“So?” I asked Diver, after he’d spent about half an hour with Aiello.
“The kid claims he knows nothing about Mapes’ murder, nothing about Penny Hopkins’ disappearance and murder, and nothing further on this guy Gordie. The only thing he admits to is harassment.”
“Do you buy all that?”
Diver shrugged one shoulder. “He says all he was doing was giving a favor to get a favor. He picked on Mapes and in return got quality mounts. That means that whoever this guy Gordie is, he’s got some juice in the racing world, right?”
“Or the guy he works for does,” I added. “What are you going to do with Aiello?”
“I think we’ll hold him, go over his story two or three hundred times. Maybe it’ll change.”
“I’ll keep in touch. I’d like to know if he does change it, in any way” I started to walk away, then turned back. “You know, if that doesn’t work, it would be interesting to see who comes to get him out.”
“Where will you be?” he asked.
“At the track. That’s where it all started, I think that’s where it all has to end.”
“Good luck,” he called. I waved a hand behind me and left.
The first thing I wanted to do when I got back to the Downs was find Lassiter. It was time for us to have another talk. I also wanted to talk to Hopkins, as violently opposed to such a conversation as he might be.
I didn’t intend to give either one of them a choice in the matter.
I went back to the track, and Sally’s, which always seemed to be my starting point. With all the breakfasts I’ve had at Sally’s I never once had lunch there, so that’s what I did.
The talk in the place was about Penny Hopkins and Eddie Mapes, as you might expect. They said the usual about Penny, that she was a great-looking broad and it was a shame. The talk about Eddie was new to me, though, especially the two guys at the next table. I don’t know exactly who or what they were, but they were obviously track people, so what they said had to have some validity.
They were talking about how Mapes had been slipping toward the end. He wasn’t the rider he had once been. It seemed, they said, as if his concentration was gone.
Thanks to Danny Aiello, I thought.
And Willy Donero.
And a couple of mugs after him, to beat him up, to kill him.
How could he concentrate on horse racing?
I grabbed a scratch sheet off an empty table and checked to see how many horses Lassiter and Hopkins had entered. Hopkins had a horse in almost every race, Lassiter in five. Neither of them had a horse in the first race, Lassiter hadn’t one in the second. That meant my first visit would be to Lassiter.
Outside in the parking lot I spotted Brandy across the road and called out to her. She was dressed in green and pink silks and was obviously ready to ride. When she saw me she stopped and waited for me to cross over.
“Hi, Hank.” She treated me to a big smile.
“Hello, Brandy. How many mounts you got today?”
“I was listed for four, but picked up two more when Danny Aiello didn’t show up.” Her own words struck a chord suddenly, because she squinted up at me and asked, “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Yeah, I turned him over to the cops for questioning, and had to run him around the training track to do it. Brandy, do you know a tall, slim, dark-haired man named Gordie something-or-other?”
“Is that your tall man’s name?” she asked.
“That’s it. Ring any bells?”
She shook her head. “Not for me, it doesn’t. Sorry, Hank, but there are so many people I see every day, every week.”
She made an effort to think about it again, then shook her head in annoyance. “Let me think about it and get back to you if it clicks, okay? I gotta go win a race.”
I put my hand on her arm. “Good luck.”
She hesitated a moment, looked around, then said, “Oh, what the hell,” and got up on her toes to kiss me on the mouth.
“See ya,” she called, and trotted off.
I decided not to watch her and dwell on how much I found myself liking her. Instead, I started for Lassiter’s barn, wondering if his wife had mentioned my visit. Considering her invitation while exiting from my car, I thought not.
Lassiter was in one of his stalls, checking out what was probably his entry for the third race.
“Lassiter,” I called from outside.
He was bent over, checking the left foreleg of his charge, and turned his head to see who was calling. He didn’t look pleased when he saw it was me.
“Po,” he said flatly He went back to checking the horse’s foot, checked the other one, then stood up and said to someone I couldn’t see, “Okay.”
He turned around and asked me, “What do you want, Po?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“I heard about Penny. I don’t particularly want to talk to you about it, and furthermore, I don’t see why I should.”
I took out my N.Y.S.R.C. identification and showed it to him.
“Oh, so that’s it. You’re one of Biel’s boys.”
“Is that what they call us?” I asked. It was the second time I’d heard it that day. Shukey was going to love that.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were with the N.Y.S.R.C. when you first came to see me?” he asked, opening the door and coming out of the stall.
