by John Dunning
He opened the door and the shedrow stretched away into the distance. I saw Obie and Bob watering their horses. Wisely, they didn’t look up, but Pompeii Ruler was curious as usual. Sandy hovered in the doorway as if he couldn’t make up his mind what to do. Finally he said, “I want this done with by early next week.”
“A week seems to be everybody’s time frame,” I said. First Junior wants me gone in a week; now you.” He walked away without another word.
I tried Sharon from the pay phone in the kitchen and got her on the first ring. We talked about Cameron. Like Baxter, she was finding it difficult to care.
“But something ought to be done for him,” she said. “He’s their brother, for God’s sake. They’d be just as happy if he was thrown in some potter’s field in an unmarked grave.”
She would have him cremated, and the ashes buried up in Idaho.
“How are you doing?” she said.
“Not as well as I’d like. If Cameron stole those books, only his killer knows for sure.”
“You still think Mamma’s death is tied to the books.”
“Yeah, I do. Just don’t ask me to prove that in a court of law.” I took a deep breath. “Your friend Sandy is getting impatient.”
“Would it do any good if I talked to him again?”
“I don’t know. What would you say?”
“Ask him to give you some more slack.”
“Let’s play it by ear for now. If he actually runs me out of here, I’ll let you know.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’ve got to drop back and punt,” I said, but in fact I didn’t know what. I had never worked like this before. All the people I needed to see were in a closed, protected environment where I had no official standing. I was here by permission that could be revoked at any time. I had already offended some of them and would probably offend the others the first time I asked a question. No one had to talk to me about anything. “I don’t know whether to walk on eggs or come out swinging.”
“Follow your heart. Whatever you do, it’ll be fine.”
“That ain’t necessarily so, Sharon. But I’m going to see Baxter in a little while. What else is happening up there?”
“I’m playing telephone tag with your friend Carroll. He wants to come out here in a few weeks and see my books. You do think I should do that?”
“I think he’s worth knowing even if you never sell or donate them. Sometime I’ll show you that bibliography he wrote. Incredible piece of work.”
“It would be nice if you could be here. December tenth was mentioned.”
I wrote it down but I had no idea where I’d be then. Almost as an afterthought, she said, “By the way, Junior knows where you are. He got a call from some California policeman, asking questions. They talked to me as well.”
“What’d they ask?”
“Questions about you, a few about Bax. Mainly they wanted to verify where you’d come from and what you were doing.”
“How are you getting along with the junior one?”
“He never gives me any grief. Yesterday he actually appealed to my sense of reason. He and Damon want to come out to Santa Anita and bring HR’s horses. So if you go that way you’ll see them there before too much longer.”
I wondered again if they could just do that on their own.
“Unless I raise a fuss, who’s gonna stop them?” Sharon said. “Even if I do, my lawyer tells me they’d probably win. Junior’s the manager. He’ll argue that this is in the estate’s best interest. These horses have a definite racing life span, two years, maybe three, and if any of ’em do well their value could go up enormously. So theoretically at least, the clock is ticking.”
“Try to talk to Junior before he comes. Tell him if he screws up what I’m doing it’ll work against him in the long run.”
“What do I tell him if he asks what you’re doing?”
“Tell him nothing.”
“He won’t like that.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to get tough with him.”
Bax took a long drag on his smoke. “All I can do is tell you what I told the cops. Hell, I don’t know what happened to Cameron. But yeah, I’m sure I looked guilty as hell.”
“You look better today,” I said.
“I am better. But before you walked in on me yesterday, I had been down to the cut.”
“So you found the body before I ever got there.”
“Christ, I’ll never forget it. I’ve never seen anything like that. I was shocked. I mean listen, there hasn’t been any real love lost between Cameron and me for twenty years. But seeing him there in the water with his head blown open…and those worms eating his brains out…”
He shivered. “I couldn’t move for five minutes; couldn’t move, couldn’t look at it. Then I turned and ran like hell. Man, I’m telling you, I never ran like that. Thought I was gonna drop dead myself.”
We had walked up to the backstretch rail to talk in private. He leaned on the rail and lit another thin black cigar. “Then I got to the house and I just…froze again. I could barely breathe when I thought about it. You ever see a dead man?”
“I was a homicide cop,” I said with a dry little laugh.
“You would have then, wouldn’t you?”
“Once or twice.”
“I never have. Somehow the thought of death has always made me squeamish. I have a helluva time putting a sick horse down, gotta get the doc to do it. I hated being Candice’s pallbearer, and I didn’t even go over for the old man’s funeral. Didn’t want to see him, all waxy like that.” He blew a cloud of smoke. “Cameron was the first I ever saw.”
“It gets easier after the first dozen. You close your mind and just do the job.”
“I can’t imagine. I don’t know how anybody does a job like that.” He put his head down and said, “Whoever did that to Cameron never meant for him to get up, did they?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
He shook his head. “You ever know anybody like me?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s the fear of death. I believe it’s called thana-phobia.”
“You mean I’m not the only one?”
