The Trojan Colt Read online

  When I went back out to Bernice’s desk, she already had the information.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “It looks like you were right. Or maybe it was Lou who suggested it. Anyway, the guy in the blue Mercedes matches Horatio Jimenez’s description.” She paused. “What the hell happened, Eli?”

  “The son of a bitch tried to kill me again.”

  “Why?”

  “I wish to hell I knew,” I said. “A week ago I’d never heard of him, and I’m sure he’d never heard of me. I’m no closer to knowing what happened to Tony Sanders than I was the minute his parents approached me—and yet he’s tried to kill me twice.” I sighed and shook my head. “I’d give my kingdom, such as it is, to know what he thinks I know.” I paused a moment and thought about it. “Hell, I don’t even think he knew it was me. I was in a different car, and I don’t think he got a decent look at my face.”

  She frowned. “Then why was he shooting at you?”

  I thought about it, and then thought about it some more. “It doesn’t make any sense, does it?” I said at last.

  “Did he mistake you for someone else?” asked Bernice dubiously.

  “No, he couldn’t have,” I answered. “Not unless we assume he was waiting to kill some guy who drives a two-year-old green Chevy.”

  “What was he doing in his car when you spotted him?”

  “Taking a break, staking it out, waiting for a friend, who the hell knows?” I answered with a growing sense of frustration.

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Eli,” she said.

  “Name me one thing about this case that does,” I shot back.

  “Well,” she continued, “there’s one positive aspect about this whole mess.”

  I stared at her. “I’d love to hear it.”

  “There is a solution, and you must be very close to it,” said Bernice. “Otherwise, why would they have tried to kill you?”

  “Like I just said, I don’t know for a fact that he knew it was me.”

  “He knew it was you after you took me home from dinner,” she said. “And even if he didn’t recognize you today, he was parked there, and he didn’t shoot the first hundred or so cars that drove past.” She stared intently at me for a moment. “Oh, shit! You’re bleeding right through that bandage on your ear.”

  She summoned another uniformed policewoman, who arrived about half a minute later.

  “Eli, this is Officer Hutchinson, but you can call her Jeanine. Jeanine, this is Eli Paxton. He’s been staying with us the past few nights, though I don’t think you’ve met him. Right now he’s concentrating on bleeding all over himself and also on our nice clean floor. Would you please take him somewhere and clean him up properly, and see if you think he needs to see a doctor?”

  “I’ll be happy to,” said Jeanine. “It beats listening to the guys talking about who should and shouldn’t be starting for Big Blue this fall.” She turned to me. “Follow me, Mr. Paxton.”

  “Call me Eli,” I said.

  She smiled. “You may not feel so friendly after I finish working on that ear.” She peered more closely at me. “Your cheek doesn’t look all that good either.”

  She led me to a small lab—not forensics, not anything in particular, just a little room with a bunch of computerized equipment and a hell of a lot more supplies than the bathroom’s medicine cabinet.

  “I’ll be as gentle as I can,” she said, “but this is probably going to hurt.”

  She pulled the bandages off my ear, and I couldn’t stop myself from grunting in pain.

  “Bad guys, or just careless in the kitchen?” she asked as she began cleaning the wound a lot more thoroughly than I had.

  “One or the other,” I said.

  “Hey, I’m one of the good guys.”

  “A guy took a couple of shots at me while I was driving, and shot out a window.”

  “Yeah, I thought so,” she said, picking up a small metal tweezers. “Your cheek seems to be okay, but you have a little sliver of glass in your ear lobe.” She very carefully pulled it out. “How clever of you to tape it in so I could see it for myself.”

  “Anything to please a cop,” I said, suddenly wincing as she touched something tender with the tweezers.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s out now.” She began applying some kind of salve. “All done. Don’t wear your earrings tonight.”

  “I’ll resist the temptation,” I said.

  She continued looking at the earlobe. “I think exposure to fresh air is best for it. You’ve bled all over your collar and shoulder already, so you can’t do much more damage to the shirt.” She stuffed some cotton and a bandage in a plastic bag and handed it to me. “If it starts bleeding again, use this.”

  “Thanks, Jeanine,” I said when she backed off to indicate she was all through patching me up.

  “I’ve got two sons,” she replied with a smile. “This is old hat to me.”

  We walked back to Bernice’s desk, I thanked her again, and she vanished into the inner recesses of the building.

  “Lou says he’ll catch up with you—I think his exact words were ‘I’ll debrief him’—in about forty-five minutes. Maybe he can figure out what Jimenez was doing there.” She paused. “We can still go out to dinner if you’re up to it—and if you have a clean shirt. If you feel you’d rather skip it, that’s okay too.”

  “We’ll go,” I said. “Even potential murder victims get hungry.”

  “And are you still going back to Cincinnati tonight?”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “I don’t know what I’ve missed that they think I know, but they’ve tried to kill me twice, and I’m damned well going to find out why.”

  Her computer started beeping, and a minute later an officer brought in a man who’d been drinking way too much way too early in the day, and I could tell I was in the way, so I went to “my” room, lay back on the cot, and tried again to dope out what they thought I knew that warranted my death.

