Blind Switch

by John McEvoy

  Doyle said, “Do I call you Al?”

  Bolger turned very serious. “Not even once,” replied the New Zealander. “Out of respect to my father, and Mr. Huxley, it will be Aldous, if you don’t mind.”

  Doyle nodded in assent. He recognized Bolger as being one of those lifelong horsemen whose years of hard physical work made them gristle-tough and fiercely independent. I doubt I could dent this son of a bitch with a hand ax, Doyle thought. “Aldous it is,” he said aloud.

  Bolger turned to the woman. “Caroline,” he said, “meet Jack Doyle. Jack, my sister, Caroline Cummings. And these are her children, Helen and Ian.”

  “’Ello,” the children said, almost as one.

  “Are you visiting, or do you live in the States, too?” Doyle asked their mother.

  Caroline shook her head, her blond bangs moving across her forehead. “No, we don’t live here. This is actually our first time in your country. No, we’re on what you might call an extended visit to my brother down in Kentucky. Longer than he may have anticipated.” Her smile was somewhat apologetic. Doyle noticed that Caroline’s strikingly large, widely set eyes were brown-gold, while the children’s eyes were a very light shade of blue.

  “Nonsense,” Aldous said. “Caroline,” he added, “as you know, Jack and I have some talking to do. Why don’t you take the kids in to those farm buildings. We’ll come back for you in a bit.”

  “Right you are.” As the three of them moved off, one of the zoo workers announced over a portable microphone, “Our goat-milking begins in three minutes. Watch the milking and try some,” she invited. Helen and Ian dashed on ahead of their mother.

  As Doyle and Bolger began walking in the opposite direction, Bolger said, “The ‘long visit’ my sister mentioned has only been about three weeks. She’s more than welcome to double that or more, if she wants. I’m not married. I’ve got plenty of space for her and the kids. They seem to like it at Willowdale. And they need the time away from home.”

  Doyle looked at Bolger inquiringly. Bolger said, “Caroline’s husband, Grant Cummings, was a jockey, and one of my oldest friends. He carked it in a bloody awful spill back home at Ellerslie, that’s the track in Auckland, a little over a year ago.

  “A terrible, shocking tragedy, it was. Grant was only just turned thirty. He was coming into his own as a rider, just starting to get the best mounts from the top stables. Grant was a great bloke, and a great husband and father as well. It’s been very tough on Caroline and her kids.

  “I invited them over here after Grant’s funeral, trying to give them a change of scenery, something to help them along. It took them a long time before they finally decided to come. But I’m glad they did. They seem to be brightening up a bit every day they’re here. Thank God for that,” he said.

  Seeing the earnest expression on Bolger’s face, Doyle felt himself warming to the man and his obvious sincerity.

  “Caroline’s no bludge,” her brother continued. Seeing the look of incomprehension on Doyle’s face, he quickly amended, “I mean she’s not here to spend time with me because she’s in any financial straits. Her husband left her a goodly packet, and he was well insured. No, Caroline and the kids have got big bickies—what I mean is, more than enough money. They’ve no worries on that score, believe me.

  “And for the kids, it’s not all holiday they’re on. It’s winter back home, and she made them bring a term’s worth of lessons with them. She spends hours with them on their school work near every day. Caroline’s a remarkable woman,” he said. “She’s got her own real estate business in a suburb of Auckland. Started it herself and built it up, dealing mostly with the high end properties.”

  Bolger shook his head admiringly. “Sometimes I can hardly believe she’s what my little sis grew up to be.”

  Strangely, Doyle found this glowing description to be somehow depressing. He realized he’d been immediately attracted to Caroline, but learning that she was a wealthy widow served to dampen his interest. A bit too high up the financial ladder for me, he thought regretfully, and abruptly changed the subject.

  “What about you, Aldous?” he asked. “What’s your story?” It sounded ruder than Doyle had intended.

  Bolger gave him a startled look at the sudden shift in tone. His ordinarily open and good-natured expression fled his face, replaced with a frown. Doyle realized he’d succeeded, however unwittingly, in hurting Bolger’s feelings.

