Murder at the Racetrack (16 page)

“Get it done then,” the goon said.

I leaned on one knee and rubbed Mama’s right front leg. I jabbed the needle into the middle of a thick vein and watched as
the fluid flowed into her body. Mama didn’t even flinch, took the shot and kept her gaze on the two strangers in her stall.
I stood and handed the box and the needle to one of the two goons. “Tell your boss that if this stuff works half as good as
advertised, she should be pretty much out it by the time the race starts.”

“I got a better idea,” the bigger of the two goons said. “Why don’t you tell him? He’s expecting you to watch the race with
him. You know, just in case not everything goes off without a hitch.”

I glanced over at Blue and nodded. Then, I turned to Yellow Mama and held my hand against a side of her face. “I’m counting
on you, champ,” I whispered. “Don’t let me down now.”

I watched the race from the paddock area, surrounded by Touchdown and his crew. They were munching on deli sandwiches and
cold beer, waiting for the start of the race. “Don’t look so glum,” Touchdown said. “You did the right thing. It was the only
move you could make and, for once in your life, it was a smart one.”

“That’s how I feel,” I said. “I just hate that it had to come down to this.”

“Maybe it’ll make you give up the gamble,” Touchdown said. “But I wouldn’t bet on that. Guys like me live off guys like you.
Always have and always will.”

“I might just take you up on that bet,” I said.

The bell sounded and the two horses shot out of the starting gate. Valley Girl jumped to a three-length lead, with Mama laying
back, getting a feel of the track, Blue gently easing her from the outside rail to the inside. Valley Girl was a pace horse,
the kind that runs a great race until she hears the pounding hoofs of a horse that’s closing in. Then, she either takes off
or gives up the chase. I leaned against the railing and watched Yellow Mama move up a length, getting the measure both of
the track and of her opponent.

“She doesn’t look doped up to me,” Touchdown said, ignoring me and throwing the question to one of bis goons.

“He pumped the shot into her,” the goon said. “Me and Jimmy both saw it for ourselves. Gave it to her right in the leg.”

“Then why isn’t she running at half-mast?” Now Touchdown was looking at me, the veins in his neck throbbing with anger.

“Could be you got your hands on a sour batch of dope,” I said. “Or it could be it was just sugar water I shot into her veins
and that does nothing but make her thirsty. And she’ll get plenty to drink once the race is over.”

“She wins this race, the only thing that horse is going to be drinking is her own blood,” Touchdown said. “I’ll chop her up
with my own hands.”

“Oh, she’ll win this race,” I assured him. I turned to glance at the track and Mama was now up by two lengths with Valley
Girl fading fast. “But you won’t be cutting her up or bothering Blue either for that matter.”

Touchdown managed a laugh, reached out and grabbed on to my shirt. “And why’s that, gambler?”

“Old Man Tomasino has a soft spot for animals, especially horses,” I said. “You know he had one in Sicily when he was a boy,
raised it as his own. Just so happens his old man got into a gang war and during one of the battles their barn caught fire
and Tomasino’s horse died in the flames.”

Touchdown slammed a fist against the hard edge of a guardrail as Yellow Mama crossed the finish line.

“What the hell has Tomasino’s bullshit Sicily story got to do with what just happened here?” he asked through clenched teeth.

“I told him about Yellow Mama and by the end of the story he did two amazing things,” I said. “Two things I never in my wildest
dreams would ever imagine him doing.”

“Spill,” Touchdown said, his tough veneer starting to wilt under the hot sun.

“First, he offered me a hundred grand for the horse,” I said. “On top of which he included a nice salary for me and Blue to
keep taking care of her. All I had to promise him was never to lay down another bet in my life. On anything.”

“What’s the second thing?” Touchdown asked.

“He laid a million-dollar bet on Yellow Mama to win,” I said. “Hard for me to believe a nice old man like that has that kind
of cash sitting around, but he does. He covered his action with your bookies. I did, too. Not as much, only five hundred thousand,
but then me and Old Man Tomasino don’t play ball in the same league.”

