by John Dunning
24
During the night Sandy had left a message at the stable gate. Barbara was ill with flu and that had delayed them for a day or two. They were now looking to arrive day after tomorrow, or at least by the end of the week. Till then we were on our own.
We sat in the racetrack kitchen, which had opened for breakfast, and we talked it over. Bob was restless now: His mood leapfrogged between darkness and daylight. “I don’t know whether we should hang together or split up,” he said in a down moment, but in the brilliant new day he would put on more confident airs. “I don’t think this is going to happen again,” he said, but then he asked nervously what I thought. “I don’t know, Bob,” I said: “On the face of it there’s no reason to think you’re in any danger, but you might give this some thought. Whatever’s in the wind may already be there, so unless you’re getting sick of my company, and I wouldn’t blame you for that, it might be smart to either get far away or stay close till Sandy gets here.” There was no work to do till then anyway, so I thought I’d drift around and ask some questions. This way I could use the time to our own advantage, keep moving and maybe make the day pass quicker. Bob liked this suggestion, and right after breakfast we wandered through the stable area and he and Erin stood chatting nearby while I asked the same questions about Geiger, his sons, Candice, and the old days.
This was an obvious time-killer. Geiger had never raced here to my knowledge, but soon we found some old horsemen who remembered him from their own days long ago up north. “I knew him on the fair circuit,” one old trainer said. “I was just starting out then and I had me a booming stable of four head. I raced at Santa Rosa, Vallejo, Sacramento, places like that in the fifties and sixties, and I ran into Geiger and his missus out in Omaha a couple of times as well. The first year I met him I thought he was a little distant, but he warmed up after that. He often had his young wife with him, sometimes not but she came out fairly often. A real looker she was, and more than that, she was a charmer. I think he liked to show her off.”
Another old man chimed into the same conversation. “Wasn’t likely you’d forget her if you ever met her even once. That lucky old bastard Geiger; I can still see her sittin’ in the shedrow with him, sayin’ nothing while he had opinions about everything. I heard some people say she was snooty, but I never put any stock in that. If you made contact with her eyes, what you saw was a tragic figure. If you said something to her as simple as good morning, miss, why hell, she’d light right up and talk your ear off. She’d talk about the weather, the newspapers, anything to keep you there so she wouldn’t be alone again. That was my impression, anyway. She was lonely as hell, that’s the feeling I had.” Bob considered this a breakthrough, but what had we actually learned? We already knew that some people had found Candice unforgettable, that she was vivid in some old memories even years after the most superficial contact. After a while I was only going through the motions and that was how, when a vital lead dropped in my face, I almost missed it.
“I saw a woman I know in the kitchen,” Bob said that afternoon. While I talked to a trainer who faintly remembered Geiger and had never met Candice, Bob had walked over to the kitchen on a coffee run. I gave him a grunt and he said no more about it for several minutes. On the face of it this was going to be just another horny racetracker story, but Bob was too thoughtful to be swapping trash. We were walking past the kitchen when I looked at him and he had that enigmatic face he sometimes got, the half-smile that disappeared if you blinked twice.
“Okay, Bobby, what’s going on?”
“Nothing. I was just telling you about this woman I met in the kitchen but you didn’t seem to be interested so I let it drop. Want to go inside and sit?”
We went inside and sat at a corner table.
“So what gives?”
“That lady who poured us the coffee…”
I saw a gray-haired woman at the register and in that moment I knew that something had happened and it was more than just another horny racetracker story.
“Her name’s Martha,” Bob said. “For want of anything better to do, she’s been knocking around racetracks all her life. I might even call her a racetrack junkie. Being such a gregarious fellow, I used to chat with her once in a while. She’s made the rounds for years, Northern California, the fairs, she was at Golden Gate last year. So this morning I asked her about Geiger, and what do you think? She was at Bay Meadows when Geiger was racing there, just before and after he met his leading lady. She’s done everything on racetracks from walking hots to slinging hash in the kitchen.”
She had walked hots regularly for Geiger, long ago.
“She remembers them both very well. Amazing coincidence. What are the chances we’d run into somebody like that in a racetrack kitchen four hundred miles away?”
“Pretty good if I’d asked the right people.”
I looked at him just in time to see the smile vanish.
“It’s a small world, Cliff.” His smile flashed again. “You gotta keep your eyes open.”
Right from the start she had a way about her, a demeanor that had smart written all over it. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve wasted my life,” she said. “I know I coulda been somebody. Like Brando said, I coulda been a contender.”
All in all though, she had enjoyed her run. “I’ve done all right, but I was seldom willing to work that hard. You get out of life what you put into it, right? And I’ve had my fun. The racetracker’s life was always a good one. Oh, the things we did.”
Women weren’t allowed on the racetracks at night in those days. “But I was adventurous and got ginneys to sneak me past the guard in the trunk of a car. All this other stuff, like working in the kitchen, this is what I had to do to make ends meet.”
She wanted to be a writer. “I never wrote like a woman. Faulkner was my hero.”
