Nice Fillies Finish Last Read Online Free

toothbrush?”
    “When you were talking to him, Goldy,” Rourke said, “did he say anything about tomorrow night’s twin double?”
    Rutherford looked from Rourke to Shayne. “Do you mean to say that Joey Dolan got you up here at four A.M. to sell you a winning combination in the twin double? That Joey. A conception of such scope wouldn’t even occur to anybody else. It’s breathtaking. But if Joey doesn’t show up, and it certainly looks as though he’s not going to, give me another drink and a few minutes with pencil and paper, and I may be able to block out some suggestions for you.”
    “I don’t think so, thanks,” Rourke said.
    “In that case—”
    He cleared his throat and tugged at the end of the five-dollar bill beneath Shayne’s coffee cup. Shayne lifted the cup, and the bill disappeared into the pocket of Rutherford’s khaki shirt.

 
CHAPTER 3
     
    TIM ROURKE expected a certain amount of needling from Shayne on the way back to Miami. But when he started to apologize, his friend merely said, “You saved yourself five hundred bucks. Forget it.”
    “I just wish I knew what happened. He certainly wasn’t stone-cold sober when I talked to him, but I can’t see him passing out somewhere when he had something as big as this on the fire.”
    “Tim, you weren’t hitting on all cylinders yourself. It’s obvious. By the time he got to the bottom of the bottle, he’d forgotten all about how easy it is to get rich betting the twin double. You’re lucky it turned out this way. Wheeling all the horses in two races runs into money. You’d make out better in the long run if you concentrated on improving your poker game.”
    “My poker game’s all right,” Rourke said defensively. “I hardly ever catch four of a kind to beat a full house, that’s all.”
    He stared moodily through the windshield at the wide strip of concrete that was flowing rapidly backward beneath their wheels. “ ‘Some ugly boys in this business.’ That’s one of the things he said on the phone, and I can’t get it out of my head. I wish Rutherford hadn’t mentioned that toothbrush.”
    Shayne snorted, and Rourke said nothing more. In the morning, after too little sleep, he showed up for work with a headache, an unpleasant taste in his mouth, something wrong with his nervous system, and the feeling that Shayne, as usual, had been talking sense. They had wasted a few hours, but it hadn’t cost him any money.
    He was writing a series of articles on payoffs in the construction business, a perennial subject he had handled so often that he could do it justice without being fully awake. He worked steadily until noon, getting through a pack of cigarettes and innumerable cups of coffee, occasionally making a phone call to check a name or a reference.
    A youthful reporter at the next desk wrenched a sheet of copy paper out of his typewriter and asked if Rourke had any aspirin. Rourke shook his head. “What’s the matter, headache?”
    The other reporter, whose name was Mehlmann, was leaning forward, very pale, his head on both fists. “Headache and gut-ache. Every time I go into that goddamned morgue, I can taste it the rest of the day.”
    “Don’t let MacMaster know you feel like that,” Rourke said, “or he’ll see to it you catch every morgue story as long as you work here.”
    “Don’t I know it,” Mehlmann agreed. “This is the third time in ten days. If I get one more wood-alcohol poisoning, I may drink a pint of paint-remover myself. I damn near covered this one from the facts on the police blotter. But it’s just as well I talked to the morgue people. The stiff had a copy of last night’s Surfside Raceway program in his pocket. That gave me my lead.”
    Rourke’s swivel chair squeaked as it came around. “Did they identify him?”
    Mehlmann checked his copy. “Joseph Dolan.” Looking up, he saw Rourke’s face. “What’s the matter, Tim?”
    Rourke was on his feet, clutching the corner of his desk.