by John McEvoy
Lou Tenuta listened impassively for several minutes, his thick hands folded before him on the linen tablecloth. He wore an expensive light blue suit, a dark blue custom-made shirt, and a white tie. With his black pompadour and narrow black mustache, he looked to Stoner like a prototypical French Quarter pimp.
Tenuta beckoned to the waiter watching from across the room. The waiter snapped his fingers to a busboy. The ripple of command reached the kitchen, from which plates of food quickly emerged, drawing Tenuta’s rapt attention. Stoner, always a light eater, paid as little attention to this food as he did to most.
Several minutes elapsed before Tenuta momentarily halted his attack on a platter of barbequed shrimp and said, “I got the guy for you. But it’ll cost you—not just for him, for us. A finder’s fee.”
“We have no problem with that,” replied Stoner, feeling relieved. This had not been as difficult as he’d feared. He was anxious to phone Rexroth and report mission accomplished.
Stoner slid an envelope across the white linen surface of the table. “That’s a down payment, plus expense money for this man to come to Kentucky and meet my employer. The man is to call me first, at the number on that piece of paper. His meeting with my employer will have to be carefully arranged and completely secret from all but a few of our people. We’ll wire your people the remainder of their fee tomorrow, to the usual account.”
Tenuta nodded as he reached for the just-delivered plate of steaming crawdads.
“What is the name of your man?”
Between bites, Tenuta said, “His name is Mortvedt. They call him the Sandman.”
“Why?” Stoner asked.
Tenuta methodically worked his way through the mound of crawdads, keeping Stoner waiting for an answer. Stoner knew this game. Tenuta, after all, was playing on his home court. Like most of the lowlifes Stoner had had to deal with over the years, Tenuta was intent on displaying his power in his town. Finally, Tenuta mopped the last of the sauce remaining on the platter with a slice of French bread, which he chewed and swallowed before speaking. Then he said, “Because he puts horses to sleep. Maybe people, too. The Sandman. That’s what they call him.
“They tell me he’ll do the kind of work you’ve got in mind,” Tenuta continued. “Here’s how you get to him.” He flipped a small piece of paper onto the tablecloth between them, making Stoner reach to retrieve it. “You call him, tell him what you want. We don’t have no contact with him on this, capice? And I got no interest in whatever you want him for either.
“Don’t have time for coffee,” Tenuta said as he rose from his chair. He nodded in the direction of the wait staff. “You want some, or some dessert, go ahead.” He left without saying another word.
***
As always, Mortvedt arrived in Louisville right when he said he would. He and Repke walked down the street from the apartment complex to a nearby chain restaurant advertising Breakfast All Day, Every Day, $1.99. They made an odd-looking pair, Repke towering over the ex-jockey, yet bending deferentially to listen to him. It was funny, Repke sometimes thought to himself, that he was always talking down to this man that he looked up to like no one else he’d ever known.
Seated in the restaurant, Mortvedt described the upcoming job as they ate.
“How much is this job worth?” Jud asked.
“Your cut is three grand,” Mortvedt answered, looking hard at Repke, his eyes cold. Mortvedt’s longish black hair was combed straight back, without a part. There was a bluish cast to his white cheeks even this early in the day, evidence of the heavy beard he shaved off each morning. This was a face that would never play host to any laugh lines near eyes or mouth. Not for the first time, Repke found Mortvedt’s look to be unsettling.
Jud let his glance shift to the clock above the deserted salad bar, then rubbed a large hand through his lank, brown hair. No question about it, the little man could make him nervous in a way that those dago gangsters in New Orleans never had during his car-stealing years with them.
Mortvedt had never revealed to Repke what the total take was from any of their jobs. And Repke never could quite get up the courage to press him about it. He didn’t want to anger Mortvedt—not since the day he’d seen the smaller man pull a concealed shiv and open a series of slices in a big black iron-pumper called Gator Man one afternoon at Oakdale. The dispute was over the delegation of duties in the prison laundry. It was over so quick hardly anyone had to lie to the guards when they said they hadn’t seen anything. Gator Man healed up and kept quiet, too, swearing he never got a good look at his attacker.
