Murder at the Racetrack

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Murder at the Racetrack Page 15

by Otto Penzler


  “But he did quit…”

  “Working as a mover was just temporary, till Ray could get a job in his chosen field.” Her expression bordered on glare. “Mr. Heller—if you want to talk to Ray, he’s waiting by the car, right over there.”

  She pointed and I glanced over at a blue Ford coupe parked just behind a squad car. A big, rugged-looking dark-haired guy, leaning against the vehicle, nodded to us. He was in a short-sleeve green sportshirt and brown pants. His tight expression said he was wondering what the hell I was bothering his wife about.

  Gently as I could, I said, “I might have a couple questions for him, at that, Mrs. Stemmer. Would you and Sally wait here, just a moment? Don’t go anywhere, please…”

  I went inside and found Mullaney and Cullen in the living room, contemplating the tape outline. Things were obviously winding down; the crime scene boys were packing up their gear, and most of the detectives were already gone.

  “Button, button,” I said to them. “Who’s got the button?”

  Cullen glared at me, but Mullaney only smiled. “The brown button, you mean? Cullen, didn’t you collect that?”

  The captain reached a hand into his suitcoat and came back with the brown button and held out the blood-caked item in his palm.

  “You want this, Heller?”

  “Yeah,” I said, marveling at the evidence-collecting protocol of the Chicago Police Department, “just for a minute…”

  I returned to Mrs. Stemmer, under the tree, an arm around her niece.

  “Couple questions about your husband,” I said.

  “Why don’t you just talk to him?” she asked, clearly exasperated.

  “I will. I’m sorry. Please be patient. Does your husband have a coat that matches those pants he’s wearing?”

  “Well… yes. Maybe. Why?”

  “Isn’t wearing it today, though.”

  “It’s warm. Why would he wear it… ?”

  “Could this button have come off that jacket?”

  She looked at it. “I don’t know… maybe. I guess. That button’s filthy, though—what’s that caked on there?”

  Quietly, I said, “When did you say your husband started his new job?”

  “Last week.”

  “But he didn’t have to go to work today?”

  “No… no. He had some things to do.”

  “Does he normally get Fridays off?”

  “I don’t know. He just started, I told you.”

  “So it’s unlikely he’d be given a day off…”

  “Why don’t you ask him”

  “Mrs. Stemmer, forgive me, but… does your husband have a gambling problem?”

  She drew in breath, but said nothing. And spoke volumes.

  I ambled over to the tall, broad-shouldered man leaning against the Ford.

  “Mr. Stemmer? My name’s Heller.”

  He stood straight now, folded his arms, looked at me suspiciously through sleepy eyes. He’d been out of earshot when I spoke to his wife, but could tell I’d been asking her unpleasant questions.

  “Why were you bothering my wife? Are you one of these detectives?”

  “Yeah. Private detective.”

  He batted the air with a big paw. “You’re nobody! I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “Private detective,” I picked up, “who followed Rich Miller to the track most of this week.”

  “… What for?”

  “For Rose’s husband—he thought she and Miller were playing around.”

  He snorted a laugh. “Only thing Richie Miller plays is the nags.”

  “And you’d know, right, Ray? See, I saw you and your buddy Richie hanging out together at Washington Park. You were betting pretty solid, yourself. Not big dough, but you were game, all right.”

  “So what?”

  “Well, for one thing, your wife thinks you started a new job last week.”

  The sleepy eyes woke up a little. “And I guess in your business, uh… Heller, is it? In your business, you never ran across an instance of a guy lying to his wife before, huh?”

  “You like the nags, too, don’t you, Stemmer? Only you don’t like to get nagged—and I bet Rose Vinicky nagged the hell out of you to pay back that three hundred. Did she hold back from your paycheck, too?”

  He shook his head, smiled, but it was sickly. “Rose was a sweetheart.”

  “I don’t think so. I think she was a hardass who maybe even shorted a guy when he had his hard-earned money coming. Her husband loved her, but anybody working for her? She gladly gave them merry hell. She was that kind of nag.”

