The Bookwoman's Last Fling (26 page)

We left everything where it was and went looking for a place to eat. There was a restaurant called Henry's, just across the parking lot near East Huntington and Colorado, and we staked out a table for three and had a good dinner. We took our time and laughed away an hour, had a walk through downtown Arcadia, and got back to the racetrack before nine-thirty. Tonight there was no urgency to get to bed: no horses to feed and muck at dawn, so we had a rare occurrence for a racetrack crew, a day off. I knew the routine now. Racetrackers work seven days a week: Christmas, New Year's, the Fourth of July, they were all just workdays; the horses were always there to eat and poop, to be watered and brushed and taken care of. We still had no idea when Sandy might roll in: could be any time between later today and the end of the week, but we were tied to the spot; we had to be here whenever he arrived, so there was no time for sightseeing. We sat in the cool shedrow for another hour; then Bob retired to one of the tack rooms and soon turned his light off. Erin came past my chair and squeezed my shoulder.

“You look like a man with his thinking cap on.”

“I'm always thinking, Erin, I'm a pondering fool. But it's like any case; the more I think the murkier it gets…until suddenly if I'm lucky I get a brainstorm that leads somewhere.”

“So what is the fool pondering tonight?”

“All of it. Who killed Cameron and why? Who cracked my head open and tried to turn me into French toast? Is this about the books, or does it go deeper, farther back to Candice and her time? Or is it all related somehow?”

She had no answers either, so we sat close for a time and were satisfied to hold hands. At some point she went into the end tack room and closed the door. I sat alone, still awake, still restless, gearing myself up for a long night.

I had a hunch, not the first time that had happened. I'll never know why: maybe something about a cop's intuition when a situation gets ready to pop. I had been right enough times over the years to listen when that voice started. But another hour passed and nothing happened. I was tired after all, and soon I nodded my head and fell asleep on the chair.

When I opened my eyes I knew I had slept deeply for three hours. I knew it was early morning. There was no sound or light from either tack room, but I was sure that some noise, a sharp rap, an object knocked over,
something,
had caused me to open my eyes.

Within seconds I was fully awake. I heard it again, a faint clink followed by footsteps somewhere out in the black shedrow. I was well hidden, still sitting in the pitch blackness near the hay bin, where no light got in from any side. This was not like a stable area during a racing season, which could also be dark at midnight. This was more like an alien world with ghostly shadow barns all around it and no life anywhere.
The City of the Horse-people:
My stupid thought of the day, but it wouldn't let go. I had come alive in a world where intelligent horse-people ruled, and I was under their thumb. My second stupid thought—horses don't have thumbs—but somewhere, I knew, were real people with real feet and thumbs. They were not from this part of the stable area, and yet someone was walking. Somewhere. I heard the crunch of a foot wearing a real shoe, not the clop of a horseshoe. I still couldn't see him, and for a time I couldn't hear him either. Then, a sound: just a step, around the corner. A
foot
step. He was in this barn on the opposite shedrow. Drill a hole straight through the stall from where I sat and you'd knock him over. I felt my heartbeat pick up. During the season I wouldn't think twice about it; I'd be accustomed to ginneys getting in at all hours, but now, at whatever hour this was, a footstep stood out like a Chandler first edition in a section of Goodwill dreck.

I didn't move.

I thought it was two o'clock, maybe three. Suddenly I had a bad feeling about it and I sat frozen in my chair. He was still directly opposite me, moving slowly down toward the tack rooms on the end.

At last I got out of the chair. Stepped into the shedrow. I made no sound as I walked. Fresh in my mind was the vision of Cameron Geiger, draped over a river branch with his head blown open, not to mention my own brush with death at the hands of the same crazy man. I moved one short step at a time, keeping up with him as much as I could: a step then wait; step then wait; stop, listen, move again, wait. I could see the dim outline of the end of the next barn, lit up by a faint beam of reflected moonlight. Now I heard nothing. No more walking, no sound. I had a sinking feeling I had lost him. He was important, he was somebody real, and I had spooked him. I thought he had probably turned and hightailed it back up the shedrow, but I resisted the temptation to hurry. I eased past the empty stalls to the end and peered around the corner.

