Blind Switch Read online

  “How would you do something like this?” Doyle asked.

  Speaking in a soft voice, Moe said that Doyle would go to work for a horse trainer named Angelo Zocchi, a distant relative of the fawning Dino. Doyle would be on the menial shift at Heartland Downs for trainer Zocchi, walking sweaty horses back and forth after they had gone through their morning exercises, and also, with shovel and pitchfork, cleaning up their lower GI products. That would be the start. Further instructions would follow, Moe said, after Doyle’s initial efforts were assessed.

  “Eventually, if things work out,” Kellman said, “you’ll pull off the stiffereeno.” Seeing the puzzled look on Doyle’s face, he added, “Stiff the horse—so it doesn’t win.”

  “Stiffereeno?” said Doyle. “That sounds like something Sinatra’s Rat Pack used to call their boners.” He shook his head. Then Doyle found himself laughing at this employment scenario.

  “Are you kidding me?” he said to Moe. “I’ve shoveled marketing and sales and advertising shit most of my adult life. Now you want me to work with horse shit? What are you, an ironist?”

  Doyle pushed his plate aside. “Why doesn’t this Angelo do this himself? Or have one of his regular employees do it? Why bring me in?”

  Kellman looked appreciatively at Doyle. “That’s an excellent question, Jack. First off, you looked to me like a prime candidate for a number of reasons, one of which is that you’re not the kind of guy anybody will walk all over out there at the racetrack. But the main reason is that Angelo Zocchi has held a trainer’s license for over thirty years. We don’t want to put him in any jeopardy of losing that license. He’s got to be distanced from this thing—on the off chance anything might go wrong.”

  “Ah, the off-chance remote possibility factor,” Doyle said. “In other words, you need a fall guy. Just in case this caper collapses.”

  “If you play this the way I know you can, nothing’ll go wrong,” Moe said as he rose to leave. “$25,000, Jack, let’s not overlook tax free, when the job is done. Think about it. Let me know. I’ll see you at the gym.”

  Doyle watched the dandelion head bounce through a field of phonies clustered near the restaurant’s front door. Moe nodded at some of the waiting people, smiled at others, shook a few hands as he neared the door. “Goodbye, Mr. Kellman, goodbye, Mr. Kellman” members of the wait staff chorused as the little man departed.

  “I’ve got a little buzz on,” Doyle said to himself. He sat at the table for a few minutes, thinking about all that Moe had said. He couldn’t help but smile at just the thought of the job he’d been offered.

  Doyle found himself strangely pleased that Kellman not only thought him capable of carrying off some kind of racetrack scam, but that he’d recognized Doyle’s readiness to do something that would be, for him, so completely different.

  As much as he was surprised at the offer, the possibilities involved, so was he somehow flattered. “Thanks, Moe,” Jack whispered to himself, grinning. “You’ve got your man.”

  Summoning Dino, Doyle put a final Bushmills on Moe Kellman’s tab. “In for a penny, in for another round,” Doyle said to the now unsmiling Dino.

  Chapter 2

  To Jack Doyle, the racetrack was a revelation. Like most Americans, his knowledge of thoroughbred racing was minimal, gleaned primarily from an occasional office outing in which an afternoon at the races meant losing his ass betting the so-called “expert” tips provided by a punk clerk from accounting.

  Working in the stable area at Heartland Downs was an eye-opener. For one thing, Doyle had never before observed in one place more ugly men and healthy-looking women.

  Doyle was surprised at how quickly he adapted to his new routine. It involved rising at 4:30, leaving his north side apartment at 5:00, then driving the twenty-five miles in his leased Honda Accord to arrive by 5:30 at the track’s secured lot where he parked amidst the vehicles, most of them dice-dangling Chevy beaters, that had transported the other grooms and hotwalkers. These amigos soon decided that Doyle was a dilettante horse owner who reveled in the menial stable tasks because he wanted to maintain a hands-on approach to his investments. Evidently, there were a few such misguided souls who populated America’s backstretches in the mornings when they could have been home sitting on their assets. Doyle did not disabuse his co-workers of their inflated notions of his status.

