Shedrow (21 page)

“Well…” There was a long pause. “Chester Pawlek is dead.”

“What!”

“He was murdered.”

“How?”

“And there’s more,” she continued, ignoring his question. “I may be in a bit of a bind myself. It seems my dear brother Wayne crawled out of his hole in Kentucky and made up this fantastic story about a conspiracy to kill Chiefly Endeavor. Brad Hill thinks that I may be under investigation by the FBI.”

Gianni felt his temples pulse. “Brad Hill? What the hell is this all about, Janice?”

“It’s nothing, Anthony.”

“It’s nothing? Look, Janice, I have to get to my next flight. Just stay put until I get home. Don’t talk to anyone, understand. Now what happened to Chester?”

“No one knows, but it’s all over the news. He was shot by someone in Lexington. That’s all they’re saying, the police are investigating.”

THE THREE HOUR FLIGHT from Miami to JFK felt like the longest Gianni had ever endured. Normally he would read, or do some sort of paperwork and time would pass quickly. Not this time. He fidgeted and moved his legs in circles to keep the blood circulating. He flexed and relaxed his calf and thigh muscles. Mostly, he thought about what he would do once he landed in New York.

He decided he would drive to the backstretch at Belmont Park even before he went home. There were very few people he could trust right now. He wasn’t even sure if he could trust his own wife. His friend Highet might be missing, or at least he wasn’t answering his mobile phone, which was unusual for him. Chester Pawlek had been murdered in Lexington, which was presumably where Highet should be. There was no way of knowing if Carla Highet was safe.

So he would seek out Jeff Willard first. Jeff would surely know as much as Janice, perhaps more about Chet and any others in the racing community who might have made news in the last week. Above all, he could trust Jeff, and they could talk amidst the refuge of their horses.

Once during the flight, he lapsed into a restless sleep and had a recurrence of a recent dream, the one where Sal Catroni was dressed like a doctor, wearing the white coat and the surgical headlight, and
carrying a chain saw. When Catroni turned on the saw and approached Gianni in the dream, he woke himself with a gasp, looked out the window of the plane and saw the Manhattan skyline beginning to take form off in the distance.

When the plane landed in New York, Gianni again switched on his cell phone and tried Highet. There was no answer and he had no new voice mail messages of his own. He dialed Jeff Willard.

“Jeff, I’m home and I need to see you right away. I can get to Belmont in a half hour. Can you meet me at your barn?”

“Well, I guess so, but it’s almost four in the afternoon. Why the barn at this hour?” Jeff asked.

“I’m just back from my mission and I really want to check on my horses. Plus we need to talk, and that’s as good a place as any. Most of all, I think I just need to smell some hay and manure.”

“Okay, Doc. I’ll meet you there. A lot has happened since you left. I guess it’s best that we meet face-to-face.”

He ended the call just as he reached the baggage claim area for his flight. The area along the baggage carousel was crowded with passengers, some pushing to secure a spot. Behind the row of passengers who crowded the carousel, a man with a baseball cap and sunglasses strolled casually back and forth from one carousel to the next, always turning to see that Gianni remained in his sight.

Gianni retrieved his Jeep from long-term parking, headed east on the Belt Parkway, then north on the Cross Island Parkway to Belmont Park. He parked the Jeep alongside Jeff Willard’s barn, next to another Wrangler, even older and more beat-up than his own. He knew it belonged to Harold, one of the peace officers for the New York Racing Association. He recognized the vehicle by its pale blue color and by the U.S. Marines sticker on the rear bumper.

“Afternoon, Doc.”

“Hello, Harold. Why so late?”

“Oh, just a little skirmish in one of the dormitories, nothing major.”

Harold Kalish was about 60 years old, a friendly fellow who did not appear outwardly tough. His hair was thinned and mostly white. Gianni had always made it his habit to chat with him on his early morning visits. Harold often spoke of his service in Vietnam and his expertise in the martial arts.

“How about you?” Harold said. “Not your usual hour either, is it?”

“I’m meeting Jeff Willard. Just got back from my missionary trip in the Caribbean. Have you seen Willard around?”

“I haven’t, but I saw his new assistant trainer a few minutes ago,” Harold said, boosting himself into the old blue Wrangler.

