Blood Sport by Dick Francis
I perched on the window sill and looked down sideways into the brightly lit car park. Coloured bulbs on the face of the motel raised rainbow shimmers on glossy hard tops and struck me as a deeply melancholy commentary on human achievement. Yet I wouldn’t have wanted to live without cars or electricity … if I’d wanted to live. My room was only two floors up, with none above. Too near the ground. I’d known of a woman who’d jumped from five and bungled it. A gun was better …
‘Well?’ Walt said insistently.
‘I’m sorry …?’ I said vaguely, turning my head back to him.
‘Where do we look?’
‘Oh … yes.’
‘On the ranch?’
‘Very doubtful, don’t you think? They must know that’s the first place we’d think of.’
‘There’s a lot of land there,’ he said. ‘And a lot of horses to lose them in.’
I shook my head. ‘They’d have to keep them in a paddock close to the house. All the rest of the ranch is well named Rocky Mountains, and they couldn’t turn them loose for fear of them breaking a leg. We’d better check, though.’ I stared unseeingly at the carpet. ‘But I guess the horses are with Matt. Offen is at Orpheus Farm, and Yola is tied to the ranch seeing to about thirty guests, so where’s Matt?’
‘Where indeed,’ Walt said gloomily.
‘He and Yola don’t spend their winters on the ranch because the valley is blocked by snow. She told me that they go south … On one of those telephone calls she told Offen they couldn’t keep Chrysalis at a place called Pitts, because it wasn’t suitable. But that was when they didn’t know we were after them … when it wasn’t an emergency.’
‘So somewhere south of the Tetons we find this Pitts, and Matt and the horses will be waiting for us?’
‘Yeah.’ I smiled briefly. ‘Sounds too easy.’
‘Easy!’ Walt said.
‘They must leave a forwarding address for mail,’ I pointed out. ‘They live a conventional law-abiding life with a longstanding business to give them obvious legal means of support. There must be dozens of people in Jackson who know their winter address.’
Our Buttress agent could get that, then. First thing in the morning.’
‘Fine.’
Walt levered himself out of the armchair and hesitated.
‘Come along to my room,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bottle.’
I wasn’t sure that I wanted to, but he smiled suddenly, wiping out all resentments, and one didn’t kick that sort of olive branch in the teeth.
‘Be glad to,’ I said.
The smile went deeper and lasted along the passage to his room, which was almost identical to mine. The window looked out on the same cars from a slightly different angle, and he had two armchairs instead of one. There was a bottle of Old Grandad on a round tray with glasses and a water jug, and on his bedside table stood a leather-framed photograph. I picked it up idly while he went to fetch ice from the machine along the passage. Walt with his family. A good-looking woman, a plain girl in her early teens, a thin boy of about ten: all four of them smiling cheerfully into the lens. He came back as I was putting them down.
‘I’m sorry about the picnic,’ I said.
‘Next week will do just as well,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the whole of the summer, I guess.’
We sat in the armchairs, drinking slowly. I didn’t like bourbon much; but that wasn’t the point. He talked casually about the split-level ranch-type house they’d moved into the year before, and how his daughter got along just fine with the folks next door, and how they’d had trouble with the boy’s health, he’d had rheumatic fever …
‘How about your own future, with Buttress Life?’ I asked.
I’ve gotten about as high as I’ll get,’ he said with surprising honesty. ‘There’s only one more step up that I really want, and that’s to chief investigator, claims division, and that’ll come along next year when the present guy retires.’
He poured more drinks, rubbed his thumb slowly over the round fingertips, and said Amy and the kids were asking him for a pool in their back yard, and that Amy’s mother was a problem since Amy’s father died last fall, and that he hadn’t caught a single ball game last season, he’d been that busy …
We sat for more than an hour without mentioning the horses once. He yawned finally and I uncurled myself from the soft chair, putting down the third time empty glass. He said goodnight sleepily with easy friendliness and, for the first time since I’d known him, without tension. Back in my own room, undressing, I wondered how long it would last. Until I made the next unpopular suggestion, I supposed. I didn’t know whether to envy him his enclosing domesticity or to feel stifled by it. I did know that I liked him both as a man and as a working companion, moods and all.
