Blood Sport Read online

He drove a mile and then said, ‘And now you’re so good at it that they beat you up. What do you think about things when that happens?’

  ‘That there’s a big fish coming down the pipeline and they want me out of the way.’

  ‘So you look all the harder.’ A statement, not a question.

  ‘You might say so. Yes.’

  ‘They’ll kill you one of these days.’

  I didn’t answer. Walt flicked a glance sideways and sighed. ‘I suppose you don’t care.’

  ‘There are a lot of others in the department.’

  Walt drove into Santa Barbara without another word, where we joined Eunice and Lynnie in the terrace restaurant for lunch. They had, they said, bought that morning the big bright dangling earrings which swung with every turn of their heads. Lynnie’s were scarlet, Eunice’s acid green; otherwise identical. Still friends, I thought in some relief. Still in harmony. Whether Eunice would do a small chore for me was, however, another matter.

  We had clam chowder with shrimp to follow, and Lynnie said with all this seafood she’d be growing fins. During coffee, when she stood up restlessly and said she was going down to the sea, it was Walt, after a pause, who said he would go with her. She looked at me questioningly, worriedly, and then turned and walked quickly off with him, talking a good deal too brightly.

  ‘Don’t you hurt that child,’ Eunice said fiercely.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘You’re too bloody attractive.’

  ‘Yeah. Charm the birds off the trees,’ I agreed sardonically. ‘Little wives spill their husbands’ secrets into my bloody attractive ears.’

  She looked shocked. Quite a change, I thought, from dishing it out.

  ‘You mean you … use it?’

  ‘Like a can opener. And as a catalyst. Who doesn’t? Salesmen, politicians, actors, women, all using it like mad.’

  ‘For God’s sake …’ Her voice was faint, but she was also laughing.

  ‘But not on Lynnie,’ I added wryly.

  ‘You didn’t need to, I guess. Dragging Dave out of the Thames was a lot more effective.’

  I watched Lynnie’s and Walt’s backs as they reached the tide line.

  ‘So that’s why …?’ I said, almost to myself.

  ‘Hero worship,’ Eunice said with barbs. ‘Does it give you a kick?’

  ‘Like a mule’s in the stomach …’

  She laughed. ‘It’s not that you’re so madly handsome in any obvious way.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed with truth, ‘I’m not.’

  She looked as if she were going to say more and then thought better of it. I jumped straight in while her mind was still half flirting, knowing, and despising the knowledge, that in that mood she was more likely to do what I asked.

  ‘Has Lynnie still got those photographs of me?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said sarcastically. ‘In a fire, she’d save them first.’

  ‘I’d like Culham James Offen to see them.’

  ‘You’d like what? What are you talking about?’

  ‘About you and Lynnie driving over to pay a neighbourly call on Culham James this afternoon, and easily, dearest Eunice, you could tell him about me pulling Dave out of the Thames, and Lynnie could show him my photograph. Especially the one of me sitting by a table outside a pub. That group of all of us.’

  She gaped and gasped, and then started thinking.

  ‘You really can’t be as pleased with yourself as all that … so for God’s sake, why?’

  ‘An experiment.’

  ‘That’s no answer.’

  ‘Earning my keep at The Vacationer.’

  A look of disgust turned down her mouth.

  ‘Finding that bloody horse?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘You don’t mean … surely you can’t mean that Offen has anything to do with it?’

  ‘I’d like to make sure he hasn’t.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, I guess that’s not much to ask. Sure. I’ll get Lynnie to come with me.’

  ‘And tell him I’m looking for Allyx.’

  She gave me a straight assessing stare, and said, ‘How about Chrysalis?’

  ‘Whatever you like. Say that Dave employed me to get him back.’

  ‘I don’t know why I’m doing it.’

  ‘More interesting than golf?’ I suggested.

  ‘Is it a game?’ She was sceptical.

