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Page 7

 

  “I thought you said he didn’t have a prayer. ”

  “That’s the word. Our client doesn’t see it that way. ”

  “Oh?”

  “Evidently Dudley’s a better horse than anybody realizes,” she said, “and they’ve been holding him back, waiting for the right race. That way they’ll get long odds and be able to clean up. And, just so nothing goes wrong, the other jockeys are getting paid to make sure they don’t finish ahead of Dudley. ”

  “The race is fixed,” Keller said.

  “That’s the plan. ”

  “But?”

  “But a plan is what things don’t always go according to, Keller, which is probably a good thing, because otherwise the phone would never ring. You want some more iced tea?”

  “No thanks. ”

  “They’ll have the race on Saturday, and Dudley ’ll run. And if he wins you get two thousand dollars. ”

  “For what?”

  “For standing by. For making yourself available. ”

  “I think I get it,” he said. “And if Kissimmee Dudley should happen to lose-where’d they come up with a name like that, do you happen to know?”

  “Not a clue. ”

  “If he loses,” Keller said, “I suppose I have work to do. ”

  She nodded.

  “The jockey who beats him?”

  “Is toast,” she said, “and you’re the toaster. ”

  None of the horses in the sixth race had a name that meant anything to Keller. Then again, picking them by name hadn’t done him much good so far. This time he looked at the odds. A long shot wouldn’t win, he decided, and a favorite wouldn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile, so maybe the answer was to pick something in the middle. The Five horse, Mogadishy, was pegged at six-to-one.

  He got in line, thinking. Of course, sometimes a long shot came in. Take the preceding race, for instance, with its big payoff for Keller’s OTB buddy. There was a long shot in this race, and it would pay a lot more than the twelve bucks he’d win on his six-to-one shot.

  On the other hand, no matter what horse he bet on, the return on his two-dollar bet wasn’t going to make any real difference to him. And it would be nice to cash a winning ticket for a change.

  “Sir?”

  He put down his two dollars and bet the odds-on favorite to show.

  Dot lived in White Plains, in a big old Victorian house on Taunton Place. She gave him a ride to the train station, and a little over an hour later he was back in his apartment, looking once again at the Bulger amp; Calthorpe catalog.

  If Kissimmee Dudley ran and lost, he’d have a job to do. And his fee for the job would be just enough to fill the two spaces in his album. And, since the horse was racing at Belmont, it stood to reason that all of the jockeys lived within easy commuting distance of the Long Island racetrack. Keller wouldn’t have to get on a plane to find his man.

  If Kissimmee Dudley won, Keller got to keep the two-thousand-dollar standby fee. That was a decent amount of money for not doing a thing, and there were times when he’d have been happy to see it play out that way.

  But this wasn’t one of those times. He really wanted those stamps. If the horse lost, well, he’d go out and earn them. But what if the damned horse won?

  The sixth race ended with Pass the Gas six lengths ahead of the field. Keller cashed his ticket and ran into his friend, who’d been talking with a fellow who bore a superficial resemblance to Jerry Orbach.

  “Saw you in line to get paid,” the little man said. “What did you have, the exacta or the trifecta?”

  “I don’t really understand those fancy bets,” Keller admitted. “I just put my money on Pass the Gas. ”

  “Paid even money, didn’t he? That’s not so bad. ”

  “I had him to show. ”

  “Well, if you had enough of a bet on him-”

  “Just two dollars. ”

  “So you got back two-twenty,” the man said.

  “I just felt like winning,” Keller said.

  “Well,” the man said, “you won. ”

  He’d put down the catalog, picked up the phone. When Dot answered he said, “I was thinking. If that Dudley horse wins, the client wins his bet and I don’t have any work to do. ”

  “Right. ”

  “But if one of the other jockeys crosses him up-”

  “It’s the last time he’ll ever do it. ”

  “Well,” he said, “why would he do it? The jockey, I mean. What would be the point?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’m just trying to understand it,” he said. “I mean, I could understand if it was boxing. Like in the movies. They want the guy to throw a fight. But he can’t do it, something in him recoils at the very idea, and he has to go on and win the fight, even if it means he’ll get his legs broken. ”

  “And never play the piano again,” Dot said. “I think I saw that movie, Keller. ”

  “All the boxing movies are like that, except the ones with Sylvester Stallone running up flights of steps. But how would that apply with horses?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been years since I saw National Velvet. ”

  “If you were a jockey, and they paid you to throw a race, and you didn’t-I mean, where’s the percentage in it?”

  “You could bet on yourself. ”

  “You’d make more money betting on Kissimmee Dudley. He’s the long shot, right?”

