The house remained mostly quiet for the rest of the afternoon. As the sun fell away for it’s evening slumber, the glow under the library door threw shades of orange into the hall. The colors disappeared into the white of the dirtied dishes that sat on a tray on the hallway floor. Inside the room, Plimpton tried to calm his nerves with a book. He couldn’t concentrate. Every two paragraphs, he stopped to glance at the clock. There was no sign of the detective Murray promised earlier in the day.
Outside the library, Pablo wrung his hands as he paced the foyer. Occasionally, he’d stop to eye the tray of dishes at the top of the staircase and argued with himself if he should venture to the second floor to retrieve them. He decided that his job was more important than his pride.
The soles of his shoes made a kissing sound against the marble stairs as he climbed slowly towards the tray. The ticking from the grandfather clock in the foyer synched with his heartbeat by the time he reached the top step. The metal handles of the tray were cold against his sweaty hands. A cup rattled and clinked as he held them closer to his chest. He nearly dropped the tray when the door to the library threw open. All of the air in the hall was sucked into the large room that smelled of leather and sawdust.
Plimpton’s shoulders sagged towards his feet when he eyed the butler. A small growl that sounded more like a moan knocked around in his chest.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s you. I was expecting someone else.”
Pablo hurried to piece together the right words. They came out in a mush.
“I’m sorry Mr. Plimpton, I just… I am…” He gave up and let the tray settle in his limp arms around his waist.
“I don’t care what you’re doing,” Plimpton said in a low, exhausted breath. “Good for nothing -” he let the rest of the sentence trail off in the air. Pablo didn’t need him to finish it to know what he meant.
The old man turned his shoulder away from the butler and started back into the room. Pablo began to turn away, but stopped halfway.
“Mr. Plimpton,” he said with what little confidence he’d been able to muster. The old man froze in place, but didn’t look back at the butler. Pablo didn’t wait to see if he would.
“You said I didn’t lock the stable,” he started. “That’s not true. I always lock it. I check it three times a night. I get up from my sleep to check it every night. It was locked all night when the horse left.”
The hall was silent for a moment. Pablo stared at the back of the wrinkled head until he saw a slight nod from the old man. Plimpton grunted something under his breath and shut the door. When the lock clicked on the knob, Pablo let out a deep breath he’d been holding in for what seemed like forever. His shoulders loosened and relaxed. The dishes clicked their approval. The walk back down the stairs and into the kitchen was silent.
It was nearly eleven o’clock at night when a knock on the front door sounded like the cavalry coming home. The old man jumped from his chair in the library, unaware that he’d fallen asleep. He did that most evenings nowadays. It disturbed Karen and Edward’s alone time in her bedroom. Pablo heard it from his new room in the stable, but he still managed to throw on a robe and get to the door before the third set of knocks.
He introduced himself as Detective Earl Mundley. A beige suit wrapped well around his tall, lean frame. Sandy hair sat atop a chiseled face with a pair of eyes so light they were almost translucent. A few stray freckles dotted his cheeks. The dark handle to a revolver stuck out from his belt.
Plimpton greeted Mundley at the foot of the staircase, he motioned the man to follow him towards the dining room. They took seats at a massive slab of mahogany in front of a window that overlooked a sprawling pasture with a stable. Pablo served coffee. Mundley’s face was drawn. His eyes were heavy and he looked like a man that had already put in an honest day of work and just wanted to go home.
“You see that over there?” Plimpton said, angling a crooked finger in the direction of the stables. “Nearly a half million in race horses sleep in there every night. The best of the best. There isn’t a collection on the whole coast that matches it, but I don’t like to talk about them. It’d make me a target of shysters.”
Mundley pointed out the recent story in the newspaper about the horses, which got a hiss out of the old man. He waved a limp hand towards the detective. “I can’t help what those rags print. They’ll say anything to make a few extra dimes.”
