Shadow Roll (7 page)

She was driving, and driving fast, along a little back road headed north.  I didn’t need a map to know it was the same road Matthew Mark McBartle took the night he died.

About two miles out of town, Mrs. Willingford pointed a long red fingernail towards an enormous tree coming at us at speed.  “There.  That’s the tree that poor boy hit.”

“Or vice versa,” I muttered, looking.  Who wouldn’t look?  There’s something about where a person dies.  It becomes special somehow.  Holy?  Unholy?  Unlucky?  Fated?  Forever theirs?  I could go on and on like that.  But I gave it up and just stared for as long as I could.  First straight ahead, then to the side, then with my head turned as far as it would go as the tree disappeared around a bend in the road.

Obviously, McBartle and his Mercury got the worst of it.  The tree had a raw chunk taken out, some bark scattered around, but was otherwise going to live.

We wound up at some bar a mile farther along the narrow country road.  With what was left of my brains, pickled as they were in gardenia and musk, I wondered if the bar was where McBartle was headed for when he took that last wrong unbraked turn.

Haven’s Inn
looked like my idea of where Hansel and Gretel wound up.  I don’t know what it looked like to Mrs. Willingford, but she was obviously no stranger there.  We were escorted by the owner himself directly to a booth by a big back window, one that showed us a lot more trees.  There was a glint of blue shining off in the distance.

“Lake,” said the owner, a tall thin number with more teeth than I was used to in one mouth.  “Not
that
lake.”

For a minute, I didn’t catch on.  Which he noticed.

“Not the lake where the jock got his.”

“Oh, right.”

“
That
lake is near the track. 
This
lake has cabins.”

I didn’t need another word to know Mrs. Willingford knew as much about the cabins back through the trees as the owner did.  No doubt she spent more time in one or the other of them than he ever would.

The moment he’d left with our order—I should say hers, since she’d ordered sidecars for both of us—she reached over with both hands to hold just one of mine.  I didn’t move.  It didn’t seem polite.  Besides, my brains were still down around my groin somewhere.  “You have to stop calling me Mrs. Willingford.”

“I like Mrs. Willing… ford.  It suits you.”

She threw back her head and laughed.  I had to give it to her.  Her long white throat was as good looking as the rest of her.  And her laughter was infectious.  It was all I could do not to laugh along.  It helped that one of us didn’t know what we’d be laughing about.  She lowered her head, looked me right in the eye, and said, “I want you to call me something else.”

“Far as I’ve heard, no one calls you something else.  Except maybe Mr. Willingford.  If I were Mr. Willingford, I’d think twice about even calling you Mrs.”

Just about to do the laughing routine again, she changed her mind.  She even let go of my hand.  “I wonder if this is a mistake.”

“Probably.”

“I’m not used to men with brains.”

“Believe me, if I had brains, I wouldn’t be here.”

“I find that insulting.”

“I find it embarrassing.  A man likes to think he’s in control.”

“And you’re not?”

“Not in the slightest.”

She put her hands back on my mine again.  I hadn’t moved it.  Not even when the sidecars arrived.  “I didn’t expect you to be cute.”

I’d heard a line like that line before.  In a movie without Mary Astor.  It’d been addressed to Bogie by the fruitcake half of one of two sisters, the half who turned out to be a killer.  Did I think Mrs. Willingford was a killer?  Certainly.  But not the kind that left dead bodies—just dead hearts.

“What did you expect?”

“From a lowly shamus?”

Interesting.  Like I knew this and that about her, she knew this and that about me.  I’ll bet she also knew who’d hired me and why.  I’d even make bet she was one of those who did the hiring.  Her or her hubby or both.  “Even a lowly shamus has standards.”

She looked like she wasn’t sure if she was offended—again.  While she was working that out, I sipped at my sidecar (whoa, Mrs. Willingford must be the owner’s best customer, no stinting on the cognac), and had a look at the rest of
Haven’s Inn
.  The part I liked best was the lack of dead deer heads glued to the pine walls.  Not even a moose over the huge stone fireplace.  What I liked even better was the friendly face grinning at me from a barstool.

Paul Jarrett was not only a hard working jockeys’ agent as well as one of the funniest guys I ever knew, plus about the best looking, he was also an alumni of my old alma mater, the Staten Island Home for Children.

If anyone was going to break Mrs. Willingford’s spell, it was Jarrett—even wearing a Hawaiian shirt.  The shirt was purple and covered with enormous yellow flowers.  No one but Paul would wear it.  No one but Paul had the gumption.  Or the bad taste.  Whichever.

