The Galloping Corpses

Chapter VII Here Comes A Bullet!

Kimberly court was a new, smart, concrete and round-the-corner-windows building. Very snappy for a stenographer.

Keene Madden didn’t honestly expect the girl to be at her apartment. But when he pushed the button beneath the Arklett mail box, the clicking of the door latch came immediately. It was a walkup. She was on the second.

The door was open when he came up the stairs. She was dressed the same as she had been at the track, but she looked different. It took him a moment to figure out that she’d cried all her makeup off, hadn’t bothered to put any more on.

“Mister Madden.” She seemed surprised, but so dejected that it made no difference. “I thought it was that lieutenant. He said he’d be over.”

“What about?” Keene followed her into a homelike living room.

There was a comfortable sofa in front of the stone fireplace, unpretentious easy chairs, one with a footstool and a smoking stand beside it. Keene wondered how many evenings Clay Larmin had sat with his feet on that stool and let her make a fuss over him.

“My mother-in-law demanded that Clay’s body be taken to her house before going—” she made an effort to keep her voice steady — “to the mortuary. If that happens, she’ll have all the say about his funeral, where he’s buried, everything. I think I have some rights to my husband after his death. I didn’t have many while he lived.”

“What’s the lieutenant say?”

“He doesn’t know what to do. He’s probably coming over to argue me out of interfering with the old — old biddy! As if she’d ever done anything but interfere between me and Clay.”

“You think that might have something to do with his ending his life?” Keene stood by the mantel. A charcoal sketch of Clay hung over it, evidently the girl’s work. Not bad, either.

“I know it did. He was so miserable. He didn’t even dare tell her we were married!”

“That mess about the Gretsch girl. That didn’t have anything to do with — what he did?”

“It couldn’t have.” She sat on the arm of a chair and poked at the dead ashes in the fireplace. “Clay couldn’t possibly have been in any trouble because of that. I was with him all last night. He used to go around with her. But that was all over. He... he was never out to her place after he proposed to me.”

The smell which had brought back those New Guinea memories was strong in Keene’s nostrils again. It made the hair on the back of his neck bristle.

“How do you account for his suicide, then?”

She tossed the poker on the hearth with a clatter. “I guess you know some of it, anyway, from what Wes Ottover said about you. But I’ll tell you what I know.”

“I might simplify matters.” It would have simplified, them a devil of a lot more if you’d done your talking this morning, sister, he said silently.

Was that familiar odor suddenly stronger? Or was he just getting more fidgety? He sat down on the sofa.

“Shoot when ready,” he said.

If it hadn’t been for the ringing ache between his ears and the lancing barb that slashed at his knee, he would have enjoyed sitting there, listening to her — in spite of that depressing stench...

He relaxed for almost the first time in twenty-four hours. The chair was soft. She was good to look at with the sunset spilling rose wine and honey gold across her face and throat. She was easy to listen to, as well.

“A lot of people thought Clay was a weak edition of his father,” she began. “Maybe he wasn’t as much of a man as the General, but he was a pretty swell guy, all the same. The trouble was, his mother.

“You saw what happened last night, at the Stirrup. His mother’d telephoned to find out if he was there with me. Of course he tipped the attendants to lie for him, but still he was scared silly she’d learn we’d been there together, so we had to beat it. Simply because she’d forbidden him to go out with me! Forbidden, mind you! Naturally she didn’t know we’d been married in Miami last March. He’d rather have cut his arm off, than tell her.”

“So—?” Keene said.

Jane nodded, sniffling a little. “I’m telling you, so you’ll understand the rest of it. We ran into a man named Morrison, in Miami. A cheap tout — fellow who made his living selling those crummy tip sheets. He learned we were married, and when he saw how rattled Clay was about that, he began to put the bite on my husband, threatening to spill the news to Mrs. Kay. She wouldn't have minded if she’d thought Clay was just having an affair with me — but marriage! Horrible!”

“Yeah. This Morrison. Gent with a booze beezer?”

“That’s right.” She scowled. “Nickname’s Plumnose. You know everything, don’t you!”

“I’m learning all the time.”

Jane got up, walked to the door of a bedroom, stood leaning against the jamb, her forehead turned toward the wall. “That heel followed us up here from Florida. Clay was his meal ticket, his pension. Sometime between the time Clay took over the management of the stables and the opening of the meet, Morrison schemed up this fixing so he could tap the till more heavily without Clay’s having to explain to mother where the money was going.”

“Where’d Towbee fit into it?”

“I never did know. I suppose he was someone Plumnose brought in, because he looked more respectable — or maybe because the Pinkertons had run Plumnose out of Tropical Park a couple times and he was afraid they’d do it again up here.”

“Might have.”

“Clay hated the finagling with his beautiful horses. He was as proud of them as if he’d trained them himself, instead of Frank Wayne’s doing all the work. But he used the stuff Morrison got for him, and he kept betting on Claybrook entries so the stewards wouldn’t get suspicious. Though Wes Ottover did anyway.”

“Was the waitress in on the deal?”

Jane pushed herself away from the wall. “She tried to cut herself in. She played around with Vince Towbee — got wise from something he let slip. That was just a day or so ago. Then she was going to the track authorities and spill the beans — unless. Clay wanted to pay her off, but I guess Morrison figured it would be cheaper to bump her off.”

Jane began to sob, quietly. Keene stood up, went to the mantel, examined the charcoal sketch.

“This yours?”

“Yes.”

“You’re quite an artist. Not only with charcoal.”

She stopped crying abruptly.

“That was a real work of art, that recital.” Keene was sympathetic. “Fits most of the facts, in a general way. Two or three things wrong with it, but—”

“What?” she wanted to know.

“Dead people. Clay. Plumnose. Gretsch. Everything you said points the finger at folks who aren’t able to talk back. Your husband was a horse-doper and a bribe-payer. Plumnose was an extortionist and a murderer. Lola Gretsch was a tramp and a blackmailer. None of ’em can deny any of it.”

Jane said crossly, “You can’t, either! It’s all true. It might not be the whole truth. But it’s all I know...” She came close to him.

“Uh, uh.” He managed to back away a little without making it too apparent. “Clay wasn’t in on the dirty work. He found out you were in it, though. I wouldn’t know whether he guessed how you were tipping off Towbee. I admit I didn't catch wise to those roulette chips you put on numbers five and two, until I remembered Hubba Dub was the Number Two horse in the fifth this peeyem. But of course you wouldn’t have had to go through all those shenanigans to get the info across to Towbee, if Clay’d been in on the fix.”

The pupils of her eyes contracted like a cat’s. “You really do know everything!”

He grabbed her shoulder. He wasn’t gentle about it. His nails dug into her flesh. He lowered his head, bull-like.

“Sure. Sure. I’ve got it all. Except a few little, unimportant items. Like — who tried to ready me for a hospital cot in that parking lot last night? Who beat out Lola’s brains? Who—”

Bill Sutterfield came out of the bedroom with a forty-five that seemed to Keene to have a muzzle a foot wide.

“Who... who... who—” the vet mocked. “You sound like a noisy owl, Madden.”

“Yeah,” Keene Madden said. “It had to be you, Doc.”

“Yeh. You certainly resemble one of those hoot-birds. You sound wise. But you’re not.”

“Want to bet?” the Bureau man said. “Or do you only bet on sure things?”

Keene knew there was no sense bracing himself against the blast of a forty-five, but he braced himself just the same...