Murder at the Racetrack (31 page)

By then Michelle was, in her mother’s phrase, “horse crazy like your crazy dad.” Bits Harlin didn’t worry at first. “I guess
a lot of girls go through the phase. It won’t last.” Michelle, however, knew that it would last, that she had inherited a
passion from her father El Canon.

Over the next year, Loopy taught her all he knew, and he knew a lot. Grooms, he said, always know the most about thoroughbreds;
trainers the next most. Owners know nothing; she should never listen to owners—the thin women wearing hats and pearls, the
beefy men in blazers and bright ties. A smart jockey will always avoid owners and listen to grooms. Take Spats in there in
the Number One stall, for example. Did his owner, Mr. Grandors, who lived in Naples, Florida, who also owned but cared far
less about Fortune’s Child, know the difference between those two animals? And did Spats’s hotshot jockey really know his
mount any more than Mr. Grandors? “Spats in there a little funny, faking how he’s sore. Deep down, he don’t care, not like
Raindancer.”

The day that Michelle brought Luis Rojas with her to the Finish line to “explain” things to her mother, to admit that she’d
been working for more than a year at Campbell Farms, sneaking out of the trailer each day before dawn to clean stables, Bits
had blamed everything on Loopy.

Betsy “Bits” Harlin took a draw on her long menthol cigarette that day and sighed out the smoke. With a shake of her blonde
curls, she pointed her cigarette at the fidgeting Loopy. “I’m looking at you, I’m looking at trouble.” Closing the real estate
section of the paper that she was always studying, she crossed her arms tightly over her turquoise T-shirt. “Don’t let the
door hit your backside, Mr. Rojas.”

“Buenos dias,
senora.” Loopy smiled, tipping his red cap to the petite woman with hair too big for her thin tired pretty face.

“And, hey, don’t try that Latin salsa on me, man.” Michelle’s mother scrubbed so hard at the bar that she sent a plastic bowl
of peanuts spilling down the counter onto a man who didn’t notice; a man with the look of someone who’d lost every race he’d
bet on for years. Refilling the bowl, Bits Harlin told Loopy,
“No mas,
amigo. Adios. Been there.”

It was then that Loopy told Michelle’s mother that he’d known her former lover El Canon and that El Canon’s dream while in
Lexington had been to win the Bluegrass Stakes at Keeneland. He had not succeeded, although it was that year,

the year of his romance with Bits, that the Mexican jockey had come in third in the Bluegrass—the first and last time he’d
ever been in the money. It was that year that Michelle had been conceived. (It had been, in fact, that very April day, right
after the Bluegrass Stakes, as Bits admitted to herself, but not to Loopy.)

Not that night, but a few weeks later, Loopy told Bits and Michelle that El Canon had died years ago from eleven knife wounds
inflicted in a jockey room somewhere abroad, stabbed by a fellow rider who was high on cocaine and certain that his wife was
cheating on him. Bits and Michelle hadn’t known. The news was no real surprise to Bits.

In the Finish line bar the night he told them about El Canon’s death, Loopy had stood up to Bits Harlin, his arm flung in
a paternal way over Michelle’s shoulder. “Someday this girl gonna come in first. She gonna make her daddy proud. She gonna
give back his honor.”

“Give back?” said Bits.

But after a month of pressure, Bits succumbed: As long as Michelle kept her grades high enough to get into college, she was
allowed to keep working before and after school at Campbell Farms. It wasn’t much of a salary for showing up at five a.m.,
seven days a week, to help Loopy and the other grooms take off the night bandages, feed and brush the horses, clean out their
stalls and tack them up for the morning riders. It wasn’t much money, but although she pretended to her mother that she was
doing it for money, she wasn’t. She was doing it for the chance to race.

One day at first light, Mr. Jones saw Michelle galloping Fortune’s Child on the exercise track. His first impulse was to send
her packing and to fire Loopy. However, Mr. Jones was not a man who acted on first impulses. Instead he clocked her. The girl
and the big gray ran the mile and a quarter in 1:59 and 7/8 ths of a second.

The next day in fresh starched shirt and Harris tweed suit, Mr. Jones paid a formal call on Bits Harlin at the Finish Line
to discuss Michelle. Two days later he brought Bits a fair and reasonable contract engaging her daughter as a jockey at Campbell
Farms. He always called Bits Mrs. Harlin, although Harlin was her maiden name. “I like his style,” Bits told Michelle. “He’s
definitely premier label.”

