The Trojan Colt Read online

“I’m surprised he’s not Errol,” said Miller. “Still, if they wanted to do it right, he’d be Basil. From what I’ve read, Rathbone was the only one of them who actually knew how to fence.”

  “I gather once they put him out with a trainer, he’ll get a new nickname.”

  “Figures,” he said, nodding his agreement. “I doubt he knows to answer to ‘Tyrone.’ They’re beautiful animals, and I love to watch them run, but they aren’t the brightest critters God made.”

  My sandwich arrived—a club that was ninety percent lettuce, and some very small, very shy pieces of turkey hiding under a slice of tomato. I stared at it for a moment, then picked it up and took a bite.

  “If a jockey has a weight problem,” I said, “he could work it off eating these damned sandwiches.”

  He chuckled at that. “Well, Eli, I’ve got to make my rounds and check on all our men. Enjoy your”—he glanced at the sandwich—“whatever it is, and don’t feed it to the colt. We want him to live long enough for us to get paid.”

  He got up, left a tip on the table that was large enough to cover both our meals, and walked out. I left half the sandwich on the plate and followed him a minute later.

  I wandered back to Barn 9 and walked down the shed row to Tyrone’s stall. Tony nodded to me but didn’t say a word. He was frowning and pacing back and forth.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “You look like you just ate a sandwich I walked out on.”

  No smile, and no answer. His tension was making Tyrone nervous, but he didn’t notice until I pointed it out to him. Then he left the stall, securing the door behind him, and he stared at me for a long minute.

  “You’re really a cop?” he said at last.

  “I used to be,” I answered. “Back when I lived in Chicago maybe ten or twelve years ago. These days I’m a detective.”

  He seemed about to say something, then thought better of it, and sat down on a chair, staring off into space.

  “I don’t know what’s bothering you,” I said, “but if it’ll help to talk about it . . .”

  “I gotta think about it,” he said.

  “Okay, but I just want you to know I’m here for you if there’s a problem.”

  “Thanks, Eli,” he said. “I appreciate it. You’re going to be around tomorrow, right?”

  “Right,” I replied.

  “There’s something I got to talk to you about then.”

  “How about now?” I suggested.

  He shook his head. “There’s someone I have to talk to first.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be here whenever you have to talk.”

  It was obvious that he wanted to be alone, so I went into the tack room and read one of the paperback thrillers I’d brought with me until I fell asleep.

  In the morning Tony was gone.

  I waited an hour or so, then found one of the other men from Striker’s agency and told him he’d better report Tony’s disappearance to Ben Miller and have them get another groom over to Tyrone’s stall, because I had no idea what he ate or when, and I sure as hell wasn’t leading him into the sales ring in five more hours.

  Then I sat back and waited. Tyrone seemed calm, and if he missed his oats or any of the special things they fed him, you’d never know it to look at him. He grazed on the straw in his stall, and since there was a bit of normal commotion around the barn—yearlings being led out of their stalls to be examined by owners, trainers, and vets, plus a few older horses who were being taken to the track for their morning workouts, he stuck his head out over the half door and watched them with what I assume was interest.

  Miller showed up half an hour later with a redheaded, freckled young man of about twenty.

  “Eli, this is Jamie Driscoll. Jamie, say hello to Eli Paxton, who will be keeping the bad guys at bay until the Trojan colt goes to someone else’s barn.”

  Jamie extended a callused hand and took mine in a firm grip.

  “Pleasetameetcha,” he said, scrunching the greeting into a single word. He nodded his head toward the colt. “Got a name?”

  “Tyrone,” I said.

  He smiled. “I approve.”

  “You like old movies?” I asked.

  “You mean black-and-white stuff?” he said contemptuously. “Never watch ’em.”

  “My mistake,” I said. “When you said you liked the name . . .”

  “Tyrone Judson,” he replied. “He’s a six-foot-ten-inch freshman on the Wildcats.”

  I stepped away from the stall door.

