Triple Crown

by Felix Francis

  All of them except me. I had volunteered to keep an eye on the barn, plus its residents, while Keith went with Diego and Maria over to the track with our two runners.

  I checked my watch – 5.07 p.m.

  George Raworth and Charlie Hern would, right now, be readying the two horses in the saddling boxes next to the Belmont paddock.

  The race was due off at 5.28.

  I had asked Keith to leave the office unlocked so I could watch the race on the television, and he had readily agreed. Being allowed to be in the office meant that searching it was so much easier and far less stressful.

  ‘I reckon we have a good chance with both of ours,’ Keith had said before he left, hardly managing to control his excitement. ‘There’ll be a bonus for us all if we can win this.’

  My bonus would have been to turn up something that would justify a FACSA raid but there was nothing incriminating in either the desk or the filing cabinet, only regular papers concerning such mundane matters as deliveries of feed or bedding, plus the personnel files for the stable staff, which included references and testimonials from previous employers.

  I skimmed through them looking for anything from Adam Mitchell that might indicate a prior employment, but there was nothing.

  I glanced at Maria’s file. She had been born Maria Isabella Quintero in San Juan City Hospital, Puerto Rico, some twenty-seven years ago, and this was her first job since coming to the United States the previous January. There was nothing particularly remarkable in that. However, the file for her cousin, Diego Ríos, was much more revealing.

  Diego was two years older than Maria, and also hailed from San Juan. He had been a groom at Raworth’s barn for a little over a year but he had been in trouble on two occasions in the past four months, since Maria’s arrival. Both were for violence against other grooms, and the second had resulted in his arrest.

  According to a letter in the file from Judge Davidson of the local district court, Diego Ríos was subject to something called an ‘adjournment in contemplation of dismissal’, an ACD.

  It was a bit like a suspended sentence except that Diego had not yet been convicted of anything.

  But he had been charged with one count of assault and the ACD simply meant that his trial had been deferred for six months. The letter went on to say that, provided Diego did not commit another offence of any kind in those six months, the case against him would be dismissed. However, if he did offend again in that time, Diego would go on trial for the assault and, if found guilty, would be jailed for up to one year at Rikers Island, the notorious New York prison.

  The letter was dated April 4th. Just one month ago. And it had been sent to George Raworth as the ACD had needed the consent of Diego’s employer to give him ‘the benefit of the doubt’ and to continue with his employment.

  So that was why they had to keep an eye on him.

  They clearly didn’t give him that much benefit of the doubt, and for good reason. My sore groin was witness to the fact that he had not learned his lesson.

  I glanced once more at my watch – 5.10. Eighteen minutes to the race.

  The drug store was well ordered with packets of powders and bottles of pills in neat rows on the two upper shelves. Below that there was an open box of sterile needles along with small red-, green- and purple-capped glass Vacutainer test tubes used for taking blood. There was also a supply of multi-sized hypodermic syringes in sealed plastic packs.

  Several brown clenbuterol syrup bottles were lined up next to them, and also some packs of stanozolol, the anabolic steroid that the FACSA vets had tested for at Hayden Ryder’s barn at Churchill Downs.

  Was Raworth using them too close to a race, just as Ryder had been suspected of doing? Was that a good enough reason to raid the barn?

  I had seen no sign of their illicit use, but I looked after only four of the twenty-eight horses. I was also confident that Fire Point hadn’t been on steroids as he’d been tested both before and after the Kentucky Derby and found to be completely clear of any banned substance.

  Standing upright on the left-hand side of the second shelf was the stable drug register, a ledger in which all drugs given to all the horses in the barn had to be recorded. At least that is what the New York Racing Association demanded.

  I flicked through the pages and looked at the entries for the past few days. The record showed the pre-race injections of Lasix given to Anchorage Bay on Thursday and Teetotal Tiger on Friday, plus the ones given today to the two runners in the Man o’War Stakes. It also recorded the sedatives, hyaluronic acid and Adequan injected into Paddleboat by the vet on Thursday morning. There was also a record of the clenbuterol being administered daily in Paddleboat’s feed.

