by Otto Penzler
• • •
Into Katie’s still-shaking hand Fritzi was placing—what? An envelope?
He’d taken it out of his inside coat pocket. It was the size of a greeting card, it was sealed. On the front hand-printed KATIE FLANDERS. Fritzi said, “Don’t open this till later. Promise.”
“Promise—what?”
“Don’t open this till later.”
“Later, when?”
But Fritzi was walking away from her. Fritzi was leaving her behind. Like a sleepwalker, she would remember him. Ashen-faced, and sweaty, and his damp hair curling and lank behind his ears. And the back of the sexy Armani jacket sweated through between his shoulder blades. Katie called, “Fritzi? Wait.” Tried to follow him but there were too many others in the aisle. Damn, Katie was stumbling in her ridiculous high-heeled shoes. “Fritzi?” Trying to follow the man she loved, and always she would remember: It was one of those nightmares where you are trying, trying desperately, to get somewhere, but can’t, like making your way through quicksand, a bog that’s sucking at your feet, and she could see Fritzi only a few yards away, quickly descending the steps in the center aisle, for a few confused seconds her vision was blocked, then again she saw, she would be a witness, as Fritzi Czechi made his swift and unerring way to the woman in the wide-brimmed straw hat and eye-catching lilac pants suit, this woman and her male friend who were also on their feet, dazed and exhilarated by the outcome of the race, which for them, too, would seem to have been unexpected, more than they’d hoped, and then Katie was seeing the woman glance around, at Fritzi, her geisha-white face not quite so young as Katie had thought, and frightened, yet she was trying to smile, for a woman’s first defense is a smile, and her companion beside her who was just lighting a cigarette turned to see Fritzi, too, and possibly there was a glimmer of recognition here, too, but no time for alarm, for there was a flash of something metallic in Fritzi’s upraised right hand, and the man staggered and fell back, and there was a second flash, and the young woman screamed and fell, the straw hat knocked from her head, there came one, two, three more shots and now in the crowd there were isolated screams, shouts, a wave of panic that sucked all the oxygen from Katie’s lungs and brain and left her paralyzed unable to believe she’d seen what she had seen, for it had happened too swiftly, nothing like a movie or TV scene for in fact she couldn’t see, all was confusion, the backs of strangers, the flailing arms of strangers, a man beside her elbowing her in his desperation to escape, a woman behind her beginning to sob, and Katie was frantic to get to Fritzi, but shoved to the side, her leg bruised against a seat, and now there came another shot, a single shot, and more screams, on all sides strangers were shoving and pushing to escape, while others were ducking down into their seats, and Katie from Jersey City understood it was wisest to imitate these, huddling in her seat with her face pressed against her knees, her arms crossed over the tender nape of her neck, praying to God another time for help, as if in these moments of terror not knowing who the shooter was, and what he’d done, and that, with that last shot, it was probably over.
• • •
He’d killed them with a handgun that would be identified as a .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol with a defaced serial number that would be traced to a shipment of several hundred similar pistols that had been illegally sold in the New York City area in the mid-1980s. He’d killed his estranged wife and her companion with two shots and three shots respectively. From a distance of less than eighteen inches. Both had died within seconds. He’d then turned the gun on himself, as witnesses watched in horror, placing the barrel precisely at the back of his head, aiming upward, and pulling the trigger with no hesitation. It was a stance, it was an act, Fritzi Czechi had clearly rehearsed many times in solitude.
Katie identified herself to police. Katie Flanders, who’d been Fritzi Czechi’s companion. Dazed and exhausted yet not hysterical (not yet: that would come later) she’d answered their questions, all that she knew. Suddenly sick to her stomach, vomiting what tasted like hot acid. She was fainting, medics attended her, her blood pressure dangerously low, yet she recovered within a few minutes and was strong enough to refuse to be taken to the hospital. Refused an ambulance. No, no! She searched for the envelope that had fallen beside her seat. With badly shaking fingers she opened it as police officers looked on. Yet, she opened it. Inside were keys to the BMW, and registration papers, and a document that looked legal, deeding the car to “Katie Flanders.” A terse hand-printed note on a stiff white card:
Dear Katie
This is for you. Also the things in the trunk.