  “That’s a point. ”

  “And that way nobody’d have a reason to take out a contract on you, either. ”

  “Another point,” Dot said, “and if the jockeys are all as reasonable as you and I, Keller, you’re not going to see a dime beyond the two grand. But they’re very small. ”

  “The jockeys?”

  “Uh-huh. Short and scrawny little bastards, every last one of them. Who the hell knows what somebody like that is going to do?”

  Keller’s friend was short enough to be a jockey, but a long way from scrawny. Facially, he looked a little like Jerry Orbach. It was beginning to dawn on Keller that everybody in the OTB parlor, even the blacks and the Asians, looked a little like Jerry Orbach. It was sort of a generic horseplayer look, and they all had it.

  “Kissimmee Dudley,” Keller said. “Where’d somebody come up with a name like that?”

  The little man consulted his Racing Form. “By Florida Cracker out of Dud Avocado,” he said. “ Kissimmee ’s in Florida, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “I think so. ” The fellow shrugged. “The name’s the least of that horse’s problems. You take a look at his form?”

  The man reeled off a string of sentences, and Keller just let the words wash over him. If he tried to follow it he’d only wind up feeling stupid. Well, so what? How many of these Jerry Orbach clones would know what to do with a perforation gauge?

  “Look at the morning line,” the man went on. “Hell, look at the tote board. Old Dudley ’s up there at forty-to-one. ”

  “That means he doesn’t have a chance?”

  “A long shot’ll come in once in a while,” the man allowed. “Look at Hypertension. With him, though, his past performance charts showed he had a chance. A slim one, but slim’s better than no chance at all. ”

  “And Kissimmee Dudley? No chance at all?”

  “He’d need a tailwind and a whole lot of luck,” the man said, “before he could rise to the level of no chance at all. ”

  Keller slipped away, and when he came back from the ticket window his friend asked him what horse he’d bet on. Keller’s response was mumbled, and the man had to ask him to repeat it.

  “Kissimmee Dudley,” he said.

  “That right?”

  “I know what you said, and I suppose you’re right, but I just had a feeling. ”

  “A hunch,” the man said.

  “Sort of, yes. ”

  “And you’re a man on a lucky streak, aren’t you? I mean, you just won
twenty cents betting the favorite to show. ”

  The line was meant to be sarcastic, but something funny happened; by the time the man got to the end of the sentence, his manner had somehow changed. Keller was wondering what to make of it-had he just been insulted or not?

  “The trick,” the fellow said, “is doing the wrong thing at the right time. ” He went away and came back, and told Keller he probably ought to have his head examined, but what the hell.

  “Kissimmee Dudley,” he said, savoring each syllable. “I can’t believe I bet on that animal. Only way he’s gonna win the seventh race is if he was entered in the sixth, but it’ll be some sweet payoff if he does. Not forty-to-one, though. Price is down to thirty-to-one. ”

  “That’s too bad,” Keller said.

  “Except it’s a good sign, because it means some late bets are coming in on the horse. You see a horse drop just before post time from, say, five-to-one to three-to-one, that’s a good sign. ” He shrugged. “When you start at forty-to-one, you need more than good signs. You need a rocket up your ass, either that or you need all the other horses to drop dead. ”

  9

  Keller wasn’t sure what to watch for. He knew what you did to get your horse to run faster. You hit him with the whip, and dug your heels into his flanks.

  But suppose you wanted to slow him down? You could sit back in the saddle and yank on the reins, but wouldn’t that be a little on the obvious side? Could you just hold off on the whip and cool it a little with the heel-digging? Would that be enough to keep your mount from edging out Kissimmee Dudley?

  The horses were entering the starting gate, and he picked out Dudley and decided he looked like a winner. But then they all looked like winners to Keller, big well-bred horses, some taking their positions without a fuss, others showing a little spirit and giving their riders a hard time, but all of them sooner or later going where they were supposed to go.

  Two of the jockeys were girls, Keller noticed, including the one riding the second favorite. Except you were probably supposed to call them women, you had to stop calling them girls these days around the time they entered kindergarten, from what Keller could tell. Still, when they were jockey-size, it seemed a stretch to call them women. Was he being sexist? Maybe, or maybe he was being sizeist, or heightist. He wasn’t sure.

  “They’re off!”

  And so they were, bursting out of the starting gate. Neither of the girl jockeys was riding Kissimmee Dudley, so if one of them won, well, she’d live to regret it, albeit briefly. Some people in Keller’s line of work didn’t like to take out women, while others were supposed to get a special satisfaction out of it. Keller didn’t care one way or the other. He wasn’t a sexist when it came to business, although he wasn’t sure that was enough to make him a hero in the eyes of the National Organization for Women.

  “Will you look at that!”

  Keller had been looking at the screen but without registering what he was seeing. Now he realized that Kissimmee Dudley was out in front, with a good lead on the rest of the field.