Doyle waved at a nearby polar bear as he walked the concrete path, deftly dodging a couple of baby strollers, then a child waving a cotton candy stick. The bear, splayed out on a rock in white-furred splendor, moved his head as if to respond. Doyle knew that was not the case, but smiled to himself at the thought.
He was, that sunny afternoon, making his way through Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo because of a phone call he’d retrieved on his answering machine the previous evening.
The voice on the phone had been quick, the message abrupt, delivered in an accent that Doyle realized was that of New Zealand. The voice belonged to Aldous Bolger, and informed Doyle, “We’ll meet Tuesday afternoon, half-past two, Lincoln Park Zoo, in the part they call the Farm. I’ll spot you, not to worry. If this doesn’t suit you, leave a message at 708-864-0854.”
The FBI agents had told Doyle to expect this call from Bolger. It was necessary, they said, for Doyle and Bolger to meet before Doyle applied for work at Willowdale Farm.
“You two need to talk, to go over the details of the job in advance, in case Rexroth has any questions for you,” Karen Engel had said. “Rexroth will definitely interview you. He talks to everybody but the landscape helpers before he hires them. It’s a peculiarity of his. By no means his only one, by the way.
“The fact that you know racehorses, from being around them at the track, will of course come in handy. But farm work, the procedures there, are something you’re not familiar with. That’s what Bolger can brief you on. He seems to be a pleasant enough fellow. I think you’ll get along with him. He can also go over the details of the Willowdale horses.”
Doyle stopped at one of the zoo’s concession stands. He bought a bag of popcorn that he nibbled at as he continued to stroll the tree-lined walkways. It was a little after two o’clock, so he had plenty of time to reach the meeting spot. Doyle’s apartment was located a couple of miles to the north. He’d always liked this place, and in fact often visited it after he’d jogged along a path in the adjacent park. In contrast to the Chicago area’s other zoo, a comparative megalopolis located in a western suburb, the Lincoln Park Zoo was accessible and compact enough to easily be traversed, and most of its inhabitants viewed, in the course of a leisurely afternoon.
Twice, Doyle remembered, he had met women here whom he’d subsequently dated: a wealthy divorcee with an obnoxious young son, and an unmarried veterinarian who worked in the zoo’s small animal house. He’d had a fairly lengthy relationship with the veterinarian until she took a job at the San Diego Zoo.
A breeze ruffled the baggy T-shirts of a group of black children in front of Doyle as he walked alongside the little zoo lake, over which a colorful flotilla of paddle boats moved in erratic fashion, guided by pilots with various degrees of proficiency. The kids, all between the ages of eight and ten, looked wide-eyed at the paddle boats, then at the sheep and cows that grazed behind fences near the red, wooden farm building.
A couple of the kids excitedly asked questions of one of the counselors who moved calmly among them. The kids’ shirts said Better Boys Foundation, a local organization Doyle knew was headquartered on Chicago’s poverty-ridden west side. “Must be an interesting field trip for them,” Doyle thought. He remembered reading a magazine article about gang members from that area of Chicago, only a few miles west of the Loop; several of the gang-bangers had admitted they’d never once in their lives seen Lake Michigan.
Doyle sat down on a bench near a water fountain. The bench was just to the side of the farm building, so he figured he should be visible to Bolger. Doyle remained there nearly fifteen minutes and was beginning to wonder if he’d been stood up. Suddenly, he felt a large hand grip his shoulder from behind him.
“No, no, mister, don’t get up. Sit right there,” Doyle heard the man say.
A man with hair so blond it was almost white moved around the bench to face him, large hand outstretched, broad smile spread across his tanned, pleasant face. He was wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt, blue jeans, and western boots. The man was a couple of inches taller than Doyle, about six feet two inches, but he looked to weigh at least forty pounds more than Doyle’s one-sixty. He looked extremely fit, Doyle thought, not from gym efforts but from years of hard, outdoor work.
Beside him stood a slim, very attractive woman in her early thirties, probably four or five years younger than the man, her hair almost exactly the same color as his. She, too, wore a blue denim shirt, opened slightly to reveal a slender neck, but instead of jeans had on a cream-colored skirt. She smiled at Doyle in friendly fashion, a smile that he found himself warmly returning. Standing between the man and woman were a young girl and boy; like the adults, they had white-blond hair, even features, and deeply tanned skin.
The man said, “Mr. Doyle, I’m Aldous Bolger. Pleasure to meet you.”
Doyle said, “My pleasure. And call me Jack, will you…er, Aldous?”
