The Trojan Colt (23 page)

I figured what the hell, I hadn't shaved in a couple of days, so I might as well make use of the time. I went into the bathroom and got a good look at my face in the mirror. It needed a shave, all right; it probably also needed a couple of stitches, and it sure as hell needed a new ear lobe. I settled for just shaving around my lips—if I kissed her again, I didn't want her to come away looking as bloody as I looked this morning—and then I took a quick shower and changed into some un-blood-splattered clothes.

Then I sat down, hands behind my head, feet propped up on the cot, and spent another hour trying to figure out why the bad guys didn't care about me for a day or two after Tony vanished and Tyrone was sold and then wanted me dead. All I got for my efforts was a headache.

The time dragged by, and finally Bernice appeared in the doorway.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“For food, a bit,” I answered her. “For company, more than you can imagine.”

She smiled. “That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all afternoon.” Then: “What kind of food would you like?”

“Seriously?” I responded. “The kind where no one shoots at me.”

“Not to worry,” she said. “As long as I wear this uniform, I'm the primary target.”

“Can I count on that?” I asked with a smile.

“Seriously, Eli, what kind of food would you like?”

“Right about now, I think I'd like anything that doesn't bite back.”

She laughed. “All right. I know a nice secluded place . . .”

“Secluded is good,” I interjected.

“It's about ten miles out of town and it's off by itself. No one sneaks up on this place.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“And I think we'd better take my car.”

“Oh?” I said.

She smiled. “It's not a green Chevy.”

“A telling point,” I agreed.

There was no sense waiting for it to get dark; that doesn't happen until about 8:30 in Kentucky in June. So she sent a uniformed cop out to make sure no one was lurking nearby, and then we went to her car, a very comfortable Chrysler 200. She kept to less trafficked streets, just to make sure we weren't being followed, the city kind of petered out, and then we were out in farm country, but not quite horse country (no white plank fences), and a couple of minutes later she pulled up to what looked for all the world like a white brick farmhouse with a small parking area.

We entered, the waiter—who was probably the owner and possibly the chef as well—gave her a big hug and led us to a table, dropped off a couple of menus, and made himself scarce. There were twelve tables, and only five were occupied, including ours.

“Does this place do any business?” I asked.

“It's early, Eli. By the time we leave, every table will be filled, and there may even be a waiting line.”

I began reading the menu—pure American top to bottom—and ordered a pure American meal of a rib eye steak and mashed potatoes.

“You come here often?” I asked while we were waiting for our food.

“Only when I'm hiding the good guys from the bad guys,” she said. “I'm sorry; that wasn't funny. I come here about once a month. I've been doing it for years.”

“Yeah, the whole staff—all one of him—seemed to know you.”

“Oh, there's more than one,” she replied, “but it's a family business. It used to be bigger. Jerry—that's the owner, the fellow who greeted us and took our order—had four kids helping him, but a daughter got married and moved out of state, and a son was killed in Afghanistan.”

“Is he the cook?”

She shook her head. “His wife is.”

We chatted a bit about everything except the events of the day, and then the food arrived and it was as good as she'd led me to believe it would be.

“Didn't you like it?” she asked when Jerry had cleared the table and brought us some coffee.

“It was fine,” I said.

“You've got a sour face.”

“It's not the food,” I said.

“This afternoon,” she said knowingly.

I shook my head. “No. I don't want to sound like Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum, but sometimes that goes with the job. What's driving me crazy isn't that they're shooting at me for stumbling onto something. It's that I still don't know what the hell I've stumbled onto.”

“I can understand your frustration,” she said. “Would it help to talk about it?”

“I've been talking about it for three days, and everything keeps coming up blank,” I said, unable to keep the frustration out of my voice. “If anything's happened to Tony, and that's still an unproven ‘if,' there's no reason why it should have happened to Billy Paulson too. And of course I don't know if anything did happen to either of them. Then there's Bigelow. The man's clearly in deep financial trouble. If this was a movie, he'd be the perfect suspect. But first, how could killing either kid get him out of financial trouble? And second, I doubt that either kid spent five minutes total in his presence. They wouldn't have had any access to his records, there isn't a damned way they could hurt him, or blackmail him, or do anything that would make him want to get rid of them. As for the managers, Chessman never met Tony, and I don't think Standish ever met Billy.” I took a swallow of my coffee, which was on the bitter side. “Okay,” I concluded, “make sense out of that.”

“I can't,” she admitted. “If they're dead, the obvious question is: who benefits from their deaths? And if it's not Bigelow, or Standish, or Chessman, then maybe you're looking too close to home. Maybe there's some gambler who . . .” She stopped and shook her head. “No, that's wrong. Mill Creek doesn't race its horses, and neither does the farm Chessman went to. It can't have anything to do with gambling.”

“You see my problem,” I said with a smile.

“It's a hell of a problem,” she agreed. “You solve this and I'll buy you a bottle of whatever you want, short of Dom Perignon. You'll have earned it.”

“You're on a budget,” I said. “I'll take an obscene dance instead.”

“Solve it first, then we'll talk,” she replied as Jerry brought two checks to the table. I grabbed them both before she could reach for hers.

“You paid for gas,” I said.

She seemed about to protest, then just shrugged an acquiescence.

I left the money and tip on the table, and then we drove back to the station. She dropped me at the front door, stayed in the car—so much for shaving, I decided wryly—and drove off as I entered the building. Lou had gone home, but Drew MacDonald was there. He'd heard about what happened and asked me to fill him in, but he didn't have any more answers than Bernice did.

