Murder at the Racetrack (21 page)

A siren split the air, and on its desperate keening, he felt a hard jolt in the flow, like a train going off the track, so
that he gripped for a hold, now clinging for dear life as he bumped and clattered, the flow rocketing forward at what seemed
inhuman speed. The river vanished, and he was on land, his body flat on the hard surface of a metal gurney, wildly jostled
as if he were being dragged across rutted ground.

“What’s the matter, Doctor?”

“Quick, get the defibrillator!”

The explosion came from the center of his chest, as if he’d lain face down on a land mine. It blasted shards of light in all
directions, flashing images of past time through a roiling steam of memory. He saw Mickey emerge, whistling happily, from
the rear door of his building, then felt the brutal shove of his hand against Mickey’s shoulder, and watched as Mickey tumbled
to the side, knees buckling, so that his head struck hard against the side of the building, a geyser of blood spouting from
his ear as he fell unconscious onto the cement stairs.

“Give me the paddles!”

A bell tolled, and in its dying echoes he saw Mickey gathered up, placed on a stretcher and wheeled into a waiting ambulance,
a local boy, as the paper had described him, dead by freak accident.

“Clear!”

“Okay.”

“Hit it!”

He felt the jerk of the gurney like blows to his body, wrenchingly painful punches that sent him into aching spasms each time
another jolt rocked the earthbound flow. With each blow a bell tolled and a year passed and logged within those passing years
he saw the outcome of his act, Old Man Deaver dead of drink, Margaret confused and shaken, never knowing why he’d turned from
her that morning, nor ever approached her again, never knowing that he was still Eddie, her white knight, bent on her protection,
and so protecting her from himself, because by his own ill luck, a rift in the laws of chance, a little, half-hearted shove
had made of him a murderer.

“Clear!”

“Hit it!”

He jerked in pain, and through the screen of his pain, yearned for the cushion of air, the invisible river, as his defiant
brain worked feverishly to figure the odds that he might at least die beyond the reach of odds.

“No good.”

But figure as he did, calculate and recalculate, the odds remained the same as long ago, when he’d first begun to lay them,
high against stopping yourself in time, getting another chance, high as the odds, he finally concluded, against a peaceful
death.

“Too late.”

At least a billion to one, he figured on the dying breath of a final calculation.

But for the first time in a long time, he had figured them too low.

Pat Jordan

T
he shooter rattled the dice in his fist and blew on them. The girl standing behind him massaged his shoulders and whispered
in his ear.

The shooter said loudly, “Come
on!
Baby needs a new pair of shoes!” He flung the dice across the green felt table. The other gamblers around the craps table
shouted out, too. The dice hit the far end of the table, tumbled back toward the shooter, and came to rest. The other gamblers
groaned.

“Craps,” the pit boss said. He raked in all the chips and said, “Next shooter.”

The young man and the girl moved away from the head of the table. An old man took his place. He was in his eighties, bald,
with a friar’s tuft of white hair, a brush mustache and a much younger man’s pale blue-gray eyes. He wore a double-breasted
navy blazer, a rep tie, gray slacks, and he fingered a felt fedora in one hand. The pit boss tossed him the dice and said,
“You’re the shooter.”

Someone around the table called out, “Come on, old man. Show us what you got.”

The old man looked embarrassed. He leaned over the table and placed some chips on a number. Then he took the dice in his soft,
pink, pudgy fingers, turned his head away from the table, and flung the dice backhanded toward the end of the table. When
the dice came to rest the other gamblers cheered.

Someone called out, “Atta boy, old man!”

Someone else called out, “He ain’t an old man now. He’s a winner.”

Five hours later, the old man cashed in his chips. He fingered the bills in his hand. One hundred and seventy-five dollars.
He put all the bills into his pants pocket, except one. He folded the bill into a tiny square and went over to the casino
coatroom. He got his double-breasted camel hair topcoat from the girl behind the counter and slipped her the folded bill.
She flashed him a quick, faint smile that vanished, without looking at the bill. She watched the old man struggle to put on
his topcoat as he walked toward the door. She unfolded the bill in her hand, looked at it, a twenty, and then called out,
“Thanks, pops! Thanks a lot!”

