by John McEvoy
“Those big companies dump people all the time. Good people like you,” Wanda quickly added.
“That tubby turd is going to pay for this,” Red vowed. “Stay out of my way on this one, Wanda.” Red lurched to his feet and stumbled toward the plastic-covered white couch that faced the forty-two-inch color television set. After flopping down, he quickly went to sleep, still muttering.
Wanda smiled fondly at the love of her life. She had heard Red promise punishment to a variety of employers, or foremen, or co-workers, over the course of his career spent performing the simplest tasks in a variety of small-time journalistic jobs. Frankly, she had been surprised when Red had landed—through the help of a friend of his, Chester Langenbach—a position on the Horse Racing Journal, part of the Rexroth empire. Wanda was further surprised that Red had lasted in the job so long, considering what she tolerantly accepted to be his combination of semi-ineptitude and bilious attitude toward work.
“Oh, you’ll get over this, too, honey,” Wanda whispered to her hubby as he rested peacefully beneath a haze of marijuana smoke and a small cloud of beer and bourbon fumes.
Ordinarily an accurate assessor of her mate’s moods and intentions, Wanda Marchik proved to be way off the mark this time.
***
As the weeks following his firing by RexCom went by, and his severance pay dwindled, Red Marchik’s fury lingered. Predictably, his half-hearted attempts to find another job produced nothing, and Red appeared to be home free with his twenty-six weeks of unemployment checks. Wanda’s business continued to thrive, so the Marchiks were not confronted by financial worries. It was the bitterness billowing from what he considered to be the huge personal insult that was his firing that stoked Red’s anger. Try as he might, he could discern no reason why he should have been found wanting at this stage of his working life. “I wasn’t doing any better—or any worse—than I ever did,” he repeatedly complained to Wanda.
In the second month of his forced retirement, Red began to soothe his ego with the theory that his firing had been “a goddam hate crime by that fucking Rexroth.” The more he thought about it, the more sense it made to him. Over the course of several days one week, Red struggled to compose a letter to his former employer.
“You will soon hear from my attorney regarding charges of age discrimination and ethnic prejudice that I intend to bring against you,” the letter began. It continued:
If you think that you can operate your evil conglomerate without fear of reprisal, think again. Understand that fighting evil is nothing new to me. I am a U.S. Navy veteran.
After my years of dedicated service to RexCom, I was abruptly terminated. The only reason I can think of for my firing is that you have carried too far your hatred of Lithuanian Americans. I proudly happen to be one. It was not lost on me that another employee fired, Mr. Harry Lopke, has a widowed mother he supports, she, too, being of Lithuanian-American heritage.
If you think you can get away with your cancerous practices, think again. Your prejudicial perpertrations are comparable to those fostered in years past in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, and today in sinkholes like Chile and China. I will show that your vicious actions have caused me to suffer a near heart attack, tremendous emotional and mental stress, and a condition of semi-impotency. I shall prove that my wife and I were almost hospitalized as a result.
I shall have my counsel subpoena you and your clique which have employed Nazified tactics for years, and which vicious activities you vermin have approved of and encouraged. I will produce documental evidence.
A copy of this letter has been sent to every member of Congress, and the Secretary of Labor, and the President of the U.S. himself, for bigotry and hate such as you spew embroils all races and all religions and all must be warned. A copy of this letter has been sent to newspaper editors, to columnists, to television and radio talk show hosts throughout this country and parts of Canada.
If you think you can smirk behind the walls of your house of hate, think again. There are some people who are dedicated to wipe out evil wherever it exists.
Best Regards,
Thaddeus “Red” Marchik
Three days later a messenger service delivered an envelope to the Marchik house. It contained Red’s letter to Rexroth, across the top of which in large writing scrawled the following reply: “I will be happy to pay for the psychiatric help you so sorely need, you raving asshole.” It was signed with the initials HR.