  ‘Well … like hunting bears,’ I smiled.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She nodded sardonically. ‘A sport.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  I parked a hired car in some scrub off the road leading to Orpheus Farm, and smoked a rare cigarette. The fierce afternoon sun roasted through the metal roof and a water mirage hung in a streak over the dry road. A day for lizards to look for shade. They’d run out of air-conditioned heaps at the hire firms: I’d had to take one of those old fashioned jobs where you breathed fresh air by opening the window. The air in question was as fresh as last week’s news and as hot as tomorrow’s.

  At five past four Eunice and Lynnie passed unseeingly across my bows, heading back to Santa Barbara. I finished the cigarette and stubbed it out carefully in the flaked chromium ashtray. I looked at my fingernails for ten minutes. No special inspiration. At half past four I started the car, pointed its nose towards Orpheus, and went to call on Uncle Bark.

  This time I drove straight up to the house and rang the ornate bell. A houseboy came: all on the same scale as at Jeff Roots’s. When he went to find Culham James I followed quietly on his heels, so my host, even if he had meant to, had no chance to say he was out. The houseboy opened the door on to a square comfortable office–sitting room and Culham James was revealed sitting at his desk with a green telephone receiver to his ear.

  He gave the houseboy and myself a murderous glare between us which changed to reasonable affability once he’d got control of it. ‘I’ll call you later,’ he said to the telephone. ‘A Mr Hawkins has this minute arrived … that’s right … later then.’ He put down the receiver and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Did you miss something this morning?’ he asked.

  ‘No … should we have done?’

  He shook his head in mild annoyance. ‘I am merely asking the purpose of this return visit.’

  ‘My colleague and I wanted answers to one or two extra questions about the precautions you take against fire, especially as regards those two exceptionally valuable stallions … er … Moviemaker and Centigrade.’

  Under his suntanned face, behind the white bracket of eyebrows, Culham James Offen was beginning to enjoy a huge joke. It fizzed like soda water in his pale blue eyes and bubbled in his throat. He was even having difficulty in preventing himself from sharing it: but after a struggle he had it nailed down under hatches, and calm with a touch of severity took over. We went solemnly through the farce of fire precautions, me leaning on his desk and checking off Walt’s solid sounding inventions one by one. They mostly had to deal with the amount of supervision in the stallions’ barn at night. Whether there were any regular patrols, any dogs loose on watch, any photoelectric apparatus for detecting opacity, such as heavy smoke?

  Offen cleared his throat and answered no to the lot.

  ‘We have the extremely expensive and reliable sprinkler system which you saw this morning,’ he pointed out. ‘It is thoroughly tested every three months, as I told you earlier.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you, then. I guess that’s all.’ I shut my notebook. ‘You’ve been most helpful, Mr Offen.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he said. The joke rumbled in his voice, but was coloured now with unmistakable malice. High time to go, I thought: and went.

  When I got back to The Vacationer some while later I found Eunice and Lynnie and Walt sitting in a glum row behind empty glasses. I flopped into a chair opposite them and said, ‘Why the mass depression?’

  ‘You’re late,’ Walt said.

  ‘I told you not to wait dinner.’ I caught a passing waiter on the wing and arra
nged refills all round.

  ‘We were considering a search party,’ Eunice said.

  I looked at all three of them more carefully. ‘You’ve been comparing notes,’ I said resignedly.

  ‘I think it’s terrible of you … wicked,’ Lynnie burst out. ‘To have made me go and deliberately … deliberately… put you in such frightful danger.’

  ‘Lynnie stop it. I wasn’t in any danger … here I am, aren’t I?’

  ‘But Walt said …’

  ‘Walt needs his brains seen to.’

  Walt glared and compressed his mouth into a rigid line. ‘You didn’t tell me you’d arranged for Offen to know you were the man who took Chrysalis. And you didn’t tell me the Clives had tried to kill Mr Teller.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell me,’ Eunice added, ‘that the couple in the background of the photograph Lynnie showed Culham Offen had tried to kill you too.’

  ‘Or you’d never have let Lynnie show it to him?’

  ‘No,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Just as well I didn’t.’

  ‘And you deliberately misled me by saying you wanted to clear Offen. It wasn’t true.’

