Evan Hunter - A Horse’s Head

He came tumbling down the stairs head over heels cursing as his skull collided with each angled joining of riser and tread, wincing whenever a new step rushed up to meet him, and thinking all the while How dare he do this to me, a good old friend like me?

He was a lanky man of thirty-nine, needing a haircut, wearing a rumpled brown suit and a raincoat that had once been white, falling down the stairs with all the grace of a loose bundle of sticks, lurching and hurtling and banging every bone in his body. Oh you will pay for this, he thought, you will most certainly pay for this.

“And estay out!” a voice called from the top of the steps.

He could not believe he had reached the landing, everything still hurt as much as it had while he was falling. He got up and dusted off first the knees of his trousers and then the sleeves of his raincoat and then he picked up his battered fedora, which had preceded him down the staircase with perhaps even less grace, and rubbed the elbow of his coat across the hat and then set it on his head at what he assumed was a jaunty angle. It was while he was putting on his hat that he discovered his forehead was bleeding, which was really no small wonder, considering the number of steps he had hit on his descent. He thought it supremely rude of the proprietor of the place, a Puerto Rican gentleman named Hijo, which meant son (and he could guess son of what), to have thrown him down the stairs simply because he’d asked for a fifty-dollar loan. He wished he had half the money he had spent in Hijo’s place over the past ten years, make that a quarter of the money, and then to be hustled out the door and hurled down the stairs. You’ll pay for this, Hijo, he thought, and stuck out his tongue to wet the handkerchief, and then wiped at the blood, and then walked out into the daylight.

It was a rare spring day, April flaunting herself like a naked whore. Hello, April, he thought cheerily and then winced and felt his backside, certain he’d broken something. You dirty rat, Hijo, he thought, sounding like James Cagney in his mind, I’ll get you for this, you dirty rat, and smiled. Oh it was a lovely day. Oh all the sweet young girls of New York were out in their summer dresses, having shucked their girdles and other restricting garments, wiggling along the avenue, prancing along as though having been led into the paddock to be ogled by horsebettors of all ages, Andrew Mullaney himself included.

Except, of course, that he himself had not been able to borrow fifty dollars from Hijo, son of, and whereas he had the twenty cents necessary for the purchase of a subway token to take him out to the Big Bold Beautiful Big A, he did not have the wherewithal to bet once he got there, great horseplayer that he was. The terrible pity about not having been able to raise the fifty was that Mullaney had received from a somewhat disreputable uptown dice player a tip on the fourth race, a filly named Jawbone who was supposed to be a hands-down winner. The disreputable dice player was a charter member of the Cosa Nostra, so it could be assumed that his information had come, if not directly from the horses mouth, at least directly from the mouth of someone intimate with the horse’s mouth. All of which left Mullaney out in the cold because the only thing you can do with a hot tip is play it. Nor can you tell anyone else how hot the tip is lest it suddenly cool; there’s nothing so fickle as a parimutuel board. So Mullaney wasn’t feeling particularly cheerful about his inability to raise the money. He had tried a faggot he knew in the Village, fellow who ran a jewelry store and from whom he had once bought a ring for Irene. The faggot had said No dice, Andy, business has been off, I don’t know what it is, I’m designing the stuff same as I always did, maybe people are beginning to lose their good taste. Well, Mullaney said, I don’t understand how anyone could pass this beautiful display of yours in the window without wanting to come in and buy up the whole sparkling lot, to which the faggot blushed, but did not give him the fifty dollars.

So Mullaney had gone uptown to Forty-second Street where there was a chess parlor and where he knew several of the chess hustlers there. Chess hustlers were usually very decent fellows, though usually broke as well. Still, there was no harm trying. He saw only one chess hustler he knew, a fellow named Archibald, whom everyone called Harry. Harry explained that he would have been only too delighted to give Mullaney fifty dollars if he had fifty dollars. But the chess-hustling business was very bad these days, what with smart-assed youngsters from the High School of Science coming downtown and playing amateurs for free, so what could he do? Mullaney sympathized and then suggested that he play his knight to queen four, thereby trapping

Blacks rook, for which Harry thanked him — then played the knight and lost it.

So that was when Mullaney went downtown again to Fourteenth Street, and asked Hijo as nice as could be for fifty tiny little dollar bills, and Hijo threw him down the steps, Oh you dirty rat, I’ll get you for this, he thought, feeling like James Cagney again. Under the influence, he winked at a nineteen-year-old girl and said, “Hello, Sweetie,” as she went by in a huff, and then shrugged and thought what a beautiful day it was anyway, even if you had a hot nag named Jawbone, itching to be bet, and couldn’t raise the money from any of your so-called friends, especially Hijo at whose poolhall he had spent perhaps a hundred thousand dollars in the past year, well at least a hundred dollars anyway. And whom he had taught to speak English, though it hadn’t helped much when Hijo tossed him down the stairs, “And estay out!” he had yelled, reverting to type, you can take a boy out of Vega Baja.

The thought of Jawbone waiting to be bet, and the Biblical association with Samson made him think again of his own aching ass and the way he had bounced along on each of those thirty-seven steps, more than that even, he had stopped counting after he hit his forehead on number thirty-eight, one more and he could have made a Hitchcock movie. He was beginning to discover all sorts of little aches and bruises now that he was out in the warm spring sunshine. If I only had some hospitalization insurance, he thought, I could collect on it, and then put the money down on Jawbone. The trouble is they take a long time to pay off on those hospitalization bets, and besides I don’t have any insurance. What I do have is twenty cents in my pocket, I wonder if anybody I know will be out at the track. I can risk the twenty cents and take the ride out, there’s sure to be somebody there I know. I can stand outside the entrance — bound to run into somebody out there — and explain that this is really a sizzler of a tip, build it up a little, say I got it from the owner of a big stable down in Kentucky, instead of a small dice player with family connections, maybe promote the price of admission plus a small stake besides. It might be worth the risk. Fifty bucks or so on the nose of a horse which on the morning line was twenty to one, that’s a thousand bucks, even if the odds don’t climb, which they usually do on a longshot.

He was standing on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue, trying to decide whether he should buy himself a couple of candy bars or a token instead, when the black Cadillac limousine pulled to the curb. He backed away from the curb at once because he had the sudden feeling that this was the President of the United States pulling up, that the doors would open and a few Secret Service men would emerge, and then the President himself would step out and go across the street to S. Klein, Always on the Square, to buy himself a ten-gallon hat that was on sale, maybe several ten-gallon hats to give away to Persian ministers of state. He was convinced this would be the President. He was very surprised when only a gentleman with a beard got out of the car, even though the gentleman looked like someone in very high diplomatic circles, not the President of course, and not even an American diplomat, but nonetheless a very bigwig indeed. Mullaney stepped aside to give the bearded gentleman room to pass, but the gentleman stopped alongside him instead and said directly into his right ear, “Get in the car.”