The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

Joyce Carol Oates Meadowlands

From Murder at the Racetrack

Bring your driver’s license, sweetheart. You’re driving.”

Fritzi’s new car? He was letting her drive?

Smiling his easy smile. Reaching over to squeeze her arm in that way of his, which sent a sensation like a mild electric shock through Katie’s body. Even as Katie warned herself, Don’t fall for it. You’ll be hurt.

Fritzi Czechi was known for his upscale but tasteful cars. This new-model steely-silver BMW with the mulberry leather interior and teakwood dash, he’d purchased only two weeks before, he was asking Katie Flanders to drive to the Meadow-lands racetrack, handing over the keys to her as if they were husband and wife, not a man and a woman in an undefined if romantic relationship. Katie stared at the keys quivering on the palm of her hand. Don’t! Don’t fall for it.

“Look, Fritzi: Why exactly am I driving, and not you? I missed the reason.”

“Because I need to concentrate, sweetheart.”

This was so. On the way to Meadowlands, while Katie, always a careful driver, drove the elegant new car at exactly the Turnpike speed limit, Fritzi studied what appeared to be racing forms, frowning, making notations with a stubby pencil. After a while he shifted in his seat to stare out the passenger’s window, frowning as if painful-size thoughts were working their way through his brain, and Katie glanced over at him wondering, what was Fritzi thinking? (Probably not of what had happened between them the night before, as Katie was. A warm dreamy erotic memory intensified by the smell of the new-car interior.) Fritzi was part-owner of one of the horses scheduled to race this Friday evening at Meadowlands, a three-year-old stallion named Morning Star who was returning to serious racing after being sidelined for months with a hairline fracture of his right front knee. Katie understood that Fritzi was worried about his horse, but also Fritzi was a gambler, which meant he dealt in odds, in numerals, and probably he had a mathematical mind and could “see” figures in his head in a way Katie could only imagine, it was so alien to her way of perceiving the world. Once, when she’d asked Fritzi how much one of his horses had cost, Fritzi had told her, “A racehorse is beyond computation, sweetheart,” which had been a mysterious answer yet made sense.

It was a way of telling Katie Flanders, too, that Fritzi’s private professional life was beyond her comprehension.

So Katie drove, and liked it that Fritzi so trusted her with his car, which wasn’t like Fritzi Czechi in fact, or any man she’d ever known, asking or allowing a woman to drive his car while he sat in the passenger’s seat staring out the window. Katie wondered if maybe Fritzi was in one of his moods: captured by the look of the mottled, marbled early-evening sky like the usual sky over northern New Jersey, clouds like chunks of dirty concrete shot with veins of acid-yellow and sulfur-red. This Jersey sky they’d been seeing all their lives, Katie thought. Familiar as a ceiling of some room you could die in.

The last time Fritzi had taken Katie to Meadowlands to see one of his horses race had been a year ago, or more. That year had passed slowly! Fritzi’s horse then was Pink Lady, a four-year-old who hadn’t won her race but hadn’t lost badly, in Katie’s opinion. Pink Lady had galloped so hard, Katie’s heart had gone out to the shuddering mare, whipped by her scowling little jockey but unable to overtake the lead horses who’d seemed to pull away from the rest immediately out of the gate as if by magic. Pink Lady had come in third, out of nine. That wasn’t bad, was it? Katie had seemed to plead with Fritzi, who’d said little about the race, or about Pink Lady, and he hadn’t encouraged Katie’s encouragement, still less her emotions. Always Katie would remember A racehorse is beyond computation and understand it as a rebuke.

A gentle rebuke, though. Not like somebody telling you to shut up and mind your own business, you don’t know shit.

Fritzi Czechi was one of those men in Katie’s life — Katie didn’t want to think how many there were, and that some of them knew one another from Jersey City High where they’d all gone — who’d been in and out of her life since the early 1970s. Now it was 1988 and they were fully grown, no longer high school kids, yet when you looked closely at them, as at yourself in a mirror, frankly, unsparingly, you saw that they were still kids trying to figure what the hell it was all about, and what they were missing out on, they were beginning to realize they’d never get.

Except Fritzi Czechi. But for his broken-up marriages, Fritzi hadn’t done badly. He exuded a certain glamour. He dressed in style. He was a fair-skinned, lean, ropy-muscled man of about five feet nine, not tall, carrying himself with a certain confidence, at least when people were likely to be watching. Fritzi had strangely luminous stone-colored eyes, fair hair thinning at the crown he wore slightly long so that it curled behind his ears; he had a habit of stroking his hair, the back of his head, a medallion ring gleaming on the third finger of his right hand. (Katie recalled Fritzi had once worn a wedding band. But no longer.) Fritzi was a good-looking man, if no longer as good-looking as he’d been six or seven years before when his smiling picture had been printed in Jersey papers as the part-owner of a Thoroughbred that had won $500,000 in the Belmont Stakes. (Katie had saved these clippings. She hadn’t been going out with Fritzi at that time, Fritzi had been married then. If he’d been seeing other women, which probably he had been, Katie Flanders wasn’t one of these women.)