“I’ve got a friend who would fight you to the death over a statement like that.”
“And I’d tell her she’s too busy being defensive. Even with the good ones like Willa Cather there’s a difference in the voice. That’s all I’m saying, a woman just writes differently than a man.”
Like a lot of wannabe writers, she went through terrific bursts of writing and then let it slide, sometimes for months. “I once wrote forty thousand words in a weekend.”
Long ago and far away: She had been at Arlington Park then.
“When I was young I wrote everything: journals, fiction, poetry; I published some of it, too. I did an article for Collier’s way back when, and my God, for a week I was rich. I wrote for horse magazines—Turf and Sport Digest when it was going, articles for The Blood Horse, and for a while I was a stringer for the Thoroughbred Record. You probably never even heard of those rags. I love publication day but I hate all the sweat that goes before it. What I really like is being out on some racetrack. If I’m gonna sweat, give me a pitchfork, not a typewriter. So I’ll work in the kitchen for a while but as soon as a real horseman comes in and offers me something I’m out of there.”
They all knew her, all the old-time trainers. A job would come along. It always did.
We were sitting in a restaurant in downtown Arcadia, waiting for our menus. I had left Erin and Bob in the shedrow and come alone. Sometimes it works better that way.
Her name was Martha Blackwell, she had written as M. J. Black, and her face just radiated character. It was deeply etched with the lines of living, and her smile was quick and wide and genuine. “So you want to know about the Geigers,” she said.
She knew them all: the old man, Bax, Damon. “And I knew Cameron, the old son of a bitch.”
“You heard he was killed?”
“Everybody knows that by now. I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but I’m not politically correct and that man was a bastard.”
“Well, he died a bastard’s death.”
“Yeah.” Just a twinge of regret now: “What a way to go.”
“And you knew Candice,” I said.
“Sure I knew her.”
/> “I’m trying to find out how she died.”
“Somebody fed her peanuts,” she said without blinking an eye.
“Got any idea who?”
She listed her head to starboard and said, “Somebody who knew where and what she ate. That coulda been any number of people.”
“Want to give me a list?”
“You thought about the old man?”
“Sure, but why would he do that?”
“Just wondering how far you’ve actually thought about it. People who marry aren’t always in love with each other. Or if they are, they don’t always stay that way.”
“Even so, they don’t kill each other without a reason.”
“He might’ve had two billion reasons.”
“He already had her money.”
“Unless he was on the verge of losing it. She was pretty generous in the beginning, but I think his act lost its charm as they went along.”
“What was she going to do,” I asked, “leave him and take the money with her?”
“I can see where he might have thought that.”
“No offense, but do you know all this or are you guessing?”
“The shedrow was my home, Mr. Janeway, at least during the daytime. I overheard things. I wasn’t a sneak, but…”
“Sometimes people say things.”
“And there are places, adjacent stalls for instance: stalls in an opposite shedrow. You’ve seen what the walls are like; you’re doing your work and suddenly you hear voices.”
I doubted this. Unlikely, I thought, that Geiger and Candice would discuss their intimate affairs in a stable area with ginneys all around. Then she said, “I worked with them one summer at the farm up near Frisco. You didn’t have to be eavesdropping to overhear things there.”
“What did you hear?”
“Everything.” She looked at me as if she expected me to understand. “When I was young I wanted to write about it. I wanted desperately to write their story. That’s why I wrote everything down at the time it happened.”
As revelations go, that was a stunner.
“I was planning to write a book,” she said. “Been promising myself that for years.”
“A book about Geiger?”
She shook her head. “Not chapter and verse, no. Who cares about the real Geiger anymore? He was well known in his time on the racetrack, but to the average Joe today he’s a nobody. Besides, there’s too much trouble when you write about real people. Geiger’s dead now, I could have my way with him, but there are too many people important to his story who aren’t dead.”
“Then where does that leave you?”
“I thought I’d use them in a novel.” She took a deep breath. “That’s the best way to get at someone who’s real, use him in fiction. But hell, it looks like I’m no fiction writer and it probably doesn’t matter. If I was really gonna write it, I’d have done that by now, wouldn’t you think?”
“I don’t know, Martha. Occasionally something happens, the sleeping giant wakes up.”
“You trying to talk me into something?” She laughed lightly and we ordered our food.
“Just making a point. Whatever you tell me can be off the record.”
“What’s the point of that? How could you use it?”
“I’ll do the best I can to keep it between you and me. But in the end you’re right, I’m trying to find a killer.”
“I always liked Candice,” she said softly. “What a classy broad.”
I looked at her straight-on. The time was suddenly ripe.
“So who do you think killed her?”
“I don’t think,” she said. “I know who it was.”
She still didn’t give me a name, not yet. We were in that early feeling-out stage and she was trying to decide about me. We went to her place, a small upstairs apartment on the edge of Arcadia. There she unwrapped half a dozen logbooks, found the one she wanted, and told me to knock myself out while she boiled some coffee. I turned the yellowing pages and read her small neat words. She had been in her late teens that first year, the year of Candice. “I was younger than she was but in the ways of the racetrack I was her mentor,” she said from the kitchenette. “Geiger taught her zilch. Keep ’em ignorant might have been his motto.”
