Puzzle of the Red Stallion (22 page)

Miss Withers shook hands stiffly. “I wouldn’t have you think I’m a race-track tout,” she informed him. “We’re here on serious business.”

“Me too,” said Captain Tinker hastily. He drew the inspector aside. “As long as you’re going in put five on Easter Bunny for me—to show. My kids always like Easter bunnies. See you here as you come out?”

“Sure!” said the inspector, accepting the five dollars. He led the way through the gate. “Awful jam in here,” he told Miss Withers. “You’d better grab hold of my arm or you may lose me.”

“You mean
you
might lose
me
!” she corrected. But she took the proffered arm all the same.

“They’re running some of the preliminary races now,” Piper explained as they moved toward the grandstand with the hurrying mob. “We may as well slip into the restaurant for a bite of lunch while we have a chance.”

Miss Withers was looking over his shoulder. “I said we might as well have some lunch!” he shouted.

“Lunch? I couldn’t swallow for love, nor money,” she said. “I’m too excited.”

“Excited over the race, Hildegarde?”

“Over the murder,” Miss Withers told him. “And over my number-one clue.”

Piper grinned. “You mean the pipe? You’ve finally managed to fit it into the picture?”

She shook her head. “I can’t fit the pipe to the murder and I’ve tried to fit the murder to the pipe. No success yet—but before this afternoon is over—” Again she peered over his shoulder. “You go and eat,” she advised him. “I’ll meet you by the door of the restaurant in half an hour.”

“Wait!” cried the inspector. But Miss Withers was already out of sight in the scurrying crowd.

In a corner near the stand devoted to the sale of hot dogs, beer, and postcard portraits of the horses Mrs. Maude Thwaite was haranguing her husband.

“I said put the whole bankroll on Verminator to show!” she was saying. “The old champion always tries—look at the form sheets. And form is everything.”

The little veterinary was protesting. “I tell you that horse is running on nothing but his nerve!” he argued. “His legs are gone, all gone. Let’s put the money on a horse that’s got a chance … on Tom-Tom, maybe!”

“You’re a fool, Thwaite,” the woman said angrily. “You have no guts. I know form in a horse when I see it….”

“And I know legs!” interrupted the veterinary.

“You’re more than a fool,” began his wife furiously, her face purple underneath its heavy coating of powder. But she broke off and her mouth cracked into a sort of smile as a cheery voice interrupted them.

“As I live and breathe, the Thwaites!” said Miss Hildegarde Withers. “Could you give me a tip on the big race by any chance?”

“Yes—” began Thwaite. His wife nudged him.

“Of course—bet—er—bet on Prince Penguin,” she said. “You can’t go wrong. We have a hot tip right from the stable.”

“Thanks, I’ll remember it,” murmured Miss Withers as she moved away. She looked back at Maude Thwaite and sniffed. “A sneak!” said the schoolteacher. “A clever, cautious sneak!”

Yet for all that Miss Withers sought out a bookie, drove the frog-faced little man frantic for ten minutes with questions, and finally put down a modest bet of two dollars.

As she put the slip carefully away in her handbag a low and discreet cough sounded behind her.

“You too!” said Abe Thomas, his face alight with a gloomy sort of triumph. “Gone dizzy with the itch for gambling, eh? Can’t you see where it leads?”

Miss Withers stared at him. “No, not at all clearly.” Then she smiled. “I’m surprised to find you here.”

The man of all work at the Gregg farm took a blackened corncob from his pocket and filled it with coarse tobacco.

“My wife’s looking after Mr. Gregg,” Thomas said. “I like to come here. I like to watch the fools tossing their money away!”

“Any advice on how to bet?” Miss Withers hinted.

For a moment his face brightened and then he looked at her discouragingly. “Advice? Sure I’ll give you advice. Leave your money in the bank like I do. Then nobody’ll get it away from you. Spend it for balloons and stick pins into them—even at that you’ll have something for your money. But don’t hand it over to the bookies!”

The crowd surged forward and against her will Miss Withers was carried along. She heard a burst of cheering and knew that out in front of the grandstand another race had swept to a climax. She found herself afloat in an unfamiliar sea with vast tides carrying her hither and yon, helpless as a floating cork. All around her shipping clerks, bank presidents, colored chauffeurs, chorus girls and stenographers surged, some screaming tips to each other, some secretively huddled over programs and racing forms.

