Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

The Saga of Tommy Brokenbridge by Dan A. Sproul

When a hurricane forms out in the Atlantic, the whole East Coast gets nervous. Hurricanes always appear headed directly for Florida when they start out. So the people in Florida from the Keys up to about Vero Beach get especially frantic.

This hurricane was still out there almost five hundred miles away, heading right toward Miami. It already had a name: Buford. Alphonsina, who had preceded Buford two weeks earlier, had spun off to the north and died out. But all Buford was doing was growing stronger and getting closer.

As you might imagine, nobody in the Miami area was happy about Buford — nobody except Tommy Brokenbridge.

Brokenbridge was not Tommy’s real name. Tommy played the horses and the numbers. And he played them a lot. When he’d worked at the Bridge Hotel, to his bookmaker he was Tommy Bridge. When he quit the Bridge Hotel, his bookmaker changed Tommy’s name to Tommy Brokenbridge. Just one of the ways bookies have of keeping track of their customers.

Later Tommy started working at one of the beach hotels. But forever after, he was Tommy Brokenbridge. I don’t think I ever heard his real last name.

Tommy was happy about Buford because of the numbers, which I’ll get to in a minute.

My name is Joe Standard. I run Standard Investigations. You’ll have a problem finding Standard Investigations in Dun & Bradstreet because most of my clientele don’t provide the type of high profile cases needed to build the reputation and bottom line requisite to be listed by such a venerable firm. That is not to say that all of my clientele are lowlife scum, but I get a high percentage.

The problem is, I work cheap. I have to. With most of the people who come to me, it’s chicken or feathers. None of them are flush very often. And when they are, they don’t seem to stay that way long.

It all works out because I’ve got a low overhead operation. I have a small office in the back of the Sunbelt Realty Company. There’s a cot in my office just under my big blowup photograph of the illustrious Seattle Slew galloping to glory in his Preakness victory. The cot cuts down on the need for an expensive apartment. And, only two doors down, they put a shower in the can for me. Sunbelt Realty collects only minimal office rent. The place is located in a dangerous part of Miami — my being there helps to keep out the riffraff. So it kind of works out for everybody. But let me get back to Tommy.

I mentioned that Tommy was a gambler. He played the numbers every day — mostly the Cuban bolita. It paid out better than the Florida lottery, but he played that, too, and jai alai and the horses.

Tommy was not a handicapper in the real sense of the word. He just generated numbers: license plates, house numbers, street numbers, Social Security numbers, any numbers that struck his fancy — but most of all, hurricane tracking numbers. When Hurricane Andrew descended on the people of Miami and Homestead, Tommy tracked it all the way in. He hammered the Cuban bolita and also managed to hit five Cash Three’s, three Play Fours, and two Fantasy Fives in the Florida lottery, eight trifectas at Miami jai alai, and an untold number of exactas and trifectas at Calder Race Course. Before Andrew destroyed Homestead, Florida, Tommy had won over one hundred twenty-eight thousand dollars. He bet the longitude and latitude numbers that were being reported on the hour after he plotted them on his hurricane map.

Tommy claims he could have made a million if all the action hadn’t shut down when the hurricane hit. He managed to hold onto the money for over a year before he went bust and had to go back to work as a waiter at the New Horizons Restaurant just down from my office.

Tommy gave up his apartment to accumulate cash for the anticipated hurricane-betting frenzy that began when Alphonsina got her name. When he was flush, Tommy had bought a new Ford van with captain’s chairs. He parked the van every night in the Sunbelt Realty parking lot. That’s where he slept. I let him use my can for twenty a week. When the radio in his van conked out and he couldn’t get good numbers, it was a panic situation for him. But he refused to cough up any of his precious bankroll for a cheap radio.

Now, Tommy seemed like a good enough guy, so like some kind of boob I allowed him to camp out in my office. He used my TV and my desk to plot his numbers for an additional twenty a week. When Alphonsina hit the newscasts and started to get close, Tommy began to send it in: to the corner convenience store for Florida lottery tickets; to the track; to the outstretched hand of the constantly underfoot bolita runner.

