Shadow Dancers (7 page)

“He’s got zero victories in twenty-two starts. That’s zero. Zip. Zip.”

“So, who’s counting?”

“Five seconds and four thirds. Take my word for it. He’s your quintessential sucker horse.”

“That’s what you say. I say today he’s in the money.”

“In your money, pal. Not mine. You know where this horse went last time out?”

“Six lengths out behind the winner. I read the same forms you do, Mooney. But that was a mile-and-a-quarter handicap. Today he’s going three quarters of a mile. That’s his strong suit.”

“His strong suit is sucking dust.” Mooney pronounced the phrase with pursed lips and maximum contempt. “I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole.”

“Your loss. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Mooney made a clucking sound with his tongue, then hoisted the binoculars to his eyes. He was not a long odds player. Never much on hunches or touts, he scorned them like the plague, preferring instead to study speed figures and focus his attention on the horse with superior numbers who could win the day’s race.

Like any first-class handicapper, he could win about four bets out of ten … that is, if he was conservative, bet relatively few races, and favored mostly horses whose odds averaged about 2 to 1, or who ran with a comfortable margin of overlay. Never much on book reading, he pored over result charts and past-performance records with rapacious energy. He supplemented those with periodic tabulations summarizing the success or failure of jockeys, trainers, and owners. He kept abreast of breeding transactions, livestock sales, and equine injuries. For a man who could scarcely recall his own phone number, his memory retrieval system for this sort of information was nigh unto superhuman.

With Fritzi, on the other hand, it was all mysticism. She had to hear voices or see something in the animal’s eyes before she’d commit money; if the signs were right she was perfectly capable of committing big.

Coming Sunday, the horse Fritzi had just bet forty dollars to win and forty dollars to place, was running at odds of 38 to 1. What Mooney saw through the glasses when he looked was a quiet, almost solemn three-year-old. Except for the tail switching easily behind him, he stood motionless in the gate. Possibly he was even a little somnolent. Despite his wretched numbers, in all fairness the horse did have a nice look about him that somehow belied the record of distinguished mediocrity he’d managed to amass for himself over the past fifteen months. The aloof imperturbability of the animal suggested an intelligence and self-possession not demonstrated by the majority of other horses lined up at the post. Mostly they were champing and bucking about in the gates, tossing their heads, nervous and dissipating energy before the race. Also, Coming Sunday had an inside position, and an inside post position represented advantage. This horse was also known to be a strong mud runner, another bias in his favor. But today he was running on a pasteboard track with blinkers and front bandages, generally a sign of tendon problems, all of which made Mooney nervous.

He swung his glasses three or four positions down to the left where Casual Air, his own personal selection, surged and bucked in the confinement of the gate. His tail was up. His ears were forward as if he were trying to hear something. His head lashed from side to side and his neck was straining. Although the day was cool, in the low fifties, through his glasses Mooney could see splotches of kidney sweat between the flanks and along the loins and withers. Not all that casual was Casual Air. But for all of the kicking up, the overall impression was not negative enough to make Mooney discount the solid clout of the horse’s charts. This was an all-out contender with plenty of energy, and raring to go.

Casual Air’s credentials were impeccable. He’d won five out of his last seven starts and his speed figures were notably impressive. His worst out for the season was a figure of 81, which still looked good enough to beat anything on this field. Even a mere duplicate of his worst performance would demolish anything in sight.

Mooney had few doubts about the horse’s current condition. Except for that sweating, which could have just been the result of an overly enthusiastic workout, the animal looked superb. His trainer, A. T. Stoddard, was an old pro out of the Lexington school. The horse had raced and won only twelve days ago. Since that effort, he’d rested nicely but had also worked five furlongs in a blazing :59
⁴
⁄
₅
. Better even, he was being ridden by a jockey who’d won on him before.

Mooney put his glasses down with a sigh of contentment. He was easy in his mind. The fifty dollars to win and fifty dollars to place he’d staked on Casual Air at modest but by no means inconsequential odds of 5 to 1 he’d already counted as money in the bank. To him that worked out to a 17 percent chance of winning — far better than Fritzi s 38 to 1, which gave her little better than a 2½ percent shot at the money. A sucker’s bet, but you couldn’t tell her that. Besides, she won quite often.

