Murder at the Racetrack (30 page)

“What does that mean?”

“Large. A large amount of Mr. Grandors’s money—”

“I don’t care. I—”

“Spats is the horse can win the Bluegrass. Only horse can beat Spats tomorrow is Windsong. Not you and Fortune’s Child, not
even on a muddy track. One-forty-six? Not going to happen.” Jones felt in his pocket for his car keys; the silver key ring
was shaped like a bridle. “So you stick to what we planned, Michelle. You rabbit the Child through the first quarter so fast
you wear out Windsong. That’s your job.” He pointed to a door two stalls back inside the stables where a gray horse stood,
craning his neck toward the young jockey. “Fortune’s Child’s not going to win that race tomorrow. He couldn’t win if we wanted
him to, which we don’t. What’s the first thing I told you about Fortune’s Child?”

“He couldn’t win. You told me he couldn’t win.”

“That’s right.” More than a year ago they’d had that conversation here at the Farms. The trainer Mr. Jones was leaning against
the paddock fence one dawn, watching while a Costa Rican groom named Loopy legged Michelle up into the tack. She was taking
the young thoroughbred Fortune’s Child out for a run. Jones said to her then, “The Child’s a mornin’-glory of a horse. And
that’s all he is.” In other words, the gray would run like the wind at his morning workout, at least when Michelle Harlin
rode him. But in a real race, and real races were in the afternoon, he’d fade away in the backstretch every time.

Now, remembering that, Michelle set her jaw at her boss. “He’s not just a morning glory. We did win. You saw. Rain-dancer
will win if I ask him to.”

Loopy the groom suddenly popped up behind two exercise boys who were walking their horses back to their stalls. Loopy had
a startling habit of appearing and disappearing without notice. He tipped his red cap, which had the name of the champion
SPATS
spelled on it in white letters. Loopy spoke eagerly. “Raindancer do it for her, that horse, that’s true. He come ’round the
pole so fast he pull Jesus off the cross.”

Mr. Jones held up his hand like a stop signal. “Loopy, stay out of this.”

“Yes, senor, all right.” Loopy’s brown hard-muscled arms crossed protectively over his T-shirt. He backed away.

The trainer motioned the girl to walk with him to his car. “Michelle, you’re doing plenty if you push Windsong to the first
pole in twenty-two or under. You drew a rotten post, fourteen. You gotta come from way outside. You gotta get over fast.”

“I can get over in twenty-one.”

“Maybe. You set that pace out of the gate, you’re doing your job.”

“You say my job is to do the best I… You say I have a gift.”

“You do have a gift, but you won’t have a life. College—”

“I don’t want to go to college. I want to win this race.”

He shook the bridle key ring at her. “Well, tomorrow you just make sure Windsong doesn’t.”

The tall man’s thin shadow shimmered across the groomed gravel as he moved past a group of tourists visiting the Farms. His
car was an unexpectedly sporty one for such a formal man, a blue Chevrolet Corvette Z06 convertible. But Raylan Jones, although
himself measured in tempo, was an admirer of speed. He had a high regard for a car that could go 185 mph. As a young exercise
boy at Churchill Downs, Jones had watched Secretariat win the Derby in one minute, fifty-nine and two-fifths seconds, and
he had then followed Secretariat to Baltimore, where he saw the big red horse set another track record at the Preakness. Then
up in New York there’d been another record at the Belmont, thirty-one lengths ahead of the rest of the field. That memorable
day, CBS couldn’t even get the second horse in the same camera angle with Secretariat at the wire. For the next twenty-five
years Mr. Jones had worked as a thoroughbred trainer because in his youth he’d seen Secretariat and had admired his speed.
He’d had hopes of training a horse of that caliber (Spats had a little of Secretariat’s lineage), but no one had ever come
close. Raylan Jones was fairly sure he’d never see anything like that 1973 Triple Crown victory again.

Michelle kept telling him that he was wrong, that right here in Lexington, he could see the gray stallion named Fortune’s
Child, the gray she called Raindancer, do something just that splendid.

“Well, you like to think so,” Jones always replied, not unkindly. “But that horse is not a champion.”

Now, the evening before the mile-and-an-eighth race, the Bluegrass Stakes, he was telling her she wouldn’t even come in third.

The trainer slid carefully into his Corvette, then turned the motor back off and leaned out. “You want a ride?” He’d never
offered Michelle a ride before.

