The Trojan Colt Read online

  “We’re going to have to start charging you board,” he said with a smile.

  “Just making what I hope is my last tour of the place.”

  “You’ve got some leads?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. Just looking around again.”

  “Looking for . . . ?”

  “Damned if I know,” I said. “Same as the last few times: anything that’ll tell me where Tony Sanders might be.”

  “So you haven’t made any progress?” said Standish. “I hope he’s okay. He was a good kid. I hate to think of him lying outside somewhere with maybe a busted ankle.”

  “I sure as hell doubt that’s the case,” I said. “He could have crawled to Louisville by now.”

  “True,” agreed Standish. “I really don’t know why he left. He liked the work, he loved the business, and everyone here liked him. Hell, even Mr. Bigelow liked him.”

  “Oh?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “I thought he barely knew him.”

  “Maybe I worded that wrong,” replied Standish with a smile. “What I meant is that he appreciated the job that Tony did with Tyrone. He had the colt in perfect shape for the sale, and you know how valuable that turned out to be.” He paused. “In fact, just a few hours after Tyrone sold, Bigelow declared it Tony Sanders Night.”

  “He did?” I asked curiously.

  Standish nodded. “He gave me a couple of hundred dollars and had me take the night staff—there are six of them—to the movies in the farm’s van, and then to a late-night dinner. Of course, the guest of honor was missing . . . but still, it was a nice gesture, and they had a great time. One of the half-price rerun houses was showing a pair of the old Sean Connery James Bond films. I hadn’t seen them, even on television, in maybe fifteen years.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I remarked.

  “It was. I know Bigelow’s having a lot of financial troubles, so that made it even more generous of him.”

  “I can’t argue that.”

  He got to his feet. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  He walked out of the office and down the aisle until he was outside, with me just a step behind him. We began walking between the paddocks and finally came to one that housed four mares—two bays, a gray, and a chestnut—and their offspring, which looked like they ranged from two to maybe four months old.

  “Okay,” I said. “What am I looking at?”

  “See the chestnut mare?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s Tyrone’s mother. And the little chestnut filly running around is his half sister, by Instant Replay.” He paused and turned to me. “If you find Tony, tell him I don’t care why he went AWOL, his job is still waiting for him, and I’m saving the filly for him.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  “We had quite a fight to keep her alive,” Standish continued. “It was a rough birth.”

  “Especially without a vet on the grounds,” I said. “Who do you use?”

  “Jim Grady,” he answered. “I brought him with me. Which is to say, I convinced Bigelow to use him when I came to work here. He’s about six miles away, but he’ll come out any time of the night or day on a moment’s notice. I’ve been using him for, oh, it must be fifteen years now.”

  We watched the foals frisking about for a few minutes, then turned and headed back to the big barn.

  “Got a question,” I said as we walked. “I know Tony’s job at Keeneland was to stick with Tyrone around the clock, but surely he had other duties on the farm here?”

  Standish nodded his head. “He had four other yearlings as well, including a filly who sold the night after Tyrone, he helped with some of the babies, and while he wasn’t a foaling man, he’d spend about every fifth or sixth night here, keeping an eye on mares who were about to drop their foals. He knew which staff members to call, and if there were problems after that, it was out of his hands. Once the foaling team showed up, he was free to leave.”

  “So he walked the foals into the barns at night or when it was raining or snowing?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “He walked the mares in and the foals followed on their own. Try to lead a month-old or two-month-old foal away from its mother and you’ve got a panicky foal, and half the time a panicky thousand-pound mare as well.”

  “Which barns would he have put them in?” I asked. “I just need to take one look to make sure I’m not missing anything.”

  He pointed out three barns to me, left me to my own devices, and walked back to his office. I waved to a couple of grooms I recognized, entered each barn in turn, examined the tack rooms and any other areas I could think to look, and found absolutely nothing relating to Tony in any way.

  It was frustrating. I had the run of the farm, carte blanche to peek into every corner. I knew Billy Paulson was dead, and I’d have given long odds that Tony had been killed too, but I couldn’t pick up a single piece of evidence, couldn’t add a thing to what I’d found—or failed to find—the last few times I’d come to the farm. Standish had been absolutely open with me, hadn’t made a single corner of the multitude of barns or hundreds of acres off-limits to me, and still I kept coming up blank.

  Somehow I knew I wouldn’t be back looking for clues or leads again. You only get so many strikes in a baseball game or an investigation before you become a failure and then a nuisance.

  All right, I thought as I walked to the car, there’s nothing to be learned here. It was useless to talk to Jason Kent; he didn’t know a damned thing until I’d visited him in his office this morning. There was no sense confronting Bigelow; comic books and bad movies to the contrary, mighty few criminals brag about all the details of their crimes to the good guys.

  I went through the whole cast of characters in my mind. There was only one left to speak to, the least likely of all to help me track down Tony Sanders. But I had simply run out of alternatives, so I started the Camry and headed off to Blue Banner Farm to talk to Hal Chessman.

  Chessman was in Blue Banner’s breeding barn when one of the hired help told him I was there. He came out a minute later to greet me.

