The Bookwoman's Last Fling

by John Dunning

  “Like maybe he was trying to prove something?”

  “Maybe he was.”

  I made a few cryptic notes. “Did you have any more to say with Candice?”

  “We had a couple of conversations, just before they left. She was asking me if I had ever worked with any great horses; I think she was trying to get him to go to the yearling sale at Keeneland and buy some expensive horses, but he didn’t seem to care by then. If you want my opinion, I think he did care. He cared desperately but was afraid to put his ass on the line. I didn’t realize this then, but I’ve thought about it since and I’d bet I’m right. He was afraid to fail, especially at that stage of his life. Here was this guy who knew everything about bad-legged gimpy horses, and I think he was afraid to buy himself a real racehorse. He thought there’d be a spotlight on him then, and that’s the last thing he wanted. What if it broke down? What if it ran badly, for any of those weird reasons? What if, what if, what if—you can drive yourself crazy with stuff like that.” She shook her head. “But damn, I think he was a great trainer. He coulda been a real contender.”

  “And instead he retired himself,” I said.

  “Yep, and that was his undoing. He was one of those guys who should never retire. Guys like Geiger need to die in the saddle.”

  So he let Junior run things and he just watched and got old. “I was long gone by then,” she said. “I was working for other trainers, but I’d see them at one race meet or another, and I always tried to pass the time with Candice.”

  We leaned over a scarred and rickety coffee table and she poured coffee I didn’t need. I still hadn’t pushed her about Candice’s death, but it was there in the air between us and I knew we’d circle our wagons and get back to it. “You said you were her mentor. Can you elaborate on that?”

  “At first she wanted to know everything, but not because she wanted to know it: it was because of him, because it would give her a leg up into his life. She didn’t know that racing was already becoming his past life; she had made it that way with her money. Look, I’m not pretending that I was her great confidante, but once in a while there’d be a look or a sigh, sometimes a word or two, a question that told more than it asked…occasionally a whole conversation.”

  “Did you ever ask her any of this?”

  “Oh no. No, no, no, no. Today I might, but back then she was like some porcelain goddess and I was way too young and insecure to butt in.” She laughed. “But I knew my horses, she didn’t, and so she asked and I told her things.”

  “Like what?”

  “What horses were about, and the men who raced ’em. How they’re trained and made fit. What she had bought into when she married him. That’s what she was really asking. So over that year we became friendly. We were never bosom buddies or anything like that, but often in the morning she’d come out to the barn where I slept and we’d talk. And over time I got the drift of things. I knew he was losing interest in racing, in just about everything that had mattered to him. Now I know he had nothing else going for him, or so he thought, and she was bright enough to realize that.”

  “He was losing it.”

  “Slipping slowly into the Sargasso Sea. Not that I’m any gifted analyst; it was just obvious. Candice understood this before I did, I was kidding myself if I thought she didn’t, and he knew it too. He had started this long slide and he couldn’t do anything to pull himself out of it. That’s what happens to some men who have lived long and well on their own terms. I read that somewhere and now I believe it. They get old and nothing much matters anymore.”

  She leaned over the table. “There’s nothing more destructive at any age than getting everything you ever wanted handed to you on a platter.”

  I sipped my coffee. She smiled. I put down my cup and made the smallest possible hand gesture. “So who killed her, Martha?”

  She gave me a now-or-never look. “I’ve been living with this forever. I never told anybody, but it’s been on my mind every day all these years.”

  Suddenly she said, “Look, I said I’d fish out that description for you, but don’t waste your time. It wasn’t that guy who killed Candice. It was Baxter. Bax killed Candice.”

  25

  “He’s crazy,” she said. “If you’re looking for reasons, what else do you need to know? If you spend any time at all with Baxter, you will understand one thing about him. He’s a bona-fide fruitcake, a true loony bird. He belongs in a corner of some nuthouse cutting out paper dolls. Let me tell you something.”

