Doyle had to admit he was by no means clear on this. “So what’s the big difference between a twenty-five grand horse and a thirty-five grand horse,” he began. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s big,” Moe assured him. “Look, racing’s got kind of a caste system. It’s based on ability, and it’s defined by numbers. Did you know there’s a big, big difference in talent between even five grand and thirty-five hundred dollar horses?”
“No, I didn’t,” Doyle said. “I’m not sure I understand a lot of this.”
“You don’t have to. Look,” Moe said, reaching into a bowl of garlic-stuffed olives Dino had placed next to the breadsticks, “you know from German Jews and Polish Jews? Lace-curtain Irish and pig-shit Irish? I don’t even have to go into this with you, Jack. Just take my word.”
I hope it’s as strong as your breath, Doyle thought as Moe reached again for the olives; he was palming them like peanuts. “You haven’t told me how I do this thing,” Doyle pointed out, adding: “Get one thing straight-I won’t hurt this horse. I won’t give her any dope or something like that.”
Moe’s dandelion head went from side to side. “You don’t have to. Hopping horse went out with spats. The testing labs have gotten too good. They discover the dope, then throw the book at the trainer. We don’t want to put Angelo out of business. He’s a good horse trainer, and he’s straight, but he owes us. Angelo will tell you what to do.”
Doyle considered Moe’s description of the Plan. “Won’t there be guys who pick up on this? Who’ll recognize what’s going on?” he asked. “Won’t they jump in and bet this horse when your guys do?”
Moe dismissed that possibility with a wave of his hand. “Jack, remember this: brains, discipline and patience are the key to the successful bettor. That explains why there are so few of them. Don’t worry about the odds we’re going to get,” Kellman grinned.
So, they ran City Sarah twice against $35,000 claimers, and she got her ass kicked, just as Moe Kellman had predicted. Doyle found he didn’t like this at all.
For the first in City Sarah’s series of three races, Doyle stood at the rail, rooting loudly, as the black filly led the field through a fast half-mile before deflating to finish tenth of twelve. As Doyle led her back to the barn, City Sarah was blowing like a bellows.
“Come on, you little mother,” Doyle said to City Sarah, patting her neck as they walked down the sandy path, “you ran your eyeballs out, you did your best. God love you.”
As Doyle was preparing the feed tub for City Sarah that evening, E. D. Morley sauntered down the shedrow. He looked admiringly at the still exhausted horse. “She’s a hard-trying bitch, ain’t she?” Morley said.
Ten days later, another field of $35,000 horses showed their backsides to City Sarah. When an irritated Maggie Howard complained to Doyle about Zocchi’s misplacement of the horse in her races-“What’s he doing with this nice little horse?” Maggie had asked-Doyle could only mumble a vague reply. He felt terrible. He drove from the track to one of the neighborhood bars near his apartment, and into one of those Tom Waits-nights he was so familiar with, packed with mixed emotions and mixed drinks.
When midnight arrived, Doyle realized he had confessed his entire life-plight to an off-duty waitress named Maureen Hoban at O’Keefe’s Olde Ale House. Maureen was only eight months or so out of Cork, Ireland, she said, but was apparently already a veritable Margaret Mead of American bar disappointments. Doyle liked her immensely.
Doyle bought numerous rounds for the two of them. He was amazed at a coincidence uncovered in the course of their lugubrious conversation-Maureen knew his co-worker, E. D. Morley!
“Sure, I met that Rustafartian fraud at the racetrack,” she giggled. “I go there on my off-days from work. I love your American harses.”
As closing time neared at the Ale House, Doyle was sorrowed to discover that Maureen was the first woman he had ever met who, the more he drank, the worse she looked, with the booze flushing makeup out of her pores in rivulets. But Maureen’s shrewd reading of his situation regarding the fixed race, Doyle found, had a beauty of its own.
“You’re a fookin’ fool if ya don’ go after that mooney,” Maureen advised. Doyle again recited his various reservations, but Maureen banished these with a wave of her arm.
