The Disappearance of Penny Read online

  “That means she’s over eighteen, right?”

  He nodded. “Nineteen, to be exact. He phoned me last night to see if I knew a good detective. I persuaded him to abandon that idea and allow me to send him one of my investigators.”

  “Ah, me, right?”

  “Well, Hank, if you were still on your own I would have recommended you anyway. This way, you do the job as a favor to me, while on salary.” He paused, then added, “I would appreciate it if you would do whatever you could.”

  He knew I wouldn’t refuse. For the most part, we maintained an employer/employee relationship, but he was one of those damned few friends I said I had.

  “I’ll go see him this morning,” I promised.

  He smiled and told me, “He’s expecting you. Penny’s Penny is supposed to work out this morning, at Island Downs’ Breakfast with The Thoroughbreds.”

  “Okay,” I said, rising, “maybe I’ll finally get to eat breakfast after all.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I stayed to watch Penny work out, and because I still had some questions to ask Hopkins. If it weren’t for Biel, if I were on my own again, I don’t know that I would have taken his case. Having been out of that sort of thing for some time now, I wasn’t sure I could operate with full confidence, but it was a favor for a friend and I couldn’t let my feelings about Hopkins, or the case in general, get in the way of that.

  I decided to just have coffee and watch a few of the other horses work out until Penny put in an appearance. I’d have breakfast at Sally’s, a little place on the stable grounds where most of the track people ate. I’d had some of the best breakfasts of my life there, and I deserved something to make up for this morning.

  I was standing at the condiments table, shoveling sugar into my coffee, when I spotted a familiar face. “Hey, Roger,” I called out.

  Roger Lucien saw me and waved, indicating he’d get a cup of coffee and then join me. The girl with the microphone was telling people that Penny’s Penny would be on the track shortly.

  “How’s the horse-eye?” Roger asked after he’d joined me.

  “Fine, Roger, great.”

  Roger Lucien was a young trainer who had started to hit it big a couple of years ago with a nice three-year-old filly named Diamonds & Pearls who had turned into one of the top older females of last year and this. Along the way he had picked up three or ten other nice horses and now he usually finished in the top ten trainers at the end of every meet. His father had been a top trainer for many years and had handled many greats, including a Triple Crown winner. For some reason his son, Roger, seemed to have more success with fillies than with colts.

  Diamonds & Pearls had already won the filly triple crown this year and had one last race before being retired. She had earned better than three hundred thousand dollars this year, and over eight hundred thousand for her career.

  Roger was headed for the top of his field, and he was nowhere near forty yet.

  “What are you doing at the workouts?” he asked. “I didn’t know you got up this early.”

  “Only on rare occasions. I was out with an early riser last night.”

  He smiled knowingly and said, “So you figured while you were up you’d come out and watch the ponies work, right?”

  “Not exactly, Roger. I’m out here in a kind of semiofficial, official, unofficial capacity.”

  He stared at me, puzzled, and asked, “What?”

  “I’m doing a favor for a friend.”

  “Oh.”

  “Tell me about Penny Hopkins,” I asked him.

  His eyes lit up. “A fox.”

  “Do you know her well?”

  He shook his head. As he did his eyes caught a filly on tile track and he followed her progress down the stretch.

  “Nice stride,” he observed. “No, I don’t know her that well, I let her walk horses for me once in a while. Besides, she’s too young for me.”

  I shook my head. “Must be tough getting old. Your what, about thirty-four?”

  “Every year of it,” he answered.

  “Old before your time,” I lamented. “Have you seen her around lately?”

  “Not for a few days,” he answered, thinking, “but that’s not unusual. She’s all over the grounds, here and there. Why, has something happened?”

  “Not that I know of,” I told him. Just then the gal with the mike announced the appearance of Penny’s Penny on the track.

  “Thanks, Roger,” I told him, getting up from my seat. I didn’t want him asking me any more questions. “Good luck with Pearl.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” he said, frowning at me.

  I walked away and approached the rail. I wanted to see Penny up close, but I also wanted to locate Hopkins. He had walked Penny down the runway from the paddock area — where they saddle the horses before every race — and had stopped at the rail. There was another rail between us, separating the runway from the spectator area. I walked over by him and leaned on that rail.

  “He looks good,” I told him.

  “He looks great,” he corrected, “and that’s just the way he runs.”

  “His next race is in two weeks, isn’t it?” I asked.

  He nodded. “That’ll clinch him as the two year old of the year,” he said, confidently.

  “Unless Bold Randy wins,” I observed. Okay, I admit it, I was trying to get a rise out of him, but he surprised me. He did flash me a sharp look, but he held his temper very well.

  “He won’t,” was all he said.

  It was only when he clicked his watch that I realized that Penny had started his run. Sometimes a trainer will run another horse with the horse he’s working, just to push him a little, but Penny was running all alone and he looked great. There was complete silence as everyone watched the potential champion do his thing. His regular jockey, Eddie Mapes, was in the irons.

  As he entered the stretch Mapes had him hugging the rail. You could hear his hooves pounding out a beat on the ground, and the air escaping from his lungs through his nostrils. He was an incredible sight streaking through the stretch and as he crossed the finish line the cheering began. I even found myself applauding.

