The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

Scott Wolven Pinwheel

From Murder at the Racetrack

Every night that June, from my cell window at Orofino, I watched the fireworks color-burn the midnight sky over the Indian reservation across the road. The colors lit up fields and sometimes the sparks would drift to earth and the old horses the Indians kept would scatter, faster than you would think they were capable of. Speed left from races they never ran, I told myself. I knew horses when I was a kid near Saratoga, in upstate New York. Whole worlds had happened since then. Those horses and fireworks were my only friends at the beginning of that summer.

I wasn’t in the race to win anymore. I’d fallen on some hard times in Eastern Washington and a gang that was a branch of the Posse made a deal with me. They’d pay me to finish off another man’s time in Idaho. I don’t know how they rigged it up, who they paid off. But one day they brought me into a hospital room in Spokane and the deputies that shackled me and took me to Orofino called me by a different name. I was inside under a new name and eight years stood between me and the door.

The Idaho State Correctional Facility at Orofino was an old brick campus, housing twice as many men as it was built for. It was a mixed classification facility, which is the worst, because the killers are in with the guys who forgot a child support payment. The guys doing a decade don’t look very kindly on the guy who gets to go home in three months. I was a maximum classification at that time, because the guy I was pretending to be had a record that began in the womb.

The guards came for me early one morning and cuffed me and shackled me for transport. I knew it couldn’t be good. Someone had filed a writ with the Federal Circuit Court and the federal judge had ordered that I be brought to his temporary chambers, in Boise. They were being forced to produce me, except I wasn’t anyone — I wasn’t the man they wanted incarcerated and I certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone I was working for the Posse. In my own mind, they may as well have been driving a mute to Boise. We passed south through the beautiful Idaho mountains and trees and blue sky. The deputies driving me didn’t say a word, just stopped once for coffee and then drove on. We drove into the streets and city of Boise. I slept on a bench overnight in a holding cell and they brought me upstairs into chambers in the morning.

The judge was in robes and seated behind a large desk, with an older woman stenographer in front of the desk. My brother and an Asian man, both impeccably dressed in gray suits, stood in the back of the room. The judge addressed me.

“The court has been made aware of some unusual circumstances surrounding your case.” He pointed at my brother and the Asian man. I nodded and the judge continued. “We’re convinced… the court has been convinced…” He paused. “The court is convinced that a sealed record and immediate release is the only way you’ll be alive at the end of the week. The State of Idaho didn’t seem inclined to let you go — so the appeal was passed up to me.”

I didn’t say anything. The court bailiff came over and unlocked my cuffs and shackles. I rubbed my wrists.

The judge stood. “I’m instructing one of my marshals to escort you to the Nevada border so we don’t have a problem. I can’t help you if you re-enter this state. And you’re on your own with other problems — but we won’t hold you here as a stationary target.” He handed me some paperwork. “You’re free to go, as long as you’re leaving the state.”

I looked at my brother, who spoke to the judge. “He’ll ride with us to Nevada, Your Honor.”

“Keep your head down,” the judge said. He looked directly at me. “And watch behind you.”

My brother shook hands with me, but we didn’t say anything, not a word. He drove the new sedan behind the marshal’s car, with Mr. Osaka in the back and me in the passenger’s seat. It was a long ride, but finally we saw a sign for the Nevada state line. We crossed it and the marshal pulled a U-turn and headed north, back into Idaho.

Mr. Osaka mumbled something and my brother spoke to me.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t warn you, but we had a heck of a time finding you. You got yourself in pretty deep.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

My brother nodded as he drove. “We’d been looking for you, to come help with Mr. Osaka’s operation. In looking for you, we found out that the man you went as, the real man, just got arrested in Montana. It was only a matter of time before the Posse tried to get to you on the inside.”

Mr. Osaka mumbled to my brother.

“What’d he say?” I said.

“Mr. Osaka doesn’t speak,” my brother said. “He understands English perfectly well and he probably speaks it, although I’ve never heard him. I speak for him. Always, for the past five years. He talks in a kind of yakuza dialect — he and I speak it to each other and that’s it. Nobody else.”