As well as horses, Fritzi was known to have invested in a number of restaurants, clubs, and bowling alleys in Jersey, though he rarely spoke of his business life; it was part of Fritzi’s glamour that he was so reticent, so elusive you might say, keeping his private life to himself, so if you were Katie Flanders you’d have to hear from other sources that things were going well for Fritzi, or not so well. “Investments,” horses, marriages. (Three marriages. Children, both boys, from the first, long-ago marriage when Fritzi had thought he’d wanted to be a New Jersey state trooper like his oldest brother. So far as Katie knew, Fritzi was separated from his third wife, not yet legally divorced. But it was only an assumption. She couldn’t ask.) Definitely it was part of Fritzi Czechi’s glamour that he did unpredictable things like giving money to bankrupt Jersey City High for new uniforms for both the boys’ and the girls’ varsity basketball teams, or he’d send boxes of expensive chocolate candies to the mothers of certain of his old friends for their birthdays, or hospitalizations, or a dozen red roses to a woman friend like Katie Flanders he was sorry about not having seen in a while, as a token of his “esteem.” Fritzi was known to pick up tabs in restaurants and clubs, and he was known to lend money to friends, if they were old friends, without asking for interest, and often without much hope of getting the money back.

He’d “lent” money to Katie, too. When there’d been a medical crisis in her family. When she’d tried to return it he’d told her, “Someday, sweetheart, you can bail me out. We’ll wait.”

Katie was a secretary at Drummond Tools, Ltd., in Hackensack. One of those temporary jobs, she’d thought, until she got married, started having babies. But just to be a secretary these days you had to know computers, and computers are always being upgraded, which is scary as hell when you’re on the downside of thirty and not getting any younger or smarter while the new girls being hired look like junior high kids. The thought chilled Katie. She reached out to touch Fritzi’s arm, needing to touch him, and liking the fact that it was Katie Flanders’s privilege to touch Fritzi Czechi in this casual intimate way since they were more than lovers, they were old friends. “This BMW, Fritzi, is very nice.”

Fritzi said, “Well, good.”

He wasn’t listening. He’d put away his racing forms and was staring now at his watch, which he wore turned inward, the flat oval disc of digital numbers against his pulse. As if, with Fritzi Czechi, even the exact time was a secret.

“’Specially compared to my own.” Katie drove a 1985 Ford compact, not a new model when she’d bought it. After this roomy number it would feel about the size of a sardine can.

Katie was suddenly quiet, realizing how she sounded. Like she was hinting that Fritzi give her this car, or another like it. She didn’t mean that at all. She only just wanted to talk. She was lonely, and she wanted to talk. After last night, she wanted to be assured that Fritzi cared for her, that he wasn’t already forgetting her, his mind flying ahead to the Meadowlands racetrack, to that blur of frantic movement out of the gate and around the dirt track and back to the finish line that would involve less than two minutes, yet could decide so much. She was frightened: If things turned out badly for Morning Star, as, she’d gathered, they hadn’t turned out all that wonderfully for Pink Lady, Fritzi would be plunged into one of his moods. If he didn’t call her, she could not call him. He’d never exactly said, but that was her understanding. Wanting to tell him, It’s lonely being the only one in love.

She wondered: Maybe Fritzi wasn’t driving because his license had been suspended? Or maybe: nerves?

If they were living together, or married, Katie had to concede, Fritzi would be like this much of the time: distant, distracted. If — why not be extravagant, in fantasy — they had children, he’d never be home. Yet she felt tenderness for him. She wanted to forgive him, for hurting her. Katie’s father, now deceased, a machine shop worker in Jersey City through his adult life, had been the same way. Probably most men were. So much to think about, a world of numbers, odds that always eluded them. So much, they couldn’t hope to squeeze into their heads.

Lonely? That’s life.

The night before, in her apartment, in her bedroom where he’d rarely been, Fritzi had showed Katie snapshots of Morning Star, taken at the Thoroughbred farm where the horse was boarded and trained in rural Hunterdon County. The way Fritzi passed the snapshots to her, Katie could sense that he felt strongly about the horse; the way he pronounced “hairline fracture,” with a just-perceptible faintness in his voice, allowed Katie to know that Fritzi felt this injury as painfully as if it had been his own. “Beautiful, eh?” was all Fritzi could say. Katie marveled over the silky russet-red horse with a white starlike mark high on his nose, the high-pricked ears and big shiny black protuberant eyes, for Morning Star was in fact a beauty, and maybe the knowledge that such beauty was fragile, so powerful an animal as a horse can be so easily injured, was a part of that beauty, as pain was part of it: the pain of anticipated loss.

“Oh yes. Oh Fritzi! Beautiful.”

Two of the snapshots had been bluntly cropped. A third party, posed with Fritzi and Morning Star, had been scissored out of the picture. Katie wouldn’t ask: It had to be the third wife. (Her name was Rosalind. Very beautiful, people said. A former model. And younger than Katie Flanders by several years.) In the snapshots, Fritzi Czechi was smiling a rare wide smile, one of his hard-muscled arms slung around the horse’s neck, through the horse’s thick chestnut-red mane. Fritzi was wearing a sports shirt open at the throat, his stone-colored eyes gleamed like liquid fire; clearly he’d been happy at that moment, as Katie had to concede she’d never seen him.

Carefully Katie asked, “Was this last summer?”

“Was what last summer?”

“… These pictures taken.”

