The Trojan Colt Read online

  “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” she said.

  “If I can come up with something, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “There’s always the possibility that he just ran off, you know,” she said. “Thousands of kids do, every month.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just don’t think he’s one of them.”

  “Drew went home an hour ago,” said Bernice. “He didn’t have any messages for you. Lou’s in his office if you need to speak to him.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Let me inject some of that coffee into a vein first.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll be at my desk if you need me.”

  I poured the coffee, stopped by the bathroom, considered shaving, decided I was still groggy enough that I might slit my throat, and went back to finish the coffee. I thumbed aimlessly through one of Tony’s magazines. After a few minutes I started feeling a little more human as the second cup took effect, and walked over to Berger’s office.

  His door was ajar, and he was hunched over his computer, reading some report on the screen.

  “You open for business?” I said.

  He swiveled around on his chair. “Hi, Eli. Come on in.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So what can your local police department do for you today?” he asked.

  “Not much, to tell the truth,” I said. “I’ve got just one thing left to do, and if it doesn’t work I’m going to tell Tony’s parents not to waste any more of their money.”

  “An honest private eye?” he said with a smile. “You’ll destroy the whole profession’s reputation.”

  “I can make up for it by promising the moon to the next woman I take out,” I said, returning his smile.

  “Not Bernice,” he replied. “I don’t think there’s enough money in petty cash to pay for your funeral.”

  “Then I’ll just lie to the IRS like everyone else does,” I said. “Of course, first I have to make enough for the IRS to give a damn.”

  “Don’t count on that. They’ll come down on you just as hard for a nickel as a million.” He picked up a coffee cup from his desk and took a sip. “Okay, how can I help you?”

  “Yesterday I went to Keeneland,” I said. “I hunted up the security guard who’d been in charge of some of the barns at the sale, including the one where Tony and I stayed.” I felt a need for a cigarette, looked around, couldn’t spot an ashtray, and tried to ignore the craving. “I asked him if there’d been any visitors during the half hour I was over at the kitchen having dinner, and he says there was just one.”

  “That’s awfully thin, Eli,” he said. “The horse was on display to anyone with credentials, and that included every registered buyer and trainer on the grounds.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “But trust me, the kid was happy and carefree when I left, and he acted like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders when I got back thirty minutes later.”

  “Okay,” he said, frowning. “Go on.”

  “I asked about the visitor. He couldn’t remember the name, but he was sure it wasn’t one of the nationally known trainers like Wayne Lukas or Bob Baffert that even I would recognize from their photos in the sports section. So I asked Combes—that’s the guard—to describe him, and he remembered that he was kind of fat with a head of white hair.”

  “A fat guy with white hair,” repeated Berger with a smile. “Well, that eliminates half the men and all the women.”

  “It’s a long shot,” I agreed. “But damn it, Lou, something spooked that kid while I was gone.”

  “So to come back to it, what do you want me to do?” asked Berger.

  “You must be able to print out a photo of this Jimenez. I want to see if Combes recognizes it.”

  “I seem to think he’s an elegant, well-built guy, kind of a 1930s ladies’ man, with coal-black hair,” said Berger. “But who knows? Maybe he’s overeaten and gone gray. I can get the photo faxed to us in five minutes’ time.”

  “Thanks, Lou,” I said.

  “Tell you what,” he added. “There’s always a possibility that Horatio Jimenez is back in Albuquerque with a dozen friends who will swear he hadn’t left town for a century, so let me also give you photos of some local muscle that probably wouldn’t be adverse to threatening the kid or taking a shot at you if the price was right.” He finished his coffee and turned back to his computer. “Hell, maybe one of them is even a fat guy with white hair.”

  He began pounding away on his keyboard, then turned back to me.

  “Okay,” he announced. “Give it three or four minutes, and they should show up right there.” He pointed to his fax machine.

  “Thanks, Lou. I hate to keep imposing on you, but . . .”

  “Not a problem,” he said. “That’s what we’re here for.” Suddenly he grinned. “Though if this goes on for another week, we may ask you to contribute to our pension fund.”

  “If Combes can’t identify any of the photos, this doesn’t go on past dinnertime,” I told him.

  We tried to kill a little time while waiting for the photos, but he didn’t know who was playing for the Reds or the Bengals, and I didn’t know who was playing for Kentucky’s basketball team, which he persisted in calling “Big Blue.” We finally found a sporting figure of mutual interest—Trojan—but just about the time we began discussing him, the first of the photos arrived, and shortly after that, two more showed up.

  “Okay,” he said, “these are all I sent for. Their names are at the bottom of the pictures. Here’s your boy Jimenez.”

  He handed it to me, and I studied it. Jimenez looked to be somewhere around forty, showing just a little gray on his sideburns, with an elegant black mustache. He looked like the romantic lead in a black-and-white movie—not any particular one, just a generic one—and what he sure as hell didn’t look like was a fat guy with white hair. Still, there may have been two or three visitors while I was gone, and Combes might have remembered only one off the top of his head.

  I put the picture aside and studied the other two. One was fat and mostly bald, the other looked like eight million guys you’d pass on the street and never give a second thought to.

