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jam ups and getting knocked to its knees.  This meant clear sailing ahead for us and we both grabbed the advantage.  Bold Venture took the Derby.  And I took nothing since I had nothing but the clothes I stood up in.  If Flo and Mister noticed I was gone, the way the times were, it was for sure they were happy to see the back of me.  Was I happy?  You bet.  I whistled all the way off the Island of Staten.  I already knew how to sleep rough and how to sell newspapers.  I knew how to groom and exercise race horses.
    I was on my way until the war showed up.
    1941.  That was Whirlaway’s year.  And we both did.  Whirl away.  Him to fame and glory; me to gore and horror in the Philippines and a crash course in scraping the bottom of human nature.
    But all that was history.  The war was over.  Hitler and Goebbels and Himmler were wherever people like Himmler and Goebbels and Hitler go.  The Japanese were back where they belonged, in Japan.  The Philippines were once again ours.  Though we stole it from the Spanish who’d stolen it from the— oh, the hell with it, this kind of thing went on as far back as men could grunt.  I hoped I was over Carole Lombard’s fatal plane crash into the side of a mountain.  Gable wasn’t.
    I didn’t suppose I was either, not completely.  I didn’t think I’d ever be.
    But here I was in Saratoga, Citation had just won the Derby and the Preakness and the Belmont, the great Gallorette won the Whitney right in front of me, her long lean chestnut body flattened out and flying, and I was just about to embark on my first serious case, one that was all mine, no Lino, one I might actually solve.  To be honest, the idea that I’d succeed did not loom large in my innermost heart.  Even so, I had a job, one that did not include shoplifters or grifters or people cheating on their better halves.
    I’d been hired by men who thought I was a real PI.
    What I didn’t have was a single idea about how to begin.
    In The Maltese Falcon , Bogie was a seasoned PI with a partner and an office and a gun and a window with his name painted on it.  A couple of years ago, I saw a movie at the Paramount four times on four consecutive nights, a real humdinger of a picture called The Big Sleep .  In it, Bogie was still a PI, but this time without a partner.  Even so, he still had a gun and an office that had a window with his name on it.  Different name, but same idea.  Me?  I had that room on Staten Island which was no place to have a room, a pot bellied stove I used for heat in the winter, a stained sink, a toothbrush, some business cards in the back of a bureau drawer, and a snub nosed Colt .38 Detective’s Special.  The snubbie was a belly gun, easy to conceal, easy to use in a hurry.  I knew about using guns thanks to using a variety of them against a lot of little people shooting at me or strafing me or lobbing bombs at me.  I had the chutzpah to take on a job I didn’t have the first idea about.  But I could read.  That helped.  And Saratoga had a fine little library.  That helped too.
    But what helped most of all was the privilege of watching a great mare named Gallorette take the Whitney Stakes from a field of outclassed males.
     
    I spent the next two days “on the job” reading Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler.  For comic relief, I snuck in something newly minted called 1984 .
    On the third day, I was ready for anything.
    Good thing no one died while I was boning up on what to do about it.
     

Chapter 10
     
    I made coffee in my little pink kitchenette.  I poured a slug of some good stuff in the coffee.  I sat in a white whicker rocking chair on the pink front porch of my pink hotel and rocked and sipped and smoked and thought about why anyone would want to kill jockeys.  One jockey made sense.  I could come up with a dozen reasons for one dead jock.  Saratoga was loaded with gambling joints, a few for the upper crust, most of ‘em for the rest of us.  Some