by John McEvoy
Kellman paused to deftly tong an ice cube from the silver bucket to his tall glass of Perrier. “The floater was related to a friend of mine, a third cousin of this guy I know. But that’s another story.
“Now, besides the tattoo as identification,” Kellman continued, “horses registered in the United States can be traced by blood types. Their parents’ blood sample records are on record—both the sire’s and the mother’s, or the dam’s, as they call them.
“As I understand it, that system was put in mainly to protect against mix-ups with young horses. If a guy bought a horse that was supposed to be sired by, say, Uncle Sam, who’d knocked up Miss Liberty or whatever, and for some reason the guy has doubts that this is true, he can check it out. The foal’s blood sample has got to be consistent with the blood types of its parents. If not, then something isn’t kosher and the alarms go off.”
Doyle shifted in his chair. “This is all very interesting, Moe. But what could this have to do with Rexroth?”
Kellman said, “I’m coming to that.
“Suppose—just suppose—that Rexroth has got a horse that nobody knows about.”
“What do you mean?” asked Doyle.
Kellman said, “I’m talking about a horse that nobody, or hardly anybody, knows about. A horse that has not been registered, or officially named. A horse that for racing purposes does not exist. And suppose this horse is owned by Rexroth, and Rexroth is giving this horse secret workouts, flying in a professional jockey to work him, staging simulated races.
“And suppose this unknown horse is supposed to be the fastest item to come along since Cigar?” Kellman sat back again on the couch, looking self-satisfied bordering on smug.
Doyle said, “I’ll be damned. You’ve heard something, haven’t you?”
Kellman didn’t answer that. He just smiled at Doyle, his eyes twinkling. “Try a pear?” he asked.
Getting up from his chair, Doyle walked slowly over to the north window of Kellman’s office suite, deep in thought. He was not even slightly aware of the impressive flotilla of pleasure boats maneuvering in the green-blue waters off Oak Street beach, or the giant white clouds, looking like deformed dumplings, that moved before the steady northwest wind, being pushed across the lake toward Michigan.
All of Doyle’s thoughts were concentrated on the bay horse housed back at Willowdale, the horse that jockey Willie Arroyo flew in to exercise each week, the horse that Aldous Bolger had been instructed by Rexroth to ignore.
He turned back toward Kellman. “Okay, let’s say Rexroth has got this unofficial horse, or mystery horse, or whatever you want to call him. What could he do with him?”
Moe reached to the silver platter and began expertly to quarter a red apple as big as a bocci ball, using a long, thin knife sharp enough to skim fuzz off the nearby peaches. He said, “If this animal has talent, there could be a special use for him. It would be tricky, but it could be done.”
“You’re talking about as a ringer.”
“I’m talking about as a ringer, yes.”
Doyle paused to think this over. “What about the horse’s registration papers? The lip tattoo? How could Rexroth work around those things?”
“The registration papers? Simple. You just use the slow horse’s papers. They’re on file at the track. All they have to show is the description of the horse in question. And if I’m right, Rexroth would have a horse in his racing stable that looks a helluva lot like the unknown horse—as close to identical as he could find.
“So the official papers aren’t a question, not considering the advances in technology along those lines.”
“Say what?” said Doyle.
“I’m saying that forged documents are all over the place. You don’t need printing presses any more. All you need is some larcenous computer genius with an inkjet printer and a scanner. Jack, from what I’ve been told, nearly half of the counterfeit money passed in this country is made that way. Papers for a horse would be no problem for the right guy to produce.”
“The tattoo. What about that?”
“No problem. Not for a guy with Rexroth’s money. That guy Stoner he’s got working for him could find an abortionist in the Vatican. They’ve got resources, my friend.
“What they could do is buy, on the sly, the services of one of the official horse tattooers. Maybe they use muscle, or blackmail. Maybe just money. But they get the guy to put the correct tattoo of the slow horse on the unknown horse, who has never been tattooed because he’s never been near a racetrack. Yet. Then they switch the horses, and they run the fast one under the slow one’s name. Get it?”
