Riders Down (2 page)

Bledsoe paused in his typing. His look bore into Bernie. “You think I’d want to worry about you the rest of my life?
Not
a good idea.” He resumed typing.

A minute later Bledsoe hit the print command on the computer. He waited for the single page to emerge from the printer, rapidly scanned it, then nodded, satisfied, and placed it on the small table next to Glockner’s armchair.

“What’s that?” Bernie said.

“It’s your suicide note, Bernie. Shall I read it to you?”

Glockner’s breath seemed to catch in his throat. Finally, he said, “You’re a cold-hearted bastard. May you rot in hell. I’m done talking to you.” He turned his head away. The second man’s iron grip continued to hold the old man down.

“Bernie, Bernie,” Bledsoe said, smiling again, “you’re the maven with numbers, percentages. You’re the fucking ‘Wizard of Odds!’ Tell me why I should even
consider
taking the chance that you, maybe when you finally hit your dotage, are in some Alzheimer’s moment and start talking about me. Perhaps someone figures out what you’re rambling about. Would that be smart business for me?
Au contraire
, Bernie,” he said, mockingly drawing the syllables out. “There wouldn’t be any percentage in that for me, would there?”

Bledsoe didn’t expect a reply and didn’t get one. He stood up from the computer table and made an over the shoulder motion with his right hand, thumb protruding. His smile seemed to widen as, for an instant, the old bookmaker struggled stubbornly, attempting to hold onto the arms of his leather chair. But the man standing back of Glockner lifted him with ease. He was almost as solidly built as the Professor, and at least four inches taller. Placing a huge hand over Glockner’s mouth, he moved swiftly to the window that the Professor had opened wide. Then he sailed little Bernie Glockner out into the frigid Chicago night.

Bledsoe turned off the lights. As the two men hurriedly moved to the door, the taller one, Jimbo Murray, said, “I give him credit. The little fucker never made a sound going down.”

“I’ll lay you 1-to-10 he did when he hit the pavement,” Bledsoe said.

Bledsoe drove rapidly but carefully from the Ohio Street ramp onto the Kennedy Expressway heading north. He was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as he zipped past slower vehicles. Jimbo was silent, looking out his passenger seat window at the sparse traffic. Finally, he said, “You know, Claude, you kind of took advantage of me with this deal.”

Bledsoe looked at him. Sharply he said, “What’s your complaint?”

“You never said anything about us tossing that old man. ‘Scare him into silence,’ you said.” Jimbo shook his head and turned to look out the window again. “I’ve never killed anybody before. I never
wanted
to kill anybody. I don’t know why the hell I let you lead me into this.” His big jaw set, Jimbo stared straight ahead as they passed the Tuohy Avenue exit.

“Well, Jimbo old buddy,” Bledsoe said angrily, “isn’t that a goddam shame? I told you this was the first step in a plan to make big money for us both. You were cool with that. I didn’t seduce you, you dumb son of a bitch. You wanted in, and I put you in, and now we’re going to put my plan in motion.”

He curved around a pair of huge, speeding trucks before adding, “What did you think, we were going to come down here and pick up some cash lying in the Chicago streets?”

Cowed by Bledsoe’s angry statement, Jimbo sat quietly. “Don’t fuck with Claude” was a motto he had come to live by not long after first getting to know Bledsoe.

Bledsoe broke the silence. “The thing is,” he said softly, “it doesn’t make any difference to me
how
you feel about it. You’re in. End of story, my man.”

Bledsoe reached into the rack of tapes he kept next to his seat, then popped in “Uncle Anesthesia” by his favorite grunge band, Screaming Trees. The sound was so loud Jimbo cringed. Bledsoe just snapped his fingers and bobbed his big head, grinning, as they left the Edens Expressway and continued north on the interstate.

