Death of a Sunday Writer (19 page)

Sly Peek had won the third race, at odds of ten to one; Desk Lamp, the favourite, was among the also-rans. There was no other information that she could check against the diary. The jockeys were named — Woodhouse was on Sly Peek — but not the trainers. She ran downstairs to the smoke shop and bought a copy of that day's
Racing Guide
and confirmed that it contained the names of the trainers; she had only to find a copy for the day in question. This, too, was easy — a phone call to the paper's offices, a promise to photocopy what she wanted if she came by the office, and she was driving across the city wondering what she would do with the information, if it checked out.

The
Racing Guide
listed the trainers: Johnny Comstock had trained the badly-beaten favourite, Desk Lamp, and MacGovern was Sly Peek's trainer. There was a small news item about a Stewards' inquiry that had been held about the running of Desk Lamp, but the Stewards had been satisfied with Comstock's explanation.

What about Johnny? Lucy thought. Was he satisfied?

There was still much she didn't know, but she set herself to decode what she could. Evidently, two horses had been drugged: one to run fast and the other to run slow. Sly Peek had run fast and Desk Lamp had run slow, that was clear enough, and evidently Desk Lamp had been favourite, at two to one. The swindle involved Johnny, the trainer, MacGovern, and the man called Nolan, the one who procured the drugs. But if Nolan was suspicious, both before and after the race, and MacGovern was eventually not let into the final steps of the swindle, but was told the story afterwards and paid off with twenty-five thousand, then evidently there had been a double-cross involving Trimble and perhaps Comstock. That must be what “switched labels” meant, that Trimble had managed to switch the labels before giving back the drugs to Nolan. Trimble, MacGovern and Nolan had therefore conspired to make sure Desk Lamp won, but by switching the drugs, her cousin had assured himself that Sly Peek would be the winner. MacGovern and Nolan had backed Desk Lamp, of course, and when the bookmaker heard that the trainer was betting against himself, he decided not to “lay off” (pass on?) Trimble's bet. He would be assuming that Trimble's information was not as good as his own.

The little sub-plot involving the jockey was unclear, but that could wait until she learned a bit more about
horse racing. She thought for a long time about what she had learned, but it only became clearer: in its simplest form, David had won fifty thousand dollars, which was either still in the office or the apartment, or had been found by whoever broke into the office, possibly by someone who knew it was there: Cowan, or Nolan, or MacGovern or Johnny. Nolan, she remembered, hadn't been seen for a few days. Now what?

The telephone rang, but she ignored it, needing time, in case it was Johnny, to decide on a response. It would have been bad enough to have discovered that Trimble had been involved in a piece of crookedness like this; to find Johnny involved was to make nonsense of the future she had been constructing, a future in which he was already central. Lucy felt like running back to Longborough and asking for her old job back.

But, as she sat there, ignoring the telephone, she knew that she was going to have to tell Johnny what she had learned about him and the reason why she would not be seeing him again. And there was still the possibility that her cousin had been murdered by someone who knew he had fifty thousand dollars. She could not just walk away from that.

The first thing was to find some flaw in her discovery, something that would bring the world and Johnny Comstock back to normal. There were still things she did not know about horse racing, and while the story on the computer looked pretty definitive, locking up the details was something she could do while she got used to the sickening idea that she would not have Johnny Comstock in her life in future.

The phone continued to ring, six or seven times. Each time she waited until the answering service cut in before she picked up the receiver and, each time, it was Johnny trying to find her.

The novels that Trimble had accumulated provided Lucy a starting point. She picked out a Dick Francis and placed it open in front of her on the desk, putting the
Racing Guide
and the diary printout into a drawer. Then she unlocked the door, left it slightly ajar, and waited. Peter appeared in half-an-hour. “Watcha doin', Lucy?”

She held up the novel.

“Doesn't look too good if a customer comes in.”

“You're the only one who doesn't knock.”

“Don't leave your door open, then. Hungry?”

“I guess so.” Then with elaborate casualness, “You read Dick Francis?”

“I haven't got time for novels.” The classic answer, irritating usually, but now the one she wanted.

“You should find time, you might learn something. These, for instance. Most of them are about racing, although I sometimes feel I'm missing something because I don't know enough about horses. One I read the other day, for instance, was all about how a race was rigged.”

“Which one? Let me see it.”

“It's at home. I wouldn't have thought it was possible.”

“It happens. How did they do it?”

“They drugged two horses. One to go fast and the other to go slow.”

“Complicated.”

“But how could they be sure they'd win? There were seven other horses in the race.”

“They couldn't be
dead
sure. They'd have to get every trainer in the race to cooperate. You can do that in harness racing, I've heard. If an owner-driver is down on his luck the others let him win a little purse, just to keep him going. See, with harness-racing they all go round and round in single file until the last little bit. You can't tell who's trying.”

“Does everybody know this?”

“Nobody
knows
it, Lucy. It's what I think when my horse comes second.”

“Never mind about harness racing. Let's stick to the other kind. The kind in the novel,” she added.

“Thoroughbreds. Why don't you answer your phone?”

“Because there's someone I don't want to talk to. You don't think thoroughbred owners all get together and agree who should win?”

“It's not possible. Not all of them. A couple might. Two or three maybe. But not all of them. More likely someone interferes with the favourite. Some of the horses in each race are just running for exercise. Everybody knows that.”

“Do the people who are betting know it?”

“Some of them. Anyway, nothing's certain. If you see a horse win at fifty to one, then the owner and trainer didn't back it. It was just running for exercise, but that day it felt good, literally feeling its oats.”

“Or it was drugged.”

“If they catch a trainer giving a horse drugs, he loses his license. They test the winner of every race. Look, let's go down and have a coffee and I'll explain it a bit.”

