Denton uttered a faint grunt of revulsion as the bird itself became trapped in the light’s beam. The thing had obviously been dead for weeks. He smiled. No wonder it had lapsed into silence. Meanwhile the tapping still continued from somewhere overhead. In the parlor — he instinctively thought of it as such with its clutter of walnut-carved Victorian furniture — his light revealed a newspaper flung across the seat of a horsehair-upholstered loveseat. A neatly excised square caught his eye. Evidently something had been clipped from the classified section. He noted the paper’s date: September 3, 1947. Well, that explained one thing. Not a wrong number but the wrong decade.
Realizing that a systematic search of the premises would require hours of patient snooping he decided it was essential to determine who in fact occupied the house and to do that he would have to explore the upper rooms.
The tapping grew louder as he ascended the stairs and when he reached the top he discovered its source — a raindrop struck him unexpectedly square on the nose. As he moved aside the steady plop-plop-plop resumed.
A thread of light showed beneath the nearest door. Hearing no sound from within the room as he pressed an ear to the panel he quietly opened the door. In the dingy glow of a pink-shaded bedlamp he saw Harriet asleep on the bed, her nest of ratty gray hair framing a curiously young-old face. He retreated, shutting the door behind him.
The two adjoining bedrooms were both vacant and when he arrived at the one at the end of the passage he knew it must be Uncle Emil’s. Wasn’t it likely that if there were in fact gold coins and watches they would be secreted in this room? Even if he disturbed the old man he wouldn’t be able to cry out, assuming Harriet had been telling the truth about his speechlessness. Without actually thinking of it as a possible weapon, Denton gripped the flashlight more tightly in his sweating fist.
One sweep of the light revealed what Denton had expected to find. Beneath the covers in a huge carved-oak bed the figure did not move. As Denton crept to the side of the bed his nostrils were assailed by an even more oppressive odor of dusty corruption. He had to make certain the old fellow was indeed asleep and not shamming.
He reached across and carefully lifted the cover, then almost instantly reared back with an audible gasp of horrified disgust. If the bird had been dead for weeks, Uncle Emil had clearly been decaying for months.
With a clatter the flashlight dropped from Denton’s hand and rolled under the bed. Panic-stricken, he fell to his knees and scrambled to retrieve it. Unable to find it he sprang to his feet and as he tried to flee from the room, he collided heavily in the darkness with a small side chair. Some object rolled off its seat as the chair overturned. Denton’s hand closed around a heavy cane with a metal knob on its end. Using it to feel his way in the inky blackness he retreated back toward the stairs. All he wanted now was to get out of this putrid-smelling charnel house.
The noise from Uncle Emil’s room awakened Harriet with a start. She rose up in bed, her heart pounding. Tap-tap-tap. Her hand flew to her throat. It was no nightmare. It was real. He was out of his room. The old devil was again on the prowl.
Desperate, desperate, desperate. It had to end. Now! Tonight! She felt she would never sleep again if she did not once and for all find the courage to do what must be done.
Her fingers fumbled in the bedside table drawer and closed around the pair of shears with which she had cut out the clipping. Clutching them to her breast she crawled out of bed and tiptoed to the door.
Tap-tap-tap... He was right outside. With a wailing screech of rage and terror she flung open the door and plunged the shears into the dark figure poised to descend the stairs. With a long-drawn dying scream the figure plunged headlong into the darkness below.
The shrill jangling of the phone awakened Gary out of a sound sleep. With a muttered oath he rolled over and snatched it up.
“Denton! Denton!”
Gary’s temper exploded. “He’s not here!”
The hysterical, pleading voice paid no heed. “I did it, Denton! I did it! I’m so frightened, Denton. Tell me what to—”
Gary banged the phone down and with a heavy groan of annoyance buried his face in the pillow. Yes, lady, he’s gone, but keep trying. He’s not gone for good, the bum, the freeloader.
Nobody could be that lucky.
Look of Eagles
by Jo Lockwood
© 1981 by Jo Lockwood
This is the 579th “first story” to be published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine... behind the scenes of a sleazy racetrack...
The author, Jo Lockwood, is an ex-model and home-economics director, and has written travel-tourism publicity, political speeches, radio and television copy for a food concern. She loves horses and horse-racing, currently has 11 cats and a dog, and lives in a small house in the country...
A lot of money passes through the turnstiles and over the counter betting windows at even the poorest tracks in this country, and Whitman Downs is one of the moldiest.
You walk around the infield or the paddock and you’ll see what I mean. The fences are chipped and peeling, and the turf is more weeds than bluegrass. The rails lean like willows over a pond, and you wonder if the only bangtails that could win out here would be polo ponies, taking those turns at a tilt.
But a lot of the characters you see are wearing their polyesters with silk ties by Sulka and well glossed shoes by Bally, and their fat hands flash diamond pinky rings.
Not the working stiffs, of course.
Most of them stick to faded jeans and slept-in flannel shirts. Oh, now and then you might spot a fancy tooled-leather belt or a pair of $300 boots, but mostly it’s no-nonsense stuff.
That’s why Ginger stood out in the crowd.
She’d have been a looker anywhere, of course, with that hair the color of a Kansas wheatfield and eyes so big and blue they were drowning pools. Nothing wrong with the figure, either. She was a tall girl and built a little like those slick models, except with curves. Legs as long as a colt’s, but with a nice girl-shape above the slim ankles.
More than that, though, it was the way she carried herself — proud and erect, with a certain class. There was something about her that made you wonder what she was doing around a sleazy back-of-beyond racetrack. Not that she didn’t legitimately belong; her father was one of the trainers, and she’d grown up around tack rooms and stables — some of them pretty good, some of them pretty tacky, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Whit Dunbar, Ginger’s dad, had a small string of horses to take care of and was known to be one of the best. Trouble was, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
One of the biggest problems a trainer has is not the bunch of horses he has to work with, though that can be bad enough, but the owners. You bring a colt along nice and easy, he’s working well and maybe takes a nice little race against his own kind, and right away the owner gets dollar bills in his eyes and Kentucky Derby on his mind.
Then there are the ones who won’t take the trainer’s word, or even the vet’s, that the horse isn’t fit. They seem to think you can give a nag a carrot and shake a little something into his oats and he’ll be ready overnight. Some of the owners, that is. Around Whitman Downs it runs to a pretty high percentage. Ask Beau Jellife, my boss. He’s just working his way back up after being barred from several tracks for sprinkling a little too much “stuff” on the feed of a little filly the owner insisted should go into an allowance race she had no business being in the gate for.