“Not that I know of,” Alice answered. “From the time he snuck out of here as a boy, I don’t believe Ronnie’s ever been back. One of the Romero boys told me a year or so back that he heard Ronnie was working on some farm up in Arkansas, or Kentucky. Ronnie can’t never be a jockey again, and he can’t get a license even to exercise horses at the racetrack. But he can work on farms, I guess.
“But,” Alice said, “I’m not even sure that’s true. Rumors ’round here are thicker than skeeters in the swamp. All I could say is that, if he ain’t in jail again, he’s probably doing something with horses. That’s all Ronnie knows. He’s smart enough to stick with what he understands.
“Thing is, Ronnie was a pretty bright boy. Could have stayed in school and done well. They was always testing him over to the grade school after he’d get in trouble. They found out that his brain was okay, but his mentality tests, well, they used to get them counselors all worked up.”
Alice Cormier shook her head sadly. “Swear to you,” she said earnestly, “it all goes back to that damned Mortvedt blood. Why my sister ever married into that bunch is something I won’t understand if I live till Huey Long comes back.”
Driving back to New Orleans, Karen said, “This Mortvedt must be a real sicko.”
“I won’t argue with that,” Damon replied as he pulled out to pass one of the horse trailers that had also recently departed LaCombe Downs.
Damon drove in silence for several miles before Karen said, “There’s one thing that really bothers me about this whole case.”
“What’s that?”
Karen said, “It’s that, from the start, the whole emphasis seems to be on apprehending Rexroth. I mean, I know he deserves it if he’s been defrauding insurance companies by having his poor horses killed. But everything seems to be aimed at him, from the time this investigation was launched. He’s the primary target. Looking for Mortvedt, well, it seems like that is seen as just an avenue to get to Rexroth. My question is, what about Mortvedt himself? As the creep doing the dirty work, why doesn’t he have the bull’s eye on his chest?”
Damon gunned the Taurus into the passing lane and sped past a pair of semis before responding.
“I know where you’re coming from,” he said. “The emphasis from the top has been on Rexroth from the very beginning. I can’t tell you why. And it’s not ‘ours to wonder why,’ either.
“All I know is that Rexroth is the big enchilada on this plate, Karen. Mortvedt’s on the menu, but Rexroth is the main course as far as the Bureau is concerned.”
Chapter 11
After angling across the frenzied Dan Ryan Expressway traffic and exiting onto the Calumet Expressway, heading for Indiana, Doyle glanced out of his car window to the left, seeing the remnants of Gary’s industrial age, the empty foundries and factories. The Skyway was dotted with signs for the area’s current boom industry: casinos. Doyle thought he’d rather be fishing for the industrial-strength carp that inhabited the waters of Wolf Lake to the right of the Skyway than shooting craps on a summer afternoon.
He figured about six and a half hours to Lexington and Willowdale Farm following the tollway to Indianapolis, a quick stop there to pick up a couple of pastrami sandwiches from Shapiro’s Delicatessen, then I-65 through the Hoosier State to New Albany, other side of the Ohio River from Louisville. Then it was an easy seventy-five miles or so from Derby Town to the heart of the Blue Grass.
Doyle moved the radio dial off an all-news station after hearing the announcer begin to describe “an Oak Park woman who was the victim of a home invasion gone terribly wrong.” Doyle tried to imagine a home invasion going smoothly to the satisfaction of all concerned.
As Doyle tuned in Gary’s good jazz station, in the middle of an Oscar Peterson tour de force titled “Nigerian Marketplace,” he began to review his assignment. He went over what Engel and Tirabassi had told him about the horse killings, went over his meeting with Aldous Bolger. Then his thought-train quickly went onto a siding marked by Doyle’s pleasant memory of meeting Bolger’s sister.
“Caroline,” he said to himself, “nice name…nice girl…Wonder how many other New Zealand women are as great-looking as she is?”
Doyle’s car, at the suggestion of Maggie Howard, was unwashed and unkempt, the interior packed haphazardly with his possessions, backseat strewn with horse industry magazines and old copies of the Racing Journal.
“You got to make it look like a horseman’s car,” Maggie had said.
This advice Doyle had received the previous morning after he’d driven out to Heartland Downs. He had wanted to say goodbye to City Sarah and Maggie, not necessarily in that order, and also ask that if any word was received in the Zocchi barn of former employee E. D. Morley, it be forwarded to Doyle in Kentucky.
Doyle had caught up with Maggie right after training hours. “I got on ten this morning,” meaning she’d exercised ten horses, she said happily, “and I’m starving. I’ll even let a suspicious character like you buy me breakfast.” Her black eyes crinkled with good humor.
Once they were seated in the track kitchen, where the morning orders were just about evenly divided between fried eggs and huevos rancheros, with bottles of beer being sold to many members of each faction, Doyle said, “What do you mean, suspicious?”
Maggie smiled at him from over her platter of ham and eggs. “Jack, you know what I’m talking about,” she said. “Ever since you came to work for Angelo, everybody around here figured you were up to something. Like I told you from the get-go, you weren’t any kind of horse person then.
“Sure, you picked up the routine pretty fast. And you showed up and worked hard, I’ll give you that. But that didn’t change the fact you weren’t really one of us.”
Doyle stepped away from the table for a coffee refill at the cafeteria counter. When he’d returned to his seat, he said, “Maggie, what you say may be true. But I’ll tell you this, my dear, I better look the part where I’m going next.” Without coming close to getting into the subject of his involvement with the FBI, Doyle recounted how he had found a position on a farm in Kentucky.
“Doing what?” said the incredulous Maggie Howard.
“Working for a friend of mine. Name is Bolger.”
“What farm you going on?” Maggie asked.
“It’s called Willowdale.”
Maggie looked even more amazed at this statement. “Jack, that’s one of the major farms down there.” Taking off her black exercise rider’s helmet, Maggie shook her black curls in another sign of disbelief. Then, her eyes narrowed as she regarded Doyle across the scarred plastic table.
“Jack Doyle, you’re up to another something, aren’t you?” she said accusingly.
“I’m just going about making a living, Maggie,” Doyle replied. “I don’t know how this is going to work out for me. But I haven’t got anything else going. I refuse to go back to the kind of bullshit jobs I used to do. And Angelo hasn’t exactly offered me any bonus money to return to work for him. So, I figured I’d give it a try down in the old Blue Grass.” He reached for his coffee cup, avoiding her gaze.
Maggie went back to the counter, evidently convinced she wasn’t going to elicit any more useful information regarding Doyle’s upcoming employment. She returned with two bran muffins nearly the size of croquet balls, then quickly polished them off. Doyle shook his head admiringly; the girl had about a twenty-inch waist. “Don’t tell me,” she said, laughing at the look on Doyle’s face. “I know, I know, it’s what everybody says-I’ve got the metabolism of a hummingbird. Well, enjoy it is my theory.”
“So,” Doyle said, trying to be as nonchalant as possible, “anybody ever hear from E. D. Morley?”
Maggie shook her head. “Not a word,” she said. “That was real strange. E. D. worked for Angelo for four, maybe five years. That’s a long time these days on a racetrack backstretch to work for the same man. Everybody figured they got along real good.