them.
When she’d stripped off her panties, Betty Lou smiled coyly at Mortvedt, her eyes roaming his muscled body until they fell on his emerging erection. She smiled admiringly, her plucked eyebrows raised. “Well now, honey, I guess you ain’t such a little man after all. Whoeee! Look at that big thing standing up to look at me.”
Mortvedt said nothing. He motioned for Betty Lou to lie down atop the worn coverlet. She extended her arms behind her and arched her back slightly as Mortvedt roughly fondled her breasts. He increased the pressure, then began squeezing her nipples. “Hey, baby,” Betty Lou said, “not that hard, okay?”
Mortvedt ignored her pleading. When Betty Lou sharply complained again, he suddenly slapped her across the face with his right hand. “God
Mortvedt dismounted momentarily. With a quick move, he flipped Betty Lou over on her stomach, then thrust his knees up between her legs. “I don’t like it there, not back there,” Betty Lou screeched. As she continued to protest, Mortvedt took her T-shirt and wound it roughly around her face so that it covered her mouth, muffling her cries.
Betty Lou tossed her head from side to side, her body squirming, but she could not get out from underneath Mortvedt, who was far too strong for her. As she tried to pull her knees up under her, he hit her a cracking punch on her right cheek. Betty Lou fell forward onto a pillow, tears of pain and anger beginning to pour down her rapidly swelling face. The laughter from the audience on the television drowned out the rest of the noises she made.
“Little man, eh?” said Mortvedt, thrusting his penis into Betty Lou’s anus. He pistoned into her, grinning at her whimpered sounds of pain that stretched over the minutes.
Mortvedt watched his face in the pock-marked mirror that stretched the length of the bed’s headboard. The louder Betty Lou wailed, the wider his smile became.
Chapter 15
In March of the year after Ronald Mortvedt, on Harvey Rexroth’s instructions, had pulled off the widely publicized and never solved theft of the in-foal mare Donna Diane-and three years before Jack Doyle went to work at Willowdale-the mare produced a sprightly brown foal without a mark of white anywhere on him. The birth of this very plain-colored youngster took place on a section of Willowdale Farm known as the Annex, a piece of property that at the time housed only Donna Diane and an old gelding that had been placed there to keep her company.
As the birth of the bay foal represented, to Rexroth, a furtherance of his revenge, it also signaled the imminent demise of Donna Diane. The mare was simply too valuable, her unsolved theft still too fresh in the minds of Kentucky horse people, for her to remain alive and possibly be discovered. So Ronald Mortvedt was summoned from Louisiana. He found Donna Diane in her dark field one night and silently dispatched her with a fatal dose of pentobarbital supplied to him by a ruled-off New Orleans veterinarian named Karl Classen.
Unlike the insurance claim-driven horse deaths that were to come at Willowdale, Donna Diane’s demise was of course not reported. Instead, Mortvedt and Jud Repke winched Donna Diane’s carcass onto the back of a flatbed truck, covered it with a tarpaulin, and drove to the farthest reaches of the Willowdale property, an area once used as a dump before environmentalists hounded Rexroth into abandoning it. There, they buried the champion mare Donna Diane. Mortvedt drove back south that night, $10,000 richer even after he had paid Repke his share.
The orphaned brown foal, an avid eater, was placed with a nurse mare. The Willowdale groom Pedro Ramos was given as his assignment the full-time monitoring of and caring for this pair. One night that fall, the brown colt was ushered unobtrusively by Pedro into a field of other weanlings. Only Rexroth’s farm manager at the time, Bob Brokopp, was made aware of the fact that the weanling band at Willowdale had been enlarged by one. Other observant workers noted the presence of the newcomer, but were told by Brokopp that Rexroth had bought the youngster privately from a small breeder up in Maryland. Such purchases were not uncommon.
When Brokopp was given his walking papers, as well as a large cash settlement to his contract, direct knowledge of the brown colt’s background remained with Pedro Ramos. At Rexroth’s instructions, Pedros’ wage package had also undergone considerable enhancement, so much so that he was the proud owner of a new Jeep Cherokee, which made him the envy of his fellow grooms. “I won a big trifecta over at Keeneland,” Pedro said, explaining his newfound riches.
In the months immediately following the theft of Donna Diane, Rexroth had relished the situation purely from the revenge angle. The outrage and anguish evidenced by the Irish-English combine when Donna Diane was discovered missing from her paddock one morning gave Rexroth tremendous satisfaction. “Hear the howls from across the ocean?” he happily asked. When the mare remained undiscovered, at first her angry owners charged carelessness, if not malfeasance, on the part of the well-known Kentucky farm which had boarded her after her sale. Later, they accused area law enforcement officials, who had unearthed no hint of Donna Diane’s whereabouts, of gross inefficiency.
Rexroth chortled mightily at these developments, although only privately, or occasionally in the presence of Stoner and Kauffman. The dense bodyguard had no interest in the matter, other than the fact that it put the boss in good humor, but Stoner asked Rexroth, “What do you plan to eventually do with this colt?”
Leaning back in his chair at poolside, Rexroth paused to light one of his hefty cigars before replying.
“Keep him out of the hands of those goddam foreign raiders,” Rexroth said. “That’s satisfaction enough for me.
“If they’d just had the class, or courtesy-I’m talking amongst gentlemen, now-to offer to go partners with me on Donna Diane, they’d still have their six million dollar mare.
“But I’ve got her colt now, and I don’t care if he’s not worth a dime on anybody’s market. I’ve got him and those sons a bitches don’t.” Rexroth pounded his big fist on the desk for emphasis, his broad face aglow with the sheen of triumph.
This situation, one that involved Rexroth playing dog in the manger with a stolen horse, remained unchanged until one day early in June, two years later, when the publishing tycoon received a phone call from Douglas Phillips, beleaguered editor of the
“Mr. Rexroth,” Phillips said nervously, “I know you want to be kept informed of any major series that we might run in the paper. That’s why I’m calling. I think we’ve got a good one,” Phillips said nervously.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Rexroth growled.
After a brief period of silence, during which he took a hearty swig from the flask of Cutty Sark combined with Maalox that he kept in his desk, Phillips continued: “We’re thinking along the lines of a three-part series, based on a file of old clippings one of our librarians came across when she was doing research at the public library. She kind of stumbled on this packet of stories from 1909, all from Midwest newspapers and all having to do with a huge scandal involving racetrack fraud.”
“Nineteen hundred and nine?” Rexroth thundered. “The
Aided by another larrup of the Maalox-Cutty fortifier, Phillips stubbornly persisted. He said he thought the more than eighty-year-old case could be vividly recalled in a series to be authored by Clyde Senzell, one of
“Mr. Rexroth,” Phillips pleaded, “it’s a sensational story. Nobody on our staff had ever heard of this case. What these guys tried to get away with, well, we think it has real appeal. Racing’s Past Thieves, we could title it. And remember, Mr. Rexroth, the
“All right,” Rexroth barked, “send Senzell out here with the clippings. I’ll go over the material with him before I decide if we’ll run this.” He hung up on the hapless Phillips without a goodbye.
Senzell arrived at Willowdale from his New York City base the next morning, having flown coach class, as he hastened to assure Rexroth. After Senzell, a very thin, tightly wound man of forty-five, had opened his briefcase and extracted a folder of fragile, faded clippings, Rexroth waved him away and began to read. Almost immediately, Rexroth found himself fascinated, intrigued, even somewhat jealous of the larceny and imagination that had been
