Nice Fillies Finish Last

CHAPTER 13

Claire smiled ruefully as he slid into the booth. “I’ve been getting more and more apprehensive. You look like a matador ready for the kill. Who was that on the phone?”

“My secretary.” He lit a cigarette, not to heighten the suspense but because he wanted a cigarette. “She’s been showing photographs to tenants at the Belle Mark. It seems that you and Paul Thorne have both been seen using the elevator.”

Claire’s face crumpled and she made a low sound. “You make it sound so easy. A simple matter of showing some pictures in an apartment house. I thought I was being so careful! I suppose I could deny it and say it’s impossible, but I won’t. Do you want to ask questions, or hear it in my own words?”

“Just tell it to me, Claire. I take it for granted you weren’t meeting him there to talk about harness horses.”

“No.” She stubbed out her smoldering cigarillo. “If I put it into words, maybe I’ll feel better about it. There hasn’t been anybody I could talk to. Joey Dolan would have listened. I think he might have understood. Last night I came close to telling him, but in the end I couldn’t make him pay for the sherry by listening to my tale of woe. Oh, dear, I don’t know how Joey got into this. I must be trying to put off telling you how I came to find myself in bed with Paul Thorne.”

“People find themselves in bed with other people all the time,” Shayne said. “You can have coffee if you don’t want another drink.”

“Another drink, by all means.”

She had a piece of Kleenex tightly balled in one fist. With an effort that was visible to Shayne, she unclenched that hand and began to shred the Kleenex while he called the bartender.

“You’ve met Larry,” she said. “He’s one of the most intelligent persons I know. He’s kind and generous and proud, in the good sense of the word. He comes of a family that has always tried to live honorable lives. There was a senator, a Confederate general, an ambassador, a famous merchant, and all their portraits are on our dining-room wall. I usually sit facing the Confederate general, in his full dress regalia, who died at Chancellorsville. Larry trusts me absolutely. That’s why what happened seems so abominable. Sometimes I can hardly persuade myself that it actually did happen.”

She tasted her new drink the instant the bartender put it down, and waited till he walked away.

Shayne said, “Your husband’s kind and decent and rich, and you can’t stand him. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No! If it was that way, I wouldn’t feel so awful. I don’t love him, whatever the word may mean. He knows that, and he’s willing to accept it. I was engaged to a man who was killed in a plane crash when he was flying south to marry me. We had hotel reservations in Nassau for our honeymoon. It took me a while to get over it. Larry was exceedingly nice to me. After we were married-well, what went on afterward has a bearing, but you’ll have to take some of it for granted. You’re not a marriage counsellor, after all.”

“Nobody’s ever accused me of that,” Shayne said gravely.

“Damn it, are you laughing at me, by any chance? Maybe it is funny, but I didn’t do any laughing at the time, I can promise you. To Larry the physical side of marriage wasn’t important, so I found other things to occupy me. I like horses. I think they like me. From the first day I showed up in the stable, Paul Thorne assumed I was available, the restless young wife of a middle-aged rich man. I won’t deny I was restless. Any self-consciously virile person like Paul would be able to guess the cause. He set out to get me. I know that’s what he did, because he told me so afterward. He planned it like a military engagement.”

After another swallow of whiskey, she said quietly, “And he won. It was at a moment when I had faced some hard truths about my marriage. It may sound immoral, but I never regretted the fact of what happened. I would regret it very much if Larry knew about it, because I know it would hurt him. What I regret is that it happened with Paul Thorne. That was unforgivable.”

Shayne started to speak. She put her hand out quickly and touched his wrist. “What connection can my stupid sex life have with Joey’s death? I can’t believe it has any. But now that I’ve started, I can’t just say we went to bed together but I didn’t enjoy it. It’s not the full truth. I came to know him quite well, much too well. People think he’s a lucky driver, but he’s too tense to be really lucky. Other drivers get away with things that get him into serious trouble. He wants to win too badly. It shows. He grew up on a Georgia hill-farm, desperately poor. He wanted to punish me for being married to a man who owned three hundred horses and could buy hundreds more any time he felt like writing a check. He borrowed the key to Brassard’s apartment. I felt-it’s hard to say in words-that it would be terribly unjust if I didn’t have a tempestuous love affair once in my life-Now you’re laughing at me again.”

The corners of the detective’s mouth quirked slightly. “Go ahead, Claire.”

“Do you know, it really is better to tell somebody. Maybe it isn’t as tragic as it seemed at the time. Fifteen minutes after I was alone with him, I knew that all he wanted to do was humiliate me. I don’t think he considered me a person at all. I told him I realized I’d made a mistake, which there was no point in repeating. But I’d written him a letter, like a fool, and he said he would stop seeing me when it suited him and not before, unless I wanted my husband to know about it. So my tempestuous love affair began.”

“How long did it go on, Claire?”

“Oh, for months. Months and months and months. Only two, I suppose, but it seemed like a century. I knew I had got into it by my own foolishness, and I had to take my punishment. Sex to Paul was like a horse race. He went all out to win. One day I discovered I was pregnant. Paul had fooled me, in a way I won’t go into. He was delighted! Planting his child in the straight line of inheritance from General Lawrence Domaine of the Army of Virginia-he thought it was uproarious. When I had a miscarriage, he nearly killed me. I had to run my car into a telephone pole to explain how I got those bruises. After that he wanted money. He wouldn’t believe I didn’t have any to give him. He worked out a plan for a fake burglary-I was supposed to give him my jewelry and other things, and tell the police I’d been robbed. I wouldn’t do it. And then it turned out that he’d only been bluffing about sending that letter of mine to Larry. He was afraid of Larry, I think, in spite of his talk. I don’t mean personally, but of what he represented. I finally told him it was over, and made it stick. He’d started his own stable by that time, and he didn’t need me to work out resentments on.”

“Your husband never found out about it?”

“Heavens, no. I began worrying again after Paul’s horse was killed and he began needing money so badly. I was afraid he might decide the hell with everything, if he was going down he’d take Larry and me with him. I’m still a little afraid of that, but I don’t know what to do about it. When this twin double prospect came up yesterday I couldn’t tell Larry I was scared to have anything to do with Paul. As far as Larry’s concerned, I hardly know him.”

She looked down quickly at her drink. “Mike, none of this has been exactly easy. Would you give me one crumb of information in return? How did you know about the Brossard apartment?”

“I had an anonymous phone call. Joey was uneasy about going there last night, for some reason, and he told somebody before he left.”

“I don’t understand it at all. Paul probably hung onto his key, but why would he want to confer with Joey? Why there? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Neither do a lot of other things.”

“Well, I don’t feel quite as sunk as I did before I told you. If somebody murdered Joey, I want him caught, and if the only way I can help is by getting up in court and saying what I’ve just said to you, I’ll do it. I won’t like it, but I’ll do it.”

“How about an owner named Mrs. Moon?” Shayne said. “Is she part of your deal?”

“She doesn’t even know about it unless Larry’s told her. They’ve been fairly thick lately.”

“Yeah?”

“Not like that! He’s been teaching her to play chess and so on. She has a horse in the ninth tonight, which nobody considers a threat.” She rattled the ice in her drink thoughtfully. “I did hear that Paul Thorne-but it couldn’t be anything.”

“That Paul Thorne what?”

“Oh, that a car like his was parked outside her house late one night. But there are other red convertibles in Florida.”

“Would Paul doublecross you tonight if he could make any money out of it?”

“Of course. Even if he didn’t make any money, for fun. But I don’t see how it’s possible.”

She said that emphatically. Nevertheless, Shayne thought she looked doubtful.