The Trojan Colt (19 page)

He thought for a moment. “There's a bunch of Bob Evans restaurants here in town. Pick one that's not too close to the station or Bigelow's farm and you should be all right.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Now all I have to do is figure out why I'm a target.”

“You could visit every place you've been the past couple of days,” he suggested. Then he shook his head. “No, that wouldn't prove a thing. He's already shooting at you, so if he follows you to places that have nothing to do with his reason, it won't prove anything.”

“If it's all the same to you, I'd just as soon not be shot at,” I said.

“Then you're going to have to turn into Sherlock Holmes and solve this by pure deductive reasoning, because the second you visit Bigelow or Standish or the kid's parents again, you're a target again, like it or not. You might not know why he's trying to kill you, but he sure as hell knows, and that means you've already given him his reason.”

“I know,” I said. “But that's crazy. I've talked to a couple of trainers, a couple of grooms, a couple of parents, and a girlfriend. Nobody knows anything. I'll stake my life on it.”

Berger sighed deeply. “In case it's escaped your notice, you already have.”

“It doesn't make any sense,” I complained. “They answered everything I asked. Nobody ducked, and I know if I'd had lie detectors on them they'd all have passed.”

“Has it occurred to you that maybe you didn't ask them the right questions?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that no one tried to kill you three days ago, or two days. All you've done is go around asking questions. Maybe if you'd asked the right one, you'd know why you've become a target.”

“That makes sense when you say it,” I said. “But what the hell else could I have asked?”

“Beats me,” said Berger. “I wasn't there. But clearly he thinks you know something you shouldn't know.”

And an hour and a half later, when I put aside the sports section of the Lexington paper and finished my third cup of coffee to go along with my second cheese Danish at a Bob Evans a dozen miles from the station, I still didn't know.

I suppose what it came down to is that I had more confidence in the shooter than I had in myself. Which is to say, I was sure he hadn't made a mistake, and that means I had—if not a mistake, at least an error of omission. There was something I should have asked that he figured a competent detective would have asked, and the answer to it, or possibly the mere fact that I knew enough to ask it, was reason enough to kill me.

I had no leads at all on Tony's disappearance, or Billy Paulson's either . . . and in fact, if the two were linked it was by the most improbable of connections, that they both rubbed the same horse.

Well, maybe that wasn't the only link. They'd both worked for Mill Creek. Maybe they'd each learned something, maybe even the same thing, about Bigelow, something he didn't want anyone to know, something that could put him in the poorhouse even quicker than he seemed to be heading for it.

Of course, that would mean that these two uneducated kids had discovered something that no one else in Bigelow's employ had hit upon, and while he wasn't surrounded by geniuses, he'd had a couple of pretty competent managers in Chessman and Standish. I knew he had an accountant, and he probably had maids and butlers. I'd met one of his gofers; there had to be more. It was difficult to think that only Tony and Billy had the pure deductive powers to unearth whatever it was they had unearthed.

After another four cups of coffee, I got the distinct impression that if I ordered one more she'd pour it on my head to open up the table to better-paying customers, so I got up, left her a five-spot so she wouldn't throw a coffee pot at my head as I walked past, paid my bill, and climbed into the Chevy that Berger or one of his officers had rented for me.

Then I just started driving around, still dwelling on the problem, and realized I was wasting the Sanderses' money if I didn't go somewhere and do something, though I was a little vague on where and what. But I knew I couldn't just keep driving until the light dawned, so I went back to Mill Creek Farm, parked near the barn area, walked around the backhoe, and found Frank Standish walking from the yearling barn; it still housed a bunch of colts and fillies, as only the very best-bred of them had been accepted for the Keeneland sale. He was heading to the large barn that housed his office.

“Another leak?” I asked, indicating the backhoe.

He nodded. “If Mr. Bigelow keeps this place much longer, I think he's going to have to replace every pipe on the property, plus half the barns. What can I do for you, Eli?”

“I've hit a bunch of dead ends. I thought I'd take another look around and see if I missed anything.”

“You've got free run of the barns and paddocks,” replied Standish. “If you want to go to the Big House—that's what we call the Bigelow residence—I'll have to get permission, but I can't imagine anyone will say no, especially with Mrs. Bigelow off visiting friends in Manhattan.”

“No, if Tony didn't spend any time there, I don't have to.

“Truth to tell, I don't think he ever once set foot in the place.”

“Where did he spend most of his free time?”

Standish smiled. “There's not a lot of free time to be had when you're working with animals, Eli.”

“He couldn't spend twenty-four hours a day with Tyrone,” I protested.

“Of course not. But he had other yearlings as well.”

“He did?” I said, surprised. “I thought he just cared for Tyrone.”

Standish shook his head. “You ship the most expensive horse on the grounds to a sale, you ship the groom he's used to with him. The others learn to adjust to new grooms in a day or two, but you never want the money horse left alone in strange surroundings.”

“How many other yearlings did he care for?”

“Two colts and a filly. They're still here.”

“He's not planning to race them?”