  ‘Er … no. But I did want you to behave naturally with him. And anyway, why all the fuss?’

  ‘We thought …’ Lynnie said in a subdued voice. ‘We almost thought … as you were gone so long … that you … that they …’

  ‘They didn’t,’ I pointed out obviously, smiling.

  ‘But won’t you please explain why?’ Lynnie said. ‘Why did you want me to give you away like that?’

  ‘Several reasons. One was to make Dave safer.’

  ‘I don’t see how,’ Eunice objected.

  ‘By letting Offen know, and through him the Clives, that we could prove the Clives were in England and beside the Thames on the day of Dave’s accident. Murder by accident is only a good idea as long as there’s no apparent motive and the murderers have no apparent connection with the victim. We’ve shown them that we know their motive and their connection, and they must now be aware that if Dave were killed they would be the first suspects. This makes it less likely they will try again.’

  ‘Crikey,’ Lynnie said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘When Walt and I went to Orpheus Farm this morning saying we were making a survey for new fire precautions, Offen wasn’t worried. He didn’t know me from Adam then, of course. It was before you showed him my photograph. But he showed no anxiety at all about two strangers turning up on a pretext that he didn’t even bother to check. None of the edginess one might have expected if he’d just had one stolen horse pinched back from him, and was in possession of two others standing in his barn. I didn’t like it. It didn’t feel right.’

  ‘He hasn’t got them,’ Eunice said with relief. ‘I was sure it couldn’t possibly be right that Culham Offen would steal horses. I mean, he’s respected.’

  Walt and I exchanged a glance of barely perceptible amusement. To be respected was the best cover in the world for fraud. Fraud, in fact, could rarely exist without it.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘I thought it would be helpful if he knew for certain that I was especially interested in Moviemaker and Centigrade, and that I wasn’t in fire insurance, but was the man he had to thank for losing Chrysalis. When I went back, after you two had left, he still wasn’t worried. On the contrary, he was enjoying the situation. It amused him enormously to think that I believed I was fooling him. I asked him a lot of questions about the security precautions surrounding Moviemaker and Centigrade, and he was still completely untroubled. So,’ I paused, ‘it’s now quite clear that the two horses standing in his barn called Moviemaker and Centigrade are in actual fact exactly what he says: Moviemaker and Centigrade. He isn’t worried about snoopers, he isn’t worried about me making clumsy preparations to steal them. He must therefore be confident that any legal proceedings will prove the horses to be the ones he says they are. He’d ambush me if I tried to steal them, and have me in real deep trouble, which would be to him some small compensation for losing Chrysalis.’

  Walt nodded briefly.

  Eunice said obstinately. ‘I think it only proves that you’re barking up the wrong damn tree. He isn’t worried simply because he isn’t guilty of anything.’

  ‘You liked him?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was bloody sweet.’

  Lynnie nodded. ‘I thought so too.’

  ‘What did he say when you showed him the photographs?’

  ‘He just glanced at them at first,’ Lynnie said. ‘And then he took them over to the window. And then he asked me who had taken them, and where, and when. So I told him about the day on the river, and about you and Dave going under the weir …’

  At the side of my vision Eunice gave me an I-told-you-so smile.

  ‘… and he said one or two nice things about you,’ Lynnie finished. ‘So I told him you came over here to look for Chrysalis, and somehow or other you found him.’

  ‘He asked where you found him,’ Eunice nodded. ‘But we didn’t know. I said you were now trying to find Allyx, and it certainly didn’t worry him. I’m sure you must be wrong.’

  I smiled at her. She didn’t want the horse found, and as an ally she was as reliable as thin ice on a sunny day. I didn’t intend to tell her anything in future which I wasn’t prepared to have passed on to Offen. Like most law abiding citizens she had not grasped that a criminal mind didn’t show, that an endearing social manner could co-exist with fraud and murder. ‘Such a nice man,’ the neighbours say in bewilderment, when Mr Smith’s garden is found to be clogged with throttled ladies. ‘Always so pleasant.’

