Riders Down

by John McEvoy

  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.

  Chapter Nine

  Sleep never came easily to Marnie Rankin, and when it did arrive it was thick with dreams that rarely varied in their length or vividness.

  Each night, after going through the laborious process of transferring herself from her wheelchair to her bed, she settled back on the pillow almost resigned to what she knew her uneasy slumber would produce. She had the same two dreams almost every night, both of them amazingly accurate replays of events in her life.

  The first dream was all too short. She was ten years old, riding her saddle horse Monty through the fields of her parents’ southwest Iowa farm. It was a morning in early summer, sunny, the dew glistening on the thick pasture grass, and she thrilled at the sense of speed and freedom she felt as she rode swiftly and surely in the protective envelope of her childhood. Nothing that followed in Marnie Rankin’s life ever approximated the innocent exhilaration of those Iowa mornings. But this dream never lasted long enough.

  In contrast, the second dream was far too long. It always began the same way, when she heard her own voice crying out:

  “No…no…no room, dammit, no room.”

  She was standing up in the irons aboard the blocky, hard-trying horse named Royal Rascal in a race at Bayou Downs in Louisiana, hauling back hard on the reins as Royal Rascal’s front hooves came dangerously close to the heels of Tucker’s Dream, the runner directly in front of them on the rail. At the same time, to her immediate right, Jesus Chavez—her major rival for leading rider honors at the track—pulled even with her on the favorite, Mightily, and began edging closer to Marnie, pinning her and Royal Rascal down on the rail.

  “No, no,” she repeated, begging for racing room, pleas that most rival jockeys would respond to and heed. She yanked on Royal Rascal’s left rein, pulling his head almost sideways. He edged closer to the rail and she felt her left leg scrape against the wood, stinging her calf muscle. Her arms ached from the effort of trying to slow down her horse and thus extricate the two of them from this moving box of peril in which they were trapped.

  With an eighth of a mile to go in the race, Jesus Chavez looked over his shoulder at Marnie. He grinned malevolently. She saw him clearly, but the possibility of what he would do next never entered her mind. True, their mutual dislike was deep, and Chavez’ fiercely competitive nature was well known. Even so, when Chavez first eased his mount over another two feet, Marnie screamed as much in surprise as fear. Terror tore through her as Royal Rascal clipped the heels o
f Tucker’s Dream. As Marnie started to go down, Chavez yanked his mount’s reins to the outside and, with a crack of his whip, moved away into a clear lead.

  Marnie’s screams of “no, no” trailed through the humid Louisiana air as she plunged off the right side of her falling horse, landing directly in the path of the trailing runners. Her first reaction was that of all good jockeys who fall—to roll, thus softening the impact of the abrupt landing from an animal going thirty-five miles an hour.

  Marnie did that perfectly. When she’d come to a halt, she immediately tried to slide on her stomach underneath the rail. She realized her helmet strap had come loose, and she reached for the strap with her right hand. That was the last thing she remembered from that day.

  In the next second and a half, despite their riders’ frantic efforts to avoid her, Marnie was battered in quick succession by the iron-shod feet of two rapidly moving horses. The first impact shattered her left arm. The second scraped a metal horseshoe across her face, slicing open her jaw. The third broke her life in two—a crushing blow to her spine that permanently crippled her.

  Breaking the surface of consciousness in her bed each night, Marnie usually found herself wet with sweat in the wake of this dream. Struggling to prop herself up against the pillow, knowing she would be awake for hours now, she wished that, if the dreams must come each night, at least their order would be reversed. But this never happened.

  The action sequence that caused Marnie Rankin’s injuries took seven and three-quarters seconds on the racetrack. She went from being a twenty-six-year-old athlete in peak condition to a permanently handicapped woman in the time it takes a thoroughbred to run slightly more than a sixteenth of a mile. Her subsequent hospital stays measured five months. More months of outpatient therapy followed. None of the post-fall events ever were in her dream—just the central event that decimated her body and her life forever.