Murder at the Racetrack (29 page)

“Maybe,” Arnie said, “but you wouldn’t be here talking to me if it wasn’t true. You wouldn’t have answered my call yesterday.
You wouldn’t have checked on my credentials after our completely nonthreatening conversation yesterday.” Seeing that Grant
was about to respond again, he stabbed a finger into the air between them. “Don’t talk. Listen,” he said with quiet authority.
“I know that Jeff Vaughn lied that day. He placed the bet that he told you he hadn’t, the only winning ticket, and decided
to keep all the money for himself.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grant said. But much of the initial bluster was gone and now he was frozen, his
eyes locked on the inspector’s face.

“Of course you do. What you don’t know is that this may in fact be the luckiest day of your life, at least since the day you
drove away from San Francisco with no one even suspecting you’d killed Jeff Vaughn.”

“Ridiculous,” Grant said again. He pushed his chair back, made as if to get up.

“They keep records, you know. I checked.”

Grant hesitated, turned in his chair, and looked back behind him at the crowded bar area, the easy escape to freedom.

“You walk out of here,” Arnie said, “my next stop is the cops.”

The anchor was halfway out of his seat, clearly torn between his impulses. “They’d arrest you before you knew what hit you,”
he said.

“Okay,” Arnie said easily. “Maybe they will. It’s your call.”

A last look at the tempting exit, then Grant came back to Arnie and lowered himself. “I’m not admitting anything.”

Arnie didn’t feel he needed to tell him again that by staying, as by his arrival in the first place, he already had. Instead,
he leaned back, crossed a leg, drank from his club soda. “Vaughn didn’t pick up the money until a week after the race. I’m
assuming you didn’t believe his cover story, which we know is always a lie. So you went down with him, or followed him. Either
way, you were there when he came out with the money. In cash.”

Grant said nothing.

“You know,” Arnie continued in a conversational, even amiable tone, “it’s lucky they didn’t have the rule back then that’s
in effect nowadays where financial transactions over ten thousand dollars in cash have to be reported to the government. And
they took the taxes out right at the park, so it was all cash. I’m thinking they took what? About twenty percent?”

“I admire your imagination,” Grant said, “but you’re out of your mind.”

Arnie offered a polite smile. “We’ll see. But in the meanwhile, you confronted Vaughn and he probably offered to split the
money with you. I don’t know what you thought about that—maybe you were just really mad at the deception in the first place,
maybe you thought it would be too much of a hassle hiding it from the other two guys, maybe you just needed the money and
it was there for the taking. Whatever, you probably kept Vaughn talking and trying to work something out until it was dark,
at which time you suggested a walk down to Fillmore to get some beer. I’m thinking you left the cash in your apartment.”

Grant focused on him for a beat, then turned his head to check the still-empty room behind him. Coming back to Arnie, he lowered
his voice. “You can’t prove a word of any of this.”

“Ah,” Arnie held up a finger, “but that’s the beauty of it. Of course I can. It’s only a matter of putting in the manpower.
No one’s even glanced at you for this before and once they start, it’s really child’s play. They check your bank records when
you first arrived here in LA and find a twenty-thousand-dollar deposit, for example, within a month of blowing out of San
Francisco where everybody, and certainly Jose Ropa, would testify that to their own personal knowledge, you were poor as a
dormouse. No, proving this stuff will be a piece of cake. The minute they turn the fire up under this, you are toast. You
really would do well to believe this.”

Grant tried a last haughty smile. “And why is that?”

“Because here’s the funny truth,
jour own
cover story was a lie. That’s what I finally realized had been right there in front of me all the time. You
loved
telling all of America every week that the cover story was
always
a lie, didn’t you? All the imbeciles out there in TV land who just didn’t get it, that you were telling them the deepest
truth about yourself.”

“And why would I want to do that?”

“Because you, Mister Peter Grant, have always been an arrogant guy. It’s why you couldn’t resist hanging a photograph of Steppin’
Pretty in your office. I never thought I’d find anything that obvious—I was hoping for an old checkbook, maybe, or the race
program for the day, and even those were long shots, but I needed something that, if it wasn’t actually hard proof, would
at least get you to talk to me again. Then, as soon as I saw the picture, of course, it all made perfect sense. Although I
must admit that the balls it took to do that surprised even me. That’s just who you are.” Arnie tipped up his glass, sucked
on an ice cube. “Any time you’d like to help me out with any of this, fill in the missing pieces, just jump right in.”

