Murder at the Racetrack

by Otto Penzler

  When you collected the whole world, your albums held spaces for many more stamps than you would ever be able to acquire. Keller knew he would never completely fill any of his albums, and he found this not frustrating but comforting. No matter how long he lived or how much money he got, he would always have more stamps to look for. You tried to fill in the spaces, of course—that was the point—but it was the trying that brought you pleasure, not the accomplishment.

  Consequently, he never absolutely had to have any particular stamp. He shopped carefully, and he chose the stamps he liked, and he didn’t spend more than he could afford. He’d saved money over the years, he’d even reached a point where he’d been thinking about retiring, but when he got back into stamp collecting, his hobby gradually ate up his retirement fund—which, all things considered, was fine with him. Why would he want to retire? If he retired, he’d have to stop buying stamps.

  As it was, he was in a perfect position. He was never desperate for money, but he could always find a use for it. If Dot came up with a whole string of jobs for him, he wound up putting a big chunk of the proceeds into his stamp collection. If business slowed down, no problem—he’d make small purchases from the dealers who shipped him stamps on approval, send some small checks to others who mailed him their monthly lists, but hold off on anything substantial until business picked up.

  It worked fine. Until the Bulger & Calthorpe auction catalog came along and complicated everything.

  Bulger & Calthorpe were stamp auctioneers based in Omaha. They advertised regularly in Linn’s and the other stamp publications, and traveled extensively to examine collectors’ holdings. Three or four times a year they would rent a hotel suite in downtown Omaha and hold an auction, and for a few years now Keller had been receiving their well-illustrated catalogs. Their catalog featured an extensive collection of France and French colonies, and Keller leafed through it on the off-chance that he might find himself in Omaha around that time. He was thinking of something else when he hit the first page of color photographs, and whatever it was he forgot it forever.

  Martinique #2. And, right next to it, Martinique #17.

  • • •

  On the screen, the Two horse led wire to wire, winning by four and a half lengths. “Look at that,” the little man said, once again at Keller’s elbow. “What did I tell you? Pays three-fucking-forty for a two-dollar ticket. Where’s the sense in that?”

  “Did you bet him?”

  “I didn’t bet on him,” the man said, “and I didn’t bet against him. What I had, I had the Eight horse to place, which is nothing but a case of getting greedy, because look what he did, will you? He came in third, right behind the Five horse, so if I bet him to show, or if I semi-wheeled the Trifecta, playing a Two-Five-Eight and a Two-Eight-Five…”

  Woulda-coulda-shoulda, thought Keller.

  • • •

  He’d spend half an hour with the Bulger & Calthorpe catalog, reading the descriptions of the two Martinique lots, seeing what else was on offer, and returning more than once for a further look at Martinique #2 and Martinique #17. He interrupted himself to check the balance in his bank account, frowned, pulled out the album that ran from Leeward Islands to Netherlands, opened it to Martinique, and looked first at the couple hundred stamps he had and then at the two empty spaces, spaces designed to hold—what else?—Martinique #2 and Martinique #17.

  He closed the album but didn’t put it away, not yet, and he picked up the phone and called Dot.

  “I was wondering,” he said, “if anything came in.”

  “Like what, Keller?”

  “like work,” he said.

  “Was your phone off the hook?”

  “No,” he said. “Did you try to call me?”

  “If I had,” she said, “I’d have reached you, since your phone wasn’t off the hook. And if a job came in I’d have called, the way I always do. But instead you called me.”

  “Right.”

  “Which leads me to wonder why.”

  “I could use the work,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “You worked when? A month ago?”

  “Closer to two.”

  “You took a little trip, went like clockwork, smooth as silk. Client paid me and I paid you, and if that’s not silken clockwork I don’t know what is. Say, is there a new woman in the picture, Keller? Are you spending serious money on earrings again?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Then why would you… Keller, it’s stamps, isn’t it?”

  “I could use a few dollars,” he said. “That’s all.“

  ” So you decided to be proactive and call me. Well, I’d be proactive myself, but who am I gonna call? We can’t go looking for our kind of work, Keller. It has to come to us.”

  “I know that.”

  “We ran an ad once, remember? And remember how it worked out?” He remembered, and made a face. “So we’ll wait,” she said, “until something comes along. You want to help it a little on a metaphysical level, try thinking proactive thoughts.”

  • • •

  There was a horse in the fourth race named Going Postal. That didn’t have anything to do with stamps, Keller knew, but was a reference to the propensity of disgruntled postal employees to exercise their Second Amendment rights by bringing a gun to work, often with dramatic results. Still, the name was guaranteed to catch the eye of a philatelist.

  “What about the Six horse? ” Keller asked the little man, who consulted in turn the Racing Form and the tote board on the television.

  “Finished in the money three times in his last five starts,” he reported, “but now he’s moving up in class. Likes to come from behind, and there’s early speed here, because the Two horse and the Five horse both like to get out in front. ” There was more that Keller couldn’t follow, and then the man said, “Morning line had him at twelve-to-one, and he’s up to eighteen-to-one now, so the good news is he’ll pay a nice price, but the bad news is nobody thinks he’s got much of a chance.”

