Million Dollar Handle Read online

  Brett Halliday

  Million Dollar Handle

  Chapter 1

  The woman Ricardo Sanchez was hoping to intercept drove a shabby cream-colored Dodge, beginning to show rust at the seams. Which was eccentric of her, because in Ricardo’s opinion she should have been able to afford a much newer car. Charlotte Geary was her name. She played golf three or four times a week. This was one of the days.

  Through the iron bars, he could see the exit of the basement garage. His pants were already ripped. He was holding a brown paper bag containing a hero sandwich and two oranges—lunch, theoretically—and he had a closed knife in one fist. It was a cool, pleasant morning, and couples from the big hotels further down the Beach were out strolling. Ricardo was given some curious looks. He had all the necessary muscles, an abundance of black hair. He knew he was conspicuous, standing in the sunshine on Collins Avenue in his ripped pants, boots, dark glasses, his tightest T-shirt. This was the wrong part of town; he was clearly no tourist. It wouldn’t take a psychiatrist or a mind reader to know he was up to something.

  Deciding to make the attempt another day, he looked at his watch and started off. At that moment, the car appeared out of the garage.

  The top was down, and Mrs. Geary, as usual, was wearing wraparound shades, her hair in a bright scarf. For her age, which had to be in the forties—and with a grown-up daughter, it had to be in the late forties—she was a great-looking woman. She looked like a model for something expensive.

  Ricardo snapped the knife open and gave his bare leg a good scrape, taking off the top couple of layers of skin. Mrs. Geary came out at him with her blinker going. As she began the turn to go north on Collins, he stepped into her path.

  His timing was a tick off. All he was trying for was a graze, but she turned more sharply than he expected, and her fender gave him a good thump. He went backward, waving both arms like a basketball player trying to draw the charging foul. His bag went flying. He made a complete pivot, hit the fence and slipped to the sidewalk.

  The woman swerved over the center line. Recovering, she rocked back and came to a stop with one wheel off the pavement. She leaped out and ran toward him. Her hair had broken loose from the scarf.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think so,” he said uncertainly.

  But Ricardo was obviously not entirely all right. He stared down at his bloody leg.

  “Oh, dear, oh, God, I didn’t see you.” She patted the air with both hands. Her breath came out in a long shudder, and she retrieved one of the oranges and stuffed it into the paper bag. “Listen, how badly are you—I thought I ran into a tree. Stay there, I’ll call an ambulance. Don’t try to get up.”

  Ricardo made a scornful noise with his lips. “Are you kidding? Give me a minute. This is no big deal.”

  The doorman from the apartment building above the garage ran out. Mrs. Geary called to him, “He stepped right in front of me. Call Mount Sinai—”

  “No, no,” Ricardo said from the sidewalk. “I haven’t been in a hospital since I was five days old.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “It’s just a scrape. Afraid I got blood on your car.”

  He rolled onto one knee and came to his feet. She jumped to help, but he was already up. A group of passersby had collected around them. Ricardo flexed each leg and did a comedy exercise to show that nothing was broken. As a matter of fact, the place that hurt worst was the point of his spine.

  “It was my fault more than yours. I didn’t look where I was going.”

  “Your leg—”

  “Messy-looking, isn’t it? But I think I’ll live.”

  “You ought to have it looked at. My insurance will cover it.”

  “I’m not getting involved with anything like that,” he said earnestly. “You know how those sharks operate. If they ever have to pay anything, they cancel the policy.” He took a step on the bad leg and grunted.

  “You see?” she said. “Getting knocked down by a car is no laughing matter.”

  He tried another step, and conceded. “What you could do, is drop me off at the dog track. They’ve got a first-aid station. If the doctor isn’t there yet I can bandage it myself.”

  “Certainly. Anything.”

  The doorman helped him hobble to her car. He backed into the front seat and used both hands to swing the injured leg in after him. Mrs. Geary ran around to get behind the wheel.