“Wot am I hearin’ now?” his counselor from Cork continued. “You’re broke down flat, are ya not? Said ya wouldn’t go back to them stiff-necked jobs ya used to do, am I right here?
“Acarse, there’s the risk somebody’ll grass on you, but the kind of mooney ya’re talkin’ about, well, chance is sure to be built in, is it not?
“Just you forget now about hurtin’ that little harse’s feelins’, or the tiny off chance of gettin’ caught out. No,” Maureen concluded, “ya should just thank the God ya’ve turned your back on that the little Jew man wants to pay ya so much for doin’ so little.”
This, Doyle decided, was just the pep talk he had needed. He was primed with purpose as he lurched to his car, Maureen in tow. No, she didn’t want to go home with Doyle, Maureen said, though she appreciated his insincere offer. All she asked in return for her sterling advice of the evening, she said, was to be notified in advance as to the date of City Sarah’s “go” race-so that she might herself make a “wee small wager” into this betting coup. Relieved that he would not have to share the rest of the night with Maureen, whose eye shadow appeared to be loosening in sheets, Doyle promised her he would most assuredly let her know the date of the Big One.
With her second consecutive dismal failure behind her, City Sarah next was entered at her “winnable” level of $25,000. Another lousy effort here-this one to be effected by Doyle-was the second-to-last brush stroke on Moe Kellman’s conniving canvas.
Angelo Zocchi called Doyle to the stable office that morning, then locked the door. “This is what you do today, Doyle-you give that filly extra heavy rations of feed, two hours before race time. An hour before, you start giving her all the water she wants. Don’t let anybody see you doing this, don’t talk to anybody about it.”
Angelo sighed as he sat back in the chair behind his battered desk. “That’s the whole package,” he said.
Doyle was puzzled. It seemed too easy. “So what will all that do?”
Angelo, not looking at Doyle, got up and moved to unlock the office door.
“Back when you was an AAU boxer or whatever the fuck you were, you ever fight on a real full stomach?”
Realization swept over Doyle, carried on a wave of very unpleasant memory. “Yes, I did,” Doyle started to respond, but Angelo was already out the door.
Doyle now understood perfectly. He recalled a steamy summer night in the Eagles Club in Rockford, Ill., maybe 1979, his third bout in an AAU tournament.
Doyle had won his first two bouts easily. Having made weight for the next one, a semi-final event that night, Doyle-hungry, dehydrated, and emboldened by his two earlier successes-walked to a bakery near the Eagles Club, where he bought and quickly consumed two quarts of cold milk and a warm cherry pie. Two hours later, a squat Mexican hard case from Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood had buried a left hook slightly below Doyle’s navel, causing him to spew a stream of vomit on the ringside timekeeper’s head.
Doyle shook his head. “I see.”
Doyle didn’t sleep the night prior to what he had begun to think of as The Stiffereeno. Badly in need of someone to talk to about all this, he tried Moe Kellman’s haunts; Moe was not to be found. Doyle then called O’Keefe’s Olde Ale House, in quest of the sympathetic Maureen, only to be informed that his confidante from Cork had quit her waitress job there. For the life of him, Doyle could not remember where he had taken Maureen when he’d driven her home from O’Keefe’s that drunken night.
“I’m not from Immigration,” Doyle had emphasized to O’Keefe, but he had failed to pry loose a phone number or address for Maureen. Unnerved, he paced his apartment floor up to the dawn, then headed for Heartland Downs. “Hell with it, I’ll just get it done,” Doyle said as he drove.
Doyle followed Angelo Zocchi’s instructions to the letter that overcast, humid spring day. At noon, he gave City Sarah her ample, non-raceday sized portion of feed. She finished it right up. Doyle then offered more, which was gratefully received.
“You’re like a damn beagle, you’d eat yourself to death,” Doyle snarled at City Sarah, bitterly regretting that Midlife Bustout had reduced him to talking to horses.
