by John Dunning
He couldn’t remember Gail’s last name, just a nice gal her own age.
I worked the phone. I called every bookseller I knew on both Coasts and some in the great Midwest. I used the ABAA directory of top dealers in juvenile fiction, I called ILAB specialists in London and asked the same question. Had anyone ever, even years ago, come in with wonderful juveniles to sell?…the kind of stuff you don’t ever forget. I worked from the boxes of reprints Sharon had stashed in the barn, and from the sketchy list I had made of missing titles that first morning with Junior. Yes, I told them all, there was a question of theft. You don’t worry about dealers at that level unless you are truly paranoid.
In the afternoon I went down to the book room and lost myself till early evening. Just before dinner I went running, a two-mile sprint that took me well past the road to the Geiger ranch, out to the road and back. I looked for Junior but there was no sign of him.
On Thursday I told Sharon I had returned Junior’s money by special delivery and I was no longer in his employ. “That’s good to know,” she said coolly. “If you need anything, holler.”
I stayed with her ten days. Every morning I helped with the stable chores; every afternoon I made my phone checks. I spent hours in the late afternoon looking through her books. The book room consumed my thoughts: It was so easy to lose all track of time down there, and my roster of her books got more detailed every day. I was flying by the seat of my pants, giving everything the broadest possible value. “At least $50,000,” I wrote beside one entry: “could be four times that, depending on how many copies there are in the universe.” I made a supplemental note: “I suspect there will be none in this condition.” I was conservative by nature, but now I wrote superlatives—“superb,” “gorgeous,” “marvelous”—until I got tired of using them. Then I began noting degrees of superb with small checks in the margins of my notes. I could have walked out of there with a quarter-million dollars under my coat and she wouldn’t know it till she took some kind of inventory, if that day ever came. I felt the weight of her trust more every day.
I was drawn to the books with her grandfather’s bookplate: every time I opened one it was like a thrilling new surprise. One morning I asked her the obvious: “You said you’ve been looking for these but you don’t go into bookstores. You must have a dealer keeping his eyes open for you.” She said she had several dealers searching constantly. One had a shop in Los Angeles and knew high-end dealers like Heritage, who might hear if something like that came on the market. I wrote all this into my notebook for future reference.
I had been in touch with the coroner’s office in the little county where Candice had died. But it was hard to get the kind of information I wanted on the phone: another reason why I’d have to go there. This was a strange time. I was not working for Sharon and yet I was. She never mentioned money again; she just left me alone. The routine continued. Each morning we were out by sunrise, feeding and watering, going about the day’s chores. We never left the house unguarded. Either I was there or Louie was: Occasionally we had Billy watch over things. I knew Sharon must be getting impatient, but she never griped, and until we found out where Cameron had gone, this was what we were stuck with.
There came a time when I ran out of people to call. It almost seemed like the missing books had fallen into some dark hole. Not a dealer, I thought: They were in some collector’s hands, someone who hadn’t sold them.
I sat for an hour in the open loft looking out over the farm. I did fifty push-ups in the barn three days that week, and by Monday of the second week I had increased my reps to seventy-five. For the first time my old wounds felt truly healed and I was whole again. At dusk I went up to the house for dinner and talk. Rosemary and Lillian kept each other in stitches and as Louie might have said we were a happy shedrow together. On Thursdays and Fridays they didn’t work, and on those nights it was just the two of us, eating alone in that big house. I sensed a slight awkwardness on her part, though I stayed loose and tried to keep things easy.
“It doesn’t seem right putting you in that tack room,” she said one evening. “You should stay in the house. I’ve got lots of room, plenty of space upstairs where you’d have as much privacy as you need. One room’s clear over on the other side: you wouldn’t hear me at all.” There was no hint that the offer was anything more than it seemed, but I liked it where I was. On Monday, my tenth day, Sharon and I met as usual just before dawn. “Cameron’s turned up,” she said. “He’s at Golden Gate, trying to borrow money from everybody he knows.” Her friend Sandy Standish had seen him in the stable area and had left a message on her telephone.