Fritzi grunted what sounded like yes. Already he’d taken the snapshots back and put them away in his inside coat pocket, with his narrow flat Italian leather wallet that was so sleek and fine.

Later, making love in Katie’s darkened bedroom, Fritzi had gotten so carried away he’d almost sobbed, burying his heated face in Katie’s neck. She’d been surprised by his emotion, and deeply moved. Katie wasn’t the kind of girl who could make love with a man without falling in love with him, or, it was fair to say, she wasn’t the kind of girl to make love with a man without preparing beforehand to fall in love with him, and deeply in love with him, like sinking through a thin crust of ice and you discover that, beneath the ice, there’s quicksand. She’d been wondering if she would ever hear from Fritzi Czechi since the last time she’d seen him, months before, and now he was with her and in her arms, and he was saying, “You’re my good, sweet girl, Katie Flemings, aren’t you?” and Katie pretended she hadn’t heard the wrong name, or maybe she could pretend she’d heard, but knew that Fritzi was teasing. She said, “I am if you want me, Fritzi.” She hadn’t meant to say this! It sounded all wrong. Holding Fritzi’s warm body, stroking his smooth tight-muscled back, kissing the crown of his head where his hair was thinnest, as, half-consciously, you might kiss an infant at such a spot, to protect it from harm, she teased, “Are you my ‘good, sweet guy,’ Fritzi Czechi?”

Fritzi was most at ease in banter. The way an eel squirms, so you can’t get hold of it.

Fritzi said, “Exit after next, sweetheart.”

The Meadowlands exit was fast approaching. Traffic was becoming congested in the northbound lanes. Katie, who’d been cruising at fifty-five miles an hour, was wakened from her reverie by her lover’s terse voice. The BMW handled so easily, you could forget where you were, and why. Maybe he’s testing me. Like a racehorse.

“Looks like lots of people have the same idea we do.” Katie meant the other vehicles, headed for the racetrack. “Coming to see Morning Star win his race!”

Again, this sounded wrong. Childish. Katie knew better. Men who followed the horses, especially men like Fritzi Czechi who were professionally involved in the business, didn’t require vapid emotional support from women, probably they resented it. All that they required was winning, which meant good luck, beating the odds, and no woman could provide that for them.

Except for the Meadowlands complex, which covered many acres, this part of Jersey wasn’t developed. The land was too marshy. There were dumps, landfills. Long stretches of sere-colored countryside glittering with fingers of water like ice. Toxic water, Katie supposed. All of northeast Jersey was under a toxic cloud. Yet there was a strange beauty to the meadowlands, as it was called. Even the chemical-fermenting smell wasn’t so bad, if you were used to it. Katie remembered how once when she’d driven along this northern stretch of the Turnpike, into a wasteland of tall wind-rippled rushes and cattails that stretched for miles on either side of the highway, traffic had been routed into a single, slow lane, for there were scattered fires burning in the area; mysterious fires they’d seemed at the time, which Katie would learn afterward had been caused by lightning. The season had been late summer; much of the marshland was dry, dangerously flammable. Clouds of black, foul-smelling smoke drifted across the highway, making Katie choke, stinging her eyes. There were firetrucks and emergency medical vehicles, teams of fire workers in high boots in the marsh, Jersey troopers directing traffic. Katie had tried not to panic, forced to drive her small car past fires burning to a height of ten feet, brilliant flamey orange, some hardly more than a car length from the highway. Like driving through hell, you took a deep breath and held it and followed close behind the vehicle in front of you, hoping the wind (yes, it was windy, out of the northeast) wouldn’t blow a spark or a flaming piece of vegetation against your car, and after a mile or so you were out of the fire area and you could see again, and you could breathe again, and you felt the thrill of having come through, a sudden stab of happiness. “I’m alive! I made it.”

Fritzi was directing Katie to exit, and where to turn at the top of the ramp. As a horse owner he had a special parking permit. Again Katie wondered why he wasn’t driving the BMW and would afterward think, It was all so deliberate! Like life never is.

They went to the long open barn behind the racetrack where the horses were stalled before their races. This part of the Meadowlands complex, hidden from view of spectators, was bustling with horse activity. Katie stared: so many horses! A local TV camera crew was filming the noisy disembarkment of a Thoroughbred stallion from his van, led blinkered and whinnying down a ramp by his elderly trainer. Photographs were being taken. Katie was struck, as she’d been at her previous visit, by the number of what you’d call civilians in the barn: families, including young children, hovering about their horses’ stalls. And everywhere you looked, horses were the tallest figures: their heads looming above the heads of mere human beings, who appeared weak and inconsequential beside them. Even Fritzi Czechi looked diminished, his face suddenly creased with an expression you wouldn’t call worry, more like concern, an intense concern, as he was approaching Morning Star’s stall.

For this warm June evening at Meadowlands, Fritzi was wearing designer sports clothes: an Armani jacket, jeans that were fitted to his narrow hips like a cowboy’s attire, and dark canvas shoes with crepe soles. The jacket was sleekly tapered, though boxy at the shoulders, with large stylish lapels; the fabric was a soft pale gray, the color of a dove’s wings, and only if you looked closely could you see the fine, almost invisible stripes in the cloth. Beneath, Fritzi was wearing a black T-shirt: but a designer T-shirt. Fritzi Czechi always dressed with a certain swagger, unlike most guys from Jersey City of any age or class, and his hair was styled to appear fuller and wavier than it was. Katie saw he wasn’t tinting it, though. A fair faded brown beginning to turn nickel-colored, like his eyes.

