The Trojan Colt Page 7

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Maybe?” I repeated.

  “You know these multi-millionaires,” he said. “They can spend more in a day than you or I make in a decade.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I don’t know these multi-millionaires, at least not as well as I’d like to—but I’ll take your word for it.

  “Anyway,” said Berger, “if I find that either kid has been harmed—or perhaps both of them—I figure maybe there’s a connection.”

  “Let’s hope they’re both having fun in the sun, but, yeah,” I agreed. “Is the guy who took the call around today?”

  He looked at the notes again. “Drew MacDonald,” he said. “Yeah, I think he’s just starting the night shift, and I’m pretty sure he’s on desk duty this week. Let me see.” He picked up his phone, punched in three numbers, and waited a minute. “Drew? Lou Berger here. Can you stop by my office for a minute? Thanks.”

  He turned to me. “He’s on his way.”

  A moment later the door opened, and a tall, slender man, graying at the sides and wearing thick glasses, entered the office.

  “Drew, say hello to Eli Paxton. He’s a detective from Cincinnati, here on a case.”

  “Public?” asked MacDonald, extending his hand.

  “Private,” I replied, taking and shaking it.

  “So what can I do for you, Mr. Paxton?”

  “Call me Eli,” I said. “I’m looking for a young man who’s disappeared, and the circumstances are very similar, at least on the surface, to one you dealt with last month.”

  “I don’t know,” he said dubiously. “Runaway kids are a dime a dozen these days.”

  “You’ll remember this one, Drew,” said Berger.

  “Okay,” answered MacDonald. “Who was it?”

  “Billy Paulson.”

  MacDonald shook his head. “Unless your kid worked for Travis Bigelow and thought someone might kill him, you’re barking up the wrong tree, Eli.”

  “My kid worked for Bigelow,” I said.

  Suddenly MacDonald looked interested. “And he thought his life was in danger?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “But he was worried as all hell about something.”

  “About what?”

  “Again, I don’t know,” I said. “But he told me one night that he was worried, he had to figure out what to do, and he might want my advice in the morning.”

  “And did he ask for it?”

  I shook my head. “I never saw him again.”

  “Interesting,” said MacDonald. “And they both worked for Bigelow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were they friends?”

  “I don’t think they knew each other. My kid was hired when yours vanished. They both wound up caring for the same horse.”

  “Grooms care for more than one horse,” noted MacDonald.

  “Not at sales time, and not when he’s worth over three million dollars,” put in Berger.

  “They both handled that Trojan colt?” asked MacDonald.

  “So I’m told. I know Tony—my kid—did.”

  “Tell you what,” said MacDonald. “It’s late for you and early for me. I have a few hours of paperwork to do, but when I finish I’ll hunt up everything we have on Billy Paulson and our search for him. Let’s meet for breakfast—well, your breakfast, my dinner—at eight tomorrow morning, and I’ll turn it over to you, and we’ll see if there’s any unifying thread.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “Tilly’s,” he said. “It’s a hash house just half a mile south of here. You can’t miss it.”

  “I feel like a fifth wheel,” said Berger. “Tell you what. I’ll come in a bit early tomorrow, before you fill your faces—and Eli, stand clear of this man when he starts pouring ketchup—and I’ll see if we have any other reports of missing persons, or anything else, connected with Bigelow or Mill Creek.”

  We all shook hands, MacDonald went back to his office, and I drove to the motel in a heavy rainstorm, where I spent an evening watching TV shows where the private eye and the cops hated each other and spent half of every episode trying to undermine each other’s work.

  I put in a wake-up call for seven o’clock, shaved without cutting myself too many times (I never could stand electric razors), showered without letting too much water spill onto the floor, found I didn’t have any clean shirts or socks left—I was supposed to be back in Cincinnati two days ago—and had the desk clerk point me to a laundry, where I dropped off some shirts, underwear, and socks on my way to meet MacDonald for breakfast.

  Tilly’s looked like a garage that had fallen on hard times. It had a couple of windows, and a couple of booths, and a bunch of stools at the breakfast counter, and it had Tilly herself, who was about fifty pounds overweight, all of it muscle. I looked around, didn’t see MacDonald, though the place wasn’t hurting for business, and sat down at a booth. There was a jukebox selection on the wall, and as I read through the selections I began to feel more and more at home. There was Sinatra, and Rosy Clooney, and Crosby, and Sarah Vaughan, and the Andrews Sisters, and no bands with idiotic names and electric instruments whose notion of music was screaming at the top of their lungs. I blew a quarter on Helen O’Connell and Bob Eberle singing “Tangerine” and ordered a cup of coffee, and just as the song ended, Drew MacDonald entered the place, peered through his thick glasses, spotted me, and walked over to sit opposite me.

  “Good morning, Eli,” he said. “I assume you had no trouble finding this place?”

  “None,” I said. “If Tilly’s food is as good as her music, I may try to coax her into moving to Cincinnati.”

  “Not unless you want an even bigger war than the one over who owns the Ohio River where it runs between Kentucky and Ohio.” He smiled. “Took ’em more than a century to resolve that one in court.”