The next week Jones started to train Michelle to ride the horse he kept instructing her, unsuccessfully, to refer to as Fortune’s
Child instead of Raindancer. The trainer was methodical and repetitive, insisting that she study things she thought she already
knew, teaching her to change bad habits for which she’d been compensating unaware.

She worked so hard and on so little sleep that she passed out one day in class. Her mother blamed Loopy, telling him he was
“the cheap blend,” while Mr. Jones was private barrel single malt.

“Senora,” he said, tapping his cap on the bar. “I’m just trying to feed my babies, like you. That’s all.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, “don’t use my baby to do it.”

When Michelle Harlin ran her first race at Keeneland, Bits told Loopy she wouldn’t come to the track, not to watch her daughter
“throw her life away.” But at the last minute she did so, running down the aisle, leaning over the rail, yelling herself hoarse
when Michelle finished fifth. The following Saturday, at the ten-dollar window, Bits bet Fortune’s Child to Win. He placed.
A week later, on a rainy afternoon, he won for the first time.

Michelle and the gray colt went on to win three of their next four races; the last race again in the rain. Pictures of horse
and rider began to show up in the local papers.

GIRL RIDES FORTUNE’S CHILD TO VICTORY

RAIN NO PROBLEM FOR FORTUNE’S CHILD

AND FEMALE JOCKEY

A television reporter sneaked a camera into Campbell Farms; he learned from Michelle that Fortune’s Child’s barn name was
Raindancer and that she herself had been named for a Beatles song. He did a little piece about her on the news that night.
Racing papers liked the angle. Soon there were headlines like
RAINDANCING!
above a shot of the mud-splattered horse and jockey crossing the finish line, alone. And a full-page front cover:
OH, MICHELLE MA BELLE!
with a picture of the gray thoroughbred nuzzling the girl’s short black curls. The owner’s son, Eric Grandors, gave Michelle
a copy of the
RAINDANCING
! photograph in a nice frame.

Michelle rode the gray to victory up and down the Eastern circuit: a mile, a mile-and-an-eighth, a mile-and-a-quarter. Then
in Delaware another horse bumped them so hard in the backstretch that Raindancer fell almost to his knees and Michelle was
banged against the inside rail. She broke her collarbone, falling after crossing the wire. Publicly, Jones filed a complaint.
Privately, he feared Michelle would be too rattled by the accident ever to race again. It was one of the reasons why so many
jockeys got addicted to cocaine; they used the drug to fight off fear after a fall.

But three weeks later, back at Keeneland, in the rain on a sloppy track, Raindancer won a mile-and-a-half stakes race by ten
lengths. It was the fastest he’d ever run. In the winner’s circle, Michelle told Loopy that she had been able to feel the
gray stallion move his position beneath her, shifting his weight to favor her strapped left side, speeding so far out in front
of the field that no other horse could get anywhere near them. “He protecting you. He love you.” Loopy shrugged.

It was there in the winner’s circle that day that Mr. Grandors, Raindancer’s owner, spoke to her for the first time other
than to say, “Hello.” He hadn’t heard about her collarbone injury. She’d begged Jones not to tell him, fearing he’d replace
her as the jockey. “Nice ride,” he said without looking at her. “But don’t use the Child up; not if you got the lead. One
length’s as good as ten.”

“Yes, sir. I think we can win the Bluegrass, Mr. Grandors.”

“Honey, you’re not paid to think,” said Grandors with a smile that moved his mouth quickly, like a trap. Michelle saw that
his son, Eric, standing nearby, didn’t like what his father had said.

Then the day before the Bluegrass Stakes race, Mr. Jones called Michelle into his office. As he took a phone call, Michelle,
waiting, studied the framed photographs of horses on his walls, in pride of place a picture of Secretariat. Below the pictures
were hand-built shelves of paperback books, many of them used textbooks from the college store:
Europe in the Middle Ages, First Year Spanish, My Antonia.

Jones told her that he had just had a talk with Mr. Grandors. She was not even to try to win the Bluegrass. It was Spats’s
year to win. Fortune’s Child was to serve as a sacrifice; Michelle was to use his speed out of the gate to set so torrid a
pace in the first part of the race that the favorite’s most serious rival, Windsong, trying to keep up, would fade in the
stretch, leaving Spats, a classic closer, to win.

Michelle had been so surprised that she blurted out, “That’s not right, Mr. Jones.”

His mouth twitched under a peppery mustache that hid a scar from a horse’s kick long ago. “Yes, it is. Both these horses belong
to Mr. Grandors. His money is on Spats. It’s his prerogative.”

“I don’t know
what prerogative
means.”