A photographer for the Newark Star-Ledger recognized Fritzi and asked to take his picture with Morning Star, but Fritzi shrugged him off, saying he was too busy. Usually, in public, Fritzi Czechi was smoothly smiling and accommodating, so Katie knew: This race meant a lot to him.

And if to Fritzi, then to Katie Flanders. My future will be decided tonight. Suddenly she was scared! On all sides she could feel the excitement of the races, like tension gathering before a thunderstorm, and this evening’s Meadowlands races were ordinary events, no large purses at stake. Katie didn’t want to imagine what it might be like at the Belmont Stakes, the Kentucky Derby. Millions of dollars at stake. Was this where Fritzi Czechi was headed, or thought he might be headed? Or was Fritzi just a small-time Jersey horse owner, hoping for luck? Katie felt how deeply her life was involved with his, or might be. She wanted him to win, if winning was what he wanted, and if he wanted badly to win, she wanted this badly, too. A man is the sum of his moods, it was moods you had to live with. If he had a soul, a deeper self, that was something else: his secret.

The tips of Katie’s fingers were going cold. She clutched at Fritzi’s arm, but he was getting away from her, walking so quickly she nearly stumbled in her two-inch cork-heeled sandals with the open toes and tropical-colored plastic straps. Katie was a soft-bodied fleshy girl, and she was wearing a candy-striped halter-top nylon dress that showed her shapely breasts to advantage; the skirt was pleated, to obscure the fullness of her hips and thighs, about which she felt less confidence. Her dark blonde hair was tied back in a gauzy red scarf, and around her neck she wore a tiny jade cross on a gold chain, a gift from Fritzi Czechi on the occasion of some long-ago birthday he hadn’t exactly remembered when Katie showed it to him.

Fritzi, see? I love it!

What?

This. That you gave me. This cross.

Quickly Katie had kissed Fritzi, to cover his confusion. She was skilled at such maneuvers with men. Always, you wanted a man to save face: Never did you want a man to be embarrassed by you, still less exposed or humiliated. Unless you were dumping him. But even then, tact was required. You didn’t want to end up with a split lip or a blackened eye.

Right now, Ftitzi was practically pushing Katie away. He’d forgotten who she was. At Morning Star’s stall, talking in an earnest, lowered voice with a fattish gray-haired man who must have been the horse’s trainer, while Katie was left to gaze at the horse, marveling at his beauty, and his size. She would play the wide-eyed admiring glamorously made-up female hiding the fact she’d been rebuffed, and was frightened: “Morning Star! What a beauty. So much depends upon you…” Katie was trying to overhear what Fritzi and the trainer were talking about so urgently. This was a side of Fritzi unknown to her: anxious, aggressive, not so friendly. It might have been that he and the other man, who was old enough to be Fritzi’s father, were taking up a conversation they’d been having recently, in which the words she, her, them were predominant. (Fritzi’s wife Rosalind? His ex- or separated wife who was a part-owner of Morning Star? Was Fritzi wanting to know if she was at the track, if the trainer had seen her?) Fritzi had only glanced at his horse, immense and restless in his stall, being groomed by a young Guatemalan-looking stable hand, and must have thought that things looked all right. Morning Star would be racing in a little more than an hour. When she’d visited Pink Lady before her race, Katie had been encouraged to stroke the horse’s damp velvety nose, and to stroke her sides and back, astonished at how soft and fine the hair was, but Morning Star was a larger horse, a stallion, and coarser, and when Katie lifted her hand to stroke his head as he drank from a bucket, he raised his head swiftly and made a sharp wickering noise and nipped at her fingers quick as a snake. “Oh! Oh God.” Katie stared at her hand, her lacquered fingernails, that throbbed as if they’d been caught in a vise. Within seconds there was a reddened imprint of the horse’s teeth across three of her knuckles. Fritzi called over sharply, “Katie, watch it,” and the trainer said, with belated concern, “Ma’am, don’t touch him, Mister can bite.” Katie quickly assured them she was all right. (Later she would realize: The stallion might have severed three of her fingertips, in that split-second. If he’d bitten down a little harder. If he’d been angry. If Katie had been due for some very bad luck.)

Katie was hurt, the young Guatemalan groom hadn’t warned her she might be bitten. He was rubbing Morning Star’s sides, he’d been combing his mane, must have been aware of Katie putting out her hand so riskily, yet he’d said nothing, and was ignoring her now. And Morning Star was ignoring her, though baring his big yellow teeth, stamping, switching his tail. Ready to race? Did a horse know? Katie supposed yes, the horses must know. But they didn’t know how risky their race could be, how they might be injured on the track, break a leg and have to be put down. At one of the races the previous year, a horse and jockey had fallen amid a tangle of horses, and the horse had been “put down,” as Fritzi spoke of it, right out on the track beneath a hastily erected little tent. Katie had been appalled, she’d wanted to cry. You came to watch a race and you witnessed an execution. “Morning Star! That won’t happen to you.”

