The Disappearance of Penny Page 4

  One look at him dispelled any vision I had of him and Penny running off together for romantic reasons.

  “Is he in love with her?” I asked.

  “Hey, you’re pretty good. Just from looking at that picture you could tell that, huh?” I stared at him until he got the picture. “Okay, okay, so he’s crazy about her. I mean, everybody is a little in love with her, but he’s sick about it.”

  “How does she treat him?”

  “Like a trained puppy. He’s her gopher, you know? But it’s his choice to be.” He shook his head slowly, a faraway look coming into his eyes. “I’d of been her gopher, she gimme half a chance.”

  I turned and went back to the bar to finish my beer. There was still some time to go before the next race and the place was still relatively empty, so he came back and leaned on the bar while I finished my drink.

  “Funny thing about Louie,” he spoke up after a few minutes.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Well, I could swear — well, hell, everyone could swear that the guy is queer. You know, what do they say now, gay?”

  “That’s what they say,” I agreed. “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, a couple of guys had the feeling he was maybe coming on to them, you know? Nothing heavy, just the way he looked at them in the jockey’s room, you know?”

  I looked across the room at Penny Hopkins’ smiling face and unbelievable body. “Well, from the way she looks, if anyone could have shaken him out of it, she could,” I commented.

  “Of course, he would never have a chance with her, anyway. No one would.” He droned on, but I had already shut him out, thinking about my next move when something he said registered and made me tune him back in.

  “What was that?”

  He had good instincts, that boy. As soon as he saw my interest perk up he clammed, waiting for a flash of green. I reached across the bar and grabbed his tie with the horse’s head on it and gave it a twist that brought him up onto his toes.

  “Repeat, please?”

  “Hey, okay, okay. All I said was that nobody has a chance of nailing little Penny because she was tied pretty tight to Paul Lassiter. At least, that’s the word around the track. Everybody’s heard it.”

  “Yeah,” I said, letting loose of his tie, “everybody.”

  Everybody knew, all right.

  Everybody but me.

  I grabbed a napkin, wrote down my name and number on it. I told him if he thought of anything else, or if he saw either one of them, to call me. I laid a five down on the bar and left.

  See how soon “soon” becomes “now”?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “It was a stupid lie,” I told him. I had found him right where I left him, in his office with a drink in his hand. It was as if he knew I would discover his lie of omission and was just waiting for me to come back. “If it was all over the grounds that you and Penny Hopkins were an item, you had to know I’d find out about it sooner or later and come back to you with it. Why lie about it?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and took a sip from his drink. I was beginning to think he couldn’t answer a question without a drink in his hand.

  Was he an alcoholic?

  “I saw no reason to volunteer any information that wasn’t necessary. Besides, isn’t that an occupational hazard with you, being lied to?”

  “Only by people who have something to hide.”

  He stiffened and claimed, “I have nothing to hide, Po.” I was glad he had dropped the polite “Mister.” “I knew Benny Hopkins wouldn’t mention it to you because he’s furious at the idea. He wouldn’t admit to anyone that his daughter was in love with me. I saw no reason to mention it either.”

  “What about you?”

  He frowned. “What about me?”

  “Are you in love with Penny Hopkins?”

  This time he didn’t sip his drink, he set it down on the table with a bang and made a face.

  “The girl is a pest, Po. For the record, we do not, as you put it, have a thing going. She may have a thing for me and that is what she has spread throughout the grounds.”

  “Have you slept with her?”

  “That’s none of your damned business, but I’ll answer it anyway. Yes, I have, on several occasions, but not recently. She still comes around, though. I only tolerate her because — ”

  “Because of what?” I prompted.

  He picked up his drink and sipped it. I fought an urge to knock it from his hand. “Because she’s dynamite in bed,” he finally finished.

  It wasn’t what he was originally going to say, but that was all right. I was pretty sure I knew what he had been about to say, anyway.

  “You’re sure you didn’t tolerate her because you knew it bothered her father?” I asked.

  He was fixing himself another drink. “I don’t go out of my way to antagonize Benny Hopkins,” he insisted.

  “What about Weatherwise?” I asked. Weatherwise was a filly Benjamin Hopkins had been very high on earlier in the year. He had tried several times to purchase her from the owner and at one point thought he had the deal set until someone outbid him.

  That someone was Paul Lassiter.

  “What about her?” he asked, defensively.

  “The papers say you practically pirated her away from Hopkins. He said he knew what it would take to make her a winner, a big winner. You bought her and she hasn’t won a race yet.”

  “That’s bullshit!” he snapped. “Nobody could make a winner out of that dud.” I guess no one likes to be reminded of their failures.

  “If she was such a dud why did you buy her?”

  He set his glass down with a bang again, but this one was filled more than the other had been and some of the liquid sloshed over onto his hand and desk. “I don’t have to explain myself to you,” he said indignantly, drying his hand with his handkerchief.

  Then something came to mind.

  “Are you married?” I asked him.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” he asked, groping for his drink. I took that to be a “yes.”

  “What does your wife think of all this talk about you and Penny Hopkins?”