“Thanks, but I need to talk to Raindancer, give him his cookie.”

He smiled in his slow way. “Well, just don’t eat it yourself. Tomorrow—you weigh in, one-oh-seven, am I right?”

“You’re always right, Mr. Jones.”

The owner’s son came trotting out of the stables on one of the exercise ponies. He gestured a salute to them with his riding
stick.

“Eric’s a nice kid,” said the trainer. “College kid.”

“He’s okay.” The girl shrugged and looked away.

After Jones drove off, Michelle returned to the stables,

where she saw the groom Loopy gesturing furtively with his red cap for her to follow him. To her surprise Loopy led her toward
Mr. Jones’s small office at the end of the stables.

The other grooms at Campbell Farms called Luis Rojas “Loopy” because, many years ago, a horse panicking in the starting gate
had crushed against his leg, ending his career as a jockey. As a result of the injury, he walked at a quick odd off-balance
tilt, one that worsened whenever he’d had a few beers, which was often.

There was nobody else around at the far end of the stables. Loopy held a ring of metal picks in his scarred hand, using one
of them with a fast furtive motion to open the trainer’s office door.

Michelle was shocked. “Loopy, what the F are you doing?”

Silently he moved her brusquely inside, locking the door behind them. In the dusky office, he chose another pick from his
ring and used it to open a desk drawer. He took out Jones’s metal box and opened it. The box was full of money.

“Jesus, Loopy! You
cabron!
Put that back!”

But the short man shrugged, pouring stacks of bills, neatly bound with rubber bands, onto the seat of an old leather recliner.
He whispered to her, “That’s ten thousand, eight hundred dollars. Just sitting here.”

Michelle grabbed the money from the chair. “That’s Mr. Jones’s! It’s, like, his savings!”

Loopy let her stuff the bills back in the metal box. “Maybe so. Tomorrow, we gonna put it all on Raindancer.”

“You can’t rob Mr. Jones!”

Nodding, he smiled at her. “He never gonna know. You gonna win the Bluegrass, Michelle. That gray horse love you. Raindancer
do anything you ask him. You gonna ask him,

come on, big boy, win this thing for me and Loopy’s poor little five baby children.”

They heard laughter just outside the office. Michelle pressed against the door, listening while two of the exercise boys moved
past, talking lewdly about the owner Mr. Grandors’s trophy wife, and how she was probably the same age as his son Eric, and
how she was probably sleeping with Eric, too. “Assholes,” Michelle muttered. Finally the men’s voices faded.

Michelle returned to Loopy. “So let me get this straight. You’re going to steal Mr. Jones’s money and bet it on Rain-dancer?”

“No, your mama going to bet it for us. Little bit this window, little bit that window. People don’t think nothing. Mama just
betting her heart.”

“No way. You’ll get a bonus anyhow if I do win. We’ll both get one.”

“That bonus is a lousy penny. You and Fortune’s Child going off, seventy-to-one, I bet. You and me, this way.” He tapped the
metal box. “We gonna win about seven hundred thousand dollars. You know how your mama want that house. You can get it. After
we win, we put this money back for Mr. Jones. He never know a thing.”

“You’re loco.” But Michelle kept looking at the box the man was holding out to her. “… You really think I can beat Spats?”

He pushed the money into her hands. “Girl, I know you can.”

•    •    •

Raindancer and Michelle had met on her birthday, as if the gray colt had been some sort of surprise present. That day in early
June, she was hurrying late from school to the roadside tavern where her mother worked as a bartender. A sudden storm caught
her as she cut across a Campbell Farms meadow. She went there hoping to see some of the horses that lived at the thousand-acre
luxury stables. She’d been watching them for years.

Stung by the hard rain, she raced to the edge of the blue-grass field, where blossoming groves of cherry trees and apple trees
grew close together, dark and thick.

It was odd that she felt no fear when the gray colt ran so noisily out of the shadows of the orchard. It was odd because things
did scare her then, like when a teacher called her name, or if she suddenly awakened in the trailer in the middle of the night
and saw that her mother had not come home.

Rain was beating the apple blossoms into a swirl around the horse as he weaved through the low boughs of the old trees. He
looked to her as if he were dancing in the rain, unable to decide what he wanted to do next. Finally, he veered to a stop
with a shiver in front of her. They stared at each other, and after a while, she took a cream sandwich cookie from her wet
backpack and, stepping toward him, carefully held it out.

