years. We don’t want to put him in any jeopardy of losing that license. He’s got to be distanced from this thing-on the off chance anything might go wrong.”
“Ah, the off-chance remote possibility factor,” Doyle said. “In other words, you need a fall guy. Just in case this caper collapses.”
“If you play this the way I know you can, nothing’ll go wrong,” Moe said as he rose to leave. “$25,000, Jack, let’s not overlook tax free, when the job is done. Think about it. Let me know. I’ll see you at the gym.”
Doyle watched the dandelion head bounce through a field of phonies clustered near the restaurant’s front door. Moe nodded at some of the waiting people, smiled at others, shook a few hands as he neared the door. “Goodbye, Mr. Kellman, goodbye, Mr. Kellman” members of the wait staff chorused as the little man departed.
“I’ve got a little buzz on,” Doyle said to himself. He sat at the table for a few minutes, thinking about all that Moe had said. He couldn’t help but smile at just the thought of the job he’d been offered.
Doyle found himself strangely pleased that Kellman not only thought him capable of carrying off some kind of racetrack scam, but that he’d recognized Doyle’s readiness to do something that would be, for him, so completely different.
As much as he was surprised at the offer, the possibilities involved, so was he somehow flattered. “Thanks, Moe,” Jack whispered to himself, grinning. “You’ve got your man.”
Summoning Dino, Doyle put a final Bushmills on Moe Kellman’s tab. “In for a penny, in for another round,” Doyle said to the now unsmiling Dino.
Chapter 2
To Jack Doyle, the racetrack was a revelation. Like most Americans, his knowledge of thoroughbred racing was minimal, gleaned primarily from an occasional office outing in which an afternoon at the races meant losing his ass betting the so-called “expert” tips provided by a punk clerk from accounting.
Working in the stable area at Heartland Downs was an eye-opener. For one thing, Doyle had never before observed in one place more ugly men and healthy-looking women.
Doyle was surprised at how quickly he adapted to his new routine. It involved rising at 4:30, leaving his north side apartment at 5:00, then driving the twenty-five miles in his leased Honda Accord to arrive by 5:30 at the track’s secured lot where he parked amidst the vehicles, most of them dice-dangling Chevy beaters, that had transported the other grooms and hotwalkers. These amigos soon decided that Doyle was a dilettante horse owner who reveled in the menial stable tasks because he wanted to maintain a hands-on approach to his investments. Evidently, there were a few such misguided souls who populated America’s backstretches in the mornings when they could have been home sitting on their assets. Doyle did not disabuse his co-workers of their inflated notions of his status.
What Doyle discovered that he liked best was the horses, amazingly powerful but for the most part docile creatures; the clear morning air at trackside, filled with the sounds of these beasts pounding through their exercises; the odor of the horse barns, a combination of liniment, horse manure and hay; and, finally, the upfront hustling of people who were trying to win something directly off their fellow horsemen without any bullshit nineteenth hole conniving or three-martini
Doyle’s first meeting with his new boss, Angelo Zocchi, took place on a bright Monday morning. It did not go well. The sixty-year-old Zocchi, a weathered piece of work who had been on the racetrack most of his life, hadn’t hired a male gringo in years-“they all drink too much back here,” Zocchi contended-but the Word Had Come Down.
Zocchi’s first words to Doyle, after he had appraised him with a look of disapproval, were: “Don’t fuck up.”
Doyle grinned. “People pay thousands of dollars to attend seminars and get such advice,” he said. “You’ve got state-of-the-art leadership skills, Angelo.”
Angelo produced a laser-beam look. “They’ll tell you what to do when the time comes,” he said. “I don’t deal in this crap except when I’m told to. They don’t need this money they try for-it’s a power trip for them, from the old days, just a gig. They try to pull one off every two, maybe three years, and they always find some chooch like you to tool it.
“Just do what you’re told,” Angelo added, “that’s all. Then get out.”
Doyle was required to obtain a state license before he could begin working as a groom for Zocchi. On the line of the application that inquired about felony convictions, Doyle wrote in “none,” while thinking to himself,
***
Other than Angelo Zocchi, who seemed to regard him with a mixture of fear and contempt, Doyle’s fellow workers were an amiable lot, particularly E. D. Morley and Maggie Howard. Morley was a middle-aged ex-boxer from Chicago’s West Side whose real name was St. Charles Robinson. A few years back, St. Charles Robinson had assumed a new identity upon becoming a Rastafarian.
“I dig the hair and the dope, mon,” he explained to Doyle, “and I om picking up the accent very nizaleey.”
Maggie Howard was a twenty-six-year-old exercise rider from Sallisaw, Okla., a bouncy little item with tousled black hair and gray eyes whom Doyle had heard described-in racing parlance-as “having great hands” and “a wonderful seat on a horse.” Doyle didn’t know from the hands, but he could enthusiastically endorse the Howard seat. Payday of Week Two, Doyle invited Maggie to have dinner with him after the races.
“No chance,” she responded.
“I like directness,” Doyle said, “so maybe you can tell me why.”
“Because I think you’re a phony, and you’re up to something back here. You aren’t any groom,” Maggie snorted.
“I’ve got the scars and the alimony receipts to prove it,” Doyle said. “Two times a groom.” Although disappointed at her response, Doyle still had to admire Maggie’s smooth-striding retreat down the shedrow. “That was a joke,” he called after her. “Think about it-I mean dinner, sometime.” Maggie never broke stride.
Doyle did not miss a day of work. In Week Three, he was instructed by Angelo Zocchi to begin grooming the “target horse.” By this time, Doyle had learned a few things about his new occupation: how to sidestep manure, keep alert at all times while avoiding being stepped on by any of these thousand-pound, frequently fey animals he cared for; how to water and feed them, and pick dirt out of their feet; how to brush, comb and rub-rag them to a Simonize glow. Zocchi was a taskmaster; Doyle, as he had been for most of his life, was very good at tasks whose worth he could recognize.
Doyle’s Project-named City Sarah-was a four-year-old black filly with a dazzling burst of speed on the racetrack and the disposition of an eager puppy off of it. Although she was a relatively cheap item in Zocchi’s well- stocked public stable-a claiming horse, whose genetic composition confined her to competing on the lower end of racing’s class scale-City Sarah was the stable pet. City Sarah eagerly nuzzled greetings to anyone who visited her stall, ate jelly doughnuts whenever they were offered, and developed an obvious affection for Doyle, who had never been held in comparable esteem by anything that weighed a half a ton or by anything that weighed considerably less.
At the end of that week, Doyle was summoned by phone for dinner at Dino’s with Moe Kellman. Plans were thereupon unfolded. Angelo Zocchi, Moe said as he dipped breadsticks in a specially prepared garlic paste, was to enter City Sarah in two races she could not possibly win. “Put her in over her head twice for thirty-five grand claiming, she’ll be nowhere,” Moe assured.
Next, the Real Foray into Fraud: Angelo would run City Sarah back down at her true class level, $25,000 claiming, and she would fail once again, this time courtesy of Doyle’s work. With this trio of clinkers dotting her dossier, City Sarah would again be entered for $25,000 claiming-and this time she would win.
The odds, Moe said, would be “exactly what my Group is looking for. We’ll bet our money, the horse wins, and that’s that. Very simple, Jack,” Moe said, waving a breadstick for emphasis.
