Hex: A Ruby Murphy Mystery

by Maggie Estep

  A moment later the announcer calls, Theyre off! and two breaths later: “And in the early lead it’s Raging Machete by a head, with Salamander Sam coming up on the rail.”

  I start to panic. A horse going right to the lead does not necessarily bode well, even in a sprint, and I distinctly heard Gaines telling Jimenez not to get involved in an early speed duel with Salamander Sam, one of trainer Nick Zito’s horses, who likes to set a blistering pace. But evidently Jimenez and Raging Machete have other plans. I watch Joe’s bay nose struggling to keep ahead of Salamander Sam’s. They go the quarter mile in less than twenty-one seconds, a nearly obscene pace. In a few more strides Joe manages to grab a length over Salamander Sam, but suddenly, Baron Ron, the chestnut that was acting up going in the gate, starts challenging, pulling within a nose of Raging Machete. The whole pack of them is practically neck and neck at the half-mile pole, just an indistinguishable mess of hooves, pinned ears, and bright silks. And then Joe starts to fade. The pack passes him. All the other horses have their ears pinned back, are intensely focused, but Joe’s ears are flopping forward and he even turns his neck at one point and looks into the grandstand. And then it’s over. The rest of the horses have already passed the finish line, Baron Ron winning by two lengths. Joe sloppily hand-gallops across, looking happy as can be at having lost another race.

  I feel demoralized. Joe just doesn’t seem to understand the concept of getting to the finish line first. His owner will probably read Gaines the riot act. Gaines will in turn spread the discontent to his employees.

  It takes me a few moments to snap out of my misery and realize I ought to find Sebastian and see what’s needed of me.

  I catch up to him as he and Ned lead Joe through the passageway back toward the backstretch.

  “Where the hell were you?” the skinny man barks.

  “Watching the race on the video screen like I told you,” I protest, looking over to Ned, hoping he’ll come to my defense. He does not.

  “This horse is hot,” Sebastian says, snatching the cooler from my arms and throwing it over Joe, who still has his ears forward, looking around good-naturedly, as if expecting accolades.

  Ten minutes later we’re all back at the barn. Sebastian has taken Joe’s tack off and I’m leading the colt around the shedrow, leaving slack in the lead rope, talking to him. As we come around to the other side of the barn, a pair of grooms from the neighboring stable eyeball me but don’t say hello. News of our loss has probably reached these guys, and they’re afraid the bad luck will spread to them.

  Once Joe’s cool enough, I take him over to a grassy embankment and watch him bury his nose in the ground. I start thinking about Frank, Little Molly, and the conversation I overheard. I’ve kept my phone turned off, although I’m sure Ariel is trying to call. I just can’t deal with her quite yet.

  I’m frowning, my eyes focused on Joe’s neck, when I feel someone standing behind me. I turn around and find Ned there, arms folded over his chest.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Ned asks.

  “What? What did I do?” I ask, startled.

  “I was talking to the horse,” Ned says, planting himself in front of Joe, scowling at the bay colt. “He’s got it in him. He can win races, he just doesn’t.” Ned shakes his head and looks sad.

  “Maybe he just doesn’t want to,” I say, great horse psychologist that I am.

  “His owners—or at least Munchinson, the only one we ever hear from—he’s not happy,” Ned says, looking deeply sad himself.

  “What’s that mean? What’s he gonna do?” I say, alarmed, flashing on horror stories I’ve heard of racehorses sold off per pound to the butcher.

  “Drop him down to claiming,” Ned says ominously.

  “Oh no.”

  Running a horse in a claiming race not only means dropping him down in class but also that the owner is willing to risk having him claimed by anyone with an owner’s license and a few thousand dollars. It’s the crown of dishonor for a colt of Joe’s potential.

  Ned leans over and runs his hands down Joe’s elegant bay legs, feeling for any heat that might indicate an injury.

  “Warm?” I ask, half hoping the colt hurt himself and has a solid excuse for his poor showing.

  “Cool as a coffin. Colt is totally sound. I don’t know what his problem is.”

