Black Cat Weekly #24

THE SLEEPER CAPER, by Richard S. Prather-1

THE SLEEPER CAPER,

by Richard S. PratherINTRODUCTION

Richard S. Prather (1921–2007)—though largely forgotten today—was a bestselling author in the 1950s and 1960s, known primarily for his Shell Scott series of mystery novels. Prather was born in Santa Ana, California and spent a year at Riverside Junior College (now Riverside Community College) in Riverside, California. He served in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II, from 1942 through the end of the war, in 1945. That year he married Tina Hager and began working as a civilian chief clerk of surplus property at March Air Force Base in Riverside. He left that job to become a full-time writer in 1949. The first Shell Scott mystery, Case of the Vanishing Beauty, was published in 1950. It would be the start of a long series that numbered more than three dozen titles featuring the Shell Scott character.

Richard S. Prather.

The Shell Scott series was so successful that it spawned a magazine, Shell Scott Mystery Magazine, which lasted for several years. It was published by Leo Margulies, who had edited and published pulp magazines for decades, after he set up his own publishing company, LeMarg Publishing. LeMarg was always on the edge of financial disaster and paid very slowly. Slow payment was a problem for Prather, who actually wrote the novellas himself—most other magazines based on successful series used young authors to ghostwrite the stories. (The Mike Shayne stories for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine from the same era were all ghostwritten.) Prather’s resentment about slow—and often no—payment led to the early end of the magazine.

In “The Sleeper Caper,” Shell Scott goes to Mexico City to investigate a racing fix—but finds himself getting ready to kill a killer. It was originally published in Manhunt magazine in March, 1953.

* * * *

YOU take a plane from the States and head south; a few hours later and up more than seven thousand feet, where the air is thin and clear, you land at Mexico City and take a cab to the Hipódromo de las Américas where the horses run sideways, backwards, and occasionally around the seven-furlong track, and you go out to the paddock area after the fourth race.

You see a big, young, husky, unhandsome character with a Mexico City tan, short, prematurely white hair sticking up in the air like the end of a clipped whisk-broom, and his arms around the waists of two lovely young gals who look like Latin screen stars, and you say, “Geez, look at the slob with the two tomatoes.”

That’s me. I am the slob with the two tomatoes, and the hell with you.

Five days ago I’d left Los Angeles and my one-man agency, “Sheldon Scott, Investigations,” and flown to Mexico for my client, Cookie Martini, an L.A. bookmaker. A big one. You may sneer at the thought of my taking a bookie for a client. Okay, sneer. As far as I’m concerned, people are going to gamble whether there are bookies or not. If they can’t bet on the nags, they’ll bet on the number of warts on some guy’s nose. Cookie Martini was at least an honest bookie, and his money was clean. In the last year or so he’d started booking bets on tracks outside the States: France, South America—and Mexico City. He and some other books taking Mexico City bets had recently been clipped for nearly three hundred thousand dollars. Cookie figured that too many longshots were coming in, too many sleepers, and he suspected a fix. So he’d hired me to find out if anything smelled here at the Hipódromo. It smelled. And it was starting to look as if a guy could get killed just sniffing.

“I wonder where Pete is?” Vera asked.

Vera was the tomato on my left, and I had to reach way down to put my arm around her. She was only five feet tall, but that still made her a head taller than Pete. Pedro Ramirez, her husband, was one of the season’s leading riders at the Hipódromo, even though he was still an apprentice.

“He’ll be here in a minute, Vera,” I said.

He was a few minutes late, and we were to meet him here and wish him luck. Pete was riding Jetboy, the solid favorite in the fifth race coming up, and it was a big race for him. He’d started the day with a total of thirty-eight wins behind him and won the second race. One more winner and he’d lose his “bug,” his apprentice’s two-kilo weight allowance, and become a full-fledged jockey. It was important in another way, too. He was supposed to throw the race.

Elena Angel squeezed my right arm. “Here he comes, Shell.”

For a moment, I just enjoyed the squeeze. This Elena was married to nobody and that pleased me hugely. She was tall, black-haired, with creamy skin and what I thought of simply as “Mexican” eyes. Dark eyes, soft, big, shadowed eyes with both the question and the answer in them. And her body could best be described with words that are pornographic.

I gave Elena a squeeze to make us even—actually, that particular squeeze put me way ahead—and looked to my left. I could see Pete walking toward us fast from the Jockey’s Room, practically sprinting. I always got a kick out of him when he was in a hurry—unless he was on a horse. He was only about only about four feet tall, wiry, a man of twenty-four, but he still looked like a kid. A tough kid. A kid who’d haul off and slug you in the knee if you cracked wrong.

When he got close, I said, “Hi, champ. I’m sinking the roll this trip.”

He grinned, jaws working while he flashed white teeth. Pete was nervous, high-strung, like a thoroughbred, and he constantly chewed little candy-coated Chiclets.

“Si,” he said. “You sink it all, Shell. This one is a shoo-in. This one, I lose the bug for sure.”

He spit out his gum and fished in his pocket for the pack, shook two white Chiclets out into his small palm. “Dio, they go fast,” he said in surprise. “I thought I had a full box.” He shrugged. “Gum?” He tossed one cube into his mouth and held out his hand.