  “Hi, Eli,” he said with a welcoming smile on his pudgy face. “We’re just introducing Marauder to one of today’s lady friends. Care to watch?”

  “I think I’ll take a pass,” I said. “If he can score on the first date, it’ll just depress me.”

  He laughed at that. “So what can I do for you?”

  A stallion’s shrill, impatient scream came from the barn.

  “Take care of his needs first,” I said. “Mine can wait a few minutes.”

  “It won’t be long,” he said. “I’m really just overseeing the men who are actually working with the horses.”

  He disappeared into the barn as Marauder screamed again, and I heard an answering scream coming from deeper in the stallion barn, a scream that sounded very jealous to me. They had a bunch of stallions at the farm, but somehow I was sure it came from Pit Boss, who’d always been a fierce competitor on the track.

  There was some more noise, and then Chessman’s voice barking orders, and then silence, and ten minutes later he emerged from the barn again.

  “Everyone needs a rest,” he announced. “That’s the fifth mare today—and the second one for Marauder. I’m giving them all an hour off before the next one.”

  “Is there someplace where we can talk in private?” I asked.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ve been up since six-thirty, and it’s getting near my dinnertime. Why don’t you join me—my treat—and we’ll talk there?”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. “At least let me do the driving.”

  “It’s a deal,” he said. He stopped a passing employee, told him that he’d be back in an hour or so, and then we walked to my car.

  “This is a special place we’re going to,” he said as he started giving me directions.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Tilly’s?”

  He laughed. “Funny,” he said. “You don’t look
like a native.”

  “I’ve been in the company of some,” I answered.

  We got there in about seven or eight minutes and took a booth in the back. Neither of us looked at a menu. Chessman ordered some salt-cured ham, and I’d liked the hot brown so much I ordered it again. We each ordered a beer.

  “Okay,” he said when Tilly had delivered our beers and gone back behind the counter. “How’s the search coming?”

  “It’s expanded beyond the Sanders kid,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “I want it understood that what I’m telling you is in confidence and goes no farther until I okay it.”

  He frowned. “You’ve got it.”

  “Let me start with a question,” I said. “Were you at the sale?”

  He shook his head. “Blue Banner Farm supports the Saratoga Sale. We didn’t have any yearlings up at Keeneland, so I didn’t see any reason to go. Besides, yearlings are another union at Blue Banner; I’m the stallion manager.”

  “One more question,” I said. “When is the last time you saw the sales topper?”

  “You mean Tyrone?” he said. “Probably about Christmas, give or take a few days. Why?”

  “That was a ringer they sold at Keeneland,” I told him.

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded in loud tones, and a couple of diners turned to stare at us. “

  “Lower your voice,” I said. “This isn’t for public consumption.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Now tell me about this.”

  “Something happened to the real Trojan colt between when you left Mill Creek and Frank Standish arrived,” I said. “It’s almost certain that he died in the interim.”

  “But that’s crazy!” said Chessman.

  “It’s true,” I insisted.

  “What makes you think so?”

  I told him how I’d doped it out. He interrupted once to explain about how flopping photos was a common practice at the magazine. When I told him the kicker, that the hip numbers weren’t flopped and that meant the cover photo wasn’t flopped, he had to agree.

  “I’ll be damned!” he said. “It’s no secret that Travis is hurting for money. His one way out was that colt, and then it breaks something or dies from colic. He’s in a blind panic, and then it occurs to him: he’s got a look-alike chestnut colt, no white markings anywhere, same as Tyrone, and he figures: why not substitute it? I’ve already gone, almost all my staff has come away with me, and Frank Standish hasn’t arrived yet. Probably the only guy who knows is Billy.” Suddenly he stopped and blinked his eyes very rapidly for a few seconds. “Oh, shit! Billy had to be in on it, didn’t he?”

  I nodded my agreement. “He couldn’t have pulled it off if Billy wasn’t a coconspirator.”

  “Billy didn’t run away,” said Chessman firmly. “That bastard killed him.”

  “That’s the way it figures,” I agreed.

  “So is your kid dead too?”

  “You mean Tony Sanders?” I asked. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “These kids get so greedy today . . .” His voice trailed off and he shook his head sadly.

  “I don’t think Tony was in on it,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “I spent a few days with him during the sale,” I said. “The kid was happy, carefree, lived for the sport. Then I go out for dinner the night before the ringer’s sold, I’m gone half an hour, forty minutes tops, I come back, and suddenly Tony’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders. He’s worried as hell, anyone can see that. He knows I’m a detective, and he says he wants to tell me about it.”

  “So did he?”

  I shook my head. “He said he had to talk to someone first, and that we’d discuss it in the morning. He was still up and still worried when I went to bed in the tack room, and he was gone when I woke up the next morning.”

  “What the hell happened while you were out for dinner?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It stands to reason that he got suspicious about Tyrone. He couldn’t have doped it out from the photos, because he never saw the one you sent to Billy Paulson. All I can come up with is that someone said something to him. It obviously wasn’t Bigelow, and I don’t think Frank Standish knows to this day that it wasn’t the real Trojan colt.”