“Handy,” I said. I hadn’t seen my brother much at the beginning of the last decade and not at all in the past five years, but years didn’t come between us. I just figured he had his own job going on, somewhere, and when my plans started to fail, I didn’t want to bring him down with me. He was a couple years younger than me and maybe I felt responsible. He’d gotten bigger since I’d seen him last.

“Do you want to work for Mr. Osaka?” my brother asked.

“What are we doing?” I said.

“Watching whales,” my brother said. And as we drove, he detailed the operation to me. In the end, I agreed.

Whales are a select group of Japanese businessmen, probably only two hundred worldwide, who come to the United States to gamble. They’re called whales because they bet huge — they’re up seven million, they’re down thirty million. If one of these guys walks into a small casino on a good night, he can bankrupt the place, or lose enough to let the casino build another club and a hotel.

Whales like bets that other gamblers can’t get their hands on and sometimes it can be exotic — betting on street fights, illegal car racing. But the yakuza control the horse racing and that means that the yakuza can sometimes control the whales.

Mr. Osaka bought seven hundred acres of land outside Reno, flattened it all out, put in a private horse-racing track and was getting set to lay in a private airfield when some of his contractors thought they’d muscle him for more money. Those contractors are gone and now my brother and I are in charge of the operation.

A private racetrack, with all the barns and stables. The whales own stuff all over the world and pretty soon, the private jets are coming in, with the stallions and racehorses the whales have accumulated. A horseman’s field of dreams. We’ve got the compound gated off and the whales pull up, with their limos and their drivers and their party girls. Every morning — the races start at eleven and they walk around, drinking, looking at the horses.

Mr. Osaka has only two betting windows open, run by Asian men the same as him. Tattoos on their hands, one guy with a Japanese character right on his throat. These are the honest men, bound to count the money, to take the verbal bets and always pay. No slips, no tickets. These guys are taking bets in the hundreds of thousands and never sweating.

Mr. Osaka walks the compound with us and mumbles to my brother as we pass the honest men by the bet windows.

“As children, they are not taught about wanting. Then, when they learn about money, they are taught it is filthy. The combination makes them honest,” my brother translates.

The favorite bet for the whales is the pinwheel. The pin-wheel lets the whale run his horse on Mr. Osaka’s track, but bet against other horses running at other tracks that come in by satellite feed. Your horse can finish second here but if you’ve matched it up against the right combo, say from Saratoga, or Pimlico, or Yonkers, you can double or triple your take. Or you can throw your money in a bigger hole. Money is green paper, to these people. They give more money to the party girls to keep them quiet than I’ve ever earned in my life. But that ended, too, once I got on Mr. Osaka’s payroll.

The horses thundered around the track every day, a different group. Sired by names you’d recognize. The track stayed hard for the rest of the summer and there were winners — Jack Rabbit Fast, Sun Comet, The Last Laugh. Some of the names didn’t translate into English.

One morning, my brother and I had to take pistols out to the building where the stable hands slept and escort someone to the gate. We came back by the track and Mr. Osaka stood at the rail, watching the horses take their morning exercise. He mumbled and my brother spoke.

“Do you know the secret of a fast horse?” my brother translated.

“No,” I said.

Mr. Osaka mumbled at length and my brother fed me bits and pieces.

“When horses run fast, all four feet leave the ground. They fly. They like to fly. It’s their fantasy. But they have to push themselves back down to the ground, so their hooves can touch the track again. So when you look at a horse, or watch him in a race, see the look on his face and the jockey’s. If they like to fly, that is no good. They must like to push themselves back to ground, to run.”

“Do you bet?” I asked.

Mr. Osaka mumbled. My brother spoke.

“I swore a vow in the beginning never to bet on horses and I have kept that vow. Once, a horse had to be shot in front of me and my father told me, You can see someone’s life in the pattern of their death-blood. The horse’s blood stopped at my feet and it was a sign to me that I should not bet on horses.”

I nodded. Mr. Osaka moved his lips and my brother continued.

“If you were shot right now, and we saw your death blood, where would it go?”

I looked at the ground, which sloped slightly onto the track, and Mr. Osaka followed my gaze.

My brother finished. “Stay close to horses then, maybe that is your life.”

