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The finish line was closing in on Wally Glenn.
Outside Arlington Trackside, Sunday snowflakes silenced the dusk. Threatening December clouds pushed down low overhead. In the "real'' world of sports, Northwestern was just two weeks away from making its first Rose Bowl appearance in 47 years.
Upstairs at the two-story inter-track betting facility, Glenn fidgeted. It had been a long mutuel afternoon, as many of his had been lately.
"Here, you may as well run these if you want,'' Glenn said, handing a two-inch stack of mutuel tickets to a committed stooper - one of those bustouts who scours the floors and tables of betting parlors looking for winning tickets inadvertently discarded by horseplayers.
"I don't think you're going to find any winners in there.''
Glenn was an unlikely sort to be casting his lot with the battered denizens of late-afternoon simulcasting. He was 59, looked 10 years younger, with a solid build and brooding good looks.
He also was gainfully employed, in his 34th year as a maintenance man at Multigraphics - the copying machine giant - in Mount Prospect. Other than a four-year stint in the Marines that ended honorably in 1961, Glenn had known no other professional life.
His personal life had had more bumps. Glenn was taciturn but blue-collar genuine with a recurring nose for jukebox ladies. His wandering nighttimes helped him free fall through a life of
marriage-divorce-marriage-divorce-bankruptcy-younger woman-breakup.
It was only after that final split that he had turned to the horses. And he had done so with a vengeance.
All of which left Glenn alone, unhappy and looking for some kind of spirit saver on this empty Sunday afternoon with Christmas closing in.
"Hey bartender, get these guys a drink,'' Glenn said, motioning to his small circle of passing racetrack buddies squirreled at the corner of the bar.
He reached into his wallet, dropped a final $20 bill onto the counter - leaving himself with a pair of dollar bills - and said:
"See you guys. I'm gone.''
And with that, Wally Glenn turned and ambled out to slice through a horseplayer's exit gloom one more time.
There is not a hint of a safety net in Illinois for the problem gambler who chooses horse racing as his tightrope of chance.
Riverboaters at least get obscure signs posted somewhere on their playing decks listing a number to call "if gambling is a problem.'' Some had likened that effort to a spectator calling "fore'' as a 747 is about to crash.
But horseplayers don't even get that much.
A bill signed by Gov. Edgar in August, 1995 - two months after the advent of full-card simulcasting in Illinois - provided for the Illinois Department of Alcohol and Substance Abuse to "post literature'' to offer help to the problem gambler at betting emporiums. But that piece of legislation has never received proper appropriations so nothing ever has been produced under its charter.
"And quite frankly, in my 10 years with the Illinois Racing Board, I'm not aware of even one phone call to us from anyone that has ever asked for help,'' said Marc Laino, the deputy director of the IRB.
Added Robert Goodman, an economist at Hampshire College in Massachusetts and author of the 1996 book The Luck Business: "Because of the degree of intellectualism that can be applied to the game, horseplaying may be the ultimate ego-driven, solitary pursuit among gamblers. Part of any committed horseplayer thinks that he really is smarter than most anyone else at the track that day.
"And because of that, horseplayers going bad may be the last people to ever even think about trying to get help.
"So only two things ever stop problem horseplayers,'' Goodman concluded. "Running out of money, or death.''
As he left Trackside on that December Sunday evening, Wally Glenn was running out of money.
"Basically, he had zipped through all of his 401(k) that he could get his hands on and had maxed out his credit cards again,'' said Eddie Liberty, who had worked alongside Glenn at Multigraphics for 31 years and was probably his best - and last true - friend.
"When his final serious relationship ended, he turned to the horses. I knew it was happening and he became something of a mystery man, solitary, especially on weekends. We never knew where he went, we didn't go out for beers anymore and he never said anything. But we knew. And I think he thought he was going to win a lot of money and go back to some kind of high life he felt he had once lived.''
In the weeks leading up to that final Sunday at Trackside, Liberty saw even more dramatic changes in his friend's behavior.
"He would always come into work Monday mornings morose, sad, but one Monday, about three weeks before that last Sunday, it was more noticeable than usual,'' Liberty recalled. "It was very early, before 6 o'clock, and still basically dark in the plant when he walked by me. I grabbed him, pulled him by the shoulders and said, `What the hell are you doing to yourself? Why are you doing this? What are you trying to prove? You're [bleeping] smarter than this and too old for it. What about your [bleeping] retirement? What about the 34 years here?'
"He looked at me very briefly with the most empty look I've ever seen on a human being. Then, without saying a word, he continued walking on by.''