  “Who else would talk to him about it?” asked Chessman.

  “I was hoping you might be able to tell me,” I said.

  A suspicious look crossed his pudgy face. “Just a minute,” he growled. “Are you accusing me?”

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m hoping you can point me in the right direction.”

  He lowered his head in thought for a moment, then looked up. “It’s got to be a vet,” he said. “The Trojan colt probably had to be euthanized, though it’s always possible he got hit by lightning or ran head-first into a tree or a building in the dark. So there are some circumstances under which you didn’t have to have a vet to put him down. But you’d need an experienced vet to duplicate the scar.”

  “I agree.”

  Suddenly he smiled. “And one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “It can’t be Lucius McGowan.”

  “Who’s Lucius McGowan?” I asked.

  “My vet. Mill Creek was one of his clients when I was there, but Frank wanted his own vet, the guy he’d been working with, and we had an opening for a full-timer here. I mean, hell, we’re standing Pit Boss and Marauder, which comes to about fifty or sixty million dollars’ worth for just those two.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Why couldn’t it be McGowan?”

  He grinned again. “Because McGowan patched up the real Trojan colt while I was at Mill Creek. He knows which side the scar was on. Whoever put the scar on the ringer never saw the colt but worked from the flopped photo.”

  “Goddamn!” I said, returning his smile. “I should have talked to you about this sooner! Except that I hadn’t doped out that it was a ringer until this morning.”

  He shook his head in wonderment. “A ringer at the Select Sale. No one in the world would have thought it. These are blue-blooded people selling their blue-blooded horses.” He paused. “Well, all you have to do is find the vet.”

  “How many are there in the Lexington area?”

  “Oh, Lord, I don’t know,” he said. “Five hundred? A thousand? With the billions of dollars of horseflesh in this area, this is the one spot in the country where it can be a big-money job for a lot of them.”

  “Makes finding a needle in a haystack seem easy,” I said, and then a thought struck me. “There’s something I haven’t mentioned.”

  “What is it?”

  “The night Tony disappeared he drove his car over to the Leestown Road Kroger.”

  “The supermarket?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. And here’s the interesting thing. It had rained on his way there and was clearly going to rain on and off all night—but he left the top down on his convertible, as if whatever he was doing only figured to take a couple of minutes.”

  “Now, that’s interesting.”

  “I’ll tell you something else interesting,” I said. “A couple of days later I was shot at by a guy who was parked about two blocks from there.”

  “Same case?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Same case.”

  “Let me guess,” said Chessman. “Was he parked in front of a red brick condo complex?” He gave me the name of the nearest cross street.

  “How did you know?”

  “Didn’t you check who lives there?”

  “A couple of doctors, a lawyer, and a banker, or something like that.”

  Chessman smiled again. “Yeah? Well, one of those doctors is . . . well, was . . . a horse doctor.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not anymore,” said Chessman. “His name’s Tobias Branson. He got ruled off the track and lost his license for supplying some very illegal performance-enhancing drugs to some very unethical trainers. He can’t practice in any of the fifty states. Which, I might add, doe
sn’t prevent him from making a good living off the industry.”

  “Explain,” I said, starting to get very excited.

  “Well, for example, the Jockey Club won’t recognize artificial insemination. You can’t register a foal that’s conceived that way. But if you’re an unethical breeder, and some mare has shipped in and either she doesn’t like your stallion or he doesn’t like her, and you don’t want to kiss the stud fee good-bye, you might wait until three in the morning, put the mare in the stallion’s proximity, collect the sperm, administer it to the mare, and voilà.”

  He paused and took a sip of his beer. “You want another?” He continued. “You know how Olympic distance runners oxygenate their blood? It’s illegal, but it doesn’t show up on tests, because it’s nothing but blood and oxygen. Take a colt that keeps fading seventy yards from the wire, oxygenate his blood, and if things go right you not only win a purse but collect some heavy winnings at the window.”

  “Fascinating,” I said as dinner arrived.

  His face hardened. “Now you have to understand, Eli: this guy is a pariah. No one knows him, no one talks to him, no one acknowledges his existence . . . until they need him, and there are always a few unethical scumbags in every sport and every business who have no regard for the rules and make everyone else look bad. What I’m saying is that I know who he is, but that neither I, nor Frank Standish, nor anyone we associate with has anything to do with Branson or anyone like him. The reason I know his address is because one of the first things everyone in the business learns is to steer clear of it.”

  I signaled to Tilly for another beer.

  “I need a minute to consider this and dope it all out,” I said to Chessman.

  “Just dope it out right. There are two nice kids who aren’t celebrating any more birthdays. I want that bastard I used to work for brought down, and brought down hard.”

  I juggled it all around in my mind for a few minutes while Tilly brought me my beer and I downed about half of it.

  “You know what I think?” I said.

  “What?”

  “According to Combes, the guard, the horse had a visitor, a potential buyer, while I was gone for dinner,” I said. “A fat guy with white hair.”