  What Doyle discovered that he liked best was the horses, amazingly powerful but for the most part docile creatures; the clear morning air at trackside, filled with the sounds of these beasts pounding through their exercises; the odor of the horse barns, a combination of liniment, horse manure and hay; and, finally, the upfront hustling of people who were trying to win something directly off their fellow horsemen without any bullshit nineteenth hole conniving or three-martini mea culpa lunches buffering the combat zone. Every man’s hand against that of every man…and the women, too. I love it, Doyle thought.

  Doyle’s first meeting with his new boss, Angelo Zocchi, took place on a bright Monday morning. It did not go well. The sixty-year-old Zocchi, a weathered piece of work who had been on the racetrack most of his life, hadn’t hired a male gringo in years—“they all drink too much back here,” Zocchi contended—but the Word Had Come Down.

  Zocchi’s first words to Doyle, after he had appraised him with a look of disapproval, were: “Don’t fuck up.”

  Doyle grinned. “People pay thousands of dollars to attend seminars and get such advice,” he said. “You’ve got state-of-the-art leadership skills, Angelo.”

  Angelo produced a laser-beam look. “They’ll tell you what to do when the time comes,” he said. “I don’t deal in this crap except when I’m told to. They don’t need this money they try for—it’s a power trip for them, from the old days, just a gig. They try to pull one off every two, maybe three years, and they always find some chooch like you to tool it.

  “Just do what you’re told,” Angelo added, “that’s all. Then get out.”

  Doyle was required to obtain a state license before he could begin working as a groom for Zocchi. On the line of the application that inquired about felony convictions, Doyle wrote in “none,” while thinking to himself, so far.

  ***

  Other than Angelo Zocchi, who seemed to regard him with a mixture of fear and contempt, Doyle’s fellow workers were an amiable lot, particularly E. D. Morley and Maggie Howard. Morley was a middle-aged ex-boxer from Chicago’s West Side whose real name was St. Charles Robinson. A few years back, St. Charles Robinson had assumed a new identity upon becoming a Rastafarian.

  “I dig the hair and the dope, mon,” he explained to Doyle, “and I om picking up the accent very nizaleey.”

  Maggie Howard was a twenty-six-year-old exercise rider from Sallisaw, Okla., a bouncy little item with tousled black hair and gray eyes whom Doyle had heard described—in racing parlance—as “having great hands” and “a wonderful seat on a horse.” Doyle didn’t know from the hands, but he could enthusiastically endorse the Howard seat. Payday of Week Two, Doyle invited Maggie to have dinner with him after the races.

  “No chance,” she responded.

  “I like directness,” Doyle said, “so maybe you can tell me why.”

  “Because I think you’re a phony, and you’re up to something back here. You aren’t any groom,” Maggie snorted.

  “I’ve got the scars and the alimony receipts to prove it,” Doyle said. “Two times a groom.” Although disappointed at her response, Doyle still had to admire Maggie’s smooth-striding retreat down the shedrow. “That was a joke,” he called after her. “Think about it—I mean dinner, sometime.” Maggie never broke stride.

  ***

  Doyle did not miss a day of work. In Week Three, he was instructed by Angelo Zocchi to begin grooming the “target horse.” By this time, Doyle had learned a few things about his new occupation: how to sidestep manure, keep alert at all times while avoiding being stepped on by any of these thousand-pound, frequently
fey animals he cared for; how to water and feed them, and pick dirt out of their feet; how to brush, comb and rub-rag them to a Simonize glow. Zocchi was a taskmaster; Doyle, as he had been for most of his life, was very good at tasks whose worth he could recognize.

  Doyle’s Project—named City Sarah—was a four-year-old black filly with a dazzling burst of speed on the racetrack and the disposition of an eager puppy off of it. Although she was a relatively cheap item in Zocchi’s well-stocked public stable—a claiming horse, whose genetic composition confined her to competing on the lower end of racing’s class scale—City Sarah was the stable pet. City Sarah eagerly nuzzled greetings to anyone who visited her stall, ate jelly doughnuts whenever they were offered, and developed an obvious affection for Doyle, who had never been held in comparable esteem by anything that weighed a half a ton or by anything that weighed considerably less.

  At the end of that week, Doyle was summoned by phone for dinner at Dino’s with Moe Kellman. Plans were thereupon unfolded. Angelo Zocchi, Moe said as he dipped breadsticks in a specially prepared garlic paste, was to enter City Sarah in two races she could not possibly win. “Put her in over her head twice for thirty-five grand claiming, she’ll be nowhere,” Moe assured.