For the next twenty minutes, the two men went over every detail of the day, from the stable being unlocked to the crumpled up note left behind. All the while, Mundley jotted down details onto a clean page in a well-worn notebook. After Plimpton had exhausted himself from talking, he took over.
“So what would you like us to do, Mr. Plimpton?”
“Get my horse back. And arrest the men that did this.”
“But you want us to keep it off the record?”
“Absolutely,” Plimpton said in a raised voice. “If word got out that I’m a quick pay for these type of things -”
Mundley interrupted, “so you’re going to pay?”
Plimpton’s face tied into knots. He swallowed a lump in his throat the size of a tennis ball. His eyes surveyed the room.
“Well, I suppose I don’t have much choice,” he said. “The horse is worth more to me than the three grand they’re asking. As long as they don’t -”
Before Plimpton could finish his thought, the conversation was torn apart by a faint scream and the blast of a gunshot upstairs. The sound made Pablo jump in the foyer. A coffee cup hopped from the tray he carried and crashed to the floor. The sound of heavy things falling rumbled the ceiling above the men, who were already up and moving with speed towards the stairs.
Their ears took them to Karen’s room, where Edward lay shirtless in bed, grasping a shoulder that leaked crimson all over the white silk bed sheets atop him. Karen, though, was nowhere to be found.
“Where is she? Where is my daughter?” Plimpton demanded. Edward pointed with his good arm towards an open window, where soft pink curtains fluttered in the breeze that entered the room.
Edward’s voice was scratchy with shock. His words were quick and out of order. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “A guy - wearing a mask - he came in. Must have climbed the trellis. Grabbed Karen. I tried to fight, but he shot. Got away.”
Mundley listened as he rifled through the room and inspected the contents of the outside world from Karen’s window. He worked with the speed and skill of a veteran detective. Plimpton was impressed, but not willing to admit it.
Pablo called Plimpton’s doctor at home while the other two men hunted for clues on the ground below Karen’s window. A muddied pair of barefoot tracks died off about ten yards from the house. A broken bracelet of Karen’s was laying in the grass. Nothing else was visible in the pitch black of night.
“Stealing a horse is one thing,” Mundley said as he gazed into the distance with his hands planted firmly on his hips, “but I don’t think we’re going to be able to keep this out of the papers.”
Plimpton’s response was delayed when Pablo’s head poked through the window above. “Dr. Thurmond is on his way,” he called to the men.
Plimpton growled back, “don’t interrupt us unless it’s something important.”
Mundley stared down old man through a crooked eye, tightened his hat down around his sandy head, and went back towards the house. Pablo showed him to the phone in the library, where he called the station. Plimpton ordered the butler to brew some more coffee. Edward lay groaning in the bed, ruining the sheets even more with his steady flow of blood. Soon after, Dr. Thurmond was at his side, inspecting the wound.
It was, according to the doctor, not life threatening. The small caliber bullet wasn’t strong enough to penetrate the arm very far. Amid the loud groans of protest from Edward, the doctor was able to remove it in the bed. In less than thirty minutes, the shoulder was cleaned, bandaged, and cleared for a return to duty.
That return wouldn’t take long. About an hour aft
er the doctor left for home, a gaggle of detectives littered the foyer. With the steady flow of bodies in and out of the house, the men almost ignored the entrance of Karen Plimpton through the doorway.
She was disheveled. The nightgown that sat loosely on her shoulders was ripped in several places. Her right cheek was red and puffy. She’d been crying. Her hair was a mess of mud and leaves.
She didn’t speak as she shuffled on bare feet onto the marble floors. Shock set up home in her eyes. Her left hand held the open front of her nightgown tightly around her breasts. The right hand held a wadded piece of paper. Plimpton approached his daughter with a look of half-satisfaction on his face.
“Where are they? Where are the men that have my horse?” he demanded.
Karen looked towards her father, but her gaze went right through him. She weakly lifted her right arm and aimed the paper towards him. Before he could grab it, it tumbled from her hand towards the ground. She soon joined it on the cold marble as she fainted into a heap.