  “All right,” I said, getting to my feet. “Let’s see if any of these can jog Mr. Combes’s memory. And thanks again.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said with a smile. “Thank the Lexington taxpayers.”

  Then I was out of his office and heading toward the front door.

  “Are you coming back in time for dinner?” asked Bernice.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But probably just to pick up my suitcase.”

  “So you figure either you’ll have licked it or it’ll have licked you by the end of the day?” she asked.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Well, I’m off at five if you want cheering up at dinnertime,” she said.

  “I appreciate that,” I began, “but . . .”

  She held up a hand. “I know what happened after you dropped me off the other night.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you?” I asked. “It sure as hell bothers me.”

  “Of course it bothers me that they’re trying to shoot you,” she said. “But we could take my car and go to a different part of town.”

  “If I decide to stay, I’ll take you up on it. And thanks.”

  She laughed. “When you’re forty and divorced, you don’t wait to be asked.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said “When you’re my age and divorced, you get out of practice.”

  She laughed again, and then I was out in the parking lot looking for a blue Mercedes convertible and thankfully not seeing one. I climbed into the Chevy, hit the ignition, and headed over to Keeneland for what I was sure would be the last time.

  I reached the track, pulled into the clubhouse lot, and went looking for Combes. It didn’t take me long to find him.

  “Good morning, Mr. Paxton,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you again, at least not so soon. What c
an I do for you today?”

  I walked up to him. “I want you to take a look at this”—I handed him the faxed photo of Jimenez—“and tell me if this was the man who visited Tony Sanders and the colt while I was having dinner.”

  He looked at the photo and instantly frowned. “No, sir, Mr. Paxton. Not even close. The man I saw was heavyset, and he had a full head of white or maybe gray hair.”

  “How about this one?” I said, showing him the fat bald guy.

  He shook his head. “No. Even with white hair the features are wrong.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I don’t have much hope for this one either, but you might as well take a look.”

  I handed him the final fax. He just looked briefly and shook his head again.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Paxton, but I never saw any of these men,” Then: “Well, let me amend that. I could have seen all of them in a shopping mall or a basketball game or even in church. They have pretty forgettable faces, except for the one who looks a little like Zachary Scott, if you remember the old movies. But I know that none of these three came to visit the groom that night.”

  “Okay, Mr. Combes,” I said, taking the faxes back. “I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

  “No trouble at all,” he said. “I’m just sorry I wasn’t able to help you.”

  “You and me both,” I said wryly.

  I shook his hand and walked back to the car.

  And that, I thought, was that. I’d run through every possibility—I hesitated to think of them as leads, because “lead” was more definite than anything else about this case. There was nobody left to talk to, and if there was a question left to ask, I couldn’t think of what it might be.

  I checked my watch. It was already eleven, so since I was charging Tony’s parents for a full day, I figured I owed them another five or six hours. Then I’d pick up my luggage, go out to dinner with Bernice, swap the Chevy for my Ford, and go home and tell my troubles to Marlowe, who would show his opinion of my reappearance by chewing on my best shoes.

  I considered my options, not that I really had any. I could drive out to Mill Creek Farm again and talk to Frank Standish, but that hadn’t helped the last few times I’d tried it. I could go back to the track and see if I could get Combes to remember anything other than that the visitor, who may or may not have had anything to do with Tony’s disappearance, was fat and white-haired. I could talk to Nanette again, but it was obvious that she knew even less about the situation than I did.

  I could barge into Bigelow’s house and accuse him of murder and/or kidnapping, and if he didn’t fall over laughing after I tried to prove it, the next night I spent in the police station I’d have a door and window with bars in them.

  I could talk to Hal Chessman again, but he was gone from Mill Creek months before Tony arrived and had never seen him.

  Those were my choices.

  Still, I felt guilty just going back to the station, sitting around playing solitaire or reading racing magazines and waiting for Bernice to clock out so I could have one last dinner with her before I went home to Cincinnati.

  I decided to think about it at lunch and see if I had any remaining options. I’d just driven up to a sandwich shop that looked like a clone of Tilly’s when it occurred to me that I wasn’t the least bit hungry, that I’d talked myself into stopping because I didn’t know what the hell to do next.

  I ran through them all in my mind again—Bigelow, Standish, Nanette, Combes, Chessman—and knew seeing any of them again would be fruitless. Finally I decided to drive back and take a second look at the Leestown Road Kroger, or rather the area immediately around it, and see if I’d missed anything the first time.

  It was useless, I knew, but I had a few hours to kill, and it beat sitting at the station feeling like a total failure, so I headed over there.

  The parking lot looked exactly the same as last time. I peeked into the store as I slowly drove by the front; it looked as clean, as well-managed, and as inviting as before. I stopped to let a young man pushing a dozen empty carts go by and watched him take them into the store.

  I drove twice around the lot, couldn’t see a thing that looked suspicious or out of place, drove around the back where the huge eighteen-wheelers delivered the products that Kroger sold. It seemed as quiet and well organized as the front. I’d have asked the guys on the loading dock some questions if I could think of any to ask, but of course I couldn’t.

