Shadow Roll (17 page)

It wasn’t more than a few minutes later when someone was knocking on my door.

Fucking hell, as us PIs say (but not in the books I’d read), couldn’t a guy get any sleep?  Especially at these prices?  So I covered my head with the goose down pillow.

It didn’t work.  I could still hear the knocking.

I was out of the bed and across the room in one second flat.  I jerked open the door all ready to yell whatever came out of my mouth.

The words died in my throat.

It was Mrs. Willingford, all smiles and moxie.  Behind her, following on as she strolled into my room, was a beautifully dressed young man pushing a beautifully dressed cart covered in a beautiful breakfast.  Including champagne.  That guy was all smiles too.  Which made me look down.  I was naked as a jay bird.

“It’s about time you got up,” said Mrs. Willingford, first tipping, then waving away the guy who’d rolled the tray into the middle of my little room, “and I see you are too.  How charming.”

By then I had at least half the bedding wrapped around me.  “Up?  I just got down.”

“But sweetie, it’s eight.  And we have so much to do.”

I was starving.  The food smelled great.  And so did Mrs. Willingford.  She also looked great.  Dolled up like she was off to the races.  It had to take hours to look like that.  What the hell time did she get up?

 “I hear you’ve solved the case.  I ought to say cases.”  She was strolling around my room, sniffing at the décor.  “Accidents, my ass.  They were murders.  I’ve heard the Grand Union had rooms like this, though I’ve never seen one.”

“It’s fine.  Go away.”

She glanced out my window.  “Oh look.  There’s two of Joker’s cars.  And Woody!”  She was waving.

“Woody?”

“My driver.  He’s waiting for us.”

“Semaphore I’m not coming.”

“Of course you’re coming.  But first—breakfast.  You like sweet things?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Have a strawberry.”

Opening my mouth for my next wisecrack, she popped a berry in.  Like Babe Duffy, I almost choked.

“There’s cream where that came from.”

Mrs. Willingford began taking off her clothes.

She had the type of beauty Vivian Leigh had.  There was a little mole on her perfect right breast, a small scar on her smooth left thigh, her knees were dimpled.  She was the color of cream, as hot as a pistol, one that’s seen action in one of those gunfights with Bonnie and Clyde, and as willing as her name.  What’s a red-blooded male supposed to do?

I fucked her.

What I thought was Joker Willingford’s wife couldn’t stand being rejected.  It drove her nuts.  If I gave her what she needed, she’d leave me alone.

Who was I fooling?  I wasn’t thinking at all.

Afterwards, the both of us gleaming all over with hard earned sweat, eating her breakfast, smoking the usual cigarettes, I wondered if I’d just made the worst mistake in my life as a PI?

Sam Russo had bedded a suspect.  Little chance of it happening again.  The rest of ‘em were guys.

Mrs. Willingford crushed out her butt in the ashtray on her side of my bed, slid out from under the covers with athletic grace, used the bathroom, got dressed, touched up her hair and make-up, leaned over for a kiss goodbye, and left.  All in complete silence.

Hold on.  Didn’t she say I was coming?  And then I got it.

It took ten minutes before I noticed the piece of paper under the ashtray.  I bathed and shaved before I read it.  I wasn’t anxious to read it.  When did she have time to write it?  Of course.  At her toilette.  It could of said anything and none of it flattering.  But I had to read the damn thing sometime and sometime had to be before I left for the track.  So I read it.

It said:
As I said,
they weren’t accidents.  But no one will ever prove it.  You weren’t bad and I ought to know.  Mrs. W.

I must have looked at that piece of paper forever.  It sure seemed like forever.  Was she telling me she did it and I’d never catch her?  Was she telling me she knew who did it, and I’d never catch them?  I had no idea what she was telling me.  I only knew what I already knew.  Three jockeys were murdered and those who counted in Saratoga Springs wanted that shut up, covered over, and forgotten.

Mrs. Joker Willingford counted in Saratoga Springs.  She counted wherever highbred horses were run.  Was she one of those who wanted it shut up—it didn’t look like it.

A man wasn’t at his best just out of the sack with a beautiful woman.  I mean, he might have felt his best, but his brain was off somewhere smelling roses.