There was an arc of wryness in his way of his turning his head a little to the side before accepting the cookie from her outstretched
hand. It made her laugh. “You’re funny,” she said. “You’re a Raindancer.” He nodded his head as if he liked the name. Then
he butted his nose against her backpack. She found a candy bar for him.

When the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the horse galloped away just when a white van with CAMPBELL
FARMS
written across the side roared up the dirt road beside the orchard. A small Latino man jumped out, holding a lead line, yelling
at the gray colt, “Son of a bitch!
Vuelto aqui ahoral”

That was how Michelle had met Loopy Rojas, who’d immediately started complaining to her about the horse as if he’d known her
for years and was certain of her sympathy.
“Hibridol
That bastard son of a bitch colt, he think he king of the world. Since he’s a little baby, he’s trying to get me fired. He
run off three days one time. They just now break him with the yearlings and he jump the fence!”

Michelle was sympathetic; she’d run away from home herself several times when she was little, taking off to look for her father,
although she had no idea where he might be. She tried to strike a deal. “I’ll help you catch that horse if you teach me to
ride.”

“You loca. He got a big buck in him this one, you let him get his head down, you flying to the moon. He’s a mess.”

“No, he’s not.” Michelle saw a gray shimmer as the colt moved in the orchard. She gestured for Loopy to look behind a clump
of apple trees. “He’s watching us. I don’t think he likes you.”

Loopy laughed loudly. “That’s the truth. He don’t like me. Mr. Jones gonna fire my ass. I got five babies. Ya ya ya ya ya!”
He appeared to realize only now that he was talking to a stranger. “You look like somebody I know. What’s your name?”

“Michelle Harlin.”

He stared hard at her, then shook his head. “No, I don’t know that name.” He held out a soiled hand. “I’m Loopy. This horse
gonna be my death.”

“You stay here.” Taking the lead line from him, she started toward the dark trees.

The horse Michelle called Raindancer was officially known as Fortune’s Child, the name she saw engraved in brass on his halter
when he bent his head to take another cookie and let her snap on the lead line. Foaled and bred in the Kentucky bluegrass,
he had been the star weanling at Campbell Farms until his “acting up” turned his trainer Mr. Jones against him. Fortune’s
Child came from a much better family, far better known, than Michelle’s. He was the grandson of the great Fortune, who had
never lost a stakes race in his life; his mother was WeepNoMoreMyLady, winner of the Breeders Cup Mile, who’d set a record
on a muddy track, who was Filly of the Year. Fortune’s Child could trace his ancestry all the way back to Gallant Fox, the
1930 Triple Crown winner.

Michelle’s parents were nobodies. Her mother, a foster child, had been for twenty years bartender at the Finish Line, a roadhouse
not far from the Keeneland, Kentucky, racetracks. Betsy “Bits” Harlin had one big dream, to own a house you couldn’t move.
She still lived in a trailer. She had named her daughter for the Beatles’ song “Michelle,” looking for a little romance in
a hard life. It hadn’t come. Well, it had come a few times, but it hadn’t stayed. Bits had always been, she admitted, a sucker
for anyone talking a foreign language. She’d been a sucker for the good-looking jockey from Tijuana, the self-named “El Canon,”
who’d spent a month in her trailer while racing second-rate mounts at Keeneland. On the best day of his life, he’d finished
third. El Canon had left town without knowing that Bits Harlin was pregnant.

“He was a little man, but he was a big mistake,” Bits told her daughter years later, when Michelle started asking about her
father. “Hey, anyhow, he left me the best thing in my life. You.”

It was doubtless because the groom Loopy was from Central America and because he knew all about horses that Michelle had liked
him from the first. After he told her that he’d realized that the person she looked like was her father (whom Loopy had met
at Keeneland), after he let her hang out at the stables, after he arranged for her to be hired to work in the stalls, after
he let her ride Raindancer, she had come to love Luis Rojas.

He lived in a tack room at the Farms, his hot plate and
little
TV on a shelf, his clothes stored beneath. For years, he had mailed money home to his large family in Costa Rica. He was
a good groom. Of all the Campbell Farms thoroughbreds, only Raindancer seemed to distrust him. But Loopy accepted that. And
he could see from that first day in the rain that the gray colt had fallen in love with Michelle. A year after they met, watching
Michelle hotwalk Raindancer, Loopy told her, “Girl, one day you going to bring your papa back his honor.”