“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 herself 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.”
He drained the rest of his Bacardi and Coke. “Well, they ain’t the only ones.” Jud’s rum-glazed eyes brightened. “We got us a pretty goddam good little money maker going down next week out there at Willowdale.” He elbowed LeeAnne in the side, just beneath one of her silicone-enhanced breasts, winking broadly. She winced. Jud waved forward the cocktail waitress.
Betty Lou leaned toward Jud. If LeeAnne wasn’t interested in this drunken disclosure, as least she could pretend to be. After all, Jud was paying for her drinks again tonight.
“You and Ronnie got something going?”
“Bet on it,” replied Jud. “We got a gooood thing going. You know what those horses are worth out there at Willowdale? Well, most people don’t know it, but some of them are worth a hell of a lot more dead than alive,” he snickered.
Jud picked up his new drink, raising it in a toast. “Here’s to good things,” he smiled drunkenly. “And I’m lookin’ at a couple of ’em right now,” he added with a giggle as he buried his face in LeeAnne’s bosom.
LeeAnne shrugged at Betty Lou, as if to say “Well, I have to let the boy play when he pays,” but Betty Lou wasn’t paying her any mind. Betty Lou’s mind was clicking out ideas the way it always had, in the fashion of an overworked copying machine that had lost smoothness but retained the ability to keep slowly churning.
Twenty hours later, Betty Lou made her call to Willowdale. She asked for the “manager in charge.” The gate house guard transferred her to Doyle, whose car he had waved through only minutes earlier.
“That’s what the woman said,” Doyle repeated. He was seated in Damon Tirabassi’s room at the Dalton House Hotel, having called the agent from Willowdale before rapidly driving the fifteen miles to town. Doyle had just finished describing in as much detail as he could the phone call of warning he’d received from the mystery woman.
Karen Engel, in jeans and a UW-Madison sweatshirt, perched on the sofa in the mini-suite. It was the first time Doyle had seen her not wearing her FBI business suit, and she looked about ten years younger. Tirabassi on the other hand, although casually dressed for him-slacks, shirt, tie but no jacket-appeared as official as ever.
Karen said, “Let’s talk about this new information. Damon, what do you make of it?”