Shadow Roll (14 page)

Did Bogie ever go through this?  It helped to remember the scene in
The Big Sleep
where he flipped up the brim of his hat, slipped on a pair of thick black rimmed glasses, lisped more than he usually did, and went through an entire pansy routine in what pretended to be a bookstore.

I felt a lot better.  I was now a drunk, but I wasn’t a pansy.

Sucking in the fine Saratoga air, remembering I didn’t owe a bookie a single dime, and feeling the rosy rag in my coat pocket, I got myself feeling just fine.

For this one moment, life was pure silk.

Chapter 27

I was looking for Babe Duffy’s dog.

Before I followed up on my fine idea, one worthy of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe (maybe even a better idea; I loved both those guys, but their cases were never long on sleuthing), I’d checked around.

Jane was some sort of hunting dog from Africa.  I figured Babe named her Jane because it was the only African word he knew: as in “Me Tarzan, you Jane.”  Whenever Babe was in town he stayed at the farm of a Thoroughbred breeder about nine miles southeast of the city of Saratoga.  The breeder’s place was called Up and Down Hill Farm.  It was where Jane lived until they found her a home.

Trouble with dogs like Jane, they were a one-man-dog and no one at Up and Down Hill suited Jane’s taste.

I’d gotten all this from the farm manager.  My story when I called this guy was I’d met Babe a few months before he’d died, and I really liked his dog.  Then I heard about his senseless accident.  So I’d wondered: perhaps Jane would like me?

Jane must of been a real pip of a pet.  I could tell Roland the farm manager couldn’t get me out there fast enough.  The idea was to fool me into taking her away—permanently.

I stood in front of the stallion barn while Babe’s dog walked all around me, her African head with its African nose sniffing my ankles, her long African tail tightly curled over her short back.  Any minute I expected her to lower her African ass and piss on my Staten Island shoes.

“She likes you,” said Roland.

I said, “How can you tell?”

I knew what he wanted to say.  I knew he was itching to say it.  Because she hasn’t bitten you yet.  But he couldn’t.  He wanted rid of the dog too bad.

“Well look at her.  You got her attention.”

“She doesn’t bite, does she?”

“Bite?  That dog?”

I didn’t care who she bit.  I only wanted Babe’s dog to get in the car I’d come in.  I didn’t want her around for long.  Just long enough to help me do what I needed to do.

The car was a deep green 1946 Buick sedan.  The guys who’d hired me and hadn’t fired me yet, provided the Buick.

I’d survived Hutsell’s “warning.”  It didn’t take much to know the goons who beat the crap out of me in the parking lot of the Grand Union Hotel were Hutsell’s goons, and Marshall Hutsell was a goon for whoever was paying the tab.  The beating was his way of reminding me I was only there for show, there were no cases to solve.

Hutsell was too quick on the draw.  If he’d left me alone, I could of wound up agreeing.  But the beating plus this, that, and the other, changed my way of looking at things.  I didn’t agree.  And every hour that passed, I agreed even less.

In Saratoga, from getting off the train ‘til now, Hutsell had done all the talking.  Hutsell got me what I wanted when I asked for it—like an up-to-the-minute list of every horse, trainer, owner, and jockey at the track.

When I got canned, Hutsell would be the guy telling me.

But until then, I was doing my job.

Jane, who had a squint on her like she’d stared at the sun, didn’t like me.  A coupla sniffs and that was it.  Didn’t come near me again.  But she liked me more than she liked Roland the farm manager.  Him, she yodeled at.  You’d think a yodel couldn’t sound scary?  Think again.

She really hated the horse being led out of the barn when I was trying to sound like a friend of Babe Duffy’s.  Big and black and beautiful, his hot walker called him Walking Tall but Roland called him Bob.  Faster than Bob probably ran, Jane went for his back left hock.  I had to hand it to Roland, he was also speedy.  He kicked Jane clear across the drive and into a bush before Bob had a chance to.  Jane was up on her feet and coming again when I opened the Buick door and called to her.  Who knows about dogs?  Not me.  I was as surprised as Roland when she chose the Buick instead of Bob.  Damned if she didn’t launch herself into the front passenger seat, then sit there staring out through the windshield.

Roland shrugged his shoulders.  I shrugged mine.  Bob snorted.  The hotwalker spat on the ground.