  Ned and I are both quiet for a spell as Joe unabashedly munches grass and generally looks pleased with himself.

  “You want to get a drink later?” Ned asks out of the blue.

  “A drink?” I say, startled.

  “Yeah, you know, rum and Coke, beer, bourbon. Drink.”

  “I don’t drink, actually,” I say, trying to gather myself.

  “Oh.” Ned looks confused. “You mean you don’t drink alcohol? Or you’re married, or otherwise engaged?”

  “The former, I guess.”

  “You guess? Who should I ask?” he says, smiling but looking a little rattled.

  “I don’t drink alcohol. But no, I’m not married. At all.” I look up at him, into those strange green eyes. “The thing is, I can’t really have even a metaphoric drink today.”

  “Oh?” He frowns, then: “Should I ask you another day or not?”

  “It’d be nice if you did.”

  “Yeah?” He looks relaxed again.

  “Yeah,” I reiterate.

  We stare at each other like stone idiots.

  “Call it a day when you’ve put Joe away,” he says eventually “and I’ll see you tomorrow?” He doesn’t seem too sure.

  “Yeah, of course.” I nod. There’s another prolonged stare. I break eye contact, turn to bring Joe back to his stall.

  I take the colt’s halter off and watch him perform his ritual of turning around twice. I latch his door shut. Walk to the tack room to retrieve my bag. I feel disjointed. The thing with Ned startled me. And the prospect of going to eavesdrop on Little Molly and Frank isn’t doing much to calm me.

  I walk over to the ladies’ room to wash some of the grime off my hands and face. A pair of grooms zip past me on clunky bicycles. They stare at me then say stuff to each other in Spanish. I feel like maybe I should go over to the cafeteria and just hang out and let all the employees of Belmont inspect me head to toe. Get it over with.

  Instead, I go in the bathroom and inspect myself. I don’t look so good. These last few days have been a whole lot more action-packed than I’m equipped to deal with. I’m not a slovenly physical specimen, since my yoga practice alone is pretty grueling, and I also swim and bike and generally keep my body busy. But this horse work is more business than I can handle. I’m tired all over.

  I come out of the bathroom and nearly trip over a black and white cat. The cat looks up at me and blinks its green eyes. I apologize aloud, then head toward the deserted barns. There’s a light wind having its way with one of the half unhinged stall doors. The door creaks and groans, an appropriate soundtrack to my little stakeout. I go into the stall I eavesdropped from earlier, waiting for Frank and Little Molly. I squat down on my haunches, cup my face in my hands and try to breathe evenly.

  About ten minutes later I hear a rustling sound on the other side of the stall wall. I peer out between the loose planks and see Frank, just a few inches from me there on the other side. He looks down at his watch, cranes his neck left and right.

  I wait. Frank waits.

  For fifteen interminable minutes we wait, and then, abruptly, Frank storms off. I quickly race around to the front of the barn in time to see him stride away. I follow.

  He stalks over to Gaines’s barn and looks around. I plant myself under the awning of the facing barn and watch. Frank hesitates for a moment then ducks into the tack room. He’s in there a few short minutes then emerges wild-eyed. He leans forward as if to vomit. He dry heaves. At that moment Gaines appears.

  I see Frank pointing to the tack room. Gaines goes in and emerges seconds later. He pulls a cell phone from his pocket and frantically punches some numbers in as F
rank stands staring ahead.

  This can’t be good.

  I get a very queasy feeling in my stomach. I walk around the outside of the barn next to Gaines’s barn. I stop to peer into a stall where there’s a goat standing next to a chestnut horse. Both creatures look at me for a moment then simultaneously put their heads down to a flake of hay on the ground.

  I eventually come back to the front of Gaines’s barn.

  In the three minutes my little promenade has taken, a lot has happened. Two security guards are standing in the door of the Gaines tack room. Gaines himself is on the phone. Some grooms have materialized, and as I step a little closer I hear one of them say, “It’s Molly Pedersen. She’s dead. Looks like a heart attack.”