Jud had concealed Mortvedt’s weapon after this flash fight. “Be first. You always got to jump the bastards first,” was the little man’s practiced theory.
Despite the fear that he often felt in Mortvedt’s presence, Jud counted himself fortunate to be involved in these remunerative and relatively risk-free jobs. He wasn’t making as much money as when he drove the stolen Mercedes and Jaguars from Cincinnati and Chicago to points south and west, but he was getting by nicely, and sleeping better, too. Unlike Mortvedt, who in Oakdale had seemed to regard his surroundings stoically, just another place to be as his life played itself out, Jud had hated prison from the bottom of his Kentucky hillbilly heart.
Mortvedt stirred his coffee. Then he said, “We’ll do it Sunday night. I got to talk to a man later today, see about some details.”
He got to his feet and laid a ten on the place mat in front of Repke. “Breakfast’s on me. You don’t have to leave no tip in a dump like this. I’ll meet you after nine tonight over to that titty joint you like.”
***
Mortvedt arrived on time at the Red Velvet Swing, a gentleman’s club that Repke patronized whenever he had enough money to pay $7 per beer. Its marquee advertised body painting, a deep soak room, stripper slaves and “much more.”
Jud had already “established a beachhead,” as he drunkenly put it to Mortvedt, with a couple of the establishment’s lap dancers who had worked the noon to eight shift and were eager for some off-the-premises action.
The women regarded Mortvedt somewhat warily as he jerked a chair over from a nearby table and sat down, appraising them silently.
“This here is LeeAnne,” Repke said, one arm around a tired-looking woman in her late twenties with long, straight black hair and a pouty mouth, lavishly over-lipsticked. Mortvedt looked at LeeAnne and said, “I guess you’re not the one that’s the life of the party.” She glared back at him as Jud continued to massage the back of her neck.
Jud said, “Betty Lou’s her name,” nodding at a small woman with tight-curled, dark blond hair that glistened beneath the revolving strobe light over their table. She looked to be about the same age and just as battle-fatigued as LeeAnne, but she mustered a welcoming look, and Mortvedt nodded in approval. He was partial to the ones with big breasts and big, sloppy smiles.
“You like being a dancer here?” Mortvedt asked.
“Oh, yessir,” Betty Lou said, brightening at the question. “My body interprets rhythm in a personal way,” she added softly, as if she were repeating something she’d first thought of long, long ago.
There were a pair of empty margarita pitchers on the table, and a third one about a quarter full. Mortvedt said, “Let’s get out of here and get us a real drink.” He got to his feet, placed a $50 bill beneath one of the coasters.
When LeeAnne made a quick and clever move toward the $50 as she scooped up her purse and started to leave, Mortvedt suddenly turned back and looked at her. She quickly withdrew her hand. Bastard must have eyes in the back of his head, LeeAnne thought. She put her arm around Jud Repke’s waist as the four of them exited the Red Velvet Swing. Mortvedt opened the door for Betty Lou.
***
They rode in Repke’s red Chevrolet across town to the interstate and checked into the first cheap motel Mortvedt spotted. He paid for two adjacent rooms and tossed the key to one of them to Jud. “Later, man,” he said. “I’ll come
get you when the fun’s done.”
As soon as he and Betty Lou had entered their room, Mortvedt crossed the worn blue carpet to the battered television set. He flicked it on, then turned up the volume. A famous big-jawed comedian was just starting his ego-stroking stroll down the front-row line of studio fans who reached eagerly to shake his hand, like supplicants trying to touch the hem of a holy man’s robe.
Taking a bottle of Wild Turkey out of the paper bag he’d brought in, Mortvedt ripped the cellophane off two of the plastic motel-issue “glasses,” then filled both of them with the amber whiskey. After handing one glass across the bed to Betty Lou, Mortvedt drank his straight down, his throat contracting effortlessly. Betty Lou said, “Can I have some sweet soda to go with this?” He ignored her request and moved around the double bed, with its faded, flower pattern spread and cigarette burn dots, to face her.