Doyle slumped back in his chair. All that Kellman had theorized, Doyle realized, could very well become reality under Rexroth’s guidance. The bay horse from the Annex…that must the betting tool that had been polished up and honed over the past few years.
“But what I still don’t get,” Doyle said, “is why a guy like Rexroth would go to all this trouble. Get involved in something like this? The bastard’s got all the money he’d ever need.”
Kellman said, “Jack, why does Rexroth kill horses for the insurance like you think he does? You tell me what this guy’s all about. I’ve got no answers for that. He is what he is.”
“I don’t know where to go with this stuff,” Doyle said. He felt overwhelmed. He went over to the window again, gazing out as unseeingly as before.
Doyle’s formerly ultra-high self-confidence level, for years near the top of the charts, was in free fall, a descent that was picking up enough momentum to qualify as a plummet. Aldous’ beating, the FBI tie-in, the hovering factor of Mortvedt—all this had invaded his life in just a few months, changing everything for him. Mentally, he tried to gather himself, as in his boxing days, when after being caught with a good wallop he’d always say to his opponent, “Is that all you’ve got?”
Doyle took a deep breath. Before turning away from the window he found himself wondering again why Moe Kellman was being so helpful. Kellman wasn’t the sort who would feel any great guilt over Doyle’s being robbed of his City Sarah payoff. He was too practical for that, though he had been generous enough with the added five grand. He’d also suggested that Jack not get too cozy with the FBI agents who had visited him. A bribe in a velvet glove, Doyle considered it.
No, Kellman’s willingness to help must have its source elsewhere. Perhaps it was traceable to something else that he’d once said to Doyle: “I like to know things. A lot of what I learn winds up making money for me.”
Doyle sat down again. “What could we do to stop Rexroth and his ringer caper?”
“Not we,” Kellman replied, the twinkle in his eyes obvious once more. “You.”
He offered another neatly quartered piece of apple to Doyle.
“Can I suggest something to you, Jack?”
Chapter 30
It was late on a Saturday afternoon, the end of a perfect early autumn day on the west side of Louisville.
Had he still been employed by Harvey Rexroth’s Horse Racing Journal, Red Marchik would have been complaining bitterly about being required to work so late on such a beautiful afternoon, especially with the Kentucky Wildcats football team playing at home. “Love them ’Cats,” was a Marchik family mantra, mostly during basketball seasons when the teams were usually excellent, but in football season, too. Red was a fan who “bled Kentucky blue.”
But now, still out of work and with more time on his hands than he’d ever had to deal with before in his life, Red gave no thought to the state university’s football fortunes as he emerged, blinking, from his basement bunker and started slowly raking the leaves that carpeted his backyard.
The ESZT-3 sports network had just finished its fourth consecutive hour of auto racing, all of which Red had tuned to; the channel was now offering a fifteen minute infomercial on oil-changing. Red was confident he knew all there was to know about oil-changing, so he had turned off the TV.
He then switch
ed on the radio. It was Reverend Roland Ruland’s re-run of his early morning show. “Raisin’ the bar…Raisin’ the bar…” Red heard the Sports Preacher thunder. “We hear that so off-ten these days. Comes from your track and field, the high jump or maybe the pole vault…whatever….We know they’re talkin’ about a higher level.
“You want to talk about really raisin’ the bar? Then, brothers and sisters, let’s talk about RAISIN’—when JEEEEEZUS high-jumped over the top of death, when he pole vaulted way, way, way, way over the top of death, and raised old LAZARUS from the dead. JEEEEEZUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY DID THAT, PRAISE GOD.”
Red knew Wanda would have listened to more, but she was out shopping. So Red had turned off the Sports Preacher and headed for his backyard, where he continued to wrestle with the problem of how to deal with his yet unsatisfied lust for revenge against Harvey Rexroth.
Wanda kept urging Red to “let it go, honey,” but Red just couldn’t bring himself to do so. The Marchiks never took insults lying down, he told Wanda, “never have, never will.” Hearing this for the umpteenth time, Wanda usually interrupted the cleaning of her handgun arsenal to light a joint. Eyes slitted against the smoke, she would regard her husband and try to figure how long it would take him to get to the point in his life where he could turn to other concerns.