The detectives moved around like a swarm of agitated bees. Pablo was once again on the phone with Dr. Thurmond and Plimpton and Mundley were crouched down on the floor examining the paper.
It was folded three times. In the center was a lock of hair the exact color of Bound by Desire’s mane. On the paper was the same hard-penciled scribble writing from the original note - only this time it was larger and more determined.
“I said no cops. If you want the horse now, it’ll cost you $6,000.”
Plimpton looked at the lead detective, who bit at his lower lip in thought. Mundley rose to his feet and called a huddle of other detectives. The old man crumpled a letter for the second time in one day, only this time he tossed the hunk of paper as hard as he could towards the front door. He didn’t rejoin the other men on his feet, though. Instead, he stayed in a crouch, running his thumb over his prized horse’s hair.
“Pablo,” the old man yelled without taking his eyes off of the locks in his hand. The butler’s head popped over the banister above. “Call my banker. Tell him to draw up a check for six-thousand dollars immediately.”
“But Mr. Plimpton,” Pablo said sympathetically. “It’s almost one o’clock in the morning.”
Plimpton deep-set coal eyes shot up and were trained on the butler’s sleep-deprived face.
“Do I look like I give a damn?”
Time refused to slow down as the night turned into early morning with a dozen or so detectives still swarming around the Plimpton home. Edward excused himself a few hours earlier to rest his wound while Pablo and Plimpton tended to Karen. Around five o’clock, their work paid off.
Some of the color was back in the young blonde’s cheeks. She’d changed into less-tattered clothing and managed to hold down a full meal. That gave Mundley and his boys a chance to get some information from her.
The questions were typical and predictable - the who, what, when, where and why of police work. Karen remained patient (at least more patient than her father) and tried to recall everything she could about the evening.
One man entered her room with a gun. He grabbed Karen and began pulling her out the window. She tried to hold onto the window frame and broke her bracelet in the process. She wasn’t strong enough and eventually was pulled through.
He dragged her to a car where two other men drove her in darkness through the woods. She said they had accents, but couldn’t tell if they were English, German or something else. A blindfold kept her from knowing where they went. Resigned to her fate, she waited in the car when it came to a stop. She wasn’t sure how long she sat there - she wasn’t exactly in the mindstate to be counting minutes - but after a while, a man shoved a note in her hand and pushed her out of the car onto the dirt road. She heard it speed off as she removed the blindfold. It was too dark to get the make, model, or license plate of the car as it tore through the woods.
She walked in bare feet for a few miles until a good samaritan stopped to pick her up. That’s how she got home.
Plimpton listened with disgust on his face as his daughter gave the information to the detectives around the dining room table. He paced the floor with his hands clenched in a red-hot grip behind his back. He bit his tongue as long as he could until he thought he tasted blood. He couldn’t hold it any longer.
“What IS the use for all this, gentlemen?” he roared. “All of these questions and all of this note taking. We’re sitting here getting cozy while these men take off to God knows where with my horse.”
No one tried to console the old man. The time for that was over. It was time for action, but that was hard to do in the detective’s current state of sleeplessness. Mundley was the one to deliver the unpopular news to Plimpton. Being in charge requires such duties from time to time.
“Look, Mr. Plimpton,” he started. “It’s late. Real late. We haven’t slept or eaten in hours. There’s nothing we can do right now with the information we have. I’ll keep a man posted on your barn. Maybe they’ll come back looking for the money. We’ll be ready for them if they do. In the meantime, get some rest. Call us when your banker draws up that check.”
The other detectives scattered from the home before Mundley could finish. Plimpton’s face was as sharp as knives as he stared down the young detective. The words he wanted to say built up in his throat, but Mundley didn’t stick around long enough to hear them. Karen’s head rested heavily on the table. Pablo stood nearby at the ready. Plimpton’s silent death stare trained on the door that closed behind the cops.
“Pablo,” he said, “get Chief Murray on the phone.”