  Keller got in line. When it was his turn, he bet two dollars on Going Postal to win.

  • • •

  Keller didn’t know much about Martinique beyond the fact that it was a French possession in the West Indies, and he knew the postal authorities had stopped issuing special stamps for the place a while ago. It was now officially a department of France, and used regular French stamps. The French did that to avoid being called colonialists. By designating Martinique a part of France, the same as Normandy or Provence, they obscured the fact that the island was full of black people who worked in the fields, fields that were owned by white people who lived in Paris.

  Keller had never been to Martinique—or to France, as far as that went—and had no special interest in the place. It was a funny thing about stamps; you didn’t need to be interested in a country to be interested in the country’s stamps. And he couldn’t say what was so special about the stamps of Martinique, except that one way or another he had accumulated quite a few of them, and that made him seek out more, and now, remarkably, he had all but two.

  The two he lacked were among the colony’s first issues, created by surcharging stamps originally printed for general use in France’s overseas empire. The first, #2 in the Scott catalog, was a twenty-centime stamp surcharged “MARTINIQUE” and “5 c” in black. The second, #17, was similar: “MARTINIQUE / 15c” on a four-centime stamp.

  According to the catalog, #17 was worth $7,500 mint, $7,000 used. #2 was listed at $11,000, mint or used. The listings were in italics, which was the catalog’s way of indicating that the value was difficult to determine precisely.

  Keller bought most of his stamps at around half the Scott valuation. Stamps with defects went much cheaper, and stamps that were particularly fresh and well centered could command a premium. With a true rarity, however, at a well-publicized auction, it was very hard to guess what price might be realized. Bulger & Calthorpe described #2—it was lot #2144 in their sales catalog—as “mint wit
h part OG, F-VF, the nicest specimen we’ve seen of this genuine rarity.” The description of #17—lot #215 3—was almost as glowing. Both stamps were accompanied by Philatelic Foundation certificates attesting that they were indeed what they purported to be. The auctioneers estimated that #2 would bring $15,000, and pegged the other at $10,000.

  But those were just estimates. They might wind up selling for quite a bit less, or a good deal more.

  Keller wanted them.

  • • •

  Going Postal got off to a slow start, but Keller knew that was to be expected. The horse liked to come from behind. And in fact he did rally, and was running third at one point, fading in the stretch and finishing seventh in a field of nine. As the little man had predicted, the Two and Five horses had both gone out in front, and had both been overtaken, though not by Going Postal. The winner, a dappled horse named Doggen Katz, paid $19.20.

  “Son of a bitch,” the little man said. “I almost had him. The only thing I did wrong was decide to bet on a different horse.”

  • • •

  What he needed, Keller decided, was fifty thousand dollars. That way he could go as high as twenty-five for #2 and fifteen for #17 and, after buyer’s commission, still have a few dollars left for expenses and other stamps.

  Was he out of his mind? How could a little piece of perforated paper less than an inch square be worth $25,000? How could two of them be worth a man’s life?

  He thought about it and decided it was just a question of degree. Unless you planned to use it to mail a letter, any expenditure for a stamp was basically irrational. If you could swallow a gnat, why gag at a camel? A hobby, he suspected, was irrational by definition. As long as you kept it in proportion, you were all right.

  And he was managing that. He could, if he wanted, mortgage his apartment. Bankers would stand in line to lend him fifty grand, since the apartment was worth ten times that figure. They wouldn’t ask him what he wanted the money for, either, and he’d be free to spend every dime of it on the two Martinique stamps.

  He didn’t consider it, not for a moment. It would be nuts, and he knew it. But what he did with a windfall was something else, and it didn’t matter, anyway, because there wasn’t going to be any windfall. You didn’t need a weatherman, he thought, to note that the wind was not blowing. There was no wind, and there would be no windfall, and someone else could mount the Martinique overprints in his album. It was a shame, but—

  The phone rang.

  Dot said, “Keller, I just made a pitcher of iced tea. Why don’t you come up here and help me drink it?”

  • • •

  In the fifth race, there was a horse named Happy Trigger and another named Hit the Boss. If Going Postal had resonated with his hobby, these seemed to suggest his profession. He mentioned them to the little fellow. “I sort of like these two,” he said. “But I don’t know which one I like better.”

  “Wheel them,” the man said, and explained that Keller should buy two Exacta tickets, Four-Seven and Seven-Four. That way Keller would only collect if the two horses finished first and second. But, since the tote board indicated long odds on each of them, the potential payoff was a big one.

  “What would I have to bet?” Keller asked him. “Four dollars? Because I’ve only been betting two dollars a race.”

  “You want to keep it to two dollars,” his friend said, “just bet it one way. Thing is, how are you going to feel if you bet the Four-Seven and they finish Seven-Four?”

  • • •

  “It’s right up your alley,” Dot told him. “Comes through another broker, so there’s a good solid firewall between us and the client. And the broker’s reliable, and if the client was a corporate bond he’d be rated triple-A.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “Keller,” she said, “what makes you think there’s a catch?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But there is, isn’t there?”