Nothing.

Still as glass.

The night brittle, cool, fragile as black crystal.

I moved slowly with my back to the wall. I was standing three feet from Erin's tack room, straight across from her door, with the moon bouncing off the manure bin my only light.

I took a step. Another.

Quiet
now.

I held my breath.

Peeked around the opposite corner…

…and there he was.

The shadow man stood ten feet away.

I flinched. He had a gun, and the gun went off in my face.

I was a dead man. I could feel the burn, I thought, like cayenne pepper, like sandblast, like kindling doused with gasoline and touched by fire.

I had been shot several times in my life and each time felt worse than the last.
They're catching up with you, baby,
I had thought at some point.
This time you really are dead meat.

But I didn't feel dead. Except for the sandblast effect, I hadn't been hit. I recoiled and tripped, falling back in the shedrow. My head was still there, I had enough brains to spin as I hit the ground, and I rolled away from him toward the tack room door. He rose up at the corner and fired again. I felt it rip through my shirt at the collar. I kicked the door, kicked off from the wall, and rolled back at him. He shot twice and missed both times as I twisted myself under his feet. I heard the door jerk open and Erin yelling my name. I shouted at her to get back, stay inside. That had as much effect as it always did. I saw her shadow bolt past and collide with his. She had him by the hair and was jerking him across the shedrow: they were in and out of the moonlight for less time than it takes to tell it, and the two of them spun crazily into the first stall. I charged in after them. He fired another round and I heard the pin click on an empty chamber. Erin must have smacked him: The collision had a distinctive jab-in-the-chops sound. I heard him grunt and saw him go twisting out of the stall, a pale figure like a fleeting ghost. He rammed into something, which turned out to be one of the posts holding up the roof; then he fell in the puddle of water under the spigot. I rolled toward him and got my legs tangled with Erin's as she leaped out of the stall. She stumbled and fell as he leaped up and took off down the black shedrow, running like a deer.

By the time I got up and moving he was in the tow ring, crossing into the next barn. I stumbled across on this end and saw him briefly, running full-tilt along the fence at Baldwin Avenue.
I'll get him now,
I thought:
There's no way he can get out of here.
Then, just that quickly, I lost him.

I heard footsteps coming fast: Bob, running up and past. “Where's Erin?” I said.

I trotted down the shedrow and crossed into the next barn. I went across the tow ring. Didn't dare call out, didn't dare not call.

“Erin!”

No answer.

“Erin!”

Nothing but the sound of the breeze.

I hurried to the barn across the way.

“Erin!”

Down a dark shedrow: across another tow ring into another shedrow. The tack room doors hung open, revealing the small, bare quarters, empty now in the moonlight.

“Erin!”

“Shh.”

I stopped moving.

“I'm over here,” she whispered.

I groped my way through the dark. She was standing just inside a stall, breathing heavily. I eased inside and put an arm over her shoulder. She was trembling and yet she had chased a crazy man down a dark shedrow alone.

“Where'd he go?”

“Don't know…not sure.”

“Maybe he's gone.”

“Uh-uh.” She squeezed my hand.
No, he's here. Don't move.

“I'm going after him.”

“No!” I heard her take a breath. “That's what he wants. He's still got the gun.”

I moved my foot. We stood, watched, waited, and time passed. At least fifteen minutes.

“Erin,” I said: “We can't keep standing here.”

“No.” She egged me on with her hands and followed me gingerly out into the shedrow.

Nothing. Nobody.

“He's gone,” I said, but she still didn't believe it.

We walked around a few barns and headed back to 107, looking over our shoulders.

 

Just a prowler, the cops said: Most likely someone who'd gotten past the gate and shouldn't be here. A prowler with a gun for effect, they said. Most people who had a gun waved in their faces would come across with their cash. Unless it wasn't cash he'd been after, I said.

I told them what had happened up at Golden Gate. What had happened to Cameron and to me. They listened then and they asked more questions. I told them about Candice, that I had been hired by her daughter in Idaho to find out the truth about her death. Bob sat through all this without saying much, but suddenly now he had been pulled into it and we all knew it.

