Murder at the Racetrack (35 page)

It was a way of telling Katie Flanders, too, that Fritzi’s private professional life was beyond her comprehension.

So Katie drove, and liked it that Fritzi so trusted her with his car, which wasn’t like Fritzi Czechi in fact, or any man
she’d ever known, asking or allowing a woman to drive his car while he sat in the passenger’s seat staring out the window.
Katie wondered if maybe Fritzi was in one of his moods: captured by the look of the mottled, marbled early-evening sky like
the usual sky over northern New Jersey, clouds like chunks of dirty concrete shot with veins of acid-yellow and sulfur-red.
This Jersey sky they’d been seeing all their lives, Katie thought. Familiar as a ceiling of some room you could die in.

The last time Fritzi had taken Katie to Meadowlands to see one of his horses race had been a year ago, or more. That year
had passed slowly! Fritzi’s horse then was Pink Lady, a four-year-old who hadn’t won her race but hadn’t lost badly, in Katie’s
opinion. Pink Lady had galloped so hard, Katie’s heart had gone out to the shuddering mare, whipped by her scowling little
jockey but unable to overtake the lead horses who’d seemed to pull away from the rest immediately out of the gate as if by
magic. Pink Lady had come in third, out of nine. That wasn’t bad, was it? Katie had seemed to plead with Fritzi, who’d said
little about the race, or about Pink Lady, and he hadn’t encouraged Katie’s encouragement, still less her emotions. Always
Katie would remember
A racehorse is beyond computation
and understand it as a rebuke.

A gentle rebuke, though. Not like somebody telling you to shut up and mind your own business, you don’t know shit.

Fritzi Czechi was one of those men in Katie’s life—Katie didn’t want to think how many there were, and that some of them knew
one another from Jersey City High where they’d all gone—who’d been in and out of her life since the early 1970s. Now it was
1988 and they were fully grown, no longer high school kids, yet when you looked closely at them, as at yourself in a mirror,
frankly, unsparingly, you saw that they were still kids trying to figure what the hell it was all about, and what they were
missing out on, they were beginning to realize they’d never get.

Except Fritzi Czechi. But for his broken-up marriages, Fritzi hadn’t done badly. He exuded a certain glamour. He dressed in
style. He was a fair-skinned, lean, ropy-muscled man of about five feet nine, not tall, carrying himself with a certain confidence,
at least when people were likely to be watching. Fritzi had strangely luminous stone-colored eyes, fair hair thinning at the
crown he wore slightly long so that it curled behind his ears; he had a habit of stroking his hair, the back of his head,
a medallion ring gleaming on the third finger of his right hand. (Katie recalled Fritzi had once worn a wedding band. But
no longer.) Fritzi was a good-looking man, if no longer as good-looking as he’d been six or seven years before when his smiling
picture had been printed in Jersey papers as the part-owner of a Thoroughbred that had won $500,000 in the Belmont Stakes.
(Katie had saved these clippings. She hadn’t been going out with Fritzi at that time, Fritzi had been married then. If he’d
been seeing other women, which probably he had been, Katie Flanders wasn’t one of these women.)

As well as horses, Fritzi was known to have invested in a number of restaurants, clubs, and bowling alleys in Jersey, though
he rarely spoke of his business life; it was part of Fritzi’s glamour that he was so reticent, so elusive you might say, keeping
his private life to himself, so if you were Katie Flanders you’d have to hear from other sources that things were going well
for Fritzi, or not so well. “Investments,” horses, marriages. (Three marriages. Children, both boys, from the first, long-ago
marriage when Fritzi had thought he’d wanted to be a New Jersey state trooper like his oldest brother. So far as Katie knew,
Fritzi was separated from his third wife, not yet legally divorced. But it was only an assumption. She couldn’t ask.) Definitely
it was part of Fritzi Czechi’s glamour that he did unpredictable things like giving money to bankrupt Jersey City High for
new uniforms for both the boys’ and the girls’ varsity basketball teams, or he’d send boxes of expensive chocolate candies
to the mothers of certain of his old friends for their birthdays, or hospitalizations, or a dozen red roses to a woman friend
like Katie Flanders he was sorry about not having seen in a while, as a token of his “esteem.” Fritzi was known to pick up
tabs in restaurants and clubs, and he was known to lend money to friends, if they were old friends, without asking for interest,
and often without much hope of getting the money back.

He’d “lent” money to Katie, too. When there’d been a medical crisis in her family. When she’d tried to return it he’d told
her, “Someday, sweetheart, you can bail me out. We’ll wait.”