Standish shook his head again. “He hasn't raced a horse in fifteen, sixteen years. He'll be selling these. They just weren't good enough in either bloodlines or conformation for Keeneland in the summer.”

“There's more than one sale here?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Standish. “What just finished was the Select Summer Sale, the very best-bred and best-conformed yearlings. There'll be three or four times as many at the fall sale, but they won't bring the kind of prices the summer yearlings did.” He paused to signal a girl to take a broodmare to a certain pasture. “The interesting part is that the fall sales are every bit as likely to produce a classic winner as the summer sales. It just won't be quite as well-bred to start with.”

“To start with?” I asked.

“Obscure Stallion X sires a Derby winner and a Santa Anita Handicap winner, and suddenly he's Hot Stallion Y. Breeding's not quite the science we wish it was. There's a centuries-old saying that still holds true: Breed the best to the best and hope for the best.”

“That's fascinating,” I said, “but I'm getting sidetracked here. Let me rephrase my question: On those incredibly rare occasions when Tony wasn't working his tail off, where did he hang out?”

“Mostly with his girlfriend, I think,” said Standish.

“I mean when he was here,” I said. “Like if he took a half-hour break and then had to go back to work. Where would he take it?”

“Ah!” he replied with a smile. “Now I understand. You see that little room there, just down from my office?”

“I thought it was an equipment room.”

“A tack room?” he said. “It is, but Tony turned one end of it into a reading room.”

“He didn't strike me as a bookworm,” I noted.

“There was one subject that fascinated him and that he knew very well.”

“Horse racing,” I said with certainty.

He nodded. “He subscribed to most of the magazines. We get them here, of course, but he subscribed long before he came to work. But we've got quite a library of books—a complete run of the annual
American Racing Manual
, lots more—and he used to sit in there whenever he had a chance and read them.”

“May I take a look?” I asked.

“Be my guest.”

I walked down to the room. It was dark, of course, but I found a light switch just inside the door. I'd half expected to see shelves of books there, but it was mostly grooming equipment, extra buckets, and horse blankets and the like—and in one corner was a swivel chair on wheels that someone at the house no longer wanted and had given to the barn area, and an abandoned lamp with a rusty base. I tried it, and it still worked.

I looked around for a few minutes, found three hardcover books in a cardboard box—all on racing, of course—but nothing else. There wasn't a damned thing to be learned here that would make someone want to start taking shots at me.

I went back into the main aisle of the barn, couldn't see Standish anywhere, and went outside looking for him. I found him about fifty yards away, leaning against a split-rail fence watching a half dozen broodmares and their foals cantering across the grass. I couldn't figure out why the mares were running—maybe something startled them, or maybe, because they'd been race mares, they just felt an occasional compulsion to run—but the foals were clearly having the time of their very young lives.

“Beautiful, aren't they?” I said as I walked up to him.

“Esoterically,” he agreed. “But practically, the smaller bay doesn't stride out enough, and some trainer's going to go crazy trying to teach the roan to switch leads.”

“Switch leads?” I asked. “I don't know what you mean.”

“A horse, even a Secretariat, gets tired if he leads with the same foot all the way around the track,” Standish explained. “Ideally, since they run counterclockwise, you want him leading with his left foot on the turns and his right foot on the straightaways. I know it doesn't sound like much, but it'll make the difference of a length or more in a six-furlong race . . . and a lot of races are won—and lost—by less than a length.”

“I didn't know that.”

“No need for you to. You're not a trainer or a jockey.”

“Is this the pasture where Tyrone ripped up his neck?”

“I sure as hell doubt it,” said Standish. “I just got here in January, and I gather he slashed it in September or October. But it wouldn't have been this paddock.”

“Why not?”

“Too small. Those weanlings like to run, so it would have been one of the two big ones”—he pointed at the paddocks in question—“off by the weanling and yearling barns.”

“You don't have a vet on the grounds,” I said. “How did they patch it up before he bled to death?”

“It's only about ten or twelve inches, and he doesn't have any arteries right there,” said Standish. “They tell me they just called the vet, held him still for twenty minutes 'til the vet arrived, and got him sewn up. Didn't even anesthetize him. Of course, we don't have the facility to knock a horse out and work on him here anyway. Probably they made a value judgment that it was easier to patch him up right here in one of the barns than send for a horse ambulance, take him to the vet's hospital, and put him under before they tried to stop the bleeding. He's a pretty tractable colt; he'll let you do almost anything with him.”

“Did Tony ever say anything about him?” I was grasping at straws, but I couldn't think of any other question.

“Just his daily reports.”

“On what?”

“The usual: Did he clean out his oats? Did he have any open sores? Was he snorting too much (which might imply a breathing problem when he got to the track)? Things like that.”

I felt myself getting tense and nervous. There was someone out there, still intent on killing me, and not only hadn't I learned a damned thing, I couldn't think of another question to ask.

Finally I just thanked him and walked back to the Chevy. As I drove away I checked every driveway I passed, every cross street, looking for a blue Mercedes convertible. The fact that I didn't see one didn't make me feel any better. All it meant, as far as I was concerned, was that the shooter was skilled at arranging ambushes.