Worst mistake I ever made. Having Tommy there was bad enough, but I didn’t factor in the accordion. We weren’t long into our arrangement when Tommy turned up one night, half in the bag, with his accordion. He insisted on playing “Roll Out the Barrel” and a medley of other polka times for me. I tossed him out and locked the door. He persisted with the serenade in the parking lot. At one point he went into a incompetent, drunken, barely recognizable rendition of “Amazing Grace.” It was too ghastly for description.

These accordion nights, as they came to be known, were all too frequent. I tried desperately to get him to leave. But he wouldn’t. He had paid me for the month, which still had two weeks to run, and he wouldn’t take back a partial payment.

“Look, Joe,” he pleaded, “Buford will hit in a couple of days, long before the end of the month. By then I’ll have all the green I can use. I’ll go then and give you a bonus to boot.”

“So how much have you grossed so far?” I asked him.

“Well, nothing yet,” he admitted. “But that’s because Alphonsina didn’t come ashore. It will be different with Buford. It’s headed right for us.”

There is little doubt that Tommy’s train had left the track some ways back. But I couldn’t take any more accordion. I could hear the tuneless, discordant, unmelodious racket through the walls at night when he played the vile instrument in the van. So when Buford was about three days out, I enlisted Bullseye Larry, who owed me a favor, to steal the van while Tommy was down at the corner with his Florida lottery bets. Not to chop it up or send it to Venezuela, mind you, but long enough to dump the dreaded accordion in the Intercoastal. He could park the van up the street when he was done.

Unfortunately, Bullseye got caught with a hot Honda Prelude and ended up in the Dade County slammer before he was able to heist the van. Two important things happened next. The first thing was, Brokenbridge didn’t seem to be collecting on any of his numerous bets.

“Something is wrong with the numbers, Joe,” he confessed to me when Buford was but two days away. “I should be up a bundle by now. It ain’t workin’ right. I don’t think Buford is going to hit Miami.”

The second thing was Tommy’s bolita runner. I should tell you about him. He was the bag man for the local bolita and well known to everybody in the neighborhood because of a singular characteristic. Years ago he was working out in West Hialeah in the industrial parks at a zinc die cast place that made jalousie window cranks. He worked one of the big presses that cut the sprue away from the casting. Got his hand caught in the press one day. He lost all but his pinkie finger on the right hand. His little finger looked about eight inches long. And he couldn’t bend it. It stuck straight out, ramrod stiff. The Cubans called him Tubo de Relámpago. Rough translation in English: Lightning Rod. But everybody else just called him Lightning.

Lightning was terrified of Buford. The closer the hurricane got, the more agitated he became. He began to spend his nights out at Tommy’s van, drinking beer and enduring the accordion — strange behavior.

My part-time operative Frankie Swinehart, or Swine as he came to be commonly dubbed, had just landed a cushy job with Calder Race Course security. A position he’d struggled to obtain after many years of working drudge security in chilly car lots and crowd control at dangerous Cuban dances for the big firm in town. I was a bit surprised to see him come through my office door in uniform in the middle of a working day a half hour before post time.

He picked up Tommy’s chart off the lone office chair. “What’s this?” he said.

“Ain’t you supposed to be work-in’?” I asked.

He threw the chart on the floor and sat down. “Got a big problem, Joe. Everybody’s trying to move their horses out on account of the hurricane. We’re goin’ nuts over at Calder.”

“I can imagine. But what are you doin’ here?”

“There’s been an accident in the backstretch — Arnie Ritter.”

“Arnie! What happened?”

Arnie was a horse trainer. Years ago I was an assistant trainer under Buddy Wayne. I kept my track license up over the years and did odd jobs for some of the trainers in the backstretch. Arnie Ritter was one of them. He was a good trainer and a longtime friend.