Bolger looked at Doyle with an expression of resigned amusement. “Let me explain the name,” he said. “Our old man thought Brave New World was the most important bloody book since the Bible, and Mr. Huxley was one of his all-time heroes. My father read Huxley’s novel to our family at least once a year. I know long passages of the bloody thing by heart.” He gave a short laugh.
Doyle said, “Do I call you Al?”
Bolger turned very serious. “Not even once,” replied the New Zealander. “Out of respect to my father, and Mr. Huxley, it will be Aldous, if you don’t mind.”
Doyle nodded in assent. He recognized Bolger as being one of those lifelong horsemen whose years of hard physical work made them gristle-tough and fiercely independent. I doubt I could dent this son of a bitch with a hand ax, Doyle thought. “Aldous it is,” he said aloud.
Bolger turned to the woman. “Caroline,” he said, “meet Jack Doyle. Jack, my sister, Caroline Cummings. And these are her children, Helen and Ian.”
“’Ello,” the children said, almost as one.
“Are you visiting, or do you live in the States, too?” Doyle asked their mother.
Caroline shook her head, her blond bangs moving across her forehead. “No, we don’t live here. This is actually our first time in your country. No, we’re on what you might call an extended visit to my brother down in Kentucky. Longer than he may have anticipated.” Her smile was somewhat apologetic. Doyle noticed that Caroline’s strikingly large, widely set eyes were brown-gold, while the children’s eyes were a very light shade of blue.
“Nonsense,” Aldous said. “Caroline,” he added, “as you know, Jack and I have some talking to do. Why don’t you take the kids in to those farm buildings. We’ll come back for you in a bit.”
“Right you are.” As the three of them moved off, one of the zoo workers announced over a portable microphone, “Our goat-milking begins in three minutes. Watch the milking and try some,” she invited. Helen and Ian dashed on ahead of their mother.
As Doyle and Bolger began walking in the opposite direction, Bolger said, “The ‘long visit’ my sister mentioned has only been about three weeks. She’s more than welcome to double that or more, if she wants. I’m not married. I’ve got plenty of space for her and the kids. They seem to like it at Willowdale. And they need the time away from home.”
Doyle looked at Bolger inquiringly. Bolger said, “Caroline’s husband, Grant Cummings, was a jockey, and one of my oldest friends. He carked it in a bloody awful spill back home at Ellerslie, that’s the track in Auckland, a little over a year ago.
“A terrible, shocking tragedy, it was. Grant was only just turned thirty. He was coming into his own as a rider, just starting to get the best mounts from the top stables. Grant was a great bloke, and a great husband and father as well. It’s been very tough on Caroline and her kids.
“I invited them over here after Grant’s funeral, trying to give them a change of scenery, something to help them along. It took them a long time before they finally decided to come. But I’m glad they did. They seem to be brightening up a bit every day they’re here. Thank God for that,” he said.
Seeing the earnest expression on Bolger’s face, Doyle felt himself warming to the man and his obvious sincerity.
“Caroline’s no bludge,” her brother continued. Seeing the look of incomprehension on Doyle’s face, he quickly amended, “I mean she’s not here to spend time with me because she’s in any financial straits. Her husband left her a goodly packet, and he was well insured. No, Caroline and the kids have got big bickies-what I mean is, more than enough money. They’ve no worries on that score, believe me.
“And for the kids, it’s not all holiday they’re on. It’s winter back home, and she made them bring a term’s worth of lessons with them. She spends hours with them on their school work near every day. Caroline’s a remarkable woman,” he said. “She’s got her own real estate business in a suburb of Auckland. Started it herself and built it up, dealing mostly with the high end properties.”
Bolger shook his head admiringly. “Sometimes I can hardly believe she’s what my little sis grew up to be.”
Strangely, Doyle found this glowing description to be somehow depressing. He realized he’d been immediately attracted to Caroline, but learning that she was a wealthy widow served to dampen his interest. A bit too high up the financial ladder for me, he thought regretfully, and abruptly changed the subject.
“What about you, Aldous?” he asked. “What’s your story?” It sounded ruder than Doyle had intended.
Bolger gave him a startled look at the sudden shift in tone. His ordinarily open and good-natured expression fled his face, replaced with a frown. Doyle realized he’d succeeded, however unwittingly, in hurting Bolger’s feelings.
“Well, then,” Bolger said gruffly to Doyle, “let’s try this path up to the right and I’ll try to sum things up as quick as you’d like. We’ll try to have you home and hosed in an hour.”
Doyle thought, not for the first time lately, that there was a thin line between being a self-protective cool operator and being just a wise-cracking asshole. There were so many “thin lines” in his life-another of the major ones lying, as his old buddy Olegaard back at Bass, Sexton used to say-between “bull-dozing and charisma.” Doyle forced himself to concentrate on what Bolger was telling him.
