Paper Doll (5 page)

The white-haired desk clerk with the young face looked at me curiously as I came in through the lobby, and then looked quickly away as I glanced at her, and was suddenly very busy arranging something on a shelf below the counter. I glanced around the lobby. There was no one else in it. I went past the elevator and walked up the stairs and went in my room.

It had been tossed. Not carefully either. The bedspread hung down longer than it had before. The pillows were disordered. The drawers were partly opened. The window shades were exactly even, which they hadn’t been earlier. I checked my suitcase. Nothing was missing. There wasn’t much to be missing. I looked out the window. There was a dark blue Buick parked across the street.

I thought about the Buick for a while, and about my room being searched, and about how the desk clerk had eyed me when I came in. I looked at the door. It hadn’t bejen forced. I thought about that. Then I went back down to the lobby and said to the desk clerk, “Has anyone been in my room?”

She jumped. It wasn’t much, maybe a two-inch vertical leap, but it was a jump.

“No, sir, of course not.”

“What’s my room number?” I said.

She turned alertly to her computer screen. “If you’ll give me your name, sir, I’ll be happy to check for you.”

“If you don’t know my name or room number,” I said, “how do you know that no one’s been in there?”

“I, well, no one goes in guests’ rooms, sir.”

“My watch is missing,” I said. “I left it on the bureau and it’s gone.”

“Oh, my,” she said. “Well, he wouldn’t…”

I waited. She didn’t know what to say. I had time. I didn’t mind the silence. From the bar down a hallway from the dining room, I could hear a man laughing. I waited.

“I’m sure he wouldn’t have stolen your watch, sir.”

“Who?”

“Officer Swinny.”

“A cop?”

“Yes, sir. That’s the only reason I let him into your room. He’s a policeman. He said it was an important police matter.”

“Alton Police?”

“Yes, sir. He’s a detective with the Sheriff’s Department.”

“You know him?”

“Yes, sir. He was in high school with my brother.”

“He drive a dark blue Buick sedan?” I said.

“I don’t know, sir. I didn’t see him until he came in the lobby. He said it was official police business. Sedale might know about his car.”

“Sedale the black guy in the green uniform?”

“Yes, sir. Officer Swinny said I wasn’t to tell you. He said it was official business.”

“Sure,” I said. Then I smiled and looked deliberately at my watch. It was 3:10. She showed no sign that it registered.

I went out onto the wide veranda. Sedale was sweeping off the steps.

I said, “Excuse me, Sedale. You know Officer Swinny of the Alton Police?”

Sedale smiled a little.

“She can’t keep a secret for shit, can she,” he said.

“Not for shit,” I said. “You know what kind of car Swinny drives?”

“Came here he was driving a Ford Ranger pickup. Red one with a black plastic bed liner.”

“Happen to know who owns the blue Buick parked across the street?”

Sedale looked over at the Buick and then back at me and shook his head.

“Can’t say I do,” he said.

“You know Swinny was in my room,” I said.

“Sure,” Sedale said. “I let him in.”

“How come?”

“She told me to.”

“You stay with him?”

Sedale shook his head again.

“Just let him in. Don’t hang around cops no more than I need to.”

“You know when he left?”

“Sure. Left about twenty minutes ago. ‘Bout ten minutes ’fore you come back.”

I looked at the Buick again. It had no telltale whip antenna. But there was a small cellular phone antenna on the back window. The windows were darkly tinted.

“Anybody in the Buick?” I said.

Sedale shrugged.

“Been parked there since I came out,” he said. “You in trouble?”

“Not yet,” I said. I stepped off the porch and started across the street toward the Buick. There was someone in it, and as I approached, he drove away.

It had been early fall when I left Boston. But in Alton it was late summer and the thick leaves of the arching trees dappled the wide streets with sunlight. Traffic was sparse and what there was moved easily, knowing there was no hurry. The heat was gentle and closed around me quietly without the assaultive quality it always had in midsummer cities.