  “My wife never comes to the track, Mr. Po,” he answered, getting polite again, “and I’ll add that my wife is no concern of yours.”

  He was wrong; she was my concern. Maybe she knew about Penny, and was jealous. Maybe she had something to do with Penny’s disappearance.

  I walked up close to him and pointed my finger at him.

  “You’ve succeeded in making me think you have something to hide, Lassiter,” I told him. “If you do, I’ll find out. I promise.”

  I felt better about not liking him now. I’d given him his chance and he’d blown it.

  I left him and went to find Hopkins. He, too, had lied to me, also a lie of omission.

  What I wasn’t being told in this case was turning out to be more interesting than what I was being told.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Hopkins wasn’t in his office and I couldn’t locate him anywhere on the grounds. The day’s racing wasn’t over; in fact, the featured eighth race was just about to start, but still he was nowhere to be found. I grabbed a program that was lying on the ground and saw that Hopkins didn’t have a horse entered in either the eighth or the ninth race. I was about to throw the program away when I had a second thought and looked again.

  Sure enough, Lassiter had a horse entered, and the morning line was six to one. Was that the horse he’d lost a “bundle” on last time because of loose bandages?

  I discarded the program and went looking for Hopkins’ assistant trainer, a man named Mickey Richards. I found him easily enough, closing down shop for the day, directing traffic, getting the horses into their stalls.

  He was an ex-jock, about thirty-five, who had retired prematurely after a bad fall. He hadn’t sustained any lasting injury, but word had it that he lost his nerve. What he hadn’t lost, however, was the marvelous rapport he had with horses, and it was pro
bably for this reason that Hopkins took him on as assistant trainer. I’d heard it said that Richards did most of the actual training, these days.

  “Excuse me,” I called out to him.

  He turned and said, “Yeah,” in a tone that said I was annoying the shit out of him.

  “Has Hopkins gone home yet?”

  He stiffened and looked me up and down with obvious distaste.

  “Mister Hopkins went home after the sixth race,” he informed me coldly. “I imagine he must be there by now.”

  As he started to turn away, obviously not delighted with my lack of respect for his master, I called out to him again.

  “What?”

  I showed him my card, the private one.

  “Are you aware that Mr. Hopkins’ daughter hasn’t been home since yesterday afternoon?”

  “He mentioned it. What’s it to you?”

  “He’s asked me to find her. Can you tell me anything about her?”

  He eyed me suspiciously and asked, “What do you want to know?”

  I got annoyed now. “Was she a virgin; did she sleep around? You know, that kind of thing.”

  He faced me squarely, fists bunched tightly. He must have been all of five-foot two, but I had no desire to tangle with him. He looked like a tough customer to be brawling with. He had hands large even for an ex-jock and his knuckles looked like they would be able to inflict a lot of damage on somebody’s face.

  We stood like that for a few moments, then he seemed to gain control of his urge to take me on.

  “Penny is young, naive, easily impressed — ”

  “You mean by Lassiter?” I interrupted. He obviously had very strong feelings about his boss’ daughter, but so had everyone I had spoken to that day-one way or another.

  “That punk!” he snapped, a look of pure hatred taking up residence on his face, as opposed to the one of pure dislike he had been wearing for me.

  “She’ll see through him! You wait! She’ll see right through him!” He turned and stalked off. When I called him again he just waved a hand behind him in disgust and kept going.

  I went back to the clubhouse in time to catch the replay on the monitors of the eighth race. I watched Lassiter’s horse go to the front and lead all the way up to the wire, where he got nailed by a fifteen-to-one shot. I hoped he was happy the bandages didn’t come loose.

  I also hoped that he had bet a bundle on him.

  I wanted to go down to the jockeys’ room to talk to the jocks about Penny, but I decided to wait until after the final race, when I’d have a better chance of catching most of them. What I wanted at the moment was a phone, and there is nothing scarcer at a racetrack than a telephone. There were, in fact, no such things as pay phones at the track, no phones at all that were available to the betting public, for obvious reasons.

  I went down to the security office, displayed my ID and asked if I could use their phone. I called Biel’s secretary and asked her to look up phone numbers and addresses on Benjamin Hopkins and Paul Lassiter. That done I went back upstairs to watch the ninth race and get a hotdog.

  I didn’t like the picture I was getting of Penny Hopkins. In fact, I couldn’t read it. Everybody either loved her or disliked her, which probably meant that nobody really knew her. If I couldn’t get some kind of a handle on her personality, it was going to be that much harder to track her down — if she had disappeared on her own, that is. If she had help, that would make it even worse. In that case, I would have to find someone who wanted her out of the way, for whatever their reason.

  Lassiter, just to antagonize Hopkins even more?

  Hopkins, to try and throw some kind of suspicion on Lassiter? Would he go that far? Would either of them carry their rivalry that far?

  What about Lassiter’s wife? Maybe she did know about Penny and was jealous.

  Melendez, to have Penny for himself?

  What I needed was someone who knew the real Penny Hopkins, and could introduce me.