It was a new element—beyond Miss Withers’s depth. “I can only try to tread water and pray for enlightenment,” she said.

She found a moment’s respite in the shadow of the staircase which led to the upper levels of the grandstand. Yet even here she was not safe from the contagion of the racetrack madness.

A fervid and perspiring young man in a light-colored ice-cream suit suddenly seized upon her. “Toy Wagon!” he gasped in her face.

Miss Withers looked mildly amazed. “I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t forget what I told you about Toy Wagon—it’s red hot, straight from the feed-box!” cried Eddie Fry. “Bet him to win, place, or show, or straight across the board. I tell you, you can’t lose!”

“To show what?” Miss Withers wanted to know.

“Show means to come third—place means second,” the young man explained. “Across the board means all three. Follow my tip and you’ll coin dough. This is my lucky day!”

Miss Withers raised her eyebrows. “Lucky? I don’t see pretty little Babs Foley on your arm. I thought you were bringing her here?”

Eddie Fry shrugged. “That kid? She—well, it was just a pipe-dream, just a pipe-dream. I’m not the marrying kind anyway. Besides, Babs hasn’t got the pep that her sister had.” He moved away, humming a cheerful lyric of his own composition.

“
When Miss Otis was asked, at the last great Judgment Day, madam,

‘Are you pure as the driven snow?’ They heard her say,

‘I was pure as the driven snow!

But I drifted far and I drifted wide, and so, madam—

Miss Otis regrets
—”

“A strange young man,” Miss Withers said to herself. “But he was very definite about that horse.” Almost in spite of herself she sought out the bookmaker, studied the mysterious notations upon his slate, and made two more bets. “Just to make sure,” she said to herself.

She found the inspector near the door of the restaurant nervously gnawing at a cigar. “Too much of a mob to get anything to eat,” he admitted. “I finally grabbed a hamburger and let it go at that. Let’s go back to the paddock and see if the horses are being led out,” he urged. “No use wasting our time in this mob.”

Miss Withers denied that she had been wasting her time. “I’ve been making a decision.”

“Yeah? What about?” Piper grinned. “I suppose you’ve got an idea who’s going to win this race?”

She nodded seriously. “I was given a hot tip—right from the horse’s haymow,” she said.

“Right from the what?” gasped the inspector.

“From the er—the oat-bin, or whatever it is. But that wasn’t what I meant by making a decision. Oscar, if you were swimming in very deep water and found that your water-wings were filled with lead instead of air, what would you do?”

“Me? Toss ’em away and start paddling for dear life.”

“Sound advice,” Miss Withers told him. “That’s what I’m going to do. And now shall we look at the horses?”

“I saw a couple of pals of yours in the beanery,” Piper told her as they came out of the grandstand. “Barbara Foley and that cowboy, Latigo Wells. She was giving him the works—big soulful eyes and everything.”

Miss Withers looked pleased. “Of course! I suggested it myself—told her that if she wanted to help avenge her sister it would be a good idea for her to play up to the two or three young men who might have had a love motive—and find out.”

The inspector was dubious. “You didn’t suggest that she go so far as to hold hands with him under the table?” And Miss Withers was forced to admit that she had not.

“I don’t suppose you could overhear what they were talking about?” she asked.

The inspector looked at her. “Hildegarde! What do people usually talk about when they hold hands under the table?”

Miss Withers sniffed. “How should I know? Race horses, probably.”

She learned in the next few minutes that she was right. Babs Foley and her tall and rangy admirer were shouldering their way through the crowd in the direction of the paddock. The girl’s voice came high and clear….

“Of course it’ll be all right, silly! My woman’s intuition tells me Santa Claus will win—I’ve always believed in Santa Claus.”

There was an expression in Latigo Wells’s face which showed that he was not too firmly convinced in the reality of the old gentleman with the whiskers.

Miss Withers pulled at the inspector’s sleeve and they let themselves be carried with the current of the moving crowd. “Fancy meeting you here!” she said as they came up with Latigo and the girl. “Having any luck?”

“Luck!” sang out the girl as if it were spelled in capital letters. “All the luck in the world—but we’re saving it for the big race, aren’t we, Latigo?”

Her companion seemed faintly embarrassed, ill at ease. He nodded painfully.

