A Stone's Throw

by James W. Ziskin

  “It’s a body, Sheriff,” said one of his deputies. The one named Bell. “Two, actually.”

  He hadn’t cared a whit about the fire until Stan and I stumbled over the bodies. Well, Stan did most of the stumbling. . . . Now the deputy was most officious and acting as if he’d discovered King Tut’s tomb.

  “What were they doing in there?” asked Pryor.

  Deputy Bell shrugged and pointed at me. “I don’t know. She found them.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Yeah, Frank Olney radioed me that you were here. So what possessed you to go rummaging through the debris?”

  “Just being thorough.”

  “You didn’t take any pictures of the bodies, I hope.”

  Wide-eyed, I shook my head, convincing myself it wasn’t a lie if I didn’t actually pronounce the words. I had, in fact, fired off a few frames of the charred corpses.

  Pryor scowled at his men. “My boys shouldn’t have let you in there. It’s dangerous and a crime scene besides.”

  The two deputies swallowed their medicine without protest.

  “Who do you think they might be?” I asked the sheriff, who deferred to the coroner.

  Herb Edelman, a rotund man in his fifties with a bald pate, was hovering over the remains on bended knee.

  “One’s clearly a woman,” he said without looking up at me. “The other appears to be an adolescent male. I’ll know better after the postmortems later today. But this isn’t any great mystery. Smoke inhalation. Asphyxiation. Seems a shame to cut them open to prove it.”

  At least he was keeping an open mind.

  “May I call you later for the results?” I asked.

  He turned and squinted up at me, still on his hands and knees in the muck. “No later than seven. I watch Perry Mason at seven thirty.”

  “I met William Hopper, you know,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. Edelman appeared unimpressed. Too bad. My brief encounter with television’s Paul Drake had been the only bright spot during my trip to Los Angeles earlier in the year, and it still gave me thrills. I kind of had a thing for Paul Drake, even more so after he’d called me beautiful and winked at me. “Any chance that’s an adult male?” I asked, steering myself back to the subject at hand.

  With all the grace of a punch-drunk prizefighter stumbling to his feet on the count of nine, the coroner pushed himself up off the muddy ground with both arms and a couple of grunts. Vertical once more, he coughed himself red in the face. After several restorative breaths, he wiped his hands on a cloth, which he tossed aside like a soiled tissue. Someone else would clean it up. Or maybe not. In no hurry to answer my question, he retrieved an Old Gold from a crumpled package in the breast pocket of his jacket, flicked his lighter, and puffed smoke into the air.

  “Maybe a jockey?” I prompted, tired of waiting for him to get around to a reply.

  “It’s possible,” he said. “Autopsy will tell.”

  “An autopsy can tell if he was a jockey?” I asked, doing my best Judy Holliday impression. Either he had no sense of humor or I wasn’t funny.

  “What about the caretaker?” Stan asked the sheriff. “You don’t suppose that’s Chuck Lenoir. He’s a pretty small guy.”

  Pryor considered the shorter of the two bodies. “Lucky Chuck? Is he still around? He’d be pretty old by now. Why the Shaws kept him on, I can’t understand. Seemed pretty useless to me.”

  “And the woman?” I asked. “Anything that might help with an identification?”

  “No pocketbook that I can see,” said the coroner, puffing away on his cigarette. No wonder standing up winded him as if he’d just run a four-minute mile backward. “Burned beyond recognition. Everything except for some red hair, an earring in the left earlobe, and a bit of fur. Looks like fox. My wife has one just like it.”

  “It won’t be easy putting a name on her,” said Pryor. “Unless someone’s reported her missing. I’ll ask around in Saratoga, Schenectady, and New Holland.”

  “We might get lucky and find a fingerprint,” added Edelman.

  “What about the fabric around the male’s neck?” I asked. “Almost looks like racing silks.”

  The sheriff grunted.

  “Could be a lady’s scarf,” offered the coroner.

  I doubted that. Orange-and-black diamonds weren’t exactly the latest Paris fashion.