  “The dog track—you mean Surfside?”

  “Yeah, that’s where I work.”

  “That’s a coincidence. My husband owns it.”

  “Are you Mrs. Geary?” Ricardo said, surprised.

  “Indeed I am. Look, you’re going to need something to soak up the blood.”

  She folded her blue scarf lengthwise. He pulled the rip in his pants back to the seam, and she worked the scarf in under his leg and tied it. The bloody abrasion was on the inside of his thigh. He had selected the spot after considerable thought. She seemed to be breathing more quickly by the time she was finished. Her hair was a soft russet color, long and cleverly cut. Probably she spent too much time in the sun. It had given her skin a leathery texture, but it was the very best leather. She wore a bra, of course. That was a necessity at her age. But she was slimmer and more supple, and generally in better shape, than most of the girls his own age. He didn’t think he could talk her into his scheme unless he could make physical contact, and the idea had made him a little queasy. Now he was beginning to think that it wouldn’t be hard to take, at all. He wished she would take off her shades so he could see her eyes. Eyes were important to Ricardo.

  They jounced back onto the street.

  “I don’t know why I said Max owns the track,” she said. “I own the same number of shares, for tax reasons, but that’s not the same thing, is it? He’s the man, he’s in charge. I hardly ever go near the place.”

  “There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that Max Geary’s in charge of Surfside.”

  Geary was away at the moment, which was why Ricardo had picked today. That was unusual during a meeting. Geary decided everything, down to the number of ounces in the drinks and the size of the type in the performance charts. He was one of the first to arrive in the afternoon, one of the last to leave at night, after the take had been verified and loaded at gunpoint into the armored car.

  “I mean, Jesus,” Ricardo said, “the boss’s wife. Lucky I didn’t try to get witnesses and sue you.”

  “You wouldn’t have to sue. Put in a claim.”

  “No, seriously. A friend of mine, he was in an accident and the lawyers got hold of him. He finally got a settlement, something like ten thousand bucks. The lawyers got half. And if you add up all the hours, not just in court and the lawyers’ office but sitting around dreaming, he could have made more money at Surfside leading out dogs. And nothing was really wrong with him, so he felt like a shit.”

  “I don’t know what’s got into me lately. I’ve been driving like a crazy person.”

  They were approaching the Kennel Club, with its huge sign: “Sensational Surfside.” When the track was built, in the early ’30s, the surrounding land had been jungle, but the great hotels had been pressing northward, year by year, and now the dog track blocked their way like a cork in a bottle. Real estate people thought dog tracks should be located on cheap land at the edge of the Glades, not here on one of the most expensive strips of sand in the world. The grandstand looked across the backstretch fence to open ocean. The only trouble was a shortage of parking. The track owned the blocks on the other side of Collins, between Collins and Indian Creek, but on big nights the parked cars spilled into the streets of Bal Harbour, to the annoyance of the rich retired white people who had houses there. Geary’s answe
r to complaints was that dogs had been running at Surfside before Bal Harbour had any houses or streets.

  They pulled up at the clubhouse entrance.

  “I’ll come in with you,” she said, starting to get out.

  “No! Believe me, if I walk in with Mrs. Geary, the guys will be heckling me about it five years from now.”

  “Then I’ll wait. One look at that leg and they’ll give you the afternoon off. I’ll drive you home.”

  “No,” Ricardo said again. “I’ve got a couple of projects going, I mean betting projects, and I have to be on the scene.”

  “I thought you didn’t care about money.”

  “I care about it, but I want to make it my way, without any lawyers.”

  After closing the car door he stayed there for a moment, looking down at her. “Thanks for the ride, Mrs. Geary. Next time I walk past your driveway I’ll be ready to jump.”

  “Call me and tell me how you are.”

  He had started away. He gave her a quick look, but because of the damn dark glasses there wasn’t much he could see.

  “All right, sure.”