  “Well, you two will want to get acquainted,” I said.

  He shrugged. “We’re going to get unacquainted by dinnertime. He’s the headliner in this afternoon’s auction.” He entered the stall, petted Tyrone for a minute, picked up a brush and rag and began grooming him.

  “So what the hell happened, Eli?” said Miller.

  I shrugged. “Beats me. The kid was here when I went to sleep and gone when I woke up.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Something was bothering him, but he didn’t walk to talk about it.”

  “Girl trouble, probably,” said Miller. “That’s what it usually is at that age.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you don’t think so?”

  “I don’t know. But we talked a lot the past couple of days, and he never once mentioned girls. His passion was racing.”

  “Maybe he was upset because in all likelihood he’d be losing Tyrone today.”

  “Come on, Ben,” I said. “Until they get Tyrone in a race, for all you know, you can beat him.” I started reeling off Tony’s figures about expensive yearlings who earned out their purchase prices, and he held up a hand.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “My interest in horses starts and ends at the finish line. Kid probably went out to the West Coast for drugs and sex, just like all the other kids these days. He’s not our responsibility.”

  I could tell Ben wasn’t interested in talking about Tony anymore, and Jamie was busy working on Trojan, so I decided I might as well go over to the track kitchen for what I hoped would be my last meal at Keeneland.

  A couple of Striker’s men were there, but all they wanted to talk about was some owner’s sexy wife, who could probably have bought the three of us with the mad money she spent on clothes in a week. Then, since the NFL football training season had begun, the subject changed to arms. It was always arms in the summer in Cincinnati—Ken Anderson’s, Boomer Esiason’s, Carson Palmer’s, and these days Andy Dalton’s. Once they started full-contact scrimmages it would turn to knees.

  Finally they left. I sat alone with my cup of coffee and what was left of my cheese Danish, and wondered where the hell Tony had gone off to—and, more importantly, why. He had to know that this would be a black mark against him, that no one hires a groom who walks off in the middle of the night, and since he was too big to be a jockey and too poor to be an owner and not anywhere skilled enough to be a trainer, how the hell was he going to find work in this sport that he so clearly loved?

  I thought about it until my coffee turned cold and then walked back to the barn. Jamie had finished rubbing Trojan down and was feeding him a carrot when I arrived.

  “Welcome back,” he said. “Hope you ate well.”

  “As well as can be expected at a backstretch kitchen,” I replied. “I’ll be here ’til the auction if you want to go grab some breakfast.”

  He smiled. “You’re new to the track, ain’tcha?”

  “To all of it except the two-dollar windows,” I said.

  “I know. Around here, the day starts at sun-up. Most of the trainers, grooms, and jocks you see had breakfast three hours ago and are starting to think about lunch.”

  “Thank God I won’t be here long enough to get used to those hours,” I said devoutly, and he laughed.

  “Well, you don’t see any of the owners around in the mornings, either,” said Jamie.

  Somehow it seemed a little early to read the thriller I’d taken to bed the night before, s
o I picked up some of the racing magazines Tony had been reading and started thumbing through them. I didn’t see any ads for the top sires, the champions I remembered from the racetrack, but that figured: they were booked years ahead, so why spend the money on ads? Actually, more than half of the ads were for yearlings that were being sold in the next few days, which certainly made sense. I wondered how many of them would ever be heard of again after the first of the year, the arbitrary birthday of all racehorses. And then I wondered if Tony Sanders would ever be heard of again either. Hell, kids walked off jobs all the time, but there was just something about his face the night before that bothered me. He didn’t look bored, or lustful, or high. He looked scared, or at least worried.

  I spent a couple of hours trying not to think about him. Thoroughbred Weekly had a fascinating article listing the all-time biggest busts—starting with that thirteen-million-dollar half brother to Seattle Slew who never won a race, and juxtaposing them to the list of the greatest bargains. Twenty-five thousand for John Henry looked pretty good, given that he won over six million, but of course he was a gelding and his earnings stopped the day he left the track. The trick was to buy something like Storm Bird and collect eighty million a year in stud fees.

