Shadow Roll by Ki Longfellow Read Free Book Online Page B

had not been out earlier with the boys, and from all accounts was up in his room at the Grand Union by 9 p.m.  Hours later, he got up, got dressed, and went out.  He left the hotel at 3:15 a.m. exactly.  The time was noted by the night elevator operator.  A short while later, on a small country road headed north to Glens Falls, his sleek little convertible slammed into a huge sycamore tree.  Both car and driver were write-offs.  There were no skid marks, no other cars on the road, no house nearby, no dead deer, mangled moose, crushed caribou or deranged dog he might have tried to avoid.  There was nothing but a dead jockey.  The police concluded that young McBartle had fallen asleep at the wheel.  Verdict: automobile accident.
    The last death happened only two days before my arrival, which was one day before the guy who knew some guys made a long distance call all the way to Stapleton, Staten Island, to hire me to make sure the police had got it right.
    The third kid was 17, was raised in the stables of one of the flashier Lexington, Kentucky, horse farms, and before he died was running neck and neck with Manny Walker for top honors at Belmont.  Babe Duffy, Manny Walker and Matthew Mark McBartle were all three trying to outride each other at Saratoga’s short meet before each met his “accident.”
    The last, Babe Duffy and his barkless dog, Jane, had hiked out to one of Saratoga’s mineral springs—when the wind was just right, the whole city stank of ‘em—and sat himself down on a nice shiny rock.  The paper assumed he was there for a picnic.  Some picnic, his ham sandwich went down the wrong way, or wouldn’t go down at all, or something, and with Jane helpless beside him, he died of asphyxiation.  Slumped there, his hands clutching his swollen neck, his face the color of a ripe eggplant, a couple of tourists stumbled over them.  It took a trained member of the local pound to get past Duffy’s dog Jane so they could take the body away.
    For the third time, the verdict was accidental death.
    Babe Duffy was the regular rider of Hornet’s Nest, a flashy grey gelding who was on a roll: eight solid wins at three different tracks.  Hornet’s Nest was also a Travers entry.
    All three were young, all three were promising first rate jockeys, all three died within a little over a week of each other during the Saratoga season, all three had mounts in the Travers—and all three were accidents.
    Right.  If that was true, and I had to admit it could be, Lino Morelli understood the Theory of Relativity.
     

Chapter 12
     
    She was everything I thought she’d be.  Tall, sleek, legs that wouldn’t stop, enormous soft eyes that didn’t miss a trick.  Dark glasses pushed up on my head, I first saw her standing in the morning sun like a Lincoln penny fresh from the mint.  She was looking at me just like I was looking at her.  But what she had to be seeing wasn’t a patch on what I was seeing.  I was looking at years of breeding.  I was looking at dreams come true.  I was looking at a million bucks.  She was looking at a guy who was piecing his life together from books he’d read and movies he’d seen.  A guy who thought the shadows on a big screen were talking to him.  Why she was looking at me, I couldn’t say.  If I were her, I wouldn’t be.  But she was.  Both of us were staring like what we were seeing was all there was in the world to see.
    She broke the spell first.  I could of kept it up for hours.  But when she did, I finally noticed that the woman who stood at her perfect head, a slender brown leather gloved hand holding her halter, wasn’t half bad either.
    The big difference was in the eyes.  Fleeting Fancy’s eyes were honest and kind.  You couldn’t say the same for Mrs. Willingford, third wife of old man “Joker” Willingford, fourth generation owner of one of Kentucky’s biggest distilleries ( Joker’s Special Blend ), fourth generation breeder of some of Kentucky’s