Forget that.  There was enough of me left to know this: I was out of a job, but not out of money.  I was solving this case if it got me killed too.  I swore this on the memory of my murdered mother.  And on the life of Jane.

Clean and freshly shaved, I climbed back in bed, punched the pillow a few times, and fell asleep.

Chapter 33

I woke up for a second time at noon.  What the hell should I do now?  I couldn’t check on Jane.  Everyone knew about Jane.  We’d been all over the track.  She’d even caught a scent—then lost it in a pile of horse dung.  What if I was being watched?  Alonzo had done his job well.  How else did Mrs. Willingford find me so quickly?

Was I being watched
before
I moved into the Grand Union?  Of course I was being watched.  Maybe by more than the eyes in the head of down-on-his-luck George Labold.  How else would whoever it was know when to attack Jane?  OK.  So what if that someone followed me today?  I had to assume they would.  For instance, today’s early morning wake-up call.  That could of been Mrs. Willingford’s way of checking on Jane.  But no Jane.  So she left me a snotty self-satisfied note.  If that’s what it was.

I’d had moments of doubt before this, but this time I really thought I might be better off selling insurance—like Walter Huff in James M. Cain’s
Double Indemnity
.  Walter was doing just fine until he met Phyllis Nirdlinger and Phyllis Nirdlinger’s doomed husband.

There was one strawberry left and a little champagne.  I dropped the strawberry into the glass, drank the champagne, and chewed the berry.  Was Mrs. Willingford my Mrs. Nirdlinger?  If she was, who did she want me to kill?

I’d kill to talk to Hank on the telephone.  I couldn’t.  Not even from my own room.  Who knew who was at the switchboard listening?  Bribed or coerced.  So I had to leave that one to trust.  Jane couldn’t die.  She wasn’t built for it.

All I could do was keep going until I couldn’t go any farther.

So that’s what I did.  I kept going.

It was what we did on Luzon.  When the food ran out and the ammo was running out and there were more and more of them and less and less of us.  When we and our mounts were strafed from the air and missiles whistled in from the sea.  When tanks ran down rank upon rank of us.  When blood and fire and unbearable noise were our lot without cease.  When most of us, starving, ate our horses, the horses who’d charged tanks when we asked them to, who’d taken us places our own artillery could never go, horses who never complained and never said no.

Growing up in the Little Kid’s Lock-up never taught me to care for my fellow man.  But the horses we rode in the Philippines, they gave me a strong and lasting love for other kinds of life, just as valuable as ours, more loyal, more beautiful by far, without greed, without envy, and without murder in their hearts.

Except for maybe some cats I’d met, and Jane.

I rode a Morgan mare called Magpie.  Magpie was shot out from under me.  I sat with her as she died, the ground pocked with the craters of past explosions and soon to be cratered with more, her lovely head in my lap.  We talked.  Me in my tongue, she in hers.  Magpie wasn’t afraid, I could tell from the soft look in her eye.  But I was.  I was afraid because I was still alive and the world around me was still there, beyond any hell I’d ever imagined back when Jesus was Alan Ladd and his greatest apostle was Mister.

Hell.  I’d gone and gotten all sappy.  It was time to stand up and keep going.

First thing I did was what Hank Hanson suggested I do.  Go back to the pink hotel, knock on every door, ask if anyone had seen anyone or anything around the time I was talking to Clay in the gents at my new hotel, the Grand Union.  I got a few slammed doors, but I also got a few answers—even if they were all different answers.  A small man in a big car had been parked outside for over an hour doing what seemed essentially nothing (listening to Walter Winchell was my guess), a big man on foot walked by (the old lady who told me  said she didn’t like someone on foot around after dark; it just wasn’t “nice”), a tall woman under a huge hat arrived, spoke with the desk clerk, then left, a delivery boy knocking on the wrong door, a kid running down a corridor—but not my corridor.

I asked the lady who mentioned the big man on foot if she noticed his shoes.  She said, “Shoes, sonny?  It was dark.  Besides, unless they’re mine and they’re killin’ me, I don’t give a fig about shoes.  All I know is he had some on.  I think I woulda noticed if he didn’t.”

I asked the desk clerk, who had been on duty at the right time on the right night, about the tall lady in the big hat.  He said, “What tall lady in a big hat?  Some of the people who stay here are all wet, you ask me.”