I turned to tell Roland I was taking Babe’s dog for a spin, see if we got along.  But the man was already walking away.  He had a little spring in his step.  I knew what he was thinking.  He was thinking, God bless America, there goes that damn dog.  He was wrong.  I was working on my great idea and when I’d done that, Jane was coming back to Up and Down Hill Farm.

Sorry, I’d say, wrong dog.  Not a good fit.

Jane and I drove all the way to Babe’s last picnic spot without a yodel between us.  I stared out the windshield so I could tell where we were going.  She stared out the windshield for her own reasons.  But passing through a gate that led to a certain mineral springs, one of her short perky ears cocked up.  Just one.  At the same time, her upper lip curled, exposing fine white teeth.

I parked, got out, went round to her side of the car, and opened her door.  I’d expected her to leap outside but it didn’t happen.  What happened was exactly nothing.  Jane sat in the car.  She didn’t even turn her head to look at me.  So I dug Hollie’s rose colored hanky out of my pocket.

My thinking went like this.  Hollie Hughes managed two of the dead jocks.  This could mean their smell should still be on him.  That in itself wouldn’t matter, but if Hollie had been around their murderer, or if Hollie were their murderer (and therefore faking his grief; I’d worry later about
why
Hollie would kill his own living), Jane would go nuts.

“Here, girl.  Sniff this.  You know about this?”

I got a response.  It was slow, but it was something.  Jane lay down.  Lying down, she looked like the Sphinx before one of Napoleon’s men blew most of its face off.

I rummaged around in my other pocket for what I’d taken from the jock’s room back at the track: the cloth used to wipe the blood off Toby Tyrrell’s face.  It’d been tossed on the floor for some other poor sap to clean up.

Toby got the mount on Fleeting Fancy.  Maybe he killed for it?

The moment I stuck Toby’s cloth under her nose, Jane sailed from the car in one balletic movement, and raced away, headed straight for the spot where Babe Duffy’s body’d spent two days deader than a dead heat.  Never leaving his side sat his African dog Jane.  On guard.  Mourning.

Jane was a red and white streak far ahead, disappearing round a bend on the wooded path I’d meant to follow.  When I caught up, she was sitting on a huge golden slide of hardened minerals.  The smell of sulfur was as strong as the smell of Staten Island’s breweries.  Both took getting used to.

Inhaling sulfur made Jane wrinkle her useful doggy nose.  Added to her wrinkled forehead, she was something to look at.  But not approach.  I hadn’t forgotten the stallion.

Babe died on a rock.  He’d been sitting on a huge translucent yellow rock with his faithful dog Jane, eating a ham sandwich.  And then what happened?  Jane knew.  She’d watched the whole thing.  Had she taken a bite out of someone?  After the scene with the stallion, I knew she would of tried.  But did she succeed?

One thing I did know: if she saw whoever it was again, she’d know it and she’d react—and although I didn’t think a fierce dog’s fearsome animosity would mean much to the cops or the courts, I’d know who my culprit was.  Once I knew that, I also knew that if it took me forever, I’d find something, anything, that proved it.  In my world, killing three good jocks was a huge no-no, as bad as killing a horse.

I pulled Hollie’s hanky out of my pocket once more, held it up to her.  She still ignored it.  So I tried Toby’s cloth again.  This time she cocked both ears and jumped, first to race up a leaf scattered path that arrived at the golden rock from a different direction, then to run around the rock, yodeling.

I guessed all the bark had long ago been bred out of a dog like Jane, but not the voice.  She could yodel, she could make gurgling noises deep in her throat, and her version of a whine was tuneful.

The killer arrived from the other path.  Using it, either he (or the long shot she), would of been heard coming by both dog and man.  The crunch and crinkle of leaves would give him away.  But Babe stayed on his rock.  What could that mean?  That it was just someone passing by and Babe had no reason to worry?  Or that Babe knew who was coming and still had no reason to worry—or so he thought?

Jane wasn’t going back to Up and Down Hill Farm quite yet.  First she was going for another ride.

Chapter 28

Saratoga’s racing season was short.  So was my employment.  It covered a couple of weeks.  I’d already used up plenty of that time.

This day’s racing was over.  All over the better part of town, the well heeled and the well connected were deep in a bottle of this or that.  They were stuffing their faces with what I’d heard ‘em call “finger food.”  That was one of those names that told you exactly why: because they ate it with their fingers.  Right now, fingering, chewing, swallowing, slurping, they were yelling in each other’s overfed faces about this race or that, this horse or that, this dollar lost or won.

