The only thing I gave Eddie Mapes to drink was black coffee.
After a shower, that is.
A cold one.
When he was reasonably sobered up — and patched up — I joined him in another cup of coffee and tried to get some idea of just what was going on.
Starting with the fight with Danny Aiello.
“He’s a young punk!!” Eddie snapped when I asked him about that. “Oh, he’s got some riding ability, all right, but he’s also got a smart mouth.”
“Just as far as you’re concerned?”
“No, he gets on some of the other rider’s nerves, too, but he seems to take some kind of special pleasure in riding me, if you’ll excuse the pun.”
I did and waved it away.
“Only sometimes I get the feeling it isn’t a pleasure,” he added, frowning. “Sometimes he looks like he’s not really enjoying it.”
“Then why would he do it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“What specifically started the fight?”
He chose that particular moment to sip his coffee and I was reminded of Paul Lassiter sipping his drink before answering a question.
Mapes’ eyes wouldn’t meet mine as he answered, “Just a combination of things, I guess.”
I thought about the tall man I had seen Aiello talking with both before and after the fight. I was sorry I didn’t have a good enough description in my mind to relay to Mapes for a possible identification. “Tall, dark-haired, slim” fit an awful lot of people.
“Okay, Eddie, skip that fight. What about those two downstairs? What was that all about?”
He shrugged again. “Probably just a mugging,” he remarked.
“C’mon, Eddie.”
“Hey, c’mon, man. I didn’t ask you to stick your neck out or your nose in, right? Okay, I’m grateful, you pulled my chestnuts out of the fire, but butt out, huh?”
He got up and paced. He wasn’t angry exactly, he was just being evasive. He was trying to anger me to throw me off my plotted course.
“How about the accident in the sixth race yesterday, Eddie?” I asked, just to get his third mishap of the day into the conversation. “You going to tell me that was just another accident?”
He stopped pacing when I said that, his eyes wide. Suddenly he was a very frightened man.
“Eddie, I was just kidding,” I said, trying to calm him.
“Believe me, if they could set that up — ” he began, then stopped short.
I pulled one out of left field — or, at least, out of the backstretch.
“Eddie, has all of this got anything to do with Willie Donero?”
He turned away from me real quick and put one hand behind his head. Then he turned back and said, “Look, man … “but stopped and changed his mind. “I gotta go, “he told me, grabbing his shirt and putting it on. “I’ve got a big race to ride in tomorrow.”
“You’ve had a hard day, “I told him. “You’re going to be pretty sore in the morning.”
“I’ve had worse and still rode winners,” he assured me.
“You going to win tomorrow, Eddie?” I asked him. “Or are you going to lose?”
He buttoned his shirt, put his jacket on and collected the paraphernalia that most men carry in their pockets and returned it to his pants.
“Mr. Po, listen. I really do appreciate what you did for me tonight, okay? But don’t stick your nose in my business anymore, okay?”
I gave in — for now.
“All right, Eddie, not unless you ask me to. I’m available, if you ever need help and there’s something you think I can do. Deal?”
“Yeah, okay, deal,” he agreed, just to get me off his back.
Then he left.
I watched him from my window. He made it to the end of the block without falling down or being pounced on.
I cleaned up the place, thinking more and more about that tall man I’d seen with Danny Aiello.
Was that really a jockey/agent relationship, as I had originally thought?
And what had Aiello said to Mapes that had set him off? He might have actually killed Aiello if I hadn’t stepped in at the right moment.
It wasn’t part of my job to think about those things, but maybe I’d talk to Danny Aiello tomorrow. Maybe I’d find something out.
You know, about Penny Hopkins?