So there I was.  No tall lady, or so the clerk said.  A big man who could of fit the bill as the guy in the elevator with Manny Walker.  It depended on how big.  But no way to know if he was, or wasn’t, that guy, since no one else but one nervous nellie still in her nightie and curlers saw him, coming or going—but what about a delivery boy knocking on the wrong door?

I went back for a second crack at the couple who’d been behind the “wrong door.”  They weren’t pleased to see me the first time; the second time was even chillier.  But they didn’t tell me to make tracks.

They said he wasn’t exactly a boy, more like maybe pushing middle age.  Since they themselves were just out of diapers and freshly married, “middle age” could mean thirty.  They said he wore what a delivery boy should be wearing, a dark blue delivery uniform but neither could recall if there was an insignia over his pocket.  And if there was, what it was.  They said with a bright light over their door, and him being right under it, his face was in shadow and difficult to see.  They said that he said he was sorry once and once only.  I asked if he’d asked where the right room was.  They said, nope, he’d just said sorry and was on his way while they got back to handicapping the next day’s races—or whatever they were doing.  I asked for a physical description.  One said he wasn’t all that big.  The other said he wasn’t all that small either.  To both, he seemed to be maybe sort of tall.

“Really tall?”

“Well,” said the male half of the reluctant duo, “maybe not really tall.  Hell, how would I know?  I’m pretty tall myself if you haven’t noticed.”

I got in one more question before they shut the door in my face.  What was he delivering?  Didn’t know, he didn’t say, snapped the tall man who was about as tall as Edward G. Robinson on one of his tall days.  But they didn’t notice him carrying anything.

I said thank you to a closed door.

It was the delivery “boy.”  I was sure of it.  With Lino, I would get these kinds of hunches.  Lino always thought each one was like some sort of miracle.  But then, Lino himself was the real miracle.  I mean, dumb as a rock, yet he kept his job.  But a hunch wasn’t some kind of mysterious knowing without knowing.  A hunch was just plain knowing because all sorts of little things added up.  Like wearing a delivery uniform a guy could get rid of quick if it got bloody, and still walk up and down nice suburban streets without scaring old ladies.

Things were adding up.  I wasn’t ready to sit around and write it all down yet, make a few lists, but I was getting there.  First, I had to go create a big splash at the track.  I had to stroll through the upper tiers where the bigwigs hung out.  I had to wander through the jockeys’ dressing room.  I had to hang out at the paddock watching the horses parade before their races.  If whoever tried to kill Jane (she
was
alive, I knew that because I needed to know it) thought he’d succeeded—and why not? he’d tried hard enough—then he probably figured he was safe.  I’d also bet a wad on everyone who counted in the Saratoga racing game knowing I’d been booted out of the picture.  Even Mrs. Willingford could be thinking I was on my way home with my tail between my legs.

But I thought if I showed up at the track, doing what I’d been doing all along, things ought to shake out a little.  That’s what I needed right now.  To shake things up.

Especially as this day was the day before the 79th running of the Travers Stakes—the first was held in 1864 but a few got missed along the way.  The Travers was the best Saratoga had to offer.  It was the race Fleeting Fancy was running in.  The Willingford’s filly had one real competitor: Ace Admiral.  Ace Admiral was a great horse.  His trouble was that last year and this year Calumet Farm’s Citation was winning everything.  And what he wasn’t winning, his stablemate, Coaltown, was winning.

The owners of Ace Admiral were carefully choosing their spots.  They’d entered him in the Travers because Coaltown wasn’t entered in the Travers, and neither was Citation.  They hired the best jockey they could get: Ted Atkinson, twice the leading jockey in North America.

Their only real competition?  Fleeting Fancy under a green and eager kid called Toby Tyrrell.

Chapter 34

An hour of working the track and I was pleased with myself.  I got stared at, whispered about, and ignored.  All this happened in all the right places by all the right people.

Mrs. Willingford, for once standing around with Joker Willingford, didn’t turn away when I walked by.  But she looked right through me.  At the same time, with the skill of a pickpocket—pretended to bump into me: oh, I
am
sorry—slipped another note in my jacket pocket.  I probably knew what it said, but people can surprise you.

I’d save it for a quiet moment.