Where the Truth Lies (37 page)

When she’d died,The Miami Herald had printed a photo of her in her Versailles uniform, identifying her as Maureen O’Flaherty. Tony said that when he saw it, he thought, “Now I’mnever gonna screw her,” and in a dark way, it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard said in conjunction with the poor girl’s death.

Ludlow had apparently taken it very hard. He barely emerged from his apartment for almost a month. Finally, the call of the hounds must have drawn him out of his seclusion. His life evolved into what it was now, a shuttle between Hallandale Beach, where the Hollywood Greyhound Track was located, and McKinley Street. For the months in the summer when the dogs didn’t run, you could still play poker or dominoes there, but Ludlow wasn’t crazy about this, and he was more inclined to restlessly hang around Gulfstream Park, the nearby horse-racing track, where they ran the Breeders’ Cup each year. He’d bet only on the daily double and almost never won.

Exactly what he did by way of vocation to meet the cost of his meager lifestyle was as much a mystery fifteen years after Maureen’s death as it had been in the fifties. Maybe he did just well enough with the dogs to keep him in Hamburger Helper for the rest of his life.

I asked Tony if there was somewhere at the greyhound track I could find Ludlow. He said he knew from talking with Ludlow that, just as in horse racing, there was a paddock area where the greyhounds were paraded around before the races started, at two. Ludlow tried never to miss this. He considered himself good at determining from this look-see which dogs were likely to win. “Like I said, you can’t miss him. Nose like Durante. Big black head of hair for a man his age, probably a toup’. All you have to do is ask anyone who works there. They all know him.”

I thanked him for his trouble and slipped him another twenty. He smiled seductively. “How about that Budweiser?” he asked.

I nodded enthusiastically. “I know, that Budweiser is really something, isn’t it?”

To me it was a pretend racetrack, like one of those children’s play kitchens with miniature boxes of Pillsbury cake mix with which you could make a cupcake in an oven heated by a lightbulb. It had one pair of washrooms, one cocktail lounge, and three ticket windows, like a train station in Utica. There was an undernourished feel about it, but nowhere near as undernourished as the wretched canines who worked there.

The greyhounds were raised to be fast, desperate, thin, and, in particular, famished. This fourth commodity somewhat guaranteed the first three. The only part about starving that was counterproductive was that when they had no food, they had less energy. But that’s where desperate (for the reward of food) kicked in.

I found Ludlow in the paddock, looking over today’s and tomorrow’s contenders. He fit the description Tony had given me, and his identity was verified by a sleepy security guard.

Ludlow was taking lots of notes on a racing form, flipping back a page now and then to cross-reference some bitch’s progeny. Imagine Walter Matthau without the charm and you have Kef Ludlow: a sour-faced man with a shock of black hair of which he was not the original owner, a prominent nose that instantly evoked the Great Schnozzola without the greatness, and beady eyes so rheumy he seemed permanently on the verge of weeping. Or perhaps his eyes weren’t rheumy at all.

He was tall, perhaps over six feet, but his stooped shoulders and receding chest brought him right back down to earth. He didn’t have a potbelly, but his stomach and thighs were those of a slightly stockier person.

He got right in there with the greyhounds as if he were the judge of a dog show at Madison Square Garden. More than once it looked as if he was smelling their breath, in the manner of a mother checking her teenage son for the scent of liquor. He petted them, but there was nothing good-hearted about it. He was appraising them, with all the warmth of a slave trader pinching the breasts of a nubile Nubian girl. Some of those displaying the dogs looked offended by his handling of their charges, but apparently a fixture like Ludlow was given wide latitude in this department.

I trailed him into the enclosed grandstand, which, blessedly, was air-conditioned. The back wall was a hideous pale pink with blue and green vertical stripes that had lost their color over the years in the direct sunlight. Everyone knew Kef, and perhaps for this reason, everyone left him alone. I, luckily, didn’t know him at all, so I plonked myself down next to him. I still was looking pretty smart in my newly purchased outfit, but he appeared to resent the intrusion.

“Mr. Ludlow?” I asked.