  She tried valiantly to pour us another top-off, but this time I stopped her by putting my body in harm’s way. She sat and suddenly she was off again.

  “There was a story that got started about Bax. Seems he was convinced somebody was trying to sabotage him by messing with his horses’ feed. So Bax begins testing it by eating it himself. He gets into a bale of pure locoweed and eats it all with blueberries and nonfat milk, and he’s been like this ever since. They found him doing a polka at midnight with all his fillies and mares. I’m not making this up. Somebody may be, but it’s not me. They say when Bax was young the Army wanted to give him a Section Eight, but he was so far beyond that, they didn’t have numbers that high. The scary thing to me is, you never can tell what a guy like that will do. He’ll be just fine for a day, a week, two months, two years. Then he begins to slip and the cracks appear. They get wider and he starts babbling, talking but making no sense at all. Bax has a persecution complex as wide as the Mississippi River. Ask anybody who’s ever worked for him. They all love him to death at first. He’s so easy, he knows his horses, and he leaves you alone if you take good care of them, but then he’ll slip off the edge and start howling at the moon.”

  He wasn’t like Junior, she said. “Junior was just a case of bad temper. That’s all he ever was, a blowhard letting off steam. Mad because life hadn’t gone his way. But mad as in angry, not nuts.”

  Baxter was the real McCoy. “It’s frightening how normal he can be: normal and bonkers almost in the same breath, depending on how something strikes him. It’s not always something you can see, either. Haven’t you heard yet about Bax and his ways?”

  She had worked for him one whole summer: had even gone with his crew to Hot Springs. “At first I thought I was going to love working for this guy, but one day during a rainstorm he went haywire. He had a horse that was favored to win going away, except for one thing. The horse absolutely would not run on an off-track, and guess what? God made it rain that day. God made it rain, the odds dropped off, and his horse ran way up the racetrack. Hell, he’s probably still running, back there in Arkansas. Bax should have scratched him the minute the rain started that morning, but no, for some reason known to nobody else, he got it in his head he needed to win that race, no matter what, so he let him run and got what he asked for. Horse runs dead last. Say what you want about Junior, he never would’ve done that. Hold him back, let him win another day, that was Junior. Bax is the greatest example I know, how you can be cunning and crazy all at once.”

  So the morning after the mud debacle she had found him in his horse’s stall, standing in that inky darkness with the most wicked-looking butcher knife she had ever seen. The light from the shedrow gleamed off the blade, the only light anywhere in the world that morning. The rain was still falling and Bax was talking to his horse like they were blood adversaries, enemies older than time. “Make no mistake, asshole, I can kill you whenever I want to,” she heard Bax say, somewhere out in the ink: “I can put this blade right through your neck and nobody will do a thing about it.”

  A horse is nothing more than a piece of property, Bax said. “So if I tell you to run in the mud you goddam better run your bloody guts out in the fuckin’ mud, you hear that?”

  Son of a bitch, he said, more times than she could count.

  “What have you got to do in your whole fat-ass worthless life? Stand here, eat, sleep, shit, work fifteen goddam minutes a week, and twice a month I ask you to run me a horse race.”

&nb
sp; It was almost like that poor horse could understand him, she said. Long after dawn he was jittery, upset. “You think Junior would do that to a horse?”

  No, I didn’t think even Junior would do that.

  “Horses pick up vibes. Maybe they don’t know English, maybe they can’t do long division and diagram sentences, but the good ones are nobody’s fool. And I think they know hate when it comes straight at ’em like that.”

  She fluttered her hands in a gesture of pure nerves. “So try this,” she said, and her voice quaked. “Then he says, I could put you where I put Candice, just remember that if you’re ever tempted to screw me around.”

  The air in her place felt suddenly cold. I looked in her eyes again and she was very serious and credible. There are people who are believable with crazy facts and she was one of them. I nodded my belief and I could see her taking heart from that.