  “Well, then,” Bolger said gruffly to Doyle, “let’s try this path up to the right and I’ll try to sum things up as quick as you’d like. We’ll try to have you home and hosed in an hour.”

  Doyle thought, not for the first time lately, that there was a thin line between being a self-protective cool operator and being just a wise-cracking asshole. There were so many “thin lines” in his life—another of the major ones lying, as his old buddy Olegaard back at Bass, Sexton used to say—between “bull-dozing and charisma.” Doyle forced himself to concentrate on what Bolger was telling him.

  “I came to the States six years ago,” Bolger said. “I’d gotten started in the horse business back home when I was a lad, mucking out stalls when I hardly came up to the horse’s belly. I worked for an uncle of mine, Duane Hatch, for years. He eventually lined me up with a job in England, and I learned a lot working there on some of the major breeding farms.

  “But I was always aware that the best horses, and the best farms, were in the States, especially Kentucky. So, when I heard about an opening at Willowdale, well, cor blimey, I fired off a resume. I figured I had enough experience by then to take on a manager’s position at a major farm. All I knew about Willowdale was that it was owned by a very wealthy man, that he was interested in breeding top horses, and the pay packet was quite nice, indeed. It’s what I’d hoped of doing all my life, man.

  “Maybe I should have caught on to the fact that something was wonky when….” Bolger was interrupted by Doyle. “Something was what?”

  Bolger said, “Wonky. I mean, you know, crooked. Wonky’s something we say at home.”

  “Like cor blimey?”

  Bolger grinned at Doyle, his innate good nature back in evidence. “You’ll have to forgive me, friend. Like they say, you can take the lad out of the country, but you can’t take the country’s talk out of the lad. If I confuse you too much, just stop and ask me what I mean. No offense will be taken. This happens to me a lot.”

  Doyle nodded. He felt himself starting to like this big, good-natured man. Then Bolger’s normally amiable face creased with concern as he resumed talking.

  “Once I got to Willowdale,” he said, “I was damned surprised to learn that I was the third farm manager hired in eighteen months. I’d had no idea. Maybe I was too eager to grab at this opportunity. Maybe I should’ve done some research of my own. But from where I was, in England, this looked like a dream job.

  “Anyway, when I later asked Rexroth about the two managers who’d been there before me, he just shrugged it off. ‘Personality clashes,’ is how he’d put it, ‘very common here in America.’ Then he’d say, ‘Let’s not let that happen to us, eh, Aldous,’ and give me a thundering clap on the back. And I’d go back to my air-conditioned cottage and riffle through my check stubs, and kind of park under the rug any concerns I had about Willowdale’s job turnover.

  “I just said to myself, it’s the same thing here as anywhere else I’d been. You work for a man with big bickies and you take your chances. Some of them will like you, some won’t, and with the money they’ve got they can afford to change employees like they change their woolies. That’s the risk of being in the employ of the rich, if you follow me here, Jack.

  “And,” Bolger added, “Rexroth can be a very charming fella, when he wants to be. Just one of the ‘common old workin’ men’—he’s got an act like that he trots out every now and then. But down deep I think he’s got the inborn contempt for others that’s bred into so many of these privileged bastards. Don’t get me started on
that subject.”

  They had walked to the middle of one of the bridges that spanned the park’s meandering lake. Doyle paused and leaned his arms on the railing. “So where did your problems start with Rexroth?”

  “Not right away. The first year was grand,” Bolger replied. “We foaled some nicely made young horses. We went to the Keeneland breeding stock sale and bought some very fine mares. Rexroth told me, ‘If you see a mare you think is worth the money, pay the money.’

  “I’ll admit it, I was pretty impressed by this—not only that Rexroth had the money, but that he’d trust me with spending it the right way. I’ll admit, too, that I got kind of caught up in the grand spirit of things. I mean, we were riding around in a limousine, eating at the best restaurants. It was quite a leap for a Kiwi lad like myself.

