‘Sure,’ Marius agreed easily. ‘How about another ten thousand, on top?’
‘Used bills. Half before.’
‘Sure.’
Piper Boles shrugged off his conscience, tossed out the last of his integrity.
‘OK,’ he said, and sauntered away to his car as if all his nerves weren’t stretched and screaming.
Fred Collyer had heard every word, and he knew, without having to look, that one of the voices was Marius Tollman’s. Impossible for anyone long in the racing game not to recognise that wheezy Boston accent. He understood that Marius had been fixing up a swindle, and also that a good little swindle would fill his column nicely. He thought fuzzily that it was necessary to know who Marius had been talking to, and that as the voices had been behind him he had better turn round and find out.
Time however was disjointed for him, and when he pushed himself off the wall and made an effort to focus in the right direction, both men had gone.
‘Bastards,’ he said aloud to the empty night, and another late homegoer, leaving the hotel, took him compassionately by the elbow and led him to a taxi. He made it safely back to his own room before he passed out.
Since leaving LaGuardia that morning he had drunk six beers, four brandies, one double Scotch (by mistake), and nearly three litres of bourbon.
He woke at eleven the next morning, and couldn’t believe it. He stared at the bedside clock.
Eleven.
He had missed the barns and the whole morning merry-go-round on the track. A shiver chilled him at that first realisation, but there was worse to come. When he tried to sit up, the room whirled and his head thumped like a pile-driver. When he stripped back the sheet he found he had been sleeping in bed fully clothed with his shoes on. When he tried to remember how he had returned the previous evening, he could not do so.
He tottered into the bathroom. His face looked back at him like a nightmare from the mirror, wrinkled and red-eyed, ten years older overnight. Hung-over he had been any number of times, but this felt like no ordinary morning-after. A sense of irretrievable disaster hovered somewhere behind the acute physical misery of his head and stomach, but it was not until he had taken off his coat and shirt and pants, and scraped off his shoes, and lain down again weakly on the crumpled bed. that he discovered its nature.
Then he realised with a jolt that not only had he no recollection of the journey back to his motel, he could recall practically nothing of the entire evening. Snatches of conversation from the first hour came back to him, and he remembered sitting at table between a cross old writer from the Baltimore Sun and an earnest woman breeder from Lexington, neither of whom he liked; but an uninterrupted blank started from halfway through the fried chicken.
He had heard of alcoholic blackouts, but supposed they only happened to alcoholics; and he, Fred Collyer, was not one of those. Of course, he would concede that he did drink a little. Well, a lot, then. But he could stop any time he liked. Naturally he could.
He lay on the bed and sweated, facing the stark thought that one blackout might lead to another, until blackouts gave way to pink panthers climbing the walls. The Sports Editor’s warning came back with a bang, and for the first time, uncomfortably remembering that twice he had missed his column, he felt a shade of anxiety about his job. Within five minutes he had reassured himself that they would never fire Fred Collyer, but all the same he would for the paper’s sake lay off the drink until after he had written his piece on the Derby. This resolve gave him a glowing feeling of selfless virtue, which at least helped him through the shivering fits and pulsating headaches of an extremely wretched day.
Out at Churchill Downs three other men were just as worried. Piper Boles kicked his horse forward into the starting stalls and worried about what George Highbury, the Somerset Farms trainer, had said when he went to scale at two pounds overweight. George Highbury thought himself superior to all jocks and spoke to them curtly, win or lose.
‘Don’t give me that crap,’ he said to Boles’ excuses. ‘You went to the Turfwriters’ dinner last night, what do you expect?’
Piper Boles looked bleakly back over his hungry evening with its single martini and said he’d had a session in the sweat-box that morning.
Highbury scowled. ‘You keep your fat ass away from the table tonight and tomorrow if you want to make Crinkle Cut in the Derby.’
Piper Boles badly needed to ride Crinkle Cut in the Derby. He nodded meekly to Highbury with downcast eyes, and swung unhappily into the saddle.
Instead of bracing him, the threat of losing the ride on Crinkle Cut took the edge off his concentration, so that he came out of the stalls slowly, streaked the first quarter too fast to reach third place, swung wide at the bend and lost his stride straightening out. He finished sixth. He was a totally experienced jockey of above average ability. It was not one of his days.
On the grandstand, Marius Tollman put down his race glasses shaking his head and clicking his tongue. If Piper Boles couldn’t ride a better race than that when he was supposed to be trying to win, what sort of a goddam hash would he make of losing on Crinkle Cut?
Marius thought about the very many thousands he was staking on Saturday’s little caper. He had not yet decided whether to tip off certain guys in organised crime, in which case they would cover the stake at no risk to himself, or to gamble on the bigger profit of going it alone. He lowered his wheezy bulk onto his seat and worried about the ease with which a fixed race could unfix itself.
Blisters Schultz worried about the state of his trade, which was suffering a severe recession.
Blisters Schultz picked pockets for a living, and was fed up with credit cards. In the old days, when he’d learned the skill at his grandfather’s knee, men carried their billfolds in their rear pants’ pockets, neatly outlined for all the world to see. Nowadays all these smash-and-grab muggers had ruined the market: few people carried more than a handful of dollars around with them, and those who did tended to divide it into two portions, with the heavy dough hidden away beneath zips.
Fifty-three years Blisters had survived: forty-five of them by stealing. Several shortish sessions behind bars had been regarded as bad luck, but not as a good reason for not nicking the first wallet he saw when he got out. He had tried to go straight once, but he hadn’t liked it: couldn’t face the regular hours and the awful feeling of working. After six weeks he had left his well-paid job and gone back thankfully to insecurity. He felt happier stealing ten dollars than earning fifty.
For the best haul at racemeets, you either had to spot the big wads before they were gambled away, or follow a big winner away from the pay-out window. In either case, it meant hanging around the pari-mutuel with your eyes open. The trouble was, too many racecourse cops had cottoned to his modus op, and were apt to stand around looking at people who were just standing there looking.
Blisters had had a bad week. The most promisingly fat wallet had proved, after half an hour’s careful stalking, to contain little in money but a lot in pornography. Blisters, having a weak sex drive, was disgusted on both counts.
For his first two days’ labour he had only fifty-three dollars to show, and five of these he had found on a stairway. His meagre back-street room in Louisville was costing him forty a night, and with transport and eating to take into account, he reckoned he’d have to clear eight hundred to make the trip worthwhile.
Always an optimist, he brightened at the thought of Derby day. The pickings would certainly be easier once the real crowd arrived.
Fred Collyer’s private Prohibition lasted intact through Friday. Feeling better when he woke, he cabbed out to Churchill Downs at seven-thirty, writing his expenses on the way. They included many mythical items for the previous day, on the basis that it was better for the office not to know he had been paralytic on Wednesday night. He upped the inflated total a bunch more: after all, bourbon was expensive, and he would be off the wagon by Sunday.