The Last Private Eye

by John Birkett

  The disappearance of a stable hand and his wife. A dead man in a motel room. A story that would “blow the town wide open.” Duke and Jessica Kingston. Howard Taggert. A pair of Derby horses. A bookie’s telephone number. A locker key. A syringe. What the hell did it all mean?

  Rhineheart didn’t know. He was the first to admit that he wasn’t hitting on much when it came to solving puzzles. His talent was for hanging in there, plodding along, poking around, and uncovering things. It occurred to him that he was going to need some help on this one. Farnsworth, Rhineheart thought. If there was anyone who could help him find the answers in this case, it was old Farnsworth. Everything Rhineheart knew about detecting had been taught to him by Farnsworth.

  Tomorrow, Rhineheart decided, he would go and see the old pro, talk to him about the case, hear what Farnsworth had to say. Just thinking about bringing the old man in on it improved Rhineheart’s mood. He switched on the radio and found an FM station that featured old-timey jazz. He drove back to Louisville with the tinny sounds of a 1920 New Orleans jazz band beating against his ears.

  It was after five when he got back. He stopped at a gas station near the expressway and telephoned Cresthill’s head trainer, John Hughes, but there was no answer.

  He ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Jeffersontown. Moo Goo Gai Pan, fried rice, and hot tea. Dessert was a scoop of ice cream and a fortune cookie. The paper in the cookie read, The star of riches will soon shine upon you.

  He called McGraw at home. The news on the syringe was negative. Frank Parker couldn’t identify whatever substances were in the syringe. He was going to have to run more tests. He wanted Rhineheart to call him.

  “You find out anything about Walsh?” Rhineheart asked McGraw.

  “You bet your ass I did,” McGraw said. “You were right. Walsh worked for River City Stud for two years. He left there to go to Cresthill. I got all this from a clerk at Thoroughbred Employment. It’s on Walsh’s job application.”

  “Good work,” Rhineheart said. “You going to be at O’Brien’s later?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it, no.”

  “I just got back from Cresthill Farms. I’ll buy you a beer and tell you about it.”

  “I’ll see you there about nine.”

  The Hideaway Club was a long, narrow shotgun of a room with a bar on one wall, a row of booths on the other, and a dozen tables in between. The decor was early red-neck. Rhineheart slid into one of the empty booths and looked around. Even though it was Sunday the place was packed and noisy. All the tables were taken and the bar was crowded with loud, rowdy cowboy types in jeans and Western hats.

  The jukebox was playing a Merle Haggard number. On the wall above the bar, a poster advertised a C&W radio station that played “Lovin’, Lyin’, Laughin’, Cryin’, Cheatin’, Hurtin’, Flirtin”’ music.

  A slim dark-haired girl with a sweet innocent face approached the booth. She was carrying a tray and holding a bar rag in one hand. She was wearing a denim mini skirt and white knee-high boots.

  “Get you somethin’?”

  Rhineheart took a gamble. “Hello, Tammy.”

  She smiled at him. “Do I know you?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “I don’t believe I know you.”

  “I’m a friend of Carl’s.”

  The smile vanished. Her voice turned cold and unfriendly. “What do you want?”

  “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

  She shook her head. “I got no time to talk. I’m busy.”

  “I’m trying to get in touch with Carl.”

  She laughed, a hollow little laugh. “Join the club, mister. Looks like ever’body’s trying to get in touch with Carl. Only Carl ain’t here. Carl took off. And nobody knows where he is. Not his good-for-nothin’ buddies. Not his sweet little thang of a wife. Not even me. His girl friend. His ex-girl friend. The dumb-ass who believed all his lies and his bullshit, and believe me, mister, it was all bullshit.”

  “You got any idea where Carl might be?”

  She smiled bitterly. “Ask his wife—if you can find her. I hear she’s split too. It wouldn’t surprise me none if they’re together someplace. Look,” she said, “it’s like I told them other two guys, I don’t give a royal shit where Carl Walsh is. He could be dead and it wouldn’t make me no matter. And if you find him you can tell him I said that.”