He looked down into his racing form. “I have no tips for you, miss. If you want tips, pay for a copy of theMiami Racing Gazette, it’s an eight-page daily, you can get it at the cigarette counter to the right of where you first walk in. It’s a dollar.” He looked at me and his snarl softened a bit, probably because he liked the sight of my nipples through the thin fabric of my outfit as they reacted to the icy air in the grandstand. “I’m sorry,” he added.

“Mr. Ludlow, I’m a journalist.” I took from my purse a small plastic sleeve one-fourth the size of a page inCosmopolitan. For official inquiries about Vince and Lanny, I had my folded-up letter from Connie Wechsler on Neuman and Newberry stationery, which I kept with me at all times, confirming that a book about the duo had been commissioned by a reputable publisher. But for all other interviews, I used the contents of the plastic sleeve as my “letters of transit,” as this was my temporary visa when venturing unprepared into unknown territories. From the sleeve I withdrew five folded slick magazine pages, each the first page of an interview with or an article I’d written about a famous person, and I’d picked the five for their diversity: Edgar Winter, Viveca Lindfors, Cesar Chavez, Buckminster Fuller, Judy Carne. Somewhere in there, at least one name meant something to most everyone.

Kef looked through the package and said suspiciously, “Miss O’Connor, you know all these famous people, why are you talking to me? I don’t know anybody.”

I put the articles away. “I’m writing a series of pieces for a new magazine coming out here soon calledHooray for Hollywood. Each piece of mine is going to be about some interesting facet of life in this area, past and present. Greyhound racing, politicians who started out here, celebrities who retired here, you get the idea. You’re quite the legend, Mr. Ludlow. I’m told you know more about this track than the people who run it.”

It was a very safe bet on my part to say this. Find me a sports fan who thinks the owners of his team know or care as much about the sport or the team as he does.

Ludlow sniffed. “The people who own this place are running it into the ground. Look around you.” The grandstand was dotted with perhaps thirty people, all but a few well over sixty. “The first race starts in fifteen minutes. Sure, the crowd’ll get bigger but not by much.” He set down his racing form. “So what’s your angle? The cruelty of dog racing? Been done a million times. You’re not going to get anything from me on that topic.”

“No, very much the opposite, Mr. Ludlow. Actually, I think that dog racing is a beautiful thing.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah? How so?”

The thing I’d always loved about the debating team in college was that you had to be prepared on a moment’s notice to argue either the pro or the con of the question, with equal passion and conviction. Your true feelings were completely irrelevant. All that mattered was the argument.

I said to him fervidly, “Mr. Ludlow, the starting point for my article is that a dog race has it over a horse race any day. Horses are beautiful animals, no doubt about that. But sorry, they’re not really smart. We don’t think a cow is smart, right? A horse is just a cow that runs fast and looks pretty.” The idea of containers of homogenized horse milk came to mind and momentarily nauseated me. “But a dog? A dog is a smart animal. A dogknows he’s in a race. A dog has pride, wants to be liked, wants to win. You ever see a horse at the end of a race? If he came in fifth, does he look disgraced? No. But a dog, a dog would know, Mr. Ludlow. A dog would bow his head in shame.” I sat back, pleased with my improv.

Ludlow looked at me in disbelief. “Dogs … dogs are dumb, pathetic animals, Miss O’Connor. Hitler had one, you know. That’s how much these dogs know about character. Give a stray dog a steak, he’ll be your friend for life until you don’t have a steak and somebody else does. These animals are meat whores. And stupid? Greyhounds will chase a metal rabbit that has no scent around the same oval loop five, six times a day for the most useful portion of their lives. The reason they do it is not because they’re hungry for fame, praise, or affection. It’s because they’re hungry for food.” He smiled a dry smile. “But if you think writing the kind of romantic claptrap you’re spouting will help keep this crummy place on its feet a few more years, you go right ahead. You feel free to put your words in my mouth and then quote me. Just get my name right.”

I told him I had it right already and spelled it for him. He seemed pleased. I tried to make him feel as if he were some sort of local legend, like Toots Shor or Jack Dempsey. I laughed at things he said that weren’t intended to be jokes, and when I complimented him on his sense of humor, he said, “Well, you can’t take life too seriously now, can you?” It was said that Charles Dickens would allow no man to be a bore, and I refused to let Kef Ludlow be a crab. Perhaps it had been a while since a girl in her twenties had treated him warmly.

