Blind Switch

by John McEvoy

  Collier was “very, very anxious to avoid a prison sentence,” Karen said, “so he tried to deal. He volunteered information regarding a theft he’d engaged in four years ago. It involved a horse, and what he believes was a valuable one. According to records, the theft Collier described coincides time-wise with the theft of a famous mare named Donna Diane. Collier played a minor role in this, but he was there when the horse was taken and he described the other men involved.”

  Doyle said, “I don’t get what you’re getting at here. What’s the connection?”

  Damon reached over to a stack of papers on the table and extracted a folder that he handed to Doyle. “This is Lucas Collier’s confession. It’s long and rambling, so you can skip over a lot of it. I’ve tagged with a blue marker the parts that are of interest to us.”

  According to Collier, he’d been approached one night in a rural beer bar by a man who identified himself only as Jud. Collier had been asked if he was familiar with the physical layout at Sheridan Brothers’ Farm. “Hell yes,” Lucas had answered, “I worked there about three years. What do you need to know?”

  What the man named Jud wanted to know was the location of the broodmare fields, the rotation schedule for the horses that was used by the Sheridan Brothers’ farm manager, and the location of the roads that ran through the property. Jud spent several hours over the next two nights interviewing Collier and making notes. After giving him some instructions, Jud said he would contact Collier in a week or so. He paid Collier $1,000 “in cash money” for the information and said that a similar payment was possible for future services.

  As Doyle read further, he learned how the men—there were three of them—had stolen this horse. First they ascertained which field held the valuable mare Donna Diane. For three straight nights, the smallest of the three spent an hour or so at the pasture fence, feeding Donna Diane and her companion gelding sweet alfalfa from a plastic bag. Sheridan Brothers’ Farm, like most breeding farms, employed only a few night watchmen who made occasional rounds of the property. The watchmen were easy to spot as they checked on the sixteen- to twenty-member groups of mares in each pasture.

  Collier told the interrogators he had parked his pickup at the intersection of two farm roads about a half-mile from where Jud and the little man had left their car. Collier was instructed to flash his lights and drive off immediately if he spotted any vehicle or anyone approaching, but he never was required to do that.

  Doyle looked up from his reading. He shook his head. “Can you imagine having millions of dollars’ worth of horses being guarded by five-dollar-an-hour night shift guys? Man, these farm owners down here are a trusting lot. Or stupid. Or cheap.”

  “Not anymore,” Damon replied. “After the Donna Diane disappearance all the farms beefed up their security systems.”

  “Was there a reward for her?”

  “Only a million dollars,” Karen said. “But they never found out what happened to her.”

  On the third night, Lucas Collier’s confession continued, when Donna Diane had again enthusiastically come to the fence, eager for company and food, Jud quickly and quietly sawed off three boards where they joined the fence post. He swung them outward, creating a gap. The little man, who had slipped a lead rope on Donna Diane, silently led her through the opening.

  “I was too far away to see exactly how they done it,” Collier said, “but that was what Jud told me they was going to do. Jud, he took those board ends and tied them back onto the fence post with rope. They wouldn’t hold against any pressure, but there wasn’t any of that. And from where I stood, the fence looked okay, like there was nothing wrong with it.”

  The mare nickered anxiously as the little man led Donna Diane carefully down the embankment to the one-horse trailer attached to Collier’s pickup truck. Since he was known in the area, the idea was, Lucas said, that “anybody seeing me hauling a trailer wouldn’t be much suspicious. I guess that was why they needed me. Course, I was a pretty good lookout, too,” he added.

  As soon as the mare was in the trailer, Collier said, the little man “stuck her with a needle,” which he assumed contained a tranquilizer.

  Then, Collier said, the men drove cautiously down the dark country backroads in their two-vehicle procession. They went just a few miles, he estimated, before they pulled off the asphalt and up a narrow dirt road leading onto a property Collier had never seen.

  Jud motioned for Collier to get out of his truck. Jud and the little man then unhooked the trailer from Collier’s pickup and sent him on his way, another $1,000 in his jacket pocket.