Chapter Two

On a brisk April afternoon in Chicago, some two months after Bernie Glockner’s fatal descent in the night, the field for the fourth race at Heartland Downs Racetrack curved around the final turn, heralded by cries of excitement from the few thousand bettors on hand. Matt O’Connor, two-thirds of the way through writing his daily column for
Racing Daily
, the national newspaper for which he had worked for eleven of his thirty-six years, glanced up from his computer screen and looked out the press box window at the wide strip of brown earth over which nine horses were churning. The race in progress was a low-level claiming event, newsworthy only if a horse or a jockey died during it, or a long shot winner emerged to pay more than $100. O’Connor resumed writing as the horses pounded toward the finish line, located three stories below the press box that sat atop the Heartland Downs grandstand.

“Damn!”
came a shout from O’Connor’s left. Then there was the sound of a pair of binoculars being thumped onto a desk top, followed by the crash of an overturned chair. Source of this activity was O’Connor’s press box colleague, Rick Rothmeyer, handicapper for the
Beacon
, a Chicago daily. Rothmeyer had picked another loser and was beginning another of his blame-assigning tirades. He stalked behind the row of desks, muttering angrily. He was a large, somewhat overweight man of forty-one, and people tended to stay out of his way. Rothmeyer’s big, round face reddened as he ranted.

O’Connor shook his head resignedly, rose, and stretched. A tall, sandy-haired man with the solid physique of the college third baseman he once had been, he walked over to refill his coffee cup. He was very familiar with Rothmeyer’s outbursts and knew he would not be able to concentrate on finishing his column until his friend’s harangue was over. The late-in-the-day press box coffee was terrible. O’Connor’s nose—broken years before in a home plate collision with a catcher’s shoulder—wrinkled in disgust. He dumped the coffee into the sink.

Though he had worked as a respected racing handicapper for more than fifteen years, Rothmeyer had yet to admit that his occasional “cold streaks” resulted primarily from his own misguided calculations. To his mind, the fault almost always lay with others: either trainers who had poorly prepared their horses or, far more frequently, the horses’ riders—“inept pinheads,” as Rothmeyer termed them.

Rothmeyer said, “That nitwit Anderson rode right up into a closing pocket, couldn’t get through, finally decides to go outside, then gets beat a nose. How dumb can he get?” Arms raised imploringly he added, “How dumb can
I
be—to pick a horse he’s on?”

O’Connor said, “What was the last horse you rode? A big blue and white one on a merry-go-round?” O’Connor knew that Rothmeyer not only had
never
ridden a horse but, from observing him on the rare occasions that he visited the backstretch or the paddock, suspected that his colleague was probably afraid of these powerful, often fey creatures.

***

Sometimes, listening to one of Rothmeyer’s diatribes, O’Connor questioned his own decision to enter racing journalism. Rothmeyer could have that effect on him. But these doubts about his job choice rarely lingered for long.

Prior to joining the
Racing Daily
as its Chicago columnist, O’Connor had enjoyed an upwardly mobile career at three mid-sized Midwestern daily papers following his graduation from Marquette University’s journalism school. He’d worked city side at the first two. After becoming increasingly hardened while writing stories about subjects that he came to see as mundane and/or depressing, he had switched to sports at the third paper. Eighteen months of covering college and high school athletics had leached most of the vocational enthusiasm from him—he couldn’t decide, following the games, if he was more bored listening to the players or to their coaches. Then O’Connor learned of the opening for a columnist on the national horse racing daily, applied, and had been hired by editor Harry Cobabe.

The racetrack proved to be a wondrously different place. Matt had suspected as much when he was a kid going to the races with his father, a tools salesman with a love for horses and a conveniently elastic work schedule. Matt came to regard the world of the racetrack as an intriguing microcosm, its citizenry running the gamut from millionaire horse owners to $300 a week stable employees, with a lively middle ground in between through which money flowed in a steady stream.

There were the horses, thousand-pound, graceful creatures that ran thirty-five miles an hour on legs that looked designed to hold up nothing heavier than coffee tables. There was the vibrant, early-morning atmosphere of the track with hundreds of these beautiful animals exercising, the sounds of their hooves and their breathing providing a percussive counterpoint to the called-out greetings their riders sent into the cool air. And there was the afternoon pleasure of being able to observe nine contests each day between equine competitors and their gifted riders—men and women who, O’Connor was convinced, were pound-for-pound the world’s best athletes.