The cops covered the stable area, talking with everyone they found. They made a list of people stabled here who had arrived early. Bob knew a few of the trainers and some of the ginneys on the list, but nobody with any reason to shanghai us.

They talked to the overnight stable-gate guard, who swore he had been awake the whole time and nobody had come in without a license. The guard always kept the gate closed during the late hours, so anyone coming in would have to stop and state his business.

They would talk to the front office about putting an extra guard on. And it would probably make the newspaper. The
Times
guy was aggressive, he had heard the radio call and was already asking questions. “Lots of shootings in L.A.,” Erin said. “Surely he can't cover them all.”

But Santa Anita was not Watts. Erin and I sat in the shedrow that morning. Sometimes we just sat; sometimes we talked.

“You were damned magnificent,” I told her.

She smiled wanly. “I didn't feel so magnificent. In fact, I haven't felt like my old fearless self since last year.”

“Don't remind me.”

Last year we had both come much too close to cashing it all in.

“I've made a startling discovery, old man. I'm not quite ready to die yet.”

“Good thing to learn.”

“When you mess with bad people you never know. I do know that since last year I'm not as easy as I was. A feeling of real mortality has crept into my head.”

“Maybe you should get out of here. Fly off to Denver, get lost.”

“Do I look like someone who'd cut and run out on you?”

“I didn't say that.”

“You were thinking it.”

“It's not polite to tell a buddy what he's thinking.”

“No, but…” She took a deep breath. “No.”

“I'm starting to think this flake may follow us now no matter where we go. Somehow we've become a threat to him, more than just a couple of yahoos looking in dark corners. And there's another thing. He's already killed one fellow—never mind that Cameron was a fairly worthless fellow, somebody ought to do something about it.”

“And that would be you.”

“You see anybody else applying for the job?”

She sighed loudly.

“And then there's Candice, Erin. Somebody should do something about Candice.”

During the night Sandy had left a message at the stable gate. Barbara was ill with flu and that had delayed them for a day or two. They were now looking to arrive day after tomorrow, or at least by the end of the week. Till then we were on our own.

We sat in the racetrack kitchen, which had opened for breakfast, and we talked it over. Bob was restless now: His mood leapfrogged between darkness and daylight. “I don't know whether we should hang together or split up,” he said in a down moment, but in the brilliant new day he would put on more confident airs. “I don't think this is going to happen again,” he said, but then he asked nervously what I thought. “I don't know, Bob,” I said: “On the face of it there's no reason to think you're in any danger, but you might give this some thought. Whatever's in the wind may already be there, so unless you're getting sick of my company, and I wouldn't blame you for that, it might be smart to either get far away or stay close till Sandy gets here.” There was no work to do till then anyway, so I thought I'd drift around and ask some questions. This way I could use the time to our own advantage, keep moving and maybe make the day pass quicker. Bob liked this suggestion, and right after breakfast we wandered through the stable area and he and Erin stood chatting nearby while I asked the same questions about Geiger, his sons, Candice, and the old days.

This was an obvious time-killer. Geiger had never raced here to my knowledge, but soon we found some old horsemen who remembered him from their own days long ago up north. “I knew him on the fair circuit,” one old trainer said. “I was just starting out then and I had me a booming stable of four head. I raced at Santa Rosa, Vallejo, Sacramento, places like that in the fifties and sixties, and I ran into Geiger and his missus out in Omaha a couple of times as well. The first year I met him I thought he was a little distant, but he warmed up after that. He often had his young wife with him, sometimes not but she came out fairly often. A real looker she was, and more than that, she was a charmer. I think he liked to show her off.”

Another old man chimed into the same conversation. “Wasn't likely you'd forget her if you ever met her even once. That lucky old bastard Geiger; I can still see her sittin' in the shedrow with him, sayin' nothing while he had opinions about everything. I heard some people say she was snooty, but I never put any stock in that. If you made contact with her eyes, what you saw was a tragic figure. If you said something to her as simple as good morning, miss, why hell, she'd light right up and talk your ear off. She'd talk about the weather, the newspapers, anything to keep you there so she wouldn't be alone again. That was my impression, anyway. She was lonely as hell, that's the feeling I had.” Bob considered this a breakthrough, but what had we actually learned? We already knew that some people had found Candice unforgettable, that she was vivid in some old memories even years after the most superficial contact. After a while I was only going through the motions and that was how, when a vital lead dropped in my face, I almost missed it.