  I checked my watch again: 5.16. Twelve minutes to post-time.

  Beneath the shelves of drugs were stacked several cardboard boxes and I briefly took a mental snapshot of their positions before looking in them. One had rolls of unused leg bandages, a second had spare saddle pads and a third was full with plastic containers of disinfectant.

  Underneath the boxes, in the corner of the store, there sat what appeared at first to be a rather stumpy beer keg – a heavy metal cylinder about eighteen inches tall and a little over a foot in diameter, with two carrying handles welded to the top. I lifted out the cardboard boxes so I could see it more clearly.

  The white cylinder had ‘CryoBank’ painted in blue letters on its side, and it certainly didn’t contain beer – far from it.

  The lid was much smaller in width than the cylinder, similar in size and shape to the caps on those large bottles of water used in office drinking fountains, except that it was metal not plastic. There was a slight ‘pop’ sound as I removed it, as if a little pressure had been released. I tried to look in but couldn’t see anything due to a white fog that swirled about inside the container.

  I’d seen something like this before, at the equine research hospital in Newmarket. This was a cryogenic flask used to store living cells at very low temperatures, immersed in liquid nitrogen. But what was it doing here?

  I remembered asking the laboratory staff at the hospital how often the liquid nitrogen had to be replaced due to it evaporating into the air. Every two or three weeks, they had said, depending on how often the flask was opened and how much material was being stored.

  So this flask, which clearly still had liquid nitrogen in it, must have been refilled fairly recently.

  I glanced again at my watch: 5.20.

  I had to get back to the office in time to watch the race. I needed to know what happened.

  The flask had a metal rod clipped to the rim that went down into the tank beneath. I went to touch it but it had frost on the handle, so I folded one of the saddle pads from the box and used it as an insulating glove to lift the rod. On the end was a metal cup containing three straws, similar to plastic drinking straws but rather smaller in both length and diameter. Each of the three contained some deep-frozen material.

  I would have loved to remove one of the straws for testing but, with only three there, I was worried it would be missed. But, if I couldn’t take the chance of taking a whole straw, how about if I took just a bit of one? Or would it then stand out as being shorter than the other two?

  I went back into the feed store. Hanging on a hook were a pair of scissors used to open the feed bags. I fetched them and cut about half an inch off the bottom of each of the straws, making sure that the bits contained some of the frozen material. I carefully placed them into one of the red-capped Vacutainer test tubes, which I then slipped into my pocket.

  5.23.

  Time to go.

  I returned the three straws to the metal cup, lowered it back into the liquid nitrogen and re-clipped it to the rim as before. Then I secured the lid, returned the saddle pad and restacked the cardboard boxes. I spent a moment checking they were back exactly as I had found them.

  5.25.

  Satisfied, I relocked the drug store, silently let myself out into the shedrow and went quickl
y back to the office.

  The ten runners were at the start, still having their girths checked. The Man o’War Stakes was run on the turf course that sits inside the main dirt track. The race was over a mile and three furlongs so the starting gate was in front of the grandstand.

  With one eye on the TV screen, and with the outer office door shut and locked, I used the picks to let myself into Keith’s bedroom. Maybe I was just naturally inquisitive, but it seemed a shame not to have a quick look in there while I had the opportunity. I might not get the chance again.

  Not that there was much to see.

  Keith appeared to have very few clothes, hardly enough to fill even half the available locker space. Indeed, he had more well-thumbed copies of hardcore girlie magazines than anything else, mostly spread across the floor under his bed.

  Each to their own.

  I went back into the office, locking the door to Keith’s bedroom behind me.

  ‘They’re in the gate,’ called the track announcer through the TV. ‘And they’re off and running in the Man o’War Stakes.’