He nodded. “That’s why you’re going to college. So you will know.” He told her that she had a job, not a destiny.

Michelle understood about sacrificial pacesetters. Mr. Jones had taught her about the kinds of maneuvering that went on in
racing. But she’d never thought he’d allow anything that wasn’t “right,” any more than she could imagine him drunk or having
a temper fit. And if Raindancer had a chance to win, wasn’t it a cheat to take that chance away from him? Weren’t the trainer’s
stories all moral tales about what happened to cheaters? All right, what Jones was telling her to do was not as bad as bribing
a jockey to pull a favorite back, or fraying a cinch, or hiding a dangerous heart stimulant in a carrot. It was not as bad
as the way trainers had given Viagra to their horses, even though some of the horses had died from overdoses. “Cheating only
cheats the cheater,” Jones had often told the girl. “In the short run, you can fix a race, but in the end the best horse is
the one with the best record. In the long run, go with the real odds.”

In the end, shouldn’t Raindancer win if he could? And if he did win…

•    •    •

Loopy Rojas took the money box from her and stuffed the cash into her knapsack. She said nothing as he put the box back in
place and locked Mr. Jones’s office behind them.

“You can win,” he told her at the entrance to the stables. “I don’t know much. But I know you. I know Raindancer. I know Spats.
I know it’s gonna rain. One-forty-six-something, you gonna do it.” He pulled her head toward him and kissed her curls, then
pushed her away.

Loopy Rojas had his own rules. They were unlike the code by which Michelle had once thought Mr. Jones lived. Loopy appeared
to see nothing wrong with fighting or lying, drinking or even stealing. Loopy’s rules were practical: Like, “Maybe coke keeps
you skinny and maybe it makes you brave. But it makes you crazy, like the loco that stabbed your daddy.”

Another rule, the one Loopy now told her to pass along to her mother with the stolen money, was that, starting at 12:30 tomorrow,
at Keeneland racetrack, Bits Harlin should place bets at as many different windows as possible, always betting different small
amounts, saving her biggest bets to the last possible minute.

Michelle made one more effort to talk Loopy into putting the money back in Jones’s desk drawer. “My mom’s not going to believe
you saved up ten thousand dollars. What if she decides to call the police and get you arrested?”

“Then you phone me quick and I’ll be on the road out of this crazy country before the police get the key in their big car.
And lose that race? Same thing. Luis Rojas is dust on the road. But you gonna win. Your padre in heaven gonna be proud.”

“My dad went to heaven? I doubt it.”

“Doubt’s a terrible thing, chica. I see you tomorrow.” And he was gone in that fast slanting way of his.

Hours later, when Michelle walked into the Finish line, she still hadn’t decided what she was going to say to her mother.

Then, suddenly all that cash burned hot as coals in her backpack. She saw Mr. Jones seated at the smoky bar, talking to Bits
Harlin. Mr. Jones, who couldn’t bear the smell of cigarettes, sat with his white-shirted elbow leaning on the bar, right next
to her mother’s ashtray.

Michelle could feel her heart thud as strongly as she felt Raindancer’s heart during a race. Did Mr. Jones know that Loopy
and she had robbed him that evening? She forced herself to go up to the bar and say hello.

But the trainer treated her the same as always; he just told her to go get some sleep, that she had a big race ahead of her.

He shook hands with Bits. “That’s a pretty nice house,” he said, and walked out of the Finish Line.

“What’s a pretty nice house?” Michelle asked, watching the bar door as he left and the owner’s son, Eric Grandors, entered
with two young men who looked like fellow college students.

Her mother was showing her a circled photo in the real estate section of the paper. A little Dutch Colonial in a subdivision,
a garage and lawn and hedged with new azaleas. “Dream on, right?… Michelle?”

“Sure, Mama, right. Dream on…” Michelle rubbed her mother’s hand. There were cheap rings on each finger. “… Mama. Loopy wants
you to do him a favor.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

“He’ll pay you.”

“Sure he will.”

“Just listen.”

Bits listened to her daughter’s story. Then she looked at the money in the knapsack. Then she took the knapsack to the back
corner of the bar and counted the cash. She didn’t believe the ten thousand dollars belonged to Loopy Rojas. But she didn’t
suspect the truth either. Instead she assumed Loopy had given Michelle money pooled by a collection of Latino workers at the
Farms who needed someone to place their bets for them. And finally, she agreed to do so; there was nothing illegal in it,
was there? If Michelle and Raindancer lost, they lost. If they won, Bits would get a twenty-five-thousand dollar cut out of
the winnings.