Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [63]
‘Used bills. Half before.’
‘Sure.’
Piper Boles shrugged off his conscience, tossed out the last of his integrity.
‘OK,’ he said, and sauntered away to his car as if all his nerves weren’t stretched and screaming.
Fred Collyer had heard every word, and he knew, without having to look, that one of the voices was Marius Tollman’s. Impossible for anyone long in the racing game not to recognise that wheezy Boston accent. He understood that Marius had been fixing up a swindle, and also that a good little swindle would fill his column nicely. He thought fuzzily that it was necessary to know who Marius had been talking to, and that as the voices had been behind him he had better turn round and find out.
Time however was disjointed for him, and when he pushed himself off the wall and made an effort to focus in the right direction, both men had gone.
‘Bastards,’ he said aloud to the empty night, and another late homegoer, leaving the hotel, took him compassionately by the elbow and led him to a taxi. He made it safely back to his own room before he passed out.
Since leaving LaGuardia that morning he had drunk six beers, four brandies, one double Scotch (by mistake), and nearly three litres of bourbon.
He woke at eleven the next morning, and couldn’t believe it. He stared at the bedside clock.
Eleven.
He had missed the barns and the whole morning merry-go-round on the track. A shiver chilled him at that first realisation, but there was worse to come. When he tried to sit up, the room whirled and his head thumped like a pile-driver. When he stripped back the sheet he found he had been sleeping in bed fully clothed with his shoes on. When he tried to remember how he had returned the previous evening, he could not do so.
He tottered into the bathroom. His face looked back at him like a nightmare from the mirror, wrinkled and red-eyed, ten years older overnight. Hung-over he had been any number of times, but this felt like no ordinary morning-after. A sense of irretrievable disaster hovered somewhere behind the acute physical misery of his head and stomach, but it was not until he had taken off his coat and shirt and pants, and scraped off his shoes, and lain down again weakly on the crumpled bed. that he discovered its nature.
Then he realised with a jolt that not only had he no recollection of the journey back to his motel, he could recall practically nothing of the entire evening. Snatches of conversation from the first hour came back to him, and he remembered sitting at table between a cross old writer from the Baltimore Sun and an earnest woman breeder from Lexington, neither of whom he liked; but an uninterrupted blank started from halfway through the fried chicken.
He had heard of alcoholic blackouts, but supposed they only happened to alcoholics; and he, Fred Collyer, was not one of those. Of course, he would concede that he did drink a little. Well, a lot, then. But he could stop any time he liked. Naturally he could.
He lay on the bed and sweated, facing the stark thought that one blackout might lead to another, until blackouts gave way to pink panthers climbing the walls. The Sports Editor’s warning came back with a bang, and for the first time, uncomfortably remembering that twice he had missed his column, he felt a shade of anxiety about his job. Within five minutes he had reassured himself that they would never fire Fred Collyer, but all the same he would for the paper’s sake lay off the drink until after he had written his piece on the Derby. This resolve gave him a glowing feeling of selfless virtue, which at least helped him through the shivering fits and pulsating headaches of an extremely wretched day.
Out at Churchill Downs three other men were just as worried. Piper Boles kicked his horse forward into the starting stalls and worried about what George Highbury, the Somerset Farms trainer, had said when he went to scale at two pounds overweight. George Highbury thought himself superior to all jocks and spoke to them curtly, win or lose.
‘Don’t give me that crap,