Shadow Roll (5 page)

We spent those few months on the streets of New York City with some newsies, sleeping in alleys under cardboard, eating out of trash cans, learning how to choose the right mark and boost a wallet or two.  We learned how to roll a drunk.  But nicely.  I’ve always had a nice way about me.  Lino wasn’t so nice, but being a cop at heart, he felt guilty.  Sometimes he’d take the money but find a way to get the wallet and all its pictures and cards and stuff back to its owner.

I discovered girls the year Brokers Tip took home the roses.  What a race.  The two leading jockeys, Meade on Brokers Tip and Fisher on Head Play, punched each other all the way down the backstretch and across the finish line.  As a kid, I loved it.  Hey.  I loved it now.  I also loved Rosemarie for about three months.

I learned a lot from Rosie.  She learned nothing from me, but she was real sweet about it.  She wasn’t so sweet when I went off with Ellen.  And then Ellen didn’t like Corrie.  Corrie paid her brother to beat me up when I met Angela.  That was a banner year for girls.

In Omaha’s big year, all on my lonesome, I made it out of that place they called a home.  I got all the way to Monmouth Park, hitchhiking, hopping trains.  They didn’t find me for months.  During those months I haunted the barns meeting George Montgomery Labold and George’s pals.  One of ‘em was a claiming trainer, training horses at the bottom end of Thoroughbred horse racing.  Even so, from Carl—claiming trainer’s name was Carl Hessing—I’d learned enough so I got to get up on a glossy back now and then to exercise some better horses than Carl’s horses, high bred nags that took a stakes race now and then.  Someone must have snitched.  Only way Mister Zawadzki could find me and haul me “home” in his Model T dump truck.

Thinking back, that was the time of my life.

Why would Mister and Mrs. Z want me back?  Because the Zawadskis were paid by the head and every once in a while someone came counting heads.  (As for those missing, Mrs. Z’d already made that one easy, even for Lino.  Few asked and when they actually did, they got the same answer: little sonofabitch ran away, din’t he?  Or din’t she?  Until Pamela, it always worked because one or the other of us was always trying to run away.)

My final escape from the ancestral home was with Bold Venture.  We weren’t world beaters, that horse and me, but we were survivors.  It was a lucky year for horse and boy; our competition was preoccupied with jam ups and getting knocked to its knees.  This meant clear sailing ahead for us and we both grabbed the advantage.  Bold Venture took the Derby.  And I took nothing since I had nothing but the clothes I stood up in.  If Flo and Mister noticed I was gone, the way the times were, it was for sure they were happy to see the back of me.  Was I happy?  You bet.  I whistled all the way off the Island of Staten.  I already knew how to sleep rough and how to sell newspapers.  I knew how to groom and exercise race horses.

I was on my way until the war showed up.

1941.  That was Whirlaway’s year.  And we both did.  Whirl away.  Him to fame and glory; me to gore and horror in the Philippines and a crash course in scraping the bottom of human nature.

But all that was history.  The war was over.  Hitler and Goebbels and Himmler were wherever people like Himmler and Goebbels and Hitler go.  The Japanese were back where they belonged, in Japan.  The Philippines were once again ours.  Though we stole it from the Spanish who’d stolen it from the— oh, the hell with it, this kind of thing went on as far back as men could grunt.  I hoped I was over Carole Lombard’s fatal plane crash into the side of a mountain.  Gable wasn’t.

I didn’t suppose I was either, not completely.  I didn’t think I’d ever be.

But here I was in Saratoga, Citation had just won the Derby and the Preakness and the Belmont, the great Gallorette won the Whitney right in front of me, her long lean chestnut body flattened out and flying, and I was just about to embark on my first serious case, one that was all mine, no Lino, one I might actually solve.  To be honest, the idea that I’d succeed did not loom large in my innermost heart.  Even so, I had a job, one that did not include shoplifters or grifters or people cheating on their better halves.

I’d been hired by men who thought I was a real PI.

What I didn’t have was a single idea about how to begin.