O’Connor often marveled at the camaraderie that existed in a sport/business replete with individualistic natures, one in which fierce daily competitions determined who got the money and the bragging rights, who got the goose eggs and was left with the stomach-churning nights. Racing was a world unto itself, filled with hustlers, dreamers, schemers, and hard-working citizens. As Matt once said to his father, “If a man can’t find something to write about in horse racing, he’s either lazy or dead.”

Back at his press box desk, O’Connor said to Rothmeyer, “Watch the damned replay. Anderson was pinned down there because a hole didn’t open—like he thought it would, and like it usually does. It wasn’t the kid’s fault. It was just the way the race played out. If the hole opens, he shoots through and looks like a genius. Even to you.”

O’Connor shook his head. “No, I take that back—not to you. You’re too stubborn to admit the truth. Every time one of your Best Bets loses, it’s the jockey’s fault. That’s bogus. I’m done arguing with you, you goddam hardheaded Kraut.”

Rothmeyer was replying, “And screw you, too, you dumb Mick,” when the phone on O’Connor’s desk rang. He picked up the receiver as Rothmeyer stomped off. “O’Connor here,” he said.

“Glad to hear it,” came a familiar voice. It was Moe Kellman, a wealthy Chicago businessman and horse owner with a reputation for being lengthily, discreetly connected to the Chicago Outfit.

O’Connor said, “Mosey, what’s up? Did you get me those Cub tickets for next week?”

“Matt, hold on. That’s not why I called. I need to talk to you about something important. Not on the phone. When can you do it?”

“Tomorrow after the races okay?”

“Good. Come to my office. And thanks,” Kellman said. The line went dead.

O’Connor sat before his computer, thinking about Kellman’s request. Courtesy would have compelled him to comply with it. His newsman’s innate curiosity compounded his inclination to do so, for Kellman had never before sounded so serious in all the conversations they had had.

His reverie was interrupted when Melanie Dorsett, the press box aide who served as receptionist/secretary/coffee maker/publicity notes writer placed copies of the next day’s racing entries onto his desk. Looking up, Matt said, “Thanks, Melanie,” and watched as this very tall, young, redheaded woman approached the desk of her nemesis, Rick Rothmeyer. “You’re late again, Stretch,” Rothmeyer growled in greeting. Melanie gave him a scornful look. “The way you’ve been picking horses, you might as well use a hatpin instead of your so-called system,” she said. She turned her back and walked away, continuing to distribute the sheets on other press box desks.

Melanie, a Northwestern University junior on a basketball scholarship, was spending the spring and summer as a Heartland Downs press box employee. Her father, Stan Dorsett, was a professional clocker who worked at the track timing the races and whose influence had helped get her the job. Those bloodlines were enough to raise Rothmeyer’s hackles, for he held most clockers in low esteem. “Some of them couldn’t accurately time a hippo waddling twenty yards,” he often said, “and the ones that can clock accurately don’t always report the best workouts. They’d rather keep that information for themselves. I remember reading that during World War II the Defense Department was planning to hire some New York clockers to hand-time artillery shells on a test range in New Jersey. The plan never got off the ground. But it was just as well, somebody said, because those clockers would probably just hold out the fastest ones anyway.”

“Why do you give Melanie so much grief?” Matt had once asked.

Rick said, “She’s interning here, right? Well, I’m helping prepare her for real life.”

Matt was still thinking about Moe’s call when Rick said, “C’mon, lighten up, Matt. I’ll buy you an adult beverage. And I won’t say another word about the mental and physical midgets they put up on these horses. Swear to God.”

The two men packed up their laptops, briefcases, put on their sport jackets and walked to the press box elevator. Its uniformed operator, a portly senior citizen, put down his track program and waved them in. “Tapped out yet, Leon?” asked Rothmeyer.

“I’m alive in the late double,” Leon confided as he closed the elevator door.

As they rode down, Leon complained about the “tough beat” he had suffered in the feature race. Matt and Rick smiled at each other behind his back. Leon’s litany of lousy luck was legendary. Yet they—and Leon, too—knew that he would be back at the pari-mutuel barricades the next day, optimistic and confident as ever.