The Buttress Life agent in Jackson came through with the Clives’ winter address within twenty minutes of Walt calling him: 40159 Pittsville Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada.
I remembered Yola’s smile at the thought of winter. Las Vegas explained it. Yola liked to gamble.
‘What now?’ Walt said.
‘I’ll go on out there and take a look.’
‘Alone?’ There was a certain amount of anxiety in his voice, which I interpreted as a desire not to be left in Santa Barbara with Eunice.
‘We need you here,’ I said placatingly. ‘And don’t tell her where I’ve gone.’
He gave me a sharp glance. ‘I won’t.’
We drove in the hired car out to Orpheus Farm, where I showed him where I’d hidden the radio tape recorder between three rocks, with its aerial sticking up through the branches of a scrubby bush. The nearest neatly railed paddock was only feet away; the house, about four hundred yards. We picked up the radio and parked a short distance down the road.
‘Supposing he sees us?’ Walt said, watching me wind back the reel.
‘He’ll only think we’re watching the farm routine, to know when to pinch Moviemaker. The radio will pick up the bug in his office from at least a quarter mile, but it gets fainter after that. It has to work on the air-vibration system. Not such a good amplification as electricity. Do you ever use them?’
‘Bugs?’ He shook his head. ‘Not often. Cameras with telescopic lenses are better. Catch the claimants walking around on their paralysed legs.’ Satisfaction echoed in his voice. Like me, a rogue hunter to the bone.
Smiling to myself, I switched on. Cutting in and out, Culham James’ various conversations filled three-quarters of an hour of tape time, but nothing he said was of any use to us. I rewound the reels again and we put the radio in among the rocks, Walt agreeing that he would come back after sunset and listen to the day’s take.
He drove me then to the Los Angeles airport, where I hopped on a plane to Las Vegas, arriving mid afternoon. The desert hit like a gust from an oven when they opened the plane doors, and from a nearby building the usual lighted numbers proclaimed to the populace that in the shade, if they could find any, it would be 108.
The air-conditioning at the edge of town motel I booked into was turning itself inside out under the strain, and the Hertz man who presently took my money admitted that this was a little old heatwave, sure thing. Had to expect them, in July. The inconspicuous Pontiac he hired me was this time, however, a cooled one. I drove around for a while to get my bearings, and then took a look at Pittsville Boulevard.
The high numbers ran two miles out of the town, expensive looking homes along a metalled road with the desert crowding in at their rear. The Clives’ house was flanked by others on both sides: not near enough to touch, but too near for the invisible stabling of stallions. The place on Pitts wasn’t suitable, as Yola had said.
It was low and white, with a flat roof and a frame of palms and orange trees. Blinds and insect screens blanked out the windows, and the grass on each side of the drive was a pale dry biscuit colour, not green watered like its neighbours. I stopped the car in the roadway opposite and looked it over. Not a leaf moved under the bleaching sun. Ten minutes tic
A mile past the Clives’ house the metal surface ended, and the road ran out across the desert as a dusty streak of gravel. I turned the car and went back, thinking. The comparative dead-endedness of Pittsville Boulevard explained the almost total lack of traffic past the Clives’, and also meant that I couldn’t drive past there very often without becoming conspicuous to the neighbours. Keeping a check on an apparently empty house, however, wasn’t going to get me much farther.
About five houses along on the town side of the Clives’ there was another with water-starved brownish grass. Taking a chance that these inhabitants too were away from home I rolled the Pontiac purposefully into the palm-edged driveway and stopped outside the front door. Ready with some of Walt’s insurance patter, I leant on the bell and gave it a full twenty seconds. No one came. Everything was hot, quiet, and still.
