by Dick Francis
‘How about your hotel? Where are you staying?’ Walt said.
‘The Biltmore.’
Walt’s eyebrows rose two clear inches.
‘Teller’s paying,’ I said. ‘He has an account there.’
‘What did you do then? Save his life?’
‘Six times,’ I agreed, matching his sarcasm.
‘He must really think,’ Walt said reflectively, ‘that you might get his horse back.’
‘We,’ I said.
‘Nope. You. There’s no trail. I’ve looked.’
A coloured cab driver in rolled-up shirt sleeves took us to the hotel, hot air blowing in gusts through the open window each time he accelerated. The city moved sluggishly under the brazen sun, and there was more rubbish than usual littering the streets.
‘This is a filthy town,’ said Walt, seeing it through my eyes. ‘Give me Chicago.’
‘Too cold,’ I said automatically. ‘Beautiful, but too cold. That freezing wind off the lake …’
‘Are you guys from Chicago?’ said the cab driver. ‘I was born there, in the Loop.’
We talked to him about that. I drifted away into the disorientated state of not caring a jot about the cab driver, or Walt, or Dave Teller, or Caroline, or anyone on earth. We went up to my room in the Biltmore and I dragged through the host motions of ringing down for a bottle of Scotch and ice and seeing to heat, light and ashtrays. Walt loosened his tie and took a first appreciative swallow.
‘You look pooped,’ he said.
‘Natural state.’
‘I guess it’s midnight already, to you.’
‘I guess.’
There was a considerable drinking pause. Then he said, shifting his sturdy body in the white leather chair, ‘Well, do you want to know about this horse, or don’t you?’
‘Sure.’ The boredom in my answer came over shockingly strong, even to me. He looked faintly startled and then speculative, but when he spoke it was strictly business.
‘They were taking him in a horse van from Kennedy Airport to Lexington, Kentucky. He’d spent the compulsory twenty-four hours immigration quarantine in the airport stable, along with six other horses which came over on the same flight. All normal at that time. They loaded Chrysalis and four others into the van, and drove westwards from New York on the Pennsylvania turnpike.’
‘Time?’ I asked.
‘Left Kennedy 4 PM Monday. Last Monday, that is. A week today. Estimated Lexington midday Tuesday. Seven hundred miles.’
‘Stops?’
‘Yeah,’ Walt said. ‘Stops. That’s where the trouble started.’ He swirled the clinking ice round in his glass. ‘They took their first meal stop at a diner near Allentown, about eighty-five miles from New York. There were four men in the van, two drivers and two grooms. Drivers in the cab, grooms in back with the cargo. At the first stop they took turns to eat, drivers first, grooms after. The drivers chivvied the grooms, and gave them too short a time to eat a good meal. There was an unfriendly argument.’
‘They all say so?’
‘Yeah. I’ve talked to all four, one at a time. They’re all trying their hardest to pin the blame on the others. They left the diner and went about two hundred miles to their night stop at Bedford. That was no better. Far from cooling off, they had begun to scuffle.
‘They turned off the turnpike on to the interstate highway – seventy – south of Pittsburg, and left that again at Zanesville, taking the south-west fork to Cincinatti. About fifty miles farther on they turned due south to cross the Ohio River into Kentucky, and go on through Paris and down the Paris Pike to Lexington.’
‘I’ll need to see it on a map,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘From Zanesville to Paris they took secondary routes, though all paved roads, of course. Right? Now it was in Ohio that the van was hi-jacked, and it was over the state border in Kentucky when it was found, which has caused a couple of arguments here and there.’
‘Hi-jacked! That’s the first I’ve heard of that.’
‘It was hi-jacked by mistake for a truckful of liquor which was about twenty miles behind it along the road. The vans looked alike, same colour, same size, and neither of them had any large identifying signs.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘By that time, Tuesday morning, the drivers and grooms were all eating at the same time, though at each end of the lunch counter. They left the horses unguarded for a full quarter hour, and during that time someone simply drove off with the whole works.’