  “Morning, Drew,” yelled Tilly from behind the counter.

  “The usual,” he replied, then turned to me. “How about you?”

  “I’ll have the same.”

  “But you don’t even know what it is.”

  “I know it hasn’t killed you yet,” I said.

  “What the hell,” he said with a shrug. “Hey, Tilly, make it two—one for me, one for my friend.”

  “So,” I said, “what have you got for me?”

  He sighed heavily. “Bits and pieces. I don’t know if they fit or not, but you’re welcome to them.”

  “Such as?”

  “Let me see. Where to start?” he said, frowning. “Or rather, who to start with?”

  “There’s more than Billy Paulson?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s up to you to find out. But let’s start with Paulson.”

  “Shoot.”

  “He phoned the station thirty-eight days ago. He didn’t expressly ask for me, just for any cop, and my phone wasn’t in use at the moment. He told me that he’d learned something, or discovered something, or found something out—he was a little vague, not purposely; I think he just wasn’t a clear thinker, at least not that day—and that he was scared. I questioned him, but he didn’t want to tell me what was frightening him, just that he wanted a name to ask for if he came to some decision or other and wanted to call back. He also wanted us to search for him every day if he didn’t check in with us—and we did, for a few days anyway.”

  “Did he say what he might call back about?” I asked.

  MacDonald shook his head. “Could have been to tell me what was frightening him, could even have been to ask for police protection. He was pretty vague. All I could get out of him was name, rank, and serial number . . . which is to say his name and where he worked, which doubled as his address. Mighty few grooms go home at night. One of the benefits of being a groom is that you don’t pay room and board.” He smiled. “It’s a consideration at any level. My wife says when we retire—she’s working at Walgreen’s—we should buy a little farm, partly for some retirement income and
mainly because the house comes with the farm.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So the kid worked for Bigelow. And you never heard from him again.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s all you had last night.”

  He nodded. “That was everything I had last night. Today I’ve got a little more.”

  “Okay.”

  “I can supply the dots. I don’t know if they can be connected, but that’ll be your job.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “What have you got?”

  He was about to answer when Tilly approached the table and gave us each a plate of eggs Benedict smothered in hollandaise sauce, plus hash browns and toast, as well as a cup of coffee for MacDonald and a refill for me.

  “Looks good,” I remarked.

  “Tastes even better,” he said. “Trust me on this.” He turned to Tilly. “Someday I’m going to kidnap you, cart you off to a desert island, and have you cook just for me.”

  “Get me a new stove and freezer and I just might go willingly,” she said with a smile, and retreated to her workplace behind the counter.

  “So,” I said, “you were about to tell me something?”

  “A few things. We figured that if the kid actually learned anything dangerous, he had to have learned it at Mill Creek Farm, since he lived there and according to his coworkers hadn’t driven anywhere in his ancient Rambler for almost a week.”

  “Makes sense,” I agreed.

  “So we did a little research on Bigelow,” he continued. “The man’s in deep financial trouble.”

  “Well, until two days ago, anyway,” I said. “His place is falling apart. And it’s the kind of damage that looks like it’s been that way and getting worse for a few years.”

  “It’s more than the farm,” said MacDonald. “He needed money to buy the damned farm in the first place. The clothing company he owned went belly-up ten years ago, and the brokerage house he had a share in closed its doors four years ago.” He paused. “Not only that, but he owned three shares in Moonbeam and a share in Trojan, and he sold them all in the past eighteen months.”

  “What would they have been worth?”

  “Whatever the market will bear,” answered MacDonald. “Trojan syndicated into forty shares for thirty million dollars when he retired, so theoretically that makes each share worth about three-quarters of a million, but it’s a free market, so if you want a share and no one will sell for that price, you pay a million or a million and a half or whatever it takes. And of course, if he produces ten or twelve stakes winners in his first crop, and maybe a champion or two, it’ll be four or five times that much two years from now. Moonbeam is an established sire, maybe a dozen years old, so his price is pretty much set. Near as I can tell, shares are trading for about four hundred thousand.

  “What do you get for a share?”

  “Depending on the stallion and the agreement, one or two stud services a year. You can use them on your own mares or sell one or both to other mare owners.”

  “So he made maybe two million dollars in the last year or so just selling those shares, and he still needed money?”

  “He did when Billy Paulson went missing,” said MacDonald. “I don’t know about now. He just got over three million for the Trojan colt, and he sold five others for another million and a quarter total.” He paused. “That’s all I’ve got on Bigelow. The man was in trouble before the sale. He just picked up a quick four mil, so that may have gotten him free and clear. As for the kid, maybe he stumbled on something, some phony business deal Bigelow was going to dupe investors with.” He shrugged. “Or maybe not.”

  “Well, it’s something to look into, if my clients want to pursue the case,” I said.

  “Dig in, Eli,” he said. “I kid you not, this is the best eggs Benedict in the state.”

  I took a bite. Damned if he wasn’t right.

  “So,” I said, wolfing down a couple more mouthfuls, “is that all you’ve got?”

