Hoofprints (Gail McCarthy series) (7 page)

Steve came back with our drinks and handed them out, sitting down on the couch with me, close enough to be friendly, not so close he invaded my space. "Gail, I read that you found Ed and Cindy Whitney; that must have been terrible. "

"It was pretty bad," I admitted.

"I still can't believe it. I've got Plumber at the barn here, since the police didn't know what to do with him. They found my name in Cindy's address book and called me, and I went down and picked him up."

"In the long term, I don't know. He's entered in the hackamore class at Salinas this Saturday, paid up and everything, and I got in touch with Cindy's lawyers and they said to go ahead and show him. I know that's what Cindy would have wanted. I guess anything he wins will just be part of her estate."

"Do you know who inherits the horse?" I asked, thinking of Plumber and what a good-natured, friendly colt he was, a lot like Gunner, hoping he would end up with a good home.

"I've got no idea." Steve appeared to be thinking along the same lines I was. "I sure hope he goes to the right place." Shaking his head, he added somberly, "It just seems terrible. Ed and Cindy were great people."

"You knew them pretty well, didn't you?" I asked him.

"Oh, very well. We were all really good friends." He looked rueful. "Of course, the police wanted to know if I was particularly good friends with Cindy."

I bet they did, I thought to myself. Handsome Steve Shaw was a husband's nightmare. From what I understood, half of his female clients were in love with him.

Steve was still talking. "I told them it wasn't like that. We were all just close friends. I'm going to miss her," he said sadly. "She was a lot of fun."

That was a pretty good epitaph for Cindy, and one that she would have liked.

"And Ed, too," Steve was saying. "I don't think people understood Ed very well. Ed was a really genuine person."

Now, that was debatable, I added in my mind. Bret looked nauseated. He'd finished his drink, I noticed, and curled his lip at Steve. "Ed was an asshole."

Steve glanced over at him. "He was a friend of mine," he said briefly and, with smooth civility, changed the subject. "Still shoeing?"

Bret shrugged.

"My shoer left town last week, and all my horses are due. I could give you a couple of days of work, if you're interested."

Bret shrugged again. I felt mildly surprised that Steve would consider using Bret; he was a capable shoer, but notoriously unreliable, and he and Steve were clearly not on the same wavelength.

Steve was brisk, and I thought I could guess his reasoning. Bret did a good-enough job, and thirty dollars was half of what horseshoers in Santa Cruz County were currently charging. When you were talking about twenty horses, it added up.

"All right." Bret still sounded sullen, but again, from his end, too, economics were probably the bottom line. I suspected Bret was broke.

"I'm sorry to get you out after dinner, Gail." Steve was walking toward the door. "I know you've had a rough day."

I murmured agreement.

"Did you just drop by to visit Cindy and go in and find them dead?" Steve half-shuddered.

"Cindy called me out to see Plumber," I told him. "It was almost an accident that I found them at all. I sat out at the barn and waited for her for a while, and at the last minute, I tried the house. It was a pretty bad shock," I admitted.

Steve put a hand on my shoulder lightly, and I felt grateful for the sympathy as well as the absence of grisly questions.

We walked side by side through the summer night--cool, with the wet edge of fog-into his big barn, a covered arena with a row of stalls down each side and a huge hay shed at the back. Steve flicked a switch and one row of stalls lit up. We started down the lighted breezeway, Steve glancing into each stall in a horseman's automatic routine check.

I stopped when I saw Plumber, munching hay contentedly in the third stall down. Leaning over the half door, I reached a hand out to touch his shoulder. "How're you doing, buddy?"

Steve stopped with me and we both stared appreciatively at the colt. Plumber was a horse that took your eye; it was hard to say exactly why. At fifteen hands, he was medium-sized for a Quarter Horse, he had good but not outstanding confirmation, and his breedy head was attractive, but not at all halter horse "cute." His color was unusual-light brown-the color of coffee with cream in it, or freshly made cocoa. Still, unusual or not, it wasn't a flashy color, and Plumber had no fancy chrome-like white markings, only a tiny star in the center of his forehead. No, it was nothing external; it was the expression on his face-friendly, curious, intelligent-that said, this is a good horse.

Echoing my thoughts, Steve sighed. "He's a good one. The whole time I've trained him he's been just like a smart dog, right there with you, wanting to do what you ask. I'll be sorry to lose him."

"Well, maybe you won't."

"Who knows." Steve glanced at me curiously. "You know, one thing I wondered about. Was Cindy buting this horse?"

Remembering the bottles I'd seen on her desk, I told him, "Not that I know of. I saw quite a few bottles of bute in the tack room when I was looking for her, and it seemed kind of odd to me. She wasn't the type to just start giving her horse painkillers without having a vet check him first."

"I wouldn't have thought so either." Steve looked reflective. "I guess if something's wrong with him it'll show up. Well, that mare's down here," he added, turning away.

I followed him to a stall where a buckskin mare stood, one foot cocked in a relaxed way, her head down and her eyes half-closed. Her left front leg was carefully wrapped in cumbersome ice packs, but she didn't seem to be in any distress.

Steve walked in the stall with her and began unwrapping the leg, his fingers deft and competent. Bending down next to him, I caught the tang of his aftershave and was briefly conscious of a sense of intimacy. I put it out of my mind automatically; many of my veterinary calls involved moments like this one with overtones of linked physical closeness. The quiet barn, the gentle sigh of the mare's breath, Steve's soothing voice as he murmured to her-these were the ingredients of an awareness I'd learned to thrust away as inappropriate.

I could feel Steve's eyes on me, his face close to mine as we both crouched in the shavings, but I kept my own attention firmly on the mare's leg as I ran my hand up and down her tendon. There was swelling all right, quite a bit of it, but through the puffiness I could feel the tendon itself, and it felt smooth and firm, uninjured.

