Close Call (19 page)
It was well after the night’s final race and Jack was just finishing his wrap-up story when the door to the otherwise deserted press box opened. Still looking at his computer screen, he muttered, “Who the hell is coming in here now?” He was tired, both physically and mentally, from another twelve-hour day, so many in a row now. An hour or so before, he’d asked himself, not for the first time, “Why did I take this damn job?” The answers always were, “I need the money…Moe asked me to…I feel obliged to help Celia.”
He heard the water cooler burble. When he looked up he saw Celia’s tall form bent over the spout handle. She drank thirstily from a small paper cup, then refilled it. Finally, she turned to wave to him, one hand extended, before going over to sit on the long couch at the far end of the darkened press box. It was an area containing three armchairs, a coffee table, and a couple of floor lamps. Celia reached up and turned off the only lamp that was on. She leaned forward and put her head in her hands. From where he stood, he saw her shoulders begin to shake and heard muffled sobs. He walked rapidly over to stand in front of her, saying softly, “Celia…Celia.” She raised her tear-streaked face. “There are just times, Jack, that it all gets to me. Bob—he’s had a terrible day. Fidelia and I put him to bed an hour ago. He looked desperately unhappy before he finally dropped off to sleep.
“That was the worst piece of a very, very bad day,” Celia continued. “There are the track finances. Al Hannan, our comptroller, told me this morning that we’re barely meeting the weekly payroll. We’ll be lucky if we can hang on until the end of the meeting. I don’t know,” she whispered, “it just gets to be too much some days. This is one of them.”
Doyle knelt before her. Looking at this beautiful embodiment of sadness, he felt a catch in his throat. He reached forward and lifted her chin up. He said, “I wish like hell there was something I could do to help.”
Celia suddenly rose to her feet. He was surprised by the speed of her movement and he got up quickly. She looked directly at him, eyelids still wet, her mouth drawn down. Hers was a look both imploring and determined before she stepped close to him, pressed her moist lips on his, arms tightly around his neck. He took an involuntary step backward.
Celia clutched him more tightly. Jack felt himself begin to harden as she pressed against him, her mouth all over his now, her breath coming in short gasps. “Hold me, Jack. Please, hold me,” she said urgently. “I’ve no one to do that for me anymore. No one. Not anymore.” He kissed her deeply, cupping a breast in one hand, running his other hand down her trembling back. Her moan carried a hint of desperation.
As they kissed and held each other, Doyle’s thoughts, in quickly dismissed flashes, were of the unlocked press box door. Of Bob Zaslow, asleep in his apartment bed one floor above. His own recent statements to Shontanette. A couple of Commandments whose numbers he could not readily recall at the moment. Hemingway’s description of a moral act as something you felt good after.
All such speculation ended when Celia moved her mouth away from Jack’s and looked up at him, eyes locked on his. She took his hand and led him to the couch, sat down, and lay back on it, beginning to unbutton and wriggle out of her green skirt, never taking her eyes off of his face.
Jack knelt beside the couch and hurriedly but gently began to open the buttons on her white blouse. When, moments later, Celia was naked, Jack’s eyes riveted on the lovely length of her. She watched hungrily as he rapidly discarded his clothes in random piles. When he was done and stood before her, Celia arched her back and reached one arm to the floor lamp above and behind her, and the room went dark. And she reached for him.
***
Some ninety minutes later Doyle walked with Celia down the long corridor leading to the entrance to her apartment. Celia stopped at the door, turned to him, and gave him a soft, brief kiss, and a flash of her great wide smile. It was followed by a long, silent look before she turned the key and slipped through the doorway. He remained there, staring at the closed door, hoping it would open and she would come out to him having changed her mind. But he knew she wouldn’t. He knew she meant it when she’d whispered to him, only minutes before, still in his arms, “Thank you, Jack. That was, well, what I thought it would be. What I wanted, what I needed…Had we met in a different time….” Her voice trailed off before she added, “What we did will never happen again.”
“So this is how you define bittersweet,” Doyle said to himself as he slowly walked to the elevator. He kept recreating in his mind Celia’s hungry touch, the feel of her, their love making which had evolved from a frantic pace to a gentle rhythm. Those memories would haunt him, that he knew.