“On Santa Claus to show,” continued Babs. “Every cent we can beg, borrow or steal!”

“That’s just the trouble,” Latigo murmured. He scratched at his long upper lip.

Babs drew closer to him, smiling up into his face. “Oh, don’t be a wet blanket,” she begged. “We will win, I just know we’ll win. This is
our
day!” She was breathless, misty-eyed….

Miss Withers saw the expression on her face and hastily blew her nose. “The race track is no place for sentiment, Oscar,” she said softly as if to convince herself.

“I wish I had the money in a poker game,” Latigo Wells said after a moment. “You can’t always tell about horses….”

The quartet was finally thrust against a breast-high railing and held there by the pressure of the gaping crowd behind them. Beyond the railing was a small circle of trodden sand with a plot of green grass in the center.

“Here they come!” cried Barbara excitedly. On the far side of the paddock appeared a stocky young man in a red jacket, astride a fat horse. They plodded into the paddock leading a procession which consisted of a long line of prancing blanketed thoroughbreds, each with a stableboy at his bit. They paraded once around the ring.

Suddenly the green center of the ring was filled with jockeys—hard, tiny men in brilliant silks. Here and there officials, large and soft, moved pompously and serenely among them.

Off came the blankets. “Jockeys up!”

Miss Withers was a little disappointed. “They look just like other horses to me,” she complained. “Only the legs are longer….”

“That’s Santa Claus!” interrupted Barbara. “There—number four!” Her voice, too, sounded disappointed. He looked old and sleepy.

“Where’s his whiskers?” Latigo drawled, and rolled a cigarette.

The inspector was amused. “They don’t show much life as long as they’re held by the stableboys,” he explained.

Another signal and the nine thoroughbreds moved obediently out of the paddock and along the sandy lane which led to the gate between grandstand and clubhouse. “They’re numbered according to rail positions,” Piper explained. “Easter Bunny has the choice spot, two is Verminator, then Toy Wagon, Santa Claus, Tom-Tom, Good News, Prince Penguin, Wallaby, and Head Wind.”

Miss Withers stared curiously at these blue bloods of the turf. They all looked alike to her, in spite of variations in color and trappings. Head Wind, the pampered beauty king, seemed hardly to differ from the dubious long-shot who ambled along just ahead—Wallaby, that would be, according to the program.

Head Wind was tossing his head high in the air and Wallaby’s hung low, as if abashed at the presence of so much superior horse-flesh. One of the horses toward the head of the line jerked away from the handler and started back for the stable, but was immediately recaptured.

“They know what’s going to happen!” the inspector explained.

“I wish
I
did!” Miss Withers sighed. The horses were prancing sideways as they neared the entrance to the track and in the distance a bugle rang out sweet and clear. There was something in the sound which made the schoolteacher’s blood pound with a strange excitement.

“They all look like winners!” she cried. “I’m going to bet again.”

The dark cave beneath the grandstand was a frenzied madhouse now, with a long line of would-be bettors standing before every bookmaker’s table, each desperately anxious to get rid of the money on his person before post-time. The hands of the clock showed twelve minutes to three. Twelve minutes—720 seconds …

They took their places in the nearest line and Miss Withers saw Babs Foley put a large roll of bills into the hand of Mr. Latigo Wells. “You make the bet—for luck!” the girl was saying. “We’ll sink or swim.”

The line moved forward, stopped again. Then the voice of the bookmaker drowned out the other sounds. “Listen, brother, once your money is down on the line you can’t change your bet! You’ve got two hundred bucks on Verminator….”

He was talking to Thwaite, the veterinary, whose habitually waxed mustache drooped sadly. Thwaite plunged one hand into his pocket and brought out a fistful of silver. “One fifty, one sixty-five … two dollars, then!” he cried. “On Tom-Tom!”

“Okay, two bucks on Tom-Tom.” The bookie wrote the ticket and the veterinary put it deeply away in the folds of his wallet. He departed, avoiding Miss Withers’s eye.

“Treason in the ranks,” murmured the schoolteacher. “A rebellion on a small scale.”

The line moved up again. Suddenly Miss Withers noticed a small, somewhat dingy little man hurrying toward the farther doorway.

On an impulse she told the inspector to hold her place and drew Latigo Wells aside. “Look!” she said. “Ever see him before—that man in the doorway?”