She motioned for them to sit down across from her, then pushed forward a plate of meat. “That’s barbequed raccoon,” Alice said. “Help yourself. If you don’t like that,” she added, “the red beans and rice are awful good here.” Alice briskly transferred three forkfuls of food into her mouth, her eyes never leaving their faces as she did.
Karen learned forward. “We just had our lunch, Ms. Cormier,” she said, “but thank you anyway.
“The reason we’re here,” Karen continued, “is to try to get an idea of how to locate a man you’re related to. His name is Ronald Mortvedt. We understand he’s your nephew.”
Alice Cormier slowly lowered her fork onto her plate. She looked pained under the weight of unbidden memory. “Oh Lord,” she sighed, “what’s that boy gone and done now?”
In the sweltering south Louisiana afternoon, as a portable fan swept back and forth nearby, making ripples in the fetid air but cooling nothing, Karen and Damon listened patiently as Alice Cormier recounted her recollections of “my sister Audrey’s only child.”
“Ronnie,” she said, “was an unhappy baby, crying all the time, poor little fella, and as he got older he was just a real mean-tempered little boy. And he got to be meaner every year, it seemed.
“Ronnie’s daddy, Maurice, would come home drunk and beat on the both of them, Audrey and Ronnie. It was terrible, what went on there for years. Audrey went to the sheriff a lot of times but never got no help that I remember. I don’t know why. Finally, Audrey just up and run out on them, and later on Ronnie left here, too. I ain’t seen him since. I read about him the papers, though. Last I heard he was over in that prison west of here. I wrote him some letters up there, but I never heard back from him.”
Alice paused to run a kerchief across her forehead. She took a long drink of iced tea before continuing. “Ronnie’s a boy that probably was no good just from his father’s blood-them Mortvedts are nothing but trouble. Never been nothing else. But I always felt sorry for Ronnie. There’s many a time, Audrey told me, that Maurice would whup him for no reason at all. So he was never surprised when he got whupped for something he did do.
“By the time he was nine or ten and starting to ride in the match races around here, he was as hard as oak. There didn’t seem to be anything he was scared of or could bother him-even the beatings from his daddy. Boys four or five years older than him was afraid of Ronnie.”
Over the course of the next hour, Alice took considerable pains to emphasize that Ronnie Mortvedt’s character was in no way representative of his mother’s side of the family. “I’ll tell you all day long that them Mortvedts was the matter here,” Alice said forcefully. “Our people hardly never got into no trouble with the law. And we sure didn’t enjoy it when we did.
“We had people in racing, too,” Alice emphasized. “My daddy, Mervin Cormier, was a very, very well respected horseman. He was known over in New Orleans. He raced his horses there for many years and made a lot of friends doing it.
“I’ll never forget when daddy died. Before they brung him back here to be buried, they had a service for him right there at the Fair Grounds racetrack in the morning. We all drove over there for it.
“It was kind of a memorial service. They held it right after the workouts was over. All daddy’s friends from the racetrack turned out, even though it was a rainy morning, and kind of cool, too. The racetrack chaplain gave a little talk, and then the hearse with daddy in it drove all the way around the track. That’s a mile around there, I believe.
“When that hearse turned into the homestretch one of daddy’s old friends, a horse owner named Jack Muniz, he hollered out, “‘Yeah!
“And everybody else started joining in, saying the same thing: “‘Here comes the winner!’ I remember standing right by the winner’s circle when that hearse moved by real slow. I was crying, and so was most of the rest of them.”
Alice Cormier sat back in her chair. “When you think of what kind of people Ronnie came from-at least on
“So he left to work at the racetrack about”-Karen paused to consult her notes-“eleven or twelve years ago?”
“That’s about right.”
“Has he ever come back here for a visit?” Karen continued.
“Not that I know of,” Alice answered. “From the time he snuck out of here as a boy, I don’t believe Ronnie’s ever been back. One of the Romero boys told me a year or so back that he heard Ronnie was working on some farm up in Arkansas, or Kentucky. Ronnie can’t never be a jockey again, and he can’t get a license even to exercise horses at the racetrack. But he can work on farms, I guess.
“But,” Alice said, “I’m not even sure that’s true. Rumors ’round here are thicker than skeeters in the swamp. All I could say is that, if he ain’t in jail again, he’s probably doing something with horses. That’s all Ronnie knows. He’s smart enough to stick with what he understands.
“Thing is, Ronnie was a pretty bright boy. Could have stayed in school and done well. They was always testing him over to the grade school after he’d get in trouble. They found out that his brain was okay, but his mentality tests, well, they used to get them counselors all worked up.”
Alice Cormier shook her head sadly. “Swear to you,” she said earnestly, “it all goes back to that damned Mortvedt blood. Why my sister ever married into that bunch is something I won’t understand if I live till Huey Long comes back.”
Driving back to New Orleans, Karen said, “This Mortvedt must be a real sicko.”
“I won’t argue with that,” Damon replied as he pulled out to pass one of the horse trailers that had also recently departed LaCombe Downs.
Damon drove in silence for several miles before Karen said, “There’s one thing that really bothers me about this whole case.”
“What’s that?”
Karen said, “It’s that, from the start, the whole emphasis seems to be on apprehending Rexroth. I mean, I know he deserves it if he’s been defrauding insurance companies by having his poor horses killed. But everything seems to be aimed at him, from the time this investigation was launched. He’s the primary target. Looking for Mortvedt, well, it seems like that is seen as just an avenue to get to Rexroth. My question is, what about Mortvedt himself? As the creep doing the dirty work, why doesn’t he have the bull’s eye on
Damon gunned the Taurus into the passing lane and sped past a pair of semis before responding.
“I know where you’re coming from,” he said. “The emphasis from the top has been on Rexroth from the very beginning. I can’t tell you why. And it’s not ‘ours to wonder why,’ either.
“All I know is that Rexroth is the big enchilada on this plate, Karen. Mortvedt’s on the menu, but Rexroth is the main course as far as the Bureau is concerned.”
Chapter 11
After angling across the frenzied Dan Ryan Expressway traffic and exiting onto the Calumet Expressway, heading for Indiana, Doyle glanced out of his car window to the left, seeing the remnants of Gary’s industrial age, the empty foundries and factories. The Skyway was dotted with signs for the area’s current boom industry: casinos. Doyle thought he’d rather be fishing for the industrial-strength carp that inhabited the waters of Wolf Lake to the right of the Skyway than shooting craps on a summer afternoon.
He figured about six and a half hours to Lexington and Willowdale Farm following the tollway to Indianapolis, a quick stop there to pick up a couple of pastrami sandwiches from Shapiro’s Delicatessen, then I-65 through the Hoosier State to New Albany, other side of the Ohio River from Louisville. Then it was an easy seventy-five miles or so from Derby Town to the heart of the Blue Grass.
Doyle moved the radio dial off an all-news station after hearing the announcer begin to describe “an Oak Park
