Tim Rourke expected a certain amount of needling from Shayne on the way back to Miami. But when he started to apologize, his friend merely said, “You saved yourself five hundred bucks. Forget it.”
“I just wish I knew what happened. He certainly wasn’t stone-cold sober when I talked to him, but I can’t see him passing out somewhere when he had something as big as this on the fire.”
“Tim, you weren’t hitting on all cylinders yourself. It’s obvious. By the time he got to the bottom of the bottle, he’d forgotten all about how easy it is to get rich betting the twin double. You’re lucky it turned out this way. Wheeling all the horses in two races runs into money. You’d make out better in the long run if you concentrated on improving your poker game.”
“My poker game’s all right,” Rourke said defensively. “I hardly ever catch four of a kind to beat a full house, that’s all.”
He stared moodily through the windshield at the wide strip of concrete that was flowing rapidly backward beneath their wheels. “ ‘Some ugly boys in this business.’ That’s one of the things he said on the phone, and I can’t get it out of my head. I wish Rutherford hadn’t mentioned that toothbrush.”
Shayne snorted, and Rourke said nothing more. In the morning, after too little sleep, he showed up for work with a headache, an unpleasant taste in his mouth, something wrong with his nervous system, and the feeling that Shayne, as usual, had been talking sense. They had wasted a few hours, but it hadn’t cost him any money.
He was writing a series of articles on payoffs in the construction business, a perennial subject he had handled so often that he could do it justice without being fully awake. He worked steadily until noon, getting through a pack of cigarettes and innumerable cups of coffee, occasionally making a phone call to check a name or a reference.
A youthful reporter at the next desk wrenched a sheet of copy paper out of his typewriter and asked if Rourke had any aspirin. Rourke shook his head. “What’s the matter, headache?”
The other reporter, whose name was Mehlmann, was leaning forward, very pale, his head on both fists. “Headache and gut-ache. Every time I go into that goddamned morgue, I can taste it the rest of the day.”
“Don’t let MacMaster know you feel like that,” Rourke said, “or he’ll see to it you catch every morgue story as long as you work here.”
“Don’t I know it,” Mehlmann agreed. “This is the third time in ten days. If I get one more wood-alcohol poisoning, I may drink a pint of paint-remover myself. I damn near covered this one from the facts on the police blotter. But it’s just as well I talked to the morgue people. The stiff had a copy of last night’s Surfside Raceway program in his pocket. That gave me my lead.”
Rourke’s swivel chair squeaked as it came around. “Did they identify him?”
Mehlmann checked his copy. “Joseph Dolan.” Looking up, he saw Rourke’s face. “What’s the matter, Tim?”
Rourke was on his feet, clutching the corner of his desk. “Where was he?”
“In a hallway on Fifth Street. Did I miss something? I only gave it three paragraphs.”
He held out the yellow sheet of copy paper, but Rourke waved it aside. “I don’t want to see the damn story. Tell me what happened.”
“I didn’t really go into it, Tim. Apparently he went to sleep where they found him. No identification, no money. A little chin beard, five or six days’ stubble everywhere else. He’d been picked up for vagrancy a couple of years back, and they had his prints. Two other bums were found dead in that neighborhood within the last week-damn fools made the mistake of getting drunk on methanol, wood alcohol. Somebody broke into a hardware store a while back, and the cops think that’s where the stuff came from. They did an autopsy on Dolan. It was methanol, all right, maybe not in pure form. Naturally everybody figured this was more of the same. When a dead man hasn’t shaved for a week, of course there’s not much pressure. Tim, does the name Dolan mean something to you?”
“Damn right,” Rourke said grimly. He stood there for another second, gripping the corner of his desk. Poor Joey, he said to himself. He should have been satisfied with small bets and an easy life. He should never have started dreaming about big money. Somebody had read about the two wood-alcohol deaths, and had thought he could drop Dolan in a hallway and no questions would be asked. But Tim Rourke had some questions, by God. He made himself a promise. By the time he was finished with this, whoever had done it would be very sorry.
His lips set, he strode to the sports side of the city room. Ad Kimball, working on his selections for the races that evening, looked up as Rourke stopped beside him. He put his head in his hands and groaned.
“I’d almost forgotten I was sick,” he said. “Then you have to come along and remind me. Have you ever tried reading a race chart with a hangover? After about two minutes, that small print starts squirming around like beetles.”
“Come over and talk to MacMaster with me,” Rourke said. “I don’t want to explain things twice.”
“Why? I don’t talk to city editors unless I have a good reason.”
Rourke picked up the phone on his desk and asked for an outside line, then dialed Michael Shayne’s number. Lucy Hamilton, Shayne’s brown-haired secretary, told him her boss was working on something on Miami Beach.