  I asked the sheriff if the firemen had given any opinions on the cause of the fire. He shook his head. “Those boys are lucky if they know which is the business end of the hose. I’ll get the Saratoga fire chief out here later today to have a look.”

  I thanked him and the coroner for the information and headed back to my car. I had film to develop and a story to write; my friend Fadge was taking me to the races at one.

  I managed to drop off my two rolls of Tri-X at the paper, pound out an economical story on the dead bodies discovered in the barn, and phone my editor, Charlie Reese, all before eleven. He asked me what my plan of action was.

  “I’ll check with Sheriff Pryor later. He’s going to have the fire chief inspect the scene for signs of arson. And he might have some information on any missing persons who fit the descriptions.”

  “What are the descriptions of the victims?”

  “Pittsburgh rare.”

  Silence from Charlie’s end. I knew he didn’t approve of such dark humor.

  “Sorry,” I said. “The coroner is doing the postmortems today. I’ll talk to him before Perry Mason airs. And I’d like to locate Lucky Chuck Lenoir. He’s the caretaker of Tempesta.”

  “What else?”

  “It’s a long shot, but there’s Issur Jacobs at the New Holland Savings Bank. He handled affairs for Shaw Knitting Mills after they moved away. That can wait till Monday morning.”

  “Anything I can do to lend a hand?”

  There was a burr under my saddle. Charlie sensed it.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Judge Shaw,” I said. “I’m assuming he’s still the legal owner of the property.”

  Charlie drew a breath. “Yes, I see.”

  I was well acquainted with Judge Harrison Shaw. His daughter, Jordan, had been murdered in a local motel nearly two years earlier, and I met with the judge many times while working on the story. He’d asked me to help find his daughter’s murderer, and I complied. And succeeded. But the memory was a painful one for me. In the end, once the case had been solved, he’d refused my awkward offer of friendship and commiseration; my own father had been murdered the year before. The rejection had left me feeling gutted, humiliated, and angry.

  Charlie hemmed. While not the most constant pillar of support, he was, nevertheless, usually in my corner. But now he was offering precious little in the way of help. I’d have to screw up my nerve and face the judge on my own.

  “Keep Georgie Porgie out of my hair, will you?” I said, opening an escape hatch for Charlie that he didn’t really deserve.

  “I’ll try. But you know Artie Short.”

  George Walsh, Georgie Porgie to those in on the joke—which meant everyone at the paper except George—was the rotten-egg smell that hung in the air at the New Holland Republic. When not sharpening his pencils—the only skill remotely related to writing in his arsenal—George strutted around the place like the cock of the walk. Son-in-law of the publisher, Artie Short, he enjoyed, as such, the unearned and undeserved rank of golden boy, in spite of his struggles with spelling, typing, and making sense of the funny pages. His spectacular gaffes and embarrassing flubs were legendary at the paper, viz. his opinion piece on the Godless Cuban Revolution and “Fido Castrel.” As an homage to his witlessness, I’d thumbtacked that masterpiece of finger painting to the board at my desk right after it appeared, and it was still hanging there, yellowing like a stain, fully three and a half years later. His occasional sports stories, which read like last century’s mawkish leftovers warmed up with impenetrable analogies and incongruous, facile clichés, prompted either head-scratching or laughter, depen
ding on the generosity of the reader.

  I was excited about my first trip to the Saratoga racetrack. My only previous experience with a horse race had come years earlier, shortly after the war, when my father took me with him to Italy for an entire summer. I was ten. After two weeks of museums, libraries, and symposia, he promised me a treat. The Palio. A horse race, he said. Oh, God, I thought, longing for the seasickness of our ocean crossing instead. But the trip to Siena turned out to be one of the highlights of my summer. We enjoyed ringside seats from the windows of an apartment above the Piazza del Campo. A professor friend of my father’s had invited us to watch the pageantry. Ten horses and riders, who were called fantini, decked out in livery from the different contrade, or districts, of Siena, started the race. But only seven horses and six riders finished the three laps of the piazza that day, with the others either falling on the sharp turns of the dirt-covered oval or running out of the requisite energy and inclination to see the endeavor through to its conclusion. The winning horse, Piero—I wrote it in my diary—galloped to the finish ahead of Oca and claimed victory for the Giraffa contrada. A commotion broke out when some disappointed partisans roughed up their fantino for failing to uphold the honor of their colors. I loved the pomp and drama. Well, not the beating of the jockey—but my father shielded my eyes and guided me away from the window before I saw too much blood.

