Riders Down

by John McEvoy

  The two watched as the redheaded man replaced the phone on its hook. He hefted the duffel bag to his shoulder. It appeared to be heavy, evidently bulging with currency, but he carried it easily. He drained his beer cup before moving toward the escalators.

  Oily Ronnie said, “See you later, Toby. Got to head out. If I win the ninth you can cash me out tomorrow.” He put his mutuel tickets in his wallet, then hurriedly followed the redheaded man down the escalator.

  Many people—especially parents with children, patrons who had come in groups, and tapped-out losers—were leaving before the final Heartland Downs race of the afternoon as Ronnie followed the redheaded man through the clubhouse door and toward the parking lot. It was a noisy, crowded scene, the valet parkers scurrying to retrieve cars, senior citizens walking slowly to their buses, children chattering to parents deflated by defeat of their horses, and Ronnie had to hustle and sidestep to keep his target in sight. In Section C of the vast parking lot, he saw the redheaded man approach a blue Toyota, open the passenger side door, then enter. There was a woman behind the wheel, and another figure in the back seat that Ronnie could not see clearly.

  As the blue Toyota backed out of its slot toward him, Ronnie raised his binoculars. When the car had straightened out and began driving off, he read its license plate, which was mud-spattered but not so badly that its numbers were illegible. He quickly said to himself, “Wisconsin 869-1121,” and knew he’d locked it into his memory. Looking up from the license plate to the back seat, Ronnie saw another pair of binoculars, aimed at him. They were in the hands of a broad-shouldered, bald man. Ronnie could not see the eyes behind those glasses. But as the blue Toyota receded in the distance and he lowered his binoculars, Ronnie felt a chill, as if the gaze aimed at him had contained a strain of invisible, but very tangible, menace.

  Ronnie shook off his feeling of concern, concentrating on the bag of money he’d just seen leave the track. “I’ve got to keep an eye out for these people,” he said to himself. “If they hit again and are this dumb, I know the boys that’ll take that cash off them.”

  Opening the door to his gray BMW, Ronnie heard the track announcer call the finish of the ninth race. His horse finished third. Ronnie reached for his wallet, extracted the $400 worth of worthless tickets, and scattered them across the tarmac before getting behind the wheel.

  “Damn,” he said, “I thought that horse was a cinch.” He was parked directly beneath one of the overhead television cameras monitoring the lot, but he carefully looked around to make sure he was not being observed by any people walking to nearby cars. Ronnie cautiously reached below the dashboard and extracted the cigarette lighter, which had been hollowed out and contained his portable drug stash. Leaning sideways in the seat and keeping his head down, he poured coke into a crisp, tubed $50 bill, snorted twice, and replaced the lighter.

  He sat back up behind the wheel, then momentarily leaned back against the cushioned head rest, feeling better already. Then he started the BMW and drove off, singing to himself:

  “You take Mary, I’ll take Sue,

  “Ain’t much difference ’twixt the two,

  “Cocaine…run all ’round my brain.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Matt started his work day by interviewing Moss Tilton, the man in charge of starting the races at Heartland Downs, who was about to celebrate his thirtieth year on the job. Tilton, a hard-bitten old Texan, allowed as how he had “watched more horses’ asses in full flight than any man in America outside of the U. S. Congress.”

  That scheduled interview had been followed by an impromptu and unwanted session with Leon the elevator operator. Leon held the car at floor level and wouldn’t open the doors until he had described in excruciating detail the small fortune he’d “just missed in yesterday’s fifth race. For about the thousandth time, I play a trifecta that comes in 1-2-4. If they would invent a bet like that, I’d hit it so often I’d retire in a week,” Leon lamented.

  “Yeah, and if they wrote races at six furlongs and one jump, I’d be living on an estate on a Caribbean island,” Matt replied, finally escaping Leon’s clutches.

  A few minutes later Matt had just poured his second cup of coffee of the morning when his phone rang in the Heartland Downs press box. There was no greeting when he picked up the receiver, just a question barked out by his chronically impatient editor, Harry Cobabe: “How many jocks have died in strange ways that you know about?”

