yeah, I keep forgetting you lived here once”
“Not here,” 1 said. “Not in this town. Anyway, 1 didn‟t live here. I was, oh. . I guess you could say I
was a summer guest.”
“When was that again?”
I was trying to be casual, trying to keep away from personal history. I didn‟t know him well enough to
show him any scars.
“Twenty years ago, just for a couple of months. It‟s hardly worth mentioning,” I answered in an
offhand way.
“You were just a kid then.”
“Yeah, a senior in college.” While I didn‟t want to get too personal, I didn‟t want to play games,
either.
“Teddy Findley was my best friend,” I added after a second or two.
“Oh,” he said. “Then you know what‟s been going on.”
“No, I got out of touch with the family,” I said.
“You know the Findley kid is dead?”
“You mean Teddy?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes,” I said. “It‟s after that I kind of lost track of things.”
“Well, what happened was the racetrack, that‟s what. The town got bent. Twenty years ago there was
probably, what, seventy-five, a hundred thousand people?”
“Sounds about right.”
“Probably three hundred thousand now, about half of ‟em from the shady side of the tracks. What you
got here, you got a major racetrack, and a beauty. Looks like Saratoga. A classy track, okay? That‟s a
gimmee.”
“Where is it?”
“Back behind us, on the other side of the river. It‟s dark now, anyway.”
“Okay, so you got a classy track. Then what?”
“I think maybe what the money in town expected was kind of another Ascot. Everybody standing
around sipping tea, wavin‟ their pinkies in the air. What they got is horseplayers, which come in every
shape, size, and variety known to mankind, and about half of them smoke tea; they don‟t drink it.”
“So that‟s what Front Street‟s all about?”
“It appeals to some of that element. It isn‟t Front Street‟s gonna make your gonads shrink. It‟s what
happened to the rest of the town. They turned it into a little Miami.”
“They? Who‟s they?”
“The wimps that took over. Look, Chief Findley‟s an old man. Most of the rest of the old power
structure‟s dead. They turned it over to their heirs. Keepers of the kingdom, right? Wrong. Wimps, the
lot of „em, with maybe an exception or two.”
“1 probably know some of them,” I said.
“Probably. But it wasn‟t just them, it was anybody had a square foot of ground they could sell.
Condos all over the place. High-rise apartments. Three big hotels on the beach, another one going up.
Real estate outta sight. Two marinas as big as Del Mar. You feel bad now, wait‟ll you see Doomstown
in the daylight.”
That was the first time I heard it called Doomstown, but it was far from the last.
“I‟m still surprised Chief Findley and the old power structure let it happen,” I said.
“Couldn‟t do anything about it,” Dutch growled, “They died or were too old to cope.”
An edge had crept into his tone, a touch of anger mixed with contempt. He seemed to sense it himself
and drove quietly while he calmed down.
I tried to fill in the dead space. “My father used to say you can inherit blood but you can‟t inherit
backbone.”
For the first few blocks we drove through the Dunetown I wanted to remember, the large section of
the midtown area that had been restored to its Revolutionary elegance.
I remembered driving through the section with Chief and Teddy one Sunday afternoon a long time
ago. It had fallen on hard times; block after block of broken-down row houses that were either
boarded over or had been converted into cheap rooming houses. We were in Chief‟s black Rolls
convertible and he was sitting on the edge of his seat, shoulders square, his white hair thrashing in the
wind.
“We‟re going to restore this whole damn part of town,” he had said grandly, in his soft, Irish-southern
accent, while waving his arm at the drab ruins. “Not a damn museum like Williamsburg. I mean a
livin‟, breathin‟ place where people will be proud to live. Feel like they‟re part of her history. Share
bed and board with her ghosts. This is the heart of the city, by Cod! And if the heart stops, the city
dies. You boys just remember that.” He paused to appraise the street, then added, half under his
breath, “Someday it‟ll be your responsibility.” And Teddy looked over at me and winked, in those
days I was one of the boys.
It seemed he had kept that bargain, although Cod knows what miserable trade he had made, allowing
the business section to go to hell. That part of it didn‟t make sense. This part did. The parks and
squares opened the town up, letting it breathe and flourish naturally, giving it a personality of its own.
Here and there, expensive-looking shops and galleries nudged up against the townhouses. You could
tell that zoning here was communal, that the rules were probably shaped by common consent.
“This is better,” I said. “But Front Street, Jesus!”
“They had to give the two-dollar bettors someplace to play,” Dutch said matter-of-factly.
We took a left and a right and were back to reality again. We were on the edge of Back O‟Town, a
kind of buffer between Dunetown and the black section. You could feel poverty iii the air. The fancy
shops gave way to army-navy stores and cut-rate furniture outlets. it was the worn-out part of town. A
lot of used-car lots and flophouse hotels.
We drove in silence for a minute or two, then I asked, “How long you been here, Dutch?”
“Came down from Pittsburgh almost four years ago, right after they passed the referendum for the
track.”
“They built it when?”
“It opened for business year before last and the town went straight to hell. From white Palm Beach
suits to horse blanket jackets and plaid pants overnight. You gotta bust an eardrum to hear a southern
accent anymore.” His own was a kind of guttural Pennsylvania Dutch.
“You mean like yours?” I joked.
He chuckled. “Yeah, like mine.”
“Town on the make,” I said, half-aloud.
“You got that right.”
“Flow long you been a cop?”
“Forever,” he said, without even thinking.
He turned down a dark residential street, driving fast but without circus lights or siren.
“Hell of a note,” I said. “Chief and his bunch pampered Dunetown. it was like a love affair.”
“Well, pal, that‟s a long time ago. it‟s a one-night stand now.” He paused and added, “You know the
Findleys that well, huh?”
I thought about that for a minute before answering.
“Well, twenty years dims the edges,” I said.
“Ain‟t that the truth.” Dutch lit a cigarette and added, “Sounds like you thought a lot of the old man.”
I nodded. “You could say that.”
“The way it comes to me, his kid was a war hero, got himself wasted over in Nam. After that the old
guy just folded up. Least that‟s the way I hear it.”
“Too bad,” I said. I was surprised at how indifferent my words sounded.
“I guess.”
“I gather you‟ve got reservations about Findley,” I said.
He shrugged. “It‟s the machine. I don‟t trust anybody‟s been in politics longer than it takes me to eat
lunch. And I‟m a fast eater.”
Old feelings welled up inside me, noodling at my gut again, a passing thing I couldn‟t quite get in
touch with. Or didn‟t want to.
“It was like a fiefdom, y‟know,” he went on. “A couple of heavyweights calling all the shots. Now it‟s