The Trojan Colt Read online

  “Solve it first, then we’ll talk,” she replied as Jerry brought two checks to the table. I grabbed them both before she could reach for hers.

  “You paid for gas,” I said.

  She seemed about to protest, then just shrugged an acquiescence.

  I left the money and tip on the table, and then we drove back to the station. She dropped me at the front door, stayed in the car—so much for shaving, I decided wryly—and drove off as I entered the building. Lou had gone home, but Drew MacDonald was there. He’d heard about what happened and asked me to fill him in, but he didn’t have any more answers than Bernice did.

  Finally I went to my room, closed the door, found that I wasn’t sleepy—it was only eight-thirty—and sat down at the desk next to the pile of Tony’s Thoroughbred Weekly magazines and the box with Billy Paulson’s stuff. I picked up Eddie Arcaro’s whip and tried to imagine what it felt like to be riding Citation or Whirlaway home ten lengths in front of the field. Probably the way Dick Tracy felt whenever he put a super-villain behind bars. It was a feeling I could only imagine.

  I finally put the whip back in the box and pulled out the inscribed photo again. I didn’t know that much about horses, but I could tell that Tyrone was a handsome-looking animal, even with that scar on his neck. Since Billy was holding the rope that was attached to his halter, Tyrone figured to be under a year old in the shot, and he was already exuding class and power. I replaced the photo in its envelope, pushed the box aside, and opened a Thoroughbred Weekly from March. A photo of the finish of the Flamingo Stakes was on the cover—three noses on the wire, I read about it being the race of the year so far, and I began idly thumbing through the pages. After a couple of minutes I put it aside and picked up the most recent issue, from two weeks ago. It was much thicker than the March issue, which figured, because there must have been fifty pages of ads for yearlings that would be auctioned at Keeneland. I thumbed through it, looking for Tyrone, and I found him in an ad for the Mill Creek yearlings. He had a full page to himself, as befitted the first Trojan colt ever to be sold at auction, and I spotted him by the scar even before I saw his pedigree with his parents in incredibly bold letters.

  I stared at the photo for a moment and thought, And I actually petted you. Somehow I knew that was as close to that kind of quality as I was ever going to get.

  I finally put the issue aside and picked one up from February, which covered the San Antonio Handicap and some other big-money races. I began thumbing through the various issues, and suddenly one of the December issues from the previous winter caught my eye. It boasted an article about the first crops of Trojan and the imported British champion Morpheus.

  I opened it and soon came to a photo spread showing every Trojan and Morpheus colt and filly that was scheduled to be sold at auction during the coming year. To my untrained eye they were all good-looking horses. The Morpheus offspring were mostly blacks and dark bays, the Trojans mostly chestnuts with the occasional bay or gray thrown in for good measure. I spotted Tyrone and his scar right away. The pose looked very familiar, and I realized it was the same photo that Chessman had sent to Billy—but with Billy, who was standing at the edge of it, cut out.

  Or was it the same? Maybe his feet were placed differently. Not that it mattered, but just out of curiosity I pulled Billy’s photo out of the box and took another look.

  And suddenly I knew what question I had failed to ask, and I even knew where I had to go for the answer.

  When morning came I was up almost with the sun and waited impatiently for a couple of hours until I was pretty sure my destination would be open for business. I had one of the officers take the Chevy back and get me a Toyota Camry that was a nice, nondescript gray. Then I packed what I needed in a large manila envelope and headed for the door. Bernice was just showing up for work as I was leaving.

  “You look happy today,” she remarked.

  “It must be the sight of a pretty woman so early in the day,” I said, giving her a peck on the cheek.

  “You’ve figured something out,” she said instantly.

  “Yes, I have,” I replied.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Are you going to tell me about it or not?” she demanded.

  “I’m just checking it out, and then I’ll be happy to tell anyone who’ll listen,” I said.