  Matt shifted the phone to his left ear, the one farthest from colleague Rick Rothmeyer, who was arguing loudly on his phone with his girlfriend, then saying to her, “Ivy, let me tell you something. Some day, you’ll find yourself. And you’ll be really, really bummed.” Rick put down the phone, a satisfied grin on his face. Matt resumed talking to Cobabe.

  “Why are you asking me?” Matt said. “‘You’ve got a crack research department down there at the main office, don’t you? Or why don’t you put some of your copy desk gerbils on it, so they’d stop fiddling with the prose I send them?”

  Matt enjoyed sparring with Cobabe, who two years earlier had replaced an editor Matt despised, Hugo Hamilton, dismissed because of increasing ineptitude. Hamilton later talked himself into the sports editor’s job on a small paper in southern Ohio, where he was fired again, this time for an act that entered journalism lore. A terrible writer who was obliged to provide one sports page column per week, Hamilton faced a deadline one day with a blank computer screen before him. Desperate, he went to the internet and downloaded a column from a major Cleveland paper. It was a piece that sharply criticized the Ohio State University football program. Without reading it, Hamilton deleted the byline of its writer, Bill Livingston, and hurriedly put his own byline on it. The controversial column ran that night. The next morning, Hamilton got a phone call from an irate reader and OSU alum who lambasted him for “such a dumb, scurrilous, vicious column.” After listening for a minute or two, Hamilton angrily interrupted the caller. “Listen, jerkoff,” he shouted into the phone, “go shove that column up your ass. I didn’t write the goddam thing.”

  Cobabe ignored Matt’s remark about the copy desk. He said, “I am asking you in order to determine whether you retain any shred of the acuity that occasionally has appeared in your work during my time here.”

  Matt laughed in acknowledgment of this jibe. He took a sip of coffee. “Well,” he began, “there was Citation’s rider Al Snider back in the 1940s—he disappeared while fishing off the Florida Keys. There was an ex-jock named McKeever and another named Miller, back in the ’80s. They died off the other coast of Florida, evidently in a boating accident that no one saw. How am I doing?”

  “Since then. Let’s talk more recent,” Cobabe said.

  “Mike Hole. Suicide, but under suspicious circumstances. Eric Walsh. Murdered by persons unknown. Then there was that Cajun bug boy down in Louisiana a few years back. His death was ruled a suicide—even though he’d been shot in the back. Ah, Louisiana. How’s that?”

  Cobabe admitted, “Not bad. Evidently you haven’t sacrificed all your brain cells to Jack Daniels. I find this encouraging. Sometimes, you know, I tend to give up hope for your generation, so many of them walking around yapping on cell phones, or listening to crap music on their headsets, going down the street and refusing to make eye contact with anyone except themselves in the store window reflections. They make Narcissus look like an amateur at self-absorption. But don’t get me started on that.”

  “You started,” Matt said.

  “Never mind, let’s get back to the subject at hand,” Cobabe said. “Those deaths you mentioned were spread over many years. Did you know that this year alone there’ve been three of these midgets murdered in the last two months?”

  Matt put the phone down on his desk and took a deep breath. “Midgets.” What a term to describe the most amazing athletes Matt had ever observed. Somehow, sometimes, his acerbic editor could catch Matt with his defenses down and thoroughly appall him with his ca
llousness.

  “Yes, of course I know that,” Matt finally answered. “There was Eddie Calvin over in Indiana. Before him, that Mexican rider, Carlos Hidalgo in Maryland. And Mark Guerin in New Orleans. Who could forget?” he said softly.

  Cobabe, barking orders to a staff member in the office, evidently didn’t hear Matt’s response. Or at least he resumed talking without any acknowledgment of it.

  “On top of that,” Cobabe said, “there have been upsets in two of our major races and huge gimmick payoffs as a result. My question is: what’s happening here? Jocks murdered. Handicapping form falling apart. What the hell’s going on in American racing?”

  Cobabe paused, then sighed into the phone for effect. “Am I being too demanding, like the tyrant my troops believe me to be, if I ask: ‘Don’t I smell a major story here? One that my ace Chicago columnist should be poking his sizeable proboscis into?’”

