The Trojan Colt Page 14

  After another four cups of coffee, I got the distinct impression that if I ordered one more she’d pour it on my head to open up the table to better-paying customers, so I got up, left her a five-spot so she wouldn’t throw a coffee pot at my head as I walked past, paid my bill, and climbed into the Chevy that Berger or one of his officers had rented for me.

  Then I just started driving around, still dwelling on the problem, and realized I was wasting the Sanderses’ money if I didn’t go somewhere and do something, though I was a little vague on where and what. But I knew I couldn’t just keep driving until the light dawned, so I went back to Mill Creek Farm, parked near the barn area, walked around the backhoe, and found Frank Standish walking from the yearling barn; it still housed a bunch of colts and fillies, as only the very best-bred of them had been accepted for the Keeneland sale. He was heading to the large barn that housed his office.

  “Another leak?” I asked, indicating the backhoe.

  He nodded. “If Mr. Bigelow keeps this place much longer, I think he’s going to have to replace every pipe on the property, plus half the barns. What can I do for you, Eli?”

  “I’ve hit a bunch of dead ends. I thought I’d take another look around and see if I missed anything.”

  “You’ve got free run of the barns and paddocks,” replied Standish. “If you want to go to the Big House—that’s what we call the Bigelow residence—I’ll have to get permission, but I can’t imagine anyone will say no, especially with Mrs. Bigelow off visiting friends in Manhattan.”

  “No, if Tony didn’t spend any time there, I don’t have to.

  “Truth to tell, I don’t think he ever once set foot in the place.”

  “Where did he spend most of his free time?”

  Standish smiled. “There’s not a lot of free time to be had when you’re working with animals, Eli.”

  “He couldn’t spend twenty-four hours a day with Tyrone,” I protested.

  “Of course not. But he had other yearlings as well.”

  “He did?” I said, surprised. “I thought he just cared for Tyrone.”

  Standish shook his head. “You ship the most expensive horse on the grounds to a sale, you ship the groom he’s used to with him. The others learn to adjust to new grooms in a day or two, but you never want the money horse left alone in strange surroundings.”

  “How many other yearlings did he care for?”

  “Two colts and a filly. They’re still here.”

  “He’s not planning to race them?”

  Standish shook his head again. “He hasn’t raced a horse in fifteen, sixteen years. He’ll be selling these. They just weren’t good enough in either bloodlines or conformation for Keeneland in the summer.”

  “There’s more than one sale here?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Standish. “What just finished was the Select Summer Sale, the very best-bred and best-conformed yearlings. There’ll be three or four times as many at the fall sale, but they won’t bring the kind of prices the summer yearlings did.” He paused to signal a girl to take a broodmare to a certain pasture. “The interesting part is that the fall sales are every bit as likely to produce a classic winner as the summer sales. It just won’t be quite as well-bred to start with.”

  “To start with?” I asked.

  “Obscure Stallion X sires a Derby winner and a Santa Anita Handicap winner, and suddenly he’s Hot Stallion Y. Breeding’s not quite the science we wish it was. There’s a centuries-old saying that still holds true: Breed the best to the best and hope for the best.”

  “That’s fascinating,” I said, “but I’m getting sidetracked here. Let me rephrase my question: On those incredibly rare occasions when Tony wasn’t working his tail off, where did he hang out?”

  “Mostly with his girlfriend, I think,” said Standish.

  “I mean when he was here,” I said. “Like if he took a half-hour break and then had to go back to work. Where would he take it?”

  “Ah!” he replied with a smile. “Now I understand. You see that little room there, just down from my office?”

  “I thought it was an equipment room.”

  “A tack room?” he said. “It is, but Tony turned one end of it into a reading room.”

  “He didn’t strike me as a bookworm,” I noted.

  “There was one subject that fascinated him and that he knew very well.”

  “Horse racing,” I said with certainty.

  He nodded. “He subscribed to most of the magazines. We get them here, of course, but he subscribed long before he came to work. But we’ve got quite a library of books—a complete run of the annual American Racing Manual, lots more—and he used to sit in there whenever he had a chance and read them.”

  “May I take a look?” I asked.

  “Be my guest.”

  I walked down to the room. It was dark, of course, but I found a light switch just inside the door. I’d half expected to see shelves of books there, but it was mostly grooming equipment, extra buckets, and horse blankets and the like—and in one corner was a swivel chair on wheels that someone at the house no longer wanted and had given to the barn area, and an abandoned lamp with a rusty base. I tried it, and it still worked.

  I looked around for a few minutes, found three hardcover books in a cardboard box—all on racing, of course—but nothing else. There wasn’t a damned thing to be learned here that would make someone want to start taking shots at me.

  I went back into the main aisle of the barn, couldn’t see Standish anywhere, and went outside looking for him. I found him about fifty yards away, leaning against a split-rail fence watching a half dozen broodmares and their foals cantering across the grass. I couldn’t figure out why the mares were running—maybe something startled them, or maybe, because they’d been race mares, they just felt an occasional compulsion to run—but the foals were clearly having the time of their very young lives.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” I said as I walked up to him.

