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
Bolger said, “Wonky. I mean, you know,
“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,
“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,
