The Galloping Corpses

Chapter V Escape — By Suicide

Bill Sutterfield lounged against the bench in the saddling shed. The veterinary was watching the horses in the paddock moving in slow circles around the well-worn paths ringing the great elms. The sunlight dappled the glossy chestnut and the glistening ebony of the colts’ flanks as they moved daintily under the guidance of the grooms.

“That messy business about the girl,” Sutterfield said. “That might clear up a lot of things, Madden.”

“For instance?” Keene watched a nervous filly dancing away from Yolock. The way Friskaway was acting up, the jockey might have trouble with Claybrook’s entry in the Stakes.

The vet held out his hand, palm up. “Say Larmin wanted to get married to this kid in Ottover’s office. There’s been a lot of gabble about that. Suppose this other girl — someone he’d been playing around with before — wanted to hold him up for some kind of payoff.”

“All right. Suppose that. Then what?” Keene Madden noted Wayne in what seemed, at a distance, to be an angry altercation with the jockey who was in the emerald-hooped blouse of the Claybrook Stables.

“Oh, I’m just shooting the breeze.” Sutterfield waggled his head. “But if she had some kind of a hold on him — like maybe a secret wedding or even a kid nobody knew anything about — she might have been able to get him to handicap his own horses by having them over-exercised, or underfed or letting them drink before races. Like at one track where I worked, when an owner felt like betting on some other guy’s entry when his own horse ought to be an easy winner, he’d load the horse in a van and have him driven around all night before the race so the animal wouldn’t get any sleep and could hardly get around to the eighth pole without going wobble-legged.”

The bugle gave out with Boots and Saddles. Keene watched trainer Wayne give Skit Yolock a hand up on Friskaway.

“Nobody could fool Wayne on a thing like that, Doc” Keene said. “It would have to be worked some other way than by mistreating the horse. If the races have been rigged, that dead girl might have been tangled up in the rigging. But it couldn’t have been that simple.”

“Maybe not.” Sutterfield’s eyes lighted up as the horses fell into file behind the red-coated lead rider on their way to post. “Whatever it was, though, I hope we’ve seen the last of it. Ruy Bias in the third was the first winner Frank Wayne’s saddled in a fortnight.”

“The fix will be in the Stakes. If any,” Keene said, moving away. “Watch those samples. See you.”

He trailed the crowd streaming toward the grandstand and clubhouse. Old, young, thin, fat — open-necked polo shirts, low-cut print dresses, doggy sport coats with clubhouse tags dangling from lapels, bare midriff play-suits with binocular straps over naked shoulders. There were the two-buck Tims and Terrys whom Keene Madden was paid to protect. People who wouldn’t know a mule from a hunter, who thought the race track was a mile-long slot machine with a nag coming up every spin, instead of a pear or a lemon.

He didn’t go to the stands. The loudspeaker would give him the race, post by post. Right now the metallic voice was announcing, “The horses are at the post.”

He pushed through the crowd milling to get out of the betting ring. The Selling windows were closed. The floor beside the pipe railings was cluttered with torn-up tickets, programs, copies of the Telegraph and Racing Form.

The odds board showed Friskaway at 3–2. But the filly, Keene knew, on the basis of her last three times out should be 1–2 against the other entries lined up in the starting gate now! Somebody had been pouring it in on Hubba Dub, Number 2, now at even money.

A gray-uniformed Pink saluted Keene, let him in through the unmarked door at the side of the $5 °Cashier windows. Behind the wickets, the boys were filling in totals on their check sheets, smoking, listening to the race-caster:

“They’re off — and Popova breaks in the lead, My Hon, Friskaway, Can Doo, Hubba Dub—”

Keene went into the totalisator room. Four shirtsleeved men in green eyeshades were working the accounting machines at top speed, on the double check. A white-haired man with thick gold-rimmed spectacles and chubby cheeks saw Keene and said hello.

“Anything big?” the race track detective asked.

“Same as per usual, only more so. Gent with the trick beard and upstage specs put twenty thou on Number Two five minutes before we shut the windows.”

“Coming into the backstretch—” the hollow voice of the announcer was higher-pitched — “it's Friskaway by a length, My Hon, a head, Popova, half a length, Hubba Dub—”

“Twenty thousand fish?” Keene’s eyebrows went up. “He’s really trying for a score, isn’t he?”

