Riders Down (5 page)

Chapter Seven

That night Matt rose from his chair as Maggie Collins walked through the terrace doorway of Chicago’s North Pond Café, on her way to joining him at a table that overlooked Lincoln Park and its duck-dotted lagoon. As usual, she turned as many heads as a waiter bearing a platter of flaming saginaki.

“What are you grinning at?” she said as she slid onto the chair he was holding for her.

“Grinning? Was that what I was doing? I thought I was just gazing in awe. You look terrific. It occurred to me again today that you’re really the only job-related perk I’ve had since I started writing about racing.”

“And more than you deserve,” Maggie answered, blue eyes gleaming as she patted her short-cropped black hair into place. It was said with the smile that so frequently flitted across her tanned face.

North Pond Café, with its wonderful food and exceptional view of the city, was one of their favorite restaurants, even though it was not located near either of their homes. Maggie owned a western suburb condo only minutes from Heartland Downs, where she trained her horses. Matt was an Evanston condo resident with a much longer commute to the racetrack but with nearby Lake Michigan as ample compensation. They dined at North Pond at least three times a month, usually after which Maggie spent the night at Matt’s place before arising at 4 p.m. for her drive to the racetrack. It was a trek that she made in exchange for Matt staying at her place the numerous other nights each month they spent together.

Maggie and Matt had been an item for nearly three years. At thirty-six, he was three years her senior and one marriage ahead of her. He and his wife Kathy had agreed to disagree after five increasingly passionless years during which Matt repeatedly refused to leave racing journalism to join her wealthy father’s media empire as a general sports columnist. Matt and Kathy realized that they had married far too impulsively, and too young, and parted on extraordinarily amicable terms, ones flavored by mutual relief.

Kathy quickly remarried—an executive in her father’s company—and, from what she told Matt, was a happy woman. In his turn, Matt entered a relationship with Maggie Collins, one-time North Shore debutante, now full-time horse trainer, a person as wrapped up in her work as he was in his. They had arrived at a comfort plateau that involved time spent together on a regular but never codified basis, a rewardingly shared sex life, and no hints of a need for formal commitment on the part of either one of these very independent individuals.

As Matt confided to his friend Rick, “It’s like going steady in high school, except as adults.”

“Better not let Maggie hear you say that.”

“Funny thing is, Rick, she feels exactly the same way I do.”

Matt often thought how lucky he was, especially compared to his friend. Rick, a lifelong bachelor, had begun a volatile, sporadic relationship eight years earlier with Chicago actress Ivy Borchers. Ivy maintained she would marry Rick only if he stopped betting on horses. Rick countered that nothing less than her retirement from acting would spur him into matrimony.

After one of their regular spats, Rick explained to Matt what he deemed to be the major cause of this lengthy standoff. “Actors are dangerously devious people,” Rick contended. “No doubt about it in my mind. Remember, they’ve been professionally trained to be somebody other than what they are. Why should I believe anything this woman says?” Matt eventually came to recognize this combative relationship for what it was: an impasse of convenience, satisfying in its strange way to both Ivy and Rick. Matt was grateful he wasn’t locked up in a life like that.

Looking across the table at Maggie as she perused the list of North Pond menu specials, he smiled as he always did when thinking of how they had met. As he loved to tell the story whenever anyone inquired, “We met at third base, where she kicked me in the nuts.”

This had occurred during a summer racetrack softball league game at Heartland Downs. Matt was playing third base for the Press Box team. In the first inning of this season opener against the Backstretch Bombers, Maggie had blasted the twelve-inch ball into a gap in right field. Her long legs carried her swiftly around first and then second base. As the right fielder released the ball, she sped toward third. Matt straddled the bag awaiting the throw, as he had countless times in his athletic life. The throw was a rocket, right on target. Maggie and the ball arrived simultaneously. Maggie slid in hard on her left side. Her upraised right foot accidentally caught the crouching Matt squarely in the groin, whereupon he dropped the ball, rolling across the white chalk line in agony.

Moments later, still gripped by pain, Matt looked up at the face of the base runner. It was a very attractive face, one now with an expression that appeared to combine both concern and pent-up laughter.

“Who the hell do you think you are, Ty Cobb?” he groaned, waving his treasured Brooks Robinson signature glove at her.

“Safe is safe,” Maggie replied, standing over him, one foot still on the bag. Then her attempt at keeping a straight face failed. She broke into laughter that was soon echoed by the rest of the players, coaches, umpires and, finally, Matt.

“Come on, I’ll help you up,” she said, extending a hand.