  “I couldn’t work for him after that,” she said. “But the damndest thing happened. I was afraid to quit. Suddenly it was like he’d been talking to me, not the horse. Like he’d been talking to me all along, it was all some kind of warning. I would see him staring at me in the shedrow and there was something about him that made me flat-out afraid, and in that moment I believed he knew I’d been there, I had heard his craziness. I believed it then and I still do. So I worked through the meet and after a month I faded away. I told Bax my best friend was sick in Tuscaloosa or some silly place, and I left the state for a while. Screw it; life’s too short as it is.

  “That was years ago and he still looks at me funny. He’ll stare at me clear across the kitchen. I try to smile and be pleasant, but hey, I’ve even given that up. Now I get busy real fast. He knows, and he knows that I know. Just this morning he came into the kitchen and said, ‘Hey, Martha, how’s your friend in Tuscaloosa?’ We’ve never said a word about it in all these years. I almost dropped dead there on the floor.”

  She shivered, recalling it. “I can’t live like this. He’s got me looking over my shoulder, everywhere I go.”

  Her fists were tight on the table. “You don’t have to take my word for anything. I can give you a whole list of ginneys who worked for him, a list as long as my arm. Most of ’em stay just long enough to cash their first few paychecks; then they’re out of there. He’s only got three or four regulars he can count on, two women and a guy who’ve been with him a while. And now I’m thinking I may leave here too. Maybe I’ll go someplace where the racing’s good and there’s not much chance of running into people.”

  We looked at each other in the dim light of her apartment. I felt as if my understanding of the case was beginning to focus and become clearer. But there was still too much out of synch; there were pieces that didn’t fit with the others. Why this was I couldn’t yet figure, but I was going to find out. I gave it the full thirty seconds, all I could allow with Martha looking in my face. Either she was lying, and I couldn’t imagine why, or Bax had long ago confessed a murder to a racehorse in the middle of the night. Either Bax was crazy or maybe we all were. Either this was one case or two. Either it was about the books, random murders, or everything was linked so tightly it couldn’t yet be pried apart. For me it had started as a quest to find some missing books, soon there was a murdered man who was also the main suspect in the book thefts, and now we had a crazy man; the bastard had come much too close and wasn’t about to stop now, and I feared for everyone: Erin, Bob, and especially this woman sitting beside me. Maybe it isn’t anything we know, I thought; maybe it’s just what he thinks we know.

  “Martha,” I said softly, “I need to ask you a favor.”

  Warily she said, “It won’t cost you anything to ask.”

  “This is a big one.”

  26

  Sharon was dozing in her kitchen when I called. I explained what I needed and why, she said she’d wire us some money, and I began laying the groundwork for a hit-and-run operation. I would hit, Martha would run, and hopefully I’d get Bob and Erin out of here as well.

  I called Golden Gate and left a message for Sandy. We needed to talk, ASAP.

  I rented Martha a motel room across town, out near the airport. She had a big box, her logbooks and notes, and this was all she needed to take from the old place. We shipped it to Idaho, leaving her with only the small suitcase to carry.

  Now came the hard part. I picked up the money Sharon had wired me and drove back to the racetrack in the fading afternoon. Erin was watching my approach with wary eyes, as if she knew exactly what was in the wind. Bob came to the open tack-room door and slouched there waiting. I sat in the empty chair and cleared my throat.

  “This is not a good sign,” Erin said. “When he clears his throat, bad things are happening.”

  “So how was Martha?” Bob said.

  “Very good. I owe you one.”

  “You want to tell us about it?” Erin said.

  “Not particularly.”

  She looked at Bob and rolled her eyes. “He wants us out of here.”

  Bob brought out a third chair and sat facing us. “Be serious,” he said.

  “He is serious,” she said.

  “She knows me way too well, Bobby. And I know her.”

  “You want us to leave when?”

  “As soon as possible. Tomorrow morning would be good if we could arrange things that soon. At least by tomorrow.”

  He shook his head: half dismay, half disbelief.