“Get your clothes off,” Mortvedt commanded. He had already shed his shirt and shoes and was working on his slacks before she finished slowly pulling off her T-shirt with its drawing of a near-naked woman poised in mid-air in a red velvet swing. Betty Lou was proud of her large breasts. She took her time, giving Mortvedt a good long look at them.
When she’d stripped off her panties, Betty Lou smiled coyly at Mortvedt, her eyes roaming his muscled body until they fell on his emerging erection. She smiled admiringly, her plucked eyebrows raised. “Well now, honey, I guess you ain’t such a little man after all. Whoeee! Look at that big thing standing up to look at me.”
Mortvedt said nothing. He motioned for Betty Lou to lie down atop the worn coverlet. She extended her arms behind her and arched her back slightly as Mortvedt roughly fondled her breasts. He increased the pressure, then began squeezing her nipples. “Hey, baby,” Betty Lou said, “not that hard, okay?”
Mortvedt ignored her pleading. When Betty Lou sharply complained again, he suddenly slapped her across the face with his right hand. “Goddam you,” she cried, face flushed with anger, the imprint of his hand visible on her left cheek. “What’d you think your doin’?”
Mortvedt dismounted momentarily. With a quick move, he flipped Betty Lou over on her stomach, then thrust his knees up between her legs. “I don’t like it there, not back there,” Betty Lou screeched. As she continued to protest, Mortvedt took her T-shirt and wound it roughly around her face so that it covered her mouth, muffling her cries.
Betty Lou tossed her head from side to side, her body squirming, but she could not get out from underneath Mortvedt, who was far too strong for her. As she tried to pull her knees up under her, he hit her a cracking punch on her right cheek. Betty Lou fell forward onto a pillow, tears of pain and anger beginning to pour down her rapidly swelling face. The laughter from the audience on the television drowned out the rest of the noises she made.
“Little man, eh?” said Mortvedt, thrusting his penis into Betty Lou’s anus. He pistoned into her, grinning at her whimpered sounds of pain that stretched over the minutes.
Mortvedt watched his face in the pock-marked mirror that stretched the length of the bed’s headboard. The louder Betty Lou wailed, the wider his smile became.
Chapter 15
In March of the year after Ronald Mortvedt, on Harvey Rexroth’s instructions, had pulled off the widely publicized and never solved theft of the in-foal mare Donna Diane—and three years before Jack Doyle went to work at Willowdale—the mare produced a sprightly brown foal without a mark of white anywhere on him. The birth of this very plain-colored youngster took place on a section of Willowdale Farm known as the Annex, a piece of property that at the time housed only Donna Diane and an old gelding that had been placed there to keep her company.
As the birth of the bay foal represented, to Rexroth, a furtherance of his revenge, it also signaled the imminent demise of Donna Diane. The mare was simply too valuable, her unsolved theft still too fresh in the minds of Kentucky horse people, for her to remain alive and possibly be discovered. So Ronald Mortvedt was summoned from Louisiana. He found Donna Diane in her dark field one night and silently dispatched her with a fatal dose of pentobarbital supplied to him by a ruled-off New Orleans veterinarian named Karl Classen.
Unlike the insurance claim-driven horse deaths that were to come at Willowdale, Donna Diane’s demise was of course not reported. Instead, Mortvedt and Jud Repke winched Donna Diane’s carcass onto the back of a flatbed truck, covered it with a tarpaulin, and drove to the farthest reaches of the Willowdale property, an area once used as a dump before environmentalists hounded Rexroth into abandoning it. There, they buried the champion mare Donna Diane. Mortvedt drove back south that night, $10,000 richer even after he had paid Repke his share.
The orphaned brown foal, an avid eater, was placed with a nurse mare. The Willowdale groom Pedro Ramos was given as his assignment the full-time monitoring of and caring for this pair. One night that fall, the brown colt was ushered unobtrusively by Pedro into a field of other weanlings. Only Rexroth’s farm manager at the time, Bob Brokopp, was made aware of the fact that the weanling band at Willowdale had been enlarged by one. Other observant workers noted the presence of the newcomer, but were told by Brokopp that Rexroth had bought the youngster privately from a small breeder up in Maryland. Such purchases were not uncommon.
