All right, we had sixteen tickets that said Number Three and Number Two, and we traded those in for two sets of tickets combining My Treat, the Domaine horse in the ninth, with all the horses in the eighth. The Number One horse just won the eighth. So now we have two tickets that are still live—Number One in the eighth and Number Four in the ninth, and if Number Four comes in, baby, we’ve cracked the twin double!”