Murder at the Racetrack (19 page)

“So what?”

“Well, for one thing, your wife thinks you started a new job last week.”

The sleepy eyes woke up a little. “And I guess in your business, uh… Heller, is it? In your business, you never ran across
an instance of a guy lying to his wife before, huh?”

“You like the nags, too, don’t you, Stemmer? Only you don’t like to
get
nagged—and I bet Rose Vinicky nagged the hell out of you to pay back that three hundred. Did she hold back from your paycheck,
too?”

He shook his head, smiled, but it was sickly. “Rose was a sweetheart.”

“I don’t think so. I think she was a hardass who maybe even shorted a guy when he had his hard-earned money coming. Her husband
loved her, but anybody working for her? She gladly gave them merry hell. She was that kind of nag.”

A sneer formed on his face, like a blister. “I don’t have to talk to you. Take a walk.”

He shoved me.

I didn’t shove back, but I stood my ground; somebody gasped behind me—maybe Doris Stemmer, or the girl.

“You knew about that money, didn’t you, Stemmer? The money Rose was going to use to treat your wife to a Hollywood trip. And
you could use eleven hundred bucks, couldn’t you, pal? Hell, who couldn’t!”

He shoved me again. “You don’t take a goddamn
hint,
do you, Heller?”

“Here’s a hint for you: When a bookie like Goldie gets paid off, right before the legbreakers leave the gate? That means somebody
finally had a winner.”

His face turned white.

“Sure, she let her brother-in-law in the front door,” I said. “She may have had you pegged for the kind of welsher who stiffs
his own sister-in-law for a loan, but she probably thought she was at least safe with you, alone in her own house. That should’ve
been a sure bet, right? Only it wasn’t. What did you use? A sash weight? A crowbar?”

This time he shoved me with both hands, and he was trying to crawl in on the rider’s side of the Ford, to get behind the wheel,
when I dragged him out by the leg. On his ass on the grass, he tried to kick me with the other leg, and I kicked him in the
balls, and it ended as it had begun, with a scream.

All kinds of people, some of them cops, came running, swarming around us with questions and accusations. But I ignored them,
hauling Stemmer to his feet, and jerking an arm around his back, holding the big guy in place, and Cullen believed me when
I said, “Brother-in-law did it,” taking over for me, and I quickly filled Mullaney in.

They found four hundred and fifteen bucks in cash in Stemmer’s wallet—what he had left after paying off the bookie.

“That’s a lot of money,” Mullaney said. “Where’d you get it?”

“I won it on a horse,” Stemmer said.

Only it came out sounding like a question.

•    •    •

After he failed six lie detector tests, Raymond Stemmer confessed in full. Turned out hard-nosed businesswoman Rose had quietly
fired Stemmer when she found out he’d been stealing furniture from their warehouse. Rich Miller had told Rose that Ray was
going to the track with him, time to time, so she figured her brother-in-law was selling the furniture on the side to play
the horses. She had given him an ultimatum: Pay back the three hundred dollars, and what the furniture was worth, and Rose
would not tell her sister about his misdeeds.

Stemmer had stopped by the house around nine-thirty and told Rose he’d brought her the money. Instead, in the living room,
as she reached for her already burning cigarette, he had paid her back by striking her in the back of the head with a wrench.

Amazingly, she hadn’t gone down. She’d staggered, knocked the ashtray to the floor, only to look over her shoulder at him
and say, “You have the nerve to hit
me?”

And he found the nerve to hit her again, and another ten times, where she lay on the floor.

He removed the woman’s diamond wedding ring and went upstairs and emptied the wallet. All of this he admitted in a thirty-page
statement. The diamond was found in a toolbox in his basement, the wrench in the Chicago River (after three hours of diving).
His guilty plea got him a life sentence.

About a week after I’d found Rose Vinicky’s body, her husband called me at my office. He was sending a check for my services—the
five days I’d followed Miller—and wanted to thank me for exposing his brother-in-law as the killer. He told me he was taking
his daughter to California on the trip her mother had promised; the sister-in-law was too embarrassed and distraught to accept
Vinicky’s invitation to come along.