Fritzi came to inspect his horse. Fritzi dared to stroke the stallion’s head, talking to him in a low, cajoling voice, but not pushing it, and not standing too near. Always he was aware of the stallion’s mouth. He spoke with the groom, and a short, stunted-looking man who was Morning Star’s jockey, not yet in his colorful silk costume. It was a measure of Fritzi’s distraction, he hadn’t introduced Katie to either the trainer or the jockey. She stood to one side feeling excluded, hurt. Embarrassed! She would make a story of it to amuse her girlfriends, who were eager to hear how things had gone with Fritzi Czechi. That damned horse! — it almost bit off three of my fingers. And you know Fritzi, all he does is call over, Katie, watch it.

Or maybe she wouldn’t tell that story. It wasn’t very flattering to her. Maybe, looking back on this evening at Meadowlands, in Fritzi Czechi’s company, Katie Flanders wouldn’t carry away with her any story she’d want to recall.

Of the nine races at Meadowlands that evening, Fritzi was interested in betting on the second, third, and fourth. Of the fifth race, in which Morning Star was racing, he seemed not to wish to speak. Maybe it was superstition. Katie knew that gamblers were superstitious, and touchy. She knew that being in a gambler’s company when he failed to win could mean you were associated with failing to win. Still she blundered, asking a question she meant to be an intelligent question about Morning Star’s jockey, and Fritzi replied in monosyllables, not looking at her. They were in the clubhouse before the first race, having drinks. Katie had a glass of white wine. Fritzi drank vodka on the rocks, and rapidly. He was too nerved up to sit still. Men came over to greet him and shake his hand and he made an effort to be friendly, or to seem friendly, introducing Katie to them by only her first name. Katie smiled, trying not to think what this meant. (She was just a girl for the evening? For the night? Expendable, no last name? Or, Fritzi had forgotten her name?) Many in the clubhouse for drinks were nerved up, Katie saw. Some were able to disguise it better than others. Some were getting frankly drunk. In other circumstances Katie would have asked Fritzi to identify these people, whom he seemed to know, and who knew him, at least by name. Fritzi ordered a second drink. He was looking for someone, Katie knew. The wife. Ex-wife? Rosalind. Fritzi was smoking a cigarette in short, rapid puffs like a man sucking oxygen, for purely therapeutic reasons. When forced to speak with someone he smiled a bent grimace of a smile, clearly distracted. Compulsively he stroked the back of his head, his hair curling behind his ears. Katie would have liked to take his nervous hand in hers, as a wife might. In an act of daring, she did take his hand, and laced her fingers through his. She told him she was very happy to be with him. She told him she was very happy about the previous night. “And I won’t ask about the future,” she said, teasing, “because Fritzi Czechi isn’t a man to be pinned down.” Fritzi smiled at this, and stroked her hand, as if grateful for the bantering tone. Yet always his gaze drifted to the entrance, as a stream of customers, strikingly dressed women, came inside. Katie asked if he’d stake her at betting, as he had the previous year, and Fritzi said sure. “Not only am I going to stake you, sweetheart, you’re going to place bets for me, too.” Katie didn’t get this. Must be, there was logic to it. She wasn’t going to question him. She wished she could take chloroform and wake after the fifth race, when the suspense was over, and Morning Star had either won, or had lost; if he’d lost, had he lost badly; if badly, how badly. Katie had a sudden nightmare vision of the beautiful roan stallion crumpled and broken on the track, medics rushing toward him, the sinister canvas tent erected over the writhing body… It would be Katie Flanders’s broken body, too.

Except Katie wasn’t worth as much as Morning Star, whose bloodlines included Kentucky Derby winners. Katie had no life insurance, for there was no one for whom her life was precious.

After his third vodka, Fritzi took Katie to place their bets at the betting windows. The first race was shortly to begin. This wasn’t a race in which Fritzi was much interested, for some reason he hadn’t explained. Only the next three. And in each, he was calculating they’d win the exacta, which seemed to Katie far-fetched as winning a lottery: Not only was your bet on the winning horse, but on the horse to place. (What were the odds against the exacta? Katie’s brain dissolved into vapor, thinking of such things.) The money Fritzi gave her to bet with was in crisp twenty-dollar bills. Katie wasn’t paying much attention to the odds on the horses. How much could they win, if they won? Especially she didn’t want to know the exact sums of money they’d be losing, if they lost. Of course, all the money was Fritzi’s. Yet, if they won, Katie would win, too.

She thought, He does love me. This is proof!

Fritzi led her to their reserved seats, in a shady section of the stadium, at the finish line, three rows up. Drinking seemed to have steadied Fritzi’s nerves. He was still smoking, and looking covertly around. Whoever he was looking for hadn’t arrived yet. Katie was beginning to tremble. (All the money she’d bet! And the fifth race, Fritzie’s race, beyond that.) The first knuckles of her right hand were reddened, swollen, and throbbing.

Katie said, “I’m just so — anxious. Gambling makes me nervous.”

Fritzi said, “Horse racing isn’t gambling, it’s an art.”

He told her if you knew what you were doing, you didn’t risk that much. And if you didn’t know what the hell you were doing, you shouldn’t be betting.

“My way of betting,” Katie said, meaning to be amusing in the little-girl way she’d cultivated since childhood, “would be to bet on the horses’ names.”