  “That’s a redundancy. Besides, no one even knows what proboscis means anymore, Harry.”

  There was a sigh at the other end. Then Cobabe said, “All right, tell me what you’re working on now.”

  “I’m doing a long feature for Saturday on a trainer here, Mark Kaplan, young guy in his first year out of Minnesota, off to a great start. I’ll file that Racing Board wrap-up I told you about this afternoon. I’ve got to cover a Horsemen’s Association meeting tomorrow night, they’re electing officers and there are some wild-eyed nut cases challenging the current incumbents. Should be lively.

  “And,” Matt said softly into the phone, “I’m looking into rumors of a guy here running an investment scam involving racehorses. Nobody else knows about this, Harry, this is a case in progress. So, I’m keeping this quiet.”

  Another silence. Then Cobabe conceded, “Okay, I know you’re busy, Matt. But this jock thing could be hot. As soon as you can, next week at the latest, I want you to move this to your front burner. Get it?”

  Matt finished his coffee. Then he said, “Fax the clippings on all three of those jocks who were killed this year. Hidalgo, Calvin and Guerin. I already know about the two races you’re talking about—those payoffs had everybody flapping. I’ll start thinking about this.”

  “Think hard,” Cobabe answered. “Think fast.”

  Matt went over the clipping file late Sunday night. When he was finished, just before midnight, he called Cobabe at home. This was akin to interrupting the Pope during his rosary, and very much discouraged by the editor, but Matt dialed anyway.

  “This better be good,” Cobabe growled.

  Matt said, “I need to go to Vegas. I’ll be away one, maybe two days. You’d better send one of your deskmen out to Heartland to cover for me while I’m gone.”

  There was a silence on the other end before Cobabe repeated himself. “This better be good.”

  “It could be. I need to talk to a friend of mine about these ‘unusual races.’ If something’s not kosher about them, he’ll know.”

  Cobabe said, “Matt, I’m tired. It’s late. Make the trip. I trust your judgment on this. Call me if you need anything.” Then he hung up.

  Matt dialed Maggie’s number. The phone rang six times before she came on to sleepily say, “This better be good.”

  “You know, that’s exactly what Harry Cobabe said to me about fifteen minutes ago. Imagine, you and my esteemed editor sharing speech patterns.”

  Maggie sighed as she sat up in bed. She waited him out. With less than four hours to go before her alarm clock went off, she was conserving energy.

  He said, “I hate to call you at this hour, but I just wanted to let you know I’m going out of town early tomorrow. I’ll be gone a couple of days.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said, “where?”

  “I am going to Vegas to consult with the most expert source I know concerning all matters related to horse race gambling.”

  Maggie yawned, then said, “Okay. Just be careful. Call me from out there tomorrow night. And say hello to The Fount for me. Love you,” she added before hanging up and clicking off her light.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Darlene, bring me a couple of corned beef on rye. Two pastramis on onion rolls. Sides of potato salad, cole slaw. A jumbo shrimp cocktail, the big fruit salad. And another pitcher of margaritas. No salt, right? Thanks, darling,” smiled David Zimmer, otherwise known as The Fount, as he settled himself into a poolside chair at Las Vegas’ Delano Tower Hotel.

  The order he’d placed was the first full meal of the day for The Fount, a six-foot-three, one-hundred-and-thirty-eight pound metabolic marvel who ate relentlessly in such quantities without gaining an ounce. Darlene, the waitperson who often served The Fount, gritted her teeth as she wrote down the order. So depressed at missing the cut at Hooters that she had subsequently packed on fifteen pounds but still affected a version of the well-known costume, Darlene nearly split her shorts as she pivoted away from The Fount’s table. It was 7 a.m. under a bright blue Nevada sky, the temperature reaching for eighty degrees. While taking the order from this thirty-five-year-old beanpole, Darlene never blinked, for she had waited on The Fount many times before and seen him demolish portions usually seen only on National Football League training tables. “This freak eats like that five or six times a day,” Darlene told friends. “He’s like a human landfill. He’s a good tipper, though. And he’s supposed to be the smartest guy in town.”

