Shadow Roll (4 page)

The voice was still talking.  “When you get to the Spa, I’ll be waiting for you.  Show you where you’ll be staying.”

The “Spa.”  That’s what insiders called it.  And this guy was telling me I’d be staying there.

“When’s all this supposed to happen?”

“Right now.”

“And who are you?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Does it matter why I’m doing all this?”

“Three dead jockeys enough for you?”

Christ on rye, hold the mayo,
one
dead jockey was enough for me.

“I’m on my way.”

“Of course you are.”

The line went dead and I was standing there in ashy socks realizing I hadn’t told the guy what I charged, I hadn’t even found out if he was paying me.  So what?  I was going to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York and the season was only a few days old.

I was so surprised and excited, my legs gave a little.  Good thing the bed was there or the rest of me would be covered in cigarette ash.

For me, any racetrack’s home.  Even a straight quarter mile plowed in the woods would do.  Reading the racing forms, listening to the radio, I longed for Belmont.  Pimlico.  Monmouth.  But especially the track at the Spa.  I got myself to Monmouth as often as I could, to Belmont twice, Aqueduct maybe three times, but to Saratoga—I’d never once had enough folding green to get all the way up to Saratoga Springs.

This time all I needed was in the envelope that sure enough waited for me at my end of the Staten Island ferry.

Thanks to poor dead Pamela and her poor dead babe, someone was paying my way door to door.

It was one of those late July mornings when upstate New York makes you want to sing like Bing Crosby and drink like Tallulah Bankhead.  Or drink like Bing and sing like Tallulah.  Women’s thin summer dresses weren’t yet clinging to their legs like wet laundry and a guy’s hat didn’t slide to the back of his head.

It was the kind of day anyone with the nerve and the cash (not to mention luck and an honest tip-off) could make a bundle on the visions that flashed past on dirt or grass and made your blood pound with the glory of just one thing on this earth that was pure.  To me, growing up with pigeons and rats and the Zawadzkis, plus enough cockroaches to sink the Staten Island ferry, a racehorse was all there was of beauty.

And there, waiting on the train platform, was the guy who’d called me.  An overfed guy in an expensive suit with an expensive hat on his sleek head and expensive shoes on his feet.  But his face looked like a cheap Halloween mask out of Stapleton’s Five & Dime.  He said his name was Marshall Hutsell and stuck out his hand.

I shook it—even though I disliked him instantly.  But so?  I didn’t need to like him.  Because of Marshall Hutsell, or because of whoever Hutsell worked for, I wasn’t hanging around Lino’s cop station with Lino’s hand chosen bunch of morons, all of ‘em half hoping a call would come in about something really gruesome, at the same time half hoping the phone lines would go dead so they could finish their game of Chinese checkers.  Because of Hutsell and friends, my room and board had been paid two weeks in advance for one of the smaller suites in a pink hotel with pinker petunias in the window boxes and a widow’s walk way up at the top where a widow, if she bothered to walk it, could see for miles.  Pink hotel and pink petunias were on a nice tree lined street called Case Street, a block away from the entrance to Saratoga’s historic track.

I had a job, a hotel room with private bath and a pink kitchenette, complete with a small stove, a small ice box, some pots and pans, a set of dishes, and a set of cutlery right down to the steak knives.  I had entrée to the track at any time, day or night, and some hard cash.  That was in another envelope Hutsell handed me right after delivering me to my new home at the Spa.

An hour later I stood on holy ground—the backstretch where only those in the game ever got to go.

Before this, the only time I ever saw a backstretch was because of some trainer I knew.  And all the trainers I knew trained and raced claimers.  Most were decent enough guys, kept decent enough barns, and all their hot-walkers and exercise kids and jocks on their way up or down were decent enough too—for the most part.  But barring a miracle, not one of ‘em was ever going to get that big horse.  Like that big case, the big horse was the stuff of dreams.  But maybe Sam Russo, Private Investigator, had a dream coming in.  Why not?  It could happen to anyone.

I was not only in blue grass, I was in clover.