In
The Maltese Falcon
, Bogie was a seasoned PI with a partner and an office and a gun and a window with his name painted on it.  A couple of years ago, I saw a movie at the Paramount four times on four consecutive nights, a real humdinger of a picture called
The Big Sleep
.  In it, Bogie was still a PI, but this time without a partner.  Even so, he still had a gun and an office that had a window with his name on it.  Different name, but same idea.  Me?  I had that room on Staten Island which was no place to have a room, a pot bellied stove I used for heat in the winter, a stained sink, a toothbrush, some business cards in the back of a bureau drawer, and a snub nosed Colt .38 Detective’s Special.  The snubbie was a belly gun, easy to conceal, easy to use in a hurry.  I knew about using guns thanks to using a variety of them against a lot of little people shooting at me or strafing me or lobbing bombs at me.  I had the chutzpah to take on a job I didn’t have the first idea about.  But I could read.  That helped.  And Saratoga had a fine little library.  That helped too.

But what helped most of all was the privilege of watching a great mare named Gallorette take the Whitney Stakes from a field of outclassed males.

I spent the next two days “on the job” reading Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler.  For comic relief, I snuck in something newly minted called
1984
.

On the third day, I was ready for anything.

Good thing no one died while I was boning up on what to do about it.

Chapter 10

I made coffee in my little pink kitchenette.  I poured a slug of some good stuff in the coffee.  I sat in a white whicker rocking chair on the pink front porch of my pink hotel and rocked and sipped and smoked and thought about why anyone would want to kill jockeys.  One jockey made sense.  I could come up with a dozen reasons for one dead jock.  Saratoga was loaded with gambling joints, a few for the upper crust, most of ‘em for the rest of us.  Some were out there for all to see.  The rest were tucked away in tucked away places which meant you had to go looking for ‘em.  So maybe the jockey owed someone bad some serious money.  Or maybe he wouldn’t throw a race.  Then there was always the one where a jock knew too much about the kind of hoods who could fix anything that could be fixed—like back when Rothstein fixed the 1919 World Series and probably fixed the 1921 running of the Travers.  Or maybe an owner or a trainer found out he was dirty and lost them a high paying Grade I stakes race.  It could even be chalked up to a real accident, like the disappearance of Citation’s rider, Al Snider.  A few months back, Snider and a couple of his buddies disappeared off a fishing skiff near the Florida Everglades.  It was dusk and a storm was building.  The skiff was found but not Snider.

Al was one year older than me.  He was headed to the top of his game.  A few months later, Citation won the Derby.  He won the Preakness and the Belmont.  It was Al Snider who should of been in those winner’s circles.

There was also the possibility that the guy’s wife did it.  I could think of a dozen reasons for
that
.

But
three
jockeys?

I spent over an hour in the Saratoga sun doing what Hercule Poirot liked to do, think, but Poirot was English—sorry, Belgian.

I was wearing dark glasses.  Poirot wouldn’t wear sunglasses.  But Philip Marlowe would.

No getting round it.  Time to do what the red-blooded American Philip Marlowe would do.  Wear the dark glasses.  Get to the track.  Buttonhole a few people.  Ask ‘em questions.  Talk about the jockeys.  Find the connection between them.  There had to be a connection.

I heard Bogie say, “What’s keeping you, kid?”

I said, “I’m moving, I’m moving, I’m off my rocker.”

I’d walk across Congress Park, look at a few horses in a few stalls, find the jockey’s room, talk to a couple of ‘em.  One or two had to know something.

Scratch that idea, Russo.  Talking to jockeys when they’re suiting up for the day’s meet wasn’t the smartest idea.  First off, it’s hard to talk to a man with his head down a toilet.  Half of ‘em would be puking up just one more ounce to make weight.  Second, if they weren’t puking they’d be listening to a trainer.  Third, I wasn’t supposed to be doing any detecting here.  What I was really here for was not to stir up a wasp’s nest of cops and press and panicked tourists.  I sure wasn’t supposed to spook the jocks.

Here’s what I was being paid for.  A few weeks of soft Saratoga living, filled with the flash and dash of the best racing had to offer.  After that I’d present a report stating that in each case it was a lamentable accident.  For all I knew, it could be true.  They could be accidents.  Stranger things had happened.  I didn’t know many, if any, but a hundred to one they had.

I’d been hired to prove they were accidents.  Or at least
not
prove anything else.

I didn’t like it.  It smelled like selling out.  Would Bogie do it?  The real question was: would Sam Russo do it?

You’d think I’d know the answer to that.  I didn’t.  I was in Saratoga Springs.  I was near the best racehorses in America.  I was sleeping on a soft bed.  I had an expense account.  I was being tested.

Maybe in a day or two I’d know my answer.  In a day or two I’d know who Sam Russo really was.  For now, all I had was hope.