  She stared at me. “So go already,” she said. “We’ve all been going a little crazy trying to figure out what’s happening. I hope whatever you’ve got holds up.”

  “That’s what I’m off to find out.”

  “Good luck, Eli,” she said as I walked out the door. “I mean it.”

  “I know you do.”

  The Camry felt a little cramped, but I wasn’t going on a long trip. It had a GPS, but I had no idea how it worked. I laid the street map out on the passenger’s seat so that I could refer to it if I needed to, and took off.

  A few minutes later I pulled into a small lot and realized I was only a couple of blocks from the Hyatt where I’d met Ben Miller for what had seemed like an uneventful few days of standing guard over a horse.

  I climbed a few steps to the entrance of the building I wanted, opened the door, and found myself standing in front of a pretty blonde at a reception desk.

  “Welcome to the Thoroughbred Weekly,” she greeted me. “How may I help you?”

  I flashed my detective’s license. “I’d like to speak to whoever’s in charge of the magazine—and tell him that I’m just seeking some information for a case I’m working on, nothing more.”

  “That would be Mr. Kent, our editor,” she said. “Just a moment, please.”

  She picked up her phone, punched out three numbers, and spoke very softly into it. She hung up a few seconds later. “He’s in conference right now,” she said. “It should take about ten more minutes. Won’t you please wait in our lobby? There’s coffee on the counter there.”

  I thanked her and walked to the lobby, which was filled with leather furniture I wished I could take home with me. I poured myself a cup of coffee, added cream and sweetener, and saw that there was a complimentary stack of the current issue. I picked one up and looked at it. Tyrone was on the cover, standing in the sales ring, while the caption explained that he was the sales topper by half a million dollars.

  I sat down, sipping my coffee and thumbing through the magazine. I found I was getting to know a number of the farms and stallions from their ads, as well as some of the current stakes winners, at least the ones who kept repeating their victories.

  I was just reading an article about how the field for the Hollywood Gold Cup was shaping up when the blonde walked over and told me that Mr. Kent would see me now.

  I got up and followed her as she led the way past a maze of work stations until we came to an office at the back of the building. She opened the door, walked inside, and waited for me to join her.

  “This is Officer Paxton, sir,” she said.

  A handsome man in his late forties or early fifties with a head of wavy gray hair stood up. “Thanks, Linda,” he said in a voice that had the faintest trace of a Southern accent. “I’ll take it from here.”

  She nodded and left without a word, closing the door behind her.

  “Have a seat, Lieutenant,” he said, indicating a comfortable chair opposite his desk. “Or is it Captain?”

  I smiled and shook my head. “Neither,” I replied. “I’m not a cop; I’m a private detective. I can show you my license if you’d like.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary, as long as we’re not being arrested.”

  “You’re not,” I assured him.

  “All right, Mr. Paxton.”

  “Eli,” I said.

  “All right, Eli. And I’m Jason. What can I do for you?”

  I pulled the photo Chessman had sent to Billy Paulson of himself and Tyrone out of the envelope and laid it on his desk. “Do you recognize this picture?”

  He studied it for a moment, then loo
ked up, frowning. “Should I?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  “I don’t want to sound careless or uninterested, Eli,” he said, “but we get hundreds of photos in every week. Between races and ads, we probably run close to eighty, maybe even more in the summer, in each issue of the magazine.”

  “Take a good look,” I said. “Take as long as you need.”

  He stared at it intently. “It looks like the sales topper, that Trojan colt, but I don’t know if I’ve seen this particular photo before. I don’t recognize the young man who’s holding him.”

  “The groom’s name is Billy Paulson,” I said, making very sure not to say that it was Billy Paulson, in the past tense. “Let me ask you one more question about it. Why do you think it’s the Trojan colt?”

  “Right conformation, right color, and the scar is a dead giveaway.”

  “I agree,” I said.

  He looked puzzled. “And that’s it?”