A token of my esteem.
Fritzi C.
Esteem! Fritzi C.I Katie began to laugh shrilly, helplessly, swiping at her eyes. Fritzi Czechi had eluded her, as she’d always known he would. It had not mattered that she loved him. It had not mattered what old, good buddies they were, from Jersey City. Like the roan stallion with the white starburst on its forehead overtaking, passing the other horses, galloping furiously, unstoppable, continuing in his ecstatic head-on plunge away from the dirt track, out of Meadowlands park, out of your vision and into eternity.
HOTWALKING
Julie Smith
I come back to myself around six a.m. one fine December morning. The first thing I’m aware of is that I’m in some kind of institutional cafeteria, my hands clutching one of those generic thick white mugs, this one filled with a murky liquid— undoubtedly coffee, but you couldn’t prove it by me. My taste buds aren’t working so well, and neither is anything else. I’m still too groggy to even know my name, which is as new as my surroundings. I feel a hand on my shoulder and soft breath at my ear. “Ya feelin’ better, baby?”
A black woman is standing behind me, hovering gently. She is the one who brought the coffee. Better than what? I wonder. I can’t remember feeling anything, ever, but pretty soon I remember too much, and realize that that’s because I haven’t wanted to. I’ve been in a state of alcohol-induced numbness for weeks, maybe months. But it comes to me soon that I may be where I want to be.
“I’m fine,” I lie. “Thanks for the coffee. Am I at the Fair Grounds, by any chance?”
“Least ya got that right. Ya know what day it is?”
I don’t. “But I’m in New Orleans, right?” I ask.
“Oh baby,” the woman says. She sits down across from me and I see that she is in her fifties and she has a round, kind face. “Ya need a job? Mr. DeLessep’ need a hotwalker. Ya know what hotwalkin’ is?”
I do know. And I know the Fair Grounds is a racecourse, and that I am on the backside. I know the backside of a track like my own neighborhood. I know its language, its rhythms, even its secrets—including the fact that it’s a good place to hide, that people like me, lost souls who love horses and want a ready-made community, turn up at tracks routinely. No one will think a thing about my being here, will think it odd that I seem to have dropped from the sky, with my Yankee accent and decent grammar. I am Italian by birth, but I can probably pass for Hispanic, like most of the low-level workers at the Fair Grounds. At least till I open my mouth.
“I’m Luz,” I say, and I’m acutely aware of the homonym. I must have been feeling self-destructive when I picked it. Big surprise.
“Velvet,” she answers, and it takes me a moment to realize that this is her name.
“Good to meet you,” I say. “How can I find Mr. De-Lesseps?” I know his name, of course. I’ve made it my business to know who all the best trainers are, all the important owners, all the big horses. Perhaps I will get to walk Big Easy, which I’d like a lot.
There is more racing in Louisiana than you’d imagine— maybe more than in any other state. Some of the best riders grew up at the cheap tracks in Acadia, sat on the backs of horses while other kids played on seesaws. Still, this is not the land of the Secretariats and the Seabiscuits and the Silky Sullivans. It isn’t the big time, but thoroughbreds remind me of that old saying about sex—even the worst is wonderful. There are still some n
ice animals here, and Big Easy’s one of the best—or used to be. He isn’t the horse that interests me most, and Jimmy DeLesseps isn’t the trainer I came here to meet, but I’ve still plucked a plum.
In a few hours I’ve sobered up, and I find that I have an instant family, a ton of new friends, and a half-decent job— walking hots, about all I can handle right now. I also have sunshine, clear blue sky, and the company of horses. Everything I want. I’ve landed on my feet, though God knows how.