In his Accord, Doyle sat back and took a deep breath before leaning forward and laying his arms and head on the steering wheel. A wave of shame swept over him as he thought of Bob Zaslow, imprisoned in his wasting body, sleeping, or perhaps awake and wondering where his wife had been. Doyle knew he had no business falling for Celia McCann. Knew that he had, and that it loomed as another bold faced entry in the Doyle Dossier of Poor Decisions.
He finally started the car and eased it through the dark, quiet night toward Monee Park’s west entrance. Driving past the old wooden building that contained the office of racing secretary Gary Gabriel, Doyle thought he saw a light flash on, then off. Probably his imagination. There’d be no one in that office at this hour. He drove another half-block, eyes flicking toward his rear view mirror, before he suddenly braked. He’d seen a light back there again, where it shouldn’t be. He was sure of it.
After turning off his car lights, he made a quick U-turn. He drove up next to the racing secretary’s building and parked in the shadows, several car lengths from where he knew the entrance to be. He eased his car door shut before slipping to the doorway of Gabriel’s office. This was an area he was very familiar with. Doyle often stopped here in the mornings to ask Gabriel about possible entrants into the weekend’s best races, horses he could publicize in advance. This was where trainers came to enter their horses in races, where jockeys’ agents hung out seeking assignments for their clients. Most important, it was the repository of foal papers, or registration records, of every horse stabled at Monee Park. No horse could race at Monee, or any other track in the United States, without these identification papers being on file with the racing secretary.
Doyle ducked low as he approached the windows to the office. He cautiously raised his head to peer into the dark interior. He could make out two figures, both wearing dark, hooded sweatshirts. One held a shielded flashlight aimed at the rows of opened filing cabinets that held the foal papers. From the street light coming over his shoulder, Doyle could see something silver in the man’s other hand. Then the man flicked it open. It was a cigarette lighter. The other short, hooded figure began removing the cap from a large red gas can.
Doyle quickly took off his sport coat and bunched it around his left hand. He leveled a hook, always his best punch, through the lower window panel. The shattered class clattered to the office floor. Doyle dropped down below the window level, muttering, “I hope these bastards don’t have guns. Which I should have thought of before.”
The sudden quiet was broken by the muffled sounds of panicky voices, then shoes scraping over glass. The door burst open and the two hooded figures dashed out. Startled, Doyle was able only to make a lunge at the second figure, and he missed him. Doyle skidded across the sidewalk on his chest before jumping to his feet and sprinting after them.
The hooded men never looked back as they sped toward the chain link fence bordering the wide parking lot. They went over the fence like Marines on a Parris Island obstacle course. On the other side they jumped into a dark blue sedan and sped down the alley toward Crain Avenue. Doyle crashed the backs of his fists against the fence in frustration. Their car was moving so fast, its lights off, that he never got a look at their faces. There was no license plate on the car, which careened around the corner on Crain and was soon out of sight.
Doyle limped back to the racing secretary’s office. He’d badly scraped his right knee during his pavement slide, tearing a wide hole in his slacks. He found his cell phone, which had fallen out of his sport coat, on the edge of the pavement and called Track Security. Though the night was warm, and he had run hard, his breathing was easy.
My days in the gym are still doing me good
, he thought as he pressed in the security office number.
But those bastards were fast.
***
The main night shift security guard telephoned Monee Park security director Karl Mortenson at home. Mortenson lived nearby and arrived at the racing secretary’s office eighteen minutes later. Doyle watched Mortenson examine the broken lock on the outer door, the open cabinets, the discarded gas can still full, a look of disgust on his face. The locked file drawers had been crudely pried open, either with a crow bar or a jack handle.
“Well, these guys are no locksmiths,” Mortenson said. “Did you get any kind of look at them, Jack?”
“No. When I looked in through the window, they had their backs to me. As I said, they were on the short side, stockily built. When they ran to the fence, all I could see was their legs pumping. And they were moving. They scaled that fence like monkeys. I never saw their faces because of the hoods. But these have got to be young guys. In good shape.”
