Have Gat—Will Travel (19 page)

Kerrigan spoke around the corner of his soggy cigar, "So where does Loring fit?"

"Fillson got his slimy hooks into Loring, but Loring couldn't pony up enough to keep Fillson satisfied, and he knew it. His only chance was to spend what dough he had trying to mess up Fillson's game — which is where I came in. If he could keep the pictures from getting to his wife, maybe he could get her to turn back into the goose that laid the golden eggs. But if the pictures ever got to Mrs. Loring — happy home, good-by.

"He knew she wanted a divorce, anyway, but he wouldn't give her one. What he didn't know was that she'd hired a private cop to tail him. Anyway, he was getting squeezed where it hurt, and he threatened Fillson with exposure if he didn't lay off. With Loring ready to pop, Fillson had to get rid of him or lose his sweet racket. Enter Slippy Rancin and exit Loring. The mistake was pulling it off in my office. Five gets you ten the slug used on Loring fits the gun Rancin was waving at me just before he departed this world."

I got up and stifled a groan. "The hell with it," I said. "You've got all you need in the back room. Amuse yourself. I've got a date."

I heard the whir of the projector starting as I went out the door and down the hall. Kerrigan was going to have himself a whale of a time. . . .

I looked at my watch. It was two-thirty in the a.m. I found a nickel in my pocket and flipped it. Heads I call Nancy, tails I get some sense and go to bed. Tails. I gave her a call.

She met me at the door, the wide eyes almost black in the dimness, the swollen lips half curved in a smile. I didn't kid around. I pulled her to me and kissed her. I kissed her good. When I let go her breath was coming a little faster and I was getting plenty of oxygen myself. Her lips still looked bruised and sullen and tempting, but she looked different somehow. Then I got it. Something had happened to her eyes.

A little sigh escaped her lips and she squinted up at me.

"Shell!" she said breathlessly. "My goodness! After all, I've only known you five or six hours."

Come to think of it, she was right. I laughed.

"Baby," I said, "wait till you've known me a week."

THE
SLEEPER CAPER

Y
ou take a plane from the States and head south; a few hours later and up more than seven thousand feet, where the air is thin and clear, you land at Mexico City and take a cab to the Hipodromo de las Americas, where the horses run sideways, backwards, and occasionally around the seven-furlong track, and you go out to the paddock area after the fourth race.

You see a big, young, husky, unhandsome character with a Mexico City tan, short, prematurely white hair sticking up in the air like the end of a clipped whisk-broom, and his arms around the waists of two lovely young gals who look like Latin screen stars, and you say, "Geez, look at the slob with the two tomatoes."

That's me. I am the slob with the two tomatoes, and the hell with you.

Five days ago I'd left Los Angeles and my one-man agency, "Sheldon Scott, Investigations," and flown to Mexico for my client, Cookie Martini, an L. A. bookmaker. A big one. You may sneer at the thought of my taking a bookie for a client. Okay, sneer. As far as I'm concerned, people are going to gamble whether they are bookies or not. If they can't bet on the nags, they'll bet on the number of warts on some guy's nose. Cookie Martini was at least an honest bookie, and his money was clean. In the last year or so he'd started booking bets on tracks outside the States: France, South America, Mexico City. He and some other books taking Mexico City bets had recently been clipped for nearly three hundred thousand dollars. Cookie figured that too many longshots were coming in, too many sleepers, and he suspected a fix. So he'd hired me to find out if anything smelled here at the Hipodromo. It smelled. And it was starting to look as if a guy could get killed just sniffing.

"I wonder where Pete is?" Vera asked.

Vera was the tomato on my left, and I had to reach way down to put my arm around her. She was only five feet tall, but that still made her a head taller than Pete Pedro Ramirez, her husband. He was one of the season's leading riders at the Hipodromo, even though he was still an apprentice.

"He'll be here in a minute, Vera," I said.

He was a few minutes late, and we were to meet him here and wish him luck. Pete was riding Jetboy, the solid favorite in the fifth race coming up, and it was a big race for him. He'd started the day with a total of thirty-eight wins behind him and won the second race. One more winner and he'd lose his "bug," his apprentice's two-kilo weight allowance, and become a full-fledged jockey. It was important in another way, too. He was supposed to throw the race.