Without looking back, the old man raised a hand and waved. Then he put on his fedora and pushed open the door.

It was snowing furiously, the snow swirling, blinding him. He stepped back inside the warm casino. He would have to wait it
out. He looked around the casino to see where he could rest awhile until the snow let up. There were only a few people in
the brightly lighted coffee shop. Losers staring down into their cold cups of coffee. No, that would be too depressing. Then
he saw the OTB room, off to his right, with its plush chairs facing the big TV screen relaying the horse races from California
and Florida. He had never liked the ponies. Too many variables. He preferred to be in control. He only bet on things where
he could find an edge. He remembered what an old-timer had told him once. You can never beat the race, you can only beat the
price, and even that was risky. Better to past-post the bookie, at least that way you were sure of winning. If you didn’t
get caught.

The old man went into the OTB room and sat down in a plush chair that faced the big-screen TV and the odds board beside it.
There were only a few other bettors, looking bored, sitting around him, passing time like those lost souls who passed a Wednesday
afternoon in a movie theater in a strange city. A movie theater was where you passed an afternoon if you were in a strange
city on the hustle, or a bum who just wanted to sleep, or a degenerate looking for sex.

He took off his hat and coat and tried to relax. A girl in a skimpy hostess costume moved through the room, taking bets and
drink orders. When she stopped beside him, she smiled down at him, and said, “Can I get you something, sir?”

“Just a scotch and water, honey,” he said. He watched her walk away. Her high-heeled, open-toed shoes were too big for her
feet, so she had stuffed cotton in the back.

He sat there, sipping his drink, and watched the races coming from Hialeah. It was a sunny day in Florida. The horses walked
between the towering Royal Palms onto the track, and then warmed up with a jog around the track. There was a small lake in
the center of the track where a flock of pink flamingos, which didn’t look real, nested.

The horses were at the starting gate now for the Flamingo Stakes. A trumpet blew and the flamingos rose up in a whirl of pink
wings and flew around the track from the starting line to the finish line and then they floated back down to earth in a cluster
around the lake. Then a bell rang and the gates opened and the horses came thundering out…

The old man remembered when he was in his twenties he had gone to Hialeah not to bet on the ponies, but on the hustle, he
didn’t know what hustle, it would come to him, he always did like to improvise, and as a sort of winter vacation where he
could rub elbows with the swells from Palm Beach who came down to Hialeah in their own special train. The men wore top hats
and cutaway waistcoats and striped pants and spats. Their women wore big, floppy-brimmed hats and pastel-colored chiffon dresses
and white gloves to their elbows. They all sat in the reserved dining room at tables set with cut-glass crystal and heavy
silverware and china so fine you could see through it. All the napkins were a flamingo pink and the tablecloths a pale green.
The old man, in his twenties then, sat with them, after he had slipped the maitre d’ a C-note, a lot of money in those days.
He was dressed in a creamy cashmere double-breasted suit and brown-and-white spectator shoes. He looked around at the swells,
sizing them up for a hustle. He saw Joe Kennedy, with his big eyeglasses and buck teeth, sitting and laughing with Gloria
Swanson.

A girl stopped by his table and smiled down at him drinking his scotch and water. She was a beautiful blonde in a pale pink
dress, with her floppy-brimmed hat pulled over one eye.

“You shouldn’t drink alone,” she said, and sat down across from him. He was handsome then, with his slicked-back hair and
pale blue eyes, and straight nose. But he had never been much of a ladies’ man. Or a drinker. He had a theory, even then,
that a man has enough time in his life for only one vice. Booze, broads, gambling. If you’re going to do it right, he figured,
you had to pick one and stick to it.

