Paper Doll

chapter fourteen

I WENT BACK in the hotel and called Farrell in Boston. Then I got directions from Sedale and walked on down toward Canterbury Farms. The racing stable was across town, but in Alton across town was not a voyage of discovery.

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.