We watched Mr. Osaka walk back to the white clubhouse and he disappeared inside.

They slammed out of the starting gates all summer and soon my brother and I had to make a bank trip to Reno. We didn’t go to a bank. It was just a house on the outskirts of the city; it looked like a regular white-and-blue ranch-style. We put the money in the suitcase on the kitchen table and left, as we’d been told to do by Mr. Osaka. I think I saw the blue sedan following us that day, but I’m not sure. We went to the house later in the week, twice, and the second time, I’m sure I saw it. My brother saw it, too.

We had dropped the money off an hour before and were a mile away from the racetrack when the blue sedan pulled in front of us and cut us off. I knew as soon as they got out of the car they were cops. Two cops, undercover. My brother opened the passenger side door and ran up over the bank, as they pulled their guns. I slammed them both out of the way with my car and took off. There were shots behind me, and as I looked in the rearview mirror, my brother was getting into the blue sedan, following me.

You’ve never seen so many people in such a hurry from anything. Mexican stable boys running into the desert, limos pulling around with half-dressed women, and the whales, sunglasses falling off, waving for them to hurry. Planes taking off. My brother watched the gate. Running an illegal racetrack, illegal gambling operation, weapons, now shot cops. We needed to leave.

A fire started near the horse barn. I was still looking for Mr. Osaka, but he was nowhere. There was a bulldozer next to the airfield, left from the contractors. I started it, bulldozed the fence down, got off the rig and opened the stall doors as the flames licked the wood. The horses took off across the field, into the heat. I watched them, shining, maybe three hundred million dollars of property on hooves, running like they wanted to. The owners wouldn’t be happy, but I had done it. My brother and I climbed into a new truck and cut the corner of Idaho, before slipping into Montana and up into Canada. We took our pay with us, nothing more — maybe we hoped that honorable thing would calm Mr. Osaka. The yakuza were like an ocean, deep and violent, and I knew and my brother knew we would live small lives from now on. If we wanted to live life at all.

It was Saratoga that finally called us back. We were there in August on a Sunday, walked down Main Street, bought a racing paper and then made our way over to the track. Years had passed, we had different names and we’d just done a big deal in Manhattan. One stop at the track before returning to north of the border. We settled in, examined the sheet with golf pencils and went to the window.

In the third race, we were by the clubhouse rail. There was a tremendous field coming around, the crowd was cheering. It was close. The brown blur of the pack slammed past us to the finish.

A young Asian boy stood in front of us. He’d come out of the crowd; I hadn’t seen him till now. He mumbled to my brother and I almost felt bullets piercing my back. Nothing happened. My brother spoke.

“Mr. Osaka says we did the right thing and that we should look for a particular horse in the next race.”

The boy bowed and walked into the clubhouse crowd. Sweat ran down my ribs. My brother held up the racing sheet and I looked at it.

It was the maiden race for Komodo Dragon, blinders on, Lasix, and we checked the tote board. Leading off at 85–1. None of the other names could be it. We went to the window and put it all, over seven thousand dollars — that was the lucky limit we’d agreed to bet — on Komodo Dragon. On the nose.

They brought the horses into the starting gate and bang, ring, they’re off. Komodo Dragon is at the back of the pack and as they come around the first turn, it can’t be. Komodo Dragon is dead last and drifting to the outside. Then it starts. Komodo Dragon passes one, passes two, passes Two-Time Loser, passes Long Johnny. Now it’s Komodo Dragon on the outside and the horse starts to fly, to push itself back to the ground, to fly, to push, passing as though the other horses are standing still. You can feel it in the ground and now they’re headed for the final turn, it’s Komodo Dragon and Rummy, the favorite, Komodo Dragon, Rummy, and the final stretch, Komodo Dragon is flying and pushing and the whip gets him back down on the ground, Komodo Dragon is ahead and further, by a length, Komodo Dragon.

We’re walking up to the window with the ticket and we’re not saying anything. But it’s there in my head and as soon as we’re in the car, safe, moving, back in our own race, we’ll talk about it. Beautiful houses in Vancouver and the chance to start over again, a little safer. To run under another name, in a different city, with better chances, another day.