  “Tell me about these two guys,” Rhineheart said. “They were looking for Carl?”

  Tammy nodded grudgingly. “They said they were cops, but they weren’t. I can tell cops.”

  “One bald-headed, the other with a beard?”

  Tammy nodded. “They offered me money if I’d tell them where Carl was. They acted like they didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t know.”

  “When was the last time you saw Carl?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Tuesday, I guess. He was supposed to call me Wednesday night, but he never did. The low-life son of a bitch.” She swiped at the table with her bar rag. “Who are you, anyway—some kind of cop?”

  Rhineheart said, “I’m a private investigator.”

  “A private investigator? You mean like on TV?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What are you looking for Carl for?”

  “Someone hired me.”

  “His wife? Are you working for that bitch?”

  “No.”

  “Then who?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Rhineheart said. He took a card out of his pocket and handed it to her.

  “What’s this?” She peered down at it.

  “That’s my address and phone number. I’d like you to call me if Carl gets in touch with you.”

  Tammy made a sound with her lips. “Fat chance.”

  “What makes you so sure that Carl left town?”

  She frowned at Rhineheart. “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe something happened to him,” he said. “Maybe he got in some kind of accident. Maybe he couldn’t get to a phone.”

  Tammy turned pale. “What are you talking about?” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She began to back away from the table. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. You come in here with all these questions and all this shit.”

  She threw the card on the floor and started to turn away.

  Rhineheart stood up and caught hold of her arm. “Tammy, wait a minute—”

  “Let go of me, you son of a bitch,” she said in a loud voice. He dropped her arm and watched her stalk off across the room.

  The place, Rhineheart noticed, was awfully and suddenly silent. The song on the jukebox had ended. He looked around to see a dozen rednecks and good old boys directing bad looks his way. Oh shit. Time to decamp. Rhineheart turned and strolled, cool and easy, toward the exit.

  At the door, the bouncer, a thick-necked biker type with a bushy beard and a black bandanna wrapped around his forehead, stepped in front of him.

  “Where you going, chump?”

  Rhineheart sized the bouncer up. The dude was a cruncher. He was probably going to have to use something. Like a chair. Or a table. Or a tank.

  Politely, Rhineheart said, “Step out of my way, asshole.”

  “You were messing with Tammy, man. You put your hands on her, motherfucker.”

  “I’ll tell you once more,” Rhineheart said. “Get out of my way.”

  “Whip his ass. Moose,” someone shouted from one of the tables.

  Rhineheart turned to see where the voice was coming from, then turned back to find a roundhouse right coming his way. He stepped inside the swing and threw a quick left jab—right cross to the guy’s face.

  It was a pretty-looking combination, executed with style and grace. The trouble was the blows didn’t seem to have a whole lot of effect on his opponent, who didn’t even stagger, just reared back and started throwing roundhouse rights at Rhineheart’s head.

  Rhineheart backpedaled a few steps, jabbed the bouncer’s face a coupl
e of times. Blood began to dribble from the guy’s nose. Rhineheart feinted with his left, then threw a short hard uppercut that made the guy grunt and rock back on his heels. Hitting the dude was something like hitting a tree trunk. Rhineheart was circling to his left when one of the bouncer’s punches caught him on the shoulder. It knocked Rhineheart three feet sideways. His left side went numb.

  Fuck this, Rhineheart thought. He reached over and picked up someone’s beer off a table. He cracked the bottle over the bouncer’s skull. The guy’s knees buckled and he dropped to the floor like a sack of flour. Rhineheart kicked him once in the side to keep him down. Then he turned around and faced the room.

  “Who’s next?” he said. No one moved. No one said anything. He turned and left the place. As he crossed the lot to his car he started to whistle “West End Blues.” Rhineheart’s version of the tune was based on the 1929 recording by Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, with Jimmy Strong on clarinet and Earl “Fatha” Hines on the piano.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Twenty minutes later Rhineheart was in O’Brien’s sitting across the booth from McGraw.