Marshall’d already told me nobody at the track actually knew for sure jocks were getting bumped off.  At least nobody but whoever was doing the bumping.  Basically the folks who hired me, faceless folks I hadn’t yet met and maybe never would, were pretty much in the dark along with everyone else.  Or so he said they said.  No one was altogether certain it wasn’t just a series of bad accidents—and for once not on the track—which is why they hadn’t called the cops.  Or, again, so he said they said.  The cops agreed, which is why they hadn’t shown up on their own.  Or so they said.

Uh huh, is what I said to myself as I’d listened to all this horseshit, and I’m just like Dorothy Parker once said, the Queen of Romania.  If three dead jocks one after another were accidents, three long shots had come in for Lady Coincidence.

But, like I said about coincidence, not one of them, maybe not even the cops, believed the accident angle for a minute.

That’s what I was supposed to do.  Help the guys who owned and ran and influenced the track believe it.  Or help them chalk it up to a really bad streak of luck.  The season was just starting.  The war had shut things down for three long years.  The big races Saratoga was used to hosting had gone off to Belmont.  So did the customers all of Saratoga lived on.  The last thing they needed was the money folk to stay away now the track was open again.  Or even the penny ante bettor.  Saratoga Springs was full of money all year round; it was that kind of place.  But it could always use more; it was that kind of place too.  Looking at a gaudy blood bay filly that must have cost someone more money than I’d ever see in my entire life, I thought: couldn’t we all?  I was no better than the town, and no worse.  I could always use more.

As for the jockeys themselves, the ones not dead, you could describe them as a little spooked.  Who wouldn’t be?  Deaths happened all the time on a racetrack, usually to the horses.  An image of Dark Secret winning the ’34 Jockey Club Gold Cup with one broken leg rose up in my mind.  I shut it down before I heard the “mercy shot” that killed him moments after he’d won someone a nice pot of money.  But the jocks got crippled or killed every week at some track somewhere.  Even so, it was an odd jockey who drowns in a Saratoga lake.  Or one who, completely sober, crashes his car into a tree on an empty road at 4 a.m.  Or, best for last, chokes on a ham sandwich at a picnic by a mineral springs consisting of just himself and his dog.  The dog was one of those African dogs, the ones that don’t bark.  It also didn’t leave its master’s side.  Hikers found them both a few days after the sad event.

And this had all happened in the space of nine days.  One more like it, and if I’d been a jockey, I’d move me and my tack to Southern California.  Fast.

Chapter 8

So there I was, walking a shed row of the oldest and best looking track in the U.S. of A. remembering the last time I was at any track, Monmouth as usual, crammed up against the fence with the rest of the hoi polloi.  I think my mouth was open.  I think I was yelling.  I think there was a fat guy next to me kissing his ticket over and over.  I think he stank like a moose.  I think I came this close to beaning him.  I’d just lost my shirt on a sure thing in the second.  Horse called Can’t Beat Him.  Funny thing is, everyone did, including the gate which they couldn’t get him out of.  The race went off and he was still in there trying to brain himself on the metal bars.

I did what the usual loser does; I threw my losing ticket away in disgust, all the time wondering if I was going to be spending the night in the city park, when a “stooper” came by to snatch it up, and I thought: Sam, things keep going like they’re going, that’ll be you in a month, stooping down to pick up discarded tickets hoping to find that little beauty thrown away by some idiot who couldn’t read a winning number when they bought one.

But that was then and this was now and now I was on the backstretch with carte blanche to go where I liked.  And I liked everywhere I could go.  The tidy barns, newly painted.  Horses, sleek as the finish on a new Packard, being led out to the track or led back.  Horses dancing by on the track, getting a feel for it.  Guys in cream colored suits and cream colored hats standing around staring at form sheets.  Black kids, white kids, brown kids, old men, young women, forking straw into stalls or hosing down quivering hides.  Farriers hammering shoes onto hooves or prying them off.  The smell of it all.  The sound of it all.  Why do people keep trying to close down racetracks?

