I slid out of the saddle.
“He just ran out of gas.”
He was in my face, looking down from his six foot two on my five foot three.
“Maybe you ran out of gas. He never faded like that before.”
I was stunned. Marty knew me from the time I was an apprentice. He agreed to take me on as a regular stable jockey when Mr. Fitz brought me in. I rode to win, and we always got along.
“I rode according to your orders, Marty. The horse weakened. You better check with the vet.”
Marty turned on his heels and walked off.
“Marty.”
He looked over his shoulder.
“Where’d they take Bobby?”
He gave a look I didn’t understand and spat out, “To the morgue.”
I had three more races to ride that afternoon for other owners. My heart was definitely not in it, but somehow I managed to pull off a win in the last race of the afternoon. Each of us has a valet assigned to take care of our equipment after a race. When Tony, my valet, met me in the winner’s circle to take my saddle, he whispered, “Billy, you heard?”
I stood next to him as he undid the girth.
“What?”
“Bobby’s dead.”
It came as a shock all over again.
“I know.”
“They arrested Mr. Fitzroy.”
I couldn’t even get the words out. He read the question in my face.
“They say it’s murder. They charged Mr. Fitzroy with murdering Bobby.”
I sat in the jockey’s room for an hour after a shower. I was too stunned and drained to move. I thought of the lowest ebb of my life, when I’d been hit with a year’s suspension as a jockey. They called it race fixing, but I was following the orders of a trainer who wanted his horse brought in out of the money to build the odds for his next race. It’s done. It’s not unheard of, but I make no excuses.
The year’s suspension was deliberately extreme. The Massachusetts Racing Commission was drowning in bad press over corruption. They went on a witch hunt to clean up their own image. I was branded a leper. There wasn’t an owner or trainer who dared to come near me for fear of being sucked into the outcast club.
During that period, the pickings were slim for the O’Casey family. My dad was a disabled police officer, and my sister and I had to scramble to keep a good beef stew on the table. Racing was all I knew at the age of twenty-six, except for a stint of investigative work in the Air Force. Since I was cut off from the former, I cashed in on the latter by picking up a private investigator’s license. I filled out the time doing low-life work for a choice collection of human specimens until I could get back on a horse.
Then Mr. Fitz got involved. He and my dad grew up together in a little bastion of Irish immigrants called South Boston. They stayed close as brothers even though they went in different directions. My dad followed his own father’s footsteps onto the Boston police force. Mr. Fitz followed his Irish love of horses. He eventually owned a stable of the best horses that ran at Suffolk Downs. He passed the gift along, because he took in any kid with a hard-luck story and not much chance of breaking out. I know because when I was sixteen, I was one of them.
Around the time I was suspended, Mr. Fitz was in Europe. When he got back and found out about my suspension and general blackballing he hit the roof smoking. I didn’t hear about it until much later. Mr. Fitz blew into the office of the racing secretary like General Patton in a tank. He had one ace. Mr. Fitz had entered the one horse that could draw a record crowd to Suffolk Downs in the Massachusetts Handicap. His horse, Captain Mack, could be another Secretariat, and the crowd loved him. Mr. Fitz laid it on the line with no compromise — my license would be restored in twenty-four hours or he’d scratch Captain Mack.
The secretary was no fool. He knew that racing in New England was on shaky ground and a great run by a horse like Mack could bring back the gate. I had my license back the next day. And to rub salt in the wound of the Racing Commission, Mr. Fitz put me up on Captain Mack.
I was a bag of nerves for that race, but Captain Mack and I won it. I’ve been riding for Mr. Fitz every day since, and thanks to him the other owners have been giving me steady mounts, too. There’s no ducking it. It was a gutsy move by Mr. Fitz. He was bucking the tightest blackball since the days of the McCarthy commie witch-hunt.
I realized sitting there that I owed Mr. Fitz more than I could ever repay by riding, but maybe there was another way. Two things I took from my private investigator experience during the suspension were a P.I. license and a crash course on the fundamentals of ferreting out information that people wanted to keep hidden. If I couldn’t give Mr. Fitz a win, maybe I could give him something else he needed.
I knew that Mr. Fitz’s first call would have been to Michael Hunter of the law firm of Devlin and Hunter. Michael was like a son to him. Michael and Mr. Devlin had pulled a number of kids in the stable through legal scrapes over the years. Again, yours truly speaks from experience.
I got to Michael’s office just as he was getting back from Mr. Fitz’s arraignment.
“What’s it look like, Mike?”
“Looks like we’ve got some work to do, Billy. Come on in.”
He waved me into the awesome office at the end of the corridor where the daunting presence of himself, Mr. Lex Devlin, riveted us with a gaze over horn-shell reading glasses. The look was a clear demand for the reason for breaking his train of concentration.
Mike waved me into a seat, which raised the Devlin eyebrows another notch. Fortunately, Mike took the lead.
“I just got back from an arraignment, Mr. D. This one should go to the top of our list.”
Michael filled Mr. Devlin in on what little he knew, which was that a jockey had been killed in a riding incident and Mr. Fitz was being charged with murder. I sensed from the concentration in Mr. Devlin’s burning eyes that Mr. Fitz was automatically at the top of his list. I also sensed an old South Boston connection.
“Who’s handling this at the district attorney’s office, Michael?”
Mr. Devlin had the number half dialed when Michael said, “Pat O’Connor.” Mr. Devlin hit the speaker button to let us hear the conversation.
The receptionist answered.
“Anne, let me speak to Pat.”
“I’ll see if he’s here, Mr. Devlin.”
“No you won’t. I haven’t got time to hold for his pleasure. Tell that old warhorse if he’s not on the line in ten seconds I’ll tell the Globe he wears his wife’s dresses.”
A scratchy male voice boomed through the speaker.
“You do, and I’ll tell ’em it’s to take you out dancing. What do you want, Lex? As if I didn’t know.”
“Patrick Francis O’Connor, have you lost the half ounce of brains the good Lord gave you? What’s this about Miles Fitzroy?”
“I have no choice, Lex. I know you two go back. I’ve known Fitz since the old Southie days, too. But I can’t overlook the evidence.”
“Which brings me to my next question.”
“I know. What’s the evidence? I’ll be straight with you, Lex. The office got a call to get out to Suffolk Downs. Anonymous, of course. It was right after that jockey, Bobby Pastore, took a fall. He was dead when the ambulance got to him. The caller said to check the stirrup strap on Pastore’s saddle. He told us where to find it. We got a search warrant for Fitz’s personal trunk in the stable tack room. We found the saddle and the strap under a pile of blankets. The left stirrup strap was cut with a knife three-quarters of the way through. It looks like it tore the rest of the way when the jockey put extra weight on it going into the first turn.”
“It could have been a plant.”
“It could. On the other hand, there’s more. We have a motive. The caller said that Pastore was blackmailing Fitz for something. We don’t know what just yet, but we will. We checked Pastore’s bank account and found deposits at the beginning of each of the last three months. They start at ten thousand dollars and climb about five thousand dollars each month.”