The Bookwoman's Last Fling (27 page)

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.”

“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.”

“Like maybe he was trying to prove something?”

“Maybe he was.”

I made a few cryptic notes. “Did you have any more to say with Candice?”

“We had a couple of conversations, just before they left. She was asking me if I had ever worked with any great horses; I think she was trying to get him to go to the yearling sale at Keeneland and buy some expensive horses, but he didn't seem to care by then. If you want my opinion, I think he did care. He cared desperately but was afraid to put his ass on the line. I didn't realize this then, but I've thought about it since and I'd bet I'm right. He was afraid to fail, especially at that stage of his life. Here was this guy who knew everything about bad-legged gimpy horses, and I think he was afraid to buy himself a real racehorse. He thought there'd be a spotlight on him then, and that's the last thing he wanted. What if it broke down? What if it ran badly, for any of those weird reasons? What if, what if, what if—you can drive yourself crazy with stuff like that.” She shook her head. “But damn, I think he was a great trainer. He coulda been a
real
contender.”

“And instead he retired himself,” I said.

“Yep, and that was his undoing. He was one of those guys who should never retire. Guys like Geiger need to die in the saddle.”

So he let Junior run things and he just watched and got old. “I was long gone by then,” she said. “I was working for other trainers, but I'd see them at one race meet or another, and I always tried to pass the time with Candice.”

We leaned over a scarred and rickety coffee table and she poured coffee I didn't need. I still hadn't pushed her about Candice's death, but it was there in the air between us and I knew we'd circle our wagons and get back to it. “You said you were her mentor. Can you elaborate on that?”

“At first she wanted to know everything, but not because she wanted to know it: it was because of him, because it would give her a leg up into his life. She didn't know that racing was already becoming his past life; she had made it that way with her money. Look, I'm not pretending that I was her great confidante, but once in a while there'd be a look or a sigh, sometimes a word or two, a question that told more than it asked…occasionally a whole conversation.”

“Did you ever ask her any of this?”

“Oh no. No, no, no, no. Today I might, but back then she was like some porcelain goddess and I was way too young and insecure to butt in.” She laughed. “But I knew my horses, she didn't, and so she asked and I told her things.”

“Like what?”

“What horses were about, and the men who raced 'em. How they're trained and made fit. What she had bought into when she married him. That's what she was really asking. So over that year we became friendly. We were never bosom buddies or anything like that, but often in the morning she'd come out to the barn where I slept and we'd talk. And over time I got the drift of things. I knew he was losing interest in racing, in just about everything that had mattered to him. Now I know he had nothing else going for him, or so he thought, and she was bright enough to realize that.”

“He was losing it.”

“Slipping slowly into the Sargasso Sea. Not that I'm any gifted analyst; it was just obvious. Candice understood this before I did, I was kidding myself if I thought she didn't, and he knew it too. He had started this long slide and he couldn't do anything to pull himself out of it. That's what happens to some men who have lived long and well on their own terms. I read that somewhere and now I believe it. They get old and nothing much matters anymore.”

She leaned over the table. “There's nothing more destructive at any age than getting everything you ever wanted handed to you on a platter.”

I sipped my coffee. She smiled. I put down my cup and made the smallest possible hand gesture. “So who killed her, Martha?”

She gave me a now-or-never look. “I've been living with this forever. I never told anybody, but it's been on my mind every day all these years.”

Suddenly she said, “Look, I said I'd fish out that description for you, but don't waste your time. It wasn't that guy who killed Candice. It was Baxter. Bax killed Candice.”

“He's crazy,” she said. “If you're looking for reasons, what else do you need to know? If you spend any time at all with Baxter, you will understand one thing about him. He's a bona-fide fruitcake, a true loony bird. He belongs in a corner of some nuthouse cutting out paper dolls. Let me tell you something.”

She tried valiantly to pour us another top-off, but this time I stopped her by putting my body in harm's way. She sat and suddenly she was off again.

“There was a story that got started about Bax. Seems he was convinced somebody was trying to sabotage him by messing with his horses' feed. So Bax begins testing it by eating it himself. He gets into a bale of pure locoweed and eats it all with blueberries and nonfat milk, and he's been like this ever since. They found him doing a polka at midnight with all his fillies and mares. I'm not making this up. Somebody may be, but it's not me. They say when Bax was young the Army wanted to give him a Section Eight, but he was so far beyond that, they didn't have numbers that high. The scary thing to me is, you never can tell what a guy like that will do. He'll be just fine for a day, a week, two months, two years. Then he begins to slip and the cracks appear. They get wider and he starts babbling, talking but making no sense at all. Bax has a persecution complex as wide as the Mississippi River. Ask anybody who's ever worked for him. They all love him to death at first. He's so easy, he knows his horses, and he leaves you alone if you take good care of them, but then he'll slip off the edge and start howling at the moon.”

He wasn't like Junior, she said. “Junior was just a case of bad temper. That's all he ever was, a blowhard letting off steam. Mad because life hadn't gone his way. But mad as in angry, not nuts.”