With his vicious hiring and firing practices, Rexroth was used to being occasionally harassed. Among the most irritating of his ex-employees had been a business department clerk named Matthew Dow. For weeks after he was let go Dow would telephone the publisher in the middle of the night and drunkenly sing A Letter Edged in Black. This ceased only after Randy Kauffman had been dispatched to talk things over during some of Dow’s rare sober moments. Dow had gotten the point, as all of them did. Rexroth didn’t give another thought to Marchik or his letter.
***
Soon after his letter to Rexroth was so rudely returned, Red began to lay plans for a different kind of revenge. He knew he stood little chance with the courts, and financing a lawsuit claiming age and ethnic discrimination would be expensive. Furthermore, bloodless justice was really not what he sought. Red’s plans came to fruition on a summer night, at Willowdale Farm, not long after the death of the horse Uncle Francis.
The previous month, Wanda Marchik had spotted an item in the Louisville paper about an upcoming charity fund raiser to be hosted by Rexroth at Willowdale. She had innocently mentioned this to her husband, almost immediately wishing that she hadn’t—because Red seized upon this event as an ideal opportunity for his promised act of fatal revenge.
The fund raiser didn’t promise to be as exciting as memorable Kentucky Derby week debauches thrown by one of the Blue Grass area’s most flamboyant hostesses, events featuring semi-nude dancers, high octane cocaine, and blow jobs in the bushes. But it nevertheless seemed certain to draw a large crowd and guarantee its host’s appearance—in public, on a designated date. The fact that Rexroth was obviously spending a huge chunk of money to sponsor this event served to further infuriate Red. “Some of that money came out of my hide, Wanda,” Red said. “He’s going to pay for that.”
In preparation for the charity dinner-dance, Red retrieved his old Ruger deer-hunting rifle from the Tuck-Away Storage bin west of town. The weapon had been willed to him by his father. Red and his dad, Walter, had spent many autumns in fruitless quest of deer. Walter Marchik was a terrible marksman. Red was worse.
Fortunately for him, the only shots he had been required to produce in the U. S. Navy were as a medical assistant.
With the old rifle, now cleaned and oiled, in hand, Red spent several mornings on a public shooting range near Nicholasville, blazing away at a relatively nearby stationary target. For the most part the targets, like the deer of his past, remained unscathed. Gus Potros, proprietor of the shooting range, warned his assistant to keep an eye on “that red-headed fella out there. He’s liable to drop his rifle and then hit something for the first time,” Potros said, adding, “If there’s a worse marksman in Kentucky than that man, he’s walking the streets behind a seeing-eye dog.”
One evening Red brought home a rental from the video store that he insisted Wanda watch with him. It was the movie The Day of the Jackal.
“The real one,” Red emphasized, “not the puny remake with the Die Hard guy.”
The next weekend, he and Wanda signed up for an open-to-the-public tour of Willowdale Farm. Red described this as an opportunity to “examine the layout.” He took “mental notes about the terrain,” he whispered to his wife, who had twice been asked by the tour leader not to deposit her cigarette butts in the water trough near the broodmare barn.
On the eve of the Rexroth charity gala, Red declared himself completely satisfied with their preparations. “The Tubby Tycoon is a dead man walking,” he announced as he and Wand
a shared a homemade burgoo pizza in their recreation room. Wanda just nodded. Long, long ago she had concluded that Red didn’t need a whole lot of encouragement in order to carry out his various loony schemes. The natural buoyancy of the classically bile-ridden malcontent was enough to carry him along. And the best part, as far as Wanda was concerned, was that she could usually count on Red to somehow screw up and emerge, if unfulfilled, at least unscathed.
***
Red parked their car well clear of the wide circle of light that marked the Willowdale entrance to the charity bash. Red had borrowed camouflage uniforms for both of them from his neighbor and fellow NRA member Oscar Belliard, now in his twenty-seventh year of unsuccessful attempts to recruit a powerful local militia aimed at the overthrow of the Kentucky Senate, which he considered a “cancer on the liver of the Commonwealth.” Belliard had managed to round up far more uniforms than bodies to fill them.
“These are brand-new uniforms,” Red proudly told Wanda as he tenderly applied face-black to her broad forehead.
