The Bookwoman's Last Fling (2 page)

I called him Mr. Willis after that. I try to be polite unless people deliberately piss me off, the man was older than me by at least twenty years, and respecting my elders is part of my code. He could have been any age between an old fifty-five and a well-preserved seventy. I parked my car on the street and we drove out of town in his Sherman tank. The city lights fell away and the rain came hard again. I could now see a faint streak of light in the east, but it was still too faint to matter. He drove about ten miles and turned into a dirt road posted
KEEP OUT
; fenced on both sides with the distinctive wooden slats of a horse ranch.

That was the other thing I knew about Geiger from his obit: In addition to his book collection he had been a horse racing man. But I'd soon found out that I had this chronology backward. In addition to being a lifelong horseman, Geiger had a book collection. Horses were his life and books were now part of it, a combination I found irresistible. I had always been partial to the horse, a nobler, wiser, much gentler, and far more majestic creature than man. I had been an enthusiastic customer at Centennial Race Track in Littleton, just south of Denver, until it closed in 1983. I was one of those daring young kids who got in as soon as the law allowed and maybe a little sooner than that. This was years before my police career began. I had been drawn to the turf by the spectacle, not so much as the lure of fast money. Before I was ten I had read all of Walter Farley's wonderful
Black Stallion
novels, and for a year I pictured myself as an impossible cross between Alec Ramsey and Eddie Arcaro. Of course I could never have been a jockey—I was still a growing boy and already pushing 175 pounds, but at eighteen I could spend entire afternoons watching the races. I talked to the grooms over the rail and I quickly learned their lingo. They were called ginneys, a term going back to old racing days in England, when winning owners tipped their grooms a guinea. Today, I had heard, well-heeled owners passed out bills, not coins, featuring Jackson and Grant, occasionally a Franklin if the winning pot had been good enough. I knew these things, though I had never crossed that magical line between the grandstand and the backside. I knew where the class raced, at Hialeah and Gulfstream in Florida, at Aqueduct, Belmont, and Jamaica in New York, and on the West Coast at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park, among other fabled places. I struggled with algebra but I knew the difference between allowance races and claimers. Claiming races were the guts of almost any racing program. Here a horse's true grit could be calculated, scientifically some said, against others of similar company. In a claiming race, each owner was putting a price on his horse, and the horse could be bought—claimed—by any other owner at the meet who was willing to pay the claiming price. At the same time, the price was a measure of a horse's class. How I loved those hazy, distant Saturdays at Centennial. I was caught up in the majesty of the post parade and the drama of the race, and I didn't care whether I had the two bucks for a bet.

Willis clattered and splashed us along the dirt road for a good quarter-mile. The country here was mostly a gently rolling plain. Occasionally there were trees; I could see them now as the black sky became reluctantly gray; nestled among them were some barns and beyond it all was the house. We turned in among the barns and came up to a small training track. There I got my first look at a man who might have been Geiger in earlier times. He stood at the rail watching an exercise boy work a horse in the slop: a stoop-shouldered figure in silhouette, lonely as hell by the look of him. He wasn't wearing a
GEIGER
sign on his heavy black slicker; I just figured he was one of the old man's three sons, the way you sometimes figure things out. He glanced over his shoulder as we went past and that's how he took note of us; no wave of the hand, no other movement at all. He wore a hood that showed nothing of his face. He just stood there like some grim reaper in a bad dream; then he turned away as the boy galloped his horse around the track again to complete the mile.

