Riders Down (11 page)

“Davie,” Krantz said, “come over here.”

Guerin finished carefully combing his blond hair with one of his small, strong hands, slipped into his briefs, jeans, and tee-shirt, and walked to where Krantz was seated. There was a stricken look on Krantz’ usually cheery face. “I don’t want anybody hearing this,” Krantz said in a low voice, “but there’s a telegram here you better look at right away.”

“Who from?” said the puzzled jockey.

“Some guy signs himself Professor. That’s all. Damned if I know who he is,” Krantz said. “But whoever he is, he claims he killed your brother.”

Chapter Eighteen

On a Saturday afternoon two weeks after jockey Mark Guerin’s funeral, Jimbo Murray looked up from his large, leather-bound menu, then placed it on the linen-covered table in the Heartland Downs Turf Club. There was a look of disgust on his face. Vera Klinder continued to read her menu, pausing occasionally to sip from her cranberry-flavored vodka cocktail and look around the beautifully appointed room, crowded with well-dressed patrons who were eating, drinking and discussing how they might wager on the next race.

Jimbo shook his head. “Damn,” he said, “I didn’t know we were coming to a place where they charge you thirteen bucks for a damn hamburger.”

Vera reached across the table to pat his hand.

“Honey, we should be able to splurge a little. If things work out in this race, we’ll be taking home a bunch of money.” She nodded toward the twelve-inch television set, a standard feature on every table in the upscale Turf Club. The set was tuned to Elmont Park in New York, where horses were approaching the starting gate for the final leg of that day’s National Pick Four. There were nine of them, but to the bettors, both at Elmont and at the hundreds of simulcast sites around the nation, only one seemed to matter: Number Five, Sena Sena, winner of his last five races and favored today at 2-5.

The Elmont track announcer, commenting when the camera concentrated on the prancing, gleaming-coated Sena Sena and his rider, David Guerin, referred to the horse as “the prohibitive favorite.”

Jimbo said, “I don’t get it. They’re calling this horse the prohibatable favorite, or whatever. That’s like prohibition, when they outlawed booze, right? But it don’t look like anybody’s been prohibited from betting on this son of a bitch. Look at those little odds on him.” He smiled as he re-examined the Pick Four ticket in his hand. “He’s not on our ticket,” Jimbo said. “And I’m pretty goddam sure there’s a reason for that.” He clinked his Budweiser bottle against Vera’s upraised cocktail glass. Then he motioned for the waiter and ordered the $13 hamburger. Vera opted for the fruit plate, “and an order of French fries on the side.”

***

Some forty minutes later, Oily Ronnie Schrapps sauntered up to the $50 window on the third floor clubhouse side of Heartland Downs. He was feeling relaxed on what was a “day off” for him—no old broads to snooker, no naïve prospects to impress, just a regular day at the races, trying to make some money with his bets.

With fifteen minutes to post time for the ninth and final race on the program, Oily Ronnie had plenty of time to bet. He knew what horse he was going with, one he had followed for weeks, so he had time to schmooze with Toby Mullins, the veteran mutuel clerk who had manned this $50 window for as long as Ronnie could remember.

“One race to go, Toby,” Ronnie said. “Give me two hundred win and place on the five horse.”

Mullins adroitly punched out the ticket. Then he leaned forward across the counter and beckoned Ronnie closer to him. “See that redheaded guy over there with the duffel bag?” he whispered.

Ronnie turned to his right. He spotted a redheaded man who was talking on one of the public phones on the west wall. There was a maroon duffel bag at his feet, a large beer in one hand, and a broad smile on his freckled face.

“What about him?” Ronnie said.

Mullins said, “Guy came to me with a winning ticket on the National Pick Four. One of only ten in the country.”

Ronnie’s eyebrows raised. “That had to be a good score,” he said. “What’d it pay? Nearly $200,000, right? I sure as hell didn’t have it,” he added, “not when Sena Sena flopped in the final leg at Elmont. I was only alive on my ticket to that pig.”