Touchdown lifted me off the ground and tossed me against the railing, hard, the pain in my back shooting down to my legs.
“What are you so pissed about?” I asked. “I got the fifty thousand I owe you, back in my office near the stables. You can
have one of your boys pick it up, if you want. Or, you can just subtract it from the dough your bookies need to come across
with early tomorrow morning. I’m sure Old Man Tomasino will be first in line looking to collect a million-plus winnings. But,
I’ll be there right behind him.”

“You’re not going to be around to collect anything,” Touchdown said. “You’ll be dead by morning.”

“I work for Old Man Tomasino now and he wants me to train Yellow Mama,” I said. “Just like he expects Blue to race her. You
step into that and you’re in bigger trouble than you already are. So go ahead and kill me. But if I were you, Touchdown, I’d
be looking to raise that million plus that needs to be paid out come sunup.”

I stared over at Touchdown, savored his defeat, then surveyed his silent crew. I fixed my jacket, ignored the pain in my back
and started to walk away.

“Who the hell you think you are, walking away from me?” Touchdown asked. “A small-time loser like you.”

I turned to Touchdown and smiled for the first time that weekend. “I’m not a loser,” I said, my arms stretched out. “You’re
looking at a winner. Across the board. At least for today.”

I left Touchdown and his crew in the paddock area and walked at a steady pace toward the stables. I reached into my left jacket
pocket and pulled out a paper bag filled with roasted chestnuts.

A warm gift for Yellow Mama.

Max Allan Collins

W
hen the cute high school girl, screaming bloody murder, came running down the steps from the porch of the brown-brick two-story,
I was sitting in a parked Buick reading
The Racing News.

At ten after eleven in the a.m., Chicago neighborhoods didn’t get much quieter than Englewood, and South Elizabeth Street
on this sunny day in May 1945 ran to bird chirps, muffled radio programs and El rattle. A banshee teenager was enough to attract
the attention of just about anybody, even a drowsy detective who was supposed to be watching the very house in question.

A guy in T-shirt and suspenders, mowing the lawn next door, got to her just before me.

“Sally, honey, calm down,” the guy said.

“Bob, Bob, Bob,” she said to her neighbor.

His name, apparently, was Bob. Like I said, I’m a detective.

“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked the girl.

She was probably sixteen. Blonde hair bounced off her shoulders, and with those blue eyes and that heart-shaped face, she
would have been a knockout if she hadn’t been devoid of makeup and wearing a navy jumper that stopped mid-calf, abetted by
a white blouse buttoned to her throat.

“It’s… it’s
Mother”
she said, and in slow motion she turned toward the narrow front of the brick house and pointed, like the Ghost of Christmas
Future indicating Scrooge’s gravestone.

“Look at me,” I said, and she did, mouth and eyes twitching. “I’m a policeman. Tell me what happened.”

“Something… something
terrible.”

Then she pushed past me, and sat on the curb and buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

Bob, who was bald and round-faced and about forty, said, “You’re a cop?”

“Actually, private. Is that kid named Vinicky?”

“Yes. Sally Vinicky—she goes to Visitation High. Probably home for lunch.”

That explained the prim getup: Visitation was a Catholic all-girl’s school.

Another neighbor was wandering up, a housewife in an apron, hair in a net, eyes wide; she had flecks of soapsuds on her red
hands. I brought her into my little group.

“My name is Heller,” I said. “I’m an investigator doing a job for that girl’s father. I need one of you to look after Sally…
ma’am? Would you?”

The woman nodded, then asked, “Why, what’s wrong?”

“I’m going in that house and find out. Bob, call the Englewood Station and ask them to send a man over.”

“What should I tell them?”

“What you saw.”

As the housewife sat beside the girl on the curb and slipped an arm around her, and Bob headed toward the neighboring house,
a frame bungalow, I headed up the steps to the covered porch. The girl had left the door open and I went on in.

The living room was off to the left, a dining room to the right; but the living room got my attention, because of the woman’s
body sprawled on the floor.

A willowy dame in her mid-thirties and blue-and-white floral dress, Rose Vinicky—I recognized her from the photos her husband
had provided—lay on her side on the multicolor braided rug between an easy chair and a spinet piano, from which Bing Crosby
smiled at me off a sheet music cover, “I Can’t Begin to Tell You.” Not smiling back, I knelt to check her wrist for a pulse,
but judging by the dark pool of blood her head rested in, I was on a fool’s errand.