  As the sun began to create steam from small poolside puddles left by the hoses of the janitorial crew, The Fount spread his Racing Daily on his umbrella-sheltered table. Then he opened his briefcase and laid out a thick sheaf of sheets containing his figures for the day’s horses races scheduled at tracks across the U. S. and Canada. After his usual ten hours of preliminary work handicapping the numerous cards, Fount had arrived at the tipping point of his day, when he would make his final decisions on which horses to bet, for how much, and in what combinations in events that would be conducted, as he liked to put, “on both sides of the Continental Divide.” He smiled in anticipation of the early morning “lunch” he had just ordered. He had breakfasted four hours earlier in his Delano Tower suite, and he was ravenous. Dinner for him would be at noon. The Fount labored primarily at night, made his bets in mid-morning, slept four hours, then reviewed the race results he’d videotaped on his twelve big-screen television sets and began to calculate the next set of figures. It was a seven-day-per-week work routine designed to grind most mortals into sawdust. The Fount thrived on it.

  Years earlier, as a sixteen-year-old sophomore at MIT, he had read A. J. Liebling’s book The Earl of Louisiana, about one-time Louisiana Governor Earl Long, one of the more colorful politicians in a state wonderfully notorious for producing them. Long loved playing the horses and, each morning on a long table in his state house office, would lay out side-by-side various editions of the Racing Daily containing the records of horses running everywhere in the country. After making numerous picks, Long would call his bookies and bet. “If he’s betting a bookie in Louisiana,” Liebling quoted one of the governor’s staffers, Long “puts it on the tab…But if he wins he has a state trooper over at the bookie’s joint within a half-hour to collect.”

  This, wrote Liebling, “was the life I had always wanted to live.”

  That line of Liebling’s made The Fount chuckle whenever he thought of it. He had managed to achieve an existence reminiscent of the one-time Louisiana governor’s. He stretched expansively as he thought of the day ahead. He would never govern any state, but as the widely recognized kingpin of race book betting in the world’s gambling capital, The Fount had found the life he’d always wanted to lead. He lived at a “comped” rate in a first-class hotel only twenty floors above his “office,” the room created for him by the hotel’s owners, who also rebated a goodly chunk of his wagering because of its huge volume. This wasn’t Earl Long’s Louisiana, but it was about as good as it got for a horse player in America. The Fount was convinced that Liebling would have approved.

  Dav
e Zimmer had been tagged The Fount—as in Fount of Information—in grade school when, as a six-year-old advanced to third grade, he had first revealed an amazing ability to answer even the most trivial of trivia questions. Facts, obvious or arcane, seemed to permanently attach themselves to his active brain. Eventually, he had chosen to aim his formidable mental arsenal at betting on horses.

  This decision by The Fount came after he had graduated summa cum laude from MIT with a double major (mathematics and modern European literature), then spent three and a half lucrative but increasingly boring years working as a stock analyst for a major New York City brokerage house. The Fount was introduced to horse racing at Aqueduct and Belmont by Jeff Henry, a fellow stock analyst whose father owned horses.

  The Fount found himself to be intrigued by racing—not only by the beauty of the athletic events unspooling before him on those weekend afternoons at the New York tracks, but by the challenge of deducing how to identify and wager on winners. After months of intensive study of racing history, including its voluminous literature devoted to “how to beat the races,” he spent more months watching and re-watching thousands of videotaped races. Then The Fount constructed his own system of betting, based primarily on “speed figures” of his own devising plus such elements as the type of shoes worn by horses, wind factors, and a sophisticated deconstruction of trainer patterns.

  The Fount realized he was onto something after his first two weekends of betting following his intensive study. Two more months of daily plays confirmed that initial impression and bolstered his bank account resoundingly. This was going so well he began to feel constrained by his brokerage house job, which allowed him to be in action only an hour or so per day at a nearby off-track betting shop. Finally, Zimmer announced to his astounded parents, Dr. Nate Zimmer and Naomi, that their only child was going to become a full-time horse player based in Las Vegas. “No, I’m not going to be a full-time gambler,” he patiently explained. “Gambling is for dummies cemented in front of slot machines, or howling around roulette wheels, where eventually they leave what money they brought. I’m going to make a living as professional horse player. There’s a difference.”