“Arnie asked Jimmy Cox to let me off to come over and see you. He knows me, and you know each other. That big Glitterman colt Arnie’s been prepping gave him a shot in the chest. Broke some ribs and collapsed a lung. He’s in pretty bad shape.” The accordion music started up out in the parking lot. “Jeesus, what’s that racket?” Swine asked.

I told him about Tommy and Lightning and surmised that the two idiots had got an early start on a beer-drinking accordion night.

Swine continued, informing me that Arnie didn’t want me to waste time visiting him in the hospital. “Arnie’s son Bill has twelve head at Fairgrounds in Louisiana,” Swine said. “Arnie wants you to make sure his two colts in the Calder backstretch get out before the hurricane. He wants them shipped to Bill in Louisiana. Arnie told me to tell you that he has it fixed with the horseman’s bookkeeper to cut you a check for fifteen hundred to arrange transportation.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about arranging transportation,” I readily confessed. “Where am I supposed to find transportation?”

Swine shrugged. “How tough can it be? Find somebody with a horse trailer willing to take two head to Fairgrounds for fifteen hundred. Thing is, you ain’t got much time. That hurricane is supposed to come ashore around midnight.”

From the parking lot came a barely recognizable accordion interpretation of “Easter Parade,” vocal by Lightning Rod in slurred Spanish. “You got any good news for me?” I asked.

Swine pushed his bony body up from my client chair. “Yeah, I got to get back to work. That guy out there singin’ sounds like somebody wounded him in the throat.”

Up to now I hadn’t worried much about the hurricane. I’d been through a few. When Andrew hit, I was holed up at a hurricane party in the Surfer’s Bar and Grill just around the corner. They don’t normally have much surf in Florida, and it’s doubtful that a genuine, actual surfer ever set foot in Surfer’s Bar and Grill. But it was a hell of a party. We were all rather relaxed, so we just sort of crammed into the dining room when the front half of the roof blew down the street.

Remember I told you that Tommy was the only one happy about the hurricane? I might have been mistaken. Buford was less than twelve hours away. No matter which TV station I turned to, the weathermen were positively orgasmic. They seemed to be on a hurricane high. There was much grinning and jumping about. How the weather people were able to repress the urge to break out into joyous, hysterical laughter is a mystery — and more, a real tribute to their professionalism. Documentaries and specials were presented endlessly while hurricane watches and hurricane warnings choked off scheduled broadcasting. Anywhere up and down the coast from Key West to Vero Beach you were already a victim unless you had stockpiled a two months’ supply of canned goods, flashlight batteries, bottled water, and plywood sheets, and, oh yes, portable radios and a bathtub full of water to flush the john. They neglected to mention that given all the hysterics it would require a trip to North Carolina to find a retailer with items such as candles and batteries still on the shelf; provided, that is, one were able to get onto a major thruway going north. And all I had to do was get two horses to Louisiana.

I do have a company car, a ’65 Mustang convertible. Me and the Mustang crawled north toward Calder amidst the unwashed, with-out-plywood-sheets, no-bottled-water, batteryless rabble who were trying to put Buford in their rear view mirrors.

Calder was practically abandoned. Diehard, dedicated horse-players were clearly a solid minority in Miami this day. There were just a few hundred fans sprinkled about. In the backstretch it was a different story — one titled Pandemonium. It looked like a horse push-pull-drag-get-’em-in-the-van contest.

I found Jimmy Cox at track security. He had Arnie’s check from the bookkeeper. I jammed it in my rear pocket. It was about two hours before the banks closed; after that, everything would be buttoned up awaiting Buford. I headed down the shed row to Arnie’s barn. I propositioned everybody loading a horse. There were a couple of vacancies going to Monmouth but nothing else. And nobody was heading for Fairgrounds.