Beyond the corpse stood a small table next to the easy chair with a couple of magazines on it,
Look, Life.
On the floor nearby was a cut-glass ashtray, which the woman presumably had knocked off the table when she fell forward,
struck by a fatal blow from behind. A lipstick-tipped cigarette had burned itself out, making a black hole in the braiding
of the rug. I wasn’t sure whether she’d been reaching for the smoke when the killer clubbed her, or whether she’d gone for
the table to brace her fall.

With her brains showing like that, though, she was probably already unconscious or even dead on the way down.

She looked a little like her daughter, though the hair was darker, almost brunette, short, tight curls. Not pretty, but attractive,
handsome; and no midlength skirt for Rose: She had liked to show off those long, slender, shapely legs, which mimed in death
the act of running away.

She’d been a looker, or enough of one, anyway, to make her husband suspect her of cheating.

I didn’t spend a lot of time with Rose—she wasn’t going anywhere, and it was always possible her killer was still around.

But the house—nicely appointed with older, in some cases antique, furniture—was clear, including the basement. I did note
that the windows were all closed and locked, and the backdoor was locked, too—with no signs of break-in. The killer had apparently
come in the front door.

That meant the murder took place before I’d pulled up in front of the Vinicky home around ten. I’d seen no one approach the
house in the little more than an hour my car and ass had been parked across the way. It would’ve been embarrassing finding
out a murder had been committed inside a home while I was watching it.

On the other hand, I’d been surveilling the place to see with whom the woman might be cheating when here she was, already
dead. Somehow that didn’t seem gold-star worthy, either.

I had another, closer look at the corpse. Maybe she hadn’t been dead when she fell, at that—looked like she’d suffered multiple
blows. One knocked her down, the others finished her off and opened up her skull. Blood was spattered on the nearby spinet,
but also on the little table and even the easy chair.

Whoever did this would had to have walked away covered in blood…

Her right hand seemed to be reaching out, and I could discern the pale circle on her fourth finger that indicated a ring,
probably a wedding ring, had been there until recently. Was this a robbery, then?

Something winked at me from the pooled blood, something floating there. I leaned forward, got a better look: a brown button,
the four-eyed variety common to a man’s suit—or sportcoat.

I did not collect it, leaving that to…

“Stand up!
Get away from that body.”

Sighing, I got to my feet and put my hands in the air and the young patrolman—as fresh-faced as that Catholic schoolgirl—rushed
up and frisked me, finding no weapon.

I let him get that out of his system and told him who I was, and what had happened, including what I’d seen. I left the button
out, and the missing wedding ring; that could wait for the detectives.

The next hour was one cop after another. Four or five uniformed men showed, a trio of detectives from Englewood Station, a
couple of dicks from the bureau downtown, a photographer, a coroner’s man. I went through the story many times.

In the kitchen, a yellow-and white affair with a door on to the alley, Captain Patrick Cullen tried to make a meal out of
me. We sat at a small wooden table and began by him sharing what he knew about me.

“I don’t remember ever meeting you, Captain,” I said.

“I know you all too well, Heller—by reputation.”

“Ah. That kind of thing plays swell in court.”

“You’re an ex-cop and you ratted out two of your own. You’re a publicity hound, and a cooze hound, too, I hear.”

“Interesting approach to detective work—everything strictly hearsay.”

A half hour of repartee, at least that scintillating, followed. He wanted to know what I was doing there, and I told him “a
job for Sylvester Vinicky,” the husband. He wanted to know what kind of job, and I said I couldn’t tell him, because attorney/client
privilege pertained. He accused me of not being an attorney, and I pled guilty.

“But certain of my cases,” I said, “come through lawyers. As it happens, I’m working for an attorney in this matter.”

He asked the attorney’s name and I gave it to him.

“I heard of that guy… divorce shyster, right?”

“Captain, I’d hate to spoil any of your assumptions with a fact.”

He had a face so Irish it could turn bright red without a drop of alcohol, as it did now, while he shook a finger at me. “I’ll
tell you what happened, Heller. You got hired to shadow this dame, and she was a looker, and you decided to put the make on
her yourself. It got out of hand, and you grabbed the nearest blunt instrument and—”