  A sneer formed on his face, like a blister. “I don’t have to talk to you. Take a walk.”

  He shoved me.

  I didn’t shove back, but I stood my ground; somebody gasped behind me—maybe Doris Stemmer, or the girl.

  “You knew about that money, didn’t you, Stemmer? The money Rose was going to use to treat your wife to a Hollywood trip. And you could use eleven hundred bucks, couldn’t you, pal? Hell, who couldn’t!”

  He shoved me again. “You don’t take a goddamn hint, do you, Heller?”

  “Here’s a hint for you: When a bookie like Goldie gets paid off, right before the legbreakers leave the gate? That means somebody finally had a winner.”

  His face turned white.

  “Sure, she let her brother-in-law in the front door,” I said. “She may have had you pegged for the kind of welsher who stiffs his own sister-in-law for a loan, but she probably thought she was at least safe with you, alone in her own house. That should’ve been a sure bet, right? Only it wasn’t. What did you use? A sash weight? A crowbar?”

  This time he shoved me with both hands, and he was trying to crawl in on the rider’s side of the Ford, to get behind the wheel, when I dragged him out by the leg. On his ass on the grass, he tried to kick me with the other leg, and I kicked him in the balls, and it ended as it had begun, with a scream.

  All kinds of people, some of them cops, came running, swarming around us with questions and accusations. But I ignored them, hauling Stemmer to his feet, and jerking an arm around his back, holding the big guy in place, and Cullen believed me when I said, “Brother-in-law did it,” taking over for me, and I quickly filled Mullaney in.

  They found four hundred and fifteen bucks in cash in Stemmer’s wallet—what he had left after paying off the bookie.

  “That’s a lot of money,” Mullaney said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “I won it on a horse,” Stemmer said.

  Only it came out sounding like a question.

  • • •

  After he failed six lie detector tests, Raymond Stemmer confessed in full. Turned out hard-nosed businesswoman Rose had quietly fired Stemmer when she found out he’d been stealing furniture from their warehouse. Rich Miller had told Rose that Ray was going to the track with him, time to time, so she figured her brother-in-law was selling the furniture on the side to play the horses. She had given him an ultimatum: Pay back the three hundred dollars, and what the furniture was worth, and Rose would not tell her sister about his misdeeds.

  Stemmer had stopped by the house around nine-thirty and told Rose he’d brought her the money. Instead, in the living room, as she reached for her already burning cigarette, he had paid her back by striking her in the back of the head with a wrench.

  Amazingly, she hadn’t gone down. She’d staggered, knocked the ashtray to the floor, only to look over her shoulder at him and say, “You have the nerve to hit me?”

  And he found the nerve to hit her again, and another ten times, where she lay on the floor.

  He removed the woman’s diamond wedding ring and went upstairs and emptied the wallet. All of this he admitted in a thirty-page statement. The diamond was found in a toolbox in his basement, the wrench in the Chicago River (after three hours of diving). His guilty plea got him a life sentence.

  About a week after I’d found Rose Vinicky’s body, her husband called me at my office. He was sending a check fo
r my services—the five days I’d followed Miller—and wanted to thank me for exposing his brother-in-law as the killer. He told me he was taking his daughter to California on the trip her mother had promised; the sister-in-law was too embarrassed and distraught to accept Vinicky’s invitation to come along.

  “What I don’t understand,” the pitiful voice over the phone said, “is why Rose was so distant to me, those last weeks. Why she’d acted in a way that made me think—”

  “Mr. Vinicky, your wife knew her sister’s husband was a lying louse, a degenerate gambler, stealing from the both of you. That was what was on her mind.”

  “… I hadn’t thought of it that way. By God, I think you’re right, Mr. Heller… You know something funny? Odd. Ironic, I mean?”

  “What?”

  “I got a long, lovely letter from Rich Miller today. Handwritten. A letter of condolence. He heard about Rose’s death and said he was sick about it. That she was a wonderful lady and had been kind to him. After all the people who’ve said Rose was hard hearted to the people who worked for us? This, this ... it’s a kind of… testament to her.”