“What I don’t understand,” the pitiful voice over the phone said, “is why Rose was so distant to me, those last weeks. Why
she’d acted in a way that made me think—”

“Mr. Vinicky, your wife knew her sister’s husband was a lying louse, a degenerate gambler, stealing from the both of you.
That
was what was on her mind.”

“… I hadn’t thought of it that way. By God, I think you’re right, Mr. Heller… You know something funny? Odd. Ironic, I mean?”

“What?”

“I got a long, lovely letter from Rich Miller today. Handwritten. A letter of condolence. He heard about Rose’s death and
said he was sick about it. That she was a wonderful lady and had been kind to him. After all the people who’ve said Rose was
hard hearted to the people who worked for us? This, this ... it’s a kind of… testament to her.”

“That’s nice, Mr. Vinicky. Really is.”

“Postmarked Omaha. Wonder what Miller’s doing there?”

Hiding from the legbreakers, I thought.

And, knowing him, doing it at the dog tracks.

Author’s Note: My thanks to George Hagenauer, my longtime research associate on the Heller stories, for finding the Vinicky
case in an obscure true-detective magazine. I have compressed time and omitted aspects of the investigation; and some of the
names in this story have been changed.

Thomas H. Cook

T
he paired numbers shot through his mind in quick metallic bursts, the dry slap of bullets hitting beach sand. It is the way
he’d lived, like a man under fire, raked by numbers, no trees to shield him, no foxholes, only the endless open beach, with
no sun or moon above him, just the melancholy stare of her sea-blue eyes.

“Who is he, anyway?”

“Eddie Spellacy.”

He heard his brother Jack’s true voice for the first time in almost thirty years, heard it as it actually sounded, not over
the phone, but here, beside his bed.

“Eddie the Odds, they called him.”

There was a hopeless sorrow in Jack’s voice, a yearning for things to have turned out differently, and so he didn’t open his
eyes because he knew that his brother’s long sad face would break his heart.

“He was always figuring the odds.”

“The odds on what?”

“Everything, I guess. But he made his living figuring them on horses.”

The voices came from a world he could not live in, where men and women moved easily about, heedless of the way things really
were, the awesome knowledge that was his, how the odds, no matter what they seemed, could abruptly change. Her sad sweet voice
curled through his mind,
What’s wrong, Eddie?
Even then, his answer, thrown over his shoulder as he fled from her, had seemed more truth than lie,
I just have to go.

“They find him on the street?”

“No, he had a room. Nothing more than that. He didn’t need anything more. He’d stopped seeing other people years ago. Even
me. He said he’d figured the odds that on the way to his place something might happen to me. A car wreck. A plane crash. Too
risky, he told me. Anything can happen.”

“So how’d he get to the hospital?”

“He had a heart attack. Somebody heard him moaning in his room, I guess. Called 911. I don’t know who called. Just someone.”

Someone, but not her, Eddie thought. Someone anonymous, a neighbor down the hall who knew only that the guy in Room 603 was
Eddie the Odds, one of nature’s freaks, a human calculator who never went out, was never seen, never visited, with no dog,
no cat, with nothing but his streaming numbers. Eddie the Odds. Eddie the Oddball.

He twisted about violently, the odds streaming through his head, each number an accusation, reminding him of that day, the
sudden movement, the heavy fall, the way she’d seen him in the corner of the playground the next day, started toward him,
the look in her eyes as he’d risen and walked away. He’d wanted to tell her what had happened, but what were the odds she’d
have felt the same about him after that? What were the odds she’d ever laugh with him again, or touch his hand?

“So all these years he just stayed in his room and figured the odds?”

“Yeah.”

“On what?”

“On crazy stuff. Whether a tree would fall or a car would jump the curb. Stuff like that. He never got close to anyone. Never
married, had kids. He was afraid the odds were against them if he did. That he increased the odds. He said he couldn’t help
it. It wasn’t something he wanted to do. It was something his mind couldn’t stop doing. All day, figuring the odds.”

“So he’s like… deranged?”

Yes, Eddie thought. As deranged as a man who washes his hands a hundred times a day, repeats the same phrases over and over
and over, turns off the light a thousand times or compulsively opens and reopens the refrigerator before he can withdraw that
single bottle of hyper-filtered water. He’d finally turned it into a profession, the only choice he’d had since the fearful
results of his compulsion had made it impossible for him to do anything else. He couldn’t go to an office, couldn’t have a
profession.