  “I don’t know what they done with the trailer,” Collier said. “I asked the little fella where we were when Jud gave me my money. But he never said. He just give me this real hard look, so I didn’t ask him nothing else. I just took my money and got out of there.”

  But, Collier said, about a year and a half later he was hired on a short-time basis to work cutting back undergrowth on an off-the-road piece of property. The road leading to the work site looked “mighty familiar,” Collier said, and he eventually became convinced that this was where he and Jud and the little man had parted company.

  “I found out it was land owned by that Mr. Rexroth, the Willowdale fella,” Lucas Collier said.

  Doyle closed the folder and looked at the two agents across from him at the table.

  “We had Lucas Collier going over mug shots last night,” Karen said. “He didn’t come across the man called Jud. But he absolutely, positively ID’d the ‘little man’ as Ronald Mortvedt. He said that was a face he could never forget.”

  Damon leaned forward, arms on the table. “Do you see it now, Jack? We’ve got Mortvedt, the horse killer, tied to Rexroth, the collector of insurance premiums on murdered horses.

  “We’re in business here, Jack.”

  It was the first time Doyle had ever seen Damon Tirabassi grin.

  Chapter 26

  It was a few minutes before eleven o’clock on a cloudless Thursday night. The nearly full moon gleamed a Velveeta yellow in the high summer sky. The retractable skin of Willowdale’s pool/pavilion complex was pulled back to reveal the relatively bright night, which in turn made visible the female form that circled Rexroth’s blading track. As bright as the moonlight was, her face was still not discernible in the darkened pavilion. All that was visible were the iridescent elbow and knee pads, glowing a light green, as she skated in leisurely fashion, throwing in a pirouette or two in every other loop.

  Rexroth, who sat behind his vast desk reading computer printouts, occasionally raised his head to glance at the circling figure, but did not speak. The only sounds in the building were of the whirling of her wheels and of the woman’s breathing as she made her rounds over the track.

  At five seconds before eleven, Rexroth heard movement behind one of the ceiling-to-floor curtains that hung from the expanse of windows back of his desk. He knew who it was, but couldn’t help turning to look.

  Ronald Mortvedt slipped into the pavilion. His entrance, as always, served to send a shudder through Rexroth. No matter how many times he met with the ex-jockey ex-con, Rexroth could never come close to feeling comfortable with him—this, despite the fact that in almost every moral and ethical sense they were blood brothers. Maybe that was why Mortvedt made the publishing magnate so uncomfortable.

  Also disturbing, Rexroth had found, was the little man’s great gift of stealth. He always arrived right at the appointed time, easily eluding the Willowdale security setup. That’s what makes him so good at the jobs he does for me, Rexroth thought, with a mixture of admiration and unease. Rexroth well understood that Mortvedt was, to the unsuspecting—as his victims almost always were—as deadly as cobra venom.

  Rexroth realized from the start of their relationship that the only way to meet with Mortvedt was like this, at night, at Willowdale, where secrecy was best maintained.

  Mortvedt, as always, remained out of sight behind one of the pavilion’s
drawn curtains until Rexroth dismissed the blader.

  “Darlene,” Rexroth announced, “that’s enough for tonight, sweetheart. You’re excused. And thank you.”

  After Rexroth heard the far door close, he signaled Mortvedt to come forward.

  As was his custom for these night meetings, Mortvedt was dressed all in black: long-sleeved jersey, jeans, cowboy boots, all the color of his slicked-back hair. His eyes were impassive and he sat perfectly still, strong hands on the arms of the chair. He was not there to apologize for the Bolger disaster, that was clear to Rexroth.

  Rexroth said, “What went wrong?”

  Mortvedt shrugged. “Motherfucker picked the wrong night for a walk in the rain,” he said nonchalantly. “Bad luck for us—I couldn’t do the horse—but worse luck for him.”

  “Yes, I’d say worse luck for him,” Rexroth replied. “And damned bad luck for me, too, and Willowdale. The Bolger incident has been all over the media. The fact that you apparently covered your tracks, that they have no leads or suspects—well, that’s fine, but….”

