Blind switch

“Instead, Stoner, I’m going to provide a sure-thing winner for readers of the Horse Racing Journal, whose numbers I predict will swell dramatically after this is over. I’m going to invite the great unwashed and everybody else to share in a winning bet-that Lancaster Lad will win the Heartland Derby! A publisher predicting-no, guaranteeing-a win by his own horse! Who’s ever done anything like that, I ask you?

“Or at least,” he said in an aside to the attentive Stoner as Darla rounded the near turn and headed for them, “the horse purporting to be Lancaster Lad.”

Stoner said, “I don’t know that much about the racing part. I trust your judgment, Mr. Rexroth. But, isn’t this kind of a, well, a stretch, to think that Donna Diane’s colt could win a Derby in the first start he’d ever made at a racetrack? Could he actually be that good?”

Rexroth’s expression hardened. He hated being questioned. Angrily, he threw his cigar into the center of the pool. Randy Kauffman immediately reached for his retrieving net.

Stoner was steadfast. “Mr. Rexroth,” he intoned, looking straight ahead and not at his boss, who hovered over him, “that is what you pay me for-to ask questions of this sort.”

Moments passed before Rexroth said, “You’re right, Stoner, to raise that point. Of course you are.” Rexroth sat down in the chair behind his desk, and his expression softened. “Of course you are,” he repeated. “That is, as you say, your job.

“But worry not, Stoner, worry not, my friend. I know exactly what I’m doing here.”

Rexroth, relaxed again, resumed describing his plans. He said to Stoner, “I want Douglas Phillips down here tomorrow morning so I can personally give him my instructions. Phillips is so dim sometimes that I want to be looking into his eyes so that I can tell for myself exactly what isn’t registering. Can’t do that over the phone, right? Har har har!”

Stoner chuckled in agreement. He was positive that Phillips was much smarter than Rexroth gave him credit for, but that the Horse Racing Journal editor was for the most part nearly stultified by terror when dealing with his boss. Stoner couldn’t help but ask, “Why don’t you just replace this Phillips?”

Rexroth gave Stoner an incredulous look. “Replace him? As cheap as Phillips works?”

When Horse Racing Journal’s executive editor Douglas Phillips heard the red phone ring on his desk, he reflexively reached for his flask. The red phone was for one thing only: direct calls from Phillips’ employer. The sound of this instrument, which might ring twenty times in one day and then not at all for a week, invariably made Phillips feel as if he were undergoing a colonoscopy without benefit of anesthetic. To combat this feeling, he administered his own. Phillips took a lengthy swig before saying, “Yes, Mr. Rexroth.”

When Phillips reached Willowdale the next morning, he was astounded at the orders he was given. “I want you to turn your best writers loose on this story,” Rexroth sternly instructed. “This is to be played at the top of page one of the Journal every day from tomorrow to race day.

“I will personally author a front-page piece in which I promise that Lancaster Lad, up to this point a pretty ordinary performer, will come to life and carry off the Heartlands Derby a week from next Saturday. His remarkable improvement will be the result of a startling new training regimen that will be revealed later. Or maybe not. We’ll iron out those details down the line,” the publisher said, puffing expansively on his cigar.

“Each day’s edition of the Journal,” he continued, “will carry several photos of Lancaster Lad, his jockey Willie Arroyo, trainer Kenny Gutfreund, and, of course, me.

“Other angles will be daily interviews with horse racing people, most of whom if I know them at all-except for the reliable cadre of suck-ups we can always count on-will be pooh-poohing Lancaster Lad’s chances. That’s fine. That’s great. Give their opinions plenty of play, so that they’ll look like the fools they really are once this horse wins the Derby.

“Also.…” Rexroth interrupted himself to look at Phillips, who was frantically scrambling to record every word of his boss’ orders on a yellow legal pad that was becoming blotched by drops of sweat falling from his brow. “Are you getting all of this, Phillips?” Rexroth suddenly shouted. The editor jumped in his chair, dropping his ballpoint and barely managing to hold on to his notepad. “Yes, sir, I am,” he responded. Rexroth grinned maliciously.

“Summing up, Phillips,” he said, “the repeated emphasis-the guts of this story-is that I will make history by guaranteeing a victory by my thus far ordinary horse. That is my vow, that is my promise. And this amazing triumph,” he added grandly, “will be my racing legacy.”

Douglas Phillips’ reaction to Rexroth’s Grand Plan was to think, “He’s really gone over the edge now. He can’t do this.” Of course, Phillips kept his thoughts to himself.

Rexroth, some years earlier, in overruling an objection Phillips had meekly lodged, quoted the late press critic A. J. Liebling, a man Rexroth despised for his liberal politics. “That leftist looney made just one accurate statement in his life,” Rexroth had shouted at Phillips. “I’m going to quote it to you now, and I want you to remember it: ‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.’

“Well, goddamit, I own a bunch of them. And I’ll use them the way I want to. Get it, Phillips?”

The massive publicity campaign got into high gear two weeks prior to the Heartlands Derby. Phillips dutifully saturated the Horse Racing Journal with the story, and all the rest of racing’s trade publications reported it to a lesser extent. So did other media outlets: People Magazine and the Wall Street Journal both carried items describing Rexroth’s “unique promise to the public.”

Chapter 32

Doyle had been back at Willowdale not five minutes that Thursday night after having had dinner in Lexington when the phone rang in his apartment. The caller’s voice was faint against a din of thumping background music.

“Don’t you even have an answering machine?” said the woman resentfully. “I’ve been calling for almost two hours.”

“Who’s this?” Doyle said.

No words came back, just some hushed breathing. Then she said, “I’m calling you to tell you that you all better keep on the sharp lookout out there. There’s a man going to do some damage out there, kill some kind of horse, I believe….He is a small man, and terrible mean. You’d best keep on your best watch.”

Before Doyle could again ask “Who is this?” the connection concluded abruptly from the woman’s end. “What in the hell is going on now?” he said to the silent receiver.

Fourteen miles away, Betty Lou Blackmon put down the pay phone in the lobby of the Red Velvet Swing. Quickly, she slipped back to her dressing room to prepare for her upcoming shift. Tired as she was physically, Betty Lou felt a surge of emotional energy. She wriggled as she checked herself out in the mirror, then grinned at her reflection. “Hope to God they catch that little fucker,” she whispered to herself.

The night before, Betty Lou and her best friend LeeAnne had some drinks, then dinner with Jud Repke. Jud and LeeAnne had been spending time together in recent weeks. Betty Lou liked Jud, because he didn’t mind including her for the occasional late night, after-work meals before he and LeeAnne headed back to his apartment. She liked Jud, too, because he continued to invite her even after she had made clear to LeeAnne that she never, ever again wanted to be within ten country miles of Ronald Mortvedt. The memory of what Mortvedt had done to her in the hotel was enough to make her weep with anger and mortification.

LeeAnne had passed this information on to Jud, and Jud didn’t say anything to Betty Lou about it, never chided her for not liking his buddy. Betty Lou took Jud’s silence on this matter as an indication of understanding. “He’s got so much more class than that Mortvedt,” Betty Lou remarked to LeeAnne.

But the fact that she liked Jud did not deter Betty Lou from placing him in what she hoped was trouble with his partner. That opportunity had presented itself the previous night, when Betty Lou, LeeAnne, and Jud were having “just one more nightcap,” as Jud put it, in the Stoned Pony Lounge of the Walnut Suites Motel.

A boisterous bunch of young Rotarians had just paid their bill and exited the ringside table midway of the