He Was Her Man (10 page)

Slim reached over and turned the card she’d passed on. There it was. The jack of diamonds wearing a handsome face.

“You lose!” Mickey crowed.

Slim was stunned. “What do you mean,
me
?”
His voice rose.
“
You
cheated. You peeked every time. You saw that was a picture, and you passed on it.”

“That’s right.” Mickey’s smile was a killer. “And
you
turned it over.
You
turned the first picture card.
Sugar Baby
wins. You lose.”

Slim fell back in his seat. “Well, fuck me and the horse I rode in on.”

A bell sounded in Sam’s head. Something about a horse. The key to who the black man was something about a horse.

Slim was laughing now. He was halfway between astonishment and indignation. But he was still a gentleman, standing as Mickey stood, checked her watch, gathered the cards, slipped the two hundred dollars and the cards into her bag, and extended her hand. “Thanks so much for the drink, Slim. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, and I hate to win and run, but now if you’ll excuse me.”

Sam had it. She whirled toward the black man, who grinned, and she caught a glimpse of a gold star embedded in one of his two front teeth. That cinched it. She was right, by God!

He was Early Trulove, sure as shooting, an old jail-house buddy of Harry’s partner, Lavert. She’d never really met him, hadn’t gotten close enough to shake hands. It had been a year or so ago, she and Harry and Lavert had been out at the track in New Orleans, and Lavert had pointed out Early as he had walked a filly into the paddock. Early had called something to Lavert and grinned—and Sam had commented then on the flash of gold. Early’s lucky star, Lavert had said. Wards off the silver bullets. Sam had pressed him for details, and Lavert had said Early was working as a groom for Lavert’s former employer, Joey the Horse.

She remembered the day and the man because of the filly Early had been walking. She even remembered the filly’s name, Lush Life. Lavert had said, with an insider’s wink, Bet her to win. They did, and then in the stretch she’d run herself to death. Died, they said, of a heart attack. But she broke a leg going down, and then kept foundering, struggling to rise again. It was a hideous sight, and Sam hadn’t been back to the track since.

She was about to speak to Early, call him by name, when he dropped a 20 on the bar and melted away.

That was it. Call it a night, Sammy. You’re running on your rims. She stood, slipped a bill in the crystal snifter for the singer, who gave her a big grin, then wove her way through the crowded tables across the room. She was heading out toward the elevators when she had an attack of good manners.

Well, hell, it wouldn’t kill her to take the five minutes to run back downstairs to the ballroom, say good-night to Jinx and thank her for the party, then she could go snuggle into her jammies.

Later, Sam thought that for many a Southern belle, the road to perdition has been paved with good manners.

It’s that always smiling, saying yes and thank you, and no, I don’t mind one bit, honey, you just go ahead and do what you have to, that has landed many of them in the looney bin if not in jail.

In this particular case, she could have been upstairs asleep, she could have been watching late night TV, she could have been eating a box of chocolate pecan fudge. Instead, she was standing there in shoes that pinched, listening to Jinx.

“I don’t know how that Katie Couric does it. I’ll tell you, that morning I was on her
Today Show
with my crystal altars, I thought I was going to die. I could no more get up at that time every morning to interview celebrities than I could fly to the moon. I told her. I said, Katie, honey, I don’t know about you, but I need to get my beauty sleep.”

Kitty said to Sam, “Did you have to go out to a pharmacy for those aspirin? We were about to send a rescue party.”

“I got sidetracked.”

Jinx took a deep breath and sailed off on another tack. “Don’t y’all just love Southern weddings? Aren’t they the best? I feel so sorry for Yankees and other foreigners, they don’t even begin to get into the spirit of the thing. You know how outrageous I am, and the second time, when I married Harlan, I had fourteen bridesmaids, all his sisters and girl cousins, and I had them all wear shocking pink and black from Valentino. Honey, that was even before New York women discovered black.

