Free Murder at the Racetrack by Otto Penzler Page B

tests.”
    “Jockeys pull up,” Jimmy said. “Or the horse is fed certain kinds of food—”
    “Right,” said Donna. “So we’ll do what we can to figure out what’s going on with Zuppa. And remember that all of this is just
     my guess at a distance. Shackel deserves some credit for bringing Zuppa along as far as he’s come, even if Zuppa hasn’t finished
     in the money. Lots of horses never do. I may find out that he’s just a morning glory—a horse that can run like the dickens
     in a workout, but simply isn’t a competitor.”
    “He’s a competitor,” Jimmy said with confidence.
    •    •    •
    They were to test Jimmy’s assertion just a few weeks later, when Zuppa was entered to run his first race after being moved
     to Copper Hills. Zuppa’s new vet had pronounced him fit, with no signs of mononucleosis or other health problems that might
     have slowed him down. “Good news,” Donna said. “And we don’t need to worry about harming him with some work.”
    Donna had given Jimmy the task of training Eric while she trained Zuppa. As a result, Eric came to the track much better informed
     than he had been on the day he walked into Shackel’s office.
    Eric placed only a few bets on the day’s card. He had decided to begin cautiously. Jimmy had taken Donna’s assignment seriously.
     He awakened his night-owl uncle at an ungodly hour each morning to watch Zuppa’s workouts. Living in the house across the
     road—as they did now—allowed Eric to get about forty-five more minutes of sleep, for whatever that was worth. He no longer
     groused about it, though—grumpiness had been replaced by pure anticipation. He didn’t have the connection to Zuppa that Jimmy
     did—he would have sworn that the horse showed off when he knew the boy was watching. All the same, Eric came to love watching
     the way the big colt moved. He supposed he took pleasure, too, from seeing how excited Donna and Jimmy were with Zuppa’s times
     and the way the colt was responding to other aspects of his training.
    Eric’s own lessons didn’t end with watching workouts. They watched horse races on television or from videotapes Jimmy had
     made. Eric was required to study them endlessly. Jimmy gave him stacks of racing publications and taught him how to read past
     performance data in the
Daily Racing Form.
    Eric was still too overwhelmed by the combination of new information and other changes in his life to suddenly become a heavy
     bettor, but at least Jimmy no longer worried that his uncle would place a bet based on the color of the horse, or the design
     of the stable’s silks, or the appeal of the horse’s name—and knew that he no longer believed completely in the old advice
     about the relationship of the production of road apples to friskiness in a race.
    He placed losing bets on the first two races and decided that since he didn’t have any strong preferences in the third, he’d
     not bet that race. Still, he was off to a bad start and wondered if Jimmy would despair of him. But the boy shrugged and said,
     “You’ll bet right on the fourth race. Let’s go visit Zuppa and wish him luck.”
    The fourth was Zuppa’s race—a mile and a sixteenth, a maiden race. ( “No, Uncle Eric,” Jimmy had said with disgust a few weeks
     ago, “they don’t have to be fillies!” )
    They went down to see Zuppa, who called to Jimmy the moment he saw him. Donna had other horses running in other races that
     day, and Eric decided that he would do his best to stay out of her way. She seemed glad to see them, though, and introduced
     them to the woman she had been talking to, Debbie Arrington, horse-racing writer for the
Sacramento Bee.
The reporter had been interviewing Donna about a favorite she had trained for a stakes race being held later that afternoon.
     Arrington seemed taken with Zuppa Inglese, and after asking about Jimmy’s connection to the horse, she ended up interviewing
     him as well, and took several