Baxter was the real McCoy. “It's frightening how normal he can be: normal and bonkers almost in the same breath, depending on how something strikes him. It's not always something you can see, either. Haven't you heard yet about Bax and his ways?”

She had worked for him one whole summer: had even gone with his crew to Hot Springs. “At first I thought I was going to love working for this guy, but one day during a rainstorm he went haywire. He had a horse that was favored to win going away, except for one thing. The horse absolutely would not run on an off-track, and guess what? God made it rain that day. God made it rain, the odds dropped off, and his horse ran way up the racetrack. Hell, he's probably still running, back there in Arkansas. Bax should have scratched him the minute the rain started that morning, but no, for some reason known to nobody else, he got it in his head he needed to win
that
race, no matter what, so he let him run and got what he asked for. Horse runs dead last. Say what you want about Junior, he never would've done that. Hold him back, let him win another day, that was Junior. Bax is the greatest example I know, how you can be cunning and crazy all at once.”

So the morning after the mud debacle she had found him in his horse's stall, standing in that inky darkness with the most wicked-looking butcher knife she had ever seen. The light from the shedrow gleamed off the blade, the only light anywhere in the world that morning. The rain was still falling and Bax was talking to his horse like they were blood adversaries, enemies older than time. “Make no mistake, asshole, I can kill you whenever I want to,” she heard Bax say, somewhere out in the ink: “I can put this blade right through your neck and nobody will do a thing about it.”

A horse is nothing more than a piece of property, Bax said. “So if I tell you to run in the mud you goddam better run your bloody guts out in the fuckin' mud, you hear that?”

Son of a bitch, he said, more times than she could count.

“What have you got to do in your whole fat-ass worthless life? Stand here, eat, sleep, shit, work fifteen goddam minutes a week, and twice a month I ask you to run me a horse race.”

It was almost like that poor horse could understand him, she said. Long after dawn he was jittery, upset. “You think Junior would do that to a horse?”

No, I didn't think even Junior would do that.

“Horses pick up vibes. Maybe they don't know English, maybe they can't do long division and diagram sentences, but the good ones are nobody's fool. And I think they know hate when it comes straight at 'em like that.”

She fluttered her hands in a gesture of pure nerves. “So try this,” she said, and her voice quaked. “Then he says, I could put you where I put Candice, just remember that if you're ever tempted to screw me around.”

The air in her place felt suddenly cold. I looked in her eyes again and she was very serious and credible. There are people who are believable with crazy facts and she was one of them. I nodded my belief and I could see her taking heart from that.

“I couldn't work for him after that,” she said. “But the damndest thing happened. I was afraid to quit. Suddenly it was like he'd been talking to
me,
not the horse. Like he'd been talking to me all along, it was all some kind of warning. I would see him staring at me in the shedrow and there was something about him that made me flat-out afraid, and in that moment I believed he knew I'd been there, I had heard his craziness. I believed it then and I still do. So I worked through the meet and after a month I faded away. I told Bax my best friend was sick in Tuscaloosa or some silly place, and I left the state for a while. Screw it; life's too short as it is.

“That was years ago and he still looks at me funny. He'll stare at me clear across the kitchen. I try to smile and be pleasant, but hey, I've even given that up. Now I get busy real fast. He knows, and he knows that I know. Just this morning he came into the kitchen and said, ‘Hey, Martha, how's your friend in Tuscaloosa?' We've never said a word about it in all these years. I almost dropped dead there on the floor.”

She shivered, recalling it. “I can't live like this. He's got me looking over my shoulder, everywhere I go.”

Her fists were tight on the table. “You don't have to take my word for anything. I can give you a whole list of ginneys who worked for him, a list as long as my arm. Most of 'em stay just long enough to cash their first few paychecks; then they're out of there. He's only got three or four regulars he can count on, two women and a guy who've been with him a while. And now I'm thinking I may leave here too. Maybe I'll go someplace where the racing's good and there's not much chance of running into people.”

We looked at each other in the dim light of her apartment. I felt as if my understanding of the case was beginning to focus and become clearer. But there was still too much out of synch; there were pieces that didn't fit with the others. Why this was I couldn't yet figure, but I was going to find out. I gave it the full thirty seconds, all I could allow with Martha looking in my face. Either she was lying, and I couldn't imagine why, or Bax had long ago confessed a murder to a racehorse in the middle of the night. Either Bax was crazy or maybe we all were. Either this was one case or two. Either it was about the books, random murders, or everything was linked so tightly it couldn't yet be pried apart. For me it had started as a quest to find some missing books, soon there was a murdered man who was also the main suspect in the book thefts, and now we had a crazy man; the bastard had come much too close and wasn't about to stop now, and I feared for everyone: Erin, Bob, and especially this woman sitting beside me. Maybe it isn't anything we know, I thought; maybe it's just what he
thinks
we know.

“Martha,” I said softly, “I need to ask you a favor.”

Warily she said, “It won't cost you anything to ask.”

“This is a big one.”