  “But fuckin’ what?” Mortvedt said quietly. “Ain’t no way to pin that thing on me, and you should know it. You should know it,” he repeated. Mortvedt shot a steady, black-ice look at Rexroth, who not for the first time felt a powerful feeling of regret that he’d ever decided to welcome Mr. Ronald Mortvedt into his employ.

  Mortvedt said, “Boss, where you hidin’ your nearest john in this here mansion?”

  “Oh,” Rexroth said, standing to point. “Take that door at the far end of the pool. There’s a sauna room, then a washroom.”

  Sometimes Rexroth, when making his motivational speeches dressed in his General George Patton regalia, advised his employees that “there are different ways of looking at looking back.

  “A philosopher named Santayana used to say that if you didn’t know history, you were doomed to repeat it. A baseball pitcher named Satchell Paige, on the other hand, advised never to look back because something might be gaining on you.

  “Both men were right, in their own way,” Rexroth-as-Patton would shout, “both men were wise. It’s up to RexCom employees to distinguish between the validity of these views when applied to the situation at hand. Deciding which wisdom fits at the proper time is what makes for a leader in the mighty media army of RexCom troops. It is all about choice, people!” Like all of Rexroth’s utterances, this one was always greeted with a wave of orchestrated applause from the carefully prepped employees.

  In Mortvedt’s brief absence, Rexroth wondered to himself exactly what kind of a choice he had made when he launched his alliance with the little Cajun killer. Even now he had to fight off the memory of Aldous Bolger’s horribly battered features that he’d been forced to view when visiting the crime scene in the Willowdale stallion barn.

  ***

  Mortvedt slipped back into his chair across from Rexroth’s desk. Eyebrows raised, he asked, “You been sick, boss?” He nodded at the hospital cart and tray of food nearby.

  “No, I haven’t,” replied the suddenly irritated Rexroth. Ordinarily, he limited the knowledge of his hospital-like cuisine preferences to members of the immediate staff. Rexroth could not imagine how he might explain this idiosyncrasy of his to Mortvedt, and he did not attempt to do so.

  As he looked at Mortvedt’s lean, sharp-featured face where the little man sat at the edge of the lamplight, Rexroth thought, I’ve known him four years now, and in every one of those years his sociopathy has become more obvious. Rexroth realized just how fearful he was of the ex-convict.

  Rexroth noticed that his desk clock read 11:23. The end of their association was very near.

  He said, “Ronald, I’ve got one more job for you. Then, I think it will be in the best interests of us both if we stop doing business together.”

  Mortvedt’s always morose face darkened even further upon receipt of this news. The little man leaned toward the light. His hands tightened on the arms of the chair.

  “What’s the problem?” Mortvedt said. “Yeah, I laid the wood to that clumsy farm manager of yours. That was his fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I didn’t leave a goddam trace of anything in that barn. These hayseed cops ain’t got a clue,” he said dismissively. His eyes locked onto Rexroth’s, challenging him. “So, what’s the fuckin’ problem?”

  Rexroth attempted to summon all his powers of amelioration and persuasion. He didn’t want Mortvedt to become an enemy. Rexroth needed to usher him out of his life as smoothly as possible.

  “The problem is this: we’ve stretched the envelope, you and I. Oh, certainly,” Rexroth continued expansively, waving his huge cigar, “our work together has been ultra-efficient and effective. You’ve done a marvelous job, accomplishing everything assigned you. But,” Rexroth said with a shake of his head, “I’m convinced that we’re at that point where we are uncomfortably close to pushing our luck past where it will go.

  “What you did to Bolger, no matter how much it needed to be done considering the circumstances you were in, raises the stakes for us considerably. Insurance fraud that involves dead horses is one thing. Action bordering on the murder of a human being is quite another.

  “Nothing lasts forever, Ronald. I’ve decided that we are just about at the end of our line together. I want you to kill one more of my equine liabilities. His name is Mister Mulvey. He’s in stall five in the stallion barn. You can do it any night you choose within the next two weeks. And that will be the last one you do for me. That’s why,” Rexroth said, reaching into a desk drawer for an unmarked envelope. “I’ve readied this for you.” Mortvedt took the envelope, noting, without expression, the thick packet of bills it contained. He looked at Rexroth expectantly.