Willis didn't stop and I didn't ask. We didn't exchange any wisdom or wit; he didn't pull up under the big old tree and start showing me pictures of his grandchildren or his prizewinning roses. Sudden camaraderie was not about to break out between us, so my best bet was to keep my mouth shut and not annoy him more than I already had. This I did while he drove along the track and around it, turning up the road to the house, which now loomed before us in the rain. It was an old two-story house, old when Geiger had bought it would be my guess, built here sometime well before the 1920s for another old sodbuster now long dead. None of that mattered now. Willis pulled around to the side and parked under a long overhang. A set of steps went straight up from there. We got out of the car, he gestured at me sullenly, and I went up ahead of him, emerging onto a wide wraparound porch. I stood at the railing looking out at the farm, which was just coming to life in the gray morning. I could see up to the track where the horse was being led back through the gap. The groom held him while the hooded man stood apart, and the boy sat straight in the saddle. On the road he hopped off and they all walked down to the barn where a black man stood waiting with a hot bucket of water. They were a hundred yards away but my eyes were good. The ginney washed the mud off his horse and then skimmed off the water with a scraper. Steam floated off the horse like the bubbling ponds around Old Faithful, but I still couldn't see anything of the hooded man's face. His hood kept him dark and mysterious.

I heard Willis cough behind me. He said, “You comin'?” and I said yeah sure. His tone remained surly while I tried to keep mine evenly pleasant. I followed him into the house through a side door. He said, “Wait here,” and for once I did as I was told. He disappeared along a totally black corridor. A moment later a light came on, far down at the end of the hallway on the other side of the house. He motioned me with his hand and turned into the room. Almost at once I was aware of another light beaming out into the hall, and when I reached it I saw Willis sitting behind an enormous desk. My eyes also took in two dozen horse pictures on the far wall, winner's circle pictures with an oil painting in the center. The centerpiece was a great painting of a magnificent red stallion. The caption said,
Man o' War, 1921.

“I've got a few chores to do before we talk,” Willis said. This was okay. For the moment I was at the man's beck and call; if I computed what he was paying me on a per-hour basis, I would be way ahead of the game for the seeable future. I had never made anything close to this kind of money when I was a cop, so if he wanted me to sit I could sit here all week. At some point I would hear his story, I'd tell him what if anything I could do or try to do for him, and maybe, if the answer was nothing and his demeanor was civilized, I'd consider giving him a chunk of his money back. For the moment I didn't want to drop even a hint of that possibility. Willis asked if I wanted coffee. I didn't; I had had my quota in the restaurant but I said sure, I'd take a cup, I'd be sociable.
Who knows, it might help us break some ice,
I thought. Willis disappeared and I was left to give the room another inspection alone.

The first thing I noticed was, there were no books anywhere.

The second thing, which took me slightly longer to determine, was that Geiger himself appeared in none of the winner's circle pictures. I got up and walked along the wall looking at them.

A winner's circle picture, in addition to being a quality professional photograph, gives some good information in three or four lines. First there is the name of the winning horse. Then it tells the racetrack where the win occurred; then the date, the name of the winning jockey, the horses that ran second and third, the distance, the winner's time, and the names of the owner and trainer. In all of these, H. R. Geiger was named as the owner and trainer, but the only men who had come down to stand with the winning horse and jockey were Willis and the groom. There was no gang of celebrants in any of them and this, maybe, told me a little more about Geiger. Even in cheap claiming races a crowd often assembles around the winning horse. The groom must be there to hold the horse; the jockey, still seated in the saddle, and a whole bunch of people dressed in suits and ties, flowery dresses or plain shirts and jeans, all friends of the winning owner. I had seen winner's circle pictures that had twenty grinning people crowded together as if they personally had pushed the hapless nag the entire six furlongs. But here was a whole wall showing only four faces in each: Willis and the groom, the jockey, and the horse. Willis wore his western attire, boots, the hat, and a string tie tight at his neck. The pictures were in chronological order. The oldest was from April 1962, the most recent from March 1975, about twenty years ago. Geiger's winner in that first shot had been a dark filly named Miss Ginny, who had gone to the post with all four legs wrapped. Willis was a slender young man in those days, he stood almost timidly; the jockey wore a look of authority as if he, not Willis, had been running things; and the groom was a serious black kid who looked straight into the camera. The picture had been taken at Hot Springs, Arkansas: a bright, sunny day from the look of it. The top half of the photo shows the finish line and I could see that Miss Ginny had won handily, beating the place horse by five lengths.