“That Pick Four paid just over $245,000,” Mullins said, “but that’s not the interesting part. The guy insisted on cash, no check, all $20 bills. Couldn’t be talked out of it. That’s the second time this summer that’s happened. Some broad hit the National Pick Four awhile back for well over four hundred grand. She wouldn’t take anything but cash, either.”

Schrapps frowned. “That’s got to be a hell of a big bundle of money, right?”

Mullins reached for a pen and applied it to a piece of scrap paper. “No, not all that heavy,” he said after finishing his calculations. “Each bill, like every piece of U.S. currency, weighs one gram. There are 454 grams in a pound. So, this guy was only lugging a little under twenty-seven pounds.

“They tell me that when the broad cashed in the 460 grand and took cash, she had a couple of security guards carry it out in shopping bags to a car in the parking lot. Know what she tipped the guards? Two bucks apiece. That was it,” Mullins said disgustedly.

“For this redheaded guy,” Mullins continued, “Terry Dart, the mutuel manager, spent ten minutes counting out the money for the guy down in his office. Very unusual,” the clerk added. “Most people naturally want a check. Who wants to be walking around carrying that kind of bread on him? And the guy refused an escort from track security, just like the woman before.”

“You know this guy?”

“Never saw him before today. He won that bet with a pretty small ticket. And he left the big favorite, Sena Sena, completely off it, if you can fathom that. I guess I’d better keep my eyes open for him next time, see who he’s betting,” Mullins added with a laugh.

The two watched as the redheaded man replaced the phone on its hook. He hefted the duffel bag to his shoulder. It appeared to be heavy, evidently bulging with currency, but he carried it easily. He drained his beer cup before moving toward the escalators.

Oily Ronnie said, “See you later, Toby. Got to head out. If I win the ninth you can cash me out tomorrow.” He put his mutuel tickets in his wallet, then hurriedly followed the redheaded man down the escalator.

Many people—especially parents with children, patrons who had come in groups, and tapped-out losers—were leaving before the final Heartland Downs race of the afternoon as Ronnie followed the redheaded man through the clubhouse door and toward the parking lot. It was a noisy, crowded scene, the valet parkers scurrying to retrieve cars, senior citizens walking slowly to their buses, children chattering to parents deflated by defeat of their horses, and Ronnie had to hustle and sidestep to keep his target in sight. In Section C of the vast parking lot, he saw the redheaded man approach a blue Toyota, open the passenger side door, then enter. There was a woman behind the wheel, and another figure in the back seat that Ronnie could not see clearly.

As the blue Toyota backed out of its slot toward him, Ronnie raised his binoculars. When the car had straightened out and began driving off, he read its license plate, which was mud-spattered but not so badly that its numbers were illegible. He quickly said to himself, “Wisconsin 869-1121,” and knew he’d locked it into his memory. Looking up from the license plate to the back seat, Ronnie saw another pair of binoculars, aimed at him. They were in the hands of a broad-shouldered, bald man. Ronnie could not see the eyes behind those glasses. But as the blue Toyota receded in the distance and he lowered his binoculars, Ronnie felt a chill, as if the gaze aimed at him had contained a strain of invisible, but very tangible, menace.

Ronnie shook off his feeling of concern, concentrating on the bag of money he’d just seen leave the track. “I’ve got to keep an eye out for these people,” he said to himself. “If they hit again and are this dumb, I know the boys that’ll take that cash off them.”

Opening the door to his gray BMW, Ronnie heard the track announcer call the finish of the ninth race. His horse finished third. Ronnie reached for his wallet, extracted the $400 worth of worthless tickets, and scattered them across the tarmac before getting behind the wheel.

“Damn,” he said, “I thought that horse was a cinch.” He was parked directly beneath one of the overhead television cameras monitoring the lot, but he carefully looked around to make sure he was not being observed by any people walking to nearby cars. Ronnie cautiously reached below the dashboard and extracted the cigarette lighter, which had been hollowed out and contained his portable drug stash. Leaning sideways in the seat and keeping his head down, he poured coke into a crisp, tubed $50 bill, snorted twice, and replaced the lighter.

