Authors: Ki Longfellow
I said: “He said all that? In that order? Damn.”
“Indeed, sir. As close as I can remember. I could of embellished some. I’m partial to embellishment. But yes sir, he said most of all that. And might I offer some advice?”
“You might.”
“Don’t go askin’ questions of just anyone around this place. You come back here one o’clock in the mornin’, maybe two o’clock, and you talk to a young negro fella named Alonzo. He runs elevator 9. You remember that number and that name?”
“I’ll remember.”
“And don’t you be talkin’ where anybody sees you.”
“Gotcha.”
“Alonzo set you straight. Meanwhile, you just have yourself a quick drink and then you get yourself out of here. This ain’t the place a man everyone knows is lookin’ out for them dead jocks should be seen.”
I thanked Thomas Clay Jefferson. I handed him a large tip. He took half, handed the other half back. The first half he folded neatly and placed carefully under the cigars in the red lacquer box. “A thing’s worth what a thing’s worth. Dig up the truth, sir. Cain’t have folks goin’ about hurtin’ other folks like that.”
I said I’d be back. I told him I’d let him know what I knew. He smiled at me, a smile as warming as a winning ticket.
“You come see me whenever you please. I about live here. But there’s one thing I won’t have.”
I gave myself one last lingering look in a full length mirror—Mitchum? I didn’t have a cleft in my chin, did I? I did, on the other hand, look half asleep, but that wasn’t surprising since I’d just got the stuffing kicked out of me.
Absorbed in myself, I turned back to hear what Clay wouldn’t have.
Both his eyes were staring directly into mine. “Don’t let me see you lyin’ on my wife’s second best friend’s brother’s slab.”
That made my goodbye smile fall off.
Chapter 21
I should of known who’d be holding forth at the main bar of the Grand Union Hotel.
As soon as I’d eased myself onto a stool—Clay may have groomed me as well they once groomed Black Gold, but my kidney ached like hell—I looked over and there she was, Mrs. Too-willing-ford. We both glanced away at the same time. I don’t know what or who she was looking at then, but I was staring at a nose the size of Mount Rushmore. I knew who owned it immediately. A famous nose like that, beloved at race tracks everywhere, belonged to the jockeys’ agent who’d handled both Manny Walker and Babe Duffy. Hollie Hayes was drinking straight bourbon out of a coffee cup (those old Prohibition habits die hard) looking worse than I did, even in his usual unusual selection of clothes. From shoes to hat, the man dressed like Bugs Bunny when Bugs Bunny was dressing like Red Skelton. As for crying in his beer, who could blame him? More than half his income had just died “accidently.”
Taking a quick look over my shoulder, I got an eyeful of who Mrs. Willingford was looking at. I had to hand it to him. Paul Jarrett was always a fast one. He’d changed his shirt. It was still Hawaiian, but this one was lime green with parrots on it.
Mrs. Willingford looked like she’d changed her mind about using his jockeys. And if not, they were negotiating something. Paul was doing his elbows on table, leaning in close, thing. Made me chuckle. After him warning me off. One of the things I always found myself thinking about went like this: I’d never stop being embarrassed by people.
I caught Paul’s eyes and winked. Paul had skin as thick as a rhino’s. He winked back.
I took Thomas Clay Jefferson’s advice. I got myself out of the grand Grand Union downing one drink and one drink only. I wasn’t going to see Alonzo the elevator operator about McBartle until at least one in the a.m. I had a lot of day left ahead of me. What to do now?
What I wanted to do was catch a movie. There were two new Bogie movies playing in town: something called
Key Largo
with Bacall. I liked Bacall well enough (she was no Carole Lombard, but she had a nice set of—teeth), but Bogie wasn’t playing a PI. And something without Bacall called
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. He wasn’t a PI in that either.
No time for a movie. I needed to check up on Carroll Goose, see if what he was hired for hooked up with what I was hired for. If he was, I’d go to the movies, bet the races, file a report of death by accident, and go home.
I walked through the gates of the Saratoga race track right about the time the third was going off. Oddest feeling in the world to be at a track and not have the foggiest who was running in what and who was riding who. I’d been in this situation before, but even then I’d get a bet down. Early days. Innocent days. Big loss days.