“New assistant?” Gianni asked.

“Alison McKensie. Jeff promoted her.”

As the Jeep drove off, Gianni walked down the shedrow, looking into each stall. Near the middle of the shedrow, Alison sat in the office, a stall modified to function as a work station. It had a metal desk and chair and a tall metal file cabinet. A small television sat on a shelf in one corner, tuned to the cable racing channel. Alison was watching the finish of a race at Churchill Downs.

“Congratulations,” Gianni said. “I heard about your promotion.”

“Thanks,” she said. “You know, I think I owe my promotion to Chiefly Endeavor. That horse really got me noticed because he was so damn hard to handle. But the two of us just clicked. That horse could get away from Jeff’s strongest male rider, but not me.”

“I remember. So, who looks good now?” Gianni said, looking at the barn roster posted outside the office.

“Well, we’re training a nice two-year-old by Friends Lake. Just won an allowance here and we may try him in a stakes race at Churchill after Thanksgiving. Then there’s Padre. He’s still with us. He was second in the Bernard Baruch Handicap up in Saratoga, and we’re trying to place him as a stallion. He reminds me a little of the Chief, only about ten times meaner. He’s six now and ornery as can be. Very territorial. There are certain horses he just does not like.”

“I remember that about the Chief. He had to be the alpha in the barn, right?” Gianni said.

“I swear to God, Doc, if Chief was here now, we’d have to keep them in totally separate barns. This Padre would kill another horse. I mean it. He put one of our grooms out of work for two weeks. It wasn’t his regular groom, and he turned his back on the horse when he shouldn’t have. Next thing you know, he’s on the ground bleeding.”

“The horse kicked him?” Gianni said.

“No, he bit him. He grabbed him with his mouth and lifted him right off the ground before he let go. I saw the whole thing… scary. He’s even nipped me once or twice, but nothing like what he did to that groom. So I just remember what Billy Turner, Seattle Slew’s trainer used to say.”

“What was that?” Gianni asked.

“The story has it that Billy Turner used to let Seattle Slew bite him once a day, as long as he kept winning races.”

Alison turned off the television and grabbed a folder from the desk, placing it into a satchel along with several copies of
Blood Horse
magazine.

“Which stall is Padre in?” Gianni asked.

“He’s in number five, the one with the cone in front of it. We keep him close to the office, but away from the horses that seem to bother him. He seems to tolerate the grey gelding next door. Alison walked down the shedrow towards her car. She walked to the outside of the yellow construction cone that sat in front of Padre’s stall, giving wide berth to the stall door. When she walked by, the horse reared and kicked the side of his stall, then looked out at Alison as she walked by. “You behave, you hear me,” she said, pointing a finger at the horse.

After Alison left, Gianni walked in the opposite direction, looking into the stalls as he walked. He paused to look at a dark brown colt.
Looks just like the Chief as a two-year-old
, he thought. As he studied the horse’s conformation, he heard footsteps behind him, crunching in the gravel trench alongside the shedrow. He turned to his right, expecting to see Jeff. Instead he saw a tall stocky man in a black leather bomber jacket, baseball cap and sunglasses. He had a pistol pointed directly at Gianni and he whistled a nondescript tune as he approached. As he drew closer, Gianni noticed the long scar on the right side of his face.

“Stay right there, Doc,” he said. “Put your hands up.”

“Who the hell are you?” Gianni said, slowly raising his hands.

“Friend of Chester Pawlek,” he said. “Came to finish some of his business. Pity he couldn’t do it himself, because he really wanted to.” He removed his sunglasses and placed them into his coat pocket with his left hand. Then he began to remove his jacket, switching the gun from one hand to the other. He draped the coat over a railing that ran parallel to the shedrow, continuing to point the gun directly at Gianni’s head. He stood less than ten yards away.

Gianni studied the scar on the man’s face. “You bastard,” he said. “You were my patient…Hector Giardini. I fixed your face after someone took a swipe with a machete. I remember your name. We tried to contact you because you never came back.”

“Yeah, I got the letters,” he said. “How touching.”

“You prick,” Gianni said. “Don’t you know that Chester Pawlek is dead?”