  Next, the Real Foray into Fraud: Angelo would run City Sarah back down at her true class level, $25,000 claiming, and she would fail once again, this time courtesy of Doyle’s work. With this trio of clinkers dotting her dossier, City Sarah would again be entered for $25,000 claiming—and this time she would win.

  The odds, Moe said, would be “exactly what my Group is looking for. We’ll bet our money, the horse wins, and that’s that. Very simple, Jack,” Moe said, waving a breadstick for emphasis.

  Doyle had to admit he was by no means clear on this. “So what’s the big difference between a twenty-five grand horse and a thirty-five grand horse,” he began. “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s big,” Moe assured him. “Look, racing’s got kind of a caste system. It’s based on ability, and it’s defined by numbers. Did you know there’s a big, big difference in talent between even five grand and thirty-five hundred dollar horses?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Doyle said. “I’m not sure I understand a lot of this.”

  “You don’t have to. Look,” Moe said, reaching into a bowl of garlic-stuffed olives Dino had placed next to the breadsticks, “you know from German Jews and Polish Jews? Lace-curtain Irish and pig-shit Irish? I don’t even have to go into this with you, Jack. Just take my word.”

  I hope it’s as strong as your breath, Doyle thought as Moe reached again for the olives; he was palming them like peanuts. “You haven’t told me how I do this thing,” Doyle pointed out, adding: “Get one thing straight—I won’t hurt this horse. I won’t give her any dope or something like that.”

  Moe’s dandelion head went from side to side. “You don’t have to. Hopping horse went out with spats. The testing labs have gotten too good. They discover the dope, then throw the book at the trainer. We don’t want to put Angelo out of business. He’s a good horse trainer, and he’s straight, but he owes us. Angelo will tell you what to do.”

  Doyle considered Moe’s description of the Plan. “Won’t there be guys who pick up on this? Who’ll recognize what’s going on?” he asked. “Won’t they jump in and bet this horse when your guys do?”

  Moe dismissed that possibility with a wave of his hand. “Jack, remember this: brains, discipline and patience are the key to the successful bettor. That explains why there are so few of them. Don’t worry about the odds we’re going to get,” Kellman grinned.

  ***

  So, they ran City Sarah twice against $35,000 claimers, and she got her ass kicked, just as Moe Kellman had predicted. Doyle found he didn’t like this at all.

  For the first in City Sarah’s series of three races, Doyle stood at the rail, rooting loudly, as the black filly led the field through a fast half-mile before deflating to finish tenth of twelve. As Doyle led her back to the barn, City Sarah was blowing like a bellows.

  “Come on, you little mother,” Doyle said to City Sarah, patting her neck as they walked down the sandy path, “you ran your eyeballs out, you did your best. God love you.”

  As Doyle was preparing the feed tub for City Sarah that evening, E. D. Morley sauntered down the shedrow. He looked admiringly at the still exhausted horse. “She’s a hard-trying bitch, ain’t she?” Morley said.

  Ten days later, another field of $35,000 horses showed their backsides to City Sarah. When an irritated Maggie Howard complained to Doyle about Zocchi’s misplacement of the horse in her races—“What’s he doing with this nice little horse?” Maggie had asked—Doyle could only mumble a vague reply. He felt terrible. He drove from the track to one of the neighborhood bars near his apartment, and into one of those Tom Waits-nights he was so familiar with, packed with mixed emotions and mixed drinks.

  When midnight arrived, Doyle realized he had confessed his entire life-plight to an off-duty waitress named Maureen Hoban at O’Keefe’s Olde Ale House. Maureen was only eight months or so out of Cork, Ireland, she said, but was apparently already a veritable Margaret Mead of American bar disappointments. Doyle liked her immensely.

  Doyle bought numerous rounds for the two of them. He was amazed at a coincidence uncovered in the course of their lugubrious conversation—Maureen knew his co-worker, E. D. Morley!

  “Sure, I met that Rustafartian fraud at the racetrack,” she giggled. “I go there on my off-days from work. I love your American harses.”