The dogs were funneled into their respective stalls at the starting line by a trainer who had the wisdom to wear leather gloves. The sides of the stalls were high enough that the dogs couldn’t see one another, but they yelped within their abhorrent muzzles, as if challenging one another, or perhaps calling out, “This time can’t we just ignore the rabbit? Can’t we, guys?”

They wore muzzles only to protect their noses and to help officials determine the winner in a photo finish, said the management. Right.

There was a shot, the gates opened, and they were off. A greyhound can see clearly up to a half mile away, but these animals had never been allowed to look that far. They weren’t even allowed to chase cars, many of which they could have caught.

As the dog wearing a red vest bearing the number 5 took the early lead, Ludlow leaned over to me and said, “He’s the favorite but he’s going to fade; watch number three.” Number 3 wore a royal blue vest and was currently running fourth. His name was Proud Fella. As the hounds rounded into the home stretch, the crowd of thirty came to life, or as much as a crowd can come to life when the vast majority had received a senior discount. The greyhound’s pace was approaching thirty-five, maybe forty miles an hour. One of the dogs growled as if to alert the others that this was the finish. Proud Fella surged forward, as predicted, but several of the others surged forward even more. Ludlow had been trying for a quinella, picking Bobby’s Baby and Proud Fella to finish first and second, but since Proud Fella came in fifth, it didn’t matter that Bobby’s Baby won.

Ludlow didn’t seem to mind talking to me while the races transpired. It was as if the real action was before the race, in the calculating of the odds, and at the finish line, where the results of his wager were totaled. Everything in between was merely passing scenery.

After the third race, I treated us to franks and fries as I asked him what had attracted him to the sport in the first place. He didn’t take his eyes off the tote board as he answered, “I’m not attracted tothe sport ora sport or any sport. I don’t like sports. I like gambling. That’s what I’m attracted to, the gambling. But dice, roulette, cards, slots, they have no consciousness, they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re just ‘the odds.’ So you can’t blame them. You can only blame yourself. With football, you blame the quarterback or the coach, real people, and when I lose there, it makes me churned up and upset inside. Same thing with baseball, hockey, basketball: some other guy screwed me over, and I hate that, because that’s the way real life works, every single cruddy day. Even betting on the horses, there’s a jockey. A midget from the Dominican Republic screws up and I get screwed over. Who wouldn’t hate that? But when you lose your money here, with the greyhounds … it’s all the fault of one scrawny mutt.” I laughed at his drollery and he laughed, too. “That’s what I love about the greyhounds. No jockeys, no coaches—if you lose, it’s only because of one dumb dog.”

I smiled back warmly and wrote this down as if it were the eleventh commandment. “What a wonderful way to put it,” I cooed, and he glowed as much as a broken lightbulb can.

Ludlow did fairly well that day. He boxed a trifecta and also picked up an exacta in the twelfth, which was the last race of the matinee, as they call it. He also picked the winner in the fourth. On some rather small bets, he was walking away with several hundred dollars. I got the feeling that this was not often the case.

Flush with victory, we retired to the Dog Pound, the track’s murky cocktail lounge. It’s amazing how you can illuminate a maroon bar with only the light from a jukebox, the beer signs, and a gooseneck lamp by the register. Why, if it were any brighter in the place, they’d have had to clean the tables and vacuum the carpet.

We talked at length about the Florida dog-racing scene, the track over at Flagler particularly arousing his ire. It was about as scintillating a topic as you might imagine, but in the light of the shaded candle that I’d lit at our table, I dutifully wrote down some minimal notes in one of the spiral-bound pads I always keep in my bag. I like the kind with the spiral on top so my hand doesn’t rub up against the metal coil by the left margin. I’d gone through about thirty such notebooks thus far on the project.

My note-taking took us through a third drink for him and a switch to 7UP for me after an initial Scotch. I picked up the tab, which he liked a great deal and which I said was the very least I could do in return for all the valuable insights he’d been generous enough to give me. Finally, the moment had come. I asked him for his address so I could mail him a tear sheet of the article. He told me it was 1350 North Dixie Highway, Apartment 7GW.