Riders Down (24 page)

Matt crawled into the hallway and silently closed the screen door behind him. Careful to keep the aluminum bat from touching the floor, he inched forward, shaking his head to get the sweat out of his eyes. His heart was galloping. Matt could hear Bledsoe more clearly now. Bledsoe was on a self-justifying roll, talking as much to himself as to Maggie. “Those jockeys,” he said, “they were all disposable people, professional athletes. Rock stars, talk show hosts, politicians…same deal. Why would any truly intelligent person give a damn about any of them being removed from the world?”

Maggie grunted a reply from behind the tape, but Bledsoe paid no attention. “If those jockeys had believed me in the first place, none of them would have had to die. But they didn’t. And then your boyfriend started recognizing a pattern of fixed races, and writing about it, evidently spurring on the authorities. And things started to get away from me. How unlucky could I get?” he lamented as Matt listened, thinking bitterly of Rick Rothmeyer lying in a closed coffin, feeling himself astonished at the obviously enormous distance between the self-pitying Bledsoe and normality.

Suddenly Bledsoe laughed, the whining tone gone from his voice, confident again. “Will I still get away with it? You bet your cute little ass. I pulled off some of the biggest scores in horse racing history. Stood racing on its ear. Me, who didn’t know Smarty Jones from Paula Jones when I began this project. As crimes go, this one floats atop a layer of crème de la crème.”

Creeping closer to the kitchen doorway, Matt viewed the scene from floor level. He could see Bledsoe’s big shoes on the side of the table nearest him, pointing the other way, toward where Maggie sat, her ankles crossed, as if in protection from this looming menace across from her.

Bledsoe’s rant continued. “I’m going to be long gone from here before any of those thick-headed cops get close, but I’m going to leave them something to remember me by. Besides the jockey killings, besides the betting coups, I’m going to leave them you and, after he shows up here, your meddling boyfriend. Sorry about this, my dear,” Bledsoe said, “but you go first. Nice and quick and quiet. Just like I did Marnie Rankin.” Maggie’s eyes widened again as she recalled the unexpected death of the crippled ex-jockey. Bledsoe reached into his duffel and removed a clear plastic bag. He was taking his time, enjoying it, as Maggie struggled helplessly in her chair.

“After O’Connor arrives and gets his treatment from me, I’ll take my million and be long gone. I’ll be in my own ‘protection program.’ Witnessing myself disappear,” he added with a laugh.

The phone on the kitchen counter rang. All three of them froze. Bledsoe made no move to answer it. After four rings, Matt’s recorded voice came on the answering machine, saying “Speak.” The caller was Detective Popp. “Matt, when you get this, be on the lookout for Bledsoe. The Madison police say there’s no sign of him up there. He could be heading your way. This is a real nutcake, dangerous as hell, so be careful. If you want, I’ll send a couple of my men over to your condo. I’ll try you on your cell phone. Call me if you get this first.”

Matt nearly jumped, remembering the cell phone attached to his belt. Quickly, he turned it off. He removed it from his belt and placed it on the floor. Matt was crouched at the kitchen doorway now, Bledsoe’s back to him. Maggie could see Matt but averted her gaze from him. Bledsoe unfolded the plastic bag. He started to move around the table toward her, rolling his big shoulders, as if he needed to loosen up in order to suffocate this woman. His big, bald head gleamed beneath the kitchen light. He was acting cool, but Matt could see that Bledsoe was sweating, too.

Getting to his feet, Matt quickly took one long step into the small room, moving toward Bledsoe’s right. The big man heard him and turned to look over his right shoulder, astonished at what he saw. Matt bent his knees and dropped his hands. He swung the bat left-handed as hard as he could against the side of Bledsoe’s left knee. The entire joint shot sideways. Bledsoe roared in pain. He went down on his other knee with a crash that rattled the dishes in the sink. Matt struck one more time. The second blow caught Bledsoe high on the left side of his head. It made a
whocking
sound and drove Bledsoe face down onto the floor. Amazingly, Bledsoe attempted to rise. He half turned his body, reaching up toward Matt with his right hand. Then his circuits closed down. He was out.

Matt snatched a bread knife from the kitchen drawer. He ran halfway down the hall to a closet, where he cut the cord off of his vacuum cleaner before hurrying back to the kitchen. “In a minute, Maggie, in a minute,” he said as he went to Bledsoe, who was beginning to moan. Matt quickly bound Bledsoe’s hands behind him with part of the rubberized cord. He used the rest to tie Bledsoe’s feet together. Then he went to Maggie, cut her loose and, as gently as he could, removed the tape from across her mouth. Her skin was white where the tape had pressed. Matt reached for her as she got unsteadily to her feet, then fell against him. He wiped tears from her face and held her as she shuddered, her face turned away from the sight of the battered, bleeding man on the kitchen floor.