Arnie had one stall converted for use as a feed room. It contained some feed and hay along with assorted training paraphernalia. Tack adorned one wall. In addition there was a small table with a single chair. I plopped down to ponder my next move. A sign to the right of the stall opening, at eye level, caught my attention:

I read it several times. There aren’t many things certain in this world, but if there is one universal truth, Anonymous has grasped the essence of it. Anybody in the P.I. business will testify to that. Anybody in any business, I suspect, would agree. You want tangible proof, look at my current good deed status.

I checked the two colts in the next stalls over. They seemed okay. I went back to the tiny table to study the situation. I didn’t want to let Arnie down, but I was clearly out of options. I put my head in my hands and cogitated over my next move.

“This is a stickup!”

I uncovered my eyes to behold a husky fellow with a bent nose standing in the stall entrance with an adhesive-backed deodorant in hand.

“Who are you?” the visitor asked. “Where’s Arnie?”

I explained my presence in the stall, which I noticed did have a subtle stench about it. I asked the stickup man to respond in kind.

“George Foreman,” he said, extending his hand.

“Hold on,” I said. “You ain’t George Foreman, you don’t look nothin’ like him.”

“Not the boxing George Foreman,” he explained. “I’m the horse training George Foreman. I keep my string a coupla stalls down the shedrow.”

George asked after Arnie’s health and then explained that his dog Alfred had wandered off earlier and had elected to dump a load in the corner of Arnie’s office stall. Unfortunately, some of it went up under the stall partition and couldn’t be retrieved; hence, the stickup.

“In the supermarket I had to fight off several thousand crazed women swinging water jugs and flashlights to get this deodorant,” George said. “I hope Arnie appreciates it.”

George and his string were leaving within the hour for Belmont in New York. He was sympathetic to my plight but could offer little help. He prepared the deodorant and pressed it onto the back wall under a nylon halter. He wished me good luck and disappeared through the stall opening.

A few seconds later he returned. “I just remembered something,” he said. “My sister lives in West Palm Beach, about fifty miles up the road. She has a few hunter jumpers she keeps up there. She’s got a two-horse trailer she almost never uses. She might let you use it if you have some way to get it. If you want, I’ll give her a call.”

I tossed this idea about. Arnie had a half-ton pickup, but he had the keys at the hospital, and all the car switching and the drive to West Palm would eat up a lot of time and time was quickly running out. Besides, who would drive the truck to Louisiana? Then I had my inspiration: Tommy Brokenbridge. He had a van with a V8 and a trailer hitch. He could really use seven hundred and fifty dollars. I know what you’re thinking, but I had to toss something to George’s sister for the trailer and I deserved something for my anguish. Besides, I knew Tommy was desperate enough to work cheap. And best of all, him and the evil accordion would be out of my fife. I made a mental note to give Tommy only half up front — three hundred fifty. That would give him some incentive not to sell the trailer before he started back. There was little doubt he would return. Florida numbers betting was the only fife he knew. It was a lifestyle not easily accommodated elsewhere.

George cleared it with his sister and gave me written directions to her place in Wellington, a horse community in West Palm Beach. Swine agreed to check on Arnie’s colts while I enlisted Tommy’s aid.

Going south was a breeze, just a few cars. A check issued on Calder Race Course is solid gold at any bank in Florida, but I’ve suffered a few unfortunate setbacks in my banking career over time. In the interest of haste and to avoid problems I bypassed my own bank and cashed it at the bank it was written on. With the money warming my pocket, I headed back to the office and the Sunbelt parking lot to look for my musical friend Tommy.