Beyond the Carolina Academy, I walked past a sinuous brick wall that stood higher than my head. There were no corners, no right angles. The wall curved regularly in and bellied regularly out. At the intersection of a dirt road, the wall turned cornerlessly and insinuated itself away from me. I went down the dirt road. It was soft red dirt, and my feet made a kind of chuffing sound as I walked. Here the trees didn’t droop, they stood straight and very high, evergreens, pine I supposed, with no branches for the first thirty or forty feet, so that walking down the road was like walking through a columned corridor. There was no sound except for my feet, and a locust hum that was so persistent and permanent that it faded in and out of notice. Down the road I could see the training track open up and, in the center of the infield, a vast squat tree, framed by a column of pines.

The light at the end of the tunnel.

There were hoofprints in the soft earth, then the thick sound of hoofbeats. I reached the training track. Several horses were pelting around it in the soft red clay. The exercise riders were mostly girls in jeans and boots and hard hats, with their racing crops stuck in their belts in the back and sticking up along their spines. Hundred-pound girls controlling thousand-pound animals. As I got close I could hear the horses as they gulped air in through their flared nostrils, and exhaled it in big snorts. The breathing was as regular as the muffled thud of their hooves.

To the left, about a half mile up the track, was a portable starting gate. Three or four men were gathered around it looking at the horses as they ran. One of the men was mounted on a calm, sturdy brown horse. The other three were afoot. Beyond the starting gate was a parking lot with three or four vehicles in it, and beyond the lot, to the right, was a cluster of white buildings. I walked toward it.

As I got close the guy on horseback said, “Morning.”

“I need to talk to somebody in charge,” I said.

“That’d be Mr. Ferguson,” the man on horseback said and nodded toward one of the other men standing gazing at the horses.

“Frank Ferguson,” the other man said, and put out a hand.

I introduced myself.

“Come on over to the track office,” Ferguson said. “Probably got some coffee left, though it might be kinda robust by now.”

Ferguson was a short guy with bowlegs and a significant belly, which looked sort of hard. He had all his hair and it was gray and curly and worn long for a guy his age. He had on engineer’s boots, and jeans, and a red plaid shirt and a beige corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches. He headed for the office at a quick step, and as he went he dug a curved meerschaum pipe out of his right-hand coat pocket and loaded it with tobacco from a zip leather pouch. By the time we got to the office he had the pipe in his mouth going, and the tobacco stashed back in his jacket pocket.

The office was in one end of the long stable where racehorses stood in separate stalls, looking out at the world, craning their necks, chewing hay, swaying, and, in at least one case, chewing on the edge of the stall. One horse, a tall chestnut colt, was being washed by a young girl with a hose. The young girl wore a maroon tee shirt that said Canterbury Farms on it, and her blonde hair was braided in a long pigtail that reached to her waist. She sluiced water over the horse and then soaped him and scrubbed him into a lather with a brush, and then sluiced off the suds. The horse stood quietly and gazed with his big brown eyes at the infield of the training track. Occasionally he would shift his feet a little.

The office itself was nothing much. There were pictures of horses and owners gathered in repetitive poses in the winners’ circle. There seemed to be a lot of owners. Ferguson was in most of the pictures. There was a gray metal desk in the room, and a gray metal table with some file folders on it, and a coffee machine with a half-full pot of coffee, sitting on the warming plate and smelling bad, the way coffee does that has sat for half a day on warm.

Ferguson nodded at the coffee. I shook my head. He sat at the desk, I took a straight chair and turned it around and straddled it and rested my arms on the back.

“I’m a detective,” I said. “And I’m looking into the background of a woman, used to work here, woman named Olivia Nelson. Be twenty-five years ago, maybe twenty-seven, twenty-eight. You here then?”

Ferguson nodded and poured himself a virulent-smelling cup of coffee. He put in two tablespoons of sugar and two more of Cremora and stirred it while he was listening to me.

“Yes, certainly. Been in this business forty years, forty-one come next spring. Right here. Helped open the damn training track in Alton. Everybody thought they had to be in Kentucky. But they didn’t and I showed ‘em they didn’t.” He stirred his coffee some more.

“You remember Olivia Nelson?” I said.

“Jack Nelson’s kid,” Ferguson said. He shook his head. “Old Jumper Jack. He was a contrivance, by God, if I ever saw one.”

“Jumper?” I said.

“Jack would jump anything that had no dick,” Ferguson said.

“Nice to have a hobby,” I said. “What can you tell me about Olivia?”

