Nice Fillies Finish Last Read Online Free Page A

“Where was he?”
    “In a hallway on Fifth Street. Did I miss something? I only gave it three paragraphs.”
    He held out the yellow sheet of copy paper, but Rourke waved it aside. “I don’t want to see the damn story. Tell me what happened.”
    “I didn’t really go into it, Tim. Apparently he went to sleep where they found him. No identification, no money. A little chin beard, five or six days’ stubble everywhere else. He’d been picked up for vagrancy a couple of years back, and they had his prints. Two other bums were found dead in that neighborhood within the last week—damn fools made the mistake of getting drunk on methanol, wood alcohol. Somebody broke into a hardware store a while back, and the cops think that’s where the stuff came from. They did an autopsy on Dolan. It was methanol, all right, maybe not in pure form. Naturally everybody figured this was more of the same. When a dead man hasn’t shaved for a week, of course there’s not much pressure. Tim, does the name Dolan mean something to you?”
    “Damn right,” Rourke said grimly. He stood there for another second, gripping the corner of his desk. Poor Joey, he said to himself. He should have been satisfied with small bets and an easy life. He should never have started dreaming about big money. Somebody had read about the two wood-alcohol deaths, and had thought he could drop Dolan in a hallway and no questions would be asked. But Tim Rourke had some questions, by God. He made himself a promise. By the time he was finished with this, whoever had done it would be very sorry.
    His lips set, he strode to the sports side of the city room. Ad Kimball, working on his selections for the races that evening, looked up as Rourke stopped beside him. He put his head in his hands and groaned.
    “I’d almost forgotten I was sick,” he said. “Then you have to come along and remind me. Have you ever tried reading a race chart with a hangover? After about two minutes, that small print starts squirming around like beetles.”
    “Come over and talk to MacMaster with me,” Rourke said. “I don’t want to explain things twice.”
    “Why? I don’t talk to city editors unless I have a good reason.”
    Rourke picked up the phone on his desk and asked for an outside line, then dialed Michael Shayne’s number. Lucy Hamilton, Shayne’s brown-haired secretary, told him her boss was working on something on Miami Beach.
    “Have him phone me at the paper if he calls in, will you, Lucy?” Rourke hung up and told Kimball, “Bring those programs. We’re going to be talking about horses.”
    MacMaster, the city editor, was a bald, cold-eyed man who chewed on a dead cigar as Tim Rourke told him about the phone call from Dolan, the fruitless trip to Surf-side Raceway, Dolan’s mention of danger and his death in Miami a few hours later.
    “Spell it out,” MacMaster said. “You think somebody killed him?”
    “All I know,” Rourke said, biting off his words in a disgusted voice, “is that I gave up on him last night. I let people persuade me that he’d made up this twin-double fantasy to con me out of five hundred bucks. I don’t know if I was right or wrong. It seems to me I’ve got to find out.”
    “OK,” MacMaster said. “Your hunches pay off about fifty percent of the time, and that’s good enough for me. I don’t have to tell you what the cops are going to say. They’re going to say, ‘Get the hell out of here and stop bothering us.’”
    “The hell with the cops. They go by the law of averages. Here’s a guy with a vagrancy record. He looks like a bum and smells like a bum. He never owned a TV set or subscribed to the Reader’s Digest. Probably he never paid an income tax in his life. He has wood alcohol in him, and the law of averages says don’t give it another thought. I need some more facts before I talk to the cops. I want to go up to the track and ask some questions about those twin-double races.”
    “Kimball,” MacMaster