This is what I’d learned in my twenty seven years.  God in His Wisdom only talked to certain people and every one of them was a first cousin to Groucho Marx who once said: “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

Right about then, I spotted someone I knew: George Labold.  George Montgomery Labold was a jockeys’ agent, the first of his breed I’d ever met—this was back when I was still a kid as well as still a detainee at Flo’s place, not to mention Mister’s.  Learned a lot from George and George’s friends for a whole three months one year, and got paid for it by doing anything and everything he and his friends asked me to.  Worked my way up to exercising the horses.  He was the first guy who told me I could of made a hell of a jockey if I weren’t so big and bound to get bigger, and he oughta know, being big himself, plus agenting a few of the good ones in his time.  I would of loved that, being a jockey.  But life doesn’t work that way—getting what you love.  Seemed to me life gives you what you need.  For most people, what you loved wasn’t on the table.

Anyhow, there was George and there I was, yelling hellos at each other.  Since he was half a foot taller, I was doing my yelling upwards.  At some point in all this, he asked me what I was doing on the backstretch.  It was for sure I hadn’t become a jockey.  Was I rich?  Was I an owner?

“Do I look rich to you, George?”

He looked me up and down.  “Hard to tell these days.  You look like you seen a few things.”

“We’ve all seen a few things.”

“You mean with the war and all?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Where’d you serve?”

“The Philippines.”

“You mean Bataan and like that?  Damn.  Most of those guys never made it back.”

“I know.”

And that’s about all either of us wanted to say about the war.  He’d been too old to go and I was still too close from coming back to want to remember too much.

“So if you ain’t rich, why you here?”

“Dead jockeys.”

From the way he just looked down on me, without a word, dead pan as Buster Keaton, I couldn’t tell if he knew jocks were dying or not.  George had come down a notch or two since I’d seen him last.  The three who died probably weren’t jocks he’d ever seen up close.  They won too much, rode horses that competed in the big stakes.

Knowing how to ride thanks to George and his pals, plus how to care for horses, landed me in the Philippines.  The U.S. had its last cavalry unit there, my regiment, the 26
th
.  I’ll never forget a single one of those horses, especially how it was when they got led away, eyes rolling in fear, to be butchered to feed the fellas who rode them against Japanese tanks and heavy artillery.

Those horses held the beach against the little guys with the big guns.  For awhile.

A few of us, me included, never touched a single hair of their hide except to say goodbye.  We could be starving, but we wouldn’t, we couldn’t, eat our horses.

Not another word out of George.  He was already gone, off about his business which was collaring a trainer to get one of his jocks another mount.  It was like the last time I saw him.  That was the year Cavalcade won the Derby, the same year he was Horse of the Year.  George’s jocks never saw a Derby.  But one or two of them saw a stakes race.

He had a good one once, a jockey out of South Carolina called Bingo Lance.  Bingo died on the track along with the horse that was just about to win the Suburban Handicap.

That was one terrible day for horse and man and agent.  Bingo was the closest he ever came to glory and the death of Bingo Lance was pretty much the death of George.

Standing with my hand out, I’d of liked to say more to George Labold, ask him to have a drink with me, maybe dinner in the pink hotel.

Hell, I was here for two weeks.  I’d see him again.

Next thing I knew I was in another shed row looking at a mare called Gallorette.

I would of known her anywhere.

She was big and she was rangy and the year Hoop, Jr. won the Kentucky Derby, Gallorette beat him.  A few years back she was Champion Female Horse.  This year, she was still knocking ‘em over like bowling pins.

I made a fool of myself.  I cooed at her.  Called her darling.  Dug out a handful of the peppermints I’d brought to the track and offered her a few.  It was like making an offering to a goddess.

“Hey you!  Get away from that horse!  Who do you think you are?”

“Sam?”

“Are you nuts or something, Sam?  This here’s Gallorette and she’s in the Whitney about an hour from now.  You want her sick on sugar?”

I got away from her.  Next to Gallorette, I wasn’t anyone.  Just a lonely PI in paradise.  One where jocks were getting killed.

Chapter 9

My life was measured out by Kentucky Derby winners.  World events, women, jobs, places I’d been—none of ‘em counted as markers.

I told time by the Derby.

I wish I could say I was born the year Man ‘O War won, but since he didn’t start in the big race, I couldn’t.  A horse called Paul Jones won.  I’d tried hard not to be bitter, but being born in the year of Paul Jones got my goat.  I made up for it a little bit by my first escape from the Staten Island Home for Hopeless Kiddies.  That was the year Reigh Count came home with ease.  Lino and me, we got dragged back when the Count took the Saratoga Cup.