Mortenson looked around the large room, then up at its aged ceiling beams. “Jesus,” he said, “a fire started here would rip through this whole building within minutes.”
“Looks to me like those guys were aiming at the foal papers,” Doyle said.
“But any blaze started in those papers would spread instantly,” Mortenson responded. “The sprinkler system in here looks so old I doubt it could douse a bonfire.”
He shook his head. “This whole plant needs serious upgrading,” Mortenson said.
The security chief stationed two guards at the door to Gabriel’s office, telling them, “Stay there until we get a locksmith over here first thing in the morning.” He walked with Doyle toward Doyle’s car. Doyle said, “The two guys that robbed the money room. Their descriptions were ‘short, stocky.’ Nobody saw faces that night, either.” Mortenson paused, then reached into his jacket for a cigarette. “Maybe it’s the same two guys,” Mortenson said. “But why?”
***
After Doyle had grabbed four hours of sleep, a twenty-ounce container of black coffee, and had reached his desk in the press box, he picked up the phone and heard a familiar voice say, “I heard what happened last night.”
Tired, irritable, Doyle barked at Moe Kellman, “How did you find out about this already?”
There was a prolonged silence on the other end of the phone. Doyle could picture Kellman, probably at his Hancock Building office suite, sipping tea after his early morning workout at Fit City, flush with good health and curiosity.
Kellman said, “Jack, Jack, try to harness your deep seated aversion to normal human interaction. We’re just having a conversation here. Relax. I found out about the break-in at Monee Park because I hear things. I understand that you, or Celia I should say, are not making this public. Good idea. Why make the track look like it’s under attack. Which I think it is, by the way.”
Doyle sat back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk, trying to relax. “That was a disaster averted last night,” he said. “If those guys had managed to set fire to the horses’ registration papers, our racing meet is over. They, or whoever sent them, were striking right at the heart of our operation. When the money was stolen, we survived, thanks to you. When the electricity went out on the Fourth of July, we survived. We lost a lot of money, but we survived.
“But,” Doyle said, sitting up in his chair, feeling anger rise within him, “if those bastards had burned down that office, the 2006 Monee Park racing meet would have been history. And so, in the long run, probably Monee Park itself.”
He took a deep breath, sat back, put his feet upon the desk again. “But of course, Moe, you know that. Like you seem to know everything else.”
Kellman didn’t respond to the jibe. He said, “I spoke to Celia before I called you. She agrees with me that there’s nothing random about what’s going on out there. That there’s a concerted campaign to shut down Monee Park.”
“Looks that way,” Doyle said.
Kellman said, “Are you thinking, along with me and Celia, that Niall Hanratty could be behind this?”
Doyle said, “Hanratty’s got motive, all right.”
“Yes, he does. What you’ve got to find out is who the locals are that have been hired to do his dirty work.”
“Me? Finding out is a specialty of yours, as I recall,” Doyle said. “Go to it. I’ve got my hands full trying to keep this joint afloat as it is.”
There was another silence. Kellman was probably putting down his tea mug and reaching toward the large platter of fresh fruit that was constantly replenished throughout the working day in the Hancock suite.
Finally, Kellman said, “I intend to go to it, Jack. I’ve got Celia’s best interests in mind. And the track’s. And even, believe it or not, yours.”
“I’m touched, and encouraged,” Doyle said. “Really, I mean it. Thanks, Moe.”
“One other thing. A final question, if I might ask. What were you doing at Monee Park after one o’clock in the morning, long after the races were over? I’ve never figured you for an overtime type guy.”
Doyle fought off the almost tensile memory of Celia’s mouth on his, her warm loveliness beneath him, concentrating on his answer. “Moe, sometimes I surprise myself,” he said lightly. “You remember Julius Erving? The great basketball player?”
“Who could forget? What about him?”
“Dr. J. said one time that ‘being a professional is doing things you love to do on nights when you don’t feel like doing them.’ That’s me, sometimes.”
Moe sighed. “Jack, you are sometimes so full of shit it defies the borders of imagination.”
“So long, Moe,” Doyle said.