My time here was winding down and I still hadn’t talked to Damon. I drove out along the road and turned in toward the house. It was mid-morning: The sun was bright and the day was warm, and I could see they were still up at the track, Junior and Damon, watching a horse gallop. I could see their ginney, standing by at the barn waiting with a bucket of water. I stopped the car well short of the track, got out, and said good morning to the ginney. He said, “How you doin’, sir?” almost as if he knew me well. I asked if I could go up and talk to the gentlemen at the rail and the question seemed to baffle him for a few seconds. Then he said, “I wouldn’t mess with ’em while they workin’, sir. They be right back, and this be our last horse this mornin’.” So I waited.
It wasn’t long. A few minutes later the boy turned the horse through the gap and they came up the road together, Junior and Damon on opposite sides of the horse, saying nothing for the moment. I knew this was not going to be pleasant; it was one of those things that had to be done and one of those times when I missed the authority of my badge. Damon saw me first: He raised his head and there seemed to be some kind of amusement on his face. He was probably younger than Junior but not by much. He had a gray beard and today he wore a cap and jeans and a flannel shirt. He said something; Junior looked up and stopped dead in his tracks.
They talked for what seemed like a long time. At some point Junior turned away and Damon came on alone.
“Mr. Janeway.”
I nodded.
“What can I do for you?”
“I was hoping we could have us a talk. I guess Junior and I got off on the wrong foot.”
“If Junior had eight legs like a spider you’d get off on eight wrong feet eight times running.”
I laughed politely.
“I think you understand old Willis,” he said. “Junior wants to rule the roost, and he never knows what side his bread’s buttered on.”
“Maybe he should take lessons in deep breathing.”
“Oh, Junior’s not all bad, he’s trying to do better even as we speak.”
“Didn’t look like it from here.”
“I’m telling you he’s having a change of heart. He wants you to come back on board and see what you can find out. No strings attached this time.”
“Can’t do it, though. I’ve already taken a job with Sharon.”
“Doing what?”
I didn’t want to tell him what my job with Sharon was, but I gave him this to keep him talking. “She’s mainly interested in finding out what happened to her mother.”
“I can’t help you with that. I don’t think anybody can. That was a long time ago.”
“Junior mentioned the possibility that she’d been murdered.”
“Junior’s got diarrhea of the brain cells. That’s an old theory; I thought it had been put to rest years ago. He was just trying to rankle you because you were a big-time city po-lice-man.”
“So what do you think happened to her?”
“I barely knew the woman. But if you want my guess, she ate them peanuts on purpose.”
He waited for my reaction but when I had none, he said, “My old man wasn’t easy to live with in the best of times. When he got older he was impossible. What else can I tell you?”
“I was wondering…”
“What I meant was, there’s nothing else I can tell you. If you’re looking for Can
dice, I don’t think she’s here. I don’t know anything about her and I barely talked to her when she was alive.”
“And you had no opinions about her?”
“She was a whore. Other than that, what’s to know?”
I blinked. “A whore? First time I’ve heard that one.”
“Everybody thought she was such a goody two-shoes, but we-all knew better. She wasn’t the plaster saint people thought she was, that’s all I’m saying. She had her flings the whole time she was with the old man.”
“Who’d she have these flings with?”
“That I guess was her ugly little secret.”
“Then how do you know about them?”
“Ask around, you might get an earful.”
“Ask around where?”
“Wherever your nose leads you. Look, this is all very old news, it probably does no good to rake it all up now. You asked me my opinion and I told you, but what’s it prove all these years later?” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go in now. I’ve got things to line up.”
“What can you tell me about your brothers?”
“Nothing you haven’t already heard. Baxter’s a refugee from a loony bin; Cameron’s a born loser. I guess that leaves me as the only normal one.”
He shrugged. “I’m a simple horse trainer, that’s what I know. Other than that I got nothing to say.”