‘Surely the drivers locked up, and took the keys, at least?’
‘Oh sure. It was an expert job though. A direct wire contact from the battery terminals to the starter motor.’
‘So then what?’
‘When they found the van gone the drivers called the police but it wasn’t until Wednesday morning that the van was found off the road and out of sight around a hill in Kentucky. But – no horses. The ramps were down, and all the horses had been let loose.’
‘Deliberately.’
‘Sure. Untied. All the halters were still in the van. Those racehorses were all free with no bridle or anything to catch them by. The Kentucky boys reckon the horses were let out to create a diversion, to get the cops off the tails of the hi-jackers by making them chase horses all over.’
‘And it worked.’
‘Yeah,’ said Walt gloomily. ‘The owner kicked up stink. All the horses were valuable, not only Chrysalis. But only Chrysalis was insured with Buttress.’
‘Did they get all the others back?’
‘Yeah. But Chrysalis has as good as disappeared off the face of the earth.’
‘How do you know the hi-jackers meant to take the liquor truck?’
‘The only thing they left in the cab of the horse van was a screwed-up scrap of paper. It was a note of the time the liquor company’s truck made its daily run along that route.’
‘Fingerprints?’
‘Gloves. Even for writing the note.’
Walt had talked himself dry. I refuelled his glass and felt like sleep.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
I shrugged. ‘It was Chrysalis they really wanted. The timetable note was the blind.’
‘But why? Why should anyone want to steal a stallion? That’s what’s got us all floored. I don’t know much about horses, I’m a false claims man really. I just got pitched into this between cripple cases, if you get me. But even I know that it’s the stallion’s name that brings in the stud fee. Say someone’s stolen Chrysalis, what’s the point? They can’t advertise him for stud, so he isn’t worth a dime. We figured someone might be nutty enough to want him all to themselves, like some world famous painting, but you can hide a painting quietly in a cellar, which you can’t do with a horse. The whole thing don’t make sense.’
I had my own views on that, but I said only, ‘What happened to Allyx?’
‘I only know about that from the files. I got the case out and looked it up this morning. Allyx was a French horse, apparently one of the best young sires in Europe. He was nine when he came over here, and already his get had won a list of races as long as your arm. Dave Teller was head of the syndicate which bought him; that’s why he was insured with us, as we do all the Teller estate work. Allyx was delivered safely to the Teller stud farm. No trouble in transit that time. But he was there only four days. Then there was a fire in the stables one night and they took all the horses out of the barn and turned them loose into a small corral.’
‘And when they came to fetch them – no horses?’
He nodded. ‘There was a broken rail over the far side, which no one knew about. All the horses had got through it, including Allyx. They caught all the others, though some were free for days. No sign ever of Allyx. The company had to face that he probably got into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and maybe broke his neck, and in the end they had to pay up.’
‘What about that fire?’
‘There was apparently nothing suspicious about it at th
e time. One of our very best men found no evidence of a fire being set. Still, stable fires can be started so easily … a cigarette butt in a pile of straw leaves no trace. This one didn’t do much damage before they put it out. No question of kerosene, for instance. The whole chain of events was agreed to be accidental.’
I smiled thinly.
‘What about Showman?’
Walt shook his head. ‘I don’t know how he got loose. But they found him. Dead, of course. He’d been dead some time, I think.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh, in the Appalachians. He came from that area, same as the others. But then Lexington has more stud farms than anywhere else in the States, so there’s no significance in that really.’
‘You went down to Lexington last week?’
He nodded. ‘Flew there Wednesday, when Mrs Teller called us.’
‘Mrs Dave Teller?’
‘Uh huh.’ Something moved obscurely in Walt’s face. Dave’s wife had made an impression. ‘She’s English, like you.’
‘I’ll go down there tomorrow,’ I said. I watched him waver and decide not to tell me about her. Instead, he looked at his watch, put down his glass firmly, and stood up.