The girls didn’t chew. I took the gum, started to pop it into my mouth, and stopped when I saw Pete’s face. I’d just noticed that his lips were puffed and the side of his jaw was swollen.

“What happened, Pete?” I asked. “You kiss a horse?”

He stopped grinning. “I kiss a fist. Jimmy Rath’s.” He saw the hot anger boil up in me at mention of the name, and he added, “I fix him. Don’t worry. Sometime I fix him with a baseball bat. Anyway, I fix him good when I boot Jetboy in.”

I looked toward the oval walking ring. Jimmy Rath was there with another guy about my size. I took a step toward them but Elena and Vera both hung onto my arms and Pete said, “Relax, Shell. So what do we prove this way? When I boot this one home, I’m through for the day. I come up to your table, and you can stand right behind me when I spit in his eyes. I don’t need no bodyguard. Anyway, Rath’s just Hammond’s stooge. Hammond, he’s back of it.”

I knew what Pete meant. We both knew it, and everybody knew it, but proving it was another thing. When Cookie Martini sent me down here he’d given me a letter to Pete, and Cookie told me he’d checked and there wasn’t a more honest jock in the business than Pete Ramirez. I’d watched Pete race Sunday, and met him afterward. I told him what I was here for, laid it on the line. Pete was, if anything, more interested in cleaning up any mess here than I was. Like a lot of Mexican kids born in the poor outlying states, he’d had it tough as a kid. Now he was a jockey starting to make the grade and dreaming the big dream: dreaming the big dream: a fine house, clothes—and a hundred pairs of shoes. Racing was his job, the center of his dream. Pete wanted it to be clean—and let the best man win.

And, Pete said, jocks were throwing races. He couldn’t prove it but he knew it was happening because he could ride alongside the other jocks and see them pulling leather, holding their mounts back. Sometimes owners gave their jocks instructions that their horse wasn’t to finish in the money, but Pete said this other thing was different; it happened too often, to the wrong horses. And Pete had heard soft-talk, rumors of fixes and payoffs and threats against jocks who weren’t supposed to win. Almost always it was the favorite supposed to lose, and a longshot that actually won.

Pete had nosed around, questioned the other jocks; I’d done a pile of routine legwork in Mexico City, checking the books I could find, talking to horse-players, trying to get a lead to who was putting the fixes in. The picture was pretty conclusive: at the top was a fat guy named Arthur Hammond whom everybody seemed to be scared of. He was from the States, had once been a trainer, but was ruled off the tracks for life because of shady practices. His retinue was a little mug named Jimmy Rath, and usually a couple of heavies. Hammond occupied the same table at the track every day. He’d been in a few scraps with the local cops, but never went to jail, mainly because he was “like that” with a Mexican biggie named Valdez. Valdez wasn’t a politico, but he had almost as much behind-the-scenes power as the President. And Valdez always helped his pals. Always.

Jimmy Rath had got Pete alone yesterday and told him to lose the fifth race today, Thursday, for ten thousand pesos. Pete laughed at him and walked away, reporting the bribe offer to the Racing Commission and later to me. There were no witnesses or corroboration, and consequently no proof. Apparently Rath had just now made his offer again, a little differently.

I asked Pete, “When did this happen? Anybody see it?”

“No, no, of course not. He send me over to the tack room after the fourth, and boost the ante to fifteen thousand. Then he say I either lose or get taken care of. I told him to go—well, you know. That’s when he hit me, and when I wake up, he’s gone.”

Elena said angrily, “They ought to do something about that Rath.”

“Yeah.” As far as I was concerned, the “they” was rapidly becoming me. My fingers were sticky; I realized I still held the Chiclet in my sweaty hand, and the sugary coating was getting slippery. I stuck the gum in my coat pocket and looked toward the walking ring. Rath wasn’t there. I knew where he probably was; with Hammond and two other bruisers upstairs.

In a few minutes, Pete left to weigh in, and the three of us went back upstairs to our table high in the stands overlooking the beautiful oval track bordered by trees, green lawn cool and colorful inside it. A hundred conversations swelled around us, and a constant stream of men and women wound in and out of the tables. It was pleasant and lovely, but mainly I was looking at four men seated a few tables away from us.

Jimmy Rath was there with two bruisers—and Hammond, a thick bulge of fat puffing over his collar. Rath sitting at the same table was proof enough that Hammond was the boy fixing the races—as far as I was concerned. The Racing Commission and the cops felt differently. And it would take more than hunches to get Hammond because of his pal Valdez.

Suddenly, I stopped paying any attention to Hammond. Something was moving on my leg. Slowly, suggestively. Something was moving on my leg. Slowly, suggestively. Elena and I sat close together facing the track, and her hand was resting just above my knee, caressing me gently.

I turned and looked at her face close to mine, looked at the rest of her. She was wearing a gray skirt and a pink sweater that covered her up completely, but was still very nearly indecent. A shroud on that body would have looked indecent.

“Cuidadito!” I said. “Be careful, baby. Two more seconds and another inch, and I’ll go screeching around the track with the horses.”

She smiled, wiggled long lashes. My spine wiggled. “I will be careless,” she said. “You do not look enough at me.” Her hand moved. I moved. I had never been alone with Elena since Pete introduced us, but I knew if I ever was, there’d be plenty happening.