I smiled at him and said, “I thought it might be better to play it that way.”
“Why the change of heart?”
“Well, that was a missing persons’ case. Now, it’s a murder — in fact, it’s two murders.”
“You mean Mapes? Are you working on that, too. I would think the police — ”
“I’m working with the police,” I told him.
“Oh, I see. Double the authority, huh. You work for Biel and with the police, so I better talk to you, is that it?”
“Unless you’d rather I think of a different way to persuade you.”
He looked at me for a few minutes, a big man, wide in the shoulders. Big on brawn, small on guts. You can always tell. They flex the muscles, and when you don’t react, they change their tune.
He flexed, then said, “Look, Po, I’m very busy. Just what is it you want?”
“I want some cooperation. I want to know exactly what your relationship with Penny Hopkins was.”
“An occasional roll between the sheets, that’s all. She had big tits and a lot of energy, but out of bed I couldn’t stand her.”
He raised his hands, held his palms out and said, “That’s it.”
“She was in love with you. Didn’t that mean anything to you?”
“Nothing at all,” he admitted.
“You strung her along because she was good in bed?” He shook his head. “Adequate.”
“How about, you strung her along just to piss off her father?”
He gave me a disgusted look, then seemed to change whatever he was thinking.
“Okay, Po, Benny and I are rivals, we compete for almost anything. I admit it. Maybe we did compete for Penny. It’s all academic now, isn’t it?”
He started to walk away from me and I grabbed his arm.
“Doesn’t that strike you as being just a little bit cruel to that girl?” I asked him. “She thought you both loved her.”
“Hey, that was her problem. What are you, some kind of bleeding heart? The girl was a little nuts anyway. Benny knew that, too.”
I got angry, openly angry.
“Okay, Mr. Trainer, you want tough, I’ll be tough.” I poked him a good one in the chest, drove him back a couple of steps.
“What do you know about Eddie Mapes’ murder?”
“Mapes? What the fuck are you asking me about that for?”
“What about a tall, dark-haired man named Gordie somebody? Do you know him?”
He swung at me because he thought I wasn’t ready. I was mad, so instead of just ducking, I stepped inside of it and pushed a short right into his stomach. He was in pretty good shape, so I added a second shot, with my left, in the same place. He was a big man and he seemed to take a long time to fall, but when he did it knocked the rest of the wind out of him.
I straddled him, grabbed him by his shirt and shook him.
“Damnit, who is Gordie?” I demanded.
“I don’t know any Gordie,” he yelled back at me. “Let me go, are you crazy?”
No, not crazy, but I was just about out of control, which was totally unlike me.
I let him go and stepped back.
“You swung on me first, man, remember?” I asked him.
“Yeah, well,” he began, getting up and dusting himself off, “you do kind of get on a guy’s nerves, you know?”
We’d attracted a small audience by this time and I was starting to feel uncomfortable, even embarrassed by the whole incident.
“Let’s walk,” I told him.
“Man, you hit hard,” he said, rubbing his stomach. We started walking toward his office.
“You know Danny Aiello?” I asked him.
“Sure I know him. He’s ridden a few of my horses. He’s a talented kid. I heard he was in line for the mount of Penny’s Penny.”
“Hopkins was going to pull Mapes off?” I asked, surprised.
“Mapes hasn’t been riding that well this year, Po. A lot of people think he was losing it.”
“Sure, because he was being hounded,” I replied.
“What?”
We were at his office door now and we stopped.
“Listen, Lassiter. Danny Aiello had been harassing Mapes for months, for this guy Gordie. Now Aiello is in the hands of the cops and he’ll talk soon enough. If I find out that you do know this guy Gordie, I’ll come back and show you how hard I can really hit. You got that?”
“Don’t threaten me, Po. I’ll put in a call to Howard Biel and have your job. I have some friends on the board, you know.”
I stepped up close to him and he flinched, as if he thought I was going to hit him again. Instead I just eyeballed him until he looked away.
“You make all the phone calls you want, my friend, but job or no job, if I find out you were lying to me, I’m coming back.”
I turned away from him, walked ten feet and then turned back and said, for effect, “I promise.”
Walking away I really felt embarrassed.
What a performance, Po! I told myself. You came on like a real horse’s ass.
I’d not only succeeded in making a total asshole of myself, but I’d probably clammed Lassiter up for good. If he knew anything, I sure as hell wasn’t going to hear about it now.
I’d have to have somebody else work on him.
Somebody like Shukey.