“Not hardly.”
“I used to go shooting with Cameron, but that was all for show. I never shot anything. Cameron used to say I was the lousiest shot in the U.S. of A.”
“Where’d you get the handgun you had out at the farm?”
“It was the old man’s. I remembered where he kept it; it was still there. Just for show, like all that other shit I did. It wasn’t loaded.”
We stared out across the racetrack at the grandstand. “Now you know my secret,” he said. “Nobody else knows. I’ve been ashamed of it all my life.”
“Now you’ll have to kill me,” I said, and we both laughed.
We stood there in the warming day and I watched the early birds beginning to fill up the lower grandstand. “You feel up to a few questions now?”
“I guess.” He shrugged. “But I might as well tell you right off, I don’t know anything. Whatever Cameron was doing down there is anybody’s guess.”
“What’s your guess? You must’ve had some reason to go down there.”
“I knew he stayed there sometimes. Where the hell else would he be? He wasn’t about to spend money on motels, even if he had it to spend.”
“So you went down there because you couldn’t think of anywhere else.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Were you worried about him?”
“When he just disappears like that, hell, a brother’s got to do something about it, even if the brother’s Cameron.”
“But you never expected foul play?”
“I thought I’d find him there, counting his money from some big score.”
“You just lost me.” I cocked my head. “Run that by me again.”
“Cameron always lands on his feet. You think he’s down and out and up he comes with some money.”
“Th
at’s a nice talent. How does he do it?”
“Don’t ask me. I just know he does.”
I fired a shot into far left field. “Maybe he still had access to the books.”
“I’m afraid you just lost me, pardner.”
“That’s all right, I’m just trolling. You talked to his friend Rudy?”
“He’s an idiot. Cameron’s always got some moron like that hanging around, picking up his mess. Rudy’s got no idea what Cameron went to do or why.”
“You told the cops this?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“And you yourself have no idea. Not even a wild-hair notion?”
“Nope.”
“Well,” I said after a while, “unless he had a printing press, he was getting whatever he had from somebody. Did he ever mention owing anyone big sums of cash?”
“He wouldn’t tell me something like that. He owed me some.”
“Could I ask how much?”
“Ten grand.”
“That’s a fair sum.”
“It adds up over the years.”
“And he never paid you any of it back?”
“After a while you just knew. If you loaned it to Cameron, you could kiss it good-bye.”
“And I imagine after some years of that, sources dry up.”
“You got it. When your own brothers won’t loan you a dime, where the hell can you go?”
“He was tapped with Damon too?”
“Oh, a long time ago. Damon’s got a lot more brains than I have.” He lit another cigar. “You ever known anybody who’s broke one day, flush the next?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah.” I told him about a bookseller whose shop was just up the block from mine. “Somehow he always had the money to score some books, but then he couldn’t get Public Service paid so he could turn on his lights.”
“That would be Cameron, if he’d been into books.”
I asked him again what he remembered about Candice and he said, almost in the same breath, “Finest woman I ever knew. I think my dad was one lucky old bastard. Always did think so.”
“What was she like?”
“Well, hell.” He scratched his chin. “She was honest, pretty, I always thought a straight-shooter. What else can I say?”
“You never had a disagreement with her? Never any cross words?”
“I wouldn’t do that, and you know what? Neither would she. She was incredibly easy-tempered. Just a nice woman all around. It would be like picking a fight with one of God’s angels. I know that sounds corny.”
“Damon said she slept around. You know anything about that?”
“She never slept around with me, if that’s what you’re asking. Look, I made it a point not to talk about her.”
“And you’ve got no idea why anyone would’ve harmed her.”
“Oh hell, no. I don’t know where you got that idea, but you can forget it. It was an accident, pure and simple.”
“What about her relationship with your dad?”
“They lived for each other, as far as I could see.”
“Did you see them much?”
“Not at all the last ten years. They were in Idaho a lot; and even when they were out here I didn’t see ’em. I did a lot of meets in the Midwest then, and up in Washington.”
“What about Sharon?”
“What about her?”
“Do you like her?”
“That’s a funny question. Why would I not like her?”
“No reason. Just a question.”
“I think she’s a little weird, since you ask. I mean, why would anybody with all her money lock herself away on a two-bit horse farm like that? But yeah, I like her fine.”
The announcer called the horses for the first race.
“You got anything running today?”
He shook his head. “Two tomorrow, though. But I’m just about done here—gonna break camp this week and take my horses south.”
“I didn’t know you ever raced down there.”
“Somebody’s got to ride herd on Junior and Damon when they bring our good ones out.”
We stood quietly for a few moments, watching the crowd now building quickly across the way. “I imagine I’ll want to talk to you again,” I said.
“You know where I’m at.”
“I’m on a pretty short leash. Sandy wants me to wind it up.”
“Tell him where to stick it. Hell, if he fires you, you can come down to Santa Anita and walk horses for me.”