"I'm not one hundred percent sure," I said slowly, "but I think she's just nicked the tendon sheath. Is she lame?"

"No, not at all."

"Just keep icing it on and off, maybe three times a day for the next couple of days. If she stays sound, you ought to be able to use her this weekend, even if it's swollen. I'd ice her right before and after I showed her, and keep her wrapped."

Steve smiled in relief. "That's great." He seemed about to say something else when we both heard footsteps in the barn aisle. Abruptly his face tightened up. "That must be Amber. This mare belongs to her."

Oh shit, I thought but didn't say. Amber St. Claire had the dubious honor of being my least-favorite c1ient-a prize example of that type who calls the vet out to look at every little scratch and complains constantly at the size of her bill. The whole office down at Santa Cruz Equine Practice regarded her as a royal pain in the ass, and even Jim, my boss, capitalistic money grubber that he was, would probably have dispensed with her business if it wasn't for the fact that she was so incredibly rich.

Amber was the daughter of Reg St. Claire, a legendary figure in Santa Cruz County, one of our earliest millionaire transplants from the San Francisco Bay Area. He'd moved to the Santa Cruz Mountains to retire and raise Quarter Horses; Amber, his only daughter, had grown up on his glamorous Rancho Robles, inheriting it when he died. She was in her forties now, had never lifted a finger to do any sort of work, at least none that I knew of, had been married and divorced three times, and continued to raise horses-from a distance.

Reg St. Claire had been an avid horseman; Amber, so far as I could tell, had no particular liking for the equine species; she even seemed a little afraid of them. But she continued to breed Quarter Horses, employing a crew of at least half a dozen to do all the actual work, and she usually kept a couple of show horses in training. Currently with Steve Shaw. Rumor had it that she was angling to make him husband number four.

Banishing all traces of the oh-shit I felt as her footsteps approached, I schooled my face to a noncommittal expression of polite civility and glanced at Steve. His own face was as casually bland as mine, concealing what emotions I had no idea.

Amber walked into the stall with us as confidently as a queen making a royal entrance, preceded by a wave of perfume strong enough to overcome the rich, horsey smell of the barn. I felt like wrinkling my nose but refrained; it wouldn't have been politically smart. Amber was our single biggest account.

"Hi there." The smile she gave Steve was full wattage; she turned a much milder version on me. "Hello, Gail." Back to Steve immediately. "So, how is she?"

He explained what the mare had done, how he'd treated her and what I'd said; Amber listened with her head cocked to one side, drinking in every word that came from his mouth. Her expertly tinted auburn hair, worn in a smooth, shining wedge, somehow failed to clash with her vivid red lipstick and fingernails, or the suede coat the color of fallen leaves. There was no denying Amber had style, of a sort, though I thought she looked out of place in a box stall. I also thought the adoring gaze she fastened on Steve Shaw overdone, and a little too girlish on the face of a forty-something woman.

"Do you think she'll be okay?" she asked him anxiously, though I noticed she'd never once looked at the horse.

"Gail thinks so." Steve's eyes met mine briefly, and I caught the quick ironic sparkle before I looked away.

Amber seemed uninterested in my opinions, and laid a hand possessively on his arm. "Will we be able to show her at Salinas?"

"You bet." Steve looked down at her, his smile radiating blue-eyed charm.

Seeing that I clearly wasn't needed, I sketched a slight wave and said, "I'd better be going."

Amber ignored me; Steve smiled with his usual warmth."Come on over and watch me show Plumber this weekend if you have time, Gail. At the Salinas Rodeo Grounds. Saturday morning. You'd enjoy it."

I saw Amber frown, and a little devil nudged me. "I'd love to, Steve. See you there."

As I stepped out of the box stall and started down the aisle, I could hear her voice from behind me saying pettishly, "What did you invite her for?"

I grinned. Amber might like to think she owned Steve, but she clearly wasn't too confident of him. And I more than suspected old Steve had had a lot of practice evading matrimonial lures.

Still, Amber's brand new fire-engine red Mercedes convertible was parked outside the barn; maybe Steve could see his way clear to being a kept husband-Mercedes and all.

"Goddamn Steve." Bret shook his head as I drove up the hill. "Wants me to shoe his horses. I know what he does. I charge him thirty dollars and he charges his people sixty. Pockets the extra. That's why he's so rich."

"I doubt that." I forbore to point out that such ill-gotten gains would hardly provide Steve with a royal income.

"Sure he does." Bret brightened up at the thought of Steve's larceny and rattled on the rest of the way home about his imagined sexual preferences and his failures in the truck-driving category.

I tuned him out as much as I could. Bret was about twenty ahead of me at this point; Hemingway or no Hemingway, I was definitely daunted.

SIX

When we got back to my house, Bret staggered in and flopped on the couch. He looked around my tiny living room with slightly glazed eyes and said, "You aren't quite in the same class as Steve, old buddy."

"Take it or leave it, pal."

He stretched out on the couch, already half-asleep. "I'll take it, I'll take it," he muttered.

I smiled, walked into the kitchen and got some almond praline ice cream out of the freezer. Dishing it into a bowl, I looked at the clock. Nine-thirty. With any luck, I was home for the evening. The ice cream was cold and sweet and satisfying. Bad for my health and figure, but soothing to my tired brain. I settled myself at the kitchen table with a Dick Francis mystery.

I had been sitting at the table an hour, alternately reading and eating ice cream, when my pager went off. I looked at it in disgust. "Shit."

Picking up the phone, I called the answering service.

"There's an emergency in Bonny Doon," the woman said. "Some horse has a severe colic. He's down and thrashing." She repeated the words carefully.