Clocker, but it's a sure flop, what you got in mind. Think of your
public. For instance, what's good at Hialeah? My bar bill is about to be
foreclosed and I can use a long shot."

Clocker bounced his fist on the moist table. "Those couch artists don't
know what's wrong with Zelda. I do."

"You do?" Doc asked, startled.

"Well, almost. I'm so close, I can hear the finish-line camera
clicking."

Buttonhole grasped Doc's lapel and hung on with characteristic avidity;
he was perhaps Clocker's most pious subscriber. "Doping races is a
science. Clocker maybe never doped the human race, but I got nine to
five he can do it. Go on, tell him, Clocker."

* * * * *

Doc Hawkins ran together the rings he had been making with the wet
bottom of his tumbler. "I shall be most interested," he said with
tabloid irony, clearly feeling that immediate disillusionment was the
most humane thing for Clocker. "Perhaps we can collaborate on an article
for the psychiatric journals."

"All right, look." Clocker pulled out charts resembling those he worked
with when making turf selections. "Zelda's got catatonia, which is the
last heat in the schizophrenia parlay. She used to be a hoofer before
she started undressing for dough, and now she does time-steps all day."

Doc nodded into a fresh glass that the waiter had put before him.
"Stereotyped movements are typical of catatonia. They derive from
thwarted or repressed instinctual drive; in most instances, the residue
of childhood frustrations."

"She dance all day, huh, Clocker?" asked Oil Pocket, the Oklahoma
Cherokee who, with the income of several wells, was famed for angeling
bareback shows. He had a glass of tequila in one hand, the salted half
of a lemon in the other. "She dance good?"

"That's just it," Clocker said. "She does these time-steps, the first
thing you learn in hoofing, over and over, ten-fifteen hours a day. And
she keeps talking like she's giving lessons to some jerk kid who can't
get it straight. And she was the kid with the hot routines, remember."

"The hottest," agreed Arnold Wilson Wyle. "Zelda doing time-steps is
like Heifetz fiddling at weddings."

"I still like to put her in show," Oil Pocket grunted. "She stacked like
brick tepee. Don't have to dance good."

"You'll have a long wait," observed Doc sympathetically, "in spite of
what our young friend here says. Continue, young friend."

Clocker spread his charts. He needed t