He sat back up behind the wheel, then momentarily leaned back against the cushioned head rest, feeling better already. Then he started the BMW and drove off, singing to himself:

Chapter Nineteen

Matt started his work day by interviewing Moss Tilton, the man in charge of starting the races at Heartland Downs, who was about to celebrate his thirtieth year on the job. Tilton, a hard-bitten old Texan, allowed as how he had “watched more horses’ asses in full flight than any man in America outside of the U. S. Congress.”

That scheduled interview had been followed by an impromptu and unwanted session with Leon the elevator operator. Leon held the car at floor level and wouldn’t open the doors until he had described in excruciating detail the small fortune he’d “just missed in yesterday’s fifth race. For about the thousandth time, I play a trifecta that comes in 1-2-4. If they would invent a bet like that, I’d hit it so often I’d retire in a week,” Leon lamented.

“Yeah, and if they wrote races at six furlongs and one jump, I’d be living on an estate on a Caribbean island,” Matt replied, finally escaping Leon’s clutches.

A few minutes later Matt had just poured his second cup of coffee of the morning when his phone rang in the Heartland Downs press box. There was no greeting when he picked up the receiver, just a question barked out by his chronically impatient editor, Harry Cobabe: “How many jocks have died in strange ways that you know about?”

Matt shifted the phone to his left ear, the one farthest from colleague Rick Rothmeyer, who was arguing loudly on his phone with his girlfriend, then saying to her, “Ivy, let me tell you something. Some day, you’ll find yourself. And you’ll be really, really bummed.” Rick put down the phone, a satisfied grin on his face. Matt resumed talking to Cobabe.

“Why are you asking me?” Matt said. “‘You’ve got a crack research department down there at the main office, don’t you? Or why don’t you put some of your copy desk gerbils on it, so they’d stop fiddling with the prose I send them?”

Matt enjoyed sparring with Cobabe, who two years earlier had replaced an editor Matt despised, Hugo Hamilton, dismissed because of increasing ineptitude. Hamilton later talked himself into the sports editor’s job on a small paper in southern Ohio, where he was fired again, this time for an act that entered journalism lore. A terrible writer who was obliged to provide one sports page column per week, Hamilton faced a deadline one day with a blank computer screen before him. Desperate, he went to the internet and downloaded a column from a major Cleveland paper. It was a piece that sharply criticized the Ohio State University football program. Without reading it, Hamilton deleted the byline of its writer, Bill Livingston, and hurriedly put his own byline on it. The controversial column ran that night. The next morning, Hamilton got a phone call from an irate reader and OSU alum who lambasted him for “such a dumb, scurrilous, vicious column.” After listening for a minute or two, Hamilton angrily interrupted the caller. “Listen, jerkoff,” he shouted into the phone, “go shove that column up your ass.
I
didn’t write the goddam thing.”

Cobabe ignored Matt’s remark about the copy desk. He said, “I am asking you in order to determine whether you retain any shred of the acuity that occasionally has appeared in your work during my time here.”

Matt laughed in acknowledgment of this jibe. He took a sip of coffee. “Well,” he began, “there was Citation’s rider Al Snider back in the 1940s—he disappeared while fishing off the Florida Keys. There was an ex-jock named McKeever and another named Miller, back in the ’80s. They died off the other coast of Florida, evidently in a boating accident that no one saw. How am I doing?”

“Since then. Let’s talk more recent,” Cobabe said.

“Mike Hole. Suicide, but under suspicious circumstances. Eric Walsh. Murdered by persons unknown. Then there was that Cajun bug boy down in Louisiana a few years back. His death was ruled a suicide—even though he’d been shot in the back. Ah, Louisiana. How’s that?”

Cobabe admitted, “Not bad. Evidently you haven’t sacrificed all your brain cells to Jack Daniels. I find this encouraging. Sometimes, you know, I tend to give up hope for your generation, so many of them walking around yapping on cell phones, or listening to crap music on their headsets, going down the street and refusing to make eye contact with anyone except themselves in the store window reflections. They make Narcissus look like an amateur at self-absorption. But don’t get me started on that.”

“You started,” Matt said.