Leon the Operator had entered local racing lore several summers before. On a blazingly hot August afternoon, Leon’s elevator broke down between floors. It remained stuck for nearly ninety-five minutes. Trapped in the sweltering confines of the car, Leon removed his uniform as he anxiously awaited rescue. When the repair work was finally finished, one of the electricians drove the elevator to ground level. It arrived there with Leon lying on its floor, flushed, sweating, dehydrated and wearing only his underwear. As paramedics prepared to place Leon on a stretcher, Leon’s worried supervisor asked if there was anything he could do. “Yeah,” Leon gasped after ripping off the oxygen mask, “get me a dollar trifecta box in the eighth race on the three-four-nine. And hurry! It’s got to be almost post-time!”

The doors opened and Leon said good night to his two passengers, who exited the clubhouse and began walking past the paddock toward the track’s media parking lot.

“I’ve got time for a quick two,” O’Connor said. “Where?”

“My new favorite watering hole,” Rothmeyer said. “Five blocks down on Wilke. It only opened a couple of weeks ago. Place called Jeers. Where nobody gives a shit about your name but everybody knows your business.”

Matt turned to his friend. “You haven’t pulled your ‘happy birthday’ hustle in there, have you?” He was referring to a practice that Rick had used for years when patronizing what was to him a new bar. Rick would enter, order a drink, get change for the juke box, and play three selections. The last one always would be the last song on every juke box list, “Happy Birthday.” When the song played, other patrons would look around, wondering who was being honored. Rick would sheepishly confess that he, there in the bar by himself, had played the song because it was his birthday. He had employed this trick many times a year in different bars, happily accepting celebratory free drinks from kind strangers on each such occasion.

“No,” Rick replied to Matt’s question, “I won’t be playing ‘Happy Birthday’ at Jeers. Too many guys in there know me.”

“And your devious ways,” said Matt.

As they neared their cars, Rick said, “I’ll meet you at Jeers in a couple of minutes. I’ve got to stop at the florist shop on Euclid before they close.”

Matt looked at him. “My dad always said that when you see a man buying flowers, it’s because of something he’s done, or something he plans to do. Which is it with you?”

“None of your damn business,” Rothmeyer said.

A quick two drinks it was—for Matt. He said goodbye at 7:05. Rick was lingering over the last of his drink when four of their softball-playing buddies came in, looking anxious. One of them, Jimmy Sheehan, spotted Rick. “It’s poker night and we’re a man short. We’re going over to my place, right in the neighborhood. Beer, pizza, and some Texas Hold ’Em. How about it, Rick?”

“I’ll give you an hour,” Rick replied, finishing his drink. “Then I’ll have to leave. Ivy’s making dinner for me tonight,” he said, referring to his actress-girlfriend Ivy Borchers.

Shortly before midnight, ahead more than $200, Rick attempted to pull out of the game. But Sheehan pleaded, “C’mon, man, give us a chance to get some of it back. You’re killing us.” At 1:15 a.m., having lost eleven straight hands and most of his profits, Rick threw the flowers for Ivy into a waste basket. His cards continued crummy: not bad enough to convince him to fold, not good enough to win more than the very occasional small pot.

After three o’clock, Rick even lost an argument over, as he put it, “why there shouldn’t be some kind of American Taliban that’d ban most women from wearing those jeans or skirts that show their belly buttons. There’s not one woman in thirty who looks good in those outfits. These are expanses of flesh nobody wants to be shown.”

Jimmy Sheehan, however, spoke for the rest of the players at the table when he responded, “Ah, but that one.”

Rick wouldn’t concede. “If my Ivy is the one in thirty, okay, she looks great dressed like that.” He was about to elaborate when he glanced at his watch. “Ivy!” he said. “Holy shit, I gotta get out of here.”

Ivy opened the door to her apartment just after four. She was in her house coat, and in high dudgeon. Rick shrugged apologetically. Hands raised, palms out as he confronted her, Rick took a deep breath. He said, “Ivy, I hope to God you didn’t pay the ransom. I finally managed to escape.”

There was no hint of a smile on her face as she slammed the door in his.