  By the time I finished my second hotdog, the ninth race was history. I started down to the jockeys’ room, figuring most of them would be there by the time I worked my way through the crowd.

  I used my ID to gain admittance, then stood by the door and tried to get everyone’s attention. I knew some of them, but for everyone’s benefit I introduced myself. I decided to come clean with them, because if they genuinely liked Penny, they would want to help.

  I didn’t exactly say that she was missing, however, I simply said I was looking for her.

  Apparently, she was extremely popular with most of the jocks, because the reaction was all positive. Soon I was surrounded by a band of helpful little men in various stages of undress. They crowded around so much that I was forced back into the hall.

  It was there that I held court.

  “What’s the problem with Penny?” one asked.

  “Who said there was a problem? I’m trying to locate her, that’s all.”

  “Doesn’t her old man know where she is?” another asked.

  “You kidding?” a third voice asked. “He doesn’t even know who he is.”

  They all laughed.

  “Look, quiet down a second,” I called out. “It’s no big thing, I just have to talk to her. Some of you know me, the others can ask around. She’s not in any kind of trouble, I just need help in finding her.”

  They mumble-mumbled and murmur-murmured for a few seconds, and they all knew that there was more here than met the eye, but the general consensus was that no one seemed to recall having seen her since Thursday, the day before Hopkins said she disappeared. That meant that when she left home yesterday, Friday afternoon, she did not go to the track. Lassiter had also seen her on Thursday, so that must have been the last time she was on the track grounds.

  Now I had to hope that someone had seen her outside the track.

  “How about Louie Melendez?” I decided to ask. “Has anyone seen him recently?”

  “Is Louie in a jam?” somebody asked.

  I am not an overly tall person, but I felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. I couldn’t even tell which head the voices were coming from. Scanning their faces I saw Danny Aiello, lumps and all, but I didn’t see Eddie Mapes. Maybe he had ridden the winner and was late coming in.

  “Let’s just say I need to ask him some questions and I can’t seem to locate him.”

  There were some more mumbles and murmurs and then one jock, Ronnie Sample, a fixture at New York tracks for some fifteen years, stepped forward and asked, “If we should see either one of them, or hear anything that might help, how do we get in touch with you?”

  I took out my wallet and checked my old business cards. I only had one left, so I gave it to him and told him to put it up somewhere, so the number would be available to anyone who needed it.

  “Don’t hesitate to call anytime,” I told them. “If I’m not in my service will take a message.”

  “Don’t worry,” someone else threw in. “We all like Penny and we’ll do what we can to help her.”

  I noticed that nothing had been said about liking Melendez or doing what they could to help him. I guess they weren’t as anxious to find a gay jock as they were to find a gorgeous redhead with a snubbed nose and great tits.

  “You’re all good friends of Penny’s,” I told them, probably because I felt guilty about what I had just been thinking.

  Most of them shook my hand and I felt like a politician. They filed back into the jockey room, some of them looking at the card I had given Sample and wondering why a private eye would be looking for Penny Hopkins.

  I turned to go back upstairs when I heard a voice call out, “Hey, buddy?”

  I turned to see who was calling and if they were calling me.

  At the far end of the hall, past the door to the jockeys’ room, stood a tiny girl with short, dark hair, dressed in riding silks. Her name was Brandy Sommers and she was the top female jockey in the country. She was also very outspoken, for the most part very disliked by the oth
er jockeys — male and female alike — and very uninhibited. Many of her antics had worked their way into the major newspapers as well as the racing periodicals, especially her appearance in Playboy magazine a few years ago, in a nude layout, which is why I recognized her right away. I’m an avid Playboy looker. I admit that I buy the magazine to look at the pictures, not read the articles.

  Brandy Sommers was extremely pretty. She had been referred to many times in print as “one of the best, but certainly the best-looking lady jockey in the country.” She was very small, but very well put together.

  Which brings us right back to, “Hey, buddy.”

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  She started walking down the hall toward me, her hips rolling beneath the silks. I stayed where I was and watched, since it was obviously all for my benefit. It was sexy, knowing what was beneath those silks. It made me wonder and want to see it up close and personal.

  She also reminded me of a gunfighter, calling me out on the streets of Dodge City, or somewhere equally untamed.

  She stopped about five feet from me, hands on hips.

  “I heard what you told those guys,” she told me, jerking her head in the direction of the jockeys’ room. “Got a card for me?”

  I made a show of patting my pockets, then shook my head and spread my hands. “Sorry, I’m fresh out.”

  “That’s okay, you can give me one tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  “When you pick me up for dinner,” she told me, as if I should have known it all along.

  “Now, why would I want to do that?” I asked and added to myself, aside from the obvious reasons.

  “I can help you,” she told me.

  “With what?”

  “With Penny Hopkins. You’re looking for her, aren’t you?”

  “I am. Do you know something I should know?” I asked, copying her hands-on-hips pose.

  “You’ll find out tonight. At eight?”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “Eight o’clock.” She gave me the address of her hotel and a dose of big brown eyes to tide me over until then.

  She was the only girl I ever met who could make brown eyes look sexy.