  “There is seventy-five thousand dollars there, all fifties and hundreds. You may count them if you wish. This represents your final fee, plus a bonus for excellent work done in the past. Consider the latter a farewell gift.”

  Mortvedt saw that Rexroth was determined to end their relationship in this abrupt way. He felt a wave of resentment. All the dirty work I’ve done for rich boy here, and he calls the final shot without asking me? he thought. His expression darkened, but he said nothing.

  Mortvedt tucked the cash-filled envelope into his boot. When Mortvedt did so, Rexroth noticed the ankle holster on Mortvedt’s right leg. Then he realized it wasn’t a holster for a gun, but a knife scabbard. Light briefly reflected off part of the knife blade before Mortvedt pulled his jeans leg back down over his boot. Rexroth felt himself hosting another involuntary shudder.

  But knowing now that Mortvedt was, indeed, going to go along with this parting of the ways, Rexroth began to relax. This was going to work. Mortvedt was not going to present a daunting obstacle to his plans, or any kind of obstacle at all.

  Mortvedt stared at Rexroth for a moment. Then he quickly rose from his chair and left without a backward glance. Rexroth stared at the curtained doorway through which the little man had slipped. The curtains continued to shift for several seconds after Mortvedt had disappeared, though Rexroth was unable to discern the presence of any summer breeze. The night, Rexroth knew, was dark, deep, and as silent as the black-clad figure that must be now moving to his car, hidden as always on one of Willowdale’s farthest borders.

  Chapter 27

  Jack drove Caroline and her children to Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport, following as closely as he could the ambulance transporting Aldous from the hospital. A midday summer rainstorm had just subsided, but no rainbow followed. As Helen and Ian talked quietly in the backseat, Caroline looked straight ahead from her passenger seat, eyes shielded behind dark glasses. The weight of depressed reaction to what had happened to Aldous bore down on all of them.

  Turning onto New Circle Road, Jack said, “Well, at least Aldous seems happy to be going home.”

  Caroline thought for a moment before replying. “Relieved, disheartened, terribly disappointed—all those things more likely,” she
said. “That big dream he had of making a mark on American racing as a brilliant farm manager, to have that torn away from him, it’s almost as bad as the crippling. He wanted it so badly.”

  “Don’t say crippling,” Jack responded. “You can’t say that yet. You don’t know that to be true.”

  Caroline reached over and patted Jack’s knee. “You’re right, we don’t,” she said. “I hope I’m wrong and the doctors are right, that he’ll get his speech fully back, that the knee replacements will work out over time. But what was done to him will be with him all the rest of his life. And all our lives as well. There’s a crippling involved in all that, I can tell you.”

  She turned to look out her window, attempting to muffle an involuntary sob.

  Traffic entering the airport was light. Jack pulled up to the curb behind the ambulance, whose attendants were carefully lowering Aldous’ wheelchair to ground level. He sat in it with his legs in their casts straight in front of him, his big hands gripping the chair handles. Discomfort was evident on his broad face, but he attempted to reassure the watchers by smiling.

  The Bolgers were to take a series of flights from Lexington to Auckland, arranged to accommodate Aldous and his wheelchair. Aldous had insisted on this plan. “If I’m to be chopped and chiseled, I want it done on home ground,” he’d told Dr. Sill at Central Baptist. Dr. Sill had okayed Aldous to travel three days earlier. He told Jack admiringly, “This man’s got the pain tolerance of a Thai kick boxer. He’ll be able to make that journey all right.”

  Jack waited as the Bolger party checked in at the Delta counter. It was a slow Tuesday morning and the process was quick. Caroline politely waved off an airport attendant who volunteered to wheel Aldous to the gate. “Thanks, we’ll handle it ourselves,” she said politely. “Jack, are you coming?” she asked.

  “I’ll say goodbye here,” Doyle replied. He moved forward to kneel and embrace the children. “Be good, you Kiwi rascals,” he grinned. “I’ll be checking up on you.” Standing, he turned to Aldous, who began to speak. Aldous’ voice was soft and halting as he struggled to convert ideas into sound. Jack winced at the painfulness of this slow process, then tried to hide his reaction.