Fritzi let this pass. “A name means nothing. Only the bloodline means anything. At the farm, young horses are identified by their dams’ names. Until they demonstrate they’re worth something, they don’t have any identity.”

Katie was grateful that Fritzi was talking to her again. Taking her seriously. She wanted to take his hands in hers and lace their fingers together to comfort him. Horses were at the starting gate, the crowd was expectant. A voice in her head, mellowed by wine, reminisced, That time at Meadowlands! Remember how nervous we were, Fritzi? I didn’t want to tell you how badly my hand was hurting. .

Fritzi was saying, as if arguing, “Horse racing isn’t a crap shoot. It isn’t playing the slots. You figure how the horse has done recently. You figure the horse’s history, meaning the bloodline. You figure who the jockey is. You figure who the other horses are, he’ll be racing. And the odds. Always, the odds. There’s people who believe, and maybe I’m one of them, there’s no luck at all. No luck. Only what has to be, that you can figure. Or try to.” Katie was silenced by this speech of Fritzi’s, which was totally unlike him. He seemed almost to be speaking to someone else. Not the slightest trace of banter here, or irony.

It was during the first race that Fritzi’s wife, unless the woman was his ex-wife, came to sit a row down from them, twelve seats to Fritzi’s right. Katie saw, and recognized her immediately. Or maybe Katie was reacting to Fritzi’s sudden stiffness. Rosalind was with a tall sturdily built man of about Fritzi’s age with olive-dark skin and ridged, graying hair. She was a striking young woman, as she’d been described to Katie, stylishly dressed in a lilac pants suit with a loose, low-cut white blouse, and wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat. Her long straight dyed-looking black hair fell past her shoulders. Her skin was geisha-white, and her mouth very red. She was theatrical-looking, eye-catching. Katie felt a pang of jealousy, resentment. Rosalind was said to have been a model even while attending East Orange High School, and at the peak of her brief career she’d appeared in glossy magazines like Glamour and Allure. She’d married Fritzi Czechi and gotten pregnant and had a miscarriage and within a few years the marriage was over and it was Rosalind who’d sued for divorce. All Fritzi had ever said about this third marriage in Katie’s presence was that mistakes were made on both sides: “End of story.”

Katie knew better. Not a single guy she’d ever dated, or even heard of, no matter how long divorced, if he hadn’t been the one to initiate the divorce, he never forgot. A man never forgets, and never forgives.

Katie wondered what it would be like: a former husband still wanting you, when you didn’t want him. A former lover still loving you even as he hated you. A man you’d slept with, and hoped to have children with, fantasizing how he might kill you, for betraying him.

There had to be money involved, too, with Fritzi’s marriage. He’d signed over the house to Rosalind, and the house was reputedly worth a half-million dollars. And there was Morning Star, and maybe other horses. Common property. Katie felt how Fritzi was holding himself so still he was almost trembling, as if their seats and the stands and the very earth beneath them were vibrating, shaken by horses’ pounding hooves as they galloped around the track. Katie stared, seeing nothing. A blur. People were on their feet, shouting. Katie hadn’t bet on any horse in this race, none of the names meant a thing to her. She and Fritzi had no stake in the outcome. She scarcely glanced up when the winner was declared. The time: 1.46.41. The purse was $17,000. (The purse for the fifth race would be $34,000.) Katie brushed her hand against Fritzi’s and felt his icy fingertips.

High overhead, drifting across the red-streaked sky, was a lighted dirigible advertising a brand of cigarettes. Katie glanced upward, startled. Though she didn’t exactly mean it, she heard herself saying to Fritzi, “These big open stadiums! They scare me. Somebody could drop a bomb. Some sniper could shoot into the stands. On TV I saw this soccer riot somewhere in South America. Think if people panicked, how you could be trampled…”

Fritzi said, “There’s cops here. Security cops. Things like that don’t happen in the U.S.” Fritzi was forcing himself to speak in a normal-sounding voice. But still he sat stiffly, turned slightly to the left to prevent him seeing the strikingly dressed young woman who’d been his third wife, and the man who was with her. Katie thought, dismayed, He loves her. He’ll never get over it. She had a vision of Morning Star winning his race, and Fritzi and Rosalind coming together to hug each other, united in victory. Reconciled. Was that how this evening at Meadowlands would turn out?

Ruefully Katie rubbed her throbbing fingers. She saw, shocked, that one of her meticulously manicured fingernails, lacquered ivory-pink, was broken and jagged. The nail was splitting vertically, into her flesh.

After the first race, in which they had no stake, things would happen swiftly.

In the second race, Katie had placed bets on Sweet Nougat to win and Iron Man to place. They came through. Katie was on her feet screaming and flailing the air as the horses raced around the track. All of it happening so fast: like a speeded-up dream. The horses’ rushing legs, pounding hooves, the jockeys crouched over their backs in colorful silk costumes, little monkey-men wielding whips — “Oh my God! Oh my God we won! We won, Fritzi, we won!” Like an overgrown child Katie flailed the air with her arms, hardly able to contain her excitement. The color was up in her face, her pulse beat in a delirium of hope. Fritzi remained seated. With his stub of a pencil he made a check on the racing form. When Katie tried to hug him he stiffened, keeping her at a little distance with his left forearm; not a forcible gesture, and in no way hostile, but Katie would recall it afterward. Didn’t want me to touch him. Oh Fritzi!