Minutes passed before Maggie was still. His hands lightly on her arms, Matt stepped back slightly and smiled down at her, trying to break the tense mood. He nodded toward the prostrate Bledsoe. “That’s what you can do with aluminum,” Matt said. “Wood, I don’t know. Might not have worked on this creature from hell.”

Matt gave Maggie another squeeze, then he took her hand and led her into his office. Drained, she sank onto his desk chair. Matt reached across her to the phone. “I’ve got to call this in,” he said, “911, then the paper.” He glanced back out the doorway, toward where Bledsoe lay. “Maybe the paper first,” he said.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Maggie Collins,” said track announcer Trevor Durkin over the loudspeaker system, “has sent out the winners of both daily double races on this closing-day card at Heartland Downs.” There was a smattering of applause in the Heartland Downs stands in recognition of this achievement. The date was September 19, Claude Bledsoe’s fiftieth birthday and two weeks to the day after his capture.

Each of the winning horses trained by Maggie was owned by a new client. After the second one won, Matt walked out on the press box porch. He knew Maggie would look in his direction once the winner’s circle photo had been taken. She did, waving widely, smiling up into the afternoon sun. Perhaps spurred by the publicity of their climactic confrontation with Bledsoe, Maggie’s training business had picked up greatly in recent days. Matt, too, had enjoyed what editor Harry Cobabe had to admit was a career boost. “But,” Cobabe hastily added, “don’t be looking for a pay raise at this time.”

Matt’s reportage of the events leading to Bledsoe being suspected of race-fixing, and his ultimate capture, arrest, and arraignment, had appeared on
Racing Daily’
s front page for days. And the story had legs beyond the borders of horse racing journalism, primarily because of Matt’s first-person account of his finding, then overcoming Bledsoe in his condo’s kitchen. Matt played it straight, understating if anything his description of the violent events that took place that rainy afternoon. He neither downplayed Maggie’s pluckiness nor overplayed Bledsoe’s gloating menace. He just reported, from his unique standpoint as a frightened man having to use a baseball bat to save the life of his beloved. It was a powerful story, and it attracted national media attention.

There were some things Matt had chosen not to include in his first-person account. Major among them was Maggie’s reaction to her traumatic experience. After the unconscious Bledsoe had been carried by paramedics down the back stairs of Matt’s condo building, and the police departed, Maggie and Matt, finally left alone, had at first just stared at each other, shaken survivors of something neither could ever have imagined happening. He had again held her close, feeling the fear-caused tremors as they came and went, hearing her sobs, infuriated that all of the amazing toughness he had known in her, the strength that Maggie had never failed to display in the tough, male-dominated world of horse racing, could be stripped away by a monster like Bledsoe.

Maggie had looked up at Matt, eyes bright with tears. He said, “You went through a hellish experience, Maggie. But you kept your cool. You were impressive, girl, you really were.”

She shook her head. Still staring up at him Maggie said, “Matt, it was you that scared me, too. You were like a wild man going after Bledsoe with that bat. If you could have seen the terrible look on your face…

“Oh,” she said, burying her face in his chest, “I don’t know what I’m saying. You saved my life. Thank God we both got out of there alive. But still, when you were smashing Bledsoe with that bat, you were like somebody I didn’t know…”

Matt said nothing. She wept softly for minutes, dampening his shirt with her tears, until finally, she moved even closer to him and he pulled her in tighter. They stayed that way, not speaking, not moving, until the street lights came on up and down Hinman Avenue.

***

At a little after six o’clock the next morning, after a night of repeated attempts to comfort and soothe each other before they at last dozed off, Matt awoke to find Maggie gone.

He panicked for only seconds, then smiled, remembering that there were, as always, training hours at Heartland Downs, for horses don’t wait. When he called her stable he was informed by foreman Ramon Martinez that Maggie was “out on the track watching a set of horses work.

“And Matt,” added Martinez, “she said she’ll see you for dinner tonight at her place.”

Matt hung up and lay back in bed, smiling. “What a keeper I have here,” he said aloud.

***

Four races after Maggie’s daily double coup, Matt was finishing his column for the next day’s
Racing Daily
when his phone rang. He picked it up and heard Detective Popp say, “Well, Bledsoe’s out.”