I really felt left out.

Toby Tyrrell was too young for baloney like that.  Plus he wasn’t famous enough to be feted by those who couldn’t ride or train or do much of anything with a horse but own it.  So where would he be?  Home most likely.  And home for now was the track where the jocks dossed for the season.  All except those like the once mighty Matthew Mark McBartle.  Or the now terrified Mash Mooney.

Jane and I got through the closed gate with ease: a wave of the hand, a yodel.  I parked the Buick.  By now Jane was talking to me more than Lino used to talk to me.  I guessed I was listening to a constant harangue of ancient Egyptian.  If I knew her much longer, one of us was going to have to learn English or Egyptian.  Probably me.  I suspected her command of her tongue was better than my command of mine.  I blamed the great education I got at the Staten Island Home for Left Over Kids.  That I could string together any kind of sentence came from listening to Mister’s radio and reading whatever I could get my hands on—not a bad haul, now I recall, since a handful of kids had visitors and some of the visitors brought books, not to mention a castoff or two from a charity or two.

Thinking about it, why weren’t there any teachers?  Thinking about it some more: what a stupid question.  Because Mr. & Mrs. Zawadzki ran the place, that’s why.

Like all the other interesting things going on where I grew up, the State of New York seldom got round to noticing.

No one was asleep at the jockeys’ “house.”  Jocks were lying back on their bunks, some smoking, some drinking, some doing both.  In a corner, some played cards.  Jocks were listening to the radio—Spike Jones was adding his personal touch to
The William Tell Overture
.  Two or three were trying to read.  One was reading an actual book.  I tried to catch the title but he’d covered it with paper from a brown paper bag.  Toby, clear across the room, was shaving.  Shaving what I didn’t know.  He was sixteen.  Maybe he was practicing, a man among men.

Jane saw him or smelt him or whatever she did—and she was gone.  Dodging bunks and hands and calls of “Jane!”, “Hey!  That’s Babe’s dog, Jane!” making her way right for him.

I was left flat-footed.  I’d never get there before she did.  By the time I saw Toby Tyrrell again, he could be pulp.

Was my case solved?  Did a kid eager for fame kill off his rivals?  If so, I suddenly wasn’t so happy with the PI game.  I hated what he’d done and why he’d done it, if he’d done it.  If he’d done it, I hated taking him down.

But Jane didn’t jump him.  She didn’t growl and she didn’t snarl.  She didn’t bare her teeth to bite.  No teeth, no claws, just nose—almost caused him to cut his own throat with the straight edge.

Jane was breathing him in, inch by inch, like a cop would all over a piece of prize evidence.  And all the time, she was talking to him.

I swear I understood her.  Jane was saying, “You know what happened to Babe?  You know where the killer is?”

“Jesus, doggie.  Get down!” was all Toby got out before Jane caught another scent and was gone, belly to the floor, nose to the floorboards, here, there, everywhere.  And then she stopped, her tail uncurled like a stump on her rump, and with that she made a kind of strangled oops! noise and was streaking back through the scrambling jocks and out a back door.  Me, I was right after her.  Damn, but dogs, even small dogs, could move when they wanted to.

The back door took us into an alley between the horse barns.  The heads of curious horses appeared over doors, the thud of hooves hit the walls as one or another woke up.  Jane was mad for what she was smelling.  And I was mad not to lose her.  But I did.  She got round a corner before I was halfway down a row, and when I turned that same corner, she was gone.  I tried calling her name.  Nothing.  So I walked slowly down a new row with new horses, some with name tags over their doors any other time I’d be proud to stand near.  But no time.  I kept going, glancing down every new turn, left and right.

Finally, there she was, sitting on her neat little butt, her upright ears loose on her head, her tail flat on the ground, her eyes full of dejected guilt.

I saw why.  She’d lost the scent when it reached a huge pile of fresh horse shit.  That much shit and even a dog like Jane lost her way.

She turned to look up at me, gave out a series of melodic yodels.  If I’d ever heard grief, I was hearing it now.

OK.  So the killer of at least Babe Duffy—and if Babe, then two to one also the killer of McBartle and Walker—was someone who came to the track.  He (or she) wasn’t a handicapper or a regular paying customer.  He was a horseman: an owner, a trainer, a grounds-man, a hot-walker, someone who belonged behind the scenes on a daily basis.  Probably not a jockey.