Goose wasn’t hard to find. He was where all the other security guards were: in an employee’s lounge. I called it a lounge because that’s what everyone was doing. Compared to Thomas Clay Jefferson’s gentlemen’s lounge at the Grand Union, it was a French open toilet. With most of the track “security” stuffed in it, I thought about how many Abba Zabba bars were being filched from the vending machines. As for all the other no-nos going on at the track, I imagined it was one hell of a free-for-all. Every flim flam invented by man was in full swing.
Drinking hootch out of a Dixie cup, Goose was lying back on a couch rejected by the Salvation Army.
“Hi ya, Russo!”
“Afternoon, Goose.”
“Where d’ja get the fat lip?”
“
The Finish Line
. One-day-only-sale.”
Goose thought about that long enough to get beaten to the laugh by half the other guys there.
A guy over by a wire-glass window with a mouth on him as wide as his face, said, “Who’s your pal, Goose?” Once I saw him, I couldn’t stop looking, and not because his badge said
Head of Security
, not just
Security
.
“This is my pal, Sam Russo. He’s a PI out of Staten Island.”
All smiles were off and all backs turned. Carroll Goose found this surprising. “Hey guys. That’s rude. This here is my best pal.”
Even though it cost me—kidney gave out a little scream only I could hear—I raised a hand. “Well, not— ”
“Me an’ him was on a case together. A
murder
case.”
“Carroll? Will you step over here a moment, please?”
“Sure.” He brought his hair, his moustache, his breath and his Dixie Cup. “What’s up?”
“You heard who’s riding Fleeting Fancy in the Travers?”
Goose rubbed his head which ruined his comb-over. “Now I did hear something about that. First it was supposed to be some jock out of California. Then I heard it might be this really young kid named, uh, named… ”
“Toby Tyrrell?”
“Hey, yep, sure, that sounds about right.”
“You happen to know who agents him?”
“Me? Why would I know that? I don’t even know what it means.”
“It means all jockeys have someone who helps them get mounts. You know, a horse to ride in a race? For that, the someone, called a jockeys’ agent, takes a cut of the jockey’s cut.”
“Yeah? That’s really, you know, interestin’. But hey, I just got here. Wha’d I say? Great job, right?”
“It suits you.”
Goose grinned, a huge grin for such a small face. I noticed his teeth were as small as seed pearls and as white as White King Soap.
Ten minutes later, in the jockey’s dressing room, I found Toby Tyrrell suiting up for the fifth. Egg yolk yellow silk shirt with a crimson cap. White silk breeches with the same shade of yellow stripe down the outside of the leg. A yellow pompom on top of the crimson cap. I knew those colors. They were the silks of a fair-to-middling operation with a few good horses. Not great, but honest. Treated their horses well. Tyrrell had the mount on the second favorite, a nicely set up dappled gray filly called You Don’t Know Me.
The kid was about as interested in me as I was interested in sitting through a fashion show at Bergdorf. So I leaned up against a wall, scratched a match on a pillar, and smoked. I stared at him while I did this. It only took a minute or so to unnerve him. People hate being stared at by people, especially strange people. And I had a fat lip. I also apparently resembled Robert Mitchum.
Finally the kid walked right up to me and spoke directly into my belt buckle. “You ain’t gonna like what happens you keep staring at me.”
I looked down at the top of his curly head of dark brown hair and kept staring. Which forced him to look up. So then we both stared at each other. He was a really good looking kid. Sort of Tyrone Power without the girliness.
“What’s going to happen if I keep staring at you?”
He thought about his answer long enough for me to answer for him. “Thugs? Banned from the track? No more allowance?”
I made him smile. That was good.
“You get the pickup mount on Fleeting Fancy?”
“Who’s askin’?”
“Me.”
“Yeah. I got the horse.”
“You happy?”
“You kiddin?”
“How do you feel about how you got it?”
“Accidents happen. That my fault?”
“Three accidents?”
The kid jock looked at his feet. He looked at a locker. He looked at a set of silks on a peg. He did not look at me. “Ain’t sayin’ it ain’t sorta spooky.”
“Spooky enough to make
you
worry?”
“About what?”
“Your accident.”
For that I got a sound like a goldfish blowing bubbles at the top of his bowl and a flap of the kid’s hand—like he was warding off evil. When he finally spoke, it was more a whisper than a lowered voice. “Yeah. OK. Sure. I’m spooked.”