  “Nice,” I told Hopkins.

  “It’ll do,” he muttered. He put his watch way without letting me see it.

  “What about her?” I asked him, indicating the girl with the mike.

  “I arranged for her to have orders not to reveal the time of Penny’s work,” he explained.

  Mapes was letting Penny run down before turning and heading back with him.

  “I’ve got a couple of questions, Mr. Hopkins.”

  “Huh?” He had a wary eye on Penny and hadn’t fully heard me.

  “Questions,” I reiterated, and added, “about your daughter.”

  “Oh, of course. Go ahead.”

  “I need to know where she hung out, and who with.” He scowled, still not taking his eyes from Penny. “What do I know? She was nineteen, she came and went.”

  “Who were her friends?”

  “Everybody,” he told me. “She liked everybody, everybody liked her. Talk to anybody on the grounds, Po, they’ll know more than I do about where she hung out, and who with.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll be in touch.”

  I was forgotten in the very next second. Penny was approaching and Hopkins went out to meet him.

  His daughter was his daughter, but Penny’s Penny? That horse was his whole world.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I showed the guard at the gate my N.Y.S.R.C. ID and he let me drive through into the stable area. Driving on the main dirt road, five miles an hour was tops. There were horses constantly crossing from one side to the other, and you never knew when one of them might take it into his head to break away from his handler and run in front of a car.

  My wheels were kicking up a lot of dust and I closed my window to keep it from getting in my eyes.

  Off to the left I saw a small crowd surrounding a large black horse — a colt or a filly,
I couldn’t tell from that distance — and there was a guy with a camera taking photographs of the animal. Further along I saw a jockey riding a big gray in the opposite direction, probably going to the main track for a workout. Normally, the workouts took place on the training track behind the stable area, but this late in the year it was closed. It was not winterized, as the main track was.

  My first stop was Sally’s, for breakfast — I thought.

  The parking lot was almost full, but I knew that the owners of the cars hadn’t all gone into Sally’s. The lot was used by everyone.

  As I got out of my car I saw two men in an argument of some sort at the other end of the lot. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I thought I recognized the situation. One man was very short, obviously a jockey, the taller man was probably his agent. One of them was unhappy with the other, a common enough occurrence in the world of racing. Either the jock felt that the agent wasn’t getting him enough “live” mounts — that is, quality horses to ride — or the agent thought the jockey was dogging it — blowing the mounts he did have, jeopardizing a chance of any future “live” mounts.

  I watched for a few moments longer to see if they’d start swinging at each other, but pretty soon they were walking away, the agent’s arm around the jockey’s shoulder. They had kissed and made up, and I went into Sally’s.

  Sally was a character. She was a heavyset, black woman of indeterminable age, but she had been around race tracks for years and had to be in her mid-fifties, at least. When Island Downs first opened two years ago, she moved her operation from one of the other New York tracks, but the breakfasts were still the best you could get anywhere in the city.

  She bantered with everyone who came in, whether it was your first time, or your hundred and first. You never knew whether or not she remembered you, because she treated everyone the same way.

  “Hi, Sally,” I called out.

  “What’ choo’ want, honey? I ain’t got no time to be hi’n and bye’in everybody that walks in here, you know?” she scolded me, but it was done with half a grin, just part of the act.

  I ordered scrambled eggs, sausages, home fries, coffee and juice. She told me to go sit down and she’d call me when it was ready.

  I surveyed the tables. There were about ten out front here and another ten in the back, where there was another entrance and exit. I was looking to see if there was anyone I knew There wasn’t so I took a table and listened to some of the conversation going on around me.

  If you have breakfast at Sally’s, and you keep your mouth shut and listen, you can sometimes come up with a useful piece of information — if you’re a horse player, that is.

  You might hear that a certain horse is sore and is only being run in cheap races because his barn is trying to dump him, or that another horse was in particularly good shape but was being held back during workouts, so as not to tip anyone to his real condition.

  Thoroughbred racing is as honest as any sport. You’ve got basketball players and football players who will shave a few points to cover a point spread, or a baseball pitcher who will groove one to a batter, just so the outcome of the game will be a little closer. In racing you’ve probably got jocks who will hold a horse back a little in one race so that the price will be higher in the next one. Not all races are fixed; to believe that would be a little much, but just as Ali might carry a challenger for a few rounds before winning, so might a jockey hold a horse back so his margin of victory won’t be as impressive as it might have been. If a horse wins an important race by a large margin, he won’t have many challengers in his next race, and the price on him will be next to zilch. On top of that, the more horses there are entered in a race, the bigger the purse is.

  Right now there was a big case in court where a notorious race “fixer”, Willy Donero, was testifying about all of the races he’d fixed and the jockeys and trainers he’d bought in the last five years, just to save his own hide. He was throwing around some pretty big names and the end result could have a calamitous effect on the racing industry, but I’m always suspicious of the testimony of some jerk who’s just bargaining for a lesser charge and a lighter sentence. They’ll just tell you what you want to hear, and there are people who would just love to hear that thoroughbred racing is “fixed.”