Finally I went to my room, closed the door, found that I wasn't sleepy—it was only eight-thirty—and sat down at the desk next to the pile of Tony's
Thoroughbred Weekly
magazines and the box with Billy Paulson's stuff. I picked up Eddie Arcaro's whip and tried to imagine what it felt like to be riding Citation or Whirlaway home ten lengths in front of the field. Probably the way Dick Tracy felt whenever he put a super-villain behind bars. It was a feeling I could only imagine.

I finally put the whip back in the box and pulled out the inscribed photo again. I didn't know that much about horses, but I could tell that Tyrone was a handsome-looking animal, even with that scar on his neck. Since Billy was holding the rope that was attached to his halter, Tyrone figured to be under a year old in the shot, and he was already exuding class and power. I replaced the photo in its envelope, pushed the box aside, and opened a
Thoroughbred Weekly
from March. A photo of the finish of the Flamingo Stakes was on the cover—three noses on the wire, I read about it being the race of the year so far, and I began idly thumbing through the pages. After a couple of minutes I put it aside and picked up the most recent issue, from two weeks ago. It was much thicker than the March issue, which figured, because there must have been fifty pages of ads for yearlings that would be auctioned at Keeneland. I thumbed through it, looking for Tyrone, and I found him in an ad for the Mill Creek yearlings. He had a full page to himself, as befitted the first Trojan colt ever to be sold at auction, and I spotted him by the scar even before I saw his pedigree with his parents in incredibly bold letters.

I stared at the photo for a moment and thought, And I actually petted you. Somehow I knew that was as close to that kind of quality as I was ever going to get.

I finally put the issue aside and picked one up from February, which covered the San Antonio Handicap and some other big-money races. I began thumbing through the various issues, and suddenly one of the December issues from the previous winter caught my eye. It boasted an article about the first crops of Trojan and the imported British champion Morpheus.

I opened it and soon came to a photo spread showing every Trojan and Morpheus colt and filly that was scheduled to be sold at auction during the coming year. To my untrained eye they were all good-looking horses. The Morpheus offspring were mostly blacks and dark bays, the Trojans mostly chestnuts with the occasional bay or gray thrown in for good measure. I spotted Tyrone and his scar right away. The pose looked very familiar, and I realized it was the same photo that Chessman had sent to Billy—but with Billy, who was standing at the edge of it, cut out.

Or was it the same? Maybe his feet were placed differently. Not that it mattered, but just out of curiosity I pulled Billy's photo out of the box and took another look.

And suddenly I knew what question I had failed to ask, and I even knew where I had to go for the answer.

When morning came I was up almost with the sun and waited impatiently for a couple of hours until I was pretty sure my destination would be open for business. I had one of the officers take the Chevy back and get me a Toyota Camry that was a nice, nondescript gray. Then I packed what I needed in a large manila envelope and headed for the door. Bernice was just showing up for work as I was leaving.

“You look happy today,” she remarked.

“It must be the sight of a pretty woman so early in the day,” I said, giving her a peck on the cheek.

“You've figured something out,” she said instantly.

“Yes, I have,” I replied.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Are you going to tell me about it or not?” she demanded.

“I'm just checking it out, and then I'll be happy to tell anyone who'll listen,” I said.

She stared at me. “So go already,” she said. “We've all been going a little crazy trying to figure out what's happening. I hope whatever you've got holds up.”

“That's what I'm off to find out.”

“Good luck, Eli,” she said as I walked out the door. “I mean it.”

“I know you do.”

The Camry felt a little cramped, but I wasn't going on a long trip. It had a GPS, but I had no idea how it worked. I laid the street map out on the passenger's seat so that I could refer to it if I needed to, and took off.

A few minutes later I pulled into a small lot and realized I was only a couple of blocks from the Hyatt where I'd met Ben Miller for what had seemed like an uneventful few days of standing guard over a horse.

I climbed a few steps to the entrance of the building I wanted, opened the door, and found myself standing in front of a pretty blonde at a reception desk.

“Welcome to the
Thoroughbred Weekly
,” she greeted me. “How may I help you?”

I flashed my detective's license. “I'd like to speak to whoever's in charge of the magazine—and tell him that I'm just seeking some information for a case I'm working on, nothing more.”

“That would be Mr. Kent, our editor,” she said. “Just a moment, please.”

She picked up her phone, punched out three numbers, and spoke very softly into it. She hung up a few seconds later. “He's in conference right now,” she said. “It should take about ten more minutes. Won't you please wait in our lobby? There's coffee on the counter there.”

I thanked her and walked to the lobby, which was filled with leather furniture I wished I could take home with me. I poured myself a cup of coffee, added cream and sweetener, and saw that there was a complimentary stack of the current issue. I picked one up and looked at it. Tyrone was on the cover, standing in the sales ring, while the caption explained that he was the sales topper by half a million dollars.

I sat down, sipping my coffee and thumbing through the magazine. I found I was getting to know a number of the farms and stallions from their ads, as well as some of the current stakes winners, at least the ones who kept repeating their victories.

I was just reading an article about how the field for the Hollywood Gold Cup was shaping up when the blonde walked over and told me that Mr. Kent would see me now.

I got up and followed her as she led the way past a maze of work stations until we came to an office at the back of the building. She opened the door, walked inside, and waited for me to join her.