In one way it’s a sad day, though. Some horse breaks a leg in the fourth race, and I see his doc put him down, right on the road by the dumpsters. I can’t help it, I get tears in my eyes. The vet turns to me. “He didn’t suffer,” he says, not knowing that I know as much about it as he does. “We used to have to use what they call the Humane Killer.” He shakes his head. “How ya like that? the Humane Killer.”
“You mean you shot them.”
“Yeah, but some of these docs drink a little too much, and they got to missing too many times, and sometimes the wrong horse got shot, or maybe a person. So we switched to strychnine.”
“Strychnine.” I wince, knowing what that would do to a horse, thinking about the convulsions, how its neck would stretch backward, the agony the drug would cause the animal.
“But then we had to stop that, too. Because they were feedin’ the dead horses to the lions at the Audubon Zoo, and the cats were pukin’ their guts out.”
In spite of myself, I laugh. Because I know I’m really in New Orleans. Where else would you hear a story like that?
I think of my favorite Damon Runyon yarn, “A Story Goes with It,” the one about Hot Horse Herbie, the tout whose tips always came with a tale. In New Orleans, a story always goes with it—whatever it is—and it usually makes you laugh.
Even though it’s early afternoon and a three-year-old colt has just become lion food, I feel okay. I know I can make it. I can stay here and sober up and do what I came here to do.
I get a little apartment in Mid-City, right in the Fair Grounds neighborhood, and I go to meetings when I can, but mostly I work, and that does it by default, almost.
Many of the jobs at the track, like mine, require little or no skill—though some require the nerve of a fighter pilot—but you’ve got to show up. That’s almost the whole job. You have to be there at five a.m. every day, including weekends. No one gets a day off. Ever.
• • •
Annalise Marino Finley, the person I was before I morphed into Luz Serrano, used to have her own business, which she ran with her husband, Sam. She has a graduate degree, and people address her as Dr. Finley. Annalise is a damn good veterinarian. Luz Serrano walks horses to cool them down.
That’s all hotwalking is. They have machines that do it now, but they’re awkward and a little dangerous. Most of the good trainers don’t use them. Nothing like the human touch, especially with a fractious animal, and thoroughbreds are notoriously fractious.
The backside of the track—the backstage part, if you will—is its own little bustling city. Everybody’s got a job to do, but there’s a lot of downtime, too, and nobody notices a young Hispanic-looking woman in jeans, as long as she doesn’t go where she doesn’t work. I pretty much have the run of the place, if I stay out of the big owners’ barns. That old-time racetrack secrecy thing is still in force. God forbid somebody should clock your horse, a phrase that means a lot more than time it with a stopwatch. For instance, you might, if you were bold enough, unwrap its bandages to look at its legs. You might discover it had a bowed tendon, which would be disastrous in a claiming race.
Because in a claiming race, you’re gambling that the horse you claim is “worth the money,” as we say in my village. Claiming is a gamble, like everything else here, and we prefer that word to “bet.” If he wants to keep his horse, the owner is gambling that his horse won’t get claimed; if he doesn’t, he’s betting the horse will.
If he gives a horse a drug called etorphine (aka elephant juice), he’s betting it’ll run like Citation, but not go crazy enough to run into a wall. He’s also gambling that it doesn’t get tested.
In theory, all the winners get tested after the race, and sometimes—as in a stakes race—so do the other horses who run in the money. But testing is like airport security—some days it doesn’t happen the way it’s supposed to. The Cajun guys like to roll the dice to see if it’s worth it to take a shot. If one guy sends a horse (shoots him up with narcotics, which, oddly enough, stimulate horses), and the horse doesn’t test positive, word gets around that the drug he used is passing. And there’s suddenly a rash of positives. One weekend, I heard, eighteen winners tested positive at the Fair Grounds.
My friend Bumpy Verrette, who works at the window, takes a philosophical view: “Look, ya got ten horses in a race, half are on the needle, the other half are on the joint. No problem. Ya got a level playing field.”