  “It may just be for a few days. A week or two at the outside.”

  “Give me one good reason and I will leave,” Erin said.

  “I’m setting a trap for this bird.”

  “And you’re afraid we’ll get in the way and mess it all up.”

  “You each make me more vulnerable, not less. And you can double that four times over for both of you.”

  I waited through the deadliest silence.

  “I don’t want to go,” she said.

  Bob just looked at us. “What the hell did Martha tell you?”

  “I’d rather not say just yet. In fact, neither of you may be in any danger at all. It might just be me he wants. Probably is. But I’d rather have you somewhere far away.”

  Erin sighed loudly. “And just like that I have ceased being an asset.”

  “You will never stop being an asset. But do this for me, please. Look at it as a short vacation. I promise you’ll be back before you know it.”

  “‘Please’ is the key word, Bobby. I know he’s serious when he goes polite on me.”

  Erin and I walked up to the racetrack alone. At the rail I put my arm over her shoulder.

  “I don’t want to go,” she said.

  “I know you don’t.”

  “I will never forgive myself if something happens and I’m not here to take care of you.”

  “You do that so well, too.”

  “Damn, I hate this.”

  “Help me with Bob, will you? He doesn’t want to go either.”

  “I’ll persuade Bob, if this is really what you want. If it’s truly necessary.”

  A moment later she said, “So is it? Necessary?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the crazy part, I just don’t know.”

  “Is this really what you want?”

  “No. But I’ve got to ask you to do it anyway.”

  “I’ll do it, then, under vigorous protest.”

  “Thank you.”

  In the morning I found Baxter over in Barn 136. His three ginneys were still unpacking saddles and bridles and other odds and ends. Bax sat in his shedrow, watching a blacksmith shoe one of his horses. I stood behind his chair and said nothing as the file husked a hoof into shape and the lightweight shoes were nailed in place.

  “Hi, Bax.”

  “Janeway. So what, you come over to get that job I offered you?”

  “As a matter of fact I did want to talk to you about helping out till Sandy gets here. I’m going stir crazy over there.”

  “So talk.”

  He was less friendly today: Maybe i
t was just his time of the month, one of those mood swings Martha had told me about. “What about it?” I said: “You need help or not?”

  “I always need help. Hard to get good hands these days. Are you a good hand?”

  “I’ve got a strong back and a weak mind, and I don’t tire easily.”

  He warmed up a notch and laughed. “Hey, you’re hired. You rub ’em too, or just walk?”

  “I’ve got a little to learn about rubbing ’em yet, but I’ll pick it up fast.”

  “Good. Anybody can walk, but I’ve always got a need for another ginney. Just get into it, use your head, and ask Rigger or Ruthie if you’ve got any questions. If you run into anything you can’t handle, see me.” He stretched out his long legs and said, “When can you start?”

  “Right now on a temporary basis.”

  “Come to work full time and I’ll pay you two-fifty a month for each head. Start with three; if I like what you do I’ll give you four. I pay on the first and fifteenth every month.”

  “How about we leave it temporary for now? Hey, this is a freebie, Bax, you won’t owe me anything,” and suddenly he brightened. “You wanna work under them conditions, damn right I need the help.”

  His head ginney was a middle-aged guy named Rigger Boyles. He wasn’t friendly or hostile, just all business. I soon learned that he had a nickname, Rigger Mortis.

  “You gonna sleep in the tack room?”

  “No, I’m just filling in and I’ve got a room.”

  “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  I walked back to Sandy’s. The shedrow was quiet, almost tomb-like in the late morning. Bob was sitting in the sun, watching the action in the tow ring, but absently, with his mind far away. A young woman brought a black colt out from the opposite barn and blended into the walking circle. Business was picking up. Another stable had moved into our barn on the far end and we heard another was coming that afternoon across the way. I sat in the shedrow beside Bob and we talked. He asked where Martha was and I shrugged, implying I didn’t know. “Looks like she quit her job at the kitchen,” he said.