  She was watching him, and he limped more than necessary. The scrape was beginning to hurt, and the blood had made its way through her loosely tied scarf and was running down his leg. He wished he could have thought of some easier way to make the lady’s acquaintance. Here they were, living in the same city, part of the same business, but their worlds didn’t intersect. Ricardo’s family had reached Miami from Cuba when he was nine. The schools had caught him young enough so he spoke English with hardly an accent. His father, a manufacturer in Havana before the upset, had become an automobile salesman, selling mainly to Cuban friends who had managed to get out with money. Everybody had to have a car in this country, and he had done well. He had his own AMC dealership now, life insurance, investments, a three-bedroom house in Hialeah; he voted regularly, watered the lawn regularly, paid his bills within ten days, and had American flag decals on his car windows. In Ricardo’s view, he was a little too satisfied with what he had accomplished. He had money, sure, but all around him, though he chose not to see them, were people with money.

  While still a senior in high school, Ricardo got a job as a Surfside dog boy, parading the dogs and then retrieving them after the race and taking them back to the kennel. The pay was ridiculously low. With a syndicate of fellow students, including one girl who was good at math, he began to bet. The dogs were supplied by twenty-five contract kennels. Soon Ricardo knew them by sight, and how they had performed in their previous races. He listened to handlers and trainers. His friend worked out a simple computer program and fed it to the high school computer. By the end of the first meeting they were making money, though not enough to justify the work that went into it. Ricardo was the only one who stayed interested. When the others went off to college, Ricardo, after a terrific fight with his father—he still lived at home, but he and his parents didn’t have much to say to each other anymore—took a full-time job as assistant kennelmaster. That meant precisely what it said. He did everything the kennelmaster didn’t want to do himself.

  The doctor, a third-year medical student, put on a tight bandage and told Ricardo he was a lucky son of a bitch. Hardly anyone came out of a head-on collision with an automobile without more damage.

  “Next time get the license number.”

  “I know, and get a lawyer. I prefer to work for my money.”

  Dee Wynn showed up at the lockup kennel after most of the afternoon’s dogs were already in. He was an old dog man, and until Ricardo, he hadn’t kept an assistant for more than a month at a time. But Ricardo listened to his stories and stayed out of his way when he was drinking, which these days was most of the time. He shaved infrequently, and one of his upper front teeth was missing. His blue jeans were so stiff with dirt and grease that they could have stood up by themselves. He was the only snuff-dipper Ricardo knew.

  “Rick the spic,” he said amiably, breathing out fumes. “Keep at it and you are bound to win. How many animals missing?”

  “Just four, Mr. Wynn, from Tip-Top.”

  “Well, if they don’t get here in a minute and a half, I say we scratch those dogs, much as the racing secretary don’t like scratches.”

  He wavered into his office, rooting in his ass to get at the itch that lived there. He took the pint out of his back pocket and stood it on the desk, clearing a space among the litter of undone paperwork.

  The Tip-Top station wagon slowed to a stop outside the delivery chute. Ricardo signed for the dogs and walked them across the scales and into cages. The new arrivals stirred up the kennel, and everybody began to yap and complain. Ricardo stepped outside.

  “Dee’s pissed that you’re late again,” he told the handler.

  “Yeah, well. They’re always so damn slow loading. Can you cool him down?”

  “He’ll forget it. He’s loaded. Big surprise. What about the new bitch? What’s she been going?”

  The handler dropped his voice a notch; this was classified information. “Tell Me True. That leg action, oh, my, you know she’s going to go. Worked a thirty-one seventy, feeling nice and saucy this morning. Kennel thinks we’re going to win some money on her.”

  Ricardo locked in. Now, for the next two hours, he and Dee Wynn would be alone in the receiving kennel with ninety-six dogs.