  Neither of the Raworth horses won the race. One finished a creditable third but the other was always well off the pace, trailing in last of the ten, some twenty lengths behind the winner.

  The mood in the camp when everyone returned to the barn couldn’t have been more in contrast to that of the previous day after Teetotal Tiger’s triumph.

  George Raworth was spitting feathers in anger, in particular over the horse that had brought up the rear of the field.

  ‘That damned jockey,’ he kept saying over and over to Charlie Hern. ‘He never gave the horse a chance.’

  I’d watched the race pretty closely on the TV and, in my opinion, a combined reincarnation of both Fred Archer and Willie Shoemaker wouldn’t have managed to get the horse any closer. It was sometimes easier for a trainer to blame the pilot than to accept the fact that the horse was simply not good enough.

  I slid away from the inquest.

  Just as I had been happy to hang around during the good times of yesterday, I was eager to be away from the doom and gloom of today. I wanted to be perceived as a lucky omen, not a portent of failure.

  Instead, I found a quiet spot away from listening ears to call Tony.

  ‘A cryogenic flask?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s hidden away under boxes in the drug store. There are three straws of material kept in it, frozen solid in liquid nitrogen.’

  ‘Liquid nitrogen?’ Tony said. ‘Is that toxic?’

  ‘No,’ I said, laughing. ‘Eighty per cent of the air we breathe is nitrogen.’

  ‘But that’s not a liquid.’

  ‘Liquid nitrogen is just like the nitrogen in the air,’ I said, ‘but it has been made so cold that it liquefies.’

  ‘But how do you get it?’

  ‘It’s created as a by-product when air is liquefied to produce oxygen, you know, for medical use and such. Anyone can buy liquid nitrogen from an industrial gas producer. It’s storing it that’s the problem. You need what is called a Dewar – a bit like a big thermos. That’s what a cryogenic flask is.’

  ‘But what’s the liquid nitrogen for?’ Tony asked.

  ‘To keep the material inside deep frozen.’

  ‘But what is this “material”?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, ‘but I have acquired some. It is in a test tube in my pocket. It’s no longer frozen but we could still get it analysed.’

  ‘How did you acquire it?’ Tony asked somewhat sarcastically, as if he could already guess.

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  He laughed down the line. ‘Do you want me to arrange a pickup?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said.

  ‘We have a FACSA office in New York. They deal mostly with boxing. I’ll get the station chief to collect it himself. His name is Jim Bradley. No one at the racing section will know anything about it.’

  I still didn’t like it. It would mean someone else would then know that I was not who I said I was.

  Tony seemed to sense my hesitation.

  ‘I’ve known Jim Bradley since we joined the NYPD together as cadets some forty years ago. I’d trust him to hell and back. If I tell him it is hush-hush, he’ll not tell anyone, I promise.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Where and when?’

  ‘It’s Saturday. I’ll try Jim at home. Call me back in half an hour.’

  I used the time to have my supper at the track kitchen, exchanging a plastic token with Bert Squab for a plate of highly spiced chilli con carne with rice.

  Fortunately, there was no sign of Diego or his chums as I sat down to eat. I could do without that distraction at the moment.

  I called Tony on the stroke of the half-hour.

  ‘Jim says pass it through the chain-link fence on Plainfield Avenue, which runs up the east side of the barn area. Jim drives a black Ford Bronco SUV and he knows the area well. He’ll park up exactly opposite the high-school sports field at eight-thirty sharp. It will be dark by then.’

  I looked at my cheap watch. It read 6.46 p.m. I had an hour and three-quarters to wait.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘Do you need him to get anything for you?’

  How about a cricket box?

  I was next to the chain-link fence opposite the high school sports field at least fifteen minutes before the allotted time, mostly obscured from the barns by a line of trees and some bushes.