  Eunice, propelled by a strong semi-conscious wish for him not to have Allyx, might tell Offen anything, simply because she couldn’t visualize a ‘sweet’ man being deadly. She might also tell him anything propelled by the same impulse which had made her point a gun at me.

  ‘Let’s have dinner,’ I suggested; and Eunice and Lynnie went away to freshen up.

  Walt looked at me thoughtfully, then raised his eyebrows.

  I nodded. ‘I put a bug on the underside of his desk, two feet from the telephone. I was late back because I was listening. He called Yola and told her about my visit but there wasn’t much else. I left the set hidden, and came back here.’

  ‘Do you mean it, that those two horses really are Moviemaker and Centigrade?’

  ‘Sure. He bought them, remember. Openly. At bloodstock sales. And obviously he’s kept them. I suppose he never could be certain that some ex-owner would turn up for a visit. Those horses will have been tattooed inside their mouths with an identity number when they first began to race. They have to be, over here, don’t they? It’ll be quite easy to establish that they’re the right two.’

  ‘You don’t think Mrs Teller’s right … that he never had Showman and Allyx after all?’

  ‘I’ll play you his call to Yola some time. He had the foresight to whisk those horses away from Orpheus when we got Chrysalis. He was more or less waiting for something like our visit this morning. No flies on Culham James, I’m afraid. Er … Walt, did you give Eunice and Lynnie any details about our jaunt in the Tetons?’

  He looked uncomfortable. ‘I was annoyed with you.’

  ‘What exactly did you tell them?’

  ‘Not much. I was horrified at Lynnie having shown Offen that picture of the Clives, and when Mrs Teller said you’d planned it I said you must be mad, they’d tried to kill you once already.’

  ‘And you told them how?’

  He nodded, not meeting my eyes.

  ‘Did you tell them about the bugs and the wireless set?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s important, Walt.’

  He looked up. ‘I didn’t mention them.’

  I relaxed. ‘How about our mountain walk?’

  ‘No details.’

  ‘Place?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure I mentioned the Tetons.’

  Nothing there that would hurt.

  ‘How much did you say
about Showman and Allyx?’

  ‘I told them that you’d worked out through the stud books that Offen must have them.’

  ‘Did you say the words “Uncle Bark”?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

  I sighed. ‘Walt. Mrs Teller doesn’t want Allyx found any more than she wanted Chrysalis. Let’s not entrust the state of the nation to the Indians.’

  He flushed a little and compressed his mouth. Eunice and Lynnie came back shortly after, and, though we all four had dinner together it proved a taciturn and not over-friendly affair.

  Walt rode up to my room for a conference after the coffee.

  ‘How do we find them?’ he said, coming bluntly to the point and easing himself simultaneously into the only armchair.

  ‘They’ve made us a gift of them, in one way,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘We can send a bunch of lawyers in to query Moviemaker and Centigrade’s identity, and get it established beyond doubt that the two Offen showed us are in fact those two horses. He’ll be keen for them to do it: and once he’s done it, he’ll be stuck with them. We will meanwhile do another little vanishing trick with the other two and start our own identification parade on our ground. Once they are established as Allyx and Showman, Offen cannot possibly claim them back.’

  ‘Two objections,’ Walt said. ‘We don’t know where Allyx and Showman are. And if we find them, why not get lawyers into the act right away? Why go to all the danger and trouble of taking them?’

  ‘Same as Chrysalis,’ I pointed out. ‘The first sign of any real trouble, and they’d be shot. It’s not illegal to kill a horse and whisk it smartly off to the dog food people. And vastly more difficult to identify a dead one. Impossible, I’d almost say, for the degree of certainty we need here.’

  ‘Even if we take them, and establish their identity, and everything goes smoothly, Offen will still be raking in those colossal stud fees of half a million dollars a year, because we’d never be able to prove that for the past ten years Showman has been siring every foal that’s down in the book as Moviemaker’s …’

  I smiled. ‘We’ll do something about that, once we’ve sorted out the rest.’

  ‘Which brings us back to square one,’ Walt said flatly. ‘Where the hell do we start?’