  “Probably,” he answered. “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “If I’ve got anything else. It seems awfully tenuous. The only connection is the date.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay,” said MacDonald. “Another thing I did was check our files for anything unusual, anything of interest, the day Billy Paulson vanished.” He looked across the table at me. “You ever hear of Horatio Jimenez?”

  “Sounds like a nightclub comedian.”

  He shook his head. “Not hardly.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Who is he?”

  “A shooter from New Mexico.”

  “Mob?”

  “Indy.”

  “So what’s he got to do with Paulson or Bigelow?” I asked.

  “Probably nothing,” answered MacDonald. “I have no proof, not even a hint that Bigelow knows him or even knows who he is, or that they ever had any dealings, and I’ll bet the farm we’re going to buy that he didn’t know Paulson.”

  “So why mention him at all?”

  “Because someone answering his description—we think it was him, but we don’t know for sure—was spotted in town the day Paulson vanished and hasn’t been seen since. Until now.”

  “Now?” I repeated.

  “He occasionally stops by during sales week. Never attends the sale itself, never spends more than an evening here. We figure he’s just renewing contacts—I mean, hell, the guys who can afford him are precisely the guys who can blow big money on untried yearlings—and this time we got a positive identification. Anyway, I checked the Hilton Suites, which is where he usually stays when he’s in town, and where we assume he stayed last month.”

  “So did he have a room there?”

  MacDonald shrugged helplessly. “Who knows? Hitters don’t travel under their own names, and they invariably pay cash for everything so they don’t leave a trail. Anyway, he was out of there the next morning. Now, even if it was him, maybe he was just on his way to New York or Chicago—they like out-of-town shooters in the big cities—or maybe he actually had business here. And if he did, we don’t know what it was, and there’s no reason in the world to link it to Bigelow or Paulson.”

  “Anything else?”

  He shook his head. “That’s everything.”

  “No one else vanished from Bigelow’s farm?” I persisted.

  “As far as I can tell, no one else even quit. He must pay the staff on time. Most of them live hand to mouth; pay ’em late once or twice and they’re gone. But outside of those two grooms, he hasn’t lost anyone since Frank Standish started working for him maybe six months ago.”

  “I met him,” I said. “Seems like a nice enough guy.”

  “He must be,” agreed MacDonald. “Anyway, they seem to like working for him. Usually there’s a pretty regular turnover, except when you get one of these billionaires who pays too much and wants everyone to feel like a big happy family.”

  “I get the feeling that was never Bigelow’s problem,” I said wryly.

  “I don’t know what his problems are, but he seems to have his share of them. Every now and then, when one of these huge operations goes down the drain, I can’t help but ask myself: they had to be worth millions, probably tens of millions, to get into the game. Where the hell did it all go?”

  “I’d say on horses who quit fifty yards short of six furlongs,” I answered. “But that’s not Bigelow’s problem. He never ran his horses.”

  “Well, he probably bought some wrong horses,” said MacDonald. “Or some wrong mares, actually. You can’t be much of a market breeder without a top broodmare band, and since he didn’t race, he had to buy them.”

  “I don’t know much about breeding,” I said. “My interest in racing is pretty much limited to buying two-dollar tickets and ripping them up a few minutes later . . . but I’d have to say that if he can sell one yearling for over three million, Trojan colt or not, and five more non-Trojans for over a million total, he must have an eye for a broodmare.”

>   “Him, or Frank Standish,” replied MacDonald. “Well, Standish’s predecessor. It’s too soon for any mare Standish told him to buy to have a foal ready for market. Besides, from what I can tell, he probably couldn’t drop more than fifty grand or so on any mare this year.”

  “Fifty grand will buy you a hell of a nice car,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it won’t buy you the kind of mare you want to breed to Trojan or Moonbeam.”

  “Okay, I’ll take your word for it.”

  He yawned. “If that’s everything, I’m off to grab forty or fifty winks. Let me know if you find out anything interesting. And breakfast is on the Lexington police department.”

  “Thanks,” I said, sliding out of the booth and getting to my feet as he did the same opposite me.

  “You think anything I told you will help with your missing kid?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I think the first thing I’d better do is check in with his parents and see if they want to keep spending their money.”

  “And if they do?”

  “Then I’ve still got to find out what he thought he knew and why he thought he might have to talk to me about it the next day.”

  He shook my hand. “Good luck, Eli.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I have a feeling I’ll be needing it.”

  The Sanders lived in a modest little ranch house on the edge of town—not the rich, thoroughbred-laden edge of town, the other edge. It was after nine-thirty when I pulled into their driveway and got out of the car. I figured Mr. Sanders would already have left for work, but they were both at home and had walked out to greet me before I was halfway to their door.

  “Good morning, Mr. Paxton,” said Sanders. “Do you have any news for us?”

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid not,” I said. “I just thought I’d give you an update on what I haven’t found, and see if you want me to keep looking.”

  I could tell by the way their faces fell that despite what I’d told them when they hired me, they’d pretty much expected me to have found Tony by now. They escorted me into the living room where Mrs. Sanders offered me, in quick succession, coffee, wine, beer, and brandy, all of which I turned down.