In a flash, the butler was gone. Within minutes, he got the connection from the operator and handed the phone to his boss.
Murray wasn’t happy to hear from the old man. It was too early for business talk that didn’t involve dead bodies or bomb threats. Murray was a man who enjoyed the peace of breakfast time. Plimpton didn’t care if he interrupted the moment.
He tore into the chief, blaming him for the evening’s events. If he would have sent a more competent detective, and earlier in the day, none of this would have happened. The chief patiently listened before revving up his charcoal voice for a response.
“Look Plimpton,” he said. “I told you I’d do what I could do. This type of thing isn’t easy to pull off without the necessary paperwork. We’re not talking about horse theft anymore, this is armed kidnapping. If you want us to track these guys down, we’ll do everything in our power to make that happen - but it’ll have to be on the record from now on.”
The line went silent. Murray waited a few moments before checking to see if Plimpton was still on the line. The old man cleared his throat to show that he was.
“One more night,” Plimpton said. “I’ll have the check drawn up this morning. Keep your man staked on my stable this evening. These people want money. They’ll come out here to get it. You’ll be ready for them and then it’ll be over. If it isn’t over by tomorrow, we do it your way.”
Murray wasn’t the type of man that stood for negotiations, but he wanted back to his breakfast and cared little for what happened to some rich man’s horse. He agreed to the terms and hung up the phone.
Soon after, the Plimpton household was bathed in sleep. It stayed that way until nearly noon. By that point, a certified bank check for six-thousand dollars was sitting in the hands of a pimple-faced delivery boy at the front door. Karen, afraid to sleep in her own room, was in the guesthouse with Edward. Pablo wrestled with a bucket of paint as he repaired the window frame in Karen’s room. He signed for the check and brought it up to Plimpton’s bedside, where the old man conducted a symphony of snores. He placed the check on an end table and crept quietly across the carpet and out of the room.
Pablo continued to walk on silent feet down the stairs and into the front yard. He crossed a small patch of grass with a garden and entered the guest house. Karen and Edward were wide awake. Four large, leather suitcases sat on the bed, opened up and half-filled. The two shuffled around each
other while tossing random items into the bags.
They eyed Pablo, but didn’t stop their dance.
“The check is here,” he said in a whisper so low that it was barely audible. “I put it by his bed.”
“Good,” Edward said. “That should settle it then. Tonight, we pick up the check from the stable. You keep the old man in the house. Karen, you keep lookout outside. I’ll go pick up the horse and bring it back. Once the check is cashed, we’ll split the money and be on our way.”
Karen gave Edward a look of admiration. She stopped for a moment, sighed, and planted a kiss on him that made Pablo blush. He flinched towards his wounded arm. The pain wasn’t as bad as he expected. He made sure that when they staged the kidnapping, the gun used to plug his shoulder was a pea shooter.
Karen cooed, “I’ll be so happy to be away from that man. And we’ll finally have the money we need to start our life together.”
“Insufferable bastard,” Edward said. “We should kill the horse and leave its carcass in the stable.”
“No!” Pablo protested. “No killing. We take the money and leave the horse. That’s it. No killing.”
Edward’s lips curled up to show his teeth. He shook his head at the butler in the doorway. “Still sticking up for the old man,” he said. “What’d he ever do for you? He bullies you and bosses you around like you’re some kind of slave.”
“Please,” Pablo said. “Don’t talk that way about Mr. Plimpton. He helped me when I needed him most. Let’s just get him his horse back and split the money. Then I can get my wife and daughter back and you two can go to England.”
“England,” Karen said with a look of romance in her eyes. “I can’t wait.”
The couple started to kiss again, but Pablo didn’t stick around for the encore. When he re-entered the house, Plimpton was standing at the top of the stairwell in his pajamas, his eyes still fuzzy from sleep.
“There you are,” he said. “Where’s my breakfast?”
“Right away, Mr. Plimpton.”
Warm Hands, Cold Heart Page 6