Strolling, I walked down the drive and on to the road. Looking back one couldn’t see the car for bushes. Satisfied, I made the trip along to the Clives’, trying to look as if walking were a normal occupation in a Nevada heatwave: and by the time I got there it was quite clear why it wasn’t. The sweat burnt dry on my skin before it had a chance to form into beads.
Reconnoitring the Clives’ place took an hour. The house was shut up tight, obviously empty. The window screens were all securely fastened, and all the glass was covered on the inside with blinds, so that one couldn’t see in. The doors were fastened with safe-deposit locks. The Clives had made casual breaking-in by vagrants nearly impossible.
With caution I eased round the acre of land behind the house. Palms and bushes screened a trefoil-shaped pool from being overlooked too openly by the neighbours, but from several places it was possible to see the pools of the flanking houses some sixty yards away. Beside one of them, reminding me of Eunice, a woman in two scraps of yellow cloth lay motionless on a long chair, inviting heatstroke and adding to a depth of suntan which would have got her reclassified in South Africa. I moved even more quietly after I’d seen her, but she didn’t stir.
The rear boundary of the Clives’ land was marked by large stones painted white, with desert scrub on the far side and low growing citrus bushes on the near. From their windows, brother and sister had a wide view of hills and wilderness; two miles down the road neon lights went twenty rounds with the midday sun, and the crash of fruit machines out-decibelled the traffic. I wondered idly how much of Uncle Bark’s illicit proceeds found their way into Matt and Yola’s pocket, and how much from there vanished into the greedy slot mouths in Vegas. The stud fees went around and around and only Buttress Life were the losers.
On the way back to the motel I stopped at every supermarket I came to, and bought two three-pound bags of flour from each.
From a hardware store I acquired a short ladder, white overalls, white peaked cotton cap, brushes, and a half-gallon can of bright yellow instant drying paint.
Chapter Fourteen
Walt listened to what I had to say in a silence which hummed down the telephone wires more eloquently than hysterics.
‘You’re crazy,’ he said at last, sounding as if he seriously meant it.
‘Can you think of anything else?’
After a long pause he said grudgingly, ‘Nothing quicker.’
‘Right, then. I’ll fix everything this end and give you a call in the morning. And let’s hope it works.’
‘What if it doesn’t?’
‘Have to try something else.’
Walt grunted gloomily and hung up.
I spent an hour at the airport, and then went back to the motel. The evening oozed away. I played some roulette without enthusiasm and lost backing black against a sequence of fourteen reds; and I ate a good steak listening to a girl singer whose voice was secondary to her frontage. After that I lay on my bed for a while and smoked, and kept the blues from crowding in too close by thinking exclusively of the job in hand.
At two I dressed in a dark green cotton shirt and black jeans, went downstairs, stepped into the car, and drove along Pittsville Boulevard to 40159. The town itself was wide awake and rocking: the houses along Pitts were dark and silent. With dimmed lights I rolled quietly into the Clives’ driveway and stacked the bags of flour close to the front door. Then, holding the car door but not shutting it, I eased the Pontiac back along the road and parked it in the driveway of the same empty house that I had used in the afternoon. Again, not wanting any neighbours to remember hearing a car door slam, I left it ajar, and walked back to the Clives’.
The night was warm and gentle with a deep navy blue sky and stars like fluorescent polka-dots. Two miles away the blazing lights of Vegas raised a bell-shaped orange glow, but among the palms and orange trees the shadows were thick and black and comfortably concealing.
The Clives’ was only the latest of a great many houses I had broken into. My short cuts to truth were scandalous by all public and private standards, and Keeble rarely asked how I got my information: and as I would have had the press, the police, and public opinion all balefully against me if I’d ever been caught, A gag on eggs would have been clumsy in comparison. Law-abiding citizens never knew I’d been their guest. For the Clives’, however, I had alternative plans.
Wearing surgeons’ rubber gloves, and with my shoes stuck through my belt to the left of the Luger, I worked on the lock on the back door, and after not too bad a time, considering its complexity, the two sets of tumblers fell sweetly over, and the house was mine.