He sat with the girl, whose name he couldn’t remember now, almost sixty years later. He drank his scotch and she drank her
pink lady and they talked. He had taught himself things he knew he would need on the hustle, things he had gotten mostly from
books,
The Great Gatsby,
how to dress, the stock market, Ivy League schools, although he could never get over his habit of saying Darthmouth instead
of Dartmouth, but they never caught on, although his cronies did, laughing at him, calling him Ivy League. Maybe that was
his hustle on that day, just fitting in with the swells, that girl, with no one the wiser. She just assumed he was “one of
our crowd,” so she chattered away about Palm Beach and how boring it was in-season, all the old fogies, but her mother insisted
she spend her spring break from Wellesley with the family during High Season, especially since Daddy had a horse running in
the Flamingo Derby.

“It’s all so boring,” she said as she held up a cigarette in a long mother-of-pearl holder. He lighted her cigarette with
a silver lighter he had won in a craps game. She held his hand, looked into his eyes, and blew out the lighter in a way she
had seen in a moving picture once.

“Your father has a horse in the Derby?” he said. “Tell me about it.”

“Oh, he’s just some old horse Daddy bought that nobody wanted. I don’t understand any of it. The bloodlines and all that.
It seems silly, Daddy keeping his horse out of races until now, like it’s some big secret. Who cares?”

But the old man, a young man then, cared, and after a few moments, he excused himself and went to the hundred-dollar window
and placed a G-note on the nose of Daddy’s horse, which came in first by three lengths. The girl never knew. She was still
sitting there, waiting for him to come back, when he collected his winnings, and then walked down the grandstand to the long
dirt path that smelled of hay and horseshit, with the sun slanting across his path through the towering Royal Palms that lined
the path that led through wrought-iron gates to his car.

The old man smiled to himself. The only time he’d ever scored off the ponies and he owed it to a woman. He checked his watch.
It was getting late. He got up and left the OTB room and went outside. It was still snowing, but not so bad now. He hugged
himself against the cold and walked carefully through the parking lot so he wouldn’t slip. When he got to his old Volkswagen
beetle, it was covered with snow. He swept the snow from the roof, and the front and rear windows, with his bare hands that
stung from the cold snow. It snapped him alert, heightened his senses after the long hours in the warm casino smelling of
smoke and cheap perfume and sweat. It would be a long drive home. Two hours in nice weather. He checked his watch. Five p.m.
He’d be lucky to make it home by nine in the snow. If he got home any later, his wife would be worried.

The old man drove slowly on the highway rutted with snow. He put on his windshield wipers to keep the snow from accumulating.
He passed a few cars at first, and then none. Cars were pulled off onto the side of the highway, buried in snowdrifts. The
old man hunched forward over the steering wheel. He rotated his neck to ease a cramp. It exhausted him to stand for hours
at a craps table now that he was an old man. He still wasn’t used to it. Old man. When he was younger, in his fifties, he
could shoot pool for twenty-four hours straight, pocket his winnings, throw cold water on his face, wash off the baby powder
and blue chalk dust on his hands, straighten his rep tie, button his double-breasted navy blazer, and take all his cronies
out for a big meal. He smiled to himself. Cronies. An old man’s word. Fellow card sharps and shills and past-posters like
Tommy the Blonde and Freddie the Welch and Schiamo. Club fighters with scar tissue around their eyes like Billy Bones. Baggy
pants vaudeville comics with leering eyes, and their girlfriends, strippers with yellow hair that smelled of peroxide. But
they always acted like ladies when he took them out to dinner, especially in front of his wife. She was respectable in their
eyes, if for no other reason than that she
was
his wife, now, of sixty years. He always paid for those big dinners. He liked paying. But there was no one to buy dinner
for now.

He must have gunned the accelerator in his reverie because the car was slipping sideways. He stabbed at the brake and the
car made a full, spinning circle in the snow, disorienting him for a moment, before he managed to straighten it out and continue
down the highway.

“For Crissakes!” he said out loud. “Pay attention!” He hunched over the steering wheel again and forced himself to concentrate.
That was the thing about getting old. Everyone thought it was about memory, but it was about concentration. It just flew out
of his head without warning. He knew he had lost much of his physical stamina, but at least he knew the limits of the stamina
he had left. He could adjust to that. But his concentration was something else. He never knew when he’d lose it until it was
gone. A hazard in his profession.