Matt reached for her hand and slowly got to his feet. He said, “You owe me a drink. At least.”

“After we finish whipping your sorry asses,” Maggie responded.

“Where’d you learn to talk like that? The Marines?”

“Nope. Four older brothers,” she said. “And I was the best base runner of the bunch.”

They had not met before that softball evening, but Maggie and Matt knew of each other. She was a regular reader of his
Racing Daily
column and, as trainer of a successful stable, had occasionally been mentioned in it. Matt was well aware of Maggie, who was one of only three women trainers at Heartland Downs. The other two looked like Roseanne. Maggie reminded him of a taller, sturdier version of Audrey Hepburn—Hepburn with an athlete’s body, the result in Maggie’s case of more than twenty-five years of horsebacking.

The only daughter of prominent Lake Forest attorney Jeremy Collins, Maggie had begun riding when she was five on a pony purchased by her fond father. She grew up in the equestrian show ranks, then at sixteen talked her way onto the Heartland Downs backstretch and into the summer employ of an old Texas-born trainer named Spanky Gural. It was the most exciting season of her life. She left home each morning at five o’clock, purportedly heading for her job as a counselor at a Libertyville children’s camp, but drove instead to the racetrack. There she spent long hours hotwalking, then grooming Gural’s horses, until the morning he gave in to her pestering and permitted her to start galloping horses for him. Maggie soon showed she was a natural at it, so much so that Gural encouraged her to apply for an apprentice jockey’s license.

Not long after that, one of Jeremy Collins’ law firm colleagues, Frank Rafferty, a horse owner, was observing the workouts one morning when he looked up to see Maggie cantering past on a big chestnut gelding. He waved at Maggie, whom he had known since she was a child, but she didn’t see him. When Rafferty sat down for lunch with Jeremy Collins six hours later he said, “I didn’t know your Maggie was working at the racetrack.” Jeremy Collins raised his eyebrows before returning his gaze to the menu. “Nor did I,” he murmured.

That night he confronted his daughter. Well aware of her independent streak, Jeremy still found himself puzzled by her passionate interest in horse racing. “Can’t you stay with the show horses?” he pleaded. “No,” his daughter replied. “To my mind the show world doesn’t compare with the racetrack. The sights and sounds of the track, the people, the best horses…it’s what I want to be involved with.”

Maggie walked over to her dad’s chair and looked down at him. “You’ve got to understand,” she said, “that the ribbons you win in the show world are determined by somebody’s
judgment
, their opinion. At the racetrack it doesn’t work like that. It’s a simple question of who gets there first.

“I love the competition. But I know I’ll never make it as a jockey. I’m just not
that
good a rider. But I think I’d be good at training horses. No,” she amended, “I
know
I’d be good at training horses.”

Jeremy Collins shook his head resignedly. He couldn’t help but recognize his own relentlessly competitive nature in his beautiful, earnest daughter. “All right, honey,” he said, “go for it. All I’m going to ask of you is that you finish high school and then two years of college first.”

“Deal,” Maggie said, smiling as she hugged him.

She spent five years apprenticing with Gural, one of the top horsemen in the sport. Then Maggie launched her own stable. Using seed money from her dad, she bought two horses. Each of them won their first race for her. She was twenty-five, and on her way. Now, eight years later, her stable had grown to thirty horses. Averaging nearly one hundred wins a year, Maggie was a solidly professional presence at Midwest tracks. And hers was now a frequently mentioned name in Matt’s columns when her best horses ran in Heartland’s major races.

The waiter brought their drinks, vodka and tonic for Maggie, Jack Daniels on the rocks for Matt. After ordering their dinners, he said, “I’ve got something I want to tell you about.” He described his meeting with Moe Kellman, and Kellman’s thoughts about his Uncle Bernie’s sudden death. “I don’t know if Moe is right,” Matt said, “but his track record is pretty strong, I’m told. If he
is
right, and The World’s Oldest Bookie was indeed murdered, it could be a hell of a story for me.”

Maggie had listened attentively. As she finished her salad she said, “So, do I have to start calling you Sleuth instead of Scoop?” Matt thought again how much he loved the way her eyes sparkled and her nose crinkled when she laughed, even if it was at his expense.

He said, “Are you making fun of your boon companion? You don’t envision the intrepid columnist morphing into the tenacious crime solver? I am disappointed in you.”

Maggie laughed again. Then she said, “Seriously, are you going to look into this?”

“Why not?” he shrugged. “It could be very interesting.”

