Blind switch (jack doyle mysteries)

by John McEvoy

  “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 switched 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, R
exroth 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. Rexroth.”

  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.”

  Douglas Phillips’ reaction to Rexroth’s Grand Plan was to think, “He’s really gone over the edge now. He can’t do this.” Of course, Phillips kept his thoughts to himself.

  Rexroth, some years earlier, in overruling an objection Phillips had meekly lodged, quoted the late press critic A. J. Liebling, a man Rexroth despised for his liberal politics. “That leftist looney made just one accurate statement in his life,” Rexroth had shouted at Phillips. “I’m going to quote it to you now, and I want you to remember it: ‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.’

  “Well, goddamit, I own a bunch of them. And I’ll use them the way I want to. Get it, Phillips?”

  The massive publicity campaign got into high gear two weeks prior to the Heartlands Derby. Phillips dutifully saturated the Horse Racing Journal with the story, and all the rest of racing’s trade publications reported it to a lesser extent. So did other media outlets: People Magazine and the Wall Street Journal both carried items describing Rexroth’s “unique promise to the public.”

  Chapter 32

  Doyle had been back at Willowdale not five minutes that Thursday night after having had dinner in Lexington when the phone rang in his apartment. The caller’s voice was faint against a din of thumping background music.

  “Don’t you even have an answering machine?” said the woman resentfully. “I’ve been calling for almost two hours.”

  “Who’s this?” Doyle said.

  No words came back, just some hushed breathing. Then she said, “I’m calling you to tell you that you all better keep on the sharp lookout out there. There’s a man going to do some damage out there, kill some kind of horse, I believe….He is a small man, and terrible mean. You’d best keep on your best watch.”

  Before Doyle could again ask “Who is this?” the connection concluded abruptly from the woman’s end. “What in the hell is going on now?” he said to the silent receiver.

  Fourteen miles away, Betty Lou Blackmon put down the pay phone in the lobby of the Red Velvet Swing. Quickly, she slipped back to her dressing room to prepare for her upcoming shift. Tired as she was physically, Betty Lou felt a surge of emotional energy. She wriggled as she checked hersel
f out in the mirror, then grinned at her reflection. “Hope to God they catch that little fucker,” she whispered to herself.

  The night before, Betty Lou and her best friend LeeAnne had some drinks, then dinner with Jud Repke. Jud and LeeAnne had been spending time together in recent weeks. Betty Lou liked Jud, because he didn’t mind including her for the occasional late night, after-work meals before he and LeeAnne headed back to his apartment. She liked Jud, too, because he continued to invite her even after she had made clear to LeeAnne that she never, ever again wanted to be within ten country miles of Ronald Mortvedt. The memory of what Mortvedt had done to her in the hotel was enough to make her weep with anger and mortification.

  LeeAnne had passed this information on to Jud, and Jud didn’t say anything to Betty Lou about it, never chided her for not liking his buddy. Betty Lou took Jud’s silence on this matter as an indication of understanding. “He’s got so much more class than that Mortvedt,” Betty Lou remarked to LeeAnne.

  But the fact that she liked Jud did not deter Betty Lou from placing him in what she hoped was trouble with his partner. That opportunity had presented itself the previous night, when Betty Lou, LeeAnne, and Jud were having “just one more nightcap,” as Jud put it, in the Stoned Pony Lounge of the Walnut Suites Motel.

  A boisterous bunch of young Rotarians had just paid their bill and exited the ringside table midway of the female piano player’s medley of Elvis in Vegas songs. They’d held their monthly meeting in the hotel dining room earlier in the evening.

  Jud looked resentfully at the men, all well-dressed, with recent haircuts and pressed suits, as they headed for the door. “Bastards’re just full of themselves, ain’t they?” he said. “World by the balls.”