Prince Fennimore and Signorina Goldini, died. When Prince Fennimore died I was at a horse sale Rexroth insisted I attend down in Florida. When the mare died, I’d gone with one of our crews to bring a shipment of two-year-olds up to the racing stable at Heartland Downs.”
Doyle digested this for a minute. Then he said, “Okay, this could be looked at in a couple of ways. One, Rexroth thinks you’re on to him and wanted to keep you out of the way so there was no chance that you’d discover the horse killers in action.
“Of course, there’s also possibility number two. That you’re involved in masterminding these killings and conveniently scheduled absences for yourself when they were to take place.”
Bolger stopped walking. Gripping Doyle’s arm, and powerfully squeezing it, he exclaimed, “If that’s a joke, my friend, it’s sure not funny. And if it’s not…well, what the
Doyle shook off Bolger’s hand. “Only kidding, buddy,” he said. “I get your point. And, yeah, I believe you.”
As much as I believe anybody these days, Doyle added to himself.
Chapter 9
After picking up their rented Taurus at the New Orleans Airport, Karen Engel and Damon Tirabassi began the nearly four-hour drive north and then west on Hwy. 10 to the heart of Louisiana’s Cajun country. This area was home to the quarter-million descendants of French-speaking, Roman Catholic settlers who fled there after having been thrown out of Nova Scotia in the mid-eighteenth century for refusing to pledge their allegiance to Britain’s Protestant king. They were an independent lot then, and not much had changed about that strain of their character since.
Acadiana, as this area is known, stretches from Lafayette on the east to Lake Charles on the west and is home to some of the most fun-loving, colorful citizens and memorable food that the United States has to offer.
Damon drove as Karen worked to adjust the air-conditioning. Outside the car, the morning air was thick with humidity. Oak trees seemed to shimmer and sag in the bright sunlight, and moss-covered cypresses looked similarly lethargic. The terrain varied between prairie and swamp, its common bond an enveloping layer of heat.
The two FBI agents had flown south from their Chicago base after a long phone conversation with Clayton Fugette, an agent in the Bureau’s New Orleans office. Fugette said he had received a tip from what he termed a “normally reliable informant-or as reliable as the damned snitches ever get to be”-that the horse killer, or killers, sought by Engel and Tirabassi was “from down around here, over by Lafayette. That’s in Cajun country. My man said the horse killer is supposedly an ex-jockey who went bad. Said the guy was now making a real good living killing horses for rich people for the insurance money.
“I think you should take a trip over there,” Fugette advised. “I don’t have anybody to spare right now myself. You’ve never been there, right? Well, it’s a whole different world.
As Damon drove rapidly up the interstate, Karen reached into her briefcase and took out a file. “According to the postal records, there must be nearly as many Mortvedts around Lafayette as there are catfish in the bayou.”
Damon nodded. “Yeah, it might take some time. But we’ll find the right family, or somebody who can tell us about this guy,” he said, his mouth tightening. Karen had little doubt that this would be true, for Damon was widely known in the Bureau as being one of its most tenacious agents. Before Karen was assigned to the Chicago office and teamed with him, she had heard numerous admiring references to the man they called Tirabassi the Terrier because suspects were unable to shake him off.
Damon was a native of Chicago’s Little Italy, a tightly knit neighborhood on the near west side of the Loop. He had developed an anti-crime attitude as a young boy, its source the fact that his father’s tiny sandwich shop was forced to pay “tribute” to the arrogant, “made” guys who strutted around Taylor Street like, as Damon used to sneer, “little Mussolinis.” He developed a powerful contempt for these small-time hoods who preyed on their fellow Italian-Americans, secure in the knowledge that they would not be “ratted out” to the law.
That contempt never left him through the years when Damon earned a business degree at the nearby University of Chicago-Illinois, then a law degree on scholarship at Northwestern University. At age forty, Damon had now been an FBI agent for twelve years. He was happily married, with three sons, all of whose youth soccer teams he helped to coach.
Two years earlier, after they had progressed through the early months of their partnership, Damon had finally felt at ease enough with Karen to begin kidding her that the reason they would work well together was that she had “been brought up with enough Dagos to know what to expect.”
It was true that Karen had had several good friends among the sizable Italian-American community in her home town of Kenosha, Wisconsin. She had certainly stood out from most of them physically, with her Swedish- American complexion and her size: at five feet ten inches and one hundred forty-five pounds, she had the athletic build and the ability to earn a volleyball scholarship at the University of Wisconsin, from which she’d graduated with a degree in criminal justice. She’d also taken her law degree there, and it was at the UW law school that she’d met and married Dan Litzow.
That ranked as her only real mistake made in Madison, she once told Damon; she and Litzow had divorced after three years. At thirty-three, Karen entertained few thoughts of marrying again. She dated occasionally, but for the most part found herself satisfied with making her work the overwhelming priority of her life.
Karen smiled to herself as she glanced sideways at her super-serious partner. Damon’s only real flaw, as far as she was concerned, was his major lack of a sense of humor. He wasn’t dour, but rarely did Damon permit himself even a chuckle, even when smack dab in the middle of situations that cried out for laughter. Karen remembered Damon’s all-business attitude when the two of them had apprehended a missing Chicago grain exchange dealer hiding in the canvas-covered jacuzzi of his hunting lodge in the northern Wisconsin woods. Once they’d pulled the cover back off the steaming jacuzzi, the finance felon had leaped to his feet from the roiling water, hands in the air, wearing only a Green Bay Packers ball cap. “Don’t shoot, I’ll pay it all back,” he had said loudly. Karen could hardly retain her grip on her revolver as she took in this ludicrous scene.
Damon had responded by looking impassively at their dripping-wet quarry. “You’re damn right you will, Cheesehead,” was all he had said.
A few days later, back in Chicago and describing this arrest scene to their supervisor, Karen had commented, “And Damon, well, he was the epitome of cool.” She had meant it as a compliment. Hearing her say that, Damon shook his head and sighed. “I’m not cool,” he insisted quietly. “I’m like most people. I spend my life bouncing back and forth between boredom and hysteria. I just cover it up pretty well,” he had added with a small smile.
Damon, driving with his usual calm precision, was not devoting any thought to his partner’s psyche. He had immediately accepted Karen as a required presence in his career, one whose ability to perform her job was, to his mind, never jeopardized by the fact that she was tall, intelligent, and right on the border of beautiful, despite her practical hairstyles and understated makeup.
Nor, in spite of the kidding remarks of envious male colleagues, had Damon ever thought of Karen in any way other than as that of trusted partner. Damon had grown up in a household with four very bright older sisters, a circumstance that had early on given him an abiding liking of and respect for women. And once he had, ten years before, married Marie Romano, Damon Tirabassi had never evidenced any hint of a roving eye. In his marriage, as in his professional life, Tirabassi was steadfast.
Damon shifted slightly in his seat. “You’ve read what there is on this Mortvedt,” he said to Karen. “Sum it up for me, will you?”
Karen said, “It’s not much. Just a summary of reports and rulings from the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau, the horse racing industry’s security arm.”
Mortvedt, she said, early on was the subject of the normal number of suspensions for occupational infractions-rough riding, careless riding, failure to exercise proper judgment. But as his career settled into the trough of mediocrity, his temper often took hold of him in public, and the young Cajun was fined for “striking his horse on the head” after three different losing races. On two other occasions he was suspended for viciously kicking