With Red in the lead, deer rifle in hand, they skulked through the first field of the farm, then a second, and reached a knoll overlooking the Willowdale swimming pool, which tonight was flanked by two large tents, one with a band and dance floor, one with a lengthy buffet line.
“Hand me the binoculars, honey.” After Wanda had done so, Red—prostrate on the ground, peering intently just as the Jackal would have—suddenly yelped with excitement. “There’s Rexroth,” he whispered. Red took the safety off the rifle.
As he did so, Wanda began to hear noises in the night, noises that grew increasingly louder somewhere behind them. It was a rumbling, muffled sound, at the same time both new to her and somehow strangely familiar. Suddenly, Wanda thought of movie Westerns she had seen, where the scout holds an ear to the ground before announcing, “I hear horses.”
“I hear horses, Red,” Wanda said. They both turned. Approaching was a large group of Willowdale broodmares, a collection of convivial equines spurred on by curiosity to inspect these intruders in their pasture.
The Marchiks did not know, of course, that they had nothing to fear from these mares. The Marchiks’ joint knowledge of horse behavior was extremely minimal. But their unease was at the maximum, for in the dark of the night the approaching horses looked as big as boxcars, especially to Red. He leapt to his feet and frantically led their retreat, beating Wanda over the fence and to the car by thirty widening feet. Red threw the rifle into the backseat, the car into gear, and away they sped, Wanda fumbling to pull her door shut.
As he drove home Red fulminated about the “goddam bad luck” that had served to bring “those goddam beasts right up on us.” Wanda noticed how her husband’s hands trembled on the steering wheel. Rexroth, she realized, to both her relief and satisfaction, was safe from any Red Marchik rifle shot, tonight or any other night.
Then Wanda heard heard her husband announce, “But there’s more than one way to skin a cat as fat as that. Rexroth’ll pay, oh yes, he’ll pay. Shooting may not be the answer.”
Red took a sharp exit off the Circle Beltway. He continued talking, but Wanda wasn’t really listening. She was concentrating on two questions: which frozen casserole she would take from the freezer once they reached home, and whether the comforting toast they would share would be libations of Pabst Blue Ribbon or of the pear brandy she kept under the kitchen sink for special occasions.
She had another question, too, one that made her smile as she rode: how long would it take her designated driver and fledgling assassin to cool off from this night’s intense excitement and fall asleep in her loving arms.
Chapter 14
It had been nearly two months since the death of the Willowdale stallion Wilton Lad when Jud Repke picked up his phone one afternoon and heard the cold, calm voice of Ronald Mortvedt.
“Got us another job. I’ll pick you up Friday morning,” Mortvedt said curtly.
“You in Louisville?”
“Never mind where I am,” Mortvedt answered. “Just be ready Friday morning. You’ll be back home in a couple of days.”
Home for Jud Repke was an aging apartment complex on the north side of Louisville, Kentucky. Repke had lived there for seven years, rent free, serving as the building’s superintendent. He’d gotten the job through his brother, a friend of the building’s owner. Jud set his own hours, working as few of them as he could get away with, so he had no trouble fitting a Mortvedt-procured job into his schedule.
Like Mortvedt, Jud Repke was an ex-convict who had never been married, having settled instead for a succession of live-in women friends over the years. Jud had met Mortvedt in the federal correctional center at Oakdale, in the southwestern portion of Louisiana. Repke was serving a three-to-five year term for transporting stolen goods, luxury automobiles, across state lines, a trade he had successfully practiced for much of his adult life before slipping up when a deal went bad with a New Orleans Mafia bigshot named Joe Angelici. The Mafia guy walked, but Repke was convicted and sentenced. Mortvedt was already in Oakdale doing his race-fixing time when Repke arrived.
At a well-worn thirty-eight, Jud Repke was a year younger than the ex-jockey who, he realized after they had known each other for less than a week, was both much smarter and tougher than he was. A natural follower, Repke gratefully buddied with Mortvedt for eighteen months in Oakdale before the ex-jockey was released. Repke was granted parole a year later.