In that first race, clocked at 1.25.01, Katie and Fritzi won $1,336 each.

“Honey, you don’t even seem much surprised,” Katie said, lightly chiding. She dabbed at her overheated face with a tissue. “I’m surprised. I never win things!”

Fritzi shrugged, and smiled. As if to say that, with him, now she would.

In the third race, they’d bet on Hot Ott to win and Angel Fire to place. Another time Katie was on her feet flailing the air and screaming and another time their horses pulled away from the pack, Hot Ott by a length ahead of Angel Fire, the two horses racing head-long and furious in the homestretch, and Angel Fire was overtaking Hot Ott, had almost overtaken Hot Ott, but had not, and so it was Hot Ott to win and Angel Fire to place. “He won! Our picks won!” Perspiration glowed on Katie’s skin, her eyes were radiant with innocence and hope. In this race they hadn’t won quite so much as they’d won in the first, but it would be $834 apiece. Katie sat close beside Fritzi wanting to hug, hug, hug the man, but content with just nudging knees. She fanned herself with the track program. Tendrils of hair clung to her forehead. She was trying not to glance to the side, to observe the third Mrs. Czechi in her elegant wide-brimmed straw hat, calm and beautiful in profile; though she was wishing she’d worn a straw hat herself, it conferred such class to the wearer. “Some days, they seem to last forever. I mean, you remember them forever. It’s like eternity. This is one of them, for me, Fritzi, it is.” Katie spoke happily, heedlessly. She was one to speak her heart, when she believed she spoke truthfully, and when what she said would be heard, and valued, by another whom she trusted. Stiff and unyielding as a man who has been wounded and is trying not to betray pain, Fritzi was observing Katie with his stone-colored eyes that were oddly moist, sympathetic. That was what Katie believed: sympathetic. Fritzi Czechi was her friend, he’d always be her friend, not only her lover. “It’s like at certain times in our lives, rare times, God peers into time out of His place in eternity and it’s like a—” Katie paused, blushing, not knowing what she was saying: a flash of lightning? a spotlight in a theater? an eclipse of the sun, as the sun is easing free of the shadow over it? Probably she was making a fool of herself, chattering like this. Fritzi squeezed her hand as if to calm her. “Katie, you’re my good, sweet girl, aren’t you?” he said, and Katie murmured yes, yes! and Fritzi said, “You and I go ’way back. We’re old buddies.” Katie shut her eyes to be kissed, and Fritzi did kiss her, but only on the nose, wet and playful as you’d kiss a child.

It was like Fritzi was amused by her, for her caring so much that they’d won a couple of thousand dollars. But Katie was feeling, well — like a winner should. Flying high! Drunk! That happy airy floating kind of drunk before you start to stumble, and find yourself puking into a toilet. She’d had just one glass of dry white wine in the clubhouse but it was as if she’d been drinking champagne all evening. She had a quick warm flash of being married to Fritzi Czechi and the two of them living somewhere suburban; no, they were living in Fair Hills, or was it Far Hills, Jersey horse country, Fritzi could raise Thoroughbreds, champion racehorses. In the barn, she’d liked the smell of the horses. Even the horses’ droppings. It was mixed with an overlying smell of hay. And that was sweet. She would learn to ride a horse: It wasn’t too late. Tall and elegant in the saddle she would take equestrian lessons, lose eighteen pounds and be slender again, and Fritzi would love her, and possibly he’d be faithful to her. But always, Fritzi Czechi would be her friend.

The fourth race! In the fourth race, Ftitzi and Katie won the lottery: the trifecta.

Heavenly Jewel to win, Billy’s Best to place, Sam the Man to show. They’d picked them all.

Another time Katie was on her feet, squealing, radiant with excitement. It was like she was back in high school those frenzied Friday nights cheering for the Jersey City team to win. Except here were nine horses, and of these nine any one could win, all the more triumphant their victory when Heavenly Jewel thundered across the finish line by a nose ahead of Billy’s Best, and there came Sam the Man behind, and this time even Fritzi registered a smile, a small smile of surprise, yes Fritzi was surprised to have won the trifecta. (So maybe he did believe in luck, after all.) Katie cried, “Fritzi, it’s magic. You are magic.” Magic meant they’d collect $3,799 each.

Still Fritzi seemed not-himself, somehow. Katie nudged his knees. Why wasn’t he sexier, funnier? “You don’t always win like this, honey, do you?” Katie asked, and Fritzi shrugged, “No. I have to admit.” It was like Fritzi that, though he was visibly warm, he wouldn’t unbutton the Armani jacket. A film of perspiration gleamed on his fair, flushed skin like miniature jewels. Slowly he stroked his hair behind his ears, a man in a trance.

The next race was the fifth.

Morning Star, and eight others. Katie was so scared, she hoped she wouldn’t faint. She could see that Fritzi was in some zoned-out space, very quiet, very still, just staring at the starting gate. Morning Star was second-to-inside, his jockey wore yellow silks. There was a hush of expectation through the stands. Covertly Katie glanced to Fritzi’s right and saw the beautiful black-haired young woman in the wide-brimmed straw hat also sitting very straight, very still, and gripping the arm of the man beside her.

