Murder at the Racetrack (27 page)

“And what are they telling you?”

He seemed reluctant to say it, but then it came out. “I was thinking it sounded maybe like it could be a skull case, that’s
all.”

A skull case was a crime that remained unsolved, especially one that had occurred long ago. One way or another, most murders
got solved or didn’t in under a week, and either way there was a steady enough stream of new ones to keep big-city homicide
inspectors busy. The old ones that remained unsolved for too long simply faded into the past and most of them remained technically
open, but no one investigated them.

“How old?” Cal asked.

“Twenty-eight years. Jason said Les was twenty-three when it happened, and that was in seventy-four.”

“Twenty-eight years,” she said. “What was it, the crime?”

“Might have been nothing.”

In the dark, she smiled. “You already said that. But pretending for a moment that it wasn’t nothing, that your guts are right.”

“If it was something, it was a murder.”

She realized she’d been holding her breath. Now she let it out, spoke casually. “I hear you used to do those.”

“From time to time.”

“Used to be pretty good at them.”

“I’d win a few, yeah.”

For this moment, then, right now, her husband was back. The low-key banter, a voice with no trace of boredom or fatigue. No
tiredness. She wanted to keep him here, feed his interest. “I’m getting a glass of wine. Are you good? What are you having?”

“Scotch.” He paused. “But I’m fine.” It was the first time in months that he’d refused a refresher on his drink. “In fact,
you can dump this.” He started to roust himself. “I’ll get some water.”

“I’ll get it. I’m up.”

“Such service.” He turned on the light by his chair and smiled at her when she took his glass, all but untouched. “You sure
you want to hear about this? You’ve got to get up tomorrow.”

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “I love a murder story.”

When she got back, she gave him his water, walked back to the couch, curled her feet up under her, and wrapped the afghan
over her shoulders. She took a sip of her wine. “So talk to me,” she said.

“You’ve got to remember this is all second-hand, so it’s hearsay at best.”

“All right.” He still looked great, she thought. Not just great for fifty-six, but plain old great for anybody. Always strongly
built—big shoulders, no fat—and bullet-headed, now his face exuded a natural authority that went well with the buzz cut and
the trim waist. He might, she thought, be an aging officer in the active marines. What fools the bureaucrats in the city had
been to let him go! No, not just let him go—
force
him to leave. “Hit me with some hearsay.”

“Okay. Four guys, pretty good friends, all lived in apartments in the same building on Bush in the city. Les Frankel, Peter
Grant, Jose Ropa, Jeff Vaughn.”

“You got the names, I notice. No notes.”

He shrugged, but she could tell the comment pleased him. “That’s who they were. Four friends, all in their early twenties,
all struggling financially since they all wanted to be artists of some kind.”

“All of them?”

“We’re talking early seventies. What are you gonna do? I think they put something in the water back then.”

But Cal sat straight up. “Wait a minute. Peter Grant? The TV anchor?”

“Ten points. One of them made it anyway, huh?” He shrugged. “But anyway, Les and the other two had high hopes, too. Ropa and
Vaughn were in a band together, evidently close to getting a record deal. Les was painting—he wound up in advertising specialties,
selling them—you know, pens with your company’s name on ’em, magnets for your refrigerator, calendars…” The subject seemed
to depress Arnie. “I guess he made a living.”

“But not a good one?”

A shrug. “He and his wife live—lived—in a trailer park in Daly City. God knows what’s going to happen to her now. Jason sure
didn’t, and he didn’t seem the picture of wealth himself.”

“No kids to help?”

Arnie shook his head dejectedly. “No kids. No insurance. Les evidently chose to believe that he and Lora were going to die
on the same day. But they didn’t. Bad luck for her.”

She sipped at her wine. “So was it Vaughn or Ropa? The one that got killed?”

Arnie smiled at her, then nodded. “You’re paying attention.”

“Always. So what’s Jason’s story?”

“The four of them went down to Bay Meadows, taking a day off from whatever it was they did. Each of them brought twenty dollars
to bet, total, and they decided they’d get more bang for the buck if they pooled their money and bet as a unit. So now they
had eighty bucks.”

“Big spenders.”