And on the last Friday they would ever work together, Liberty saw an even more ominous sign.
"He had borrowed little bits of money from everyone all over the plant and on Fridays, some would come looking for it. One guy came to Wally and was a little bit insistent. So Wally said, 'Here, take my toolbox. This'll square it.'
"I was very surprised, because that meant if Wally didn't pay the guy on Monday, he wouldn't have his tools to do his work. And if he couldn't do his work, what did he have left?''
"The public better get used to the fact that there will always be casualties as long as government-sponsored gambling continues to expand,'' said the Rev. Tom Grey, a Methodist minister and the executive director of the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion.
"And the vast majority of those casualties won't be reported because they aren't dramatic enough. Small casualties, festering casualties, slowly growing casualties like increased spousal abuse, depression, domestic tensions, shattered self-esteem, blown careers, blown reputations, blown retirement funding, blown college education money.
"The business of gambling is clearly a predatory enterprise. And now all we can do is hope to curb its further expansion and begin incredibly precise addiction curriculums in our school systems to try and help educate future generations to the government-partnered pitfalls that lay ahead.''
Wally Glenn must have felt the pitfalls acutely as he walked out of Trackside.
Yet many pathological gamblers find a remarkably cozy seductiveness to the reality of being tapped out.
"There are no more decisions to be made, no more adverse adrenaline rushes, just a forced trimming of the sails,'' one said.
Glenn effectively had escaped from almost all of his possessions. They lay behind him now, somewhere on that mean simulcast pathway between Aqueduct and Los Alamitos.
He headed out of the north door of the building to his car, a six-year-old brown Oldsmobile parked about 300 feet to the northeast.
If he had stopped to look to his left, Glenn would have seen the far turn of Arlington's main track, the strip where on other weekend afternoons, in more glorious times, turf superstars such as Citation and Secretariat and Cigar had wowed the masses.
Dead center, deep, he would have seen the lights of the corner tavern where he had been known to stride in and bark, "Whiskey!'' That was a coded sign for the barmaid to splash some rose wine into a coffee cup with a lot of ice and some seltzer, since a nervous stomach had long ago forced Glenn to forgo the real thing.
If he looked to his right, he would have seen the abject normalcy of the homes along Wilke Road. Inside some, probably the last moments of a Denver Broncos game in the snow were playing on TV, perhaps even with the Rockwellian scent of roast beef twirling out of a kitchen.
And if Wally Glenn had deigned to look back, he would have seen the fading lights of Arlington Trackside.
The gateway facility to his autumnal dreams.
His shattered, shattered dreams.
"When the incident was discovered, we might have had one or two media inquiries about it but nobody made it a real big deal,'' said Tony Rau, the media relations director at Arlington International Racecourse in 1995. "As a matter of fact, if you search the old newspapers, you might find one or two tiny mentions of it somewhere in a police notebook but that would be about it.
"I think the police determined that it hadn't been gambling-related at all and that it was just coincidence the fellow was found on track grounds.''
Wally Glenn was found that next morning in his car. There was a .44 Ruger Super Blackhawk (a hunting pistol) on his lap, a second gun on the front seat, three empty beer cans and a cowboy hat in back and a five-month-old racing tout sheet on the passenger's side floor with footprints on it. The radio was tuned to an FM country-and-western station.
He had died of a single gunshot wound to the head.
A maintenance worker had notified track security shortly after 8 a.m. because there was a solitary car in the parking lot. The upper right corner of the driver's side window was shattered through and the remaining part of the window was crooked. A figure inside the car was slumped back against the driver's seat.
There was no note. A driver's license from the deceased's wallet was of little use in contacting next of kin, since no next of kin could readily be discovered. It was only when an employee identification card was found on the dead man and the personnel department at Multigraphics was notified that the remaining strands of Wally Glenn's life could begin to be connected by investigators.
The medical examiner concluded it was a suicide. The body was taken by a funeral home in Arlington Heights and brought to a second home in Palatine, where a memorial service was held six days later.
Amid the sadness in the maintenance department at Multigraphics, one final irony awaited.
"Wally had contributed each week to a little group pool to buy Illinois Lottery tickets,'' Eddie Liberty said.
"That Saturday night, the night before he died, the group hit five numbers or something like that. Wally had some winnings waiting for him when he got to work that Monday.
"I often wonder, would he have killed himself that night if he knew he had the start of another bankroll waiting for him back at work?''
Maybe, maybe not. But in the loneliness of a snowy parking lot, the finish line had finally overtaken Wally Glenn.
With a gun that didn't make any noise.
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