Katie was trying not to think hairline fracture, beyond computation, put down. Was there a more devastating term than put down! She remembered the tangle of horses and jockeys in that race last summer, a horse had balked coming out of the gate, and swerved sideways into another, and horses had fallen, and jockeys, and the race was jinxed from the start though other horses had pulled away in the clear, and Pink Lady had galloped so hard, you could see the filly was running her heart out, yet the evil little monkey-man hunched over her neck continued to use his whip, and shuddering and in a lather she’d galloped over the finish line not first, not second, but third — and wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t that good enough? Though that evening, Katie had to concede Fritzi had been in an irritable mood, waving away Katie’s elation, and the well-intentioned congratulations of others. For third place wasn’t good enough. Third place at Meadowlands, a weekday race that’s one of nine races, the purse is only $21,000 to win, no: not enough. Not for Fritzi Czechi. Gallop your heart out, it isn’t enough.

For a melancholy time then Katie hadn’t heard from Fritzi Czechi. He was back with his wife Rosalind. If she’d begun divorce proceedings, these were halted. Temporarily. Katie made inquiries about Pink Lady and learned that the filly had lost races, hadn’t qualified for some high-stakes handicap in Florida, and Fritzi had sold her.

What happens then, Katie asked, dreading to know. Whoever it was telling her this, a jokey kind of guy, he’d run his fingers across his throat. “Dog food.”

Katie didn’t believe that, though. She did not.

Not Pink Lady who’d been so comely, of whom, for a while, Fritzi Czechi had been so proud.

At the gate, one of the horses was stamping its feet, misbehaving, there was a delay and the horse was led off and an announcement made, Duke II was “scratched.” Katie thought: This was good luck, what might have gone wrong in the race went wrong before the race, and Morning Star was safe.

“Morning Star”: Katie murmured the name aloud. She squinted to see where he was positioned. The tall horse, beautiful russet-red coat, white starburst high on his nose, was lost amid the others at the starting gate. All nine horses were large, beautiful, powerful beasts with muscled haunches. Each was prized by its owners. Each was worth a lot of money. It was like seeing someone you think you love, unexpectedly in a public place, and you realize he isn’t extraordinary, isn’t that good-looking, nothing special about him but you’ve invested your heart in him, you love him and want to love him and to withdraw that love would be to violate your own heart, to turn traitor.

The race began. So fast! Sudden! Katie was on her feet, blinking in confusion. Somehow it was more than the usual confusion of horses’ flying hooves, the gaily colored costumes of the jockeys, Katie’s eyes were dazzled, hardly could she catch her breath. Morning Star! Where was he? Another horse was in the lead? By a length? Pulling away? She saw the roan stallion thudding along behind, caught in the pack, struggling to break ahead. A horse did break ahead, but it wasn’t the roan stallion. On Morning Star, the monkey-man in the yellow silks wielded his whip. All the monkey-men were wielding their cruel little whips. Katie was too frightened to scream, to squeal, to flail her arms this time. For this was the race of her life.

She saw Morning Star, her lover’s horse who’d bitten her, galloping into the turn, straining to pull away from the others. Almost, Katie had an evil thought: wished there would be an upset: a spill: two horses tangled together, three horses, and falling, and Morning Star would pull away, free. In her trance of oblivion she was praying, God, let him win. God, God, let him win I will never ask another thing of You. The lead horses were in the backstretch. Morning Star was among the lead horses now. Was Morning Star pulling forward? He was! The lead horse, a big purely black stallion, had begun to wobble, other horses would overtake it. Swift and pitiless other horses would overtake it. There was the yellow-clad jockey easing his horse faster, always faster. Katie was screaming now, unaware. Screaming herself hoarse. She had no awareness of Fritzi, who was on his feet beside her, but very quiet, only just staring, his arms slightly lifted, elbows at his sides. She had no awareness of others in the stands shouting, screaming. There came horses into the homestretch, Morning Star on the inside of the track, in fourth place, now in third place, galloping furiously, now overtaking the front-running horses, in second place close behind the lead horse and edging closer, ever closer, to passing that horse; and if the track had been longer, if only the track had been longer! — the roan stallion would have passed the lead horse, thundering across the finish line only just a half-length behind the winner.

The race was clocked at 1.10.91. It would be the fastest race of the evening. Anchor Bay the winner, Morning Star second, and Blue Eyes third. Katie’s cheeks were damp with tears. She had never been so happy. She cried to Fritzi, “Oh, honey, that was good, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? His first time back, with his knee hurt? We came in second, we didn’t lose, he did real well, didn’t he? Honey?” In her excitement Katie was pawing at Fritzi, wanting badly to hug him, and he gripped her elbows to calm her, to steady her; he was himself in a daze though not smiling, not delirious with relief and happiness like Katie, more like a man waking from a dream of heart-stopping intensity not knowing where he was, but knowing what he must do. His face that was usually flushed was ashen, a rivulet of sweat ran down his forehead, his stone-colored eyes were shimmering with moisture. What was wrong with Fritzi Czechi? Telling Katie, with a small fixed smile like a mannequin’s smile, “We did real well, sweetheart. Right. This is our lucky day.”

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:

Esteem! Fritzi C.! 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.