‘Must be off,’ he said. ‘It’s our anniversary, and my wife’s fixed something special.’
‘Give her my apologies for keeping you.’
‘That’s all right. It fitted in fine. I go home from Grand Central, right downstairs. A quarter of an hour to train time.’
I walked with him to the door.
‘Walt … would you be free to come down to Lexington in the morning?’ As he hesitated, I added, ‘There’s no point in my covering all the ground twice. I’d appreciate having you along.’
‘Be glad to, Gene,’ he said too politely, and I thought to hell with you Walt, to hell with everything on earth, including me, but I’m stuck with this horse nonsense for the next three weeks, and if I say go to Lexington, you go. I hid the violent moment of irritation in turning from him to open the door, and I understood his reluctance anyway, as who likes to be dragged down to do the same piece of work twice, especially under the critical eye of an imported limey busybody? He shook my hand. ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ he said, his feelings under better control than mine.
‘Seven-thirty?’
All right.’ He loosened his jaw muscles into what looked like going to be a smile but didn’t quite make it, sketched a salute with the thick-topped fingers, and ambled unhurriedly away down the passage.
I had dinner in the hotel restaurant. A steak. Never eat steak west of Nebraska, they used to say. The beef was bred on the prairie and walked eastwards to the markets: when it got to Nebraska it hit the corn belt and only after that was it fat enough to kill. New York steaks were mostly superb, but I didn’t suppose they’d walked in through the New Jersey Tunnel. Long distance haulage took care of that … and whoever had removed Allyx and Chrysalis had had a haulage problem too. You couldn’t ride a stallion along state highways. For one thing, they no longer took kindly to a saddle after years at stud, even if they had been reasonable to handle in the first place.
Nightclubs attract me like wet Mondays in Manchester, and apathy kept me from even reading the list of shows. I went straight upstairs after dinner to catch up on a lot of lost sleep and woke again infuriatingly at two, dead tired and with a restless brain.
From habit, the Luger lay under my pillow.
It was another long night.
Chapter Five
We flew down in the morning, Walt’s puffed eyes showing that the anniversary had been duly celebrated, and mine feeling as if they’d been rolled in grit.
The two drivers, reached by telephone, met us by appointment in the entrance hall of a motel near the centre of Lexington, where Walt had stayed on his previous trip. He booked rooms for us both, and we took the drivers up to his, which proved a mile short of Biltmore standards but hot on cleanliness and Kleenex.
Walt switched on the air-conditioning, shuffled chairs around, and promised beer later. The drivers, very much on the defensive, went sullenly through the disastrous tale again, aware beyond any doubt that they should never have left the horses unwatched and were more than likely to lose their jobs. Nothing they said added much to what Walt had already told me.
‘Do you know each other well?’ I asked.
The thin birdlike one said they did.
‘And the grooms. Do you know them? And do they know each other?’
‘Seen them around,’ said the heavy one. ‘The lazy so and sos.’
The thin one said, ‘One of them came from the Midway Farm.’
That was Dave Teller’s. ‘He came specially for Chrysalis. It’s him ought to be blamed for the whole thing.’
‘Did the boys know each other, before the trip?’
‘Sure,’ said the heavy one. ‘Way they talked they both been in the horse game all their lives.’
Walt sniffed and nodded. He’d checked all this, his resigned face said. Routine.
To the drivers I said, ‘I want you to think back, and make a list of all the cars and trucks you can remember seeing on the road, all the way from Kennedy to the place you lost the horses.’
They looked aghast and as if I were crazy.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘on those turnpikes you sometimes see the same cars over and over. The ones going your way, that is. You see them at the rest stops, and maybe you start off first, and then they pass you, and then you see them again maybe stopped at another diner while you go on to the next one, and then they come past you again. Right?’
They nodded.
‘So maybe you still remember some of the cars and trucks you saw on that trip? Especially any you saw on both days.’