Inside, the air was stale and still, and dust sheets draped the furniture, looking like pale boulders in the dim light of my torch. The rear door opened into a spacious hall which led straight through to the front. I walked across, unbolted and unfastened the front door, brought in the bags of flour, and left the door ajar, like the one I’d come in by: the value of always being prepared for instant flight had been drummed into me by an ex-burglar who had once neglected it.
I went into the bedrooms. Large separate single bedded rooms again for Yola and Matt, and a guest bedroom, with a bathroom to each. I pulled all the covers off the furniture and flung on to the floor everything they had left in the chests and closets. Over the resulting mess in each room I shook six pounds of self-raising flour.
In the kitchen I emptied on to the floor a packet of soap flakes, a packet of rice, some cereal and four pounds of brown sugar, which were all lying handy in the pantry. I unlocked the pantry window and unfastened its outer screen, leaving both open: and as an afterthought tumbled some canned fruit off the shelf beneath it, to show that the intruder had come in that way.
In the spacious living room I again removed all the covers, put every ornament and small loose object in a heap on the floor, and flung flour over them and around the whole place. A smaller cosier room, facing the road, contained a desk full of papers, two large bookshelves, and a well-filled sewing box. Together the jumbled contents made a splendid ankle-deep mess on the floor. Pounds of flour fell over everything like snow.
It was while I was tearing open the last bag, ready for a final scatter round the hall, that I heard the distant police siren. Frozen, I doubted for a second that it was for me: then considered that either a too watchful neighbour had seen my torch in chinks through the blinds, or else that the Clives’ complicated locks weren’t their only protection, and that they had a direct burglar alarm line to the police.
Without wasting much time I shut the front door and heard the lock engage. Emptied the last bag of flour over a plastic flower arrangement on a table in the hall. Flitted through the rear door and clicked it shut behind me. Thrust the torch into my pocket.
The siren wailed and stopped at the front of the house. Doors slammed, men shouted, boots ran. Someone with a megaphone urged me to come out with my hands on my head. The edges of the house wer
With bare seconds to spare before the first uniform appeared in silhouette around the corner I reached the nearest of the bushes flanking the trefoil pool and dived behind it. Being quiet enough was no problem, as the law were making an intimidating clatter all around the house, but staying invisible was more difficult. They brought another spotlight round to the rear and shone it full on the house. The shuttered windows stared blindly and unhelpfully back, reflecting the glare almost as far as my cover.
Lights appeared in neighbouring houses, and heads stuck like black knobs out of the windows. I eased gently away past a few more bushes and thought I was still a great deal too close to a spell in the zoo.
A shout from the side of the house indicated that they had found the open pantry window. Four troopers altogether, I judged. All armed to the teeth. I grimaced in the darkness and moved another few yards with less caution. I wasn’t going to give them any forefinger exercise if I could help it, but the time was running out.
They were brave enough. One or more climbed in through the window and switched on the light. I more rapidly crossed the last stretch of garden, stepped over the white-painted stones, and headed straight out into the desert.
Five steps convinced me I needed to put my shoes on. Ten steps had me certain that the only vegetation was prickly pear, and close-ranked, at that. I should imagine I impaled myself on every one in the neighbourhood.
Back at the Clives’ they had temporarily stopped oohing and ahing over the mess, and were searching the grounds. Lights moved round the next door houses as well. If they went five along and found the car, things would get very awkward indeed.
I had meant to be safely back in my motel long before I called the police early in the morning to say that I was a civic minded neighbour who had just seen a prowler coming out of the Clives’…
When they showed signs of shining the light out towards where I was stumbling along I lay down flat on the ground and listened to the thud of my heart. The spotlight beam flickered palely over the low scrubby bushes and outlined the flat spiky plates of the prickly pears, but in the shifting uneven shadows that they threw, I reckoned I must be just another clump. There was a good deal of shouted discussion about whether it was necessary to take a look-see in the desert, but to my relief no one came farther out than the boundary stones. Gradually, frustrated, the dazzle and commotion retreated and died away.