Katie was a secretary at Drummond Tools, Ltd., in Hackensack. One of those temporary jobs, she’d thought, until she got married,
started having babies. But just to be a secretary these days you had to know computers, and computers are always being upgraded,
which is scary as hell when you’re on the downside of thirty and not getting any younger or smarter while the new girls being
hired look like junior high kids. The thought chilled Katie. She reached out to touch Fritzi’s arm, needing to touch him,
and liking the fact that it was Katie Flanders’s privilege to touch Fritzi Czechi in this casual intimate way since they were
more than lovers, they were old friends. “This BMW, Fritzi, is
very nice.”

Fritzi said, “Well, good.”

He wasn’t listening. He’d put away his racing forms and was staring now at his watch, which he wore turned inward, the flat
oval disc of digital numbers against his pulse. As if, with Fritzi Czechi, even the exact time was a secret.

“’Specially compared to my own.” Katie drove a 1985 Ford compact, not a new model when she’d bought it. After this roomy number
it would feel about the size of a sardine can.

Katie was suddenly quiet, realizing how she sounded. Like she was hinting that Fritzi give her this car, or another like it.
She didn’t mean that at all. She only just wanted to talk. She was lonely, and she wanted to talk. After last night, she wanted
to be assured that Fritzi cared for her, that he wasn’t already forgetting her, his mind flying ahead to the Meadowlands racetrack,
to that blur of frantic movement out of the gate and around the dirt track and back to the finish line that would involve
less than two minutes, yet could decide so much. She was frightened: If things turned out badly for Morning Star, as, she’d
gathered, they hadn’t turned out all that wonderfully for Pink Lady, Fritzi would be plunged into one of his moods. If he
didn’t call her, she could not call him. He’d never exactly said, but that was her understanding. Wanting to tell him,
It’s lonely being the only one in love.

She wondered: Maybe Fritzi wasn’t driving because his license had been suspended? Or maybe: nerves?

If they were living together, or married, Katie had to concede, Fritzi would be like this much of the time: distant, distracted.
If—why not be extravagant, in fantasy—they had children, he’d never be home. Yet she felt tenderness for him. She wanted to
forgive him, for hurting her. Katie’s father, now deceased, a machine shop worker in Jersey City through his adult life, had
been the same way. Probably most men were. So much to think about, a world of numbers, odds that always eluded them. So much,
they couldn’t hope to squeeze into their heads.

Lonely? That’s life.

The night before, in her apartment, in her bedroom where he’d rarely been, Fritzi had showed Katie snapshots of Morning Star,
taken at the Thoroughbred farm where the horse was boarded and trained in rural Hunterdon County. The way Fritzi passed the
snapshots to her, Katie could sense that he felt strongly about the horse; the way he pronounced “hairline fracture,” with
a just-perceptible faintness in his voice, allowed Katie to know that Fritzi felt this injury as painfully as if it had been
his own. “Beautiful, eh?” was all Fritzi could say. Katie marveled over the silky russet-red horse with a white starlike mark
high on his nose, the high-pricked ears and big shiny black protuberant eyes, for Morning Star was in fact a beauty, and maybe
the knowledge that such beauty was fragile, so powerful an animal as a horse can be so easily injured, was a part of that
beauty, as pain was part of it: the pain of anticipated loss.

“Oh yes. Oh Fritzi! Beautiful.”

Two of the snapshots had been bluntly cropped. A third party, posed with Fritzi and Morning Star, had been scissored out of
the picture. Katie wouldn’t ask: It had to be the third wife. (Her name was Rosalind. Very beautiful, people said. A former
model. And younger than Katie Flanders by several years.) In the snapshots, Fritzi Czechi was smiling a rare wide smile, one
of his hard-muscled arms slung around the horse’s neck, through the horse’s thick chestnut-red mane. Fritzi was wearing a
sports shirt open at the throat, his stone-colored eyes gleamed like liquid fire; clearly he’d been happy at that moment,
as Katie had to concede she’d never seen him.

Carefully Katie asked, “Was this last summer?”

“Was what last summer?”

“… These pictures taken.”

Fritzi grunted what sounded like yes. Already he’d taken the snapshots back and put them away in his inside coat pocket, with
his narrow flat Italian leather wallet that was so sleek and fine.

