In this chapter, we learn more about Preston's blue notebooks. What do you think they're for? He certainly was doing a great deal of math in them. Was it an engineering exercise? Maybe he was working out his horoscope. Maybe something more lucrative.
I hope you like the chapter. Drop me a line if you want. I'd be pleased to hear from you!
NOTE: Check out my other stories in the Sci-fi / Fantasy Section Crown Vic to a Parallel World From Whence I Came Stolen Love
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Wasted Life a Law Edwards Mystery by Sam Stefanik
18 A Gambling Problem
Bea and I had another `what do we know and what questions do we have' session. She took notes while I smoked my cigar down to a nub. We came up with the following lists.
What we know:
Preston gave up his room and moved to the slum hotel on Sunday. He was killed early in the week, but not earlier than Monday afternoon when he left the Blue-Plate diner after being stood up. He had a few dollars, no bankbook, no blueprints, meager possessions, and several notebooks full of numbers, dates, and math.
What questions do we have?
Why was he killed? Who killed him? Where are the blueprints? What are these notebooks about? Who was he waiting for at the diner?
"What else was in the room? Anything?" I asked after we'd reviewed the lists a couple times.
"Just some old newspapers." Bea replied to dismiss my question. "I told the custodian to throw them away."
Newspapers didn't sound important, but with the little information we had, anything could be a clue. I asked Bea to clarify. "How many newspapers?"
"A big stack of newsprint." She announced and held her palms up facing each other to approximate a substantial stack. "I thought it was strange because Preston is normally very tidy."
I pounced on the fact that an accumulation of anything was out of character for Preston. I assumed something was special about the papers for him to have kept them. "Tell me more. Were they newsprint, or newspapers? What were they exactly?"
Bea used her hands again to illustrate the size of the papers she'd found. "They were half the size of a regular unfolded newspaper. They looked like they opened like books."
I thought about that. There were a great many things that could fit the description she'd given. I wished she'd saved one of the...whatever the papers were. "Were they pulp magazines, with covers?" I asked.
"No, black and white newsprint."
I had an idea what she was talking about. If I was right...I didn't want to speculate. I went to my room and rummaged around. I found what I wanted and dove back into the office. "Like this?" I asked and held up what I'd found.
Bea took the item from me and examined it carefully. She nodded over the paper I'd given her. "Yes, this looks just like what Preston had. What is this?"
I explained for the uninitiated. "It's a racing form or circular for horse racing. It's all about betting and has statistics, odds, all kinds of stuff. This one is from two weeks ago."
I took the racing form back and opened it. The inside of its pages were ruled similarly to the blue covered notebooks that were in Preston's suitcase. I wondered if one thing had anything to do with the other. "Let's see if the date on this matches a date in one of these books." I suggested and reached for the stack of notebooks.
We found the right book and page and compared it to the form. The races that day were at Garden State Park, over the river in New Jersey. The abbreviation at the top of the notebook page was GSP. We checked the handwritten columns. They matched the racing form race for race. The numbered columns in the notebooks were the number of the horse, post position, some statistics, odds expressed as a ratio, a calculation that resulted in another set of odds, then a final column with either a one, two, three, or a slash in it. All twelve races and all twelve horses in each race were represented.
I assumed the final column that only used a one, two, three or a slash was to display the results of the race, meaning whether the horse won, placed, showed, or didn't finish in the money. We compared the last column in the notebook to the results listed in the racing form. Out of 144 horses over twelve races, there were thirty-six `win, place, or show' slots. Preston's figures matched sixteen of the thirty-six, and one trifecta.
I considered why the columns would match only partially. Then I wondered why he would rewrite the pages of the racing form like that. I flipped to the pages of long hand calculations and scanned them. The numbers and formula didn't mean anything to me, but they looked very advanced. The reasoning hit me all at once. It occurred to me that Preston Arlott had developed a formula to calculate the winners of horseraces, and his formula worked a little less than half of the time!
I reasoned that it would take a lot of money to start, but even a quarter bet on all thirty-six `win, place, or show' slots would return more than was laid out pretty quickly. I raised my head from my study of the notebook and the racing form. "I think this is why he was killed." I announced.
Bea didn't get it. "What does horse racing have to do with my brother and these notebooks?"
