+J.M.J.+

Photo Finish, or They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

By Miss Holly Maguire

Disclaimer:

See Part 1

By the following morning, he had it all figured out. He went to the Public Library to research poisoning rodents. Not that a horse was a big rat with the added feature of hooves, but he decided it would be a little too obvious if he smuggled a bottle of developing chemicals into the box stall, but it would look less suspicious if the stable grooms found the horse full of strychnine. His father had used that to kill the rats in the barn back home, though he'd gotten careless with it and swallowed some of it by a fortunate or unfortunate mistake, however you looked at it. The stable master at Burlington probably used it himself. Later that evening, he went to a hardware store out on the edge of town, closer to the small farms in the outlying areas, where they were more likely to stock it.

Of course the clerk found it a little odd that a well-dressed city slicker was buying rat bane, and a large amount of it at that, but Maguire fed him a line about having rats as big as horses in his basement.

Next day about noon, he turned in the morning's work: a botched burglary with a strapping Italian dame lambasting a skinny kid in his late 'teens, a safe that looked like a wrecking ball had hit it, police examining a panel cut out of the back door of a bank that had been robbed in the night.

"Hey, Maguire!" McGwin called out as they passed in the hallway.

For once he almost welcomed that grating yodel. "Hey, what?" he replied, pausing to let the shorter guy catch up.

"You got any idea where Cunningham got to?" McGwin asked.

"No. Last time I saw him was yesterday about noon when I bumped into him on my way out of Buchner's office. Why?"

"He didn't show up here this morning, and he ain't picking up his phone."

"Maybe he's got company and he couldn't leave," Maguire said with a grin he meant to be suggestive.

McGwin smirked. "Yeah, sounds about right, you bachelors." Relaxing his thin face, he added, "I need a photographer, though I doubt you'd be interested or willing to ride shotgun with me this evening."

"Why not? Spell it out, I might be able to fit it into the schedule."

McGwin shook his head, grinning almost fiendishly. "Nah, you wouldn't want it."

"C'mon, Jake, how can I know that if I don't know what it is."

"All right, Styne wants me to do a piece on Tawny Lightning for tomorrow's headline and he wants pictures. I haven't found anyone else to cover."

Maguire shrugged one shoulder, ignoring the needling in the back of his neck. "I could do it."

"Yeah, but don'tcha hate horses?"

"That doesn't mean I won't photograph 'em. Presses gotta keep rolling. What's an article about the stellar young pony everyone wants to bet on if there's no photo to go with it?"

McGwin wagged a finger at Maguire. "If I didn't know you better, Mac, I'd think you wanted to help me on this."

"Someone's gotta do it."

"All right, I'm heading out to Burlington about five this afternoon. Meetcha here?"

"I'll be here with bells on," Maguire said, mock enthusiastic.

"Oh, you don't have to be that depressed over it," McGwin retorted.

Maguire plotted his course of action as he walked home. Get a moment alone with the horse. Slip the bottle into the water bucket, snap a few shots, then walk away. He realized emptying the bottle would be too time-consuming and too noisy. But how to get the cork out of the bottle? Drill a hole in the cork and stick a broom-straw into it to stopper it? But how to keep the bottle from floating as it emptied? Tie a rock to the bottle. How to keep the rock from breaking the bottle? Wrap the rock in cotton batting. He tried hiding the bottle in the outer pocket of his topcoat, but the neck stuck out. He'd have to hide it in an inner pocket, which would be more awkward, but he'd manage somehow. Easy as falling off a log…or a horse.

"Y' don't know how grateful I am that you agreed to this," McGwin said, as they drove out to Burlington Park.

"Don't mention it," Maguire said, watching the scenery rushing by the window, the storefronts and buildings giving way to trees and fields.

"So, y' gonna tell me?" McGwin asked.

 Maguire looked at McGwin. "Tell you what?"

"Tell me how you got trampled by a horse."

Maguire shrugged, feeling the bottle in his jacket pocket against his hip. "It's nothing much to tell. I grew up on a farm. Accidents like that happen."

McGwin darted a teasingly incredulous eye from the road to Maguire. "You grew up on a farm? You grew up on a farm?!"

"I did."

"From the look of you, I find that hard to believe. I mean, you're so scrawny, y' just don' look like the corn-fed mid-west farm lad."

