Lawrence Block - Hit Parade

What he needed,Keller decided, was fifty thousand dollars. That way he could go as high as twenty-five for #2 and fifteen for #17 and, after buyer’s commission, still have a few dollars left for expenses and other stamps.

Was he out of his mind? How could a little piece of perforated paper less than an inch square be worth $25,000? How could two of them be worth a man’s life?

He thought about it and decided it was just a question of degree. Unless you planned to use it to mail a letter, any expenditure for a stamp was basically irrational. If you could swallow a gnat, why gag at a camel? A hobby, he suspected, was irrational by definition. As long as you kept it in proportion, you were all right.

And he was managing that. He could, if he wanted, mortgage his apartment. Bankers would stand in line to lend him fifty grand, since the apartment was worth ten times that figure. They wouldn’t ask him what he wanted the money for, either, and he’d be free to spend every dime of it on the two Martinique stamps.

He didn’t consider it, not for a moment. It would be nuts, and he knew it. But what he did with a windfall was something else, and it didn’t matter, anyway, because there wasn’t going to be any windfall. You didn’t need a weatherman, he thought, to note that the wind was not blowing. There was no wind, and there would be no windfall, and someone else could mount the Martinique overprints in his album. It was a shame, but-

The phone rang.

Dot said, “Keller, I just made a pitcher of iced tea. Why don’t you come up here and help me drink it?”

In the fifth race,there was a horse called Happy Trigger and another called Hit the Boss. If Going Postal had resonated with his hobby, these seemed to suggest his profession. He mentioned them to the little fellow. “I sort of like these two,” he said, “but I don’t know which one I like better.”

“Wheel them,” the man said and explained that Keller should buy two exacta tickets, Four-Seven and Seven-Four. That way Keller would only collect if the two horses finished first and second. But, since the tote board indicated long odds on each of them, the potential payoff was a big one.

“What would I have to bet?” Keller asked him. “Four dollars? Because I’ve only been betting two dollars a race.”

“You want to keep it to two dollars,” his friend said, “just bet it one way. Thing is, how are you going to feel if you bet the Four-Seven and they finish Seven-Four?”

“It’s right upyour alley,” Dot told him. “Comes through another broker, so there’s a good solid firewall between us and the client. And the broker’s reliable, and if the client was a corporate bond he’d be rated triple-A.”

“What’s the catch?”

“Keller,” she said, “what makes you think there’s a catch?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But there is, isn’t there?”

She frowned. “The only catch,” she said, “if you want to call it that, is there might not be a job at all.”

“I’d call that a catch.”

“I suppose.”

“If there’s no job,” he said, “why did the client call the broker, and why did the broker call you, and what am I doing out here?”

Dot pursed her lips, sighed. “There’s this horse,” she said.

The fifth racewas reasonably exciting. Bunk Bed Betty, a big brown horse with a black mane, led all the way, only to be challenged in the stretch and overtaken at the wire by a thirty-to-one shot named Hypertension.

Hit the Boss was dead last, which made him the only horse that Happy Trigger beat.

Keller’s new friend got very excited toward the end of the race, and showed a ten-dollar win ticket on Hypertension. “Oh, look at that,” he said, when they posted the payoff. “Gets me even for the day, plus yesterday and the day before. That was Alvie Jurado on Hypertension, and didn’t he ride a gorgeous race there?”

“It was exciting,” Keller allowed.

“A lot more exciting with ten bucks on that sweetie’s nose. Sorry about your exacta. I guess it cost you four bucks.”

Keller gave a shrug that he hoped was ambiguous. In the end, he’d been uncomfortable betting four dollars and unable to decide which way to bet his usual two dollars. So he hadn’t bet anything. There was nothing wrong with that, as a matter of fact he’d saved himself two dollars, or maybe four, but he’d feel like a piker admitting as much to a man who’d just won over three hundred dollars.

“The horse’s nameis Kissimmee Dudley,” Dot told him, “and he’s running in the seventh race at Belmont Saturday. It’s the feature race, and the word is that Dudley hasn’t got a prayer.”

“I don’t know much about horses.”

“They’ve got four legs,” she said, “and if the one you bet on comes in ahead of the others, you make money. That’s as much as I know about them, but I know something about Kissimmee Dudley. Our client thinks he’s going to win.”

“I thought you said he didn’t have a prayer.”

“That’s the word. Our client doesn’t see it that way.”

“Oh?”

“Evidently Dudley’s a better horse than anybody realizes,” she said, “and they’ve been holding him back, waiting for the right race. That way they’ll get long odds and be able to clean up. And, just so nothing goes wrong, the other jockeys are getting paid to make sure they don’t finish ahead of Dudley.”

“The race is fixed,” Keller said.

“That’s the plan.”

“But?”

“But a plan is what things don’t always go according to, Keller, which is probably a good thing, because otherwise the phone would never ring. You want some more iced tea?”

“No thanks.”

“They’ll have the race on Saturday, and Dudley ’ll run. And if he wins you get two thousand dollars.”

“For what?”

“For standing by. For making yourself available.”

“I think I get it,” he said. “And if Kissimmee Dudley should happen to lose-where’d they come up with a name like that, do you happen to know?”

“Not a clue.”

“If he loses,” Keller said, “I suppose I have work to do.”

She nodded.

“The jockey who beats him?”

“Is toast,” she said, “and you’re the toaster.”

None of the horsesin the sixth race had a name that meant anything to Keller. Then again, picking them by name hadn’t done him much good so far. This time he looked at the odds. A long shot wouldn’t win, he decided, and a favorite wouldn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile, so maybe the answer was to pick something in the middle. The Five horse, Mogadishy, was pegged at six-to-one.

He got in line, thinking. Of course, sometimes a long shot came in. Take the preceding race, for instance, with its big payoff for Keller’s OTB buddy. There was a long shot in this race, and it would pay a lot more than the twelve bucks he’d win on his six-to-one shot.

On the other hand, no matter what horse he bet on, the return on his two-dollar bet wasn’t going to make any real difference to him. And it would be nice to cash a winning ticket for a change.

“Sir?”

He put down his two dollars and bet the odds-on favorite to show.

Dot livedin White Plains, in a big old Victorian house on Taunton Place. She gave him a ride to the train station, and a little over an hour later he was back in his apartment, looking once again at the Bulger amp; Calthorpe catalog.

If Kissimmee Dudley ran and lost, he’d have a job to do. And his fee for the job would be just enough to fill the two spaces in his album. And, since the horse was racing at Belmont, it stood to reason that all of the jockeys lived within easy commuting distance of the Long Island racetrack. Keller wouldn’t have to get on a plane to find his man.