Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 3, March, 1953

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Shell Scott went to Mexico City to investigate a racing fix — but he found himself getting ready to hill a filler.

You take a plane from the States and head south; a few hours later and up more than seven thousand feet, where the air is thin and clear, you land at Mexico City and take a cab to the Hipódromo de las Américas where the horses run sideways, backwards, and occasionally around the seven-furlong track, and you go out to the paddock area after the fourth race.

You see a big, young, husky, unhandsome character with a Mexico City tan, short, prematurely white hair sticking up in the air like the end of a clipped whisk broom, and his arms around the waists of two lovely young gals who look like Latin screen stars, and you say, “Geez, look at the slob with the two tomatoes.”

That’s me. I am the slob with the two tomatoes, and the hell with you.

Five days ago I’d left Los Angeles and my one-man agency, “Sheldon Scott, Investigations,” and flown to Mexico for my client, Cookie Martini, an L.A. bookmaker. A big one. You may sneer at the thought of my taking a bookie for a client. Okay, sneer. As far as I’m concerned, people are going to gamble whether there are bookies or not. If they can’t bet on the nags, they’ll bet on the number of warts on some guy’s nose. Cookie Martini was at least an honest bookie, and his money was clean. In the last year or so he’d started booking bets on tracks outside the States: France, South America — and Mexico City. He and some other books taking Mexico City bets had recently been clipped for nearly three hundred thousand dollars. Cookie figured that too many longshots were coming in, too many sleepers, and he suspected a fix. So he’d hired me to find out if anything smelled here at the Hipódromo. It smelled.

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