They stared at me. The heavy one said, ‘It’s impossible. It was a week ago.’
‘I know. Try, anyway. Think it over. See if you can remember any at all, between you. Then write them down and leave the list here for us, sometime this evening.’
I took out my wallet and tried twenty dollars each for size. It went down well enough. They said they would try.
‘Don’t invent anything,’ I said. ‘I’d rather pay for nothing than a lot of hogwash.’
They nodded and went, with the beer postponed to their return.
‘What are you looking for?’ Walt said curiously.
‘Another horse van, I suppose.’
He thought it over. ‘They could just have planned to rendezvous where the empty van was found. They didn’t need to be seen on the road.’
‘I don’t think they can have been sure when they would be able to do the hi-jacking. They wouldn’t know where the drivers would stop for meals. No good fixing a rendezvous in Kentucky if the opportunity came earlier, up near Wheeling.’
‘They wouldn’t want to drive too far with a hot truck,’ Walt agreed. ‘In fact, it was twenty-five miles, mostly back roads. They made straight for the hills, where it would take longest to round up loose horses.’
‘Any tracks?’
‘No tyre tracks of any use. The nearest road was gravel, dry and dusty this time of year. There were the tracks of the van going off the road round behind a hillock, but on the road itself they were just a jumble. Every car which passed raised a cloud of dust and wiped out all tracks which were there before.’
I grunted. ‘Hoof prints?’
‘Dozens of those. In all directions.’
‘Back on to the gravel road?’
He shook his head resignedly. ‘Impossible to tell. None on top of the van’s tyre tracks, anyway. But we took a lot of soil samples, on the outside chance something would turn up later.’
‘You did it pretty thoroughly.’
The smile almost came. ‘A million and a half’, he said briefly, ‘is a lot of insurance.’
Midway Farm had prosperity printed on its gate posts, and I went through them alone, as Walt had said he felt the onset of a migraine headache.
A middle-aged Hungarian woman opened th
e door to me and in halting English asked me my business. Diagnosing her accent from long practice I replied in her own language, as it was simpler, and presently, having consulted in the drawing room, she showed me in there.
Dave’s wife stood in the centre of a quarter acre of deep green carpet, surrounded by deep green walls, white paint, and tomato red upholstery. She flicked my card with one thumb and said, ‘You’re the man who fished Dave out of the river.’
‘Yes,’ I said, surprised.
‘He telephoned to me yesterday,’ she explained. ‘He says I am to trust you entirely.’
She was a slim small-boned creature with the rounded tight little bottom which comes from riding horses a great deal in early girlhood. Her jawline was delicately square, nose narrow, eyes wide and bright. Grey speckled the mouse-brown springy hair, and if she was wearing cosmetics one would have needed to be nearer than I was to be certain of it. Decisive assurance showed from every crisp gesture, and from her tone I gathered that taking her husband’s word for things was not her habit.
‘Sit down,’ she said, pointing to a tomato chair. ‘Drink?’ It was two o’clock on a hot afternoon. ‘Scotch,’ she said without waiting for an answer, making it a statement, not a choice.
I watched her splash the pale golden liquid on to ice cubes in two tall glasses, and add a token drop of water. She came across and held out one of them with a graceful suntanned arm. A heavy gold chain bracelet loaded with fobs and charms clinked from her wrist, and into my nostrils floated a trace of ‘Joy’.
I tasted the whisky. Hedges and Butler’s Royal, I thought. Too fine and light for anything else. The flavour from one sip lasted a long time on my tongue.
‘Eva says you speak Hungarian,’ she said, moving away, picking up her own glass, and taking an adult swallow.
‘Mm, yes.’
‘She was most impressed.’
‘I came about Chrysalis,’ I began.
‘Do you speak any other languages?’ Her voice veered more to American than English and had the abrupt, inconsequential lurch of two drinks too many; but it didn’t show in her face.