  As closing time neared at the Ale House, Doyle was sorrowed to discover that Maureen was the first woman he had ever met who, the more he drank, the worse she looked, with the booze flushing makeup out of her pores in rivulets. But Maureen’s shrewd reading of his situation regarding the fixed race, Doyle found, had a beauty of its own.

  “You’re a fookin’ fool if ya don’ go after that mooney,” Maureen advised. Doyle again recited his various reservations, but Maureen banished these with a wave of her arm.

  “Wot am I hearin’ now?” his counselor from Cork continued. “You’re broke down flat, are ya not? Said ya wouldn’t go back to them stiff-necked jobs ya used to do, am I right here?

  “Acarse, there’s the risk somebody’ll grass on you, but the kind of mooney ya’re talkin’ about, well, chance is sure to be built in, is it not?

  “Just you forget now about hurtin’ that little harse’s feelins’, or the tiny off chance of gettin’ caught out. No,” Maureen concluded, “ya should just thank the God ya’ve turned your back on that the little Jew man wants to pay ya so much for doin’ so little.”

  This, Doyle decided, was just the pep talk he had needed. He was primed with purpose as he lurched to his car, Maureen in tow. No, she didn’t want to go home with Doyle, Maureen said, though she appreciated his insincere offer. All she asked in return for her sterling advice of the evening, she said, was to be notified in advance as to the date of City Sarah’s “go” race—so that she might herself make a “wee small wager” into this betting coup. Relieved that he would not have to share the rest of the night with Maureen, whose eye shadow appeared to be loosening in sheets, Doyle promised her he would most assuredly let her know the date of the Big One.

  ***

  With her second consecutive dismal failure behind her, City Sarah next was entered at her “winnable” level of $25,000. Another lousy effort here—this one to be effected by Doyle—was the second-to-last brush stroke on Moe Kellman’s conniving canvas.

  Angelo Zocchi called Doyle to the stable office that morning, then locked the door. “This is what you do today, Doyle—you give that filly extra heavy rations of feed, two hours before race time. An hour before, you start giving her all the water she wants. Don’t let anybody see you doing this, don’t talk to anybody about it.”

  Angelo sighed as he sat back in the chair behind his battered desk. “That’s the whole package,” he said.

  Doyle wa
s puzzled. It seemed too easy. “So what will all that do?”

  Angelo, not looking at Doyle, got up and moved to unlock the office door.

  “Back when you was an AAU boxer or whatever the fuck you were, you ever fight on a real full stomach?”

  Realization swept over Doyle, carried on a wave of very unpleasant memory. “Yes, I did,” Doyle started to respond, but Angelo was already out the door.

  Doyle now understood perfectly. He recalled a steamy summer night in the Eagles Club in Rockford, Ill., maybe 1979, his third bout in an AAU tournament.

  Doyle had won his first two bouts easily. Having made weight for the next one, a semi-final event that night, Doyle—hungry, dehydrated, and emboldened by his two earlier successes—walked to a bakery near the Eagles Club, where he bought and quickly consumed two quarts of cold milk and a warm cherry pie. Two hours later, a squat Mexican hard case from Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood had buried a left hook slightly below Doyle’s navel, causing him to spew a stream of vomit on the ringside timekeeper’s head.

  Doyle shook his head. “I see.”

  ***

  Doyle didn’t sleep the night prior to what he had begun to think of as The Stiffereeno. Badly in need of someone to talk to about all this, he tried Moe Kellman’s haunts; Moe was not to be found. Doyle then called O’Keefe’s Olde Ale House, in quest of the sympathetic Maureen, only to be informed that his confidante from Cork had quit her waitress job there. For the life of him, Doyle could not remember where he had taken Maureen when he’d driven her home from O’Keefe’s that drunken night.

  “I’m not from Immigration,” Doyle had emphasized to O’Keefe, but he had failed to pry loose a phone number or address for Maureen. Unnerved, he paced his apartment floor up to the dawn, then headed for Heartland Downs. “Hell with it, I’ll just get it done,” Doyle said as he drove.

  Doyle followed Angelo Zocchi’s instructions to the letter that overcast, humid spring day. At noon, he gave City Sarah her ample, non-raceday sized portion of feed. She finished it right up. Doyle then offered more, which was gratefully received.