Matt jumped to his feet.
“Out of what?”

“Out of the hospital wing of County Jail. They transferred him to a maximum security cell a couple of hours ago. He’ll go downtown to the Metropolitan Correctional Center some time next week. He’s still using crutches because of that knee shot you gave him. But they’re going to keep him locked down, bad knee or not. I thought you’d want an update.”

Matt thanked Popp before adding, “I heard Bledsoe was refused bail this morning. He’ll be held until the trial.”

“Correct,” Popp answered. “Larry Van Gundy told me today that they expect to go to trial after the first of the year.”

“I understand Bledsoe’s going to act as his own attorney.”

Popp snorted. “I wouldn’t put it past the arrogant prick. They won’t even try to convict him of murdering those jockeys,” Popp continued. “The fact that Randy Morrison and David Guerin say he told them he killed their brothers, in unrecorded phone calls, won’t hold up in court. Hell, Bledsoe could argue he never even made those phone calls. There’s no proof that he did. And the fact of the ballistics match on the bullets that killed the jocks coming from the Remington they found in his car trunk, that won’t fly either. There’s no proof Bledsoe fired those shots.

“But,” Popp said, “Bledsoe’s still going to be looking at a life sentence for killing Rick Rothmeyer. They’ve got him on videotape, and they’ve got a ballistics match to the rifle he used. And they’ve got him for the criminal assault on Maggie. It’s funny, in a way, that he won’t go up because of race-fixing charges. That’s what started the whole ball rolling. But they’d never be able to prove in court Bledsoe was the man behind it all. You know what I say about that? ‘So what?’ is what I say. The main thing is, this son of a bitch’ll die breathing prison air.”

Matt said, “And there’s still no sign of Bledsoe’s accomplices?”

“Vanished,” Popp said. “Jimbo Murray’s folks are in Madison, Vera’s live up in northern Wisconsin. Nobody has heard from either Jimbo or Vera. I’ve got an idea that only one person, Bledsoe, knows where they are. And he’s not saying.”

Matt’s eyes were drawn to the nearby empty desk once occupied by Rick, whose newspaper had yet to name a successor. He said, “What about the jocks? Morrison and Guerin?”

“Slaps on the hand is what I hear,” Popp replied, “a lighter suspended sentence and fine going to Morrison, who did turn himself in and admit to race-fixing because of coercion. Guerin later reluctantly came clean too, also arguing he was coerced. Which he was. But the Racing Board is going to suspend both of them for a year. Seems kind of harsh to me, but that’s their ballpark.”

Matt shook his head. “I wonder how many of the Racing Board members wouldn’t have buckled under to threats if
their
relatives were being shot to death?”

Popp said, “I hear you. But that’s the way it is.”

He had just finished talking to the detective when his phone rang again. Moe Kellman said, “I’m sorry I haven’t called before this, Matt, but I want to say thanks. You got the bastard. I understand Bledsoe hasn’t admitted it, but I know in my heart he killed Uncle Bernie as well as those jockeys. The ‘Wizard of Odds’ would bet that way, I am sure. He’d thank you, too, if he could. I’m just sorry you never got to meet him.”

“The Wizard’ would be thanking you, too, Moe. You set a lot of the wheels in motion that finally served to bring down Bledsoe.”

Moe said goodbye and Matt hung up the phone. He looked out at the racetrack. The field of horses for the sixth race was proceeding slowly, in fine order, coats glistening in the afternoon sunlight, toward the back of the starting gate. It had been placed directly in front of the stands for this mile and one-eighth race, and many fans lined the rail for a close-up view of this mini-pageant. Through his binoculars Matt watched as the colorfully garbed riders chatted with the pony girls and pony boys who were ushering the horses toward their stalls, saw them smoothing their horses’ necks with their hands. From his vantage point, these ten men and one woman looked small atop their huge, prancing mounts. Yet they perched confidently as they always did, adjusting stirrups and goggles, readying for the mad rush that would begin in moments when the gates banged open and five tons of equine energy was let loose in quest of the same goal: finishing first.

Matt knew that a minute and fifty seconds or so later one of the jockeys now visible on the track before him would be cheered as he or she galloped the winning horse back to the winner’s circle. Others would be derided by disappointed bettors. It happened every time.

He thought of the jockeys who had died at Bledsoe’s hand, the other riders killed or maimed each year in racing accidents, and marveled again that their replacements continued streaming in, fresh faced and eager, year after year, to this beautiful and sometimes brutal sport. He was then, as always, grateful that they did.