Million Dollar Handle

Chapter 3

The movement of dogs through the kennel had been carefully choreographed, with a new parade every seventeen minutes. Ricardo kept them moving without thinking about it consciously. Dee left the kennel area once or twice, perhaps to place bets. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t. It was all very careless and haphazard, and whenever he seemed to show an interest in a dog, Ricardo stayed out of that race.

Tonight he sent Billy only one signal. A standout dog had been sneaked into one of the marathon races. They bet him to win, and he won going away.

He called the motel after clearing the dogs for the last race, and he was told there was no one named Geary registered. She hadn’t showed up!

“Check again, will you? G-e-a-r-y.”

“Oh, Geary. Yes, in nine.”

He was laughing when he walked in. “You decided to come. I was afraid you might think it was all too wild.”

She had changed back into slacks and sweater, to make it obvious that this wasn’t the usual motel date. They were going to be talking dogs, and after they finished, they would go to separate houses. For the same reason. Ricardo had a bucket of fried chicken. She had brought the vodka bottle, however, and there was a faint sparkle of danger in the air.

“I’m starving,” he said. “Dee, as usual. I had to do both jobs, and I didn’t get time to eat. Do you want some chicken?”

“No, I had supper. Shall I make you a drink?”

“I guess so, but I’m not much of a vodka drinker.”

“I never used to be either, but it seems to go with the role.”

It was motel ice and straight vodka, an extremely dry martini. She smoothed the fabric of her slacks and smiled nervously.

“You were in the middle of telling me something.”

“Yeah, how to make money on the dogs. Dee’s always telling stories about the old days. To slow a dog down then, all you had to do was overfeed him or fill him with water or sandpaper his toes. Dee used to do it himself, he doesn’t mind telling you. He shot them up or he stuck a hunk of ginger up their backside. It was worth doing when they were betting against bookies. Nowadays, with the machine, you can’t win a fortune on one race because the more money you feed in, the more it shortens the odds. And the track gives pretty good protection against crooked owners or trainers. If a dog varies more than two pounds, it’s an automatic scratch. They’re in isolation two hours before post time, and the only people allowed in the kennel are trustworthy guys like Dee Wynn and myself.”

“Did you say ginger? He wouldn’t do anything like that now, would he?”

“Well, anybody who drinks as much as he does is a hard person to handicap. He lays off between meetings, and he can’t keep himself in whiskey year-round on his Surfside salary. He’s careless, is the trouble. There was a dog last year won at a good price, fifteen or something, at about a second and a half faster than his best previous time. He was obviously hopped up- obviously. I don’t know what Dee used, some drugstore amphetamine, but that dog was so high you could spot it from the grandstand. So the judge asked for a urine sample. We have a little rig we use, put it on the dog and give him a little squirt of electricity. Dee was so drunk he could barely stand up, but he switched samples and turned in the wrong urine.”

“Ricardo.”

“I know it sounds funny, but it was so damn crude! Doping’s a felony, and if that sample hadn’t turned out to be clean, I think I know who was elected to get it in the ass. Not Dee. The Latin kennel boy, Ricardo Sanchez. O.K. Last summer I took a backstretch job at Pompano, the harness track. Those horses work all twelve months, and they get tired. They need all kinds of medication to keep them in racing condition. The state and the track don’t have any incentive to keep up with it. They take the same bite whether a race is crooked or honest. So the guys who develop the medicines are always one step ahead of the guys who figure out ways to test for the medicines. You said something about Al Capone. We’re still protecting against Capone. A cousin of mine works at Pompano. He’s just my age, and he showed me a suitcase full of twenty-dollar bills. They use two basic shots. The slow one is a tranquilizer they call Sleepy Time. It was introduced last year, and the great thing about it is that it lasts exactly three hours, to the minute. Give it at six, at nine it’s gone. The dog’s temperature is normal. Nothing in the urine or blood or saliva.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“In the standard tests. The State Testing Lab hasn’t even heard about it yet. The speed-up shot is a vitamin-hormone mixture. That does show up, so you have to be careful with it.”

“But these are for horses.”

“Which are bigger than dogs, right. So I rented a schooling track in Broward County and worked out the dosages. I hate to say it, but before I got it right I killed two dogs. With the bomb, you use half a cc in a sugar solution. It doesn’t change the dog’s whole personality. With the right kind of competition, a fourth- or a fifth-place dog has a shot at first. And that’s what I’m talking about. You don’t try to win every race. When you do win, you win at good odds. At Pompano, the shots are administered through the trainer, usually. There’s no point in taking that kind of chance except in the right situation. When it happens, he wants to make sure, and there’s a tendency to overdose. So there’s already talk, and that’s bad. Using these two shots, with the run of the lockup kennel, I could hit the Double Q three times a week. But that would be dumb. I’d have to hire somebody to cash those big tickets, and that’s where most of the horse schemes have fallen apart. I want to be invisible. I won’t stop betting on class and form. I told you I bet about three races a program, and that’s all I can handle. After I make my picks, I’ll slow down one dog and speed up another. Not by much! Four or five lengths. The regular Q odds are good enough. A lot of the time something surprising will happen, and I’ll lose. That’s fine. All I’m trying to get is a little more edge, and average about three thousand a night.”

She looked disappointed. “I was keyed up for a bigger number than that.”