“Have him phone me at the paper if he calls in, will you, Lucy?” Rourke hung up and told Kimball, “Bring those programs. We’re going to be talking about horses.”
MacMaster, the city editor, was a bald, cold-eyed man who chewed on a dead cigar as Tim Rourke told him about the phone call from Dolan, the fruitless trip to Surf-side Raceway, Dolan’s mention of danger and his death in Miami a few hours later.
“Spell it out,” MacMaster said. “You think somebody killed him?”
“All I know,” Rourke said, biting off his words in a disgusted voice, “is that I gave up on him last night. I let people persuade me that he’d made up this twin-double fantasy to con me out of five hundred bucks. I don’t know if I was right or wrong. It seems to me I’ve got to find out.”
“OK,” MacMaster said. “Your hunches pay off about fifty percent of the time, and that’s good enough for me. I don’t have to tell you what the cops are going to say. They’re going to say, ‘Get the hell out of here and stop bothering us.’”
“The hell with the cops. They go by the law of averages. Here’s a guy with a vagrancy record. He looks like a bum and smells like a bum. He never owned a TV set or subscribed to the Reader’s Digest. Probably he never paid an income tax in his life. He has wood alcohol in him, and the law of averages says don’t give it another thought. I need some more facts before I talk to the cops. I want to go up to the track and ask some questions about those twin-double races.”
“Kimball,” MacMaster said.
The sports writer started. “Yeah?”
“What do you think of Rourke’s idea?”
“That somebody fed this bum wood alcohol because he found out about a scheme to beat the twin? Tim knows what I think. I think it’s ludicrous. Sure, thousands of people buy twin-double tickets every night. So far there’s always been at least one winner, and there can be as many as a couple of hundred. If I understand what Tim’s trying to say, he thinks that two of the four races tonight are fixed. I know,” he said to Rourke as he started to interrupt. “‘Fix’ is the wrong word. Let’s put it this way. Some person or persons unknown have reason to believe that two of the horses entered in the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth races are reasonably certain to win. Is that better? All right. If this was absolutely certain, and if Dolan knew what they were up to and threatened to give them away, in which case they would stand to lose a large sum of money, of course they might kill him. But murder’s an extreme way to handle the problem, it seems to me. In the first place, nothing is absolutely certain in harness racing. In the second place, why would it occur to Dolan to give them away? All he’d want would be to cut himself in on it. This would lower their payoff a little, but not too much. A twin-double investment takes capital. Say without Dolan there would be twenty winning tickets. With him there would be twenty-one. That wouldn’t make enough of a difference to justify a murder.”
MacMaster took his mangled cigar out of his mouth and looked at it for a moment. “Unless what Dolan found out would get them in legal trouble, or in trouble with the track. It’s worth a try. How are you coming with your picks for tonight, Kimball?”
“I’m down to the ninth race, and that’s the tough one.”
“Look at those last four races again with Tim’s theory in mind,” MacMaster said. “Dolan went to sleep in the Domaine barn, and let’s assume that the Domaine horses figure in it, whatever it is. I admit the chronology is a bit muddy, but if he climbed in the window at two and climbed out again at two-thirty to call Tim in Miami, he probably didn’t have a sudden inspiration as he was falling asleep. He must have seen something, or heard something, or somebody told him something.”
Kimball shrugged. “Just remember I’m no clairvoyant.” Seating himself on the corner of the desk, he began studying the entries. After a moment Rourke could see that he was becoming interested. He looked up a point in the Trotting Association Year Book.
“Christ, there are millions of possibilities. The Domaine stable has horses entered in the sixth and the ninth. Both of them raced at Yonkers last summer, and I’d better check the Yonkers programs to see what I can find. In the ninth they’ve got a mare, My Treat, an in-and-outer. She’s always had good potential, but she’s never delivered. If those are the crucial races, the sixth and the ninth, there’s one overlap. It wouldn’t strike you unless you were looking for something like it. A guy named Paul Thorne is driving in both races, and he used to work for the Domaines.”
“What do you know about him?” Rourke said.
“He’s young, tough, probably a little crazy, very competitive. He’s number two in the driver standings. The fans love him, because he always gives the impression of being out to win, and he doesn’t care how he does it, ethically or otherwise. He has a few horses of his own, but he’ll drive for any stable that pays his fee. Some people have started betting on him every time he goes out, which drives down the odds on his horses, and he’s been having trouble getting work. He’s always in hot water with the stewards, who want drivers to be gentlemen and move over when somebody wants to get by. He’s just waited out a fifteen-day suspension. If you want me to do some guessing, I’d guess he might be open to a deal.”
“Good,” MacMaster said. “That’s where you’d better start, Tim. Now what about these Domaines? What are they, husband and wife?”
“Yeah, and they’re in a different category from Thorne. It’s a big stable, with plenty of money behind it. There’s a stud farm and a training stable, and they’ve turned out a few champions, big money-winners. It’s a racing outfit, not a betting outfit.”