"Well, when you're one of the younger ones in a family of eleven kids and most of the corn goes to feeding the cows, there's not much left to go around," Maguire said. The back of his neck and the small of his back throbbed. He was not going to think about that day…His older brother Seamus getting into an argument with his father; Shay saddling up his horse and riding out in a huff; his father rushing after Shay, pulling him down from the saddle, frightening the horse so that it bolted down the alley between the barn and the henhouse, where young Harley had been gathering eggs. He dimly remembered the pounding hooves behind him, but everything went dark.

Supposedly, he'd been kicked into the side of the barn wall, face first after the horse stepped on the small of his back and the back of his neck. Miraculously, he'd had no broken bones, only some nasty bruises and bangs. But he dimly remembered that night, well after dark, when he awoke lying on his parents' bed, bandaged and stiff, hearing his parents' voices, Ma's alto squeak and Pa's nasally baritone. "If you hadn't pulled Shay down and spooked that horse"—"If the blatherin' whelp hadn't been near the barn in the first playce, if he'd nawt been born a t'all, if ye'd nawt been mollockin' about wit' thaht Inglish peddlar—"

"Y' know what Miss Kittridge, Styne's secretary calls y'?" McGwin's voice cut through the painful images.

"What?" Maguire asked, welcoming anything to get him back to the present.

"The skeleton dude," McGwin said, laughing. "She got more criminal, though. She asks me, did you ever find a photographer to cover for Cunningham? So I said, yeah, I got Maguire from the crime pages. And she says 'Don't tell me that death's head agreed to help!'"

Maguire laughed out loud. "The death's head. That's rich! She clearly doesn't know the half of it, never got a gander at my tabloid stuff."

"Yeah, she only reads the women's rags."

They pulled up to the back gates of Burlington Park. A watchman flagged them down. McGwin rolled down the window and showed him their press passes.

"Well, it's the rat and…hmm, where's the bear?" the watchman asked, eying Maguire.

"The bear never showed up," McGwin said.

The watchman opened the gates and waved them through.

"The rat and the bear?" Maguire asked. McGwin and his usual partner had clearly been here before.

"Yeah, that's what they call Cunningham and me," McGwin explained, turning the car down the road to the stables beyond the track.

As soon as McGwin parked the car and opened his door, the smell hit Maguire's nostrils: horses, a combination of hay, sweat and manure, one of the smells he'd moved to the city to escape. Breathing through his mouth, Maguire climbed out of the passenger seat and followed McGwin into the stable.

They walked into a jam of people in the corridor between the rows of stalls: stable grooms, jockeys, trainers, other newspapermen and photographers.

"Hoy there, McGwin!" boomed a big man in a tweed jacket, looking over the crowd and beckoning them.

"Comin' through, Hauser!" McGwin called back, trying to part the crowd. Maguire got ahead of him, using his camera case to help cut the crowd.

"So where's yer usual partner in crime?" Hauser asked when the two of them got up to where he stood against the door of a loose box.

"Cunningham pulled a disappearing act," McGwin explained, pointing a thumb at Maguire, who set his camera case down against a wall and started digging out the middle-sized Kodak, easier to maneuver than the Speed-Graphic and the tripod, in case he had to make any sudden exits. "So I got a second string from the crime pages."

"Bet this is a welcome relief for yah, boy," Hauser said, grinning, showing large, horselike teeth

"Not for our Mr. Maguire: a horse used 'um for a doormat when he was a kid," McGwin said, returning the smile.

"Ah, revealing all my dark secrets, eh?" Maguire twitted, loading a roll of film into the camera.

"Maybe y' better keep well back from m' nag, boy," Hauser warned. "He's lively one."

Maguire set about cranking film into the Kodak. "I'll manage. I can handle it," he said, trying to sound nonchalant.

While McGwin asked Hauser a few questions, the larger man opened the door to the box stall and let them enter.

A lion-colored horse with a black mane and tail stood at the far end of the stall, tethered to a ring in the wall. It lifted its muzzle from the oat bucket at its feet and whickered at Hauser, who reached out and stroked its nose with a wide, meaty hand.

"He's th' best I run across in years, cross between a mustang and a thoroughbred…" Hauser continued rambling on about bloodlines and training. McGwin jotted this all down. Maguire got a shot of Hauser stroking the horse's forelock.

"Could I get a shot of the horse alone?" Maguire asked. "It would make a splendid shot, show the beauty of him."

McGwin and Hauser exchanged incredulous looks. "Y' sure y' wanna try that, boy?" Hauser asked.

"I'll manage," Maguire said. "I'll send you a reprint of the shot."

"Let him: he's a bloody artist, barring his usual subject matter," McGwin said.