Arnie shrugged. “They were starving artists, all of them. But eighty dollars back in the early seventies—you remember—was
probably close to five hundred today, maybe more, so it wasn’t peanuts. And I guess what made it worse is that this was one
of those desperation moves for all of them. No other money, no hopes. Rent was coming due. They had to hit something.”

“So they went to the track? Smart.”

“They were kids.” Arnie sighed. “Anyway, they put together their forty bets for the day and sent Vaughn to the window.”

“One guy? Why didn’t they all go?”

Arnie shrugged. “Two of them were getting beer, one was holding their seats. Vaughn just happened to be the one.”

“Okay.”

“Well, as it turns out, Cal, not so okay. They’d all decided, out of their forty two-dollar bets, to bet eight combinations
for the Daily Double—high odds, big return if they hit. But while Vaughn was waiting in line, the guy behind him was jawin’
about the Six horse in the first race, how he’d heard he’d pulled up lame. He was still on the card, going out at a hundred-and-ten-to-one,
but he had no chance. If Vaughn was smart, he’d bet another horse.”

“But they—the four of them?—they had decided to bet the Six horse?”

“Right. As half of a major long shot daily double. Jason had heard the story often enough from Les, he even remembered the
thoroughbred’s name—Steppin’ Pretty. Well, long story short, they’re watching the first race and Steppin’ Pretty comes in
first…”

“And Vaughn hadn’t bet it?”

“You’re psychic. He thought he was doing them a favor, saving the two bucks for a better horse. He told them right after the
race. Like, ’Uh, hey guys, sorry, but…’”

“So they killed him right then.”

“No. They waited until the second horse came in at sixty-five-to-one. Then they stomped him to death.” He smiled now over
his water. “Not really. But it wasn’t a pretty moment.”

“How much would they have gotten? If Vaughn had bet Steppin’ Pretty?”

“You know how a daily double works?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s what’s called a paramutuel bet, so the odds the horses go out at aren’t really the crucial element. Like, say,
a five-to-one and a three-to-one hit, the amount each winner gets isn’t five times three or anything like that. It’s the total
amount everybody at the track bet on the double, divided by everybody who bet the winning combination, less about twenty percent
that the track keeps for expenses. The good news about two long shots winning the double is that fewer people wind up betting
the winning combination.” Arnie came forward, his eyes alight. “Evidently, this one, there was one winning ticket. So these
guys, theirs would have made two.”

“How much?” Cal asked.

“Twenty-one thousand, one hundred twenty dollars.”

“Oh my God. On a two-dollar bet?”

Arnie nodded. “That’s five thousand, two hundred eighty bucks each.”

Cal had recovered from her immediate shock and now whistled. “And this was when eighty dollars was a lot of money? That was
a fortune, then.”

“Yep.”

“They must have been devastated.”

Arnie had put his glass down now and chewed at the inside of his cheek. His eyes rested on a spot in the air over his wife’s
head. He came back down to her. “Evidently it hit them all like an act of God. They were all doomed to fail at everything
they tried. Jason said Les never really recovered.”

“Never?”

“That’s what his brother said. He was
this close.
They were all right there. He’d done everything he was supposed to do and fate just came by and screwed him for the fun of
it. And it always would.”

“Well, maybe that’s a little extreme.”

“Wait. Maybe not. Listen. In the next couple of weeks, the whole world of these guys went nuts on them and just fell apart.
It turns out that Les’s wife—Lora?—was six months’ pregnant with twins at the time. Couple of days later, she miscarries.
And p.s., it turns out her insides get so messed up she can’t have kids at all. Ever.”

“Not because this boy Vaughn didn’t bet Steppin’ Pretty.”

“No, of course not. But that with the proximity of the betting disaster… Jason told me that was why Les was still so hooked
on the track to this day. Someday, somehow, it had to give him back some of what he’d lost. And of course he bet long shots
over and over and just lost and lost and lost. He also gave up on painting, on his dreams. It wouldn’t matter what he did,
or how well he did it, fate was going to get him and make him fail.”

“The poor man.”

“Yeah. But not only him. Listen to this. Not even a week after Lora’s miscarriage, and apparently no relation to any of this,
Vaughn turns up mugged and dead.”