Elena Angel squeezed my right arm. "Here he comes, Shell."

For a moment, I just enjoyed the squeeze. This Elena was married to nobody and that pleased me hugely. She was tall, black-haired, with creamy skin and what I thought of simply as "Mexican" eyes. Dark eyes; soft, big, shadowed eyes with both the question and the answer in them. And her body could best be described with words that are pornographic.

I gave Elena a squeeze to make us even — actually, that particular squeeze put me way ahead — and looked to my left. I could see Pete walking toward us fast from the jockeys' room, practically sprinting. I always got a kick out of him when he was in a hurry — unless he was on a horse. He was only about four feet tall, wiry, a man of twenty-four who still looked like a kid — kid who'd haul off and slug you in the knee if you cracked wrong.

When he got close, I said, "Hi, champ. I'm sinking the roll this trip."

He grinned, jaws working while he flashed white teeth. Pete was nervous, high-strung as a thoroughbred, and he constantly chewed little candy-coated Chiclets.

"Sí," he said. "You sink it all, Shell. This one is a shoo-in. This one, I lose the bug for sure."

He spit out his gum and fished in his pocket for the pack, shook two white Chiclets out into his small palm. "Dio, they go fast," he said in surprise. "I thought I had a full box." He shrugged. "Gum?" He tossed one cube into his mouth and held out his hand.

The girls didn't chew. I took the gum, started to pop it into my mouth, and stopped when I saw Pete's face. I'd just noticed that his lips were puffed and the side of his jaw was swollen.

"What happened, Pete?" I asked. "You kiss a horse?"

He stopped grinning. "I kiss a fist. Jimmy Rath's." He saw the hot anger boil up in me at mention of the name, and he added, "I fix him. Don't worry. Sometime I fix him with a baseball bat. Anyway, I fix him good when I boot Jetboy in."

I
looked toward the oval walking ring. Jimmy Rath was there with another guy about my size. I took a step toward them, but Elena and Vera both hung onto my arms and Pete said, "Relax, Shell. So what do we prove this way? When I boot this one home, I'm through for the day. I come up to your table, and you can stand right behind me when I spit in his eye. I don't need no bodyguard. Anyway, Rath's just Hammond's stooge. Hammond, he's back of it."

I knew what Pete meant. We both knew it, and everybody knew it, but proving it was another thing. When Cookie Martini sent me down here he'd given me a letter to Pete, and Cookie told me he'd checked and there wasn't a more honest jock in the business than Pete Ramirez. I'd watched Pete race Sunday, and met him afterwards. I told him what I was here for, laid it on the line. Pete was, if anything, more interested in cleaning up any mess here than I was. Like a lot of Mexican kids born in the poor outlying states, he'd had it tough as a kid. Now he was a jockey starting to make the grade and dream the big dream: a fine house, clothes — and a hundred pairs of shoes. Racing was his job, the center of his dream. Pete wanted it to be clean, and let the best man win.

And, Pete said, jocks were throwing races. He couldn't prove it but he knew it was happening because he could ride alongside the other jocks and see them pulling leather, holding their mounts back. Sometimes owners gave their jocks instructions that their horse wasn't to finish in the money, but Pete said this other thing was different; it happened too often, to the wrong horses. And Pete had heard soft talk, rumors of fixes and payoffs and threats against jocks who weren't supposed to win. Almost always it was the favorite supposed to lose, and a longshot that actually won.

Pete had nosed around, questioned the other jocks; I'd done a pile of routine legwork in Mexico City, checking the books I could find, talking to horse-players, trying to get a lead to who was putting the fixes in. The picture was pretty conclusive: at the top was a fat guy named Arthur Hammond whom everybody seemed to be scared of. He was from the States, had once been a trainer, but was ruled off the tracks for life because of shady practices. His retinue was a little mug named Jimmy Rath, and usually a couple of heavies. Hammond occupied the same table at the track every day. He'd been in a few scraps with the local cops, but never went to jail, mainly because he was "like that" with a Mexican biggie named Valdez. Valdez wasn't a politico, but he had almost as much behind-the-scenes power as the President. And Valdez always helped his pals. Always.