Hauser regarded Maguire with incredulity knotting his bushy brows. "All right, but if you have trouble, just holler." He stepped out, leading McGwin, leaving the "artist" alone with his model.

The horse looked at Maguire, ears pointing forward, curious. It snuffed at him as he stepped back toward a corner opposite, against the water bucket.

Maguire knelt, focused the camera on the horse and snapped the shot.

The horse turned its head toward him, letting out a rumble that didn't sound too friendly. He grew aware of the sweat on the back of his neck. The beast could probably smell it. He got another shot He glanced up: the horse's ears had gone back. Not a good sign.

Maguire pocketed the Kodak, removed the broom straw from the cork, and slid the bottle out of his jacket. "Nice, horse. Nice feller," he said, backing toward the water bucket. "Easy there now, easy." The horse snorted, its eyes rolling forward.

He had just slid the bottle into the bucket, talking to the horse to cover the plip as it dropped in, when the horse lunged at him with a growl, blocking the stall door.

Maguire scrabbled up the wall and over the top. He dropped over, landing on Hauser. The horse reared up, flailing its forefeet and letting out a shrill whinny.

"Yeh shouldn't a' gawn in there, yah damn fool," Hauser said, helping Maguire up off the floor and brushing straw off him. "He knew yeh was afraid."

"You okay?" McGwin said as a couple stableboys pushed past, into the stall to subdue the animal.

"Yeah, at least I saw it coming this time," Maguire said, checking to see if his camera had survived. By some miracle, it, like him, was intact.

"Yeh get yer pictures, boy?" Hauser asked.

"I got everything we'll need," Maguire said.

Next morning, he hadn't heard from Nitti yet, but he found out what had become of Cunningham. He'd been out pounding the pavement when he came upon a crowd gathered around the door of the rooming house where Cunningham lived. When he got inside, he found a perfect photo opportunity: the police trying to figure out how to get a hogtied Cunningham out of a very narrow closet someone had stuffed him into, leaving him wedged in there, unable to move, but yelping hoarsely around the gag in his mouth. When Cunningham realized just who was photographing him, he started screaming something that sounded like "You think it's funny, Maguire?!" but which came out like "Moo vmm miff muffny?"

It was probably the work of the group of air-headed rowdies known as the "Leppurd Gang" who hung around Wells Street and were notorious for juvenile things like smushing lemon meringue pies in people's faces and sliding down banisters and occasionally throwing Irish confetti through people's open windows. It looked like their work, but he found it hard to believe that Nitti would have those batbrains on the payroll.

On the stairs of the Herald, he met a very gray-faced McGwin coming down, his eyes staring, a little glazed.

"Yer dog die, McGwin?" Maguire asked, ironic.

McGwin glanced at him. "Close," he said. "Tawny Lightning. They found him poisoned. Someone called in from Burlington Park. They had to put him down."

"Well, he won't be charging me or anyone else any more," Maguire said. "There'll be other ponies, they come and go."

"Don't mention it," McGwin said, stepping away.

"Hey, a friend of mine says there's another up and coming hoss racing today, what's the name…Flying Cap. Y' might want to look into betting on 'um."

McGwin looked at him oddly. "Now look who's giving racing tips. Were you just bulling me when you said you're afraid of horses?"

"I only heard the info, just passing it along."

Out of respect for the bereaved, Maguire found a good frame for the print of the portrait shot he'd taken and delivered it up to Hauser's room at the guesthouse at the stable. Since Hauser wasn't taking guests, he left it with the landlady. Probably just as well…

On the way out, he'd wondered if he'd spot a covered van for the fertilizer plant, but he realized this wouldn't be a likely sight. Someone like that would have a funeral for the damned pony. And there were some people who didn't get a decent funeral, for God's sake!

When he got back to his flat, he found a copy of the evening edition of the Herald jammed under the door, folded back to the sports pages. "Tawny Lightning Poisoned on Eve of Race". A note in McGwin's handwriting scribbled on the margin: I bet you're happy!

Inside the door, on the floor, lay an envelope containing seven c-notes and a scrap of paper folded around three sawbucks.

Here's a bonus for your trouble: you would have won this if you'd bet on Flying Cap today.

Nice work for someone afraid of horses.

F. Nitti

He decided horses weren't such a bad thing, as long as he didn't have to get within hooves' reach of 'em.

The End

Afterword:

Enjoy this while its here: This is going to be the last bit of Maguire mayhem, at least till the warmer months…although I have one in the works involving an Italian tenor. I have to get back to my "A.I." fics. I must! I must!