When he says “joint,” he’s not talking about pot—he means a little battery with two prongs on it that slips in the palm of the rider’s hand. Give a horse a jolt of that, he’s gonna run his haunches off. It’s also called a machine, and it’s highly illegal. The old-timers say when they harrow the turf, they turn them up by the dozen.
In a weird way, Bumpy’s right—everybody’s out for the edge. I should know. My husband, Sam, was a racetrack vet. Here’s the simple fact: There’s only one injection it’s legal to give a horse on race days. That’s a diuretic called Lasix, which reduces a horse’s blood pressure. Yet ninety percent of the injections given are administered on race days.
So how does it work? Easy. First of all, blood and urine samples can disappear. There’s no overseer to watch everyone in the spit barn every minute, and there are plenty of people there to do the dirty. Grooms, for instance. The people who walk the horses in the barn, cooling them out while they’re waiting to be tested. The piss catchers themselves. The test barn vet. The secretary in the state vet’s office. Nobody else is supposed to be in the barn, but for one reason or another, there’s always traffic.
Then, too, lots of drugs don’t show up in tests, and they aren’t really illegal. They’re just against the rules. Simple as that. An owner loses the purse if his horse gets a bad test, but he doesn’t go to jail. Most track vets do what they’re told, so long as it’s not illegal and it doesn’t hurt the horse. The vet’s got nothing to lose, and certain injections make the animals safer and more comfortable. Calcium and vitamin Bl, for instance, which tend to calm the horses. ACTH, a hormone that depletes their stores of adrenaline. Antibiotics to treat infection. Bronchodilators to prevent bleeding in the lungs.
Narcotics will test, however, and so will acepromazine, a highly illegal tranquilizer. Commonly given no-nos are morphine, Dilaudid, Ritalin and apomorphine, which Sam and I used to laugh about. When Sam first came to the track, he was so green someone said to him, “Hey, Doc, you gonna give him apo today?” and Sam thought he meant “Alpo.”
• • •
Sam and I grew up together in Jersey, in a suburb of New York. We fell in love in high school, mostly, I guess, because of our mutual affinity for animals. I loved the way he talked to his pets, and later to his patients. I’d imagine him talking to our children that way. Maybe the same thing attracted him to me—if I may brag for a moment, back home I had a reputation as a bit of a horse-whisperer.
We got married after college, went through vet school together and opened a small animal hospital. But Sam’s first love was always horses. It wasn’t long before he began working for first one trainer, then another. Though we both hated the schedule, he was hooked—and not only on the seamy romance of the track. He wanted to make a lot of money in a hurry, so we never had to worry about things like sending our kids to college—the kids we didn’t yet have. “Just a few years,” he’d say, “and I’ll come home to the puppies and kitties and guinea pigs. And we’ll have three beautiful children and live in style.” A track vet can make as much as $400,000 a season.
Problem wa
s, Sam, poor baby, was so naive he ended up involved with a small-time mobster. And didn’t even know it.
At the time, he was working for a trainer named Clancy Forest. Clancy, in turn, was employed by an owner named Claire Brent, whose “big horse” was a dazzling colt named Satan’s Moon. Sam never met Mrs. Brent, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. She didn’t own that horse, or any of the others under her name.
One day Sam reported for work, and the foreman said, “Hey, Doc, got a job for you. The horse in Stall Eighteen got a positive on his Coggins. Clancy said take him outside and put him down.” He meant the horse had come down with swamp fever, equine infectious anemia.
Sam did as he was told. Afterward, he covered the dead horse with a tarp and went on to his other duties. An hour later, he heard shouting, to which he paid no attention, and then Clancy hunted him down, car keys in his hand. He rattled them like a weapon, like he was going to go for Sam’s eyes. “Doc, you put the wrong goddam horse down. “No, I didn’t. The foreman said Stall Eighteen. “Stall Eight, dammit. Loose Lady was in Eighteen.” The way Sam told it, sweat popped out on his brow and the back of his neck prickled. Loose Lady had just won a stakes race. She wasn’t as fast as Moon, but she was a damned valuable filly.