“I saw a woman I know in the kitchen,” Bob said that afternoon. While I talked to a trainer who faintly remembered Geiger and had never met Candice, Bob had walked over to the kitchen on a coffee run. I gave him a grunt and he said no more about it for several minutes. On the face of it this was going to be just another horny racetracker story, but Bob was too thoughtful to be swapping trash. We were walking past the kitchen when I looked at him and he had that enigmatic face he sometimes got, the half-smile that disappeared if you blinked twice.

“Okay, Bobby, what's going on?”

“Nothing. I was just telling you about this woman I met in the kitchen but you didn't seem to be interested so I let it drop. Want to go inside and sit?”

We went inside and sat at a corner table.

“So what gives?”

“That lady who poured us the coffee…”

I saw a gray-haired woman at the register and in that moment I knew that something had happened and it was more than just another horny racetracker story.

“Her name's Martha,” Bob said. “For want of anything better to do, she's been knocking around racetracks all her life. I might even call her a racetrack junkie. Being such a gregarious fellow, I used to chat with her once in a while. She's made the rounds for years, Northern California, the fairs, she was at Golden Gate last year. So this morning I asked her about Geiger, and what do you think? She was at Bay Meadows when Geiger was racing there, just before and after he met his leading lady. She's done everything on racetracks from walking hots to slinging hash in the kitchen.”

She had walked hots regularly for Geiger, long ago.

“She remembers them both very well. Amazing coincidence. What are the chances we'd run into somebody like that in a racetrack kitchen four hundred miles away?”

“Pretty good if I'd asked the right people.”

I looked at him just in time to see the smile vanish.

“It's a small world, Cliff.” His smile flashed again. “You gotta keep your eyes open.”

 

Right from the start she had a way about her, a demeanor that had smart written all over it. “Sometimes I wonder if I've wasted my life,” she said. “I know I coulda been somebody. Like Brando said, I coulda been a
contender.
”

All in all though, she had enjoyed her run. “I've done all right, but I was seldom willing to work that hard. You get out of life what you put into it, right? And I've had my fun. The racetracker's life was always a good one. Oh, the things we did.”

Women weren't allowed on the racetracks at night in those days. “But I was adventurous and got ginneys to sneak me past the guard in the trunk of a car. All this other stuff, like working in the kitchen, this is what I had to do to make ends meet.”

She wanted to be a writer. “I never wrote like a woman. Faulkner was my hero.”

“I've got a friend who would fight you to the death over a statement like that.”

“And I'd tell her she's too busy being defensive. Even with the good ones like Willa Cather there's a difference in the voice. That's all I'm saying, a woman just writes differently than a man.”

Like a lot of wannabe writers, she went through terrific bursts of writing and then let it slide, sometimes for months. “I once wrote forty thousand words in a weekend.”

Long ago and far away: She had been at Arlington Park then.

“When I was young I wrote everything: journals, fiction, poetry; I published some of it, too. I did an article for
Collier's
way back when, and my God, for a week I was
rich.
I wrote for horse magazines—
Turf
and
Sport Digest
when it was going, articles for
The Blood Horse,
and for a while I was a stringer for the
Thoroughbred Record.
You probably never even heard of those rags. I love publication day but I hate all the sweat that goes before it. What I really like is being out on some racetrack. If I'm gonna sweat, give me a pitchfork, not a typewriter. So I'll work in the kitchen for a while but as soon as a real horseman comes in and offers me something I'm out of there.”

They all knew her, all the old-time trainers. A job would come along. It always did.

We were sitting in a restaurant in downtown Arcadia, waiting for our menus. I had left Erin and Bob in the shedrow and come alone. Sometimes it works better that way.

Her name was Martha Blackwell, she had written as M. J. Black, and her face just radiated character. It was deeply etched with the lines of living, and her smile was quick and wide and genuine. “So you want to know about the Geigers,” she said.

She knew them all: the old man, Bax, Damon. “And I knew Cameron, the old son of a bitch.”