  She frowned. “The only catch,” she said, “if you want to call it that, is there might not be a job at all.”

  “I’d call that a catch.”

  “I suppose.”

  “If there’s no job,” he said, “why did the client call the broker, and why did the broker call you, and what am I doing out here?”

  Dot pursed her lips, sighed. “There’s this horse,” she said.

  • • •

  The fifth race was reasonably exciting. Bunk Bed Betty, a big brown horse with a black mane, led all the way, only to be challenged in the stretch and overtaken at the wire by a thirty-to-one shot named Hypertension.

  Hit the Boss was dead last, and which made him the only horse that Happy Trigger beat.

  Keller’s new friend got very excited toward the end of the race, and showed a ten-dollar Win ticket on Hypertension. “Oh, look at that,” he said when they posted the payoff. “Gets me even for the day, plus yesterday and the day before. That was Alvie Jurado on Hypertension, and didn’t he ride a gorgeous race there?”

  “It was exciting,” Keller allowed.

  “A lot more exciting with ten bucks on that sweetie’s nose. Sorry about your Exacta. I guess it cost you four bucks.”

  Keller gave a shrug that he hoped was ambiguous. In the end, he’d been uncomfortable betting four dollars, and unable to decide which way to bet his usual two dollars. So he hadn’t bet anything. There was nothing wrong with that, as a matter of fact he’d saved himself two dollars, or maybe four, but he’d feel like a piker admitting as much to a man who’d just won over three hundred dollars.

  • • •

  “The horse’s name is Kissimmee Dudley,” Dot told him, “and he’s running in the seventh race at Belmont Saturday. It’s the feature race, and the word is that Dudley hasn’t got a prayer.”

  “I don’t know much about horses.”

  “They’ve got four legs,” she said, “and if the one you bet on comes in ahead of the others, you make money. That’s as much as I know about them, but I know something about Kissimmee Dudley. Our client thinks he’s going to win.”

  “I thought you said he didn’t have a prayer.”

  “That’s the word. Our client doesn’t see it that way.”

  “Oh?”

  “Evidently Dudley’s a better horse than anybody realizes,” she said, “and they’ve been holding him back, waiting for the right race. That way they’ll get long odds and be able to clean up. And, just so nothing goes wrong, the other jockeys are getting paid to make sure they don’t finish ahead of Dudley.”

  “The race is fixed,” Keller said.

  “That’s the plan.”

  “But?”

  “But a plan is what things don’t always go according to, Keller, which is probably a good thing, because otherwise the phone would never ring. You want some more iced tea?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “They’ll have the race on Saturday, and Dudley’ll run. And if he wins you get two thousand dollars.”

  “For what?”

  “For standing by. For making yourself available.

  “I think I get it,” he said. “And if Kissimmee Dudley should happen to lose—where’d they come up with a name like that, do you happen to know?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “If he loses,” Keller said, “I suppose I have work to do.”

  She nodded.

  “The jockey who beats him?”

  “Is toast,” she said, “and you’re the toaster.”

  • • •

  None of the horses in the sixth race had a name that meant anything to Keller. Then again, picking them by name hadn’t done him much good so far. This time he looked at the odds. A long shot wouldn’t win, he decided, and a favorite wouldn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile, so maybe the answer was to pick something in the middle. The Five horse, Mogadishy, was pegged at six-to-one.

  He got in line, thinking. Of course, sometimes a long shot came in. Take the preceding race, for instance, with its big payoff for Keller’s OTB bu
ddy. There was a long shot in this race, and it would pay a lot more than the twelve bucks he’d win on his six-to-one shot.

  On the other hand, no matter what horse he bet on, the return on his two-dollar bet wasn’t going to make any real difference to him. And it would be nice to cash a winning ticket for a change.

  “Sir?”

  He put down his two dollars and bet the odds-on favorite to show.

  • • •

  Dot lived in White Plains, in a big old Victorian house on Taunton Place. She gave him a ride to the train station, and a little over an hour later he was back in his apartment, looking once again at the Bulger & Calthorpe catalog. If Kissimmee Dudley ran and lost, he’d have a job to do. And his fee for the job would be just enough to fill the two spaces in his album. And, since the horse was racing at Belmont, it stood to reason that all of the jockeys lived within easy commuting distance of the Long Island racetrack. Keller wouldn’t have to get on a plane to find his man.

  If Kissimmee Dudley won, Keller got to keep the two-thousand-dollar standby fee. That was a decent amount of money for not doing a thing, and there were times when he’d have been happy to see it play out that way.

  But this wasn’t one of those times. He really wanted those stamps. If the horse lost, well, he’d go out and earn them. But what if the damned horse won?

  • • •

  The sixth race ended with Pass the Gas six lengths ahead of the field. Keller cashed his ticket, and ran into his friend, who’d been talking with a fellow who bore a superficial resemblance to Jerry Orbach.

  “Saw you in line to get paid,” the little man said. “What did you have, the Exacta or the Trifecta?”

  “I don’t really understand those fancy bets,” Keller admitted. “I just put my money on Pass the Gas.”

  “Paid even money, didn’t he? That’s not so bad.”