  Another groom is muttering, “Damn speed freak.”

  My whole body turns to ice as I stand there, rooted to my spot.

  In a few more moments the place is swarming with security guards and cops. Fat cops. Skinny cops. One female brunette cop with an impressive chest, which she puffs out as she stalks back and forth in front of the tack room where Molly’s body lies. Not that I’ve seen the body yet. I’ve just been minding my business, rooted to my spot, queasy.

  I feel someone standing behind me. I flip around to find myself face-to-face with Ned. He’s scowling and his glasses are down at the very tip of his nose.

  “This is horrible,” I say, shaking my head.

  “What is?” he asks, pushing his glasses back up.

  “Molly.”

  He frowns. “What’d she do now?”

  “You … you … uh … she’s dead,” I say, barely more than a whisper.

  “What?” Ned gasps. His glasses slide down his nose. He catches them.

  “Dead.” I point at the tack room.

  “Fuck,” he says, which strikes me as strange, because he almost doesn’t seem that shocked about it. Just angry. He goes over to where the chesty cop is standing. I watch her listening to Ned and motioning to a plainclothes cop. The lot of them go into Gaines’s office.

  Eventually, three paramedics carry Little Molly’s body out of the tack room on a stretcher. From where I’m standing I can’t see anything wrong with her, yet I can tell she’s dead. There’s a horrible stillness to her tiny body. Near me, a pair of weather-worn grooms are speculating about what might cause a nineteen-year-old to have a heart attack.

  The paramedics wheel the stretcher over to an ambulance that has pulled up between barns. As they lift the stretcher, Molly’s head lolls to one side. She looks angry. I would be too.

  My stomach twists up.

  I slip off to call Ariel. I get her voice mail and leave a message. Telling her to call me. Soon.

  I look around me. Ned and Sebastian are still inside the office, talking to the brunette cop.

  I feel a little weird just wandering off into the sunset, yet that’s exactly what I do. Picturing dead Little Molly’s face as I make my way to the LIRR station.

  I’m waiting for my train when Ariel calls. “I heard what happened,” she announces. “Frank called me.”

  “Ah. What’d he tell you?”

  “That one of his coworkers had a heart attack. That he found the body. I asked him point-blank if he was sleeping with the girl. He denied it, of course. But something is not right.”

  “Yes. Something isn’t right. A woman is dead. However, I guess this is the end of my Belmont career.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The source of your suspicions is dead.”

  “I still want to know what’s going on. I have a bad feeling,” Ariel snaps.

  She doesn’t seem to have a bad feeling about Molly being dead. Just about what the girl’s body may have been up to before all life left it.

  “Well, Ariel,” I say, irritated, “I can pretty much assure you there was something going on between those two, but I can’t see that hanging around the track would garner much more information about it.”

  “I want to know if Frank did it.”

  “Frank did what?”

  “Murdered her.”

  “Murdered? I heard it was a heart attack, and if not, then I think that sort of thing is best left to the police.”

  “I’m not asking you to put yourself in danger.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Of course not,” she says tersely.

  “I’m not sure what you want me to do, then.”

  “Put in another day at the track. See what you can learn.”

  I’m not crazy about this idea.

  “Please?” she says in a small voice.

  Ariel is the antithesis of a please kind of girl. Hearing her say it sways me. “Okay,” I say.

  She thanks me.

  I fall asleep on the train, waking to find I drooled on myself.

  Sebastian Ives

  18 / The Hole

  I sit in a corner of Gaines’s office, trying to keep out of the way of the police, who are everywhere. Even though I know plenty of retired cops—fellow members of the Federation of Black Cowboys out there in East New York, where I keep Prince, my quarter horse—those are old black cops, and knowing them doesn’t mean I’m all that comfortable around a bunch of young white cops. Particularly this here lady cop with her big chest sticking out. She’s already asked me a bunch of questions I didn’t know answers to and some that I did. Like the last time I saw Molly alive. Which wasn’t more than an hour ago. Incredible, if you think about it. One hour ago that little girl was riding in a horse race, now she’s been taken to the morgue. Makes you wonder.

