Claire looked at her watch. “Larry’s going to know I’ve had some drinks. He thinks I’m drinking too much lately, and he’s probably right. But sometimes it seems necessary. Mike, none of this really surprised you, did it, about Paul and me?”
“I was listening in on your fight in the motel. Ex-lovers shoot each other more often than total strangers.”
He watched her put things in her bag, his eyes cold and appraising. She touched up her lipstick.
“I told Paul I didn’t have any money,” she said, “but that’s not strictly true. I just didn’t have the kind of money he needed. What are your fees?”
“They vary. In your case, to prove that you didn’t put wood alcohol in Dolan’s sherry and somebody else did, I’ll charge you two thousand bucks.”
She looked at him briefly. “That’s a bargain.” He settled with the bartender and drove her back to the hospital parking area, where she shifted to her Mercedes. Shayne watched her pull out, after a quick wave. Then he went into the hospital reception room and asked the switchboard girl if she could locate Miss Mallinson.
Visiting hours were over for the afternoon and the volunteer in the large hat had gone home, leaving the professional staff to run the hospital. Miss Mallinson came out of the elevator, pert and trim in her white uniform.
“Everything’s fine, Mr. Shayne,” she said. “I’ve been stopping in every five minutes. His pulse is normal. His respiration is the same, deep and regular.”
“You mean he’s still snoring?”
“He is certainly still snoring. He may be coming out of it, I’m not sure. The last time I was in he tried to grab me, without waking up.”
Shayne grinned. “That sounds normal, too.”
“But in all those bandages, honestly, it’s impractical.”
“When do you go off duty?”
“An hour ago, but they’re always after us to put in overtime, so I said I’d stay. I thought I’d better keep a personal eye on him. I couldn’t explain the situation to anybody else.”
Shayne thanked her for taking such an unprofessional interest in his friend, and told her he’d call in for news every couple of hours.
He had a feeling now that he had most of the facts he needed, though he still had ho idea who had killed Joey Dolan, or why. He knew from experience that if he didn’t worry about it, the facts would rearrange themselves without help from him, until in the end a pattern began to emerge. He bought two hero sandwiches and a pint of Courvoisier, and had a quiet, solitary picnic in an ocean-front park he had passed on the way in. As he finished the last of the second sandwich, he sat up straighter, and said, “Sure!” to himself in a soft voice.
He lit a cigarette, then let it dangle unheeded from one corner of his mouth. It was a guess, but a guess that seemed to fit. By the time the cigarette burned down he had outlined a course of action that would show whether or not he was right.
He drove to Joe’s Auto Body, on Route 1, where he identified himself as the owner of the smashed Buick. He unlocked the trunk and made a careful selection of tools and equipment. He locked up carefully and returned the keys to the proprietor.
Twenty minutes later he was being waved into one of the big parking lots at Surfside Raceway. It was seven-thirty, a half hour before the first race, but the lots were filling up fast. He paid his admission and bought a program. The grandstand and ramps were already swarming with horse-players, most of them studying their programs to see what looked good in the daily double, a combination bet on the first two races. Sulkies were coming out from the great paddock barn, where all the horses that were to work tonight had been gathered under the supervision of the paddock judges. Railbirds with binoculars watched as the horses were put through fast warmup sprints under the brilliant 1500-watt lights.
Shayne asked directions, found the administration building and the racing secretary’s office, and introduced himself to the racing secretary, a short, florid man with heavy glasses, named Granby.
“I’m doing a job for an insurance company,” Shayne said, without mentioning that the insurance company he was actually working for was more interested in jewels than in horses. “At this stage I don’t want to say anything more, if that’s all right with you. You film all your races, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” Granby said. “Nowadays we get it on tape, not film. It’s faster. You can run it off two minutes after the race is over.”
“I don’t have the date of the one I want to look at. One of Paul Thorne’s horses was killed in it.”
Granby’s glasses glinted. “No problem. Is this something that can be handled without publicity, Mr. Shayne?”
“We hope so. I can’t promise anything.”
After looking up the date of the race, Granby took Shayne to a projection room, found the spool he wanted, threaded the tape into a projector and ran it off at blinding speed, without dimming the lights. Halfway through he cut the lights and slowed the tape to a normal speed.
“Here we are. This is the finish of the fifth race. The one we want is the sixth.”
The camera held on the finish line until all eight horses were across, then cut abruptly to the tote board for the official order of finish and the payoff prices, then cut again to a new field of eight horses following the starter around the turn. Shayne, slouching in an armchair with an unlighted cigarette in his mouth, watched the horses come up in line, then leap forward as the starting car folded its great wings and shot away.
“Thorne’s in the number-three slot,” Granby said over the whir of the projector. “Driving Don J. A pretty horse, very spirited horse. Three-year-old, great blood line, he had all the makings of a free-for-aller. His best time for the mile was 2:04 on a half-mile track. He’s going in a Class A race here for the first time. He went away at three to one, as I recall. He’s fourth there at the turn. That’s Star Music, a Domaine horse, ahead of him.”
A new camera picked up the horses as they rounded into the backstretch. The tape’s fidelity was very good, but the total absence of sound made the action seem unreal. The accident happened at almost the exact second when the camera on the next tower took over. Star Music drifted away from the rail going into the turn. Thorne was using his whip as he tried to brush Don J. through on the inside, along the rail. Suddenly his horse veered sharply to the right. Star Music bounced and went into a gallop, and the inner wheel of Star Music’s sulky struck Don J. on the leg. There was a moment’s tangle and Don J. veered back, breaking clear, and went into the rail.
Granby stopped the tape and reversed it. The horses and sulkies retreated around the track in a rapid blur.
“I’ll go through it again in slow motion,” he said. “We understood that Thorne was underinsured on the horse. He didn’t put in any complaints of dirty driving. Accidents do happen and we came to the conclusion that this was one of them, though we’ve learned to give anything involving Thorne an especially close look. After Star Music broke there’s too much dust to see clearly. We lose the continuity when we switch cameras.” The horses were moving back in the right direction again, slowly and painfully. “What apparently happened, as we reconstructed it, was that a shaft buckle broke as Thorne went for the opening. The shaft dug into the dirt and pitched the horse to the outside. The Domaines had had trouble with Star Music breaking. Brossard was driving him. An excellent man, one of our veterans, but he couldn’t hold him. The shaft broke as Don J. hit the rail. You can see the end for a second. There.” He stopped the projector. Thorne’s horse froze on the screen at the moment of impact. The broken shaft could be seen beneath the rail. “Then the splintered end whipped up and went into the horse’s belly. That might have been enough. He also broke both front legs. Thorne broke three ribs, cut open his head to the bone and damaged his spleen. We noticed a falloff in attendance while he was in the hospital. Frankly, he’s one of our biggest drawing cards, which is why he only pulled a three-week suspension this last time. I thought he ought to be set down for good. The stewards didn’t see fit to agree with me. Do you want me to run it through again?”
“You don’t have any pictures of what happened after he went through the rail?”
“No, the cameras follow the race. I don’t get you. Thorne was out cold.”
“Could the shaft have been cut or weakened in some way before the race?”
“Possibly,” Granby said guardedly. “It was examined, of course, but it was pretty well smashed up.”
Shayne looked closely at the screen. “Let me see the next couple of frames.”
Granby advanced the tape slowly, in short jerks, watching the detective. Shayne held up his hand and stared at the screen. Several figures were running toward the track from the backstretch. The one in the lead had a short
