“I haven’t been following the papers much,” Malone said.
“That’s all right,” Manelli said grandly. “Maybe it wasn’t in the papers. But anyhow, I figured out maybe that happened. I had nothing to do with this, Mr. Malone; you understand that? But I figured out how maybe it happened.”
“How?” Malone said.
Manelli took another puff on his cigar. “Maybe there was an error at a racetrack—we could say Jamaica, for instance, just for laughs. And maybe two different totals were published for the pari-mutuel numbers, and both got given out. So the numbers runners got all fouled up, so they got beat up and money taken from them.”
“It could have happened that way,” Malone said.
“I figure maybe the FBI had something to do with this,” Manelli said.
“We didn’t,” Malone said. “Frankly.”
“And that’s not all,” Manelli said. “Let’s say at Jamaica one day there was a race.”
“All right,” Malone said agreeably. “That doesn’t require a whole lot of imagination.”
“And let’s say,” Manelli went on, “that the bookies—if there are any bookies in this town; who knows?—that they got the word about who came in, win, place and show.”