“I came to the States six years ago,” Bolger said. “I’d gotten started in the horse business back home when I was a lad, mucking out stalls when I hardly came up to the horse’s belly. I worked for an uncle of mine, Duane Hatch, for years. He eventually lined me up with a job in England, and I learned a lot working there on some of the major breeding farms.
“But I was always aware that the best horses, and the best farms, were in the States, especially Kentucky. So, when I heard about an opening at Willowdale, well, cor blimey, I fired off a resume. I figured I had enough experience by then to take on a manager’s position at a major farm. All I knew about Willowdale was that it was owned by a very wealthy man, that he was interested in breeding top horses, and the pay packet was quite nice, indeed. It’s what I’d hoped of doing all my life, man.
“Maybe I should have caught on to the fact that something was wonky when….” Bolger was interrupted by Doyle. “Something was what?”
Bolger said, “Wonky. I mean, you know, crooked. Wonky’s something we say at home.”
“Like cor blimey?”
Bolger grinned at Doyle, his innate good nature back in evidence. “You’ll have to forgive me, friend. Like they say, you can take the lad out of the country, but you can’t take the country’s talk out of the lad. If I confuse you too much, just stop and ask me what I mean. No offense will be taken. This happens to me a lot.”
Doyle nodded. He felt himself starting to like this big, good-natured man. Then Bolger’s normally amiable face creased with concern as he resumed talking.
“Once I got to Willowdale,” he said, “I was damned surprised to learn that I was the third farm manager hired in eighteen months. I’d had no idea. Maybe I was too eager to grab at this opportunity. Maybe I should’ve done some research of my own. But from where I was, in England, this looked like a dream job.
“Anyway, when I later asked Rexroth about the two managers who’d been there before me, he just shrugged it off. ‘Personality clashes,’ is how he’d put it, ‘very common here in America.’ Then he’d say, ‘Let’s not let that happen to us, eh, Aldous,’ and give me a thundering clap on the back. And I’d go back to my air-conditioned cottage and riffle through my check stubs, and kind of park under the rug any concerns I had about Willowdale’s job turnover.
“I just said to myself, it’s the same thing here as anywhere else I’d been. You work for a man with big bickies and you take your chances. Some of them will like you, some won’t, and with the money they’ve got they can afford to change employees like they change their woolies. That’s the risk of being in the employ of the rich, if you follow me here, Jack.
“And,” Bolger added, “Rexroth can be a very charming fella, when he wants to be. Just one of the ‘common old workin’ men’-he’s got an act like that he trots out every now and then. But down deep I think he’s got the inborn contempt for others that’s bred into so many of these privileged bastards. Don’t get me started on that subject.”
They had walked to the middle of one of the bridges that spanned the park’s meandering lake. Doyle paused and leaned his arms on the railing. “So where did your problems start with Rexroth?”
“Not right away. The first year was grand,” Bolger replied. “We foaled some nicely made young horses. We went to the Keeneland breeding stock sale and bought some very fine mares. Rexroth told me, ‘If you see a mare you think is worth the money, pay the money.’
“I’ll admit it, I was pretty impressed by this-not only that Rexroth had the money, but that he’d trust me with spending it the right way. I’ll admit, too, that I got kind of caught up in the grand spirit of things. I mean, we were riding around in a limousine, eating at the best restaurants. It was quite a leap for a Kiwi lad like myself.
“The trouble started the next year. And it had nothing to do with me. What was happening was that some earlier horse purchases, made by my farm manager predecessors, turned out very badly. Well, you know, this happens in the business. Bound to. As my uncle Duane always used to tell me when I worked for him back home, ‘Aldous, this is not an exact science-neither the breeding nor the betting.’ He had another saying, too: ‘The dumbest horse can make the biggest fool out of the smartest man.’”
Bolger paused to light a cigarette, casting a sideways glance at Doyle that combined both embarrassment and defiance. “God help me, man, I know how dumb this is. But I’m not ready to quit the smokes just yet.”
Doyle made a deprecating gesture. “I don’t know why you don’t quit,” he joked. “Quitting’s easy. I must have done it twenty times before I got it right. Anyway, don’t worry about it. I know how it is. I finally kicked it about ten years ago, but you’re not talking to a member of the international tobacco police.”
“Well,” said Bolger, “there’s an officer of that department right over there on the park bench-Caroline. And I can see she’s waiting for us.”