“Mrs. Geary, some arithmetic. Three thousand times ninety, times two-the winter meeting, the summer meeting. Five hundred and forty thousand. Forty thousand of that for Billy. A quarter of a million for me, a quarter of a million for you. Tax exempt. Year after year.”

He was speaking evenly. He still hadn’t tasted his drink, as though he suspected it might have been doctored by some of the additives he had just told her about. Mrs. Geary was sitting far forward, flushed and excited.

“I must say it all sounds very plausible. What do you need from me besides my blessing?”

“It can’t be done as long as Dee stays as kennelmaster. He’s too much of a slob. He’d spoil it in a week.”

“Then that’s our first problem, because Max is definitely not going to fire him.”

“Transfer him. Or he’s old enough to retire-give him a drinking pension.”

She shook her head. “Hopeless. They’re old drinking buddies. They go all the way back.”

“This would be a way to keep the track and stave off that real estate thing.”

“You don’t understand about Max. He really believes what he says about honest racing. I don’t know what he’d do if he found out Dee was switching urine samples-maybe just warn him. But I think if you checked you’d find that happened on one of the nights when Max was away. If I could arrange this, I would, but I’d be scared even to mention it. He’d blow me out of the room.”

“He can’t really believe in that honesty crap.”

“He does, though. Once the dogs are on the track they only know one way to run, and that’s all-out. Greyhounds are more honest than people.” She waved her hand. “I’ve heard it so often.”

“If I talked to him-”

“No, Ricardo. He has a reputation with newspapermen, people like that-friendly, happy, easygoing. That’s his public face, and of course he’s in public most of the time. In private, he can be very mean. I’m sorry to say he’s one of the old Miamians who’s not happy about the Cuban emigration. You’d be off the payroll so fast…”

She stood up to get ice. “You realize I’m tremendously excited by the idea. I think it’s time I had some money of my own. If we could think of a way to get Dee fired-”

“No point in that unless I get the promotion.”

“Aren’t there days when he’s too drunk to notice what you’re doing? Couldn’t you work around him?”

“Too risky, too sloppy. It’s bad enough now to have to work around that camera.”

He saw no reason to tell her that he was already doing what she suggested, speeding up or slowing down an occasional dog, and why cut the management in on it? But this way was haphazard and unsatisfactory. And he had to pass up some of the best opportunities. When he did have a chance to use the new medicines, as in the opening race that afternoon, he could feel a temptation to increase the dosage, or to hit all eight dogs and bet big. That was what he was trying to avoid. All he wanted to do was put it on a business basis. Out of the total handle, twelve percent to the track, five percent to the state, half of one percent to Ricardo Sanchez.

“You look crushed,” she said. “I’m sorry. I wish I could hold out hope, but after twenty-three years of marriage I know the man pretty well. Plus the fact that-well, you’re very good looking, and Max is-”

He looked up at that. “What do you think we ought to do, then?” he said after a considerable moment. “They won’t charge us any more if we use the bed.”

“So tonight won’t be a total waste.”

“Something like that.”

He had chicken fat on his fingers, but he thought it would look too cold-blooded if he went to the bathroom to wash. She touched his face lightly. He put his head against the front of her sweater, pulling her in. Was that right? It seemed awkward. He worked the sweater out of the slacks, and kissed her stomach, wondering how he was going to get out of this.

His hands were as heavy as rocks. After a time she began to move in his arms, pushing forward against his mouth.

Then she broke away from him and went silently to the bathroom. He gulped the vodka martini like a prescription, fixed the bed, took off his clothes, and fidgeted.

When she came out of the bathroom, naked, they met and kissed, and he thought for a moment it was going to be all right.

But it turned out to be impossible for him. There had been too much talk about money. She was surprised, because it didn’t fit the scenario, but she was nice about it, in fact extremely nice, almost motherly, although her procedures were anything but.

“This never happened before,” he said in a low voice, without adding that he had never before been in bed with a woman her age.

“Do you want me to work some more?”

He turned away, his forearm over his eyes. “Not now.”

“I’ve been very much-on edge,” she said. “I’m sure you noticed. I’ve felt very hollow inside. With Max and me, for a number of years, there hasn’t been anything. A couple of men I play golf with, my age and older. It never involved a motel. I was too aggressive. I’m sorry.”

He sat up. “You were too-no, it’s the other way around. The whole thing is my fault. I planned it.”

“Planned what?”

“The accident. Everything. Your car didn’t make that blood. I cut myself before you hit me. But I didn’t know you’d be like this.”

“Like what?”

“A person.”

That wasn’t quite it, but it was the best he could do. Without her clothes, she wasn’t the wife of the president of Surfside. If she had been flabby or bony, he would have had no problem. The contrary was true. She was one of the nicest-looking women he had seen.

They talked for an hour, needing no help from the vodka bottle. He began to think they should try again, but she told him to sleep and she would visit him the first thing in the morning.

He was asleep when she knocked. He let her in. He was erect, they were both happy to see, and he stayed that way. It was satisfactory to them both. He went out afterward for coffee and rolls, and they stayed in bed until he left for the track. She was a big surprise to Ricardo. There was something to be said for age and experience, after all.

They met frequently after that, and the lovemaking not only continued good, it became better. They hardly ever talked about his plan, because they both had come to accept the fact that nothing could be done about it as long as her husband was alive and running the track.