“I’ve never known a rich man who minded getting richer,” Rourke said.
“You’ve got a point,” Kimball admitted. “I don’t know Larry Domaine, but I know people in his tax bracket. They wouldn’t turn down a chance at a big win, and especially if the Internal Revenue Bureau didn’t know about it. But would they take any real risks, like murdering somebody? You can look him up in the clips, Tim. I think he won a chess tournament last year. He’s a cold fish, from his looks. The wife is gorgeous. You see her picture every now and then.”
Mehlmann, the reporter who had the desk next to Rourke’s, called, “Phone, Tim.”
“That may be Shayne,” Rourke said. “He knows about this, Mac, and there may be too many angles for me to check out by myself in one afternoon. Would the paper put up a small retainer, if I can get him?”
MacMaster considered briefly. “OK, up to two hundred bucks.”
Rourke returned to his own desk and picked up the open phone. “Rourke.”
Shayne’s voice said, “Lucy told me to call you.”
“Mike, listen. Joey Dolan’s been found dead. Naturally I feel lousy about it. I’m going up to the track to see what I can find out.”
“What did he die of?” Shayne said.
Rourke related what he knew about Dolan’s death, and his suspicions about how and why it had happened. Shayne listened quietly.
“Ad Kimball’s just been handicapping those races,” Rourke went on, “and we’ve got a good jumping-off point. Dolan used the ninth race as an example when he was talking to me, and the Domaines have horses going in the ninth and the sixth. A driver named Paul Thorne, who used to work for them, is driving both races. We’re wondering if the deal is for Thorne to win one and the Domaine horse the other. What I plan to do is barge in and ask a few questions and see how they react. The Mike Shayne technique, in short. I’m going to start with Thorne. But Kimball says he’s a menace, if not slightly out of his head, and I doubt if I can handle him if he doesn’t want to be handled. Would you be able to come along, Mike? After we see Thorne, we can split up. There’s a lot of ground to cover and not much time. MacMaster says he’ll give you a retainer. I won’t mention the figure. It’s small. But maybe in the process we can come up with a couple of winners.”
“Afraid I can’t help you, Tim,” Shayne said. “I have people to see myself.”
“Hell!” Rourke said; he had been counting on Shayne. “Couldn’t you postpone it?”
“Can’t be done. I’ve been called in on that jewel robbery in the Fontainebleau last month. Diamonds insured at a hundred thousand, and I get fifteen percent if I can turn them in. As of this moment, it looks easy.”
“Of course,” Rourke said. “MacMaster’s only authorizing two hundred bucks, and compared to fifteen G’s that’s nowhere.”
“Yeah, there’s quite a difference,” Shayne said. “Something like fourteen thousand eight hundred.”
“And who is Joey Dolan, after all? A wino. A bum. He couldn’t find a niche for himself in the affluent society, and who cares?”
“That won’t get you anywhere, Tim,” Shayne said mildly. “After thinking about it, I can see how a smart manipulator might think he could beat the twin double. But murder doesn’t make sense.”
“We don’t know enough to say! As far as the cops are concerned, I know he’s already a statistic. They’d be surprised to hear that only yesterday he was a human being. But I happen to know that Joey never drank anything but sherry. It was his way of protecting himself. He would no more take a drink of wood alcohol than you would, Mike. I mean it. It would have to be at least half sherry, camouflaged in a sherry bottle. That means that whoever gave it to him knew his habits.”
Shayne said, “Maybe he stuck to sherry when you were around, but you know drunks as well as I do. You’ve got a rosy-tinted picture of the life this guy led-no office hours, no rent to pay, no butt-kissing, hundreds of friends. But be realistic, Tim. The happy-go-lucky bum is a myth.”
“I liked him, goddamn it.”
“Sure. Just don’t turn him into a hero or a saint. Even if you’re right about what happened, you know you’ll have a hell of a time proving anything, don’t you? I’ve got to go now, Tim. I have a date with a guy who’s going to put me in touch with somebody who knows what the boys are asking for the diamonds. If I don’t show up, he’s going to look for some other go-between. I don’t feel like throwing away fifteen thousand bucks because you’ve been kidding yourself about some picturesque rummy.”
Trying to keep his temper, Rourke commented that Shayne would have taken a different attitude when he was starting out in business. In those days he hadn’t looked for easy jobs, and the wealthier his clients were, the less time he had for them. Shayne answered sharply and the reporter blew up. Ever since he had heard about Dolan’s death, he had been spoiling for trouble.
“If that’s the way you want it, Mike,” he said. “From now on let’s assume we don’t know each other.”
He slammed down the phone and felt for cigarettes. He didn’t need any help from Mike Shayne. He could get along perfectly well by himself.