  “The trouble started the next year. And it had nothing to do with me. What was happening was that some earlier horse purchases, made by my farm manager predecessors, turned out very badly. Well, you know, this happens in the business. Bound to. As my uncle Duane always used to tell me when I worked for him back home, ‘Aldous, this is not an exact science—neither the breeding nor the betting.’ He had another saying, too: ‘The dumbest horse can make the biggest fool out of the smartest man.’”

  Bolger paused to light a cigarette, casting a sideways glance at Doyle that combined both embarrassment and defiance. “God help me, man, I know how dumb this is. But I’m not ready to quit the smokes just yet.”

  Doyle made a deprecating gesture. “I don’t know why you don’t quit,” he joked. “Quitting’s easy. I must have done it twenty times before I got it right. Anyway, don’t worry about it. I know how it is. I finally kicked it about ten years ago, but you’re not talking to a member of the international tobacco police.”

  “Well,” said Bolger, “there’s an officer of that department right over there on the park bench—Caroline. And I can see she’s waiting for us.”

  Bolger turned to face the other way from his sister, inhaled hugely with his back bent like a jazz saxophone player bending deep into the melody, then surreptitiously dropped the cigarette under his boot. As he crushed the butt, he said, “That girl’s got the eyes of a hawk. Let’s start heading back over there. I’ll finish telling you about the Rexroth situation as we go along.”

  It was after he’d been at Willowdale about a year, Aldous said, that the first suspicious horse death occurred.

  “I don’t mean the first horse to die,” he emphasized. “We had a couple of mares die while foaling, we had a yearling killed when he was hit by lighting out in the field one night. Those sort of things are not unnatural on a breeding farm where you’ve got two hundred or more horses. These animals are given to all sorts of mischief and misadventures, even when they’re not on the racetrack and competing.

  “But,” Bolger went on, “there then came this one incident—a horse named Uncle Francis. We found him one night down in his stall with as bad a shattered rear leg as I’d ever seen. All we could figure was that he had been frightened somehow and lashed out with it, kicking terrifically hard against the stall wall. But, still, even though that’s what the vets said…well, it was goddam unnatural. I hated to see that horse put down. But that’s all we could do. He was ruined.”

  Doyle said, “As I understand it, the insurance company paid up. Right?”

  “Yeah, they did,” Bolger replied, “but not without nosing around for weeks and, I might add, giving me and my staff a pretty good questioning.

  “Anyway, about two months later we lost another stud horse, Prince Fennimore. He was found in his stall one morning, stone cold dead. There wasn’t a mark on him. The vets and the insurance people concluded he’d died of a heart attack, which is not unheard of, but I knew this horse. Hell, he was only nine years old. He hadn’t done much as a stallion, but he was a big, strong, healthy specimen, at least to the naked eye. They performed a necropsy—that’s an autopsy for horses. It didn’t show any heart disease, but they just figured his heart quit on him.

  “Finally, a few weeks back, we find a mare named Signorina Goldini dead in her paddock. It was located right behind a barn. Not a mark on her, either. Again, it looked like a heart attack, and that’s what they decided it was, even though she’d appeared to be in a glowing grand health. Her only problem had been that, despite being bred to the farm’s best studs each year, she never got in foal. She’d been a real commercial flop.

  “At about this point, the old light bulb goes off over my thick noggin. I’d been thinking about these deaths, off and on, for weeks. Finally, it comes to me. These are heavily insured animals, ones that had been thought to have great promise as breeding prospects when they retired. But not one of the three came close to living up to that promise. Believe me, every one of them was expendable from a financial standpoint.”

  Bolger paused, then looked away, his jaw tightening. Turning back to face Doyle, he said bitterly, “Rexroth came down to wring his hands over every one of these cases. And he’d look appalled, and concerned, but his act just didn’t play with me. There was something phony about it and about him.

  “After I’d tussled with this and chewed on it, I finally called the FBI. I didn’t want to go to the state police, or the local authorities, because I was afraid Rexroth would get word of it. Through his media business, he’s got connections everywhere.