In the years Wanda had known and loved him, Red had entertained a number of obsessions—video poker, the self-improvement guru Diplok Shewphat, bait worm farming on a share-cropping basis by mail—but they eventually evaporated. She was sure this one, too, would pass. The question was when.
Red, with two failed revenge attempts against Rexroth behind him, felt stymied, and he didn’t like it. So far, he had succeeded only in killing his former employer’s bulldog Winston. The mystery surrounding that incident (“What Had This Dog Done to Deserve to Die?” was a question posed by Rexroth in an uncommonly personal Letter From the Publisher) had caused a furor, the publicity serving to make Red lie low for weeks, considering options. Now, Rexroth had trumpeted his plan to win the upcoming Heartland Derby with “my rejuvenated horse Lancaster Lad.”
“You’re right about me being out of the assassination business,” Red said one night to Wanda. “That man is not worth a murder charge in case something went wrong.”
His options now, Red thought, pushing the leaves into a pile at the back corner of the yard, were either to somehow put this whole matter behind him, and lose face with Wanda, or come up with a new idea. It was at that moment, just as Wanda pulled up to the carport and began unloading groceries, that the lead squadron of the South Louisville Hot Air Balloon Club hove into view in the sky over the Marchiks’ yard, brilliant in its monthly flight on this clear day. Soon, the first four balloons were joined by several dozen others.
As the richly colored balloons sailed south over the gawking Red, he put down his rake and began waving at the figures gliding past, some of whom waved back. Red thought he’d never seen a more beautiful sight than these vehicles of the air smoothly traveling across the vivid, blue sky.
“Damn, that looks like fun,” Red said to himself. He waved some more, and more pilots and passengers waved back, much to his further delight.
Then a thought came to Red. He bounced it around for a few more minutes as he watched the tail-end of the airborne procession. Why not? he concluded. Then he yelled, “Wanda, come on out here. And bring a bunch of Pabsts along with you.”
What had just occurred to Red was that his friend Oscar Belliard, commandant of the Underground Militia, was an avid balloonist. Often at Militia meetings General Belliard had invited Red and Wanda to “come on out some day and we’ll give you all a ride. You haven’t seen anything till you’ve been up there in the azure blue.”
As the empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans piled up in the nearby garbage can, the possibilities multiplied in the mind of Red Marchik.
Chapter 31
The Heartland Derby plan had first come to Harvey Rexroth a week earlier. On a bright October morning, as Darla whirled around the indoor track enthusiastically, Rexroth summoned Byron Stoner to poolside at Willowdale.
Rexroth, wearing a lavender velvet jumpsuit and brandishing a huge Cuban cigar, proceeded to unveil his Grand Plan. His little pig eyes danced with excitement. He rose to his feet and began pacing vigorously up and down alongside the track that bordered the massive swimming pool, talking loudly all the while.
Stoner never took notes, never needed to, for his memory was first-rate. And caution, to which the Canadian was devoted, also suggested that there never be anything in writing that might come back to plague him.
Over the years, Stoner had been privy to a number of amazing Rexrothian schemes, many of which he’d helped bring to fruition. But this one boggled the mind of even the cautious, ultra-pragmatic Stoner. I’ve never him seen as full of himself as this, Stoner thought with a shudder.
“This will be the single greatest, most audacious stroke of brilliant planning and execution in horse race cheating since John Cabray’s remarkable coup of 1909,” Rexroth boomed. “It will make me famous—strike that, more famous—and it won’t be a matter of me taking advantage of a bunch of ravenously greedy small town businessmen, like Cabray did.
“Instead, Stoner, I’m going to provide a sure-thing winner for readers of the Horse Racing Journal, whose numbers I predict will swell dramatically after this is over. I’m going to invite the great unwashed and everybody else to share in a winning bet—that Lancaster Lad will win the Heartland Derby! A publisher predicting—no, guaranteeing—a win by his own horse! Who’s ever done anything like that, I ask you?