“I’d hate to have that much of mine on any animal’s nose,” the head cashier said. “I got a weak ticker. The goat could bust a leg. Throw his rider. Get disqualified. I couldn’t stand it. Still, if you like that sort of thing, I guess it’s good, clean fun.”

“Not so clean.” Keene looked up at the Win Pool total. $88,612. What was it Lola Gretsch had said: “If there’s something in it for me.” There’d be plenty in it for Vince Towbee if #2 won. Quite a payoff.

“Coming around the far turn, Friskaway out in front by a length and a half. My Hon half a length. Hubba Dub, a head.”

For a second, Keene wished he’d gone out to watch the finish. This was the moment that always gave him the big kick — the furlong before the head of the stretch. He’d never be able to get that out of his blood — the surging excitement from the thoroughbreds, the riders “hoo-hooing” to their mounts as they thundered around that last turn.

He went out, gave instructions to the Pinkerton captain by the clubhouse stile.

“Into the stretch, and Friskaway’s fading. — My Hon coming through on the rail, Hubba Dub making his bid on the outside. — My Hon is neck and neck. — He’s leading. — No! No! Hubba Dub’s closing with a rush. — He’s up there. — It’s going to be close — very close. A toss-up between Hubba Dub and My Hon. — It looks like a dead heat. — I can’t call that one for you, folks. — It’ll be— Yes, there goes the Photo up on the board—”

When the red Photo light went out and the Official went on, Hubba Dub was first, My Hon second and the Claybrook filly third.

“That Friskaway!” the Pinkerton captain muttered. “What a dog!”

Keene said nothing, waited patiently while disgruntled losers and exultant winners streamed through into the betting enclosure.

Towbee was one of the first at the $50 window. The bearded gambler beamed affably at the cashier who counted out the fat stack of bills, was still beaming when the Pinkertons asked him politely to step into the manager’s private office for a moment.

“What for?” There was no trace of an accent, then, that Keene could detect.

“Mister Madden will explain.” The captain crowded Towbee ahead.

The gambler offered no resistance. “Am I to understand this is an arrest?”

“You’re being held on suspicion.” Keene followed him into the office, closed the door.

“Of what?”

“We’ll start with ‘conspiracy to defraud’ and work up to the real charges later. I imagine the one you’ll have the most trouble with will be ‘murder.’ ”

Towbee showed his fine, even set of teeth. “You can’t panic me, sir.”

“We’re not trying to panic you. We’re trying to convict you. I’ll give you six, two and even right now that we do.”

The gambler’s smile was a little less confident. “I know nothing of any violence, sir.”

“Before we get through, you may.”

Keene moved in on him.

The horses for the sixth were already being walked around the paddock when Keene got there. All he was interested in, at the moment, were the three horses being cooled out by their grooms under the watchful eyes of Bill Sutterfield, Wes Ottover and a trio of husky Pinkertons.

Sutterfield said, “I waited till you got here to take the samples.”

“Oke,” Keene told the vet. “Take ’em.”

“Haven’t checked on My Hon.” Ottover, the Racing Association secretary, waved toward the colt, that’d placed, its glossy black chest still heaving, its polished jet flanks steaming, “but I’d guess we won’t find any positive in Hubba Dub’s secretions. The colt won in three-tenths of a second slower than his last work.”

Keene ignored the big, rangy Hubba Dub — a bay with a long, bony head. “Friskaway’s the one was dored.”

Frank Wayne, striding across the lawn between the small-boy figure of Skit Yolock and the majestic bulk of a statuesque woman Keene recognized from her photographs as Mrs. Kay Larmin, heard the remark.

“You just exercising your mouth, Madden?” the trainer asked. “Or are you filing charges?”

Keene said, “No to the first. Yes to the second.”

The Dowager stared down her nose. “May I ask against whom you intend to make this accusation, Mister— ah—”

Ottover mumbled a hasty introduction. Keene took off his hat.

“I’m not permitted to make charges public, Mrs. Larmin,” the race track detective told her.

“I’m not asking you to.” She was brusque. “I’m certainly entitled to know if any Claybrook personnel is involved.”

The man from the Protective Bureau turned to Yolock. The jockey glared defiantly.