  “Esoterically,” he agreed. “But practically, the smaller bay doesn’t stride out enough, and some trainer’s going to go crazy trying to teach the roan to switch leads.”

  “Switch leads?” I asked. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “A horse, even a Secretariat, gets tired if he leads with the same foot all the way around the track,” Standish explained. “Ideally, since they run counterclockwise, you want him leading with his left foot on the turns and his right foot on the straightaways. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it’ll make the difference of a length or more in a six-furlong race . . . and a lot of races are won—and lost—by less than a length.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “No need for you to. You’re not a trainer or a jockey.”

  “Is this the pasture where Tyrone ripped up his neck?”

  “I sure as hell doubt it,” said Standish. “I just got here in January, and I gather he slashed it in September or October. But it wouldn’t have been this paddock.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too small. Those weanlings like to run, so it would have been one of the two big ones”—he pointed at the paddocks in question—“off by the weanling and yearling barns.”

  “You don’t have a vet on the grounds,” I said. “How did they patch it up before he bled to death?”

  “It’s only about ten or twelve inches, and he doesn’t have any arteries right there,” said Standish. “They tell me they just called the vet, held him still for twenty minutes ’til the vet arrived, and got him sewn up. Didn’t even anesthetize him. Of course, we don’t have the facility to knock a horse out and work on him here anyway. Probably they made a value judgment that it was easier to patch him up right here in one of the barns than send for a horse ambulance, take him to the vet’s hospital, and put him under before they tried to stop the bleeding. He’s a pretty tractable colt; he’ll let you do almost anything with him.”

  “Did Tony ever say anything about him?” I was grasping at stra
ws, but I couldn’t think of any other question.

  “Just his daily reports.”

  “On what?”

  “The usual: Did he clean out his oats? Did he have any open sores? Was he snorting too much (which might imply a breathing problem when he got to the track)? Things like that.”

  I felt myself getting tense and nervous. There was someone out there, still intent on killing me, and not only hadn’t I learned a damned thing, I couldn’t think of another question to ask.

  Finally I just thanked him and walked back to the Chevy. As I drove away I checked every driveway I passed, every cross street, looking for a blue Mercedes convertible. The fact that I didn’t see one didn’t make me feel any better. All it meant, as far as I was concerned, was that the shooter was skilled at arranging ambushes.

  I stopped at Fishbein’s, walked in, and looked around for Nanette. She was nowhere to be seen. My first thought was that she knew something, and the killer got to her. My second thought, far more rational, was to ask the cashier where she was. I was informed that she was on her break and would be back in a couple of minutes.

  I wandered over to the magazine section and realized that I didn’t have to exert the usual willpower, as Fishbein’s didn’t carry Playboy or its imitators. I saw a Raymond Chandler paperback, picked it up, thumbed through it, and wondered why Philip Marlowe (or Sam Spade, or Lew Archer, or any of the other fictional detectives) never seemed to feel nervous when someone was out to kill them. Or why each had, at most, one friend on the police force that he could trust and rely upon.

  I put the book back and began walking up and down the aisles, not looking for anything in particular, just killing time. Finally, as I was studying a package of disposable baby diapers, I felt a tap on my shoulder, resisted the urge to jump, resisted an even stronger urge to pull my gun, and turned around to find myself facing the lovely young blonde.

  “You wanted to see me, Mr. Paxton?” said Nanette. “Is there some news about Tony?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  She frowned. “I’m very worried about him.”

  “I know,” I said, doing my best to sound comforting. I’d have put an arm around her shoulders, but I had a feeling that could get you arrested in a family drugstore in the Upper South.

  “You obviously have more questions to ask,” she said. “How can I help you?”

  “This one’s out of left field,” I said, “but do you or Tony know anyone who drives a Mercedes convertible?”

  She shook her head. “That costs what one of us makes in maybe two years,” she answered. “We don’t travel in those social circles.”

  “Like I said, it was a long shot,” I replied. “Do you know if Tony ever worked for a guy—a farm manager—named Chessman?”

  “No. He mentioned him now and then, always favorably. I guess he worked for Mr. Bigelow but left before Tony started.”

  “Only one more question, and this is an important one,” I said. “Unfortunately, it’s also an inexact one. Did he know or even mention anyone who might live in the vicinity, say two or three blocks, of the Leestown Road Kroger?”

  She frowned. “I don’t think I’ve ever been there. Did someone there see Tony?”

  I shook my head. “No. And it has nothing to do with the Kroger itself. I just need to know if he knows someone who lives or works near there.”

  “I’ve no idea, Mr. Paxton, but I can’t imagine that he does. He’s always been pretty much of a loner. I’m sure if he knew anyone in that area, he’d have told me about it.”

  I must have shown my disappointment, because suddenly she looked even more worried.

  “If you’ll tell me who you think he knew there,” she said, “I’ll be happy to help you look for them every day when my shift’s over.”

  “I wish I knew,” I admitted.

  She frowned. “Then why are you asking me about it?”