  He went to look in at Tell Me True, who had drawn the number-two position in the opening race. She was listed as red, but she was darker than red, with a blaze on her chest. Her brisket was unusually deep, running back in that sweet greyhound curve to no stomach at all. She stood quietly on her toes, tongue lolling, looking at him intelligently, as though she could guess what was going through his mind.

  He had already handicapped this race, but now he made an adjustment. Including Tell Me True, there were three standout entries. The favorite, who had finished out of the picture in his last three starts and had been dropped into slower competition, looked like a sure winner. He was starting from the rail, and he always opened fast. But he liked to run wide on the turns, and he would be jammed and bumped. There had been a heavy sea fog in the night, and the track would be slow-to-moderate until it dried out fully. This dog performed well under such conditions. Ricardo made his calculations again. He looked into the office; Dee was nodding. Ricardo went to an equipment locker, opened a small box under some dirty rags, and armed himself. Later, when he was removing the identifying tags, he touched the favorite lightly on the hindquarters with a palm needle. The syringe was short and squat, with a half-inch plunger; the needle protruded between his middle fingers. He was being watched by the blank eye of the closed-circuit TV, but the camera was behind him, fixed in position over the door to the weighing room.

  The dogs settled down. Ricardo put a new stack of records on the stereo. Customers had begun to appear on the other side of the big window, peering in hopefully to see which of the dogs looked like winners. Dee Wynn stayed in the office, sipping and moving papers. Ricardo could hear the leadout boys horsing around in their locker room on the other side of a thin partition. The paddock judge and the scale clerk were talking dogs. Ricardo listened, but it was the usual guesswork.

  He muzzled the eight dogs for the first race and brought them out. They were weighed again, and the paddock judge checked their ear tattoos and the color of their toenails against his Bertillon card, and released each dog to his leadout boy for his number blanket.

  With nothing to do for a moment, Ricardo watched the changing odds on the big board in the infield. The canned bugle sounded. The boys led the dogs out for the first parade of the matinee.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer called, “the greyhounds are on the track.”

  Ricardo stepped into the open.

  His beard, or betting agent, was a flamboyantly dressed black named Billy, halfway up the grandstand. A vacant seat next to him was stacked with cross-referenced programs and computer printouts, window dressing to explain wh
y he won more bets than ordinary people. He had a girl with him, to guard his files while he was inside at the windows. The little clique that was always around him left him alone when he was working, but trooped inside with him, hoping to learn his secrets. He was a fancy bettor, hard to copy. He sometimes bet a race a dozen ways, and the machines would be locked by the time the kibitzers perceived that all the crazy bets were keyed to the same two numbers. He was known as Binoculars Billy, because he liked to check his figures against the liveliness and general tone of each dog as it came out of the paddock. What he was really doing, of course, was watching Ricardo.

  Ricardo unwrapped a piece of gum. That was the two dog. He put his hand in his left pants pocket—the six. Then he touched the rail lightly—the four. That combination of signals meant that he wanted Billy to box three dogs in the quinella. If any two of those three finished first and second, regardless of order, he would have a winner.

  The crowd made more noise on the first race than any other. The sapling, Tell Me True, was caught rocking when the box sprang open, and she came out late. She went to the outside on the turn, but overtook the field in the backstretch. She went wide again on the far turn and finished fourth. Of his other two picks, the six dog won the race on the inside, laughing, but number four had trouble and was never in contention. Ricardo had lost $400.

  He lost another $400 on the sixth. Then, in the eighth, he wheeled the number one dog and scored for $1700. He ended the afternoon $900 up, twenty-five percent of which would remain with Billy.

  Chapter 2

  Dee only left his office once, to go to the bathroom, and Ricardo had to wait till after the last race to call Mrs. Geary.

  “Oh, this is Ricardo,” he said when she answered. “From this morning?”

  “Of course. How’s the leg?”

  “Pretty good, I think, Mrs. Geary. It stiffened up on me, but the doctor said to expect that. What I’m calling about, did you find my wallet, by any chance?”

  “No. You mean in the car?”