“You heard he was killed?”

“Everybody knows that by now. I shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but I'm not politically correct and that man was a bastard.”

“Well, he died a bastard's death.”

“Yeah.” Just a twinge of regret now: “What a way to go.”

“And you knew Candice,” I said.

“Sure I knew her.”

“I'm trying to find out how she died.”

“Somebody fed her peanuts,” she said without blinking an eye.

“Got any idea who?”

She listed her head to starboard and said, “Somebody who knew where and what she ate. That coulda been any number of people.”

“Want to give me a list?”

“You thought about the old man?”

“Sure, but why would he do that?”

“Just wondering how far you've actually thought about it. People who marry aren't always in love with each other. Or if they are, they don't always stay that way.”

“Even so, they don't kill each other without a reason.”

“He might've had two billion reasons.”

“He already had her money.”

“Unless he was on the verge of losing it. She was pretty generous in the beginning, but I think his act lost its charm as they went along.”

“What was she going to do,” I asked, “leave him and take the money with her?”

“I can see where he might have thought that.”

“No offense, but do you know all this or are you guessing?”

“The shedrow was my home, Mr. Janeway, at least during the daytime. I overheard things. I wasn't a sneak, but…”

“Sometimes people say things.”

“And there are places, adjacent stalls for instance: stalls in an opposite shedrow. You've seen what the walls are like; you're doing your work and suddenly you hear voices.”

I doubted this. Unlikely, I thought, that Geiger and Candice would discuss their intimate affairs in a stable area with ginneys all around. Then she said, “I worked with them one summer at the farm up near Frisco. You didn't have to be eavesdropping to overhear things there.”

“What did you hear?”

“Everything.” She looked at me as if she expected me to understand. “When I was young I wanted to write about it. I wanted desperately to write their story. That's why I wrote everything down at the time it happened.”

As revelations go, that was a stunner.

“I was planning to write a book,” she said. “Been promising myself that for years.”

“A book about Geiger?”

She shook her head. “Not chapter and verse, no. Who cares about the real Geiger anymore? He was well known in his time on the racetrack, but to the average Joe today he's a nobody. Besides, there's too much trouble when you write about real people. Geiger's dead now, I could have my way with him, but there are too many people important to his story who aren't dead.”

“Then where does that leave you?”

“I thought I'd use them in a novel.” She took a deep breath. “That's the best way to get at someone who's real, use him in fiction. But hell, it looks like I'm no fiction writer and it probably doesn't matter. If I was really gonna write it, I'd have done that by now, wouldn't you think?”

“I don't know, Martha. Occasionally something happens, the sleeping giant wakes up.”

“You trying to talk me into something?” She laughed lightly and we ordered our food.

“Just making a point. Whatever you tell me can be off the record.”

“What's the point of that? How could you use it?”

“I'll do the best I can to keep it between you and me. But in the end you're right, I'm trying to find a killer.”

“I always liked Candice,” she said softly. “What a classy broad.”

I looked at her straight-on. The time was suddenly ripe.

“So who do you think killed her?”

“I don't think,” she said. “I know who it was.”

 

She still didn't give me a name, not yet. We were in that early feeling-out stage and she was trying to decide about me. We went to her place, a small upstairs apartment on the edge of Arcadia. There she unwrapped half a dozen logbooks, found the one she wanted, and told me to knock myself out while she boiled some coffee. I turned the yellowing pages and read her small neat words. She had been in her late teens that first year, the year of Candice. “I was younger than she was but in the ways of the racetrack I was her mentor,” she said from the kitchenette. “Geiger taught her zilch. Keep 'em ignorant might have been his motto.”

I heard her clatter a room away. “Imagine, with all her money and looks she could've done anything, and she wrapped her life up in this old man. She wanted so badly to please him; that was her whole gig in a nutshell. She wanted him to be happy with her.”

But he wasn't. He couldn't be because, as time went on and his old age settled in, what made him unhappy couldn't be fixed by any woman.

One day she overheard them talking: just a snatch of conversation in the empty shedrow when he was at the farm. She wrote it down that night, verbatim she said. She rummaged, and dug out the notebook.