In my tack room I lay on the bunk and thought about my shifting fortunes. Baxter had become a pleasant surprise. Sandy was turning unpleasant. Junior would soon be here. I thought about the strangeness of the human animal, about his quirks and phobias and manias. I thought about the many faces of bibliomania and I dozed lightly until the call for the third race.
I spent all afternoon asking questions. Suddenly I felt free of Sandy’s heavy boot on my back, and by the time I struck out across the stable area I had recaptured the attitude and swagger of a young cop. This might be an illusion, but for now Bax had given me a breath of fresh air. I drifted through the barns talking to grizzled old horsemen, ginneys, anyone of a certain age who might remember old Geiger and his glamorous young wife. I put a note on the office bulletin board, “Seeking information on Candice and H. R. Geiger, contact Janeway, Barn 26.” A risky tactic, I thought, but I went with Erin’s words echoing in my head: Take a chance and shake things up. That’s what I did, and in no time I was back in my natural frame of mind.
I found surprising numbers of people who remembered Candice. I talked to two old trainers who claimed their memories were as vivid as yesterday. They could still see old Geiger sitting with his pretty wife in the shedrow of Barn 28. “He had that barn every year for a while, and he’d sit in the shade for an hour or two almost every afternoon and talk with just about anybody who came by,” said Woody Benton. “I remember when I was a young upstart just getting my act together; I remember taking a gimpy horse past his shedrow and saying, ‘Hey, Mr. Geiger, can you tell me what’s wrong with this horse?’ And he looked up and said, ‘Trot him down the shedrow,’ and I did. Then he got up and felt the horse’s legs and said, ‘He’s just burnt out, needs to be rested a while. Find a place where you can pull off his shoes and just let him find himself.’ But of course we couldn’t do that. I was working for old man Sapper then, and we ran them claiming horses back every week, stood ’em in ice and just ran the bejesus out of ’em. That horse still had no end of heart, man—he’d just run and run till he broke down, and that’s what he did. He run his heart out for us and Sapper sold him to the killers.”
“What about Mrs. Geiger?”
“A real sweetie. She came out of the tack room while the old man and I were having that very conversation, and said, ‘Afternoon, Woody.’ Hell, I didn’t even think she knew my name, and I stammered something stupid and got out of their way. But I always remember her, every time I pass that shedrow I think of those days and what she was like. A lovely, classy, kindhearted woman.”
“She knew everybody’s name, from the ginneys across the way to the jockeys who rode for them,” said a trainer in the next barn. Class was the word that came up most often. “She had buckets of class and that’s something you can’t ever fake. Class never lords it over the common man, and she treated everybody alike. Insisted on us all calling her Candice, never Mrs. G. I never got used to that, but that’s what she wanted and that’s what we all did.”
“Candice,” said an old man I found up near the clocker’s stand. “She’d scold you if you forgot to use her first name, but always in a good-natured laughing way.”
None of them had any idea about her interest in books. They knew nothing about her life as heiress to the Ritchey fortune. They knew her as Geiger’s pretty, young wife who died young.
Candice. The woman in white.
I took detailed notes: names, recollections, barn numbers.
She would’ve been in her thirties then, ju
st a damn striking figure in that white dress. Young enough to shine, old enough to have that edge of authority. You don’t ever forget someone like Candice. Not ever.
Jerry Bryce, Barn 9, stared off into space and remembered the days of Candice.
I never did get my own stable. Still rubbing horses for other guys after forty years. Seems like I worked for most every trainer who ever raced in Northern California since the fifties.
I worked for Geiger in the mid-sixties, I was his head ginney, which means I was in charge of that barn when he wasn’t there. We were all in love with Candice; the whole goddam shedrow came to a dead stop when they arrived. You’d see her out of the corner of your eye; that’s all you dared to do, you never wanted to be caught gawking. Geiger had eyes like a hawk, he didn’t miss anything when she was around. He watched her like he’d watch a prize filly.
We all loved her. Me more than most, with good reason.
In 1966 she paid for my son’s funeral. Nobody was to know, and nobody did know till now. Guess she’s beyond caring. My son Jason got kicked in the head by a horse and she gave me a check to cover the expenses. It was signed Candice Ritchey, I remember that. Candice Ritchey, not Geiger, but it went right through without a hitch. I never knew anything about the name Ritchey. But long before that, I always thought she was something special.
I even tried to read that book about the woman in white, but I couldn’t get past first base. Too much flowery bullshit for my taste. Then somebody gave me the Classics comic book and I read that. Tried to imagine her in that part and I just couldn’t put her there. She was way bigger than that ghost story. But I’ve still got the comic book. Go figure.
I asked them all if they remembered ever hearing her use the nicknames Tricky Dicky or the Mad Hatter for friends, but none of them did. At the end of the day I stopped at the office to check the bulletin board. Someone had ripped my note down. I wrote another and this time I added the word REWARD in large red letters. Baxter’s offer was a nice hole card in case Sandy became impossible, but I had a feeling of growing urgency. If there was any shaking to be done, this was the time.
I felt better. I was moving again. I hurried into the gathering dusk to meet Erin.