  “If I was wrong, I didn’t want to lose my job over it. If I was right, I didn’t want to expose myself to risk, if you know what I mean. A person who will murder horses will murder men as well.

  “But I’m pretty damn sure I wasn’t wrong,” Bolger said with emphasis. He smiled at his sister and her children as he and Doyle approached them. “Just a minute or two more, then I’ll buy you lunch,” he called to them.

  Doyle, arms folded across his chest, cast an appraising glance at Bolger. “What about a pattern—is there any kind of pattern involved here, other than the fact these horses had dropped off sharply in value?”

  “The only so-called pattern I could come up with was that I was not at Willowdale when the last two horses, Prince Fennimore and Signorina Goldini, died. When Prince Fennimore died I was at a horse sale Rexroth insisted I attend down in Florida. When the mare died, I’d gone with one of our crews to bring a shipment of two-year-olds up to the racing stable at Heartland Downs.”

  Doyle digested this for a minute. Then he said, “Okay, this could be looked at in a couple of ways. One, Rexroth thinks you’re on to him and wanted to keep you out of the way so there was no chance that you’d discover the horse killers in action.

  “Of course, there’s also possibility number two. That you’re involved in masterminding these killings and conveniently scheduled absences for yourself when they were to take place.”

  Bolger stopped walking. Gripping Doyle’s arm, and powerfully squeezing it, he exclaimed, “If that’s a joke, my friend, it’s sure not funny. And if it’s not…well, what the hell, man. You think that if I was involved in this terrible business I’d be the one calling your FBI and asking for help?” he said angrily.

  Doyle shook off Bolger’s hand. “Only kidding, buddy,” he said. “I get your point. And, yeah, I believe you.”

  As much as I believe anybody these days, Doyle added to himself.

  Chapter 9

  After picking up their rented Taurus at the New Orleans Airport, Karen Engel and Damon Tirabassi began the nearly four-hour drive north and then west on Hwy. 10 to the heart of Louisiana’s Cajun country. This area was home to the quarter-million descendants of French-speaking, Roman Catholic settlers who fled there after having been thrown out of Nova Scotia in the mid-eighteenth century for refusing to pledge their allegiance to Britain’s Protestant king. They were an independent lot then, and not much had changed about that strain of their character since.

  Acadiana, as this area is known, stretches from Lafayette on the east to Lake Charles on the west and is home to some of the most fun-loving
, colorful citizens and memorable food that the United States has to offer.

  Damon drove as Karen worked to adjust the air-conditioning. Outside the car, the morning air was thick with humidity. Oak trees seemed to shimmer and sag in the bright sunlight, and moss-covered cypresses looked similarly lethargic. The terrain varied between prairie and swamp, its common bond an enveloping layer of heat.

  The two FBI agents had flown south from their Chicago base after a long phone conversation with Clayton Fugette, an agent in the Bureau’s New Orleans office. Fugette said he had received a tip from what he termed a “normally reliable informant—or as reliable as the damned snitches ever get to be”—that the horse killer, or killers, sought by Engel and Tirabassi was “from down around here, over by Lafayette. That’s in Cajun country. My man said the horse killer is supposedly an ex-jockey who went bad. Said the guy was now making a real good living killing horses for rich people for the insurance money.

  “I think you should take a trip over there,” Fugette advised. “I don’t have anybody to spare right now myself. You’ve never been there, right? Well, it’s a whole different world. Bonne chance, mes amis,” he added with a chuckle before hanging up.

  As Damon drove rapidly up the interstate, Karen reached into her briefcase and took out a file. “According to the postal records, there must be nearly as many Mortvedts around Lafayette as there are catfish in the bayou.”

  Damon nodded. “Yeah, it might take some time. But we’ll find the right family, or somebody who can tell us about this guy,” he said, his mouth tightening. Karen had little doubt that this would be true, for Damon was widely known in the Bureau as being one of its most tenacious agents. Before Karen was assigned to the Chicago office and teamed with him, she had heard numerous admiring references to the man they called Tirabassi the Terrier because suspects were unable to shake him off.