Chapter Eight

A few weeks after Claude Bledsoe began his series of educational phone conversations with Bernie Glockner, he came to understand that, eventually, the old bookmaker would have to be eliminated. He realized, too, that he could not carry out his envisioned pari-mutuel heists by himself. Reluctantly, he decided to enlist the assistance of a drinking acquaintance, Jimbo Murray. He phoned Murray at the east side Madison muffler shop where Murray now worked. They agreed to meet that evening at Doherty’s Den.

Murray was a thirty-two-year-old ex-con Bledsoe had first met at his Madison YMCA, a tall, rawboned, redheaded man who, like Bledsoe, pretty much kept to himself at the workout facility.

Murray, Bledsoe learned, had entered foster care at age three and passed through a succession of non-connective care takers, bewildered by and resentful of the system the whole way. He’d been expelled from high school at sixteen for flattening his English teacher one October morning. Earlier, he had been thrown off the football team for fighting—with the head coach. The school district’s two-strike policy on teacher abuse led to his immediate expulsion.

Later that year, fancying himself a fighter, Murray entered the Madison Golden Gloves tournament in the novice heavyweight division. He pawed his way to a decision over one inept opponent, drew a couple of byes, then found himself in the finals confronting a hulking ebony specimen named Leonardo Jackson who had dispatched all of his previous opponents with awesome rapidity. In the early seconds of round one, Murray absorbed two teeth-rattling jabs, then folded like a crepe suzette. He was booed raucously as he was counted out, then hurried to the dressing room while being berated by his coach. That was the end of his boxing career.

Four years later Murray, employed as a security guard, robbed the safe of a Home Depot store on the south side of Madison—the store he was guarding. He fled to South America with $67,580 in cash. Moving from Argentina to Brazil to Costa Rica, he eluded capture for more than eight months. Then he abruptly packed up and got on a flight to Chicago. An FBI “watcher” at O’Hare Airport spotted him arriving in Terminal Five. Murray was trailed to a McDonald’s outlet on the airport’s lower level and arrested as he polished off a Big Mac. His backpack contained $46,226 of the stolen cash. Asked why he had returned to the country of his crime, Murray replied, “I couldn’t stand the goddam beaner food.” His pedestrian appetites thus led him to spend the next sixty-two months in the Taycheeda Correctional Institution outside of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Murray had never forgiven his cousin Norman, the family cut-up, for mailing to him at Taycheeda the “Get Out of Jail Free” card from a Monopoly game.

In their post-workout beer-drinking session, Murray had disclosed his life history to Bledsoe, finding an apparently sympathetic ear. As an ex-convict, Murray had had trouble finding well-paying work. He hated the muffler shop, where wages were weak, but was stuck there. However, he told Bledsoe, he had recently filed a lawsuit he expected would be productive.

Bledsoe said, “What kind of lawsuit?”

Murray said, “It’s for these burns I got. Third-degree burns on my left arm.” He rolled up the sleeve of his grease-stained blue work shirt. “You can see the scars,” he said.

“I noticed that when we worked out on the big bag,” Bledsoe said. “How did that happen?”

The burns came, Murray explained, as he was sitting minding his own business in Celestial Bodies, a suburban Madison “gentlemen’s club,” watching a nude dancer. “While I’m concentrating on the stage this other broad comes over to me and starts a lap dance, which I had not ordered,” Murray said indignantly. “I’ve been a Catholic all my life. Plus, she was semi-chubby and full-time homely. They don’t get the top girls out there in the sticks, mainly farm girls gone wrong. This was like a third-level joint, you know, and I had no business being in there except I was stoned to my toes.

“Anyway, this chick starts operating. I lean back against the table to kind of get away from her. There’s a fucking candle on the table and my Packers’ jacket catches fire and I’m fucking burned, man. I give the broad a swat to get her away from me. The bouncer throws a pitcher of water at me. I wind up in the goddam emergency room.”

Bledsoe twirled his empty beer bottle and called to Doherty for another round. Doherty didn’t hear him. He was at the other end of the long bar, attempting to referee a heated argument between two Den regulars over whether steroids should be banned from major league baseball. “I love watching five-hundred-foot homers,” one shouted. “Who gives a shit if the hitter’s huge with chemicals. Not me!”

After he’d finally gotten Doherty’s attention, Bledsoe said to Murray, “What are you going for in the suit?”

“Big bucks,” Murray exclaimed. “That’s what suits are for. My lawyer says that club should have known I was in danger from the candle. Here,” he said, “let me read you this.”

Murray extracted a thick envelope from his jacket pocket. “I carry this along, I don’t want to lose it,” he explained. “This is my lawsuit that says this joint ‘negligently and carelessly allowed open candles on the tables to be used for lighting, when they knew or should have known that customers would be endangered by dancers embracing and dancing in close proximity to customers.’ What do you think of that? Is that strong or what?”