Ferguson shrugged.

“Long time ago,” he said. “She was a nice enough kid, hot walker, exercise rider, just like the kids out there now, had a thing for horses. You know, young girls, like to control some big strong masculine thing between their legs.”

“Nicely put,” I said. “Anything unusual about her?”

“Nope, richer than most… why I took her on. Jack had a lot of money in my horses.”

“Syndication?”

“Yessir. We got over to Keeneland, up to Saratoga to the Yearling Auctions. Buy some that look right and sell shares in them.”

“Know anything about Olivia after she worked here?”

Again Ferguson shrugged and took in some pipe smoke. He was a good pipe smoker. He’d lit it with one match and kept it going without a lot of motion.

“Nope,” he said. “Don’t keep much track of the stable kids. I know she went off to college and her momma died…” He shook his head slowly. “Like to killed Jack when she died. You’d a thought he didn’t care, tomcatting around the way he did, but he must of loved her in his way, a hell of a lot. He went into a real tailspin when she died. Took him couple years to get over it.”

Ferguson drew on the pipe and without taking it from one corner of his mouth exhaled a small stream of smoke from the other. Then he grinned.

“Still wouldn’t want to leave my daughter unattended around Jack.”

I had a sensation in my solar plexus that felt like whoops sounds.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Jack’s nearly seventy, but if he can catch it he’ll jump it,” Ferguson said.

I was silent. Ferguson looked at me speculatively. He knew he’d said something. But he didn’t know what it was. He waited.

“He’s alive,” I said.

“Was last week, anyway,” Ferguson said. “Had a couple drinks with him. You got more recent information?”

I shook my head. “I’d heard he was dead.”

“Well, he ain’t,” Ferguson said.

“I was misinformed,” I said.

Along the dirt road, under the high pines, the evening had already arrived. The locust hum had vanished, and instead there was the sound of crickets, and occasionally the sound of night birds-which probably fed on the crickets. There was no other sound, except my footsteps in the soft earth. No one else was walking on the road. I could feel the weight of the gun on my hip. It felt nice.

Since Olivia Nelson’s father wasn’t dead, someone had lied to the cops. But there was no way to know whether it was Loudon Tripp; or Olivia who had lied to Loudon; or Jumper Jack himself who had deceived his daughter.

At the hotel, I went up to my room and called Farrell.

“You got anything on that license plate?” I said.

“You’re going to love this,” he said. “South Carolina DMV says the plate’s classified. Information about ownership on a need-to-know basis only.”

“You can’t show a need to know?”

“Because it’s following you, or you think it is? No. If it was in a hit and run and three witnesses saw it, that’s need to know.”

“It’s part of a murder investigation,” I said.

“You say so, South Carolina DMV doesn’t say so. They say I can go fry my Yankee ass. Though they said it in a nice polite Southern way.”

“Classified plate number is usually undercover cops,” I said.

“Un huh.”

“Okay,” I said.

I listened to the faint hollow silence on the wire for a while.

“Okay,” I said again.

Farrell waited.

“I got something you’re going to love too,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Olivia Nelson’s father is alive.”

“Yeah?”

“Control yourself,” I said.

“Tripp said her parents were dead,” Farrell said.

“Right,” I said. “Why would he lie?”

“Maybe he didn’t lie,” I said. “Maybe she told him they were.”

“Why would she lie?”

“Maybe she thought they were dead,” I said.

“Will you fucking stop it,” Farrell said. “If her father’s alive and we were told he died, somebody lied.”

“Yowsah,” I said.

Through the window of my hotel room I could see the blue Buick, motionless under the heavy trees, across the street from the hotel.

“You going to see him?”

“Yowsah.”

“You going to stop talking like the fucking end man in a minstrel show?”

“Sho ‘nuff, Mr. Bones,” I said. “Soon’s ah do sumpin ’bout this guy that’s tailing me.”

“Why don’t you just ignore him?” Farrell said.

“Well, for one thing, it’s an open tail. Unless he’s the worst cop in the old Confederacy, he means me to see him.”

“Which means he’s trying to scare you?” Farrell said.

“Yeah. I want to know why. And who.”

“You find out, let me know,” Farrell said.

“Sure,” I said. “‘Less of course it’s classified.”