  “What was Jessica Kingston like?” McGraw wanted to know.

  “She was all right,” Rhineheart said.

  “You like her?”

  “She’s not bad.”

  “You liked her. I can tell. You were impressed. Is she as beautiful as they say?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how did it go at Cresthill?”

  “Just supah,” Rhineheart said. “They’re thinking about making me private eye to the rich and famous. Pretty soon I’ll be able to open up branch offices in the suburbs. Shopping centers. Shit like that.”

  “What’s Duke Kingston like?”

  “He’s different,” Rhineheart said.

  “Is he an asshole?”

  He shrugged, looking around the room for Wanda Jean.

  “She’s off tonight,” McGraw said. “Wanna go to a movie?”

  “I don’t think so,” Rhineheart said.

  “What are you going to do? Just sit here and get sloshed and think about Jessica Kingston?”

  “I might.”

  “The Maltese Falcon,” McGraw said.

  The Maltese Falcon? Warner Brothers, 1941. Written and directed by John Huston. From the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Bogart. Peter Lorre. Sydney Greenstreet. Mary Astor. Ward Bond. Rhineheart had seen it nine, maybe ten times. “Where’s it playing?” he asked.

  “At the Vogue. On Lexington Road. Two bucks admission. My treat,” McGraw said.

  “I’ll buy the popcorn,” Rhineheart said.

  It was after midnight when the movie ended. It had rained and the streets were wet and glistening. Rhineheart and McGraw went to the White Castle, ate hamburgers, drank coffee, and talked about their favorite scenes. Then he took McGraw home and drove back to his apartment.

  Rhineheart got a beer from the refrigerator and stretched out on the couch with a paperback mystery. Maybe he could pick up some tips on deduction.

  He was halfway through the first chapter when the telephone rang. He picked up the phone and a woman’s voice said, “Mr. Rhineheart?”

  “Yeah?”

  The words came rushing across the line—“Carl Walsh wants to see you. He wants to talk to you. Meet him at the Downs. The backside. The tack room, Barn 24B. Half an hour.” The line went abruptly dead.

  Rhineheart put the phone down. He got to his feet. What the fuck was going on? He walked over to the window and pulled back the blinds. What was he looking out the window for? The call was some kind of setup. Clearly. The thing to do was ignore it. Read the book. Go to sleep.

  He walked over to the closet, reached up, and took down the shoulder holster. He strapped it on. Why was he putting on his holster? He wasn’t going anyplace. Only a fool would go out there.

  He walked over and opened the top drawer of the desk. His gun, a Colt Python, was lying there. He picked it up and checked the chamber. It was loaded. He stuck it in the holster. Stupid. Dumb. It was beyond dumb.

  He put on his coat and headed out the door.

  Rhineheart stepped out of the shadows between the barns. He looked down the shed row, which was lighted by a line of naked light bulbs. There was no one in sight. At the end of barn 24B a faint fan of light streamed out of the tack room window. It was quiet, except for an occasional stir and nicker from behind the stall doors.

  Behind him was the gap to the backstretch and the clocker’s stand, a squat two-story cinder-block building. Ahead, and on both sides, were horse barns.

  As he headed down the shed row toward the tack room, Rhineheart looked around. The surrounding barns seemed deserted. Something was wrong. During Derby Week the place was supposed to be top-heavy with security. Where were all the rent-a-cops? Now that he thought about it, it had been a shade too easy to get into the stable area. He had climbed the fence on Longfield Avenue, and had seen no one on his trip across the backside.

  He stopped and took out his gun and held it at his side, pointed at the ground. Nothing was going to happen. But it was better to be ready. He was moving forward when he heard the crack of a weapon, and the light bulb over his head exploded with a loud thwock, spraying him with fragments of glass. The second shot slammed into the closed upper half of a stall door. Not waiting for a third, Rhineheart hit the ground, which was wet and straw-covered, propped himself on both elbows, and squeezed off two quick shots in the general direction—the barn behind and to his left—from which the fire had come.