Later, making love in Katie’s darkened bedroom, Fritzi had gotten so carried away he’d almost sobbed, burying his heated face
in Katie’s neck. She’d been surprised by his emotion, and deeply moved. Katie wasn’t the kind of girl who could make love
with a man without falling in love with him, or, it was fair to say, she wasn’t the kind of girl to make love with a man without
preparing beforehand to fall in love with him, and deeply in love with him, like sinking through a thin crust of ice and you
discover that, beneath the ice, there’s quicksand. She’d been wondering if she would ever hear from Fritzi Czechi since the
last time she’d seen him, months before, and now he was with her and in her arms, and he was saying, “You’re my good, sweet
girl, Katie Flemings, aren’t you?” and Katie pretended she hadn’t heard the wrong name, or maybe she could pretend she’d heard,
but knew that Fritzi was teasing. She said, “I am if you want me, Fritzi.” She hadn’t meant to say this! It sounded all wrong.
Holding Fritzi’s warm body, stroking his smooth tight-muscled back, kissing the crown of his head where his hair was thinnest,
as, half-consciously, you might kiss an infant at such a spot, to protect it from harm, she teased, “Are you my ’good, sweet
guy,’ Fritzi Czechi?”

Fritzi was most at ease in banter. The way an eel squirms, so you can’t get hold of it.

•    •    •

Fritzi said, “Exit after next, sweetheart.”

The Meadowlands exit was fast approaching. Traffic was becoming congested in the northbound lanes. Katie, who’d been cruising
at fifty-five miles an hour, was wakened from her reverie by her lover’s terse voice. The BMW handled so easily, you could
forget where you were, and why.
Maybe he’s testing me. Like a racehorse.

“Looks like lots of people have the same idea we do.” Katie meant the other vehicles, headed for the racetrack. “Coming to
see Morning Star win his race!”

Again, this sounded wrong. Childish. Katie knew better. Men who followed the horses, especially men like Fritzi Czechi who
were professionally involved in the business, didn’t require vapid emotional support from women, probably they resented it.
All that they required was winning, which meant good luck, beating the odds, and no woman could provide that for them.

Except for the Meadowlands complex, which covered many acres, this part of Jersey wasn’t developed. The land was too marshy.
There were dumps, landfills. Long stretches of sere-colored countryside glittering with fingers of water like ice. Toxic water,
Katie supposed. All of northeast Jersey was under a toxic cloud. Yet there was a strange beauty to the meadowlands, as it
was called. Even the chemical-fermenting smell wasn’t so bad, if you were used to it. Katie remembered how once when she’d
driven along this northern stretch of the Turnpike, into a wasteland of tall wind-rippled rushes and cattails that stretched
for miles on either side of the highway, traffic had been routed into a single, slow lane, for there were scattered fires
burning in the area; mysterious fires they’d seemed at the time, which Katie would learn afterward had been caused by lightning.
The season had been late summer; much of the marshland was dry, dangerously flammable. Clouds of black, foul-smelling smoke
drifted across the highway, making Katie choke, stinging her eyes. There were firetrucks and emergency medical vehicles, teams
of fireworkers in high boots in the marsh, Jersey troopers directing traffic. Katie had tried not to panic, forced to drive
her small car past fires burning to a height of ten feet, brilliant flamey-orange, some hardly more than a car length from
the highway. Like driving through hell, you took a deep breath and held it and followed close behind the vehicle in front
of you, hoping the wind (yes, it was windy, out of the northeast) wouldn’t blow a spark or a flaming piece of vegetation against
your car, and after a mile or so you were out of the fire area and you could see again, and you could breathe again, and you
felt the thrill of having come through, a sudden stab of happiness. “I’m alive! I made it.”

Fritzi was directing Katie to exit, and where to turn at the top of the ramp. As a horse owner he had a special parking permit.
Again Katie wondered why he wasn’t driving the BMW and would afterward think,
It was all so deliberate! Like life never is.

They went to the long open barn behind the racetrack where the horses were stalled before their races. This part of the Meadowlands
complex, hidden from view of spectators, was bustling with horse activity. Katie stared: so many horses! A local TV camera
crew was filming the noisy disembarkment of a Thoroughbred stallion from his van, led blinkered and whinnying down a ramp
by his elderly trainer. Photographs were being taken. Katie was struck, as she’d been at her previous visit, by the number
of what you’d call civilians in the barn: families, including young children, hovering about their horses’ stalls. And everywhere
you looked, horses were the tallest figures: their heads looming above the heads of mere human beings, who appeared weak and
inconsequential beside them. Even Fritzi Czechi looked diminished, his face suddenly creased with an expression you wouldn’t
call worry, more like concern, an intense concern, as he was approaching Morning Star’s stall.