“Actually what we did was this Southern wedding in Italy because that’s where Harlan’s friend, the Italian count, lived, the one he went into the electronics business with. We had a nineteenth-century coach and four horses with roses in their manes carry us from the church to his villa. I had all these little footmen in cute knee pants serving fried chicken wings and potato salad and deviled eggs to the Italians. I had to have forty deviled-egg plates sent from Neiman’s. You know you can’t get a decent deviled-egg plate north of the Mason-Dixon line, and certainly not in Italy. I mean, I could have done carpaccio and pasta primavera and veal tonnato, all that Italian thing, which would have been easier, but not nearly as—Sam, are you listening to me?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You don’t
look
like you’re listening.”

Now, that was the perfect opportunity for Sam to say, No, I’m not, Jinx. And what you’ve noticed with your extraordinary perspicacity are my eyes glazing over from sheer screaming-meemie B-O-R-E-D-O-M—except that wouldn’t be very polite, would it, and she had come back downstairs to be polite if it choked her.

Right about then Loydell steamed back into the scene, her mouth a thin line, her blue eyes sparkling. “Loydell Watson reporting back,” she said with a smart little salute as if her daughter were a general.

“Very funny, Mother. Now where
is
Speed?”

The bridegroom wasn’t downstairs yet? He must have had an even bigger headache than Sam’s. Well, of course, he did, and she was standing right there, running her mouth.

“Where is he, Mother? Is he sick? Did he have an asthma attack?”

“I called up there, but nobody answered,” said Loydell. “So I went up there, to y’all’s room.”

“And?” Jinx tapped a satin-clad foot. “What did he
say,
Mother?”

“Nothing. He wasn’t in the room.”

Jinx sighed heavily. “You are the most contrary old woman in the whole wide world and you are driving me NUTS! Now, I’ve got to leave my party and go see about him. Christ! I hope he’s not stuck in some elevator.”

“Nope,” said Loydell. “He’s not. He’s gone.”

Sam could feel a little bubble of spite rising in her breast. The fiancé had ditched Jinx. Jilted her at their engagement party. Split. Vamoosed. Oh, this was so sweet. And she was
so
glad she’d come downstairs to say good-night.

Jinx’s face had gone white with an even lighter ring around her scarlet mouth. She said, “Gone? What do you mean gone? Gone where?”

“Well, the note didn’t say anything about their destination.”

Loydell, Sam thought, you’re enjoying this too much. Jinx is going to haul off and slap you in about half a second. Spit it out, lady, before it’s too late.

“What note?” Jinx screamed. “What note?”

“The ransom note that was pinned to y’all’s bed in that big old expensive room. A family of ten could live in there easy.”

“Ransom note? What ransom note? Mother, have you gone crazy?” Jinx looked like she might stroke out any second. “You are the meanest woman I’ve ever known in my entire life. You’re just making up all this crap to ruin my party. You hate me. You’ve always hated me!” Jinx was about to go into orbit. Even Sam was beginning to feel a little sorry for her.

“Shhhhhhhhh! Not so loud,” said Loydell. “I didn’t bring the note down because I know better than to mess with the scene of a crime, all those years I spent in the law enforcement, but basically what it said was that if you want to see Speed alive again, it’ll cost you a million dollars, and you’re not to go to the police under any circumstances, or they’ll kill him. Dead.”

“Holy cow,” Sam said.

“Double holy cow,” Kitty added. “If
this
doesn’t take the cake.”

“So to speak,” said Sam.

“DEAD?” Jinx shrieked. “DEAD?”

“Shhhhhhhh!” said Loydell. “No, Julia Alice, I did not say he’s dead. But he will be if you don’t quiet down. They said not to breathe a word of this. Not to anybody.”

Jinx whirled like a comet and raced out of the room as fast as she could in her skin-tight gold lamé.

Loydell went right on. “I don’t know that I’ve ever run up on a man I thought was worth a million dollars,
and I’ve encountered a gracious plenty of ’em in my time. Now, Jinx’s dad, he knew some tricks that I guess I’d have paid for on a piecemeal basis, one by one, sort of like them men used to pay Olive, which reminds me, I need to go and call her again.” Then Loydell was off in her sensible shoes, her words trailing behind her. “I can’t imagine where Olive’s got off to. This isn’t like her. Not one bit.”