When Brokopp was given his walking papers, as well as a large cash settlement to his contract, direct knowledge of the brown colt’s background remained with Pedro Ramos. At Rexroth’s instructions, Pedros’ wage package had also undergone considerable enhancement, so much so that he was the proud owner of a new Jeep Cherokee, which made him the envy of his fellow grooms. “I won a big trifecta over at Keeneland,” Pedro said, explaining his newfound riches.
***
In the months immediately following the theft of Donna Diane, Rexroth had relished the situation purely from the revenge angle. The outrage and anguish evidenced by the Irish-English combine when Donna Diane was discovered missing from her paddock one morning gave Rexroth tremendous satisfaction. “Hear the howls from across the ocean?” he happily asked. When the mare remained undiscovered, at first her angry owners charged carelessness, if not malfeasance, on the part of the well-known Kentucky farm which had boarded her after her sale. Later, they accused area law enforcement officials, who had unearthed no hint of Donna Diane’s whereabouts, of gross inefficiency.
Rexroth chortled mightily at these developments, although only privately, or occasionally in the presence of Stoner and Kauffman. The dense bodyguard had no interest in the matter, other than the fact that it put the boss in good humor, but Stoner asked Rexroth, “What do you plan to eventually do with this colt?”
Leaning back in his chair at poolside, Rexroth paused to light one of his hefty cigars before replying.
“Keep him out of the hands of those goddam foreign raiders,” Rexroth said. “That’s satisfaction enough for me.
“If they’d just had the class, or courtesy—I’m talking amongst gentlemen, now—to offer to go partners with me on Donna Diane, they’d still have their six million dollar mare.
“But I’ve got her colt now, and I don’t care if he’s not worth a dime on anybody’s market. I’ve got him and those sons a bitches don’t.” Rexroth pounded his big fist on the desk for emphasis, his broad face aglow with the sheen of triumph.
This situation, one that involved Rexroth playing dog in the manger with a stolen horse, remained unchanged until one day early in June, two years later, when the publishing tycoon received a phone call from Douglas Phillips, beleaguered editor of the Horse Racing Journal. Phillips, as had been the case ever since he had held his post, remained under intense pressure from Rexroth to produce sensational stories involving the “dark side” of racing.
“Mr. Rexroth,” Phillips said nervously, “I know you want to be kept informed of any major series that we might run in the paper. That’s why I’m calling. I think we’ve got a good one,” Phillips said nervously.
“I’ll be the judge of that,
” Rexroth growled.
After a brief period of silence, during which he took a hearty swig from the flask of Cutty Sark combined with Maalox that he kept in his desk, Phillips continued: “We’re thinking along the lines of a three-part series, based on a file of old clippings one of our librarians came across when she was doing research at the public library. She kind of stumbled on this packet of stories from 1909, all from Midwest newspapers and all having to do with a huge scandal involving racetrack fraud.”
“Nineteen hundred and nine?” Rexroth thundered. “The Horse Racing Journal isn’t an historical magazine, Phillips, it’s a racing daily. Have you forgotten that?”
Aided by another larrup of the Maalox-Cutty fortifier, Phillips stubbornly persisted. He said he thought the more than eighty-year-old case could be vividly recalled in a series to be authored by Clyde Senzell, one of Horse Racing Journal’s feature writers.
“Mr. Rexroth,” Phillips pleaded, “it’s a sensational story. Nobody on our staff had ever heard of this case. What these guys tried to get away with, well, we think it has real appeal. Racing’s Past Thieves, we could title it. And remember, Mr. Rexroth, the Racing Daily won’t have this.”
“All right,” Rexroth barked, “send Senzell out here with the clippings. I’ll go over the material with him before I decide if we’ll run this.” He hung up on the hapless Phillips without a goodbye.
Senzell arrived at Willowdale from his New York City base the next morning, having flown coach class, as he hastened to assure Rexroth. After Senzell, a very thin, tightly wound man of forty-five, had opened his briefcase and extracted a folder of fragile, faded clippings, Rexroth waved him away and began to read. Almost immediately, Rexroth found himself fascinated, intrigued, even somewhat jealous of the larceny and imagination that had been displayed decades previous by one John B. Cabray.