That afternoon I left a message for Erin, that I was heading for California and I’d call her from Golden Gate. At dusk Sharon and I went out to eat. She took me to a place called the Sandpiper on the Snake River and we sat and talked about everything. The waiting game was finished. She watched me watching everyone else, and once when our eyes crossed paths I winked at her and she smiled. “Mr. Suspicious,” she said, and we laughed lightly. But I had spent a good piece of my life being suspicious and it was late to start changing now.
After supper she came out to the barn. I was all packed up, ready to go.
“Looks like you’re leaving us.”
“I don’t know if there are any answers out there, but that feels like the way to bet.”
I told her I would check the records on her mother’s death and send her a report.
“Well,” she said, suddenly uneasy again. “Keep in touch.” She handed me a thick roll of money, five thousand in hundreds I later found out. I put it in my pocket without counting it.
“Sorry about Junior,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do with him after you’re gone. I think at some point you’ll see both him and Damon out there, and maybe you’ll get another shot at them.”
She stared at me for another moment. “Ask for Sandy Standish at the stable gate,” she said. “He’ll be expecting you and he’ll get you in and put you on his list so you can get a license. Once you’re inside, you can go just about anywhere.”
I left before dawn the next morning. We said our good-byes in the yard at the side of her house. She hugged me impulsively and in that same spirit of adventure I patted her on the back. I drove off into the blackened west, and after a while the last phantoms of the night came calling.
When I was younger I had answers to everything. Right always won out over wrong, good stood up to evil, and I was the double-edged weapon that dispensed justice. I had unlimited faith in my own power, I knew what I could do and I feared no one. Such is the foolishness of the young, so goes the ego of the strong.
The land ahead began to brighten and soon the sun at my back lit up the highway like an incandescent ribbon. By daybreak I was well out on Interstate 86, heading west.
8
I picked up Highway 93 south, crossed into Nevada, and got on I-80 westbound. From there into Reno, I encountered no effective speed limit: I had seldom seen cops on this desert run, I had always made good time, and I rolled into the biggest little city in the world well before six o’clock. I had gained an hour crossing from Mountain to Pacific Time, and now I stopped to eat and gas up before making that last link over the Sierra Nevada, and down into Oakland.
I browsed a few junkshops and prowled through their bookshelves. Bought two mysteries from the mid-forties, nothing wonderful but I liked the jackets, and the short breaks helped keep me awake for the final push to the west.
Snow was falling as I headed up the hill toward Donner Pass. The sky was dark in the east and I was beginning to think of Sacramento as a stopping point. I knew I could make it to Golden Gate tonight, but Sharon’s friend Sandy might not be there again until tomorrow anyway. That might be the time to catch him—after the work, before he took off at noon. So I put up in a motel, read a few chapters of a truly atrocious novel, and I turned in around eleven.
In the morning I made the trip down to the Bay Area after daybreak. The snow of the high country had become a miserable rain on the Coast: steady, relentless; maddening, I imagined, if you had to race in it unless you had a great mud horse. Then it lit up your life and became something special. Golden Gate Fields sits on the east side of the bay, right on the water in Albany, just north of Oakland. Its blessing is a wonderful environment for a racetrack; its curse is the same environment, which will seal its doom. I don’t know this for a fact, but I imagine a day, sooner rather than later, when money will change hands and a group of condos will occupy the ground where, once upon a time, crowds had thrilled to the sounds of the race, the announcer’s call, and the illusion of easy money. It is a colorful way of life that will disappear without a trace.
I got off the freeway in Richmond and drifted south. I was early and I still had time to kill, so I killed some of it riding down San Pablo Avenue. Occasionally the rain slacked off and I got out and walked a few blocks. I found an open newsstand and I bought a copy of the Daily Racing Form, where I learned that Sharon’s friend Standish had a horse in the second today: a $10,000 claiming race for three-year-olds and up. I got in my car, turned west on Gilman Street and drove the few blocks out to the bay. The stable area was directly on my right and there was a parking lot on my left. I found a small café under Interstate 80 where it passes over Gilman and a parking space almost adjacent to the front door. I stopped and went in for coffee.