  “Do you know anything about the Tempesta stud farm?” I asked Fadge over a cup of coffee at Fiorello’s, the ice-cream shop across from my apartment on Lincoln Avenue.

  The big guy—six-two and tipping the scales at more than three hundred pounds—held the undisputed title of My Dearest Friend in the World. A boon companion for sharing late-night pizzas and off-color jokes, he was, I knew, also more than a little sweet on me. But at that moment, he was seated on a stool at the counter brooding over the Daily Racing Form in preparation for our day in Saratoga and indifferent to, if not unaware of, my presence.

  Fadge was, in fact, an inveterate horseman. A gambler. Shameless “plunger,” in his words. He liked to bet, and the larger the wager the more interesting the outcome. His business took a backseat to the betting all year round, but especially when the Saratoga Thoroughbred season rolled around in August. If he couldn’t locate a relief soda jerk to man the shop during the meet, he would simply lock the front door, wedge his considerable self behind the wheel of his car, and hurtle off toward the track with little regard for posted speed limits or slow-moving vehicles in his path.

  Absorbed in his study of the Racing Form, he hadn’t heard a word I’d said, so I repeated my question about the stud farm. Still nothing. To test his hearing, I slipped off the stool at the counter and approached the cash register behind the nearby candy case. I pushed down hard on the stiff No Sale button, and the cash drawer popped open, producing a bright ching as it did. Fadge remained oblivious. I could have emptied the till and tapped-danced my way out the door, and he wouldn’t have been any the wiser. I closed the drawer and rejoined him on a stool at the counter instead.

  “Ron,” I said more insistently. Only his older customers ever called him by his given name. Eyes bulging from a thyroid condition, he regarded me as if I’d roused him from an erotic dream with a bucket of cold water. “What do you know about the Shaw Tempesta Farm out on Route Sixty-Seven?”

  “What? Tempesta Farm? What did I miss?”

  “There was a fire out there this morning before dawn,” I said. “An old foaling barn burned to the ground.”

  He shrugged at me. “So? That’s nothing new. The place is abandoned.”

  “Why did they close it down anyway? I know they moved the carpet mills south, but Saratoga is still there. Why shutter the farm?”

  “The Shaws kind of lost interest in horse breeding after the fire that killed twelve horses.”

  “How awful. What happened?”

  “It was before the war. Thirty-seven or -eight, I think. A fire broke out in the stables, and twelve of the Shaws’ finest Thoroughbreds died.”

  “How did I miss that in Sanford Shaw’s biography?”

  “The Shaws didn’t talk about it. The biographer must have got the message.”

  “That’s so sad.”

  Fadge nodded. Although his interest in horseflesh was, in the main, a sporting one, he nevertheless had a soft spot for the beasts. At least for the ones that won money for him.

  “The place went into decline,” he said, returning to his Racing Form. “It’s been derelict now for at least fifteen years. So the fires usually have one of two explanations: bored kids with matches or Jewish lightning.”

  “No, Fadge. This is different. Two people were killed.”

  “Two people? Who?”

  “Wait a minute. Did you just say ‘Jewish lightning’?”

  He blanched and rubbed a hand over his face. “Sorry. It’s an expression. Besides, you’re always making fat jokes at my expense.”

  I knew he hadn’t meant anything by it. And, yes, I was guilty of making the occasional remark about his weight, but that didn’t mean I liked what he’d said. I poked him in the ribs. Hard. He rubbed his side but didn’t dare protest.

  “Sorry, El,” he repeated. “Tell you what. Go draw yourself a Coke on the house while I finish up here.”

  “A Coke? For the ‘Jewish lightning’ crack? No thanks. And you can finish your handicapping in the car. I’ll drive.”

  The bells above the door jingled, interrupting our quarrel, and a short, rotund woman in her late fifties waddled in carrying a small dog in her arms.