9

EARLY TRULOVE WAS four when he went horse crazy. At least that’s what his momma called it when she’d carried him to downtown Daytona Beach, “to sit on a pony and have his picture took. He wouldn’t get off that pony. I say I’m gone beat him with a stick, he say, Go on, this little horsey’s mines. The man owned the pony, took the pictures, he just laughed. Say, boy like you, think you’d grow up out in the country, be used to horses ’fore now.”

But that wasn’t how it was. Early’s mom, Valeen, had escaped the green prison of the deep Arkansas countryside, where you could live and die and meet your maker, all the time seeing nothing more exciting than two dogs in a dead heat chasing a squirrel. Valeen had been looking to bust out. And when a cousin, a daughter of Aunt Odessie, wrote her from Daytona Beach saying that there were not only jobs for black folks but a blue ocean and a sandy beach and
real
speed, race cars going around and around like a house afire in the Five Hundred, well, Valeen had started packing.

Grabbed up Early, her only son—named because he arrived at the end of her seventh month, small, but fully formed and raring to go—and headed for Daytona thinking a boy as in-a-big-hurry as Early could probably find himself something to do around the race cars when he grew up, mechanic maybe, he was handy—even if he was black in a white man’s world.

But it wasn’t cars that Early fixed on. It was that pony, and by the time he was 16, Early had migrated due west from Daytona Beach a little over an hour’s drive to Ocala and Marion County, which claims the highest density of thoroughbred farms per square foot in the United States. Valeen said, Humph, could have stayed home in Arkansas, I knew horses what you be studying.

It was in Ocala that Early was taken in by Asphalt, a black groom who knew all there was to know about thoroughbreds—and young boys who had the bug. Asphalt taught Early that a horse was something you honored, that you were proud to serve them with the hard, low-paying work because there was glory in it. Besides, if you had the bug and you were black, what were your options? You’d never be a jockey, even if you were a small man with good hands like Early, nor a trainer. And as for owning, well, you might as well dream of being the lord of one of those castles that came with a yacht down in Palm Beach. But you could groom, you could hot-walk, you could travel the circuit of racetracks working with other good people, black and white and brown, good people who honored horses.

It was while he was down in New Orleans grooming for Joey the Horse’s trainer that Early had met Jack Graham.

It was Jack who was waiting now behind the wheel of a tobacco brown Rolls when Early stepped out the back lobby door of the Palace Hotel. Jack, the same large silver-haired man Early had signaled to in the lobby only a few minutes earlier. Jack, the boss operator of Hot Springs’s underground gambling machine, whom the locals called Mr. You Know Who, a term of both endearment and respect.

“You want to slide over, Jack?” Early hoped that he would. He’d never seen anyone so awful behind the wheel.

“I’ll drive,” said Jack, giving him his fishy grin.

Early knew that Jack knew how much he hated to ride with him and insisted on driving now and then just for the devil of it. It was those times that Early became a God-fearing Christian again, in fact, wished he were a Catholic, had himself some of those little beads.

They were heading out toward Lake Hamilton and Gardiner Place, one of Jack’s two casinos. Jack had just missed grazing a Lincoln Town Car pulling out of a parking place on Bathhouse Row when he said to Early, “She’s a looker. Doc’s partner.”

“What’d you expect? Aren’t they always, the women, that is?”

“Yeah.” Jack hoisted his big body in the leather seat, which creaked. “Doc always did have pretty good taste in women. I never knew what they saw in him, though. Even less now, he’s showing his age. And the booze has got to be eating away his brain.”

Then Early watched Jack check himself in the rearview mirror to see if you could say the same of him. Well, you couldn’t. For a white man Jack was pretty sharp-looking, in Early’s opinion, which probably didn’t count for much, his being a better judge of horseflesh or womanflesh.

Jack Graham was about 50, six foot three, 200 pounds, maybe 205, with a powerful body, a nice big square-jawed face, and a nose that hadn’t been broken but once. He had a full head of silver hair and bright blue eyes. Take that actor Brian Dennehy, subtract a few years, you’d pretty much come up with Jack Graham.

Jack himself had grown up in New Orleans’s Irish Channel, out on Magazine Street, and could trace his lineage in the Big Easy’s underworld back to his grandaddy, who was a bootlegger and had worked out the original accommodation with the Italians.