“You keep chewing on that until I get back,” I told her, “I can’t miss this.”

Chapter 14

First thing Paul said to me, after the bear hug (he’d been a strong kid though only an inch or so taller than me; he was now a strong guy, not an ounce of fat on him, solid muscle—practically lifted me off my feet), was, “Heard about Mister.  Not surprised in the least.  But sorry to hear about your mom.  That was bad.  Real bad.”

“I’ve filed it, Paul.  Way down, deep as it goes.”

“Understood.”

I turned my glass round and round in my hands.  “And there we were, thinking the words ‘Staten Island’ and ‘murder’ didn’t go together.”

Paul stared at me.  “You kiddin’, kiddo?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Well, think again.  You ever hear of Albert Fish?”

“
The
Albert Fish?  The Brooklyn Vampire?  The Gray Man who killed and tortured who knows how many children and ate their—”

“Well I ain’t talkin’ about my Mom’s pet guppy.  And you’re all grown up now.  You can say ‘butts.’”

Once again, he’d made me smile, not that Fish was funny.  But Paul just had that way about him.  “OK, go on.  Tell me about how the island and Albert Fish go together.”

Paul leaned closer over the table.  He used to do that exact same thing after lights were out and he’d tell us all ghost stories.  He could tell a story, any story, so well we’d all spend hours shivering under our meager covers.  “Once they finally caught him, ’35 I think it was, he boasted he’d killed or raped or tortured over a hundred little kids.  And one of ‘em was a poor little eight year old boy he’d seen playin’ on his front porch in Port Richmond.”

“Our Port Richmond!”

“The very one.  They found the kid later in the woods strangled with his own suspenders.  That was in ’24 or ’25.”

“Seriously?”

“The police sure thought so and it’s a safe bet that Francis X. McDonnell’s mom and dad thought so.”

“If I’m so smart, how come I didn’t know that?”

“Some of us knew some things when we were kids, and some of us knew other things.  Mister told me about Fish.”

“Why the hell would he tell you that?”

“To scare me?  To keep me in line.  Who knows about Mister?  He could surprise a kid.  He sure surprised you.”

“That he did.”

Paul peeked over my shoulder.  “As for me, I
am
surprised about Mrs. Willingford over there.”

“What?  I’m not good enough for her?”

“Too good.  Be careful.  She gets her nose out of joint, guys like us get other stuff out of joint.”

“Point taken.  Which means I can’t hang around here too long.  Look.  I’m staying at the Pascal House on Case Street.”

“Pink suits you.”

I let that one go right on by.  “You got some time to come round and talk over old times?”

“You bet.  Am I hearing you got an actual case?”

“Amazingly enough, yes.”

“I’ll come tonight.  You can tell me about it.”

“Eight o’clock?”

“Eight it is.  That’s if you can escape the clutches of the Joker’s wild card.”

I snuck a look.  Mrs. Willingford was inspecting her make-up in a small blue enameled compact.  A smaller pink tongue licked something off her painted lips.  I remembered something I’d only been reading a few days back.  Something out of
The Bride Wore Black
.  “…those ice-cold eyes, that kissable mouth.”

I said: “She’s not Lombard.”

“Nobody is.”

I gave him one of my best smiles.  He caught it and gave it back.

“That shirt suits you.”

He looked down at it and laughed.  “Couldn’t resist it.  Bet you wish you had one.”

“You’d lose.”

I’d always liked Paul.  Admired him.  Followed him around in the woods playing Cowboys and Indians.  Cribbed from his math papers.  He was better at that stuff than me.  Though I beat him all hollow at reading.  He wasn’t much of a reader.  When it came to books, I was school champ.  But when it came to figuring out things to get up to in the middle of the night, Paul was our man.  That he ended up a jocks’ agent was a bit of a stumper.  Being locked up in the Kid’s Joint, it was hard for us kids to learn any kind of skill.  So where he’d caught the racing bug had to be from me.  I figured he was an agent for the same reason I was a PI.  Both due to our being too big to be jockeys.  We were like the guys who had a lot of friends who were musicians, but we couldn’t play anything, not even a kazoo, and we couldn’t sing a note, so we ended up managing the band.  I thought he was that guy just like I’d of been that guy if I tried to stick with racing.

Jarrett managed jocks.  The best I could do to stay close to the game was place bets on the ponies.