Jimmy Rath had got Pete alone yesterday and told him to lose the fifth race today, Thursday, for ten thousand pesos. Pete laughed at him and walked away, reporting the bribe offer to the Racing Commission and later to me. There were no witnesses or corroboration, and consequently no proof. Apparently Rath had just now made his offer again, a little differently.

I asked Pete, "When did this happen? Anybody see it?"

"No, no, of course not. He send me over to the tack room after the fourth, and boosted the ante to fifteen thousand. Then he say I either lose or get taken care of. I told him to go — well, you know. That's when he hit me, and when I wake up, he's gone."

Elena said angrily, "They ought to do something about that Rath."

"Yeah." As far as I was concerned, the "they" was rapidly becoming me. My fingers were sticky; I realized I still held the Chiclet in my sweaty hand, and the sugary coating was getting slippery. I stuck the gum into my coat pocket and looked toward the walking ring. Rath wasn't there. I knew where he probably was; with Hammond and two other bruisers upstairs.

I
n a few minutes Pete left to weigh in, and the three of us went back upstairs to our table high in the stands overlooking the beautiful oval track bordered by trees, the green lawn cool inside it. A hundred conversations swelled around us, and a constant stream of men and women wound in and out of the tables. It was pleasant and lovely, but mainly I was looking at four men seated a few tables away from us.

Jimmy Rath was there with two bruisers — and Hammond, a thick bulge of fat puffing over his collar. Rath's sitting at the same table was proof enough that Hammond was the boy fixing the races, as far as I was concerned. The Racing Commission and the cops felt differently. And it would take more than hunches to get Hammond because of his pal Valdez.

Suddenly I stopped paying any attention to Hammond. Something was moving on my leg, slowly, suggestively. Elena and I sat close together facing the track, and her hand was resting just above my knee, caressing me gently.

I turned and looked at her face close to mine, looked at the rest of her. She was wearing a gray skirt and a pink sweater that covered her up completely, but was still very nearly indecent. A shroud on that body would have looked indecent.

"Cuidado!" I said. "Be careful, baby. Two seconds and another inch, and I'll go screeching around the track with the horses."

She smiled, wiggled long lashes. My spine wiggled. "I will be careless," she said. "You do not look enough at me." Her hand moved. I moved. I had never been alone with Elena since Pete introduced us, but I knew if I ever was, there'd be plenty happening.

I put my hand over hers and said, "Honey, you want me to fall down frothing?"

"Yes," she said. Then: "What is frothing?"

The question was gone from her eyes now; only the answer was there. I started to tell her a terrible lie about what frothing meant, but right then the high, fast notes of the bugle sounded, and the announcer said the horses were coming onto the track for the Quinta Carrera, the fifth race.

Elena took her hand away, and I put it back; then the horses were passing in front of us. I saw Pete in bright red-and-white silks up on Jetboy, a black five-year-old gelding with clean, graceful lines. I expected Pete to look up and nod or wave, but he went right on past, head slightly bent.

I realized I didn't have a bet down on Jetboy, so I went down to the window and bought two fifty-peso win tickets. Jetboy was one to two, the odds-on favorite. By the time I'd reached the table again, the race had already started. I sat down beside Elena, stuck the two tickets into my pocket and my fingers hit the sticky gum.

I pulled it out and started to throw it away. Then I noticed that the white coating had melted and there was what appeared to be a hole pushed into the gum. I squinted at it, spread the thing with my fingernails. There was a hole all right, with a white powdery stuff inside it. It hit me all at once, and I jumped to my feet just as the crowd did, except that they were yelling about the race.

T
he horses were charging down the far side of the track, opposite the stands, and Jetboy trailed the fifth place horse by four lengths. Usually Pete stayed closer than that, but he wasn't riding as smoothly as he usually did. I knew damn well why, and my heart jumped up into my mouth as he started his move on the last turn. The crowd was jumping up and down as Jetboy reached the fourth spot close behind the bunched leaders. I watched Pete slumped over the saddle, riding sloppily, not like a kid with thirty-nine winners behind him — and then he tried to go through on the inside, and I bunched my hands into tight fists and almost squeezed my eyes shut. He couldn't make it; there wasn't room and I knew he couldn't make it. I was yelling at the top of my lungs as I saw Jetboy practically brushing the hard, sharp wooden rail. The whip came down again, and it all happened in a second.