“Are you gentlemen all right?” the waiter asked.

“Maybe a refill on the soda, thanks,” Arnie said.

“Mr. Grant?”

Grant pointed at his untouched drink. “I’m good,” he said. After the waiter withdrew, he leaned forward. “So? What do you
want? Is this blackmail? Is that it?”

“Actually, it’s a little better than blackmail. Let’s wait a minute, here’s the waiter again. I love the service here.” With
a fresh club soda in front of him, Arnie spun the glass with both hands. “Here’s the thing, and the reason it’s your lucky
day. For reasons of my own, I’m not feeling too good about the police myself lately, the way they do things. I’m not particularly
inclined to do their work for them and I think it’s likely to the point of certainty that if I just forget this whole thing
and walk out of here, this whole issue of Jeff Vaughn’s murder will never arise again. Of course, that would put me in great
jeopardy. You could just have me silenced and that would be the end of it for you. But,” Arnie said, “because mama didn’t
raise a fool, I’ve taken the precaution of sending your nice photograph of Steppin’ Pretty to a friend, along with instructions
as to what he might like to do with it in the event of my unfortunate death or disability.”

Grant spoke through gritted teeth. “You’re actually liking this, aren’t you?”

Arnie gave it a serious beat, then broke a smile that would have been positively cheerful if he hadn’t realized that that
would have struck a wrong note, so he toned it down. “I’ve had worse days, after all, to be honest,” he said soberly. “But
the real issue, as you put it, is what do I want?”

“I’m listening.”

“Good. Because I want you to understand this very clearly.” All trace of the earlier smile was gone. Arnie reached into his
shirt pocket and extracted a piece of paper upon which he’d scribbled several columns of numbers. “In nineteen seventy-four,
you stole twenty-one thousand, one hundred and twenty dollars from Jeff Vaughn and, really, from your other two friends. Actually,
it was less than that because of the taxes, but I already did the figuring and I’m going with the gross amount. Figuring ten
percent interest compounded yearly, which is another break I’m giving you since I could also have compounded it daily, that
comes to three hundred and four thousand, five hundred seventy-one dollars today. That’s the straight settlement amount, if
you want to look at it that way. But I think we’ll both agree that some punitive damages are called for here as well, since
you murdered to get your hands on this money. Punitives usually run three times the settlement amount, as I’m sure you know.
So that brings us to nine hundred and thirteen thousand, seven hundred and thirteen dollars, which is close enough to a million
to round it up, don’t you agree?”

“You think I’ve got a million dollars lying around?”

“Mr. Grant, please don’t insult me. I was up at your house today, remember. The cars alone, the art in the living room…” Arnie
shook his head. “Don’t tempt me to ask for more. A million is a reasonable figure.”

Grant’s weathered face had gone white.

But again, Arnie held up a finger, checking him before he could speak. “If it’s a help, you should know that I, personally,
don’t want the million dollars at all. I want you to send a cashier’s check for that amount to Lora Frankel. She lives in
a trailer park in Daly City. I’ve got the address.”

“Lora Frankel?”

Arnie nodded. “Les’s wife. Who you may recall lost twin babies over this whole thing, and subsequently she and Les could never
have children at all. You stole that money from them, and now that Les is gone, she needs it desperately. I think it’s only
fair that you pay her back.”

“Then what?”

“Then I send you your picture of Steppin’ Pretty and my notes for the formal police investigation, the whole package. Which
if you’re smart, you’ll destroy.”

“The originals, you mean?”

“Right. The one and onlies.”

“And this will never come up again?”

“That’s right.”

“What if I don’t believe you?”

“Well, then you’ll probably wind up doing a lot of needless worrying in your future life. I wouldn’t go there. It won’t happen.”
Arnie raised his chin. “Look, Mr. Grant, this is the deal of a lifetime I’m offering here. You take it, you’re out a little
money you can easily afford. You don’t, you go to jail, maybe even face the death penalty. You’re telling me you need to think
about this?”