  Okay, no surprises, and at least I’d killed half an hour while going through the motions. I spotted a nice little restaurant and decided I’d drive once around the area, just to complete my wasted quest in this part of town. Then I’d grab some lunch while I decided how to kill the rest of the day.

  I began driving south a couple of blocks, turned at a minor cross street—and then I saw it, parked between a pair of condos: a blue Mercedes convertible. The top was up, and there was a guy inside it, reading a newspaper. I slowed down and tried to get a look at him. His face was buried in the paper, and when I reached the corner I took a right and began circling the block. When I was directly opposite it on the next street, I stopped, pulled out my pen, and reached into the glove compartment looking for a piece of paper. All there was, except for a pair of maps, were the rental papers, which had been signed by Berger and billed to the cops. I put them in my left hand, held the pen in my right, and started driving again. This time I slowed down about thirty yards behind the convertible, read the plate, and began scribbling it down while I weaved down the street at a snail’s pace.

  A guy behind me honked, but that didn’t worry me. Even if the hitter in the convertible looked over to see what the fuss was about, all he’d see was a green Chevy he’d never seen before.

  As I passed him I put my hand up as if shielding my eyes from the sun so he couldn’t get a look at my face. That was my mistake. The sun had ducked behind a cloud, and it took him less than a New York second to figure out I didn’t want him to see who I was.

  He pulled out, honking at the guy who was behind me and directly in front of him, and I took off like a bat out of hell. I was doing sixty in a few seconds and hoping some squad car would show up to arrest me, but as the saying goes, there’s never a cop around when you need one.

  I hit a wall of traffic and had to slow down, and suddenly he was right behind me. He didn’t know who I was—he hadn’t seen my face and I wasn’t in the Ford—but he knew I was interested in him, and that was enough. I could see his hand and arm come out the driver’s window, and I heard a shot, though none of my windows broke.

  I saw signs for I-75 south to Florida and I-64 to Louisville, but I figured the last thing I wanted to do was race my little 6-cylinder Chevy against a sleek Mercedes, so I kept turning into the city, looking for heavier traffic and more turns.

  I had to slow down when some lady on my right, plugged into her cell phone and paying no attention to anything, ran a light that had just turned red for her and green for me. There was another shot, and this time my back window shattered.

  I turned into an alley and floored it. He was slow reacting, but the Mercedes made up for it once he entered the alley, and he was almost on top of me when I turned right onto another street.

  The next cross street was a commercial one, going one way to the right, with a light at the corner. I ran the light and took a left, going into the one-way traffic. There were a bunch of cars coming at me. They honked like hell, but they jogged left and right to avoid hitting me.

  The Mercedes swung into the street right on my tail. He stuck his arm out and took two more quick shots. I felt one thud into the trunk, and the other shattered the window of an oncoming car. I swerved and barely avoided him, and an instant later I heard a crash behind me. I checked the rear-view mirror and saw that an SUV that had barely avoided me had side-swiped the Mercedes. No one seemed badly hurt, but the SUV had spun around and was blocking the street, so that was the end of the chase. I saw the Mercedes’ driver jump out of his car and dart between two buildings.


  I turned again at the next street, with the traffic this time, started to get my bearings—I’d been so intent on escaping that I had no idea where I’d been driving—and finally made my way back to “my” police station.

  Bernice got up from her desk the second I walked in the door.

  “Are you all right, Eli?” she said solicitously. “You look terrible!” She glanced out the door. “What happened to your car?”

  “Everything in order,” I said. “But the very first thing is this: there was a car crash”—I gave her the general location; I couldn’t remember the street or any of the numbers—“and no, it didn’t involve me. Well, not exactly. But the shooter in the blue Mercedes was involved. No one was driving away from that, so there had to be a cop on the scene in a couple of minutes. The shooter ran off, but I got his license plate number.” I handed it to her. “See if the cop got a description of him from any witnesses. And warn any cop who’s looking for him that he’s armed and dangerous.”

  “Lou’s in conference and Drew hasn’t come in yet,” she said. “I’ll take care of it myself. Sit down somewhere, Eli. You look terrible.”

  “I’d say that you ought to see the other guy,” I said wryly, “but the whole exercise is about finding out who the other guy is and why he wants me dead.”

  “We don’t have any medics here,” she said. “But go into the bathroom and clean the blood off. We’ve got bandages there.”

  “Blood?” I repeated, frowning. “What blood?”

  “Just go,” she said, starting to type on her keyboard. “You’ll figure it out.”

  I went to the bathroom that was attached to the room I’d been staying in, turned on the light, and peered into the mirror—and found that I was bleeding from my right ear and two spots on my right cheek. I hadn’t felt it in the heat of the chase, but the shot that shattered the window had sent some slivers of glass against the right side of my face and cut it open.

  I checked the cabinet, found some anti-bacteria spray, closed my right eye and sprayed it on my face, then stuck a couple of bandages on. The ear bled right through, so I covered it with two more, one on top of the other, and that seemed to do the trick.