The place was crowded with grizzled old men in jeans and boots and flannel shirts; more than a few of them I figured were horsemen, and the rest were horse players waiting for the gates to open sometime before noon. Some might know Sandy Standish; one of them might even be the man but I doubted it. The fellow Sharon had described had better things to do than gossiping with old farts during working hours. I sat quietly drinking my coffee, looking at my newspaper, and soon I heard racing talk behind me. Again I turned to my Racing Form and found the race they were discussing. A four-year-old named Green Money Machine was said to be a sure thing in the fourth. It was six furlongs and he was a killer at this distance against this kind of company. He would go off at about 3–1, the Racing Form predicted, and one old man said, “If he gets clear and comes into the turn on top, they can kiss his hiney good-bye. He’s the best thing going today.” There was ominous talk of his long layoff—he hadn’t run in four months—and that’s why the odds were good. But he was in easy, dropping in price from his last start in early summer, which he had won in a walk from better horses than these. He loved an off track. “He’ll eat this field alive,” the talkative one said: “These horses can’t run fast enough to scatter their own shit.”
I coughed to cover a laugh and looked at the form on Sandy’s horse, a big red gelding named Pompeii Ruler. He was a 9–1 shot in the early line; his bloodline went back a few generations to Bold Ruler, one of the great studs of our time.
I finished my coffee and went outside: parked in the lot across the street and backtracked through the rain to the stable gate. A suspicious-looking man leaned out of his window and I asked for Sandy Standish. The rain was coming down heavier now and I huddled against his outer wall as he turned away and spoke into a microphone. “Sandy Standish to the stable gate…Sandy Standish, you have a visitor at the stable gate.” I waited for several m
inutes, until the wind shifted and there was nowhere to hide; then I got up against the glass and gave him my hangdog look. At last he opened the window and said, “You want to wait in here?”
I thanked him and went into the little guard shack. He motioned me to a stool and I perched there out of his way while cars came through in a steady parade. Mostly he just checked for licenses and they went on in without a hitch. Occasionally there was a question—“Who’re you with, sir? Who did you want to see, ma’am?” And this or that car was made to pull off to the side until the owner or trainer could be summoned. I sat on the stool patiently through all of this. Ten minutes passed. The guard said, “I’ll give him another call,” but I said no, “He’s probably busy, give him another fifteen minutes.” He nodded and I sat watching the cars go in and out. And suddenly I looked up and there in the guard’s face was Cameron Geiger.
I had never seen him before that moment, but I had no doubt who he was. First I heard the sound of his car—he was sitting behind the wheel of an old Buick that had a wicked ping. At least two of his eight cylinders were sticking. At the same time I saw the younger man with him in the front seat. As I scanned the car I saw the crushed fender. He said, “Call Bax again. Come on, Alvin, get the lead out of your ass.” The guard looked at me and rolled his eyes. Wearily he picked up the microphone and said, “Baxter Geiger to the stable gate, please; Baxter Geiger, you have a visitor at the stable gate.” Then the guard asked Cameron to pull his car over to the side and please wait. The word wait was not in Cameron’s vocabulary, but he pulled off the road in a snit and sat in the car with his companion until its windows fogged over. This took maybe ten minutes; then Cameron got out and angrily approached the stable gate on foot. So far he was living up to his advance billing. His huge belly was the most conspicuous thing about him; his hips looked almost brittle in support, and he shuffled along in obvious pain. The other fellow stayed in the car. The stable gate man was busy checking cars coming and going and he never looked back, but I tracked Cameron all the way in as he limped toward us through the rain. Suddenly he jerked the door open and came inside, bellowing. “So what’re you gonna do, Alvin, make me sit out in this rain all goddam day? Where the hell is Bax?”