I stood and watched as one of them inserted a hypodermic needle into Fire Point’s neck just behind his head. The horse was well used to this procedure. He made no movement as the needle went into his jugular vein and blood was collected into two Vacutainer test tubes, identical to the one I’d passed through the chain-link fence to Jim Bradley at Belmont.
I picked up the straw from the bedding stockpile but, instead of going straight back to my horses, I walked along the line of stalls until I came to the one where George Raworth had stopped during the night. I took a step forward and looked inside. It was empty.
‘What do you want?’ asked a deep angry voice behind me that made me jump.
‘Nothing,’ I replied automatically, turning round.
The voice belonged to a tall man with ebony skin who was standing in the shedrow, the whites of his prominent eyes standing out against a dark face as he stared at me accusingly.
‘I’m Paddy,’ I said with a broad smile, putting down the bale of straw and extending my right hand towards him. ‘I’m here with Raworth’s crew. My first time at Pimlico.’
‘Tyler,’ the man replied. ‘I’m with Bryson.’
He slowly shook my offered hand and even grinned at me, exhibiting a fine collection of gold teeth. My overtly friendly approach had completely disarmed his anger.
‘I’m based at Belmont,’ I said. ‘Only here for the big race.’
‘Gulfstream,’ Tyler said, pointing a finger at his own chest. ‘In Miami. Too damn cold up here, for my liking.’ He shivered.
Cold? He must be joking. But I could see from his thick woollen sweater that he wasn’t.
‘Who do you look after?’ I asked.
‘Crackshot,’ he replied with another flash of the gold teeth. ‘He’s out at exercise right now.’ He waved a hand towards the empty stall. ‘I’m doing his bed.’
Crackshot.
What had George Raworth been doing in the middle of the night outside the stall of the only other horse in the Preakness that most of the pundits gave any chance to other than Fire Point?
My suspicious mind was working overtime.
24
I led Ladybird from the barn to the paddock about thirty minutes before the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes and walked right past FACSA Special Agent Trudi Harding, the shooter of Hayden Ryder at Churchill Downs.
She ignored me, not giving me a first glance let alone a second. She was standing with Frank Bannister on a raised platform near the track entrance and they were too preoccupied scanning the faces of the large Friday crowd to notice the groom passing by right under their noses.
Uniquely in my experience, the paddock at Pimlico was indoors, and not at all what British racegoers would expect. Here, instead of being a parade ring where the horses would walk to be inspected, the paddock was an area where the horses stood to be saddled in numbered stalls that corresponded to their post-draw positions.
I held Ladybird’s head as George Raworth and Keith made her ready.
First they placed a thin chamois cloth onto the horse’s bare back to prevent slippage. That was followed by the saddle pad, weight cloth, numbered saddle cloth and finally the saddle, all of them held in place by a wide strap passed under the belly and secured tightly to buckles on either side of the saddle. Over the top of everything, for added safety, went a three-inch-wide webbing over-girth.
Satisfied, George gave Ladybird a friendly smack on her rump as Keith and I led her up the ramp under the jockeys’ room, back into the daylight, and onto the track. George issued jockey Jerry Fernando with some last-minute instructions and a leg-up into the saddle before I handed the horse over to one of the outriders.
Unlike in England, where a horse runs free to the start under the control of its jockey alone, those in the United States are led to the gate by an outrider on a ‘lead pony’, one pony to each runner.
Whereas a ‘pony’ is properly defined as a member of an equine breed in which normal mature horses stand less than fifty-eight inches tall at the withers, the lead ponies at racetracks are often retired Thoroughbred racehorses, and therefore are not ponies at all.
But no one seemed to care as the excitement built.
I watched on the big screen as the horses, plus the ponies, circled behind the starting gate that was situated right in front of the grandstand.
The crowd for the Preakness the following afternoon was expected to be three times bigger but, nevertheless, there was a loud cheer as the gates flew open and the nine runners in the feature race of the day surged forward.
Victor Gomez had been right.
Ladybird was good. Very good.
She led from start to finish, holding off a late challenge to win by a neck.
Understandably, George Raworth was delighted, coming out onto the track with me to lead the horse into the winner’s circle.
I could see both Bob Wade and Steffi Dean standing by the rail. I pulled the peak of my cap lower and kept my eyes down but I think the special agents were more interested in each other than in anyone else.
I had realised that being a groom was, in fact, a very good undercover persona. Grooms were invisible, even more so than waiters in restaurants. Anyone looking my way was staring into the eyes of the horse rather than into those of the man leading it.
I knew of one trainer in England who could readily identify every horse in his hundred-strong yard just by looking at it, even in the rain, but he couldn’t tell his stable staff apart, one from another. Irrespective of their real names, he simply called all his lads ‘John’.
While Ladybird’s owner, trainer and jockey were receiving their trophies from the star of a TV soap opera, Maria and I walked the horse from the winner’s circle to the post-race testing barn.
Here we waited with the horse for almost an hour, whistling and pouring water until Ladybird finally acquiesced and supplied the urine sample the testers required.
Maria was not her usual ebullient self, not speaking to me once during the wait.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ I said, but she didn’t understand the idiom. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked slowly instead.
She nodded. ‘OK.’
‘Then why don’t you say something?’
This time she shook her head. ‘No talk.’
I thought she almost seemed frightened.
‘What has Diego said to you?’ I asked.
‘No talk,’ she repeated. ‘Diego, he say no talk.’
‘Or what?’ I asked.
She definitely appeared frightened this time. She looked all around her with wide eyes and then whispered. ‘Diego say he cut me if I talk to you.’ She traced a fingernail down her cheek from a tearful right eye all the way to her chin.
Diego was getting to be more than just a nuisance. He had clearly decided that it was easier to intimidate his cousin than me, and he was probably right. The sooner he was dragged off in chains to Rikers Island the better.
George Raworth came into Ladybird’s stall when I was still brushing her down after washing away the sweat of her exertions.
‘Well done, my girl,’ George said, patting the horse on the neck in love and gratitude. ‘Great job, Paddy. Now for the Preakness tomorrow.’
He even patted me on the back as well.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘Let’s hope so.’
‘Hope doesn’t come into it,’ George said with a laugh. ‘I believe Fire Point is a sure thing.’
He should know, I thought.
‘The professor thinks the semen is probably from an American Quarter Horse,’ Tony Andretti said when I called him at eight o’clock on Friday evening. ‘The DNA doesn’t match that of any known stallion held by the National Quarter Horse Registry but it closely resembles other Quarter Horse DNA records that are available, as if the source was possibly related.’