  Lou Berger came into my room in about half an hour.

  “I hear you’ve had an exciting day,” he said.

  “And it’s only half-over,” I replied wryly.

  “You want to tell me exactly what happened?”

  I recounted everything from when I drove to the Kroger and how I managed to get away from my pursuer.

  “That was quick thinking,” he said. “Quick, but dangerous. I don’t think I’d have gone the wrong way into traffic.”

  “You would have,” I said, “if the guy behind you was shooting at you.”

  “Maybe,” he admitted, and then added: “Especially based on the descriptions we’ve got.”

  “I know,” I said. “It was Jimenez.”

  “Looks like. We can’t be sure, but it figures. What we can’t figure out is what the hell he was doing there. I checked, and not a house or condo on that block has changed hands in more than a year.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Hell, you could fill a book with what I don’t know about this case.” I pulled a pack of cigarettes out of my shirt pocket. “Sorry,” I said as I lit up. “I need this.”

  “Terrible for your health,” remarked Berger.

  “Not as terrible as getting shot at by a pro,” I said, taking a deep drag. “I don’t suppose anyone’s found him yet?”

  “Eli, the guy had a gun in his hand, and he’d been shooting at you. Do you really think anyone followed him?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Hell, I wouldn’t have either.”

  “You might have,” he said. Then he smiled. “But you’d have checked to see if there was a reward first.” He stared at me for a long moment. “So are you staying on the case or going home?”

  “I was all set to leave,” I admitted. “I thought I’d hit a dead end, and I was just wasting the Sanderses’ money.”

  “And now?”

  “Damn it, Lou, if they’re still shooting at me, I’m close to something, even if I don’t know what the hell it is.”

  “But was he s
hooting at you?” he asked. “I mean, did he know he was shooting at Eli Paxton? The way Bernice described it when she reported it to me, there’s every possibility that he still doesn’t know who he was shooting at this morning.”

  “That’s probably true,” I agreed.

  “Then I don’t follow you,” said Berger.

  “Jimenez is involved in this in some way. He tried to kill me a couple of nights ago. Today he may not have known it was me, but he was ready and willing to kill anyone who spotted him—and he had to know I was writing down his plate number or maybe taking a photo of him, something so that I slowed to a crawl right opposite him and then tried to hide my face.” I finished the cigarette, reached for another, and exercised just enough willpower not to pull the pack out. “Now I have to assume he’s not on the lam from the law anywhere, because he was willing to be seen during the auction. That means that whatever reason he had for shooting, it wasn’t simply that someone in a green Chevy knew that this guy with no warrants out for his arrest was in Lexington.”

  He took a deep breath and released it slowly. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted.

  “Anyway,” I concluded, “it’s just vaguely possible that he recognized me, though he didn’t get much of a look at me even the other night. It was dark, he ran me off the road, and then a couple of hours later he took a shot at me across a parking lot just half a second after I opened the door. He may not know even now what I look like. Maybe he does, but I’d give heavy odds that if you or Drew drove by him exactly the way I did, not in squad cars, he’d have shot at you too.”

  “Makes sense,” he said. “But what the hell is there? I’ve pulled up a list of everyone who lives within a block of where you told Bernice he was parked. There are a few doctors, a lawyer, a minister, no breeders or trainers, no jockeys.”

  “If I knew that, I’d have this thing half solved,” I said. “I’m still trying to find a connection between Tony and Billy. As far as anyone knows, they never met, not even once. One worked for Chessman and one worked for Standish. They didn’t even have any friends in common, in or out of the horse business. The only link is that they rubbed the same horse, and one was gone before the other was hired.”

  “I wish I could say something useful,” replied Berger. “You’ve pretty much convinced me they’re dead, but there are no clues, no nothing. I’ll help you all I can, and so will Drew, but I can’t put a lot of men on this case. If one kid surfaces next month in Los Angeles and the other shows up a year from now in South Beach after we’ve spent a thousand man-hours trying to prove they’ve been killed, heads are going to roll around here, and I’m a little long in the tooth to retrain for a new profession.”

  “What about the Mercedes?” I asked.

  “Rented in Tulsa,” he said.

  “To?”

  Berger made a face. “Joe Smith.”

  “Well, at least you know you’re looking for a Hispanic guy carrying a license that identifies him as Joe Smith,” I said with a smile.

  “We know who we’re looking for,” he said seriously.

  Then one of his men stood in the doorway and cleared his throat.

  “Yeah?” said Berger, turning to him.

  “Seven-car pile-up on the interstate ramp, sir.”

  Berger turned to me. “Sorry. I’ve got to go figure out who’s available to send to the scene of the idiocy.”

  I nodded, not that a show of disapproval would have kept him in the room, and then I was alone again and still puzzling over what the hell I was supposed to know that made me a target.

  Things started getting busy—mostly traffic problems, but there was an attempted holdup at a currency exchange, a couple of domestic violence cases, and some kid stole some other kid’s car. Lou was kept busy, Bernice was even busier, and Drew was still working the night shift, so I had the next couple of hours to amuse myself before Brenda showed up and Bernice and I could go out to dinner.