I heard her clatter a room away. “Imagine, with all her money and looks she could’ve done anything, and she wrapped her life up in this old man. She wanted so badly to please him; that was her whole gig in a nutshell. She wanted him to be happy with her.”
But he wasn’t. He couldn’t be because, as time went on and his old age settled in, what made him unhappy couldn’t be fixed by any woman.
One day she overheard them talking: just a snatch of conversation in the empty shedrow when he was at the farm. She wrote it down that night, verbatim she said. She rummaged, and dug out the notebook.
Across the years Candice said, This doesn’t matter.
Doesn’t matter to you. But it can be damned devastating to a man.
We won’t let it be. We just won’t let it.
Easy for you to say. Look, I don’t want to talk about this.
I love you anyway; you know that. And it’s only a small part of life.
It’s a helluva big part of a man’s life. Just the fact that it doesn’t matter at all to you matters like hell to me. I don’t want to talk about it.
Don’t worry, then; it’s fine.
No, it’s not fine. It’s not fine, goddammit, it is not fine.
Then let’s go to the doctor.
No way any goddam pill-pusher’s gonna fondle me.
From the stove Martha said it didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to figure that out.
“She never wanted a lover,” I said. “She only wanted her daddy back.”
“There are women who don’t care at all about the physical lovemaking. I was like that, and it took me a while to understand it. And maybe I did listen a little more than I should have. I was just interested. People were my stock-in-trade. You understand that.”
“Sure.”
By the second year everything had changed. “I came in late,” Martha said: “caught up with them at Pleasanton, in the middle of a short race meet. He was still doing the fairs: Jesus, he didn’t have to do that small-time stuff anymore, and maybe that was his trouble; he didn’t have to do anything then. My own opinion is, Geiger was one of those guys who needed to work. He needed to have to work, you understand what I’m saying? He couldn’t exist on busywork, what he did had to be real, and it had to make a difference to him that he had to do it. And that’s what was wrong. With her money she had given him the freedom to do anything, and what he did was nothing at all: he didn’t have to turn a lick anymore for as long as he lived. He worked anyway, every day during that time, and he still won races. But for me, that was a great summer out on the farm. I mucked stalls and stared at the sky. Candice had her little girl with her then, cute little kid with pigtails.”
“Was it just the three of you?”
“There was an old black woman they hired, a nanny I guess you’d call her. But she had to leave for some reason and I helped with the kid for a month or so. And Candice made a friend from the next farm over. I’ve forgotten her name.”
“Gail.”
“Yeah, that’s it. I took care of the kid when they went walking.”
“Were there ever any guys around?”
“Just one.”
“Did you know who he was?”
“No idea. He came to visit once or twice and they went walking up through the glen.”
“But it wasn’t Sandy Standish?”
“No. I know Sandy and this wasn’t him.”
“Did you get a good look at this guy?”
“He only came those few times while I was there. But yeah, I saw him. I was gathering firewood one day and they came out of the woods not fifty yards away. And I had great young eyes then.”
“Did they see you?”
“Oh yeah. I looked right into his face.�
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“What are your chances of remembering him after all this time?”
“I don’t need to. I wrote a description of him that same day.”
She looked at me and smiled. “I’m a writer, I still do that. Tonight I’ll probably write a hundred words on you.”
I stared at the floor and took a deep breath. “Do you by any chance still have that description?”
“I’ve got everything. I’m a packrat. I’ll find it and make you a copy.”
“Thank you.” I made a note. “Did you ever see them again after that?”
She shook her head.
“What about Candice? She ever say anything?”
“No, I think she was too embarrassed.”
“How often was Geiger there? Did he come to the farm often?”
“I couldn’t tell you that. He came near the end of that summer for about three weeks. He arrived suddenly; I remember that. She was surprised and flustered when he showed up out of the blue. She had somebody coming to see her.”
“Same guy, or do you know that?”
“Same guy, same car. But they got lucky, Geiger was tired after his trip and he took a nap. She went out on the road and headed the guy off at the gate. I could just see that car through the trees, and them talking for just a minute. Then he left.”
“You remember what kind of car it was?”
“Pale green. If you’re asking me the make and year, no.”
I wrote down “pale green car” anyway, though it had probably been gone for years. “So what did Geiger do while he was there?”
“Lazed around. Then packed ’em all up and took ’em off to Idaho. I went up to San Fran, got myself a rubbing job. Same old, same old.”
“How was Geiger with the child while they were there?”
“I thought he was distant. But then they had some racing people out, an end-of-summer bash, and he really came out of his shell for that. He bounced her on his knee and laughed and tried to get her to talk. You know, the doting-dad routine. But I always thought it was an act.”
“Why was that?”
“Because as soon as it was over he went straight back to his old ways. Distant. Brooding. It was like the kid had that one window into his life and that was it. Like he was showing her off for his friends. Before and afterward she didn’t exist.”