  There was no return fire. He thought he saw somebody—a man’s shape—moving away in the darkness. He couldn’t be sure.

  He scrambled to his feet and ran toward the backstretch. Ahead, a shadowy figure vaulted the rail and ran up the track toward the clubhouse turn, disappearing from Rhineheart’s view when it passed behind the clocker’s stand. Rhineheart jogged up to the rail. The figure had vanished into the darkness.

  Behind him, tack room lights were coming on, voices were being raised. It was time to split, but as he turned to leave he looked up, his eye caught by the sight, in the distance, across the track, of the famous twin spires. Outlined against the night sky, they loomed ominously up above the track and the surrounding landscape. There was something sinister about the way they stood there high above everything, the whole mess.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next morning Rhineheart woke at nine, threw on some sweats, drove over to Bellarmine, ran twenty laps around the track, and drove back home. He showered, shaved, and got dressed. Tan slacks. A navy blazer. White shirt. Button-down collar. No tie. He put his gun in the shoulder holster and strapped it on. He drank three cups of coffee and read the morning paper, which had an article about the mysterious slaying of a racetrack worker whose body had been found Sunday morning in a Dixie Highway motel. Rhineheart washed the cup out in the sink, went out to the Maverick, and drove down to his office.

  It was located on Main Street in downtown Louisville, down the block from the Kentucky Center for the Arts and the Humana Building. It was on the fifth floor of a hundred-year-old building that was being renovated floor by floor. By the time the renovators reached Rhineheart’s floor he was sure he wouldn’t be able to afford the rent.

  The sign on the door said MICHAEL J. RHINEHEART, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. Inside was one large square room with a twelve-foot ceiling, a scarred hardwood floor, and six tall narrow windows that overlooked the intersection of Seventh and Main.

  Rhineheart had picked up the furniture here and there. A beat-up leather couch. A battered old filing cabinet. Several chairs. A couple of desks. His was an old, worn walnut rolltop with a lot of pigeonholes. McGraw’s desk was smaller, a gray steel job that sat in the corner.

  McGraw was seated behind it, hunched over an old Royal Standard. Rhineheart watched her hunt and peck for a moment. On her job application she had stated that she could type sixty words per minute.

  Rhineheart said, “I thought I was the world’s worst typist.”
<
br />   “You were wrong,” McGraw snapped.

  “Good mood, huh?”

  “Here’s the mail.” She handed him a stack of letters, which he dropped on his desk.

  “I get any calls?”

  “Someone named Patty Dubois. Said she was Public Relations Director of Cresthill Farms. Wants you to call her back. I left the number on your desk. Oh, I almost forgot. A Karen Simpson called. She says you have her number.”

  Rhineheart smiled . . . enigmatically, he hoped.

  “Who’s Karen Simpson?” McGraw asked.

  “Material witness,” he said.

  Rhineheart opened the second drawer of his desk, where he kept a box of ammunition. He took his weapon out of the holster and began loading it.

  McGraw gave the Python a bad look. “What’s that?”

  “What do you mean, what’s that? You never saw a gun before?”

  “Do you—Are you . . . going to . . . ?”

  “Relax,” Rhineheart said. “I’m just loading it.”

  “What happens after you load it?”

  “I put it back in the holster. Like this.” He reholstered the weapon.

  McGraw said, “I’m not into guns.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “How come you’re carrying one, then?”

  “I may need it,” he said. “Things are starting to get a little funny.” He sat down and put his feet up on the desk.

  “What do you mean funny?”

  “I got shot at last night.”

  “You got shot at last night?”

  Rhineheart nodded. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it might be a good idea if you stayed away from the office for a while. You could work at home. You could—”

  “Bullshit,” McGraw said with a firm shake of her head. “No way. I’m not staying at home because you got shot at.”

  Rhineheart shrugged. “Have it your own way.”

  He picked up the phone and dialed Ms. Dubois’s number. A Fayette County exchange. Ms. Dubois, it turned out, had a voice full of pep and vim and enthusiasm.