“Of course I know,” he said. “But dead or alive, my instructions are the same—Dr. Anthony Gianni has to die, because he knows too
much.”

“So shoot me, Gianni said. Don’t expect me to plead for my life. Because the truth is, I don’t feel that I have a lot to lose right now. I won’t leave any orphaned children. Just one slightly fucked up wife. And a pretty good bank account that will mostly go to charity. If that’s my legacy, then so be it.”

“You’ve got pretty big balls, I must say,” Giardini said. “Even when I threatened to cut your fucking fingers off a while back, you stayed pretty cool.”

Gianni flashed back to that horrific day when the two men had kidnapped him from his office. In a sudden recollection he remembered one of the men saying,
I’m Sal Catroni, of the Catroni family, and this here is Hector. Hector was a medic in the marines. He’s here to help you with some medical treatment.
He remembered the man’s face covered by a ski mask, and he recalled the sound of his voice.

Gianni began to walk backwards, slowly, unconsciously retreating from the gun.

“Where you going?” Hector said. “You can’t go anywhere. It’s just you and me. And the horses.” He matched Gianni’s retreat with slow steps forward.

“Who’s your favorite horsey?” Hector said. “You have one here you like as much as the Chief? Because I could kill that one too.” He made a sudden turn and pointed the gun into one of the stalls. “Is this your favorite horsey? How about if I shoot this one right between the eyes and send him to the meat market. You like horse meat, Doc? I hear they go crazy for it in Japan.”

Gianni stopped in front of stall number four. Directly behind him was the cone in front of Padre’s stall. He continued his slow
retreat backwards, walking just outside the cone, between it and the outer railing.

Hector walked faster, closing the gap between them. He walked inside the cone and pointed the gun into stall number five. “Is this your favorite horse? I think he needs to learn how to behave.”

The horse reared and kicked the side of the stall. Hector pointed the gun into the stall, then back at Gianni. The horse’s head came out of the stall and in one sudden movement his mammoth jaws opened then closed on Hector’s chest and upper arm. The horse shook his head and reared, hurling Hector to the ground. The gun fell to the ground, and Gianni lunged forward and grabbed it.

The swashbuckling Hector Giardini was now face down on the ground, dazed, his white starched shirt turning red with blood.

“My turn now,” Gianni said. “Stay down or I blow
your
brains out.” He dialed 911 on his cell phone.

John Pawlek’s attorney leaned over and spoke quietly, close to John’s ear. They were the only two in the conference room on the first floor of the Fayette Circuit Court in Lexington. Eric Carlin was widely regarded as the best criminal attorney in the state—Delores Pawlek saw to it that her son got the very best. Carlin knew when to speak quietly and when to be the courtroom orator. His longish grey hair was neatly combed back from a part just off center, and he was dressed in an impeccably tailored grey suit.

“Do you understand the charge against you?” Carlin asked.

“I understand. Second degree murder,” John said.

“Okay, let’s do this once more before we go in front of the judge. I need to know exactly what happened that morning when you followed your father to Carla Highet’s apartment.”

John looked weary. His attorney had arranged for him to at least appear clean shaven and well dressed for the arraignment, but a little grooming could not reverse the past few days of mental and
physical anguish he had experienced while confined to a jail cell.

Carlin said, “I want you to start back in New Jersey. Tell me why you came to Kentucky in the first place.”

John began, “The FBI suspected that my father was involved with the killing of the stallion, and they wanted me to wear a wire and then get him to talk about it. The first time I tried was at home in New Jersey, but my father had disappeared the very same day I was set up to tape him. He had supposedly committed suicide, though very few people believed that.”

Carlin said, “I’m going to ask you to talk about the hanging and how you came to discover the body in the attic. I want to show how traumatic that must have been for you.”

“Fine, I can talk about that,” John said. “I was really strung out for a while after that, totally messed up. My Uncle Ralphie—this friend of my father’s, not my actual uncle—he was really worried about me. My mother had gone to him for help. Ralphie eventually told us that my father hadn’t committed suicide after all, that he was still alive and in Kentucky. He thought it would help to straighten me out if he told me.”

“Did it?” Carlin asked.

“I guess so. I went back to the FBI and told them what I knew. They started their own surveillance and when they located him, they told me where he was.”