  “That’s nice, Mr. Vinicky. Really is.”

  “Postmarked Omaha. Wonder what Miller’s doing there?”

  Hiding from the legbreakers, I thought.

  And, knowing him, doing it at the dog tracks.

  Author’s Note: My thanks to George Hagenauer, my longtime research associate on the Heller stories, for finding the Vinicky case in an obscure true-detective magazine. I have compressed time and omitted aspects of the investigation; and some of the names in this story have been changed.

  THE ODDS

  Thomas H. Cook

  The paired numbers shot through his mind in quick metallic bursts, the dry slap of bullets hitting beach sand. It is the way he’d lived, like a man under fire, raked by numbers, no trees to shield him, no foxholes, only the endless open beach, with no sun or moon above him, just the melancholy stare of her sea-blue eyes.

  “Who is he, anyway?”

  “Eddie Spellacy.”

  He heard his brother Jack’s true voice for the first time in almost thirty years, heard it as it actually sounded, not over the phone, but here, beside his bed.

  “Eddie the Odds, they called him.”

  There was a hopeless sorrow in Jack’s voice, a yearning for things to have turned out differently, and so he didn’t open his eyes because he knew that his brother’s long sad face would break his heart.

  “He was always figuring the odds.”

  “The odds on what?”

  “Everything, I guess. But he made his living figuring them on horses.”

  The voices came from a world he could not live in, where men and women moved easily about, heedless of the way things really were, the awesome knowledge that was his, how the odds, no matter what they seemed, could abruptly change. Her sad sweet voice curled through his mind, What’s wrong, Eddie? Even then, his answer, thrown over his shoulder as he fled from her, had seemed more truth than lie, I just have to go.

  “They find him on the street?”

  “No, he had a room. Nothing more than that. He didn’t need anything more. He’d stopped seeing other people years ago. Even me. He said he’d figured the odds that on the way to his place something might happen to me. A car wreck. A plane crash. Too risky, he told me. Anything can happen.”

  “So how’d he get to the hospital?”

  “He had a heart attack. Somebody heard him moaning in his room, I guess. Called 911. I don’t know who called. Just someone.”

  Someone, but not her, Eddie thought. Someone anonymous, a neighbor down the hall who knew only that the guy in Room 603 was Eddie the Odds, one of nature’s freaks, a human calculator who never went out, was never seen, never visited, with no dog, no cat, with nothing but his streaming numbers. Eddie the Odds. Eddie the Oddball.

  He twisted about violently, the odds streaming through his head, each number an accusation, reminding him of that day, the sudden movement, the heavy fall, the way she’d seen him in the corner of the playground the next day, started toward him, the look in her eyes as he’d risen and walked away. He’d wanted to tell her what had happened, but what were the odds she’d have felt the same about him after that? What were the odds she’d ever laugh with him again, or touch his hand?

  “So all these years he just stayed in his room and figured the odds?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On what?”

  “On crazy stuff. Whether a tree would fall or a car would jump the curb. Stuff like that. He never got close to anyone. Never married, had kids. He was afraid the odds were against them if he did. That he increased the odds. He said he couldn’t help it. It wasn’t something he wanted to do. It was something his mind couldn’t stop doing. All day, figuring the odds.”

  “So he’s like… deranged?”

  Yes, Eddie thought. As deranged as a man who washes his hands a hundred times a day, repeats the same phrases over and over and over, turns off the light a thousand times or compulsively opens and reopens the refrigerator before he can withdraw that single bottle of hyper-filtered water. He’d finally turned it into a profession, the only choice he’d had since the fearful results of his compulsion had made it impossible for him to do anything else. He couldn’t go to an office, couldn’t have a profession.

  “So when did this thing start, this thing with the odds?”

  “When he was still a kid.”

  “What did it start with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  With a girl, Eddie answered now, though without speaking, keeping his secret safe, the odds now incalculably vast against his ever revealing it. Her sea-blue eyes rose like two lost moons over a turbulent river of rapidly streaming numbers.

  She.

  The only one he’d ever loved.