“Dead? Lord!”

“No kidding. So there goes the record contract for Ropa as well, and Grant freaks out, can’t handle the vibe, everything in
the world going to hell, he splits for LA. Bottom line is a month after the fine day these four guys spent at the track, their
lives are ruined. Three of them—Vaughn, Ropa, and Frankel—pretty much forever.”

“So what are you thinking?” Cal asked.

“I wouldn’t say it was all the way to a thought, yet. Just a little itch. It’s all kind of pat, don’t you think?”

“What is? Vaughn not making the bet and everything falling apart?”

“Not so much that,” Arnie said. “But what if he had made it after all?”

•    •    •

Mostly out of habit, Arnie had asked Jason for his card at his brother’s funeral, and first thing the next morning he called
him, trying to pin down the day and year of the original horse race a little more clearly. Arnie still had friends at the
Hall of Justice. He got to the building by 9:30 and told them he was working on his memoirs and after giving him ten minutes
of pro forma grief, the lieutenant okayed his admission to records in the building’s basement—shelves and shelves of evidence
and folders on cases going back fifty years and more.

Jeffrey Vaughn had been killed in October 1974. He had gone out to get a six-pack of beer at a convenience store three blocks
from his apartment building—a rough three blocks near Fillmore, Arnie knew. Still rough now nearly thirty years later, even
with all the gentrification. As Jason had told him, the crime had never been solved.

Arnie read through everything in the pathetically thin folder. What he found provocative, although it didn’t surprise him,
was that the investigation never came anywhere near focusing on any of Jeff’s friends who’d been at the track with him. There
were no transcriptions of taped interviews from Frankel, Grant, or Ropa. The only one mentioned in any of the reports was
Ropa, who’d been Vaughn’s roommate, but who’d been visiting his family in San Diego for several days on either side of the
crime.

The investigation’s conclusion was clear: Vaughn’s murder was one of those tragic, random events that were all too common
in big cities. The white boy should have known better than to walk through the ghetto at night. His killer was never caught.

•    •    •

Ropa was easy to find. He was listed in the phone book in San Jose. His wife, Stella, was home when Arnie called, identifying
himself as a policeman. After assuring her that her husband was in no trouble, she told him that he worked as a paralegal
for a law firm in Santa Clara, and Arnie could call him directly there.

They met in the Starbucks near his work at 5:15. Ropa was, from Arnie’s perspective, a bit of an unusual guy. His gray hair
was pulled back off the face of an Aztec chief. Braided, it hung to his belt. A diamond earring gleamed on one earlobe. But
he wore a business suit and spoke perfect, educated English. Like Les Frankel, he was probably close to sixty-five, but he
was in better shape than Les had been, and much taller.

At Arnie’s quizzical glance, he volunteered that he was mosdy, still, a musician—a percussionist with Latin bands— but it
didn’t pay the bills, so he did this law gig in the daytime. Had been doing it for almost twenty years. It beat the constant
scraping. He kept up an easy patter until they’d gotten settled over their lattes, then said, “So, this is about Les? I’m
sad to hear he died. I haven’t heard his name in years.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, it’s really more about Jeff Vaughn. I understand you two were roommates.”

The strong, dark face clouded over immediately. “Stella said I wasn’t in trouble. If I am, that’s cool, but we don’t talk
anymore. I go across the street and get a lawyer.”

“You think you need a lawyer?”

“Everybody needs a lawyer, inspector. Maybe not all the time, though. That’s what I’m wondering about right now.”

Arnie held up a palm. “I didn’t lie to your wife. The reports indicated you were out of town when it happened. I don’t doubt
it.”

“Way out. I split for a week to chill at the beach. Things were way too heavy up here.”

“In what way?”

Ropa’s mouth turned, but it wasn’t quite a smile. “In what way not? Jeff was my partner back then. Music. We had a band going
pretty good, close to a record deal even if you believed the rumors, and we did. But then suddenly all this weird shit started
happening, and Jeff and I were getting ready to kill each other—manner of speaking, okay?—so I thought it would be smart to
give ourselves some space, you know? So I split.”

“Why were you going to kill each other? Over the music?”

“No, the music was always good. Something else.”