Bledsoe had never seen Murray exhibit such enthusiasm. He pretended to look impressed at what he had heard.

“Who’s your attorney?”

Murray took a long pull at his Miller Genuine Draft. “It’s kind of cool,” he said. “Lady named Alberta Erlebacher. I met her years back when she was my parole officer. She was going to law school at night then. She was real nice to me. I always stayed in touch with her even when I didn’t have to.”

Murray shook his head. “You know,” he said, “there are some real loonies doing lawsuits. Clogging up the court system.”

“Is that right?” Bledsoe replied.

“Damn right,” Murray said. “There’s a story in the paper today about a guy got leg cramps, him and his wife, flying to Europe. London, Spain, I don’t remember where. But they come up with this story that the seats on their plane didn’t give them enough room for their legs.

“Well, shit, I can understand that. First time me and my girl-friend Vera took a vacation we went to Acapulco. She got a deal on a group flight, or tour, I don’t know what they called it, but Claude, it was bad. Row in front of me, the guy sat back and about had his head in my lap. I had to give him a good slap to get him to straighten up. Even then it was uncomfortable as hell. We get to Mexico, I’m sore and stiff as hell when I come shuffling off the damn plane.

“So, yesterday when I read about this guy’s suit against the airlines, I can, like, identify. But then I go on reading about him. Get this. He says in his lawsuit that his airline seat was so bad that five days later he’s cramped up, and he trips going up the steps to some cathedral over there, and falls on his face, and busts his front teeth and his glasses. Almost a
week
later! Now he’s suing the airlines for two hundred grand. Is that some major bullshit or what?

“Kind of stuff like that, man, makes my lawsuit look pretty goddam good. Am I right?”

Bledsoe signaled the bartender. “My round,” he said.

Bledsoe was silent as the beers were delivered. He said, “So, your case won’t be coming to trial for awhile. Am I right?”

“Right,” Murray said, “they’re fucking us over with the delays, all that bullshit. Fucking lawyers.

“And,” he added, draining his beer, “while I’m waiting I got some major money shortages. This chick that lives with me, Vera that I mentioned, works the night shift at Oscar Mayer during the week. But when she’s out on the weekends, man, she’s like an ATM machine in reverse, sucking up my bread.”

That had been two weeks ago. Tonight, when the two men met again at Doherty’s Den, the previous conversation resumed in almost seamless fashion, Murray again complaining about his money shortage and Vera’s profligate ways. “I’m crazy about that chick, but she’s busting my balls with her spending,” he told Bledsoe. “From the standpoint of finances, I’m in a shithole section of my life,” he added morosely. “I need to get a better job, or a second bad one to go with the one I’ve got.”

There was a silence as they drank their beers and looked up at the television set behind the bar. Murray became engrossed in the rerun of a “reality” show on which large, well-built, butch-looking women, scantily attired in fake furs, beat the crap out of muscular, equally well-oiled, but outnumbered male opponents.

At the first commercial break Bledsoe, who had remained quiet as he tried to exclude the sounds of televised mayhem, turned to Murray.

“Do you mind hurting people?” he asked.

“Claude, that’s what I do best,” boasted Murray, draining his beer bottle and thumping it on the bar. He smiled as he confided, “I just don’t like getting hurt myself. I’m not into pain, except for giving it.”

Bledsoe took another look out of the corner of his eye at the big, strong, stupid, and malleable specimen beside him. Then he said, “I think I’ll have some work for you. Easy work for good money, nothing dangerous. We’ll talk next week.” Bledsoe got up to leave.

Murray’s big red race turned an even brighter hue. “All right, brother, sounds good to me.” He was still smiling after Bledsoe had gone out the door.

Bledsoe walked briskly back to his apartment. Two houses down from his building he passed the home of one of Madison’s numerous resident liberals, an attorney/women’s rights activist named Marcia McCollister. It was a small frame house with a huge red, white, and blue flag hanging from a second floor window. Instead of stars and stripes, the flag was emblazoned with the names of huge corporations: Exxon, Enron, GMC, Halliburton, Eli Lilly. On her front porch, facing the street, was a large blackboard, on which Marcia placed a new inscription every Monday morning. This week’s read “Impeach President Pinhead, Your MisLeader.”

Bledsoe passed Marcia’s property without glancing at the sign. As apolitical as he was amoral, he never paid any attention to such typically Madison-like statements. His thoughts were on crimes to be committed.