  Anyway, I didn’t even notice the time passing by until one of the sales officials stopped at the stall and told Jamie to get Tyrone ready, that he’d be sending an escort over in a couple of minutes, and then they’d all walk to the sales pavilion together.

  “Personally,” he added, “I think it makes more sense to put the cream of the crop up at night, where fans can watch the auction on streaming video, but two of the people who want to bid on this colt asked for an afternoon auction, since they won’t be here tonight. They could use proxies to do their bidding, of course—I mean, hell, we’ve been doing that for the better part of a century—but I guess they’re business rivals and each wants to gloat over the other if he wins the auction.”

  Then he was gone, and Jamie ran a brush over Tyrone one last time and attached a lead shank to the halter.

  “I’ve gone over every inch of him,” he told me, “and there ain’t so much as a pimple. I say he brings close to two mil.”

  “I’ve heard higher guesses than that,” I said.

  “That’s because he’s the first Trojan colt ever to enter the ring,” answered Jamie. “But he had a mama too, and every time she ran more than nine furlongs she tripped on her pedigree.” He shrugged. “What the hell. Most races are shorter than that these days, so maybe he’ll go two and a half after all.”

  Then a couple of men in suits showed up. “Time,” announced one of them, flashing his credentials, and the other opened the stall door, then stood aside as Jamie led Tyrone down the aisle and out of the barn. The colt pricked up his ears and looked around but didn’t seem at all nervous. I didn’t know what you wanted in an auction yearling, but you got nervous if the horse you’d bet on started sweating heavily on the way to the post. Tyrone was dry as a bone, which is more than I could say for the two guys in suits walking alongside him in the Kentucky sun.

  I’d seen photos of prior auctions in Tony’s magazines, but evidently they’d all been taken at evening sessions, when the rich and famous felt compelled to wear tuxes and designer gowns. But as I entered the pavilion and surveyed the audience, I couldn’t tell the billionaires from the trainers and the press (well, with a very few exceptions).

  I noticed they’d stuck a label on Tyrone’s right flank. It read “203,” and from that moment until the auction ended he was known and referred to only as “Hip 203” by both the auctioneer and in the catalog.

  He was third in line. A filly went for what I was told was a disappointing quarter of a million, and then the colt just ahead of Tyrone was led into the ring. There were a couple of bids, but the auctioneer couldn’t elicit anymore, and he announced that the colt hadn’t met his reserve—something like four hundred thousand—and would be returned to his breeder.

  It got me wondering if maybe everyone had been overestimating either Tyrone’s value or the health of the economy. I didn’t know what his reserve was, or even if he had one, but I had a feeling that Bigelow, his breeder and consignor, must be getting a little nervous as Jamie led him into the ring.

  It turned out that I worried for nothing. The opening bid was a million and a quarter, and the auctioneer was up past two million in less than a minute. I could see half a dozen of the rich and famous whispering with their trainers and their bloodstock agents. Finally one white-haired gent nodded his head, the auctioneer announced that the bid was two and a quarter, and somehow they passed over two and a half and two and three-quarters in the next few seconds to land on three million.

  No one raised their hands or gave any other indication that they were about to bid, and the auctioneer, no fool he, just relaxed and gave them all another minute to confer. Then he announced, “Going once, going twice” and got a three-and-a-quarter-million bid before he could reach “going three times.”

  He gave everyone another minute, and this time no one bid, and Tyrone—excuse me, Hip 203—was sold to Khalid Rahjan, an oil-rich sheikh from Dubai or the Emirates (I never knew the difference; to me it’s all “the Middle East”). I checked to see who was shaking his hand. That’s when I found out that Biff Wainwright was his trainer, and that meant I might actually get a chance to see Tyrone when he began his career, because unlike Bill Halwell, who was strictly a West Coast man except for the Triple Crown and the Breeders’ Cup, Wainwright often ran his horses in the Midwest.

