Deadly Joke by Hugh Pentecost Page B

the moment,” Chambrun said. “It was a friend of Charlie’s who thinks the bullet was meant for Charlie, not you.”
    “And that I fired it? Or had someone fire it?”
    “That you, at any rate, had a motive,” Chambrun said.
    “Lucky for me I have an alibi,” Maxwell said. Then his eyes narrowed. “But I don’t have an alibi, do I? Stew Shaw was my alibi.”
    “There’s the driver of the limousine,” Chambrun said. “I’m trying to locate him.”
    “Miss Ruysdale is still trying,” I said.
    Maxwell shook his head. “You don’t miss much, do you, Pierre?”
    “I want to help you, Doug, but I need to know it all to be of much use.”
    Maxwell closed his eyes for a moment. He must, I thought, be close to exhaustion after the tensions of the evening. “It’s so long ago it’s almost hard to remember,” he said. “It was thirty years ago, the spring of my senior year at Barstow. Charlie Sewall and I were very close in those days. The look-alike thing made us almost like twins. Charlie was the hell raiser and I was the serious student, but when I had free time for it, I enjoyed a little hell raising myself. We’d had some disciplinary bouts with the college authorities, but that spring we got into real trouble. Not with the college. Charlie liked to play the horses. He didn’t have the money, but I had a generous allowance from my father. I put up the money, but we went into it on a fifty-fifty basis. In the beginning it was just a couple of dollars a day; Charlie studied the charts and the morning line, and he was lucky or smart. We won a few, and then we won a big daily double—more than a thousand dollars. It—it’s the kind of thing that gets in your blood, Pierre. You understand, we didn’t often go to the track. We just figured and bet. There was a sort of poolroom-bowling alley place near the college. The proprietor could get bets down ‘just to accommodate the students.’ It all seemed innocent enough. Charlie and I were riding high. We had more cash to spend than we were used to.
    “Charlie made friends with some kind of sharpy who hung out at the poolhall place. He was one of those guys who has ‘inside connections.’ We followed his lead on a few bets, and we cleaned up. We were the real get-rich-quick kids. Then we started to have a run of bad luck. Before you knew it, we’d dropped everything we’d made during the winter, and we were scratching to find some cash so that we could recoup. Charlie had bought himself a car, and the finance company was down on him. It was a tragedy to us. I suppose an outsider would have laughed at us. We owed a few hundred dollars and my father was a very rich man. I didn’t want to go to my father. He’d have disapproved. He’d probably have bailed me out, but he’d have held it over my head like a club; he was a stern disciplinarian.”
    Maxwell shook his head, as though it was hard for him to believe even now. “That’s where our sharpy friend came into the picture. He came to us one day, all very secret and hush-hush. There was a horse going that day at long odds. It was, he told us, a fix. The syndicate that owned the horse was controlling the betting. If we wanted to come in for say five thousand bucks, we would be rolling in money. The horse would pay about fifteen dollars for two. It wasn’t too hard for Charlie and me to figure out that we stood to win something over thirty-five thousand dollars. Of course, it was dream-thinking, because we didn’t have five thousand dollars to put up.
    “‘Look, fellows,’ our sharpy told us, ‘I’ve been dealing with you long enough to know you’re straight shooters. You want to give me your I O U for five G’s, I’ll place the bet for you.’
    “‘And if we lose?’ I remember asking him. I was hooked; I was going to go along with it, but I was going to be prudent to the end. ‘What if we lose?’
    “‘This is a certainty,’ our sharpy said. ‘As certain as anything can be. The horse