Thomas Perry: Sleeping Dogs

Jack Hamp walked along the thick carpet of grass and looked out over the fence across the track. It was an odd little place. With the short season here, all the horses had returned to their paddocks for the winter. Today you could as easily imagine that this was the site of the Santa Maria County Fair as a place where people laid down serious money on horses.

The desk sergeant had said that B. Baldwin’s betting booth had stood sixty meters to the left of the stands, ten meters back from the rail. That would be about here. Hamp turned and looked at the grandstand, then beyond it toward the road. From this spot you couldn’t even see the top of the walnut tree where the Bentley with the bodies in it had been parked. So it wasn’t a question of an enterprising bookmaker noticing a couple of rich young men and deciding that it would be safe to get together a crew to kill them for their walking-around money. The victims hadn’t even gotten close enough to the track for Baldwin to see them; there had been no betting slips in their pockets, no turf on their shoes.

So if anybody had picked them out, it had to be Lucchi or young Talarese. It was odd that the nephew of a New York underboss would be reduced to starting his career as a street thief, or even as a bookie who happened to see a couple of easy marks. What good could the family imagine that his experience as a British bookie would do him in New York? There was no possibility of useful contacts in the barns or on the street; there wasn’t even the same monetary system.

Hamp decided to ask the Brighton police about the stolen-car market in England. He couldn’t imagine that anybody might have hoped to sell a hot Bentley in a country that wasn’t more than four hundred miles from end to end, but it was something you had to ask about before eliminating it. For all he knew, Talarese might have been serving an apprenticeship in pinching Rolls-Royces and using the Mafia’s channels to sell them in Asia or someplace.

But he had an instinct about this. He was fairly confident that when he had done all the footwork and checked out every angle, what he was going to end up with was essentially the same story. The two Limeys had only been unexpected witnesses. Talarese had been out here one fine day at the Brighton racetrack, doing whatever he was supposed to be doing, when he had happened to see a man who, among all the people milling around at this track, he and only he could possibly have recognized. Then with the sun making the bright silks on the horses and jockeys glow, and the birds singing—they were sure as hell singing today, so they probably had been then too—he had started feeling lucky.