“Okay. This will be good. I said to him, ‘Mr. Heller, my name’s Busch, and I’m a broker.’ He said broker of what, and I said of anything people want broken, just for a gag, but he had no sense of humor and I saw he didn’t, so I dropped that and explained. I told him there was a great demand among all kinds of people to know what horse was going to win a race the day before the race was run or even an hour before, and I had read about his line of work and was thinking that he could help to meet that demand. He said that he had thought several times about using his method on horse races, but he didn’t care himself to use the method for personal bets because he wasn’t a betting man, and for him to make up one of his formulas for just one race would take an awful lot of research and it would cost so much it wouldn’t be worth it for any one person unless that person made a high-bracket plunge.”
“You’re paraphrasing it,” Wolfe objected. “I’d prefer the words that were used.”
“This is the best of my ability, mister.”
“Very well. Go on.”
“I said I wasn’t a high-bracket boy myself, but anyway that wasn’t here or there or under the rug, because what I had in mind was a wholesale setup. I had figgers to show him. Say he did ten races a week. I could round up at least twenty customers right off the bat. He didn’t need to be any God Almighty always right; all he had to do was crack a percentage of forty or better, and it would start a fire you couldn’t put out if you ran a river down it. We could have a million customers if we wanted ’em, but we wouldn’t want ’em. We would hand-pick a hundred and no more, and each one would ante one C per week, which if I can add at all would make ten grand every sennight. That would—”
“What?” Wolfe exploded. “Ten grand every what?”
“Sennight.”
“Meaning a week?”
“Sure.”
“Where the deuce did you pick up that fine old word?”