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end of the Staten Island ferry.
    Thanks to poor dead Pamela and her poor dead babe, someone was paying my way door to door.
     
    It was one of those late July mornings when upstate New York makes you want to sing like Bing Crosby and drink like Tallulah Bankhead.  Or drink like Bing and sing like Tallulah.  Women’s thin summer dresses weren’t yet clinging to their legs like wet laundry and a guy’s hat didn’t slide to the back of his head.
    It was the kind of day anyone with the nerve and the cash (not to mention luck and an honest tip-off) could make a bundle on the visions that flashed past on dirt or grass and made your blood pound with the glory of just one thing on this earth that was pure.  To me, growing up with pigeons and rats and the Zawadzkis, plus enough cockroaches to sink the Staten Island ferry, a racehorse was all there was of beauty.
    And there, waiting on the train platform, was the guy who’d called me.  An overfed guy in an expensive suit with an expensive hat on his sleek head and expensive shoes on his feet.  But his face looked like a cheap Halloween mask out of Stapleton’s Five & Dime.  He said his name was Marshall Hutsell and stuck out his hand.
    I shook it—even though I disliked him instantly.  But so?  I didn’t need to like him.  Because of Marshall Hutsell, or because of whoever Hutsell worked for, I wasn’t hanging around Lino’s cop station with Lino’s hand chosen bunch of morons, all of ‘em half hoping a call would come in about something really gruesome, at the same time half hoping the phone lines would go dead so they could finish their game of Chinese checkers.  Because of Hutsell and friends, my room and board had been paid two weeks in advance for one of the smaller suites in a pink hotel with pinker petunias in the window boxes and a widow’s walk way up at the top where a widow, if she bothered to walk it, could see for miles.  Pink hotel and pink petunias were on a nice tree lined street called Case Street, a block away from the entrance to Saratoga’s historic track.
    I had a job, a hotel room with private bath and a pink kitchenette, complete with a small stove, a small ice box, some pots and pans, a set of dishes, and a set of cutlery right down to the steak knives.  I had entrée to the track at any time, day or night, and some hard cash.  That was in another envelope Hutsell handed me right after delivering me to my new home at the Spa.
     
    An hour later I stood on holy ground—the backstretch where only those in the game ever got to go.
    Before this, the only time I ever saw a backstretch was because of some trainer I knew.  And all the trainers I knew trained and raced claimers.  Most were decent enough guys, kept decent enough barns, and all their hot-walkers and exercise kids and jocks on their way up or down were decent enough too—for the most part.  But barring a miracle, not one of ‘em was ever going to get that big horse.  Like that big case, the big horse was the stuff of dreams.  But maybe Sam Russo, Private Investigator, had a dream coming in.  Why not?  It could happen to anyone.
    I was not only in blue grass, I was in clover.
     
    Marshall’d already told me nobody at the track actually knew for sure jocks were getting bumped off.  At least nobody but whoever was doing the bumping.  Basically the folks who hired me, faceless folks I hadn’t yet met and maybe never would, were pretty much in the dark along with everyone else.  Or so he said they said.  No one was altogether certain it wasn’t just a series of bad accidents—and for once not on the track—which is why they hadn’t called the cops.  Or, again, so he said they said.  The cops agreed, which is why they hadn’t shown up on their own.  Or so they said.
    Uh huh, is what I said to myself as I’d listened to all this horseshit, and I’m just like Dorothy Parker once said, the Queen of Romania.  If three dead jocks one after another were accidents,