  “Mrs. Pindaro,” said Fadge. “Thank you for helping me out.”

  She smiled and placed the dog—a pug named Leon—down on one of the stools at the counter. “Happy to do it, Ronnie. You know I used to help out your father years ago. I think I remember the ropes. Though the prices have certainly gone up.” Her left nostril flared as she aimed a reproachful eye at him.

  I fancied Fadge was reconsidering his choice of pinch hitter. He hated customers who groused about prices.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I brought little Leon along,” she said. “I can’t leave him alone too long. He has to do his business, big and small, whether I’m home or not.”

  “No problem, Mrs. Pindaro,” said Fadge. I was sure he didn’t like the idea, but with the races beckoning and no one else to mind the store in his absence, what choice did he have? “I’m sure things will be quiet today,” he continued, lying to the poor lady. A Saturday afternoon in August promised to be anything but slow.

  Little Leon sat beside me on the next stool, huffing his dog breath on my arm. I tried to give him a pat on the head, but he must have thought I had food in my hand and wouldn’t have any of the petting. I settled in and ignored him, and he returned the favor.

  Fadge noticed the time, jumped off the stool he’d been holding down, and untied his fudge-splattered apron. “Damn, we’re gonna be late for the first race. Let’s go, El.”

  He opened the cash register, scooped a wad of bills from the till, and grabbed his Racing Form. Then he was out the door like an eager three-year-old colt bolting from the starting gate. I trotted along behind.

  It may have looked like the runner-up in a demolition derby, but, aside from backfiring regularly, Fadge’s Nash Ambassador ran well enough. The driver’s side door had been dented shut three years earlier, and, as a result, whosoever was piloting the jalopy had to climb in from the passenger side. That Saturday afternoon, the honor fell to me. I took the wheel, shifted into first, and roared off down Lincoln Avenue, giving Fadge thirty precious minutes to finish his brilliant plan to beat the odds and walk away from the track with a fortune in his pockets. He sat beside me among the discarded wrappers, newspapers, and empty soda bottles, scribbling notes into the margins of his Racing Form. He wouldn’t even let me put on the radio. Claimed it distracted him.

  Windows open a crack for some fresh, cool air, the Ambassador cruised along Route 67 as if she’d just rolled off the showroom floor. W
e were approaching Tempesta Farm. I nudged Fadge, interrupting his handicapping, and indicated the scene of the fire with a tilt of my head. He folded his paper and gazed out the window. About 150 yards from the highway’s shoulder, beyond the warped and weather-beaten rail at the top of the training track’s homestretch, the ground was blackened and scarred and bare. The smell of charcoaled wood still hung in the air. Fadge watched the pile of cinders slide by.

  Sheriff Pryor’s squad car, five state police cruisers, and seven other county vehicles had blocked off the drive, directly in front of twelve stone monuments guarding the entrance. A Saratoga Springs Fire Department station wagon sat parked at the side of the highway. I took my eyes off the road to glance at the scene. At least thirty men were fanning out over the grounds, ten or fifteen feet apart, heads bowed as if searching for something. I turned my attention back to my driving.

  “You weren’t kidding about the barn,” said Fadge.

  “What are those stone pillars for?” I asked.

  “Sanford Shaw put them up. A tribute to his favorite horses.”

  “They look like tombstones.”

  Fadge shrugged. “A lot of people assume they’re markers for the twelve Thoroughbreds that died in the fire. But those monuments were there long before then.”

  The farm disappeared in the rearview mirror.

  “So tell me what happened,” said Fadge. “Two people were killed?”

  “A woman and a boy. No idea who they were, but the sheriff’s looking into missing persons.”

  “A woman and a boy,” said Fadge as if repeating a riddle.

  “Actually, I think the boy might have been a man. A jockey.”

  “How come?”

  “The body had some racing silk wrapped around its neck. Maybe part of a jockey’s flak jacket. Black-and-orange diamonds, like a jack-o’-lantern. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Not Tempesta’s colors,” he said. “Theirs were purple and gold. Back when they were racing. And black and orange isn’t the most common combination.”