I moved along the wall looking at each individual picture until, at some point, I felt uneasy. I didn't know why then: If I had thought about it at all I might have attributed it to the almost unnatural sameness of the people in the circle. From year to year they never changed places: it was always Willis standing alone on the far left, then a broad gap, then the groom, the horse, and the rider. The jockey was the same skinny white kid for that first half-year; then a series of jocks had replaced him, each riding for the old man for a year, more or less. The ginney was mostly the same black kid; he had been in the first picture and was in the last, with three white kids taking turns with him, holding the horse in the sixties. What was so unusual about that? I finally decided it must be Willis. He wasn't the owner or the trainer; he didn't hold the horse; he had no real purpose in the picture as far as I could see, and yet there he was, standing far apart, staring into the camera with that same eerie way he had. Expressionless—that's how I would describe him. He looked almost like a mannequin, a man with no soul.

“Here's your coffee,” he said suddenly from the doorway.

I turned and looked into those vacant gray eyes. His expression never changed: maybe that was part of it. Only when I had irritated him back at the restaurant was it plain just from looking at him that I had. I said thanks and took the mug. Our hands touched briefly before he drew his away. His skin was cold. He wore his western shirt buttoned tight around his neck—not even the string tie to give him a more naturally uptight look. If uptight was what he was trying to project, Junior Willis was doing that. His long sleeves were also buttoned, and the whole picture was of a man who couldn't relax even for a moment. He had not brought any coffee for himself, and as soon as he had delivered mine he left the room again. I drank it to be polite and waited some more. Fifteen minutes passed, marked by no sound other than the ticking of the clock in the corner. I heard footsteps: Someone walked down the porch just past the window. I heard a door close and I figured whoever it was had come inside. There was a momentary murmur, two voices talking in monotone: then an angry shout. “God
damm
it, doesn't she realize these horses can lose the best part of their racing lives while they screw around with a snag in the will? We've got to get everybody on board and pulling in the same direction here.” I heard Junior's voice, lower but still mostly distinct. “Let me warn you about something, Damon. I know she's your sister,” and at that moment Damon said, “
Half
sister, goddammit,
half
sister!” There was a pause, then Junior said, “Maybe she's your sister but I know her a helluva lot better than you do, and I'm telling you, you'd better not try any of your loudmouth bully-boy tactics on her. In the first place, she doesn't care whether these horses ever race. In the second place, she won't be moved by money or threats, and in the third place, it's just plain dumb to piss her off. Let me work on her.” There was more talk in lower muffled tones, as if they had moved away and were standing across a room or perhaps in the next one. Nothing then for another ten minutes. I looked at the clock and soon I heard footsteps again.

Willis came in alone. Now he looked more annoyed than before. I watch people in situations like that, I am a veritable hub of nerve-endings, I notice changes, and what I knew at the moment was that some kind of change had occurred, no matter how small. A change in the face of an unchangeable man is something you notice. I tried to make it easy on him: I sat at the front of the desk and said, “Just been looking at your pictures,” and Willis only nodded. He didn't seem to be focusing well; he was trembling mad. Then, almost thirty seconds later, his eyes did focus on the wall and he said, “So what do they tell you?” I thought there was a clue in that: He was trying a little too hard to find out if I could see my own hand in front of my face. So I looked again and suddenly I saw what I had missed the first time around. Then I had been looking too intently at the action in the winner's circle itself: now I saw a dozen flecks of white behind it as I quickly skimmed the whole gallery. In April 1963 a woman had stood in front of the lower grandstand behind the winner's circle. Her face was clear in that first long-ago shot; I could see that she was decked out in a white dress with a carnation on her lapel. I glanced at the next picture and there she was again, same white dress, fresh carnation, and she stood in the same place behind the circle. Whatever had just happened on that spring day in 1963, she liked it. I didn't point this out immediately. I said, “They tell me you've been with Geiger a long time,” and I glanced at the other pictures. The woman was always in the same place behind the action, in that gap between Willis and the horse. For more than ten years, with some notable gaps, she had been there when Geiger had won a race.