“Or at least,” he said in an aside to the attentive Stoner as Darla rounded the near turn and headed for them, “the horse purporting to be Lancaster Lad.”
Stoner said, “I don’t know that much about the racing part. I trust your judgment, Mr. Rexroth. But, isn’t this kind of a, well, a stretch, to think that Donna Diane’s colt could win a Derby in the first start he’d ever made at a racetrack? Could he actually be that good?”
Rexroth’s expression hardened. He hated being questioned. Angrily, he threw his cigar into the center of the pool. Randy Kauffman immediately reached for his retrieving net.
Stoner was steadfast. “Mr. Rexroth,” he intoned, looking straight ahead and not at his boss, who hovered over him, “that is what you pay me for—to ask questions of this sort.”
Moments passed before Rexroth said, “You’re right, Stoner, to raise that point. Of course you are.” Rexroth sat down in the chair behind his desk, and his expression softened. “Of course you are,” he repeated. “That is, as you say, your job.
“But worry not, Stoner, worry not, my friend. I know exactly what I’m doing here.”
Rexroth, relaxed again, resumed describing his plans. He said to Stoner, “I want Douglas Phillips down here tomorrow morning so I can personally give him my instructions. Phillips is so dim sometimes that I want to be looking into his eyes so that I can tell for myself exactly what isn’t registering. Can’t do that over the phone, right? Har har har!”
Stoner chuckled in agreement. He was positive that Phillips was much smarter than Rexroth gave him credit for, but that the Horse Racing Journal editor was for the most part nearly stultified by terror when dealing with his boss. Stoner couldn’t help but ask, “Why don’t you just replace this Phillips?”
Rexroth gave Stoner an incredulous look. “Replace him? As cheap as Phillips works?”
***
When Horse Racing Journal’s executive editor Douglas Phillips heard the red phone ring on his desk, he reflexively reached for his flask. The red phone was for one thing only: direct calls from Phillips’ employer. The sound of this instrument, which might ring twenty times in one day and then not at all for a week, invariably made Phillips feel as if he were undergoing a colonoscopy without benefit of anesthetic. To combat this feeling, he administered his own. Phillips took a lengthy swig before saying, “Yes, Mr. Rexro
th.”
When Phillips reached Willowdale the next morning, he was astounded at the orders he was given. “I want you to turn your best writers loose on this story,” Rexroth sternly instructed. “This is to be played at the top of page one of the Journal every day from tomorrow to race day.
“I will personally author a front-page piece in which I promise that Lancaster Lad, up to this point a pretty ordinary performer, will come to life and carry off the Heartlands Derby a week from next Saturday. His remarkable improvement will be the result of a startling new training regimen that will be revealed later. Or maybe not. We’ll iron out those details down the line,” the publisher said, puffing expansively on his cigar.
“Each day’s edition of the Journal,” he continued, “will carry several photos of Lancaster Lad, his jockey Willie Arroyo, trainer Kenny Gutfreund, and, of course, me.
“Other angles will be daily interviews with horse racing people, most of whom if I know them at all—except for the reliable cadre of suck-ups we can always count on—will be pooh-poohing Lancaster Lad’s chances. That’s fine. That’s great. Give their opinions plenty of play, so that they’ll look like the fools they really are once this horse wins the Derby.
“Also.…” Rexroth interrupted himself to look at Phillips, who was frantically scrambling to record every word of his boss’ orders on a yellow legal pad that was becoming blotched by drops of sweat falling from his brow. “Are you getting all of this, Phillips?” Rexroth suddenly shouted. The editor jumped in his chair, dropping his ballpoint and barely managing to hold on to his notepad. “Yes, sir, I am,” he responded. Rexroth grinned maliciously.
“Summing up, Phillips,” he said, “the repeated emphasis—the guts of this story—is that I will make history by guaranteeing a victory by my thus far ordinary horse. That is my vow, that is my promise. And this amazing triumph,” he added grandly, “will be my racing legacy.”