  Gaines is on his phone and Frank is sitting in a chair right near him, looking green as the lady cop asks him questions. Frank’s not a good egg but it doesn’t mean he deserved to find the body. Plus, he’d been carrying on with the girl for a while. I know he’s got some serious ladyfriend, but he had it bad for Molly, which is bound to make the cops and the federales interested in him big-time. Whatever. So long as they don’t try pinning it on me. There’s always funny shit going on in the backstretch. Trainers trying to sneak new, undetectable drugs in, accusing grooms of feeding the horses poppy seed bagels if the equines turn up positive for opiates. In my time, I been questioned by the federales and the local cops, and they’ve given me a hard time a few times too, always looking to blame a black groom before they go pinning something on a nice white trainer. But I never done anything funny to a horse in my life. And not to a human either.

  It’s too damned crowded in this office that ain’t meant to fit more than three people to start with, so I make my way over to the door, thinking I’ll check on the horses.

  “Where you going?” the lady cop wants to know. I tell her I’m going to see about the horses and she tells me not to go far. I assure her I will not.

  I go stand in front of Liz’s Tizzy’s stall, petting the little gray’s nose and mulling things over in my head for a minute until it occurs to me that Ruby’s not around anymore, and I get a tiny strange feeling about it, about her, how she turned up on the backside here out of nowhere, clearly not knowing her way around a racetrack and now all of a sudden there’s a dead person. But then I put this thought out of my mind. The horses like the girl. And I trust that.

  As I’m standing there, I see that Little Molly’s uncle, Jimmy John Mancuso, has suddenly turned up, and I count my blessings that I’m not standing in that office right now. With the kind of temper that guy’s got, it’s very possible that objects and people are gonna start flying. The man loses his cool over little things, and I just don’t want to know what he’s gonna do over the death of his pretty, young niece.

  To get as far away as possible from the office, I go all the way down to Ballistic’s stall and go in to stand next to the horse. Ballistic isn’t the friendliest individual in Gaines’s string and he doesn’t seem all that interested in my little visit, but I do need to check on his feet—looked like he might be getting a touch of thrush this morning. Though I’d yell at anyone else for such negligence, I don’t bother t
ying the colt to the wall and just ask him to lift each foot for me, risking him reaching down and biting me on the ass. The horse seems to know what’s good for him, and I inspect all four feet without interference. No thrush either. Guess I was being paranoid.

  I look the colt over for a minute. Nice-looking chestnut, though not much of a racehorse.

  I look at my watch and see it’s five now. Dinnertime. I wonder if the police will give me a hard time if I feed the horses and head on home. As I stand there debating it, a lovely person materializes there outside Ballistic’s stall.

  “Hi, Sebastian,” she says, and I look at Asha Yashpinsky and am very glad I’m not a white man because right now I’d be blushing to the roots of my being.

  “Asha, hello,” I say.

  “Little Molly is dead?” she says, her pretty face pinched up with worry.

  I nod at her and we both cast our eyes down for a moment.

  Asha asks how much I know, and I tell her not much. Apparently a heart attack. Maybe some kind of amphetamine overdose. We both fall silent again until all the horses, knowing it’s dinnertime, start getting anxious, some turning around in their stalls, almost all poking their noses over their stall guards and looking out with the devil in their eyes.

  “I gotta feed,” I say, then immediately wish I hadn’t for fear it’s going to make Asha disappear.

  “You want a hand?” she asks.

  “That’d be great,” I say, smiling at the gorgeous girl. “Everybody else’s still talking to the police.”

  Several horses shake their heads vigorously, apparently approving of Asha’s offer.

  A few minutes later we’re down to brass tacks, feeding. And we’re just finishing up when the short white lady officer comes over. I barely contain a need to moan out loud.

  “Ives,” she says, walking up to me and getting a little closer than I like, “I need your home number. We’re done with you now but Agent Osterberg of the FBI may need to get in touch with you tonight.”