  “Not quite,” I said. I pulled the December issue out of the envelope, opened it to the page I’d marked by folding its upper corner, and pushed it across the desk to him. “How about this one?”

  “Same colt,” he said instantly.

  “You’re sure?”

  He nodded his head. “Hell, I think it’s even the same photo, except that the groom’s been cut out.”

  “I think it’s the same photo, too,” I said. “Would you have a copy of the photo on file here?”

  “Certainly. If not the actual photo, than a high-resolution scan of it. We keep every photo that comes in here.” A quick smile. “Thanks to computers, what used to fill four storage rooms now fits in one tower and a couple of externals.”

  “And you don’t see anything peculiar about the photo you ran?”

  He looked again and shook his head. “Not a bit,” he said easily. “Look, Eli, if a world-famous trainer like Todd Pletcher or Bob Baffert was at the other end of the rope, of course we’d have left him in, but no one wants to see a kid who just rubs down the horse.”

  I shook my head impatiently. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Look again.”

  Kent looked and shrugged. “Same picture, absolutely.”

  “But in the magazine the scar’s on the right side of his neck, and in the original it’s on the left side,” I half-yelled.

  “Is that what this is all about?” he asked with a smile.

  “Absolutely.”

  “I can see that an explanation is in order,” he said.

  I nodded my head. “It sure as hell is,” I said. “I want to know why you reversed the photo.”

  He frowned. “Reversed?” he repeated, and then seemed to relax again. “Let me initiate you into the terminology of the publishing business, Eli. Reverse would be to change something that was white on black to something that was black on white. What we did with this photo was to flop it. That’s the term: to flop an image. Right becomes left, left becomes right.”

  “You make it sound like it’s a standard practice,” I said.

  “It is.”

  “Why?” I asked. “I mean, no disrespect, but a horse is a horse. Who cares which way he’s facing?”

  “Mr. Geller—he’s our publisher—cares,” answered Kent. “It’s our policy—well, his policy, which makes it our policy—that whenever possible the horse should be looking off the page, to the open spaces, which he’s theoretically going to run through any second. So if he’s on a left-hand page, he faces left, and if he’s on a right-hand page, he faces right. We try not to have him facing the middle of the magazine; no wide open spaces there.”

  I thumbed through the magazine, and in another three pages I found a horse on a left-hand page racing hell for leather toward the center of the magazine.

  “Then explain this, please,” I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.

  He looked at it and smiled.

  “What do you see, Eli?”

  “Same as you,” I said. “I see a horse and jockey crossing the finish line and heading right for the middle of the magazine.”

  “You see a filly with the number ‘4’ on her saddlecloth winning the Santa Ynez Stakes at Santa Anita. We try to have them all look off into the distance beyond the magazine, but we run dozens of photos of races, and it would look damned silly to flop the photo if it meant we flopped the saddlecloth number and the figures on the tote board in the infield. Even Mr. Geller understands there are limitations to flopping photos.”

  I thought about what he said. I was about to apologize for taking up his time and was preparing to go back to square one of the whole damned problem, when something else occurred to me.

  “You say you have the original photo, a duplicate of this one”—I indicated Billy’s photo—“on file here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Probably on your computer?”

  “Definitely on our computer.”

  “Would it be flopped?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, it would be preserved exactly the way it came in. If this colt goes out and wins the Derby or the Breeders’ Cup, we may do a retrospective of him, but we can’t know now whether he’ll be on an odd-numbered or even-numbered page.”

  “I see,” I said. “I have one last favor to ask. Can you pull up the original and make absolutely sure it was the same as the one I brought in, that indeed you flopped it?”

  “I can tell you right now that it’ll be the same,” he said, and I caught a little annoyance creeping into his voice. “I don’t know what grand conspiracy you were imagining, but I assure you again that there is absolutely nothing unusual about flopping a photo of a horse, a dog, a Playmate, anything where the flopping doesn’t make the viewer do a double-take, such as when letters or numbers are included.”

