“At this point the crowd, even the clucks who have lost money on Bradford Baron, fall silent. They leave the track talking about the terrible tragedy they have witnessed. Cabray’s suckers, some of whom have traveled to Jersey all the way from Cow Flop, Iowa, or whatever, were the most dumbfounded by this turn of events. They trooped out of the track in various stages of dejection.
“Bobby Mitchell’s ‘body’ is transported to the county morgue by the paid-off sheriff. When the wagon nears the steps of the building, Bobby Mitchell suddenly springs to life and enters a waiting coach. Cabray is in that one, holding Mitchell’s payoff, and they drive away, never again to be seen in that part of Jersey.
“The next day-and you can imagine what kind of night Cabray’s losers must have gone through-a couple of the brighter lights inquired as to the funeral plans for the dead jockey. ‘No dead jockey ever was brought in here,’ says the coroner, and shoos them away.
“‘What about the doctor who pronounced him dead on the racetrack?’
“‘Nobody around here like that,’ said the district attorney.
“Finally, a couple of days later, after the sheriff and police chief have told them to haul their asses out of town, these fellows returned to the Midwest and West. Some of them then found a sympathetic prosecutor in Des Moines. Later, the Attorney General’s office gets interested. And, two years after the race, the indictments are handed down for Cabray and his pals.
“Cabray was arrested in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The only reason the authorities ever located him was that he had gotten in touch with one of the original pigeons, an Oklahoma oil tycoon named Prentice O’Bannon. Cabray wrote O’Bannon a long letter, apologizing for what he described as the ‘mix-up’ in New Jersey, but promising that he would make up for it with a better, tremendously more profitable fixed race at the track in Hot Springs that fall. Cabray had either blown his ill-gotten gains, or lost his marbles, or had the biggest set of balls in the U. S. Whatever, he tried to go back to this well once too often, and the oil tycoon went to the cops. That’s how they came to nab Cabray.”
Stoner sat forward in his chair. “All right. They had the trial. Cabray and three of his cohorts were present. That’s what one of the first stories in the file said. What happened?”
Rexroth reached into the glistening ice bucket for the second bottle of champagne. He smiled broadly as he carefully filled his stein to the brim.
“What happened was that John B. Cabray and his three associates on hand were found guilty. By a jury of what obviously could not have been their peers, I might add, since I don’t think they produce world-class con men by the dozen in the Hawkeye State. Anyway, they were sentenced to fifteen years in prison and ordered to make restitution.
“Found guilty in absentia were the eighty Cabray accomplices not in custody but named in the indictments. The shitkicker judge there in Des Moines permitted Mr. Cabray and his buddies to post bond. Can you imagine? Bond was set at $5,000 per man. Out there in the corn belt, the judge must have thought that was major money.
“But it wasn’t for these lads, of course. Naturally, Cabray and his boys soon departed Des Moines, Iowa, never to be seen again. For them, $5,000 in bond money was an incidental expense. None of the money bet by the greedy Babbits of the Midwest and other regions was ever recovered.”
Rexroth swirled the champagne in his stein, looking pensive. “John B. Cabray,” he said softly. “Oh, how I would have liked to have known that man.”
After a few minutes of silence, Rexroth put his stein down on the desk. Senzell looked expectantly at his employer.
Rexroth gazed benignly back at Clyde Senzell. He said, “This is excellent stuff. Should make a terrific series. Go to it, Senzell, give it your best. We’ll publish this over the weekend of July Fourth. Tell Phillips to promo it heavily in advance.
“And,” Rexroth added, “tell Phillips to give that librarian a good pinch on the ass for finding this material.”
After Senzell had gone, Rexroth sat without speaking for several minutes. Stoner busied himself reading that day’s RexCom financial summaries which he’d retrieved from the nearby fax machine. As usual, the figures looked good.
Rexroth leaned back in his chair, his right hand, with its Ivy League Squash Champion ring gleaming in the light, resting lightly on Winston’s cranium. As Rexroth ruminated, the slumbering bulldog silently passed some powerful gas, something that only Stoner seemed to notice.
Finally, Rexroth looked at Stoner and said, “I can’t get over this Cabray story. What an achievement it was to pull off a caper like that! He was brazen, and bold, and thoroughly dishonest and, best of all, he got away with it! He took their money and got away with it!”
Rexroth realized that nothing in his already privileged life would please him more, bring him more satisfaction, than to somehow emulate Cabray in some strikingly larcenous way. He poured the last of the second bottle of what he called “Donny P” into his stein.
It was then that Rexroth’s thoughts turned to the royally bred son of Donna Diane, grazing these days in total obscurity in one of the far Willowdale pastures.
Rexroth had originally orchestrated the theft of Donna Diane only to exact revenge on his hated foreign rivals. It had been, up to then, simply a matter having the mare’s offspring for himself, and fuck those Micks and Brits. Now, with Cabray’s caper fresh in his consciousness, Rexroth’s mind fastened upon the plain bay yearling.
And then the Grand Plan suddenly arrived full-blown in the devious mind of Harvey Rexroth, a criminal epiphany that caused him suddenly to leap to his feet and thrust his thick arms into the air.
“Ah…fucking…hah!” Rexroth shouted, loud enough to cause the surprised Stoner to drop the sheaf of financial reports, to startle the bulldog Winston, who awakened with another vicious fart, and to cause Randy Kauffman to turn away from the television screen whereon a group of dwarf transvestites of different races were embroiled in a scuffle that had carried them, along with the talk show host, into the front rows of the studio audience.
Chapter 16
“It’s going okay,” Doyle said. He was at an outdoor wall phone of the Wildcat-Jiffy-Shopper gas station and convenience store located at an intersection of country roads three and a half miles from Willowdale. It was early dusk of a warm summer evening, and Doyle was talking to Karen Engel in Chicago. He thought the FBI agent sounded a little anxious. This prompted Doyle to play it as cool as he possibly could manage. “Nada to worry about so far,” he said.
“Nothing I want to talk about,” Doyle might have added, but did not. Embarrassed as he was at what had happened, Doyle had decided to refrain from mentioning the major faux pas he had committed the day before.
He had been standing outside the Willowdale stallion barn, leaning on a paddock fence and rubbing the nose of a friendly black horse named Chisox. It was nearly lunch time. Doyle, having completed his morning duties under Aldous’ supervision, was passing the time talking with the stable assistant named Pedro. He asked the young Mexican-American about Chisox’ stud record.
There wasn’t any such record, Pedro said, shaking his head. Chisox, he said, was a teaser.
“Huh?” Doyle responded. After a few moments during which Pedro looked quizzically at Doyle, he proceeded to briefly describe the teaser’s role, to which the amazed Doyle said, “A teaser does fucking what?”
Pedro gave him another puzzled look. “No, no, he does no fuckeen,” Pedro emphasized. He informed that it was the role on every stud farm of at least one male horse to be used to excite the mares sexually, then be removed from their presence prior to ejaculation so that a valuable stallion could be slotted in to polish off the breeding job.