  The streetlights out on Plainfield Avenue, and the other lights on poles around the barns, did nothing more than throw deep shadows beneath the trees within which it was easy for me to remain hidden.

  I crouched, stock still, facing inwards towards the barns, searching for any telltale movement that might indicate the presence of other eyes, there to watch me.

  There was nothing. Not even a rabbit or a squirrel.

  I waited.

  Jim Bradley arrived in the black Ford Bronco right on cue at eight-thirty exactly, and the handover of the Vacutainer test tube through the fence took only a few seconds.

  I was already well on my way back to the bunkhouse before the Bronco had even turned the corner at the end of the street.

  21

  ‘It’s semen.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Semen. Probably equine semen but more tests are needed to confirm it.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous,’ I said.

  ‘Quite so,’ Tony agreed. ‘But that’s what it is, nevertheless. I dug a biochemistry professor at Columbia University out of bed early on Sunday morning to test it. He swears to me that the stuff you gave to Jim Bradley was semen. Some of the sperm in it were still swimming.’

  It didn’t make any sense.

  ‘Why would a training stable need frozen semen?’ I said. ‘Artificial insemination is not even permissible in Thoroughbreds. All mating has to be done by live cover – the stallion has to physically mount the mare.’

  ‘Maybe George Raworth is collecting semen from his colts and freezing it to breed from later, even if it’s not permitted by the rules.’

  ‘I very much doubt that,’ I said. ‘It’s not all that easy to get semen in the first place, not unless you have a mare on heat to get the colt excited. You would also need specialist collecting equipment, and I saw none of that during my search. And what would be the point? He couldn’t use the semen for breeding, anyway. Nowadays, every Thoroughbred foal has to be DNA-tested to confirm its parentage before it can be registered into the stud book.’

  ‘Then your guess is as good as mine,’ Tony said.

  It was Sunday afternoon and I was behind the track kitchen, talking on the telephone. I had purposefully chosen a wide-open space so that no one could creep up to listen to my conversation without being seen. It also had the added advantage that I would be able to see any potential attacker from afar.

  I spun through 360 degrees.

  No eavesdroppers. And no Diego.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ T
ony asked. ‘Don’t you think we have enough for a raid?’

  ‘I think we should wait a while longer,’ I said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Two reasons. First, I am interested in finding out what the semen is used for, and second, I am off to Pimlico tomorrow. I’ll be down there until after the Preakness. There would be no point in planning a raid here at Belmont if I’m not around to see any reaction if Raworth is forewarned.’

  ‘Is his whole operation moving down to Pimlico?’ Tony asked. ‘We could mount the raid there.’

  ‘He’s sending only five horses down in a truck – three run in the Preakness itself, and the other two in different races. The rest of them stay here.’

  ‘How did you manage to get yourself included?’ Tony asked.

  ‘I was lucky. In the right place at the right time. Four of the staff are going, including me, plus George Raworth himself.’

  ‘Well, it’s your call,’ Tony said. ‘Can the British do without you for another week?’

  ‘Paul Maldini was not expecting me back for at least two weeks.’

  ‘But it has already been two weeks since I met you at Dulles.’

  So it had. Somehow, it didn’t seem that long.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I need a bit longer.’

  ‘Shall you tell Paul or shall I?’ Tony asked.

  ‘It might be better if it came from you,’ I said. ‘Tell him that I’m not coming back just yet.’

  ‘How long shall I say you’ll be?’ Tony asked.

  ‘You said to me in London that you needed me to work for you for as long as it takes. Paul Maldini was at that meeting. He didn’t object.’

  I reckoned Paul hadn’t objected because he knew I was contemplating leaving the BHA. He was aware of my unhappiness that I no longer had the opportunity to work undercover. Perhaps he thought it was better to lend me to Tony for as long as it took, and then have me back, than to lose me altogether.

  ‘Tell Paul that it might take a little longer, that’s all,’ I said. ‘When is the Belmont Stakes?’