“So this Lora Frankel suddenly gets a check for a million dollars. How do you explain that?”

“I don’t. I thought I’d let you come up with some really good cover story.”

•    •    •

Arnie gave Grant three weeks to send the check before he would deliver the package including the photo to the police. He did
it with four days to spare. The famous Mr. Peter Grant was sure that Lora wouldn’t remember specifically, but the money was
a dividend from a penny stock that had been a precursor to a precursor of a company that had finally merged into Cisco. He
and his old friend Les had invested in it back in the early seventies when they’d all used to hang out together. He’d come
across the original stock certificate, in Grant’s name only—ten thousand shares for which they’d pooled their money and spent
a hundred dollars—when he’d been going through his old files. On the certificate itself, though, he’d written “half for Les
Frankel,” and now this payment was his debt of honor repaid. As a personal favor, Grant asked Lora to keep the news of the
distribution as quiet as possible. In his position as a serious newsman, he didn’t crave publicity for his own sake. Grant
was sure she understood.

In the same three weeks, Arnie had rented a small office a few blocks both from their home and from Cal’s workplace in the
Sunset District. He’d sent a letter out to all the attorneys he knew in the city, advertising his services as a private investigator
as soon as his license came through, which should be very shortly. He’d already gotten fourteen calls.

Now he was opening the blinds, letting the sunlight back in after a lunch hour during which he and his wife had broken in—as
they put it—the fold-a-bed in the new office digs. Cal was buttoning up her blouse. “Under the circumstances,” she told Arnie,
“I’ll bet he could have told her to super-glue her lips together for six weeks and she would have done it.”

“For a million bucks, I might be tempted to do the same thing.”

“You do,” Cal said, “and I’ll kill you.”

Michael Malone

P
lease listen, Mr. Jones. Loopy is a hundred percent sure about rain tomorrow. Nobody can beat us on a muddy track.”

“Loopy is a hundred percent sure of zero.”

“But, Mr. Jones, it’s like destiny. I can do it in one-forty-six. Raindancer—” The teenaged Michelle Harlin stood there arguing,
small, trim, prettier than she thought, with tight black curls that shook with the vigor of her effort to persuade her trainer
of her conviction.

“You’ve got an occupation, Michelle, not a destiny. And please call that horse by his proper name. His name is Fortune’s Child.”
Tall and thin, Jones, the trainer at Campbell Farms, was an African American in his fifties, fair enough to freckle, with
large still hands knobbled by arthritis. His style was so formal that, even in the stables, he wore his dotted tie tucked
into a white shirt, the sleeves precisely rolled to sharp elbows; so formal that when asked his name, he replied always, “Mr.
Jones.”

“Go home, Michelle.” His habitual firmness was tempered with a nod on the verge of an affection never made explicit.

257

“You know what to do. What Mr. Grandors has hired you to do.” He locked a metal box on his desk and then placed the box in
a drawer that he also locked.

The young woman jumped from atop the tack trunk. “Home? Why? Mama will get off work at the bar and we’ll go home to a trailer
and watch TV. And the bar will be playing the same dumb songs and the same dumb drunks will be singing along. So… oh whatever.”

Michelle stepped around a tanned young man, Mr. Grandors’s son, here on spring break from college for the races. Saddle over
his shoulder, he grinned, waving.

The trainer Jones was already walking away from her, down the long corridor of stalls. Around him dozens of stable hands and
grooms hurried back and forth. He nodded at a few men nearby before stopping at the last stall, beyond which stretched perfect
meadows of Kentucky bluegrass. At this stall, the sheen of the enameled white wood gleamed and the bright brass hinges on
the door flashed in the low slant of sun. On the stall door, a wreath of roses circled a brass plate with the name SPATS.

Jones gave a tap on the door; inside it, a big roan thoroughbred whinnied. When Michelle stepped up beside the trainer, he
pointed to the horse. “Spats is going to win tomorrow. Spats is going off the morning-line favorite. Post time Spats will
still be the favorite, and a gargantuan sum—”