Bolger turned to face the other way from his sister, inhaled hugely with his back bent like a jazz saxophone player bending deep into the melody, then surreptitiously dropped the cigarette under his boot. As he crushed the butt, he said, “That girl’s got the eyes of a hawk. Let’s start heading back over there. I’ll finish telling you about the Rexroth situation as we go along.”
It was after he’d been at Willowdale about a year, Aldous said, that the first suspicious horse death occurred.
“I don’t mean the first horse to die,” he emphasized. “We had a couple of mares die while foaling, we had a yearling killed when he was hit by lighting out in the field one night. Those sort of things are not unnatural on a breeding farm where you’ve got two hundred or more horses. These animals are given to all sorts of mischief and misadventures, even when they’re not on the racetrack and competing.
“But,” Bolger went on, “there then came this one incident-a horse named Uncle Francis. We found him one night down in his stall with as bad a shattered rear leg as I’d ever seen. All we could figure was that he had been frightened somehow and lashed out with it, kicking terrifically hard against the stall wall. But, still, even though that’s what the vets said…well, it was goddam unnatural. I hated to see that horse put down. But that’s all we could do. He was ruined.”
Doyle said, “As I understand it, the insurance company paid up. Right?”
“Yeah, they did,” Bolger replied, “but not without nosing around for weeks and, I might add, giving me and my staff a pretty good questioning.
“Anyway, about two months later we lost another stud horse, Prince Fennimore. He was found in his stall one morning, stone cold dead. There wasn’t a mark on him. The vets and the insurance people concluded he’d died of a heart attack, which is not unheard of, but I knew this horse. Hell, he was only nine years old. He hadn’t done much as a stallion, but he was a big, strong, healthy specimen, at least to the naked eye. They performed a necropsy-that’s an autopsy for horses. It didn’t show any heart disease, but they just figured his heart quit on him.
“Finally, a few weeks back, we find a mare named Signorina Goldini dead in her paddock. It was located right behind a barn. Not a mark on her, either. Again, it looked like a heart attack, and that’s what they decided it was, even though she’d appeared to be in a glowing grand health. Her only problem had been that, despite being bred to the farm’s best studs each year, she never got in foal. She’d been a real commercial flop.
“At about this point, the old light bulb goes off over my thick noggin. I’d been thinking about these deaths, off and on, for weeks. Finally, it comes to me. These are heavily insured animals, ones that had been thought to have great promise as breeding prospects when they retired. But not one of the three came close to living up to that promise. Believe me, every one of them was expendable from a financial standpoint.”
Bolger paused, then looked away, his jaw tightening. Turning back to face Doyle, he said bitterly, “Rexroth came down to wring his hands over every one of these cases. And he’d look appalled, and concerned, but his act just didn’t play with me. There was something phony about it and about him.
“After I’d tussled with this and chewed on it, I finally called the FBI. I didn’t want to go to the state police, or the local authorities, because I was afraid Rexroth would get word of it. Through his media business, he’s got connections everywhere.
“If I was wrong, I didn’t want to lose my job over it. If I was right, I didn’t want to expose myself to risk, if you know what I mean. A person who will murder horses will murder men as well.
“But I’m pretty damn sure I wasn’t wrong,” Bolger said with emphasis. He smiled at his sister and her children as he and Doyle approached them. “Just a minute or two more, then I’ll buy you lunch,” he called to them.
Doyle, arms folded across his chest, cast an appraising glance at Bolger. “What about a pattern-is there any kind of pattern involved here, other than the fact these horses had dropped off sharply in value?”
“The only so-called pattern I could come up with was that I was not at Willowdale when the last two horses, Prince Fennimore and Signorina Goldini, died. When Prince Fennimore died I was at a horse sale Rexroth insisted I attend down in Florida. When the mare died, I’d gone with one of our crews to bring a shipment of two-year-olds up to the racing stable at Heartland Downs.”
Doyle digested this for a minute. Then he said, “Okay, this could be looked at in a couple of ways. One, Rexroth thinks you’re on to him and wanted to keep you out of the way so there was no chance that you’d discover the horse killers in action.
“Of course, there’s also possibility number two. That you’re involved in masterminding these killings and conveniently scheduled absences for yourself when they were to take place.”
Bolger stopped walking. Gripping Doyle’s arm, and powerfully squeezing it, he exclaimed, “If that’s a joke, my friend, it’s sure not funny. And if it’s not…well, what the hell, man. You think that if I was involved in this terrible business I’d be the one calling your FBI and asking for help?” he said angrily.
Doyle shook off Bolger’s hand. “Only kidding, buddy,” he said. “I get your point. And, yeah, I believe you.”
As much as I believe anybody these days, Doyle added to himself.