“Never mind, let’s get back to the subject at hand,” Cobabe said. “Those deaths you mentioned were spread over many years. Did you know that this year alone there’ve been three of these midgets murdered in the last two months?”

Matt put the phone down on his desk and took a deep breath. “Midgets.” What a term to describe the most amazing athletes Matt had ever observed. Somehow, sometimes, his acerbic editor could catch Matt with his defenses down and thoroughly appall him with his callousness.

“Yes, of course I know that,” Matt finally answered. “There was Eddie Calvin over in Indiana. Before him, that Mexican rider, Carlos Hidalgo in Maryland. And Mark Guerin in New Orleans. Who could forget?” he said softly.

Cobabe, barking orders to a staff member in the office, evidently didn’t hear Matt’s response. Or at least he resumed talking without any acknowledgment of it.

“On top of that,” Cobabe said, “there have been upsets in two of our major races and huge gimmick payoffs as a result. My question is: what’s happening here? Jocks murdered. Handicapping form falling apart. What the hell’s going on in American racing?”

Cobabe paused, then sighed into the phone for effect. “Am I being too demanding, like the tyrant my troops believe me to be, if I ask: ‘Don’t I smell a major story here? One that my ace Chicago columnist should be poking his sizeable proboscis into?’”

“That’s a redundancy. Besides, no one even knows what proboscis means anymore, Harry.”

There was a sigh at the other end. Then Cobabe said, “All right, tell me what you’re working on now.”

“I’m doing a long feature for Saturday on a trainer here, Mark Kaplan, young guy in his first year out of Minnesota, off to a great start. I’ll file that Racing Board wrap-up I told you about this afternoon. I’ve got to cover a Horsemen’s Association meeting tomorrow night, they’re electing officers and there are some wild-eyed nut cases challenging the current incumbents. Should be lively.

“And,” Matt said softly into the phone, “I’m looking into rumors of a guy here running an investment scam involving racehorses. Nobody else knows about this, Harry, this is a case in progress. So, I’m keeping this quiet.”

Another silence. Then Cobabe conceded, “Okay, I know you’re busy, Matt. But this jock thing could be hot. As soon as you can, next week at the latest, I want you to move this to your front burner. Get it?”

Matt finished his coffee. Then he said, “Fax the clippings on all three of those jocks who were killed this year. Hidalgo, Calvin and Guerin. I already know about the two races you’re talking about—those payoffs had everybody flapping. I’ll start thinking about this.”

“Think hard,” Cobabe answered. “Think fast.”

Matt went over the clipping file late Sunday night. When he was finished, just before midnight, he called Cobabe at home. This was akin to interrupting the Pope during his rosary, and very much discouraged by the editor, but Matt dialed anyway.

“This better be good,” Cobabe growled.

Matt said, “I need to go to Vegas. I’ll be away one, maybe two days. You’d better send one of your deskmen out to Heartland to cover for me while I’m gone.”

There was a silence on the other end before Cobabe repeated himself. “This better be good.”

“It could be. I need to talk to a friend of mine about these ‘unusual races.’ If something’s not kosher about them, he’ll know.”

Cobabe said, “Matt, I’m tired. It’s late. Make the trip. I trust your judgment on this. Call me if you need anything.” Then he hung up.

Matt dialed Maggie’s number. The phone rang six times before she came on to sleepily say, “This better be good.”

“You know, that’s exactly what Harry Cobabe said to me about fifteen minutes ago. Imagine, you and my esteemed editor sharing speech patterns.”

Maggie sighed as she sat up in bed. She waited him out. With less than four hours to go before her alarm clock went off, she was conserving energy.

He said, “I hate to call you at this hour, but I just wanted to let you know I’m going out of town early tomorrow. I’ll be gone a couple of days.”

“Okay,” Maggie said, “where?”

“I am going to Vegas to consult with the most expert source I know concerning all matters related to horse race gambling.”

Maggie yawned, then said, “Okay. Just be careful. Call me from out there tomorrow night. And say hello to The Fount for me. Love you,” she added before hanging up and clicking off her light.