Me, I first heard the horses run on the radio.  One thing I was always really good at was listening to Mister’s radio.  He’d be smoking those cigars Flo hated out back in that shack he had all to himself stuck sort of sideways onto the old six car garage and I’d be right outside one of the windows, the one he could never get all the way closed.  Wasn’t just me either.  Lino Morelli and Paul Jarrett and a few others killed ourselves trying to keep quiet so we could listen to Jack Benny or Fred Allen or Burns and Allen—which wasn’t easy, believe you me.  More than once Paul or Lino or whoever had to stuff their shirts in their mouths to stifle the laughter.  But when Mister switched the dial to the horse races everyone would drift off but me.  Paul would listen for a race or three, but then he was gone too.  There was something about the sound of the race caller, the noise from the crowd, the rhythm of pounding hooves.  From the first, I was there, right there, heart beating along, and I wanted that world as much as, later, I wanted Bogie’s world—before the war came along and made all those worlds even more precious knowing how easy they could all blow away.  I must of heard every race Seabiscuit ever ran.  It was Seabiscuit got me into this fix.  I might have a lot more money stuffed in a sweet little bank account if I hadn’t found racetracks.  But probably not.  I would of found some other way to get rid of it.  Money just didn’t seem to stick to me.

Mrs. Willingford was steaming when I got back to our table.  Good thing she was too proud to do more than show it.  But she did have a word to say about Paul.

“Joker likes that guy, but I never let him hire his jockeys.”

“Why not?”

She started to open her mouth, started to say something.  Then she closed it, turning her lips to thin strips of red rubber.  At the same moment, I think we both knew she’d made a mistake.  She couldn’t tell me why not.  So I knew why.  The look on her face gave the whole game away.  Because Paul may or may not have spent a little time in those cabins by the lake, but he’d never spent any with her.  And from the look on mine, she knew I knew.  She also knew she wouldn’t be spending any with me.  It must of shown in my eyes.  Or the way my ears flapped.  Or the way I couldn’t finish the sidecar she’d ordered and paid for.  Between her highhanded assumption I was not much more than a stable hand and my little chat with Paul, Mrs. Willingford’s spell had faded dead away.  Well, not completely, I admit that, but completely enough.  It can happen that way and I was glad it did.  The way she didn’t look at the cabins, the way I felt I’d better get back to her table—or else, the laugh in Paul’s voice when he implied I might have some trouble escaping Mrs. Willingford, all that and more told me I was just about to be somebody’s pet poodle.  One who could wind up in a pound.

Not Sam Russo, Staten Island’s finest PI, not by a long shot.  I gently pushed my barely touched drink over to her side of the table.  “You probably need this more than me.”

Mrs. Willingford stood up so fast the table thought about going over.  I grabbed both glasses to keep them smashing to the floor.

“I was mistaken.  Good luck finding your own way back to town.”

And she was out the door, had her zippy little roadster all revved up, and was gone in a fishtail of dust.

I looked at Paul and he looked at me and I had the best laugh I’d had in years.

It was about the last real honest laugh I’d have in Saratoga Springs.  But I didn’t know that at the time.

“Close call, pal,” said Paul.  “You’ll have to come with me.  ‘Bout time I got back to work.”

As we were walking out the door of the witch’s house—what with this and that and the other, for me, Hansel and Gretel would always live in an oven at
Haven’s Inn
—Paul called back over his shoulder.  “Put it on my tab, right, Ray?”

It could of been my imagination, but Ray’s response of “OK” didn’t sound too excited.  Like most barkeeps, he’d probably heard it too often from too many people.  I wasn’t surprised he was hearing it from Paul Jarrett.  Paul was forever borrowing what little we had when we were kids.  Sometimes we even got it back.  With interest.  Paul was the only kid I ever knew could calculate a rate of interest.  Me and Lino were sure he’d go into banking.

Like Dillinger did.

Chapter 15

After all the reading I’d done in my pink room in its pink hotel, I should of known to play my cards close to my chest.  Marlowe did, Poirot did, Spade did.  But this was Paul Jarrett, a kid I’d known since I could remember knowing anyone, and I needed someone to talk to.  So all the way back to town, I talked.  Or listened.  The listening turned out pretty well.  For one thing I learned why the track would hire a wet sock like the kewpie doll ex-cop for security.  From Paul, I learned the genius’ name was Carroll Goose.  I wish I was kidding, but I’m not.