“You might as well scrub this one, Fritz.” He handed her the glasses back. “It’s a washout.”

“For you, my friend.” She snatched the binoculars and snapped them to her eyes just as the bell rang and the gates shot open.

There was an explosion of dust as the field of twelve pounded out of the gate. A great roar went up for the first race of the day. Pennants flapped wildly atop the grandstand and clubhouse. The scene below was a dazzling palette of track colors all flowing together in a blurry collage.

By the time the dust had cleared, the field had already pounded past the three-sixteenths pole where Mooney and Fritzi stood at the rail, cheering. Coming Sunday and Casual Air were neck and neck, leading the pack by a full length. They were still neck and neck at the far turn and swinging into the back stretch. At the three-quarter pole, it looked as if both of them would finish in the money.

“Go on, you Casual Air,” Mooney bellowed until he was hoarse.

“Come on, Sunday.” Fritzi jumped up and down. “Come on, you sweet boy.”

“Move it. Move it, Casual Air. You son of a bitch.”

Past the clubhouse turn and pounding into the home stretch, both horses, for some inexplicable reason, quit. They simply faded as if they’d lost interest or just run out of gas. A pair of disreputable hayburners, Vagrant and Tollkeeper, flew past them along with another horse. Coming Sunday and Casual Air finished fourth and fifth respectively. Both out of the money.

Mooney and Fritzi went home bumper to bumper on the expressway, both glowering in embattled silence all the way back to Manhattan. The quality of their luck in the first race was indicative of how they fared throughout the rest of the day. They’d lost about a thousand dollars between them, added to which Wizard, their own entry in the fourth race, had hardly covered himself with glory. By the time they reached 83rd Street, neither of them was feeling very kindly disposed toward the world.

Upstairs, there was a message from Mulvaney on their answering machine. “Where the hell have you been?” the chief of detectives snarled when Mooney finally reached him on the phone. “I’ve had the goddamned M. E. on the phone to me six times this afternoon looking for you.”

“It’s a sorry thing when a man can’t even go to his dentist without —”

“Don’t give me that dentist crap, Mooney. You better come up with something better than that. This time he’s out for blood, and personally —”

“You hope he gets it, right? What’s that old bag of gas blowing off about now?”

“That girl you pulled out of the drain last month?”

“What about her?”

“They’ve got an ID on her.”

“How’d they get it?”

“Someone called the Sixth Precinct this morning. Gave her name and address. Wouldn’t leave his own name.”

“Would you?” Mooney quipped sarcastically.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just thinking out loud. Probably the same joker who tipped the Forty-fourth and told ‘em to go fish her out of the drain in the first place.”

“Name’s Cara Bailey. Four twenty East Seventy-third. It’s a brownstone. She had a second-floor walkthrough. Landlord said she’s been missing three weeks.”

“Why the hell didn’t he notify anyone?”

“Says he figured she was on vacation. We went up there and pulled a set of prints. We matched them downtown with what the M.E.‘s got. It’s her, all right.”

“So what the hell are you so browned off about?”

“What the hell am I browned off about?” Mooney could hear the words gagging in the chief of detectives’ throat. “I’ve had a half-dozen guys up on Seventy-third Street all day, doing your goddamned job, while you’re off at the flats.”

“So I slipped out for a couple of hours. Big deal.”

“Big deal is right. It should’ve been you up there on Seventy-third Street pulling prints. There’s a family up in Great Barrington has to be notified.”

Mooney groaned. “Oh, Christ, Mulvaney. Don’t give me that job. If you’ve a shred of decency, I beg you.”

“You notify those people tonight, Frank. Get ‘em down here first thing in the morning to make an identification. Then get on to the girl’s boss.”

“Her boss?”

“She worked for some kind of literary agency up on Fifty-seventh Street. Crane, Poole Associates. You get your ass up there tomorrow and —”

By that time Mooney was steaming. “Listen, I’m just sitting down to dinner.”

“How swell for you. I’m not. I’m three hours away from dinner. Buried under a mound of turd here. Anything yet on those number scribblings?”

Mooney sighed, resigned to what he knew must follow. “The math professor up at Columbia tells me they looked to him like a fixed series.”

“A fixed what?”