  “I know, and I believe you,” I said. “But if I can just see it, I’ll be out of your hair forever.”

  He grimaced and sighed. “All right. It’ll take a couple of minutes.”

  He reached for the issue, got the date from the cover, picked up his phone, and punched in some numbers.

  “Hello, Bill?” he said. “This is Jason. In the December 23rd issue we ran a spread of photos on potential auction yearlings from the first crops of Trojan and Morpheus. Print out the photo of Bigelow’s Trojan colt, the one who just topped the sale, and bring it in, would you, please? Yes, right away, thanks.”

  He hung up the phone and looked at me, not without a degree of pity.

  “I’m sorry to destroy your big case for you,” he said. “You saw the flopped photo and thought someone ran a ringer through the sales ring.” He shook his head. “Too bad. It would have made a helluva story.”

  A minute later a young black man entered the office with a sheet of paper and laid it on Kent’s desk.

  “Thanks, Bill,” said Kent.

  “Anything else?” asked Bill.

  “No, that’ll be it.”

  The young man left the office. Kent looked at the printout of the photo and passed it across the desk to me.

  “Same photo,” he said. “Facing the same way as your photo, with the same kid holding him in the same pose. Satisfied?”

  I gave him a huge grin. “More than satisfied,” I said. “Elated.”

  He looked puzzled. “I don’t follow you, Eli,” he said. “What do you think you know that I don’t know?”

  I kept grinning. “Tell me again why there are some photos you can’t flop.”

  “Like I said, if they’ve got letters or numbers, they come out backward.”

  I tossed the current issue of Thoroughbred Weekly onto his desk. “Tell me what you see.”

  “The Trojan colt. Scar’s on the right side, so we probably flopped it again. There are less people off to the right, so we had him look that way.”

  “You didn’t flop it,” I told him.

  “What makes you think not?”

  I pointed to the “213” on his hip.

  “If the scar is on his left side, those numbers
would be flopped too—and they’re not,” I said. “You ever hear of a scar migrating from one side of a horse’s neck to another?”

  He picked up the magazine and held it side-by-side with the photo.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” he muttered.

  Kent was silent for a long minute as the revelation sank in. Finally he came back to life.

  “My God, Eli, what a story you’ve uncovered! Even before we print it, I’ve got to talk to the TOBA—that’s the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association—and tell them what’s happened! Oh, and Fasig-Tipton! They’ve got to know too!”

  “They’ll all know,” I assured him. “But not yet.”

  He stared at me. “I can’t keep something like this quiet. I mean, you’re talking about a three-million-dollar scam!”

  “That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” I said.

  He frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded.

  “There is almost certainly a murder connected with this, and probably two,” I explained. “You’ve got to keep this quiet until I can piece together the evidence I need to nail the killer.”

  “Eli, this is more than my profession,” said Kent. “The racing industry is my life. I can’t stand by quietly now that I’m aware of what may be the biggest single fraud ever perpetrated on it! They have to be informed, to be warned!”

  “It should just be for a few more days,” I said. “But if word gets out that we know what happened, the people I’m after are going to start running. And off the record, they’ve already started shooting.”

  His face reflected his indecision. “I don’t know . . .” he began.

  I could sympathize with him. He wasn’t looking to beat his competition for a Pulitzer Prize. He was concerned with the integrity of the industry he loved and to which he’d devoted his life.

  “All right,” I said. “I gave you the story of the decade. Now I want you to do me a favor.”

  “What?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Come for a ten-minute ride with me.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m cooperating with the cops at a local police station. You know nothing about me, and you probably distrust my motives, or maybe you think I’m out for some personal glory, and I’m probably not going to convince you otherwise by myself. But if the Lexington police explain why this has to be kept secret for a few more days, that we are after more than a crooked consignor, and that we’ll give you all the details first when we break the case, will you listen to them?”