When, two years ago, Mortvedt had tracked Repke down at a grandstand bar at Churchill Downs late one blustery fall afternoon, Repke was not only delighted to see his old jailmate but to hear his plans for work. It didn’t take Repke long to agree to go into business with Mortvedt. As Jud later would gratefully say during some of their late-night bar visits, “Ronnie, you been a regular money machine for me, and I thank you for it.”
Repke was also unaware of what had gone on in Mortvedt’s life after the two of them left prison, unaware that Mortvedt had joined a burglary ring that operated in the New Orleans area. Repke was unaware that, one winter night, Mortvedt had killed a home owner who discovered him, beating him to death with the crowbar he had used to gain entrance to the house.
It was at that point in his life that Mortvedt confirmed for himself, once and for all, that killing didn’t bother him in the least. Had Repke known that, he would still have been eager to go into business with the little man.
***
Harvey Rexroth had also been eager to go into business with Ronald Mortvedt—or at least someone like him. Their unlikely alliance dated from a horse sale four years earlier, one of the major Kentucky auctions. It was a hot, humid July night, and bidding for the best stock was equally torrid throughout the premier portion of the sale. That session concluded with the offering of a mare named Donna Diane.
A champion runner, Donna Diane was now retired from racing, had been bred, and was carrying a foal sired by a famed male champion. This mix of blue chip past performances and golden-hued promise combined to make for an extremely attractive prospect. Donna Diane was valuable in her own right, and the anticipated foal could correctly be expected to have tremendous value as a runner, then a breeding prospect, no matter what its sex. “By a champion, out of a champion” began the auctioneer’s sales spiel. All these factors added up the expectation that Donna Diane would attract the highest price at the sale. She did not disappoint.
In the weeks leading up to the auction, Harvey Rexroth had boasted to several industry people that he was determined to buy Donna Diane. He saw her as the potential leading light of his growing broodmare band, a name acquisition that would further underline his stated desire to become a major player in horse racing.
As Donna Diane was led into the crescent-shaped sales ring that night, Rexroth mopped his face. Despite the air-conditioning inside the pavilion, he was sweating heavily. Seated next to him, Byron Stoner had never before observed his boss at anything approaching this level of anxiety.
When the bidding began on Donna Diane, the first shouted offer was a whopping one million—unheard of for an opening bid. The crowd buzzed. The price rose rapidly after that, shedding bidders along the way. Finally, it became clear that there were really only two serious factions remaining: Rexroth and a partnership made up of wealthy Irish breeders and English bookmakers. This partnership had dominated the sale in recent years, spending millions on horses that it shipped back for eventual racing in Europe.
The bidding on Donna Diane climbed to four million, then five million. When the man representing what Rexroth resentfully termed the “foreign conglomerate” coolly indicated that six million dollars was fine with him, Rexroth realized he was not going to outbid these rivals.
Without even a glance at the expectant auctioneer, Rexroth suddenly rose from his seat and stormed out of the pavilion into the steamy night, Stoner and Kauffman struggling to keep up with him. Approached by reporters as he awaited the arrival of his limousine, Rexroth rebuffed them all, including Ira Meyer, who worked for Rexroth’s own Horse Racing Journal.
For days after the sale, Rexroth fumed over his failure to purchase Donna Diane. Stoner had never seen him so bitterly distraught. Stoner attempted to counsel Rexroth to look beyond it, but his advice earned him only a tirade of curses. Finally, one night, Rexroth summoned Stoner to join him poolside. His massive jaws grinding with intensity, Rexroth said, “I am going to have Donna Diane. That mare should belong to me, and she will.”
“That partnership will never sell you the horse,” Stoner cautioned. Rexroth just looked at him. “I’m well aware of that,” he replied. Then he described what he wanted done, emphasizing to Stoner that “they’re due to ship her abroad at the end of the month. That’s how much time we have.”
The next morning, Byron Stoner flew to New Orleans. There, through the expensive offices of Daniel Delacroix, a powerfully connected attorney employed by RexCom to represent its interests in that section of the South, Stoner was introduced to Lou Tenuta, a high-ranking member of the Tornabene crime family. Over dinner that night in a private room of one of the city’s legendary restaurants, Stoner explained the purpose of his visit.