  I figured what the hell, I hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, so I might as well make use of the time. I went into the bathroom and got a good look at my face in the mirror. It needed a shave, all right; it probably also needed a couple of stitches, and it sure as hell needed a new ear lobe. I settled for just shaving around my lips—if I kissed her again, I didn’t want her to come away looking as bloody as I looked this morning—and then I took a quick shower and changed into some un-blood-splattered clothes.

  Then I sat down, hands behind my head, feet propped up on the cot, and spent another hour trying to figure out why the bad guys didn’t care about me for a day or two after Tony vanished and Tyrone was sold and then wanted me dead. All I got for my efforts was a headache.

  The time dragged by, and finally Bernice appeared in the doorway.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  “For food, a bit,” I answered her. “For company, more than you can imagine.”

  She smiled. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all afternoon.” Then: “What kind of food would you like?”

  “Seriously?” I responded. “The kind where no one shoots at me.”

  “Not to worry,” she said. “As long as I wear this uniform, I’m the primary target.”

  “Can I count on that?” I asked with a smile.

  “Seriously, Eli, what kind of food would you like?”

  “Right about now, I think I’d like anything that doesn’t bite back.”

  She laughed. “All right. I know a nice secluded place . . .”

  “Secluded is good,” I interjected.

  “It’s about ten miles out of town and it’s off by itself. No one sneaks up on this place.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “And I think we’d better take my car.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  She smiled. “It’s not a green Chevy.”

  “A telling point,” I agreed.

  There was no sense waiting for it to get dark; that doesn’t happen until about 8:30 in Kentucky in June. So she sent a uniformed cop out to make sure no one was lurking nearby, and then we went to her car, a very comfortable Chrysler 200. She kept to less trafficked streets, just to make sure we weren’t being followed, the city kind of petered out, and then we were out in farm country, but not quite horse country (no white plank fences), and a couple of minutes later she pulled up to what looked for all the world like a white brick farmhouse with a small parking area.

  We entered, the waiter—who was probably the owner and possibly the chef as well—gave her a big hug and led us to a table, dropped off a couple of menus, and made himself scarce. There were twelve tables, and only five were occupied, including ours.

  “Does this place do any business?” I asked.

  “It’s early, Eli. By the time we leave, every table will be filled, and there may even be a waiting line.”

  I began reading the menu—pure American top to bottom—and ordered a pure American meal of a rib eye steak and mashed potatoes.

  “You come here often?” I asked while we were waiting for our food.

  “Only when I’m hiding the good guys from the bad guys,” she said. “I’m sorry; that wasn’t funny. I come here about once a month. I’ve been doing it for years.”

  “Yeah, the whole staff—all one of him—seemed to know you.”

  “Oh, there’s more than one,” she replied, “but it’s a family business. It used to be bigger. Jerry—that’s the owner, the fellow who greeted us and took our order—had four kids helping him, but a daughter got married and moved out of state, and a son was killed in Afghanistan.”

  “Is he the cook?”

  She shook her head. “His wife is.”

  We chatted a bit about everything except the events of the day, and then the food arrived and it was as good as she’d led me to believe it would be.

  “Didn’t you like it?” she asked when Jerry had cleared the table and brought us some coffee.

  “It was fine,” I said.

  “You’ve got a sour face.”


  “It’s not the food,” I said.

  “This afternoon,” she said knowingly.

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t want to sound like Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum, but sometimes that goes with the job. What’s driving me crazy isn’t that they’re shooting at me for stumbling onto something. It’s that I still don’t know what the hell I’ve stumbled onto.”

  “I can understand your frustration,” she said. “Would it help to talk about it?”

  “I’ve been talking about it for three days, and everything keeps coming up blank,” I said, unable to keep the frustration out of my voice. “If anything’s happened to Tony, and that’s still an unproven ‘if,’ there’s no reason why it should have happened to Billy Paulson too. And of course I don’t know if anything did happen to either of them. Then there’s Bigelow. The man’s clearly in deep financial trouble. If this was a movie, he’d be the perfect suspect. But first, how could killing either kid get him out of financial trouble? And second, I doubt that either kid spent five minutes total in his presence. They wouldn’t have had any access to his records, there isn’t a damned way they could hurt him, or blackmail him, or do anything that would make him want to get rid of them. As for the managers, Chessman never met Tony, and I don’t think Standish ever met Billy.” I took a swallow of my coffee, which was on the bitter side. “Okay,” I concluded, “make sense out of that.”

  “I can’t,” she admitted. “If they’re dead, the obvious question is: who benefits from their deaths? And if it’s not Bigelow, or Standish, or Chessman, then maybe you’re looking too close to home. Maybe there’s some gambler who . . .” She stopped and shook her head. “No, that’s wrong. Mill Creek doesn’t race its horses, and neither does the farm Chessman went to. It can’t have anything to do with gambling.”

  “You see my problem,” I said with a smile.

  “It’s a hell of a problem,” she agreed. “You solve this and I’ll buy you a bottle of whatever you want, short of Dom Perignon. You’ll have earned it.”

  “You’re on a budget,” I said. “I’ll take an obscene dance instead.”