  He saw her as she looked the morning she’d first come to Holy Cross, Margaret Shaunassey, twelve years old, a new girl in the neighborhood, with a smile like spring rain and sea-blue eyes. What were the odds, he’d asked himself at that first moment, that she would even notice him, a kid from West 47th Street, Eddie the kidder, Eddie the goof, a school-yard prankster, tall for his thirteen years, with a freckled face he could do anything with, shape like dough, turn tragic or comic by turns, hide all his shyness and uncertainty behind.

  “So he’s been this way his whole life?”

  “Not his whole life. But most of it. It came on him when he was thirteen.”

  Thirteen, Eddie thought as he lay silent and unmoving, save for the backward journey of his mind. Thirteen and in love with Margaret Shaunassey. But what were the odds that he could win her against the likes of handsome boys like Angelo Balderi and smart ones like Herbie Daws? Not very good, he guessed, but in that same instant knew he would shirk off all his fearful lack of confidence, and boldly go where he had never gone, go there with everything on the line, all his chips on this one number, spin the wheel, regardless of the odds.

  “And since then?”

  “Since then, he’s been Eddie the Odds.”

  Eddie the Odds, alone in a cramped little room in a Brooklyn hotel, staring at Manhattan, but never going there, because he couldn’t stop his mind from figuring the odds of a subway accident or a bus collision or the even greater odds against a flooded tunnel or collapsing bridge, odds that were constantly changing, like the flipping numbers on that immense scheduling board he’d once seen in Grand Central, odds forever racing by at an impossible click, turning on him suddenly, throwing endless strings of calculations, odds that exploded all around him, hurling earth and shrapnel, lighting his inner sky with millions of sparks. But worst of all, as he knew too well, they were odds that he increased simply by being on that train or bus, increased by being the carrier of bad luck, misfortune like a virus he could spread to anyone, and so increased the odds that the little girl next to him in the subway or the little boy beside him on a bus would be dead, dead, dead. Dead because of him. Dead because he defied
the odds, brought death with him where he stood and where he went, untimely death, against all odds.

  He felt his fingers draw into a fist, then the fist thrust outward, the way it had that morning, just a little shove, but one that had finally recoiled and come rushing back toward him, invisibly penetrating the hard bone of his skull, reconfiguring his brain in a freakish and irrevocable way, turning him into what he had become since then, Oddball Eddie, Eddie the Odds.

  In a quick vision, he saw the home he might have had, and had so often imagined during the long years he’d lived in his small cramped room. A large house with a large yard, kids playing on the green lawn, and she there, too, the one he’d done it for, Margaret Shaunassey, the girl with the spring-rain smile.

  He’d first spotted her in the school playground, and against the odds, approached her.

  I’m Eddie Spellacy.

  Hi.

  You’re new, right?

  Yes.

  After that it had been all jokes, and Eddie the jokester had made her laugh and laugh, laugh until her eyes watered and she fought for breath and clutched her sides and begged him to stop, stop, because it was killing her, this laughter.

  And so he’d stopped, fallen silent, then, more in love than anyone in books or movies, revealed the mission of his lovesick heart.

  I’ll always look out for you.

  And he’d meant it, too, meant it as deeply as he’d ever meant anything. He would be her knight, escort her through the mean streets of Hell’s Kitchen, fend off the neighborhood dragons, its street toughs and bullies, protect her from catcalls and leering glances, and still later, as they grew older, married and had children, he would protect her from the fear of loss and abandonment, the dread of loneliness and the steady drip of age. He would do all of this. And he would do it forever. He would never cease, until she was safely home.

  You can feel safe with me, Margaret.

  That was when she’d reached into her lunch box and offered him one of her mother’s homemade cookies.

  I do feel safe with you, Eddie. I really do.

  What else is there but this? he wondered now, the thought cutting through the flaming trails of exploding odds, What else is there for a boy but this offer of protection? If he had ever known nobility, it was then. If he had ever known courage or self-sacrifice, these had come to him through her, fallen cool and sweet upon his shoulders like spring rain. All he had ever wanted was joined with her, his hope for marriage, family, an ordinary life.

 

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