“I’ll put it up to you, Skit,” Keene said. “Couldn’t you tell that Friskaway wasn’t right?”

The rider spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Funny thing. I ride fifteen hundred races a year, an’ I never yet been able to get a mount to tell me when it feels like doin’ its best. Maybe if I had one of them Protective Bureau badges, the gee-gees’d open up an’ tell all.”

Wayne growled, “Don’t duck, Skit! Answer him!”

“Ah—” the jockey shrugged — “the filly wilted pretty sudden, head of the stretch, but—”

Keene said, “Know how it feels to be up on an entry that’s been given a depressant?”

Yolock began an obscenity, cut it short.

“A depressant?” Bill Sutterfield swiveled to peer at Friskaway. “You mean phenobarbital?”

“Or something else,” Keene nodded. “Your chemists would have analyses for that. But maybe something new has been added. Something they haven’t found a twenty-four hour test for.” He moved across to the filly, touched her forelegs. “There’s no quivering, as there’d be if your entry had been raced into the ground, Mrs. Larmin.”

The Dowager touched her trainer’s sleeve. “How about it, Frank?”

Frank Wayne squatted, ran his hands over the filly’s hocks. “He’s sweating properly. It could be. But—”

“Who?” The old lady thrust out her chin at Keene.

Keene put his hand on Wayne’s shoulder. “I expect your trainer has a notion about that.”

“Damn it!” Wayne’s face grew flaming red. “Don’t put me in the middle, you—”

“Check,” Keene said promptly. “You’re right. You’ve been in the middle long enough. You didn’t know for sure and you couldn’t talk.”

The Dowager’s lips became a thin, straight line. “Stop shilly-shallying! Frank could talk to me about anything or anyone.”

Frank Wayne held out his hands. “Take it easy, Kay—”

She ignored him. “You must mean Clay, Mister Madden. You can tell me that much. You have to tell me. Do you suspect Clay?”

“I think your son has known what’s been going on, Mrs. Larmin.” Keene wondered how much she’d heard about Lola Gretsch.

“I will not believe it.” She was vehement. “There aren’t many things I’d put past that boy, but manipulating horse races is one of them. He thinks more of the stables than he does of me.”

Ottover chimed in, “I can’t credit that, at all, Madden. I know for a fact the boy has been a very heavy loser, these last two weeks, betting on his own entries. Surely, if he’d known somebody was taking the edge off them, he wouldn’t have put his money on Claybrook silks.”

Somebody cried, “Wes! Wes!”

They all turned. Jane Arklett was running from the office bungalow — cutting heedlessly across flower beds, bumping into people, her coppery hair jouncing at the nape of her neck with every long-legged stride. She ran with her head thrown back, like a miler who is at the last gasp.

Wayne held Friskaway’s nose, bending to examine the filly’s eyeballs. “This is a hell of a time to come up with a charge like that against Clay, Madden. Kay — Mrs. Larmin — is worried stiff about him in connection with that other matter.”

“Indeed I am,” the Dowager said stonily. “But I have complete confidence in my boy. You’re the second person today to make what I consider preposterous statements about him.”

“It's easy to settle,” Keene said. “Ask him.”

Jane came to a panting halt. She glanced wildly around the group circling the filly.

“Clay? Nobody’s going to ask him anything!” Her voice was flat. “He killed himself in the police station ten minutes ago. Slashed his wrists with a knife. Bled to—”

She held herself rigidly for a second, then burst into tears, flung her arms around the Dowager’s neck, buried her head on the ample bosom, whimpering.

Ottover rushed to her. Wayne caught Mrs. Larmin’s arm to support her. But the old lady put her hands up, disengaged Jane’s grasp, pushed her away. The Dowager made no outcry whatever. Only the spasmodic contraction of the tired facial muscles showed the extent of her shock.

“At least,” she pointed her chin at Madden, “there will be no further mention of the unsavory matter which you brought up, sir. And—” she blinked wretchedly at Jane — “I will not be subject to further humiliation on your account.”

“Don’t be so sure, Mrs. Kay Larmin!” the girl flared at her. She poured venom over every syllable. “You might be subject to a good deal on account of your son’s widow! Yes — I'm Mrs. Larmin, too!”