I explained, glad to be the one with the knowledge for a change. "Your brother figured out a system to use statistics and his engineer's math to predict the winners of horseraces. It's not fool proof, but he's right a little less than half the time. If we assume this one page isn't a fluke, he could make a fortune."
I thought for a second and laid out a possible scenario for Bea. "Let's look at the events that we know about from Preston's last few days at the rooming house. He was calling anyone he ever knew for a hundred dollars and someone to help him on Saturday. I say the hundred dollars he wanted was for betting money. I think the help he wanted was to spread the bets out to several bookies, so no one would catch on about his system.
"When he couldn't get the cash or any help, I think he tried to do it on his own and build up from twenty-five or fifty cent bets. To bet twenty-five cents on all thirty-six lines with no trifectas, would only take nine dollars. He had the money to do that. Someone must have noticed that he was winning too much. I assume they checked him out, got wise, and killed him, then they took back the money that he'd won."
Bea didn't see the whole picture. She didn't understand how winning some bets could lead to getting killed. "But why would they kill him? Why wouldn't they just take the money?"
I tried to explain the dark side of gambling. "There's a lot of mob connections in horseracing. They don't like to lose money. Anyone with a system as good as this one is a liability to their organization. With enough start-up cash, your brother could have ruined them in just one afternoon. If all they did was take the money back, the system stays with him because it's inside his head. If they kill him, the system dies, and they don't have anything to worry about."
Bea squeezed her face between her palms and stretched her expression sideways in a miserable grimace. "It's horrible to think he was killed for something so meaningless. It's...it's disgusting." She proclaimed and released the sides of her face.
Bea was right, it was disgusting, but it was also the way the world works. Dwelling on the senselessness of it wasn't going to help anyone or anything. "Let's see if my theory fits the timeline." I suggested in order to get Bea back on topic. "I say he did his betting on Saturday, then saw something that scared him either late Saturday or early Sunday. He packed up and moved on Sunday, but they caught up to him somehow and killed him Monday afternoon."
I'd explained my idea out loud to help me organize it in my head. My theory didn't explain the blueprints or tell us who Preston was waiting for at the diner. It also didn't explain why he didn't run right down to the university for his degree Monday morning and then blow town. He would have had the money to pay for it. I couldn't imagine why he didn't.
I was also surprised that whoever killed Preston and took the money back didn't take his notebooks. I thought it seemed strange that they would leave the evidence of the system to be found by someone else. Anyone good at advanced math would likely be able to use the books to recreate Preston's system. I decided that there was more we didn't understand, but the puzzle pieces had started to fit together.
Bea raised another objection to my theory. "But, wait, isn't that cheating? Preston wouldn't cheat."
I didn't like the idea of him cheating either. Cheating was next door to lying and both seemed to run counter to everything I knew about Preston. I considered his circumstances for barely a second before I decided to give the poor kid a pass. I tried to soften the idea of it for Bea, to make it more palatable for her to accept. "Don't look at it as cheating. The whole system is crooked. He was just evening the odds."
Bea accepted my rationalization without comment, but I could tell she didn't much like it. She set her objection aside so she could deal with more immediate concerns. "Now we know why he was killed. How do we find out who did it?" She asked.
It was a good question and one that set me back on my haunches to think. I reasoned that, to find Preston's killer, we'd have to figure out where he did his betting. Preston wouldn't waste the train fare to go to a racetrack to gamble, even if the race on Saturday was local, which I didn't know.
Either way, Preston wouldn't have to go to the track. The city was full of back-room bookmakers. If he found a place where there were two or three of them within a block or two of each other, that would make him as safe as he could hope to be if he was working alone with no start-up money.
That reasoning didn't give us much to go on. There were places with little clusters of bookmakers all over the city. Since Preston didn't change his residence until Sunday, I concluded he worked his magic close to his rooming house. I figured he realized how exposed he was after the fact and that's why he fled the next day. I thought a little more.
The only clear way forward that I could see was for us to get some help from the outside. Since I was no longer on the police force, I didn't know the reputation of the mobsters or the gamblers who operated in the city. I needed to talk to someone who did.
"I think we need some advice." I announced and dialed the phone for the police station at 4th and Snyder. When the receptionist answered I asked for "missing persons, Captain Herbert Marshall."