“So when did this thing start, this thing with the odds?”

“When he was still a kid.”

“What did it start with?”

“I don’t know.”

With a girl, Eddie answered now, though without speaking, keeping his secret safe, the odds now incalculably vast against
his ever revealing it. Her sea-blue eyes rose like two lost moons over a turbulent river of rapidly streaming numbers.

She.

The only one he’d ever loved.

He saw her as she looked the morning she’d first come to Holy Cross, Margaret Shaunassey, twelve years old, a new girl in
the neighborhood, with a smile like spring rain and sea-blue eyes. What were the odds, he’d asked himself at that first moment,
that she would even notice him, a kid from West 47th Street, Eddie the kidder, Eddie the goof, a school-yard prankster, tall
for his thirteen years, with a freckled face he could do anything with, shape like dough, turn tragic or comic by turns, hide
all his shyness and uncertainty behind.

“So he’s been this way his whole life?”

“Not his whole life. But most of it. It came on him when he was thirteen.”

Thirteen, Eddie thought as he lay silent and unmoving, save for the backward journey of his mind. Thirteen and in love with
Margaret Shaunassey. But what were the odds that he could win her against the likes of handsome boys like Angelo Balderi and
smart ones like Herbie Daws? Not very good, he guessed, but in that same instant knew he would shirk off all his fearful lack
of confidence, and boldly go where he had never gone, go there with everything on the line, all his chips on this one number,
spin the wheel, regardless of the odds.

“And since then?”

“Since then, he’s been Eddie the Odds.”

Eddie the Odds, alone in a cramped little room in a Brooklyn hotel, staring at Manhattan, but never going there, because he
couldn’t stop his mind from figuring the odds of a subway accident or a bus collision or the even greater odds against a flooded
tunnel or collapsing bridge, odds that were constantly changing, like the flipping numbers on that immense scheduling board
he’d once seen in Grand Central, odds forever racing by at an impossible click, turning on him suddenly, throwing endless
strings of calculations, odds that exploded all around him, hurling earth and shrapnel, lighting his inner sky with millions
of sparks. But worst of all, as he knew too well, they were odds that he increased simply by being on that train or bus, increased
by being the carrier of bad luck, misfortune like a virus he could spread to anyone, and so increased the odds that the little
girl next to him in the subway or the little boy beside him on a bus would be dead, dead, dead. Dead because of him. Dead
because he defied the odds, brought death with him where he stood and where he went, untimely death, against all odds.

He felt his fingers draw into a fist, then the fist thrust outward, the way it had that morning, just a little shove, but
one that had finally recoiled and come rushing back toward him, invisibly penetrating the hard bone of his skull, reconfiguring
his brain in a freakish and irrevocable way, turning him into what he had become since then, Oddball Eddie, Eddie the Odds.

In a quick vision, he saw the home he might have had, and had so often imagined during the long years he’d lived in his small
cramped room. A large house with a large yard, kids playing on the green lawn, and she there, too, the one he’d done it for,
Margaret Shaunassey, the girl with the spring-rain smile.

He’d first spotted her in the school playground, and against the odds, approached her.

I’m Eddie Spellacy.

Hi.

You’re new, right?

Yes.

After that it had been all jokes, and Eddie the jokester had made her laugh and laugh, laugh until her eyes watered and she
fought for breath and clutched her sides and begged him to stop, stop, because it was killing her, this laughter.

And so he’d stopped, fallen silent, then, more in love than anyone in books or movies, revealed the mission of his lovesick
heart.

I’ll always look out for you.

And he’d meant it, too, meant it as deeply as he’d ever meant anything. He would be her knight, escort her through the mean
streets of Hell’s Kitchen, fend off the neighborhood dragons, its street toughs and bullies, protect her from catcalls and
leering glances, and still later, as they grew older, married and had children, he would protect her from the fear of loss
and abandonment, the dread of loneliness and the steady drip of age. He would do all of this. And he would do it forever.
He would never cease, until she was safely home.