Read Online Shadow Dancers by Herbert Lieberman - Free Book Online

out of the Lexington school. The horse had raced and won only twelve days ago. Since that effort, he’d rested nicely but had also worked five furlongs in a blazing :59 4 ⁄ 5 . Better even, he was being ridden by a jockey who’d won on him before.
    Mooney put his glasses down with a sigh of contentment. He was easy in his mind. The fifty dollars to win and fifty dollars to place he’d staked on Casual Air at modest but by no means inconsequential odds of 5 to 1 he’d already counted as money in the bank. To him that worked out to a 17 percent chance of winning — far better than Fritzi s 38 to 1, which gave her little better than a 2½ percent shot at the money. A sucker’s bet, but you couldn’t tell her that. Besides, she won quite often.
    “You might as well scrub this one, Fritz.” He handed her the glasses back. “It’s a washout.”
    “For you, my friend.” She snatched the binoculars and snapped them to her eyes just as the bell rang and the gates shot open.
    There was an explosion of dust as the field of twelve pounded out of the gate. A great roar went up for the first race of the day. Pennants flapped wildly atop the grandstand and clubhouse. The scene below was a dazzling palette of track colors all flowing together in a blurry collage.
    By the time the dust had cleared, the field had already pounded past the three-sixteenths pole where Mooney and Fritzi stood at the rail, cheering. Coming Sunday and Casual Air were neck and neck, leading the pack by a full length. They were still neck and neck at the far turn and swinging into the back stretch. At the three-quarter pole, it looked as if both of them would finish in the money.
    “Go on, you Casual Air,” Mooney bellowed until he was hoarse.
    “Come on, Sunday.” Fritzi jumped up and down. “Come on, you sweet boy.”
    “Move it. Move it, Casual Air. You son of a bitch.”
    Past the clubhouse turn and pounding into the home stretch, both horses, for some inexplicable reason, quit. They simply faded as if they’d lost interest or just run out of gas. A pair of disreputable hayburners, Vagrant and Tollkeeper, flew past them along with another horse. Coming Sunday and Casual Air finished fourth and fifth respectively. Both out of the money.
    Mooney and Fritzi went home bumper to bumper on the expressway, both glowering in embattled silence all the way back to Manhattan. The quality of their luck in the first race was indicative of how they fared throughout the rest of the day. They’d lost about a thousand dollars between them, added to which Wizard, their own entry in the fourth race, had hardly covered himself with glory. By the time they reached 83rd Street, neither of them was feeling very kindly disposed toward the world.
    Upstairs, there was a message from Mulvaney on their answering machine. “Where the hell have you been?” the chief of detectives snarled when Mooney finally reached him on the phone. “I’ve had the goddamned M. E. on the phone to me six times this afternoon looking for you.”
    “It’s a sorry thing when a man can’t even go to his dentist without —”
    “Don’t give me that dentist crap, Mooney. You better come up with something better than that. This time he’s out for blood, and personally —”
    “You hope he gets it, right? What’s that old bag of gas blowing off about now?”
    “That girl you pulled out of the drain last month?”
    “What about her?”
    “They’ve got an ID on her.”
    “How’d they get it?”
    “Someone called the Sixth Precinct this morning. Gave her name and address. Wouldn’t leave his own name.”
    “Would you?” Mooney quipped sarcastically.
    “What?”
    “Nothing. Just thinking out loud. Probably the same joker who tipped the Forty-fourth and told ‘em to go fish her out of the drain in the first place.”
    “Name’s Cara Bailey. Four twenty East Seventy-third. It’s a brownstone. She had a second-floor walkthrough. Landlord said she’s been missing three