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three long shots had come in for Lady Coincidence.
    But, like I said about coincidence, not one of them, maybe not even the cops, believed the accident angle for a minute.
    That’s what I was supposed to do.  Help the guys who owned and ran and influenced the track believe it.  Or help them chalk it up to a really bad streak of luck.  The season was just starting.  The war had shut things down for three long years.  The big races Saratoga was used to hosting had gone off to Belmont.  So did the customers all of Saratoga lived on.  The last thing they needed was the money folk to stay away now the track was open again.  Or even the penny ante bettor.  Saratoga Springs was full of money all year round; it was that kind of place.  But it could always use more; it was that kind of place too.  Looking at a gaudy blood bay filly that must have cost someone more money than I’d ever see in my entire life, I thought: couldn’t we all?  I was no better than the town, and no worse.  I could always use more.
    As for the jockeys themselves, the ones not dead, you could describe them as a little spooked.  Who wouldn’t be?  Deaths happened all the time on a racetrack, usually to the horses.  An image of Dark Secret winning the ’34 Jockey Club Gold Cup with one broken leg rose up in my mind.  I shut it down before I heard the “mercy shot” that killed him moments after he’d won someone a nice pot of money.  But the jocks got crippled or killed every week at some track somewhere.  Even so, it was an odd jockey who drowns in a Saratoga lake.  Or one who, completely sober, crashes his car into a tree on an empty road at 4 a.m.  Or, best for last, chokes on a ham sandwich at a picnic by a mineral springs consisting of just himself and his dog.  The dog was one of those African dogs, the ones that don’t bark.  It also didn’t leave its master’s side.  Hikers found them both a few days after the sad event.
    And this had all happened in the space of nine days.  One more like it, and if I’d been a jockey, I’d move me and my tack to Southern California.  Fast.
     

Chapter 8
     
    So there I was, walking a shed row of the oldest and best looking track in the U.S. of A. remembering the last time I was at any track, Monmouth as usual, crammed up against the fence with the rest of the hoi polloi.  I think my mouth was open.  I think I was yelling.  I think there was a fat guy next to me kissing his ticket over and over.  I think he stank like a moose.  I think I came this close to beaning him.  I’d just lost my shirt on a sure thing in the second.  Horse called Can’t Beat Him.  Funny thing is, everyone did, including the gate which they couldn’t get him out of.  The race went off and he was still in there trying to brain himself on the metal bars.
    I did what the usual loser does; I threw my losing ticket away in disgust, all the time wondering if I was going to be spending the night in the city park, when a “stooper” came by to snatch it up, and I thought: Sam, things keep going like they’re going, that’ll be you in a month, stooping down to pick up discarded tickets hoping to find that little beauty thrown away by some idiot who couldn’t read a winning number when they bought one.
    But that was then and this was now and now I was on the backstretch with carte blanche to go where I liked.  And I liked everywhere I could go.  The tidy barns, newly painted.  Horses, sleek as the finish on a new Packard, being led out to the track or led back.  Horses dancing by on the track, getting a feel for it.  Guys in cream colored suits and cream colored hats standing around staring at form sheets.  Black kids, white kids, brown kids, old men, young women, forking straw into stalls or hosing down quivering hides.  Farriers hammering shoes onto hooves or prying them off.  The smell of it all.  The sound of it all.  Why do people keep trying to close down racetracks?
    This is what I’d