  Rumor had it that major indictments were not that far off.

  Shit, as far as I was concerned, the only sport that was totally fixed — and played by a script, for Christ’s sake — was wrestling, but you’ve got people who will even argue that point with you.

  Granted, I got my job because of a race that was tampered with. Three years ago a trainer brought in a champion Argentinean horse and substituted him for a cheaper horse in a ninth race triple event. The horse won easily, and the resulting payoff, both on the horse for winning and on the triple, was exorbitant. It was not discovered until after the trainer had cashed his winning tickets that a switch had been made. There had been a big court case and racing was quite embarrassed by the whole affair. It was after that incident that Howard Biel had applied to the board of directors for a grant to hire a team of special investigators, to make sure nothing like that ever happened again. It was a hard battle because, just like every corporation in any business, the N.Y.S.R.C. was tight-fisted. They finally agreed to finance a team of four investigators, which was one-fifth the manpower Biel had originally asked for. He took what he could get, however, and contacted me first. The rest you know.

  That was one incident, and a sport shouldn’t be judged by one scandal. Anyway, the sport itself caught the guy and didn’t try to cover up.

  “Come and get it, honey, ‘fore it gets cold, “Sally called. I got up, went over to the counter and grabbed my tray. I was finally going to get to eat my breakfast.

  I was about to take my first bite of egg when a kid, probably a hot-walker from the looks of him — they’re the people who walk a horse around after a race until he cools off — came storming in, waving his arms and yelling.

  “They’re gonna kill each other, somebody stop ‘em!”

  “Who?” somebody asked.

  “Eddie Mapes and Danny Aiello. They’re trying to kill each other out there,” the kid shouted.

  Shit.

  I got up and told the kid to show me. A few other people followed us out and we saw what the kid meant.

  Two little guys were wailing away at each other just across from the parking lot, in front of a stall with the number 40 on it. They looked like two little lightweights fighting a championship bout where everything and anything goes.

  I started to trot across the road and then I saw one of them — it looked like Mapes, from the pictures I’d seen of him — pick up something, an iron bar of some kind, and he looked like he was ready to wrap it around Aiello’s skull. I quickened my pace and grabbed a hold of his arm on the down swing.

  “Let me go, you motherfucker! “he screamed. “I’m gonna cave that cock-sucker’s head in. Lemme go!”

  “Take it easy, Mapes,” I hollered back. While I had a hold on him I saw Aiello getting ready to land a roundhouse right.

  “Goddamnit, somebody grab that other mosquito!” I shouted.

  A couple of guys not much bigger than him grabbed Aiello by each arm. I was having a hard time holding Mapes. As small as he was, as small as any jockey was, they had tremendous strength in their arms and wrists. I was experiencing that strength now, but once I utilized my superior height to push him off balance, I was able to subdue him a little easier. When he dropped the iron piece I pushed him away from me, in the opposite direction from Aiello.

  “Simmer down!” I shouted at him.

  “Who the fuck are you, man?” he demanded, holding the arm I’d bent to make him drop his weapon.

  I fished out my ID and showed it to him.

  “N. Y. S. R.C.,” I told him, and he calmed down a bit. “You want this incident to go down on a written report?” I asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “How about y
ou?” I asked, turning to Aiello.

  “No, sir, “he muttered. He was young, about twenty, which made him almost half Mapes’ age. He had a growing mouse under his left eye and a split lip. Mapes, on the other hand, was unmarked. He had obviously been getting the better of the kid, which made me wonder why he felt it necessary to pick up a weapon.

  I didn’t bother asking who started it, that was what you asked two kids fighting in a schoolyard. Also, I didn’t give a damn. I was satisfied just to stop them. If they wanted to go somewhere else and continue, that was their business.

  “Okay, go someplace and cool off,” I told them. I picked up the implement Mapes had been holding. It was a long bar, probably used when working with horseshoes. I threw it inside a stall and started back to Sally’s. I didn’t even bother to look and see which way the two combatants went. I was pissed because I knew my breakfast was going to be cold.

  “Hey, Hank, “somebody called from behind me. I turned around and saw a jock I knew running toward me. He was dressed in street clothes and had obviously just parked his car. He was dropping his keys into the pocket of his nylon windbreaker.

  His name was Joey Importuno.

  “What the hell was all that about?” he asked, jerking his head toward stall number 40.

  “Be damned if I know. I didn’t bother to ask. Eddie Mapes and some kid named Aiello were going at it tooth and nail, until Mapes picked up something heavier than a nail. I didn’t want to be a witness to murder, so I took it off him.”

  “Danny Aiello?” he asked.

  “I didn’t hear his first name. Young kid, about twenty, dark hair. I recognized Mapes from the Racing Form. Who’s the kid?”

  “A new apprentice. He’s got pretty good hands.”

  “Yeah, well, somebody better teach him how to fight, because he was getting his ass kicked.”

  We entered Sally’s together and I sampled my breakfast while Joey got himself a glass of skim milk. It wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated; it was lukewarm instead of cold.

  “Mapes is tough, “Joey told me after he’d sat down across from me. “I’ve had my share of scrapes with him myself.”