  As Tyrone was led out of the ring, Ben Miller walked over to me.

  “Okay, Eli, they’ve got their own security, so there’s no need for you to stick around. Go on back to Cincinnati and pick up your fee from the office tomorrow morning.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I was afraid that I might catch something, being exposed to all this money.”

  “I assume that’s your notion of a joke.”

  “Probably,” I replied.

  “I hope so,” said Miller. “You may not know it, but Bill Striker could buy and sell a third of these people.”

  I thanked him for another reminder of what I hadn’t achieved with my life and began walking to the exit when a middle-aged couple approached me. They weren’t dressed like most of the bidders, but zillionaires are allowed to be eccentric, so I came to a stop until they were standing in front of me.

  “You’re Mr. Paxton?” said the man.

  “Eli,” I replied.

  He looked around uncomfortably. “We’d like to speak with you, but it’s very crowded and noisy in here. Could we talk outside?”

  “Lead the way,” I said and fell into step behind them.

  Once we were outside they stopped and turned to me.

  “I am Marcus Sanders and this is my wife, Muriel.”

  Something about his name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it, so I looked at him expectantly.

  “We’re Tony’s parents.”

  “Tony the groom?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is he?” I said. “I’ve been worried about him.”

  “So are we,” said Marcus Sanders. “Mr. Bigelow phoned to tell us he’d run off and deserted the horse he was caring for, and that he would never work in this industry again.”

  “Do you know where he went?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “He phoned us last night and said he wanted to talk to us, that something was bothering him and he’d be by in an hour.”

  “But he never showed up,” said Mrs. Bigelow.

  “Has he got a girlfriend?” I asked. “Maybe he’s with her.”

  It was her turn to shake her head. “They broke up when he spent more time with the horses than with her. I don’t think he’s seen her in half a year.”

  “Besides,” added Sanders, “that wouldn’t be something he’d want to discuss with us.”

  “A lot of kids run off to California,” I said. “Or these days, I think Denver and So
uth Beach are two more prime destinations.”

  “He’s never been as far from home as Nashville or Dayton, Mr. Paxton. He didn’t drink and he didn’t drug.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “He’s our son,” said Mrs. Sanders firmly. I hated to tell her how many parents said those same words while their kids were high as kites. She turned to her husband. “Tell him, Marcus.”

  “He seemed to like you,” said Sanders. “At least he said so on the phone. And he said you were a detective.” He paused. “We want to hire you to find our son.”

  “If he’s skipped town, it could be weeks, even months,” I told him.

  “He hasn’t left town,” replied Sanders adamantly. “He wouldn’t know where to go.” He stared into my eyes. “He was worried, Mr. Paxton. He was coming home to talk about something, something important.”

  “And you’ve no idea what it was?”

  “No. Have you?”

  I shook my head. “He was happy as a lark when I went off to dinner and very upset when I came back. But that’s all I know.”

  “Will you find him, Mr. Paxton?”

  “No promises. I can look for him, but this is a town and an industry where I’m a total outsider.”

  “He trusted you,” persisted Sanders.

  “All right,” I said. “I’m not the most expensive detective around here”—an understatement by a few hundred percent—“but no detective is cheap.” I studied them, their clothes, their bearing, making my estimate. “My fee is a hundred and a half a day plus expenses, and a ten percent bonus if I find him. And I’ll want five hundred as a retainer.”

  If he looked like he might back off, I was prepared to tell him I’d waive the retainer and the bonus because I was so fond of Tony, but instead he pulled out a checkbook, wrote “five hundred dollars” on a check that already had my name and the current date on it, and gave me a card with their address and phone number. Then he reached into a vest pocket and withdrew a folded sheet of paper, which he handed to me.

  “A list of his friends,” Sanders told me.

  I studied it. “He didn’t have too many, did he?”

  “He was devoted to his work.”