  I figured it couldn’t hurt to tell her the truth. “Because the police found his car parked there.” I decided not to tell her that he’d left the top down with a rainstorm coming.

  I promised to keep her informed of any developments and then walked out to the Chevy, which I’d parked right in front of the store, got in, and tried to think of what I might have missed. Finally I decided to drive back to Keeneland.

  It was a lot less crowded now that the sale was over, and it wouldn’t be open for racing again until the fall, but there were still about fifty or sixty cars parked there—trainers, exercise boys (well, that’s the term, though half of them are girls these days), grooms, track officials, the crew that maintained the track, and a couple of unclassifiables.

  I walked over toward where the yearlings had been stabled, and as I approached Barn 9 a guard approached me.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “May I see your credentials?”

  “I’m just looking for someone,” I replied. “Another guard, in fact.”

  “Even so, I’m afraid you’re not allowed in this area without a pass.”

  “My name’s Eli Paxton,” I said, pulling out my wallet and flashing my detective’s license. “I just want to see the guard who was on duty here during the sale.”

  “We had lots of guards,” he replied, relaxing somewhat now that he saw I was almost a cop.

  “I need the guy who was in charge of Barn 9.”

  “I’ll have to go check the duty chart,” he said. “I can’t leave you here alone, so why don’t you come with me, Mr. Paxton?”

  “Lead the way,” I said, falling into step behind him as he walked to a small building at the end of the row of barns. We entered it, and while I was looking for a chart tacked to a wall, he activated a computer, typed in a few words, waited for an answer, and then turned to me.

  “The man who you want is Roger Combes,” he announced. “He’s currently at”—he peered intently at the screen—“the owners’ and track officials’ private lot.”

  “And where is that?” I asked.

  “Under the clubhouse,” he said, pointing toward the grandstand. “Just a minute.” He pulled out an official-looking notepad, scribbled something on it, and handed it to me. “This’ll get your car in and save you walking almost a mile each way from where your car is now. We’re not racing, so Roger should be the only one on duty today.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Much appreciated.”

  I walked back to the Chevy, got into it, and drove where he had indicated. I finally pulled into the private lot, and as I got out of the car, Combes walked over.

  “May I please see your—?” He stopped dead and stared at me. “Don’t I know you?”

  I nodded and extended my hand. “Eli Paxton. I was keeping watch over the Trojan colt.”

  He smiled. “Ah! Now I remember. And he topped the sale, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Pretty horse.” Suddenly he frowned. “Ah! I remember now. That groom went missing. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  “As a matter of fact, it is,” I said.

  “He seemed like a good kid. It’s hard to believe that he just ran off to have a good time before the colt even made it to the sales ring.”

  “A lot of us are finding that difficult to believe,” I replied, “which is why I’ve been retained.”

  “Good!” he said.

  I stared at him curiously.

  “I’d hate to think nobody cares.”

  “People care,” I said. “His parents, for starters.”

  “So what can I do to help?” asked Combes.

  “The night before the colt was sold . . .” I began.

  “The night the groom disappeared,” he interrupted, nodding his head.

  “Right,” I said. “I was with him all day, and again at night. The only time I left the barn was to eat at the kitchen. Now, think hard, because this may be very important: Were there any visitors during the half hour or so I was gone for dinner?”

  “We don’t keep a record of each visitor, Mr. Paxton,” he sai
d. He closed his eyes and seemed to make almost a physical effort to concentrate. Finally he opened his eyes and looked at me. “I think he only had one—a portly gentleman with white hair.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  He shook his head. “No. It was probably just a potential buyer or his agent or trainer. Whoever it was, he had a right to be there. He spent a few minutes talking to the young man, probably asking questions about the colt, and then he left.”

  “And that’s all you can remember?”

  “I seem to think he was local, that I may have seen him a couple of times over the years, but that’s all,” said Combes. “I’m sorry, Mr. Paxton. If I’d known then that it was important . . .”

  “Not your fault,” I said. “And the likelihood is that it was just a possible bidder and had nothing to do with Tony’s disappearance.”

  “When he finally turns up, let me know,” said Combes. “He was a nice kid. Whenever he wasn’t working he was always reading. You just don’t find many young people like that.”

  “I agree,” I said. “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Combes.”

  “Roger,” he corrected me.

  “Roger,” I amended.

  I walked back to the Chevy, pulled out of the parking lot, and realized I had no idea where to go next. I could visit his parents, or Standish, or Nanette, or Chessman, or Jeremy the farm hand, or even Bigelow himself, but the truth of the matter is that I was all out of questions to ask them—and I was no closer to finding out what had become of Tony Sanders than the morning I woke up and found that he was missing.

  I awoke to the smell of coffee and saw Bernice standing there in the doorway with a tray that held a pot, a cup, and the necessary white stuff.

  “Well, look who finally woke up,” she said as she walked into the room and put the tray on a table.

  “Coffee in the hands of a good-looking woman does it every time,” I said, swinging my feet down to the floor and sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “So is Sam Spade making any progress?”

  I shook my head. “Not so’s you’d notice it.”