Dressed as any one of a thousand swells come to town for the season, still wearing the dark glasses, I made my way to the newspaper office.  I thought the local rag would know a thing or two they hadn’t printed.  Well, that was the idea anyway.  But why they’d tell me was something I was working out as I strolled south along Broadway.

“Sam!  Hey, Russo!”

I froze.  Christ on a hamburger bun.  Who the hell did I know in Saratoga besides George Labold?  Worse, who the hell knew me?  I turned.  Slowly.  No pretending I hadn’t heard the voice.  No use running.

I didn’t even know the guy’s name.  But I knew his face.  It was that barely grown-up lug, the one with a comb-over, the tongue-depressor-moustache and boozer’s breath.

Why would a Staten Island cop, the one guarding poor little Pamela’s crime scene, be in Saratoga when I was in Saratoga?  (Speaking of Lino’s latest case, I’d learned Pamela’s last name was Teager, that she’d been raped by her uncle, the wonderful Rudy Teager, and that her loving father took his brother in, but threw Pamela out.  After that, somehow she’d made her way to the Staten Island Home for Children, where Mister—acting for his merciful God—put her out of his misery.)  Here, in all his rooty toot zoot-suited glory stood the kewpie-doll cop.  I was exaggerating.  What he was wearing was not a Zoot suit.  But it could of been.  The bright green material was shiny enough and green enough and too big enough.

I slipped off the glasses to check I was seeing what I was seeing.

If he noticed me doing that, I couldn’t tell.  He had his hand out.  I was supposed to shake it—in public, where decently dressed citizens could see me doing it.  It was embarrassing.  So I put out my own hand hard enough to propel him into the nearest half private place—which happened to be a bar called
The Finish Line
.

He minded getting shoved into a bar—with a name, I thought, that summed up drinking to a T—about as much as I minded sitting through a Bogart double feature.  Not that I minded drinking.  I liked drinking.  But not before noon.  Most people drew a line somewhere.  Seemed this guy didn’t know how to draw.  Now I was closer, I could smell his choice of poison: Old Crow.  He and his suit were “aged” in the stuff.  I’d noticed it back in Stapleton standing around Pamela and her crime scene.

A smell strong enough to compete with all that was some smell.

 “You buying me a drink, Russo?”

I didn’t have an answer to that one.  Dragging him into
The Finish Line
, I’d acted on instinct alone.  So I bought him a drink.  I asked for a glass of water.  On the rocks.  I got a glass of water without ice and a funny look from the barman.

“Thanks,” said whoever this cop was, knocking back my gift with one quick bend of his wrist.  “Never thought I’d see you up here.  Figured you for a strictly Monmouth Park kind of guy.  You wanna know why I’m up here?”

No.  Yes.  No.  Well actually yes.  “You came for the mineral waters?”

“Hah!  Nah.  I came ‘cause your old pal Lino fired me.  So I’m not a flatfoot no more.  Boo hoo.  But about two hours later this other guy hired me.”

The hair on the back of my neck crisped a little at that.  “Oh yeah?”  I wanted to ask why Lino fired him.  I wanted to ask why anyone else would hire him.  I wanted to know what he was hired
for
.  Did it have anything to do with dead jockeys?  I didn’t say a thing besides “Oh yeah?”

“I’m standing there, looking at nothing, right?  And I mean nothing.  It’s out of the blue, what Lino done.  And I’m a vet like you and about a million other guys and I’ve just lost about the seventeenth job in a row, and this guy walks up and he says, you look like you could use a little work.  And I say, you ain’t just whistling Dixie.  And he says, well then, giddyap, pal, ‘cause you’re perfect for this job I got.  So I get into this car— ”

“Hold on.  You just got into a car?”

“Sure.  Who wouldn’t get into a brand new Cadillac?”

“About everyone I can think of,” I said, “unless there’s a gun involved.”

I don’t think he heard me.  He was still waxing lyrical.  He’d also ordered another Old Crow—on my dime.  And this was a guy I didn’t even know the name of, and didn’t hope to find out.  All I was doing by now was wondering if there was a back door to
The Finish Line
, one by the men’s room, and if I went out it, would I still be headed in the right direction for the offices of
The Saratogian
?  Now there’s a name you don’t get to say too much—unless you live in Saratoga.  Or as I’ve said they say up here: the Spa.