Over coffee in the Portuguese restaurant, Tse tried to lay out the elements of racing. How a trainer can perfectly legitimately, or rather, without much fear of detection, hold up a good horse for several races until the price is right, then let it win at nice odds. How he can switch around the equipment — blinkers, tongue-strap, noseband — to affect the running of a horse; how a jockey can give a horse a poor ride while seeming to do his best; how, in short, a trainer and a cooperating jockey can make a horse win them some money without the whole world knowing what is going to happen first. All this and much more Tse told her.

“And this is all legal?”

“Not
legal.
Every horse is supposed to run his best every day. But it isn't crooked, either.”

“But drugs are crooked?”

“Some are, sure. But you have to catch them. Trouble is, the boys with the drugs are one step ahead of the vets. Every time they test for a new drug, the boys are already using something else.” Indeed they are, Lucy thought. “Why do people bet? With all this going on, their horse might not be getting a fair chance.”

Tse laughed. “Like the man said about the poker game — ‘I know it's crooked, but it's the only game in town.' What I'm telling you, everybody knows. So you try to figure out what they are doing and bet accordingly. You remember when we were out at the track you told me about that old lady whose horse was running? I looked it up, remember, and although it had been losing, that trainer, Johnny Comstock, had put it up against better horses. I figured he'd decided to win one for the old lady, and he had been getting it ready. I was right.”

“But it didn't win. I bet that horse to show because she was such a nice old lady.”

“It came second by a neck, but it was trying. What more can I ask? I lost my money, but so did the trainer and the old lady.”

“Another thing,” Lucy continued, trying to sound like someone who was puzzzled by a detail in Chapter Eight, “If a bookie gets a big bet, what does it mean to say 'he lays it off?'”

“What it says. He just turns round and bets with a bigger bookie, to cover himself. That way he'll probably earn a little commission, service the customer, but he won't risk losing a packet.”

“But if he's sure the horse will lose, then he might not lay it off?”

“That's called betting-gambling, and bookies don't like to gamble. But he might, if it's absolutely safe.”

“If he heard, say, that the trainer was backing someone else's horse?”

“That might do it. Then, depending on the trainer, he'd know that it wasn't trying, that the jockey might be holding it up.”

Lucy shook her head. “And yet you
still
bet.”

With the help of Tse's instructions, Lucy once more compared the diary with the
Racing Guide's
version of the result. Once more, she felt the necessity to speak her thoughts aloud, but not to Tse. She had caught a flicker of curiosity from him when she had momentarily forgotten that she was supposed to be talking about the plot of a novel. She didn't want to arouse him any further. There was only one person. She picked up the phone and dialled Nina, waving to her through the window as she identified herself. “I need help,” she said. “Are you free for dinner? I need you.”

“How important is it? I have an appointment.”

“Oh, Nina, it's very important. To me.”

“Sure. Straight from work? Where are you taking me?”

“That place you showed me the other day. I'll see if I can get a table at the end. This is very private.”

“Sounds a lot more interesting than getting my feet done. Pick me up when you're ready.”

Le Select Bistro had a table available in the corner of the front room where they would not be overheard. Lucy pulled out the diary and the
Racing Guide.
She had made an extra copy of the diary, snipping off the surrounding text that contained the fantasies about Nina. Step by step, she took Nina through it, having to explain every detail because Nina knew nothing about horse racing. By the time the coffee arrived, Nina claimed she understood what Lucy was talking about.

“There's a story there all right,” she said. “Your cousin and your lover managed to fix a race and made, my God, fifty thousand dollars.”

“And David got killed for it. By Nolan or Cowan, or Johnny.”

“Don't go off half-cocked...”

“But it's all there!”

“David died of a heart attack, right in the office. I saw him.”

“You didn't see who was there earlier before you came in. And he might have had a phone call, saying they were coming for him, or have been looking out the window and saw Cowan's enforcer come into the building. You can't get round this.” She slapped the papers on the table. Her voice had risen slightly as the hysteria she was controlling bubbled through.

Nina pressed her hand. “It looks like something bad, all right. But be careful. They sound like a lot of...”

“I know. But there's fifty thousand dollars around somewhere. That's what they were looking for when they broke into the office. I know it.”

Nina said, “Can I go over it again to make sure I understand? There's Desk Lamp last...”

“At two to one. Someone must have been backing
him or he would have been at four or five to one.”

“Let me do it, Lucy.”

“Sorry.” Lucy dabbed the corner of her eye.

“Sly Peek — there's a name that would have appealed to your cousin — won at ten to one, therefore his trainer wasn't backing him. Right?”

“MacGovern.”

“And even the Stewards thought that Desk Lamp had run badly. What are you going to do?”

“Find that fifty thousand dollars. Someone tried to rob him after he was dead. Cowan paid up, so David got the money. I think it might still be around, because they searched everything and if they'd found it, I would have seen where their search ended.”

“Clever. If you find it, who does it belong to? You?”

“David got it by cheating, so I can't keep it.”

Nina blinked. “You could give it back to that bookmaker. He'll be pleased.”

Lucy shook her head. “He thought that the race was rigged for Desk Lamp to win, so he shouldn't benefit. Serves him right for trying to outsmart David.”

“The Salvation Army?” Nina looked at the race result again, and pointed to a line. “What does
that
mean?”

“It means the race was worth forty thousand dollars.”

“So if Desk Lamp had won, as it should have done, then that owner would have won forty thousand dollars?”

“Say thirty. The next three horses get some.”

“What an expert you've become! Him, then, for a start. What about Nolan, and the trainer of Sly Peek? They lost their money.”

“Don't make fun. They're all crooks. They deserve what they got.”