I could see a problem developing. Tommy was no doubt the most ceaseless nitwit I’d ever run across in my travels. But he was psychotic in his habits. He did everything by the numbers. He was methodical in the time and sequence of his bets. He timed his trip to the corner store for lottery tickets to the second. What I’m saying is, he’s predictable. Tommy runs a tighter schedule than the airlines. When I had left earlier, he’d started an early accordion night. If anything, he should be staggering around with the accordion or passed out in his van by now. But the van was gone. Something was amiss. Then came more trouble: Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

At least that’s what everybody called them behind their backs. Humbierto, Diaz, and Louis ran the Cuban bolita in Little Havana. Never was clear who the big cheese was, but I always suspected Huey. Diaz and Louis always dressed elegantly — suit and tie, shined shoes, the whole gangster bit. Huey was different. Braced on either side by the well-manicured Dewey and Louie, Huey stood before me in my own office smiling at me under his ragged, burrito-infested mustache, sporting ragged denim shorts and shower thongs. His English was pretty good.

“Where he es, Brokenbreedge?” Huey wanted to know.

I went around my desk and sat down. “I got one word for you guys: Adios!”

I knew they probably wouldn’t mess with me. They were businessmen first. As such, they were aware of my own reputation and connections. They commenced to argue among themselves in Spanish. Even in Spanish the word relámpago is tough to mistake. As the argument heated up, relámpago seemed to punctuate every other sentence.

It didn’t take long to figure out what was happening here. The head office of the Cuban bolita wouldn’t be out trying to collect from Tommy. They had knucklebusters for that. They were looking for Lightning Rod. That could only mean one thing. Lightning had made off with their collection money.

It fit together. Lightning was terrified of the coming hurricane, and Tommy was near broke. It seemed pretty clear that Tommy and Lightning had absconded with the swag.

Huey then asked me if I had seen Lightning Rod lately. I told him the truth: that Lightning and Tommy were here earlier but not now. The group pondered that for a bit, then left. They were still discussing the situation at the top of their collective voices well into the parking lot. There was no chance that Huey and company would bring the cops into this. Lightning was away clean, or so it seemed.

None of this was helping me at all. I made a call to George’s sister and told her I wouldn’t be coming for the trailer. I guessed the only thing left was to sit and brave it out. I made a call to Calder and talked to Jimmy Cox in security. I told him that Arnie’s horses were staying.

“We’re putting all the horses still here into the receiving barns where we can button up and keep an eye on them,” he told me. “You want me to have Swine take Arnie’s horses over now?” he asked.

I told him to go ahead. I called Arnie at the hospital, but he was in surgery. There wasn’t much left to do but amble over to the Surfer and wait for Buford. I clicked on the TV. Buford was still about eighty miles out but had speeded up. New predictions indicated Miami didn’t have seven hours left. It was now estimated to be less than three hours. As I watched, the television began to beep, and a message printed across the bottom of the screen. At the same time the now weary weatherman seemed reinvigorated.

“This just in from the Weather Center. Buford has veered sharply north. The indication now is that it will miss the Miami area... I repeat... Buford will miss the Miami area. Where, or if, it will come ashore has not been passed along to us as yet. Stand by; we will try to get a prediction on that.”

So Tommy had been right about why his numbers didn’t work. The hurricane wasn’t going to hit Miami. I locked up and went around the corner to the Surfer’s Bar to watch the outcome on satellite TV with a Budweiser in my fist. I made a mental note to get up early so I could tend to Arnie’s horses.

The next day word on the street was that Lightning had made off with over eight thousand dollars. In other news, Buford had come ashore briefly. The hurricane had veered in about a hundred twenty miles north of Miami at Hobe Sound, bounced around some, then headed northeast and out to sea. Later on in the day the news crew came on television to report the damage. For the most part it was just a few signs knocked down, with only one serious incident. There were few cars on the highway because of the relentless warnings. But it was reported that two Miamians driving a van with no radio did not receive any warning that the hurricane had veered north and was headed directly for them. On U.S. 1, just past Hobe Sound, their van was lifted and tossed into forty feet of Hobe Sound inlet water. Tommy, Lightning, the accordion, and the bag money went in the drink together. Only Tommy and Lightning came out. It was reported that the two behaved rather badly and had to be restrained by police from diving back into the tortuous sea to regain their possessions.

I still don’t know if all the hysteria is warranted — but it looks like there might be some merit in at least having a radio.