“He says they’re things called fibonacci numbers, tribonacci numbers …”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Yeah, I know. He’s got a lot of fancy names for it. Integer sequences. Combinatorics. Numbers theory. Solid state physics. It all boils down to the fact that there are repetitions of certain sequences all throughout nature, and these sequences sometimes tie things together which you wouldn’t normally think tie together. Get it?”

“No,” Mulvaney snapped. “I’m not too big on nature. What the hell does that tell me specifically about these numbers we keep finding?”

Mooney swallowed hard. “Nothing. But you know that string of numbers we found down in the drain on that Bailey job last month, fourteen, twenty-three, twenty-eight, thirty-four, forty-two?”

“What about ‘em?”

“Mussacchio over at the Nineteenth swears they’re also the local stops on the West Side IRT.”

“Terrific. Now we can start patrolling the whole goddamned subway.”

“I’m also talking to a linguist guy up at Natural History,” Mooney went on with failing courage. “He’s sure the numbers have something to do with the alphabet.”

“Alphabet?” Mulvaney s voice made a sharp squeal as if he’d been struck.

“The idea being that in standard cryptography you can assign a numerical value for every letter in the alphabet, A being one; B, two; C, three; and so forth.”

“Brilliant. And how does that jibe with the numbers we’ve got?”

“It doesn’t. At least not for the Roman alphabet. Now he’s checking the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Greek, the Pythagorean, the Phoenician, the Syriac …”

“And what’s all this supposed to tell us?”

“Who knows? Maybe that our guy is a Syrian math whiz. How the hell should I know?”

“Sounds like a pile of horseshit to me.”

“Bingo.”

“Anything new on that Torrelson job?”

There wasn’t, but Mooney felt it might be prudent to make it appear there was. “Well, maybe.”

“Maybe what?”

“The car. It looks like it’s green.”

“Green what?”

“Just that. That’s all we know.”

Mulvaney made a strangled sound. “You really outdid yourself, didn’t you?”

“We squeezed a little more out of the old dame next door. We’re trying to put a make on the car now.”

“Take my advice, Frank. You try hard. Real hard. There’s a lot of people watching you.”

“I’ll try not to disappoint them,” Mooney remarked sourly and started to hang up.

“And one more thing.” Mulvaney’s voice took an ominous drop. “I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

The sudden transition from rage to that of almost collegial intimacy made Mooney uneasy. “About what?”

“Not on the phone. In my office. Tomorrow.”

A long, rather strained pause ensued. “Fine. I’ll see you in the morning,” Mooney snapped and hung up the phone. When he turned, Fritzi was there, staring hard at him.

“Looks like you lost your best friend.”

“Worse, even. I lost three hundred bucks.”

“I lost seven hundred,” she beamed. “You don’t see me down in the mouth.”

“That’s different. You’re rich.”

“If I am, sailor, so are you.” She gave the flesh above his waist a pinch. “What’re you eating tonight?”

“Crow.”

“Don’t have any. What about pot roast?”

“Pot roast,” Sanchez intoned sepulchrally from his perch. “Pot roast.”

“THIS IS IT.”

Slumped in the backseat of the squad car, Mooney looked up from his
Daily News.

“Four-thirty West Fifty-seventh.”

“What’s the name of the guy again?”

Pickering extracted the small sheet of crumpled paper from his pocket, smoothing it out on his knee. “Crane, Poole Associates. Room fourteen oh three. It’s Crane we’re looking for.”

Mooney nodded.

“Mr. Avery Crane.”

Grumbling to himself, Mooney lumbered up out of the squad car. “Wait here for us, Lopez,” he called over his shoulder at the driver. “We’ll be down in twenty minutes.”

“And she just stopped coming in?”

“Not like that. Not all at once. She tried coming in for a short time after. She was pretty shaky, so we tried her on half days.”

“And?”

“It went okay for a while. But it just got to be too much for her. For one thing, the work suffered. Messed up contracts. Didn’t give messages. Didn’t return phone calls. Stuff like that. She was distracted. Finally we suggested she take a vacation. With pay,” Mr. Crane hastened to add. He was a natty, fastidious man. Manicured and barbered impeccably. A vision in gray sideburns and good British tailoring. About him was an air of expensive cologne and the sort of inflated self-importance that becomes quickly annoyed with any interruption of its normal routine.