“So you don’t think they were accidents?”
“I don’t know,” he wailed in a quiet sort of way. There was a lot of despair in that little wail. “I just don’t know.”
That made two of us. But one of us was beginning to get a picture forming in his mind. Hazy. Still full of holes. But a picture nonetheless.
Chapter 22
I hung about for a bit, smoked a few cigarettes, nursed a few beers watching Toby Tyrrell bring You Don’t Know Me home by four lengths in a hand ride. A few feet away a coupla heavy betters talked about the kid’s way with a horse, that they’d be watching out for him from now on, but the dappled gray filly wasn’t bad either. Mostly they were working out who to bet on in the Travers Stakes. Could this new jock bring home Fleeting Fancy like he brought home You Don’t Know Me? Was there a point in betting a filly against colts? And how about that Gallorette, taller than a lot of the males? And, oh boy, was she faster. In ’45 she’d beaten Hoop Jr. who’d won the Kentucky Derby that year. Still going up against males, she took second in the Wood Memorial. She beat Stymie. She’d won the Carter Handicap as well as, a few days back, the Whitney. Hard to bet against her. They both licked the ends of their pencil stubs. But then, said one, there was Fleeting Fancy, another female up against males. Fleeting Fancy won less races than Gallorette but she won easier. The other said: she was also younger.
Hard call, said one. You bet, said the other.
Listening to all that, I got sleepier and sleepier. It’d already been some day. I’d fed Carroll Goose a nourishing breakfast of booze, read a lot of newspapers at the office of
The
Saratogian
, got taken for a ride by a woman who thought I could be bought (which I suppose I could, but for a lot more than she was offering), met an old friend from the “School” who’d started out giving her the cold shoulder, but was warming up, heard that some of the track’s bigwigs were pulling scams with the help of bogus security (which only went to show some people could never have enough), got sent for by a jock in serious hiding who knew for a fact Manny Walker hadn’t just drowned, he’d
been
drowned, borrowed a horse from a “friend” to prove the hidden jock wasn’t just blowing hot air, got beaten up by two of somebody’s thugs in the parking lot of the Grand Union Hotel, got cleaned up by the nicest guy in Saratoga Springs, and had just now discovered Fleeting Fancy’s new jock was scared witless.
But not so witless he couldn’t guide his horse home with ease and grace in the Fifth at Saratoga.
Holy horsehide. I was sagging on my feet. Not to mention my back ached like a tooth.
I still had that dinner with Paul Jarrett at 8. I still needed to keep myself awake until one or two in the morning for a talk with Alonzo, the elevator operator.
I did what Bogie would of done. I went back to my pink room in my pink hotel and dreamed lovely pink dreams in my canopied bed, which thank God, wasn’t pink. Not that I remembered any of ‘em. I didn’t think Bacall made an appearance. But I bet Lombard did. She didn’t often miss her scenes in my dreams. I was forever grateful about that.
Dinner with Paul was at a little steak joint off Broadway on Spring Street. The food wasn’t bad. It got better when Paul turned up in a plain white shirt, and better still when he paid for the meal. After the day I’d had, Paul paying the tab took the biscuit. Jarrett was funny and he was clever but he was tight with a dollar.
“I’m celebrating,” he explained.
I didn’t like to think about what. I’d bet Mrs. Willingford had something to do with it, but I didn’t ask. I just said that was fine by me and ordered a brandy. And then I was off again, telling him all about my glorious day. It amused the hell out of him, all except the part about me looking like Jim Mitchum. He stared at me long and hard, then moved his seat so he could stare long and hard at my dashing profile. “You know, Sam, that darky wasn’t far off.”
I didn’t like Clay getting called a “darky” but there wasn’t much I could do about it—short of socking a friend in the nose. So, just to keep the peace, I let that go like I let so much else go. There was also the fact he hadn’t finished what he was saying.
“You do look a lot like Mitchum. Funny I hadn’t noticed it before.”
“And you look like Assault.”
Assault, winner of the ’46 Kentucky Derby, was no prize for the eye. A bit on the scrawny side, he also limped. Paul took it in the way it was meant, and I went on telling him all about my day until I ran out of steam.