High Stakes Read online

  At the door, Rourke turned to say, “I’ll tell Barry on my way out then.”

  ***

  Doyle began to push open the Shamrock door just as it was jerked from the inside. He almost fell against the emerging Barry Hoy who laughed and said, “Heard you were coming, Jack.” They shook hands. Hoy said, “The Boss is waiting. Take those stairs to the right of the betting windows.”

  At the top of the stairs, Doyle nearly bumped into the descending Rourke, who nodded a polite but unenthusiastic hello. The surprised accountant stumbled forward as his precariously perched bifocals fell off his nose. Doyle snatched them midway of their fall toward the stairs. “Och, Mr. Doyle, I didn’t see you coming up. Those are some quick hands you’ve come equipped with. Thank you,” he added as Doyle handed him the eyeglasses. “You know the way to Niall’s office? Good. Welcome back and good-bye to you for now.” He continued his careful descent, right hand tight on the banister.

  Doyle gave a quick rap on Hanratty’s door and entered. Niall, grinning, quickly came around the wide, paper-filled desk to reach for Doyle’s hand saying, “Bless you, Jack, for coming down. You surely didn’t have to. But you’ve pleased my dear Sheila by doing so. She’s worried about me. She shouldn’t be, of course, but she is. So I didn’t put up too much of a protest when she told me she’d asked you to meet with me. Glad to see you again, my friend.”

  Hanratty snatched his suit coat off the back of his chair and shrugged it on. “Because of our success together in the States, Sheila has enormous confidence in your assorted abilities that I described to her, probably with some degree of exaggeration. She’s come, poor woman, to envision you as a master of not only deduction but arbitration and confrontation.”

  He picked up a large thick brown envelope, moved to the door, and waved Jack through. “But let’s talk from behind a pint or two and over a lovely little lunch. Are you with me?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  They slowly made their way the two blocks on tourist-crowded sidewalks to Hanratty’s favorite Kinsale restaurant, McCann’s Oyster House, a venerable local institution that overlooked the harbor. After they were seated at Hanratty’s customary table near the wide front window, he introduced Jack to their smiling waitress. “Katie, meet Jack Doyle. He’s come all the way from the States, Chicago exactly, to dine at Kinsale’s most deservedly famous restaurant.” A few minutes later, Katie delivered pints of Smithwick’s. “Slainte,” Hanratty said, and touched his glass to Doyle’s. “Half-dozen fried oysters to start, then the grilled sole,” Hanratty said to Katie. “Double that, please,” said Doyle.

  Hanratty took a long pull on his lager before opening the envelope he’d brought. “Now, I know Sheila’s concerns about my safety have extended to you. She talked to you about it at the dinner last night, which is why you’re here. Yes, there were a couple of minor traffic incidents. I wish to God I had never mentioned them to her, for she’s magnified them way out of proportion.”

  He paused to attend to the lager before saying, “But I want to show you some things that should flush your fears, Jack. You must understand that you can’t be in a business like mine without making people unhappy, causing complaints. Not surprisingly, over the years I’ve gotten obscene phone calls and a drawer full of nasty, semi-literate letters from disappointed punters blaming me for their ineptitude.”

  “Complaints about what?”

  “Imagined harm that’s been done them. They’ve lost money and they blame me. My odds were ‘off.’ Or my clerks shortchanged them. Or the particular shop of mine they frequent wasn’t open early enough for them to get a winning bet down before they went to work. Always a supposed winning wager, of course, never a loser. Or, the shop wasn’t open late enough. The lines were too long. There weren’t enough bet takers behind the wickets. Oh, numerous are the grievances abounding in the lives of these losers. Most of my customers, God love them, are quite aware I run an absolutely honest business. Always have. Always will. That’s why they keep patronizing Shamrock Off-Course Wagering. Why my business has thrived and grown. But there’s always an element of nutters roiling the shallow waters.

  “It’s the same old self-deceiving bullshit, year after year,” Hanratty continued. “There’s a stream of it that pours through the bloodstreams of bad bettors everywhere. You probably know many of them back home that are eager to announce their big scores, right? Whether it’s betting horses, dogs, football, baseball, or the stock markets. But how many ever report their far more numerous losing days?”

  Doyle said, “Hardly any that I know. I guess it’s the same all over.”

  “Wherever men risk their money,” Hanratty said. He paused to fork up one of the plump oysters, gently dipped it in the cocktail sauce, chewed with evident satisfaction. Then his frown returned. He opened the eleven by thirteen brown envelope he’d brought and extracted several sheets of paper as well as a standard sized envelope. “This is just a sampling from my collection of loony letters I’ve received over the years. Please note the address on this one,” he said, handing a small envelope to Jack.

  Hanratty’s name and home address were centered in the proper place. In the upper left corner, however, where the return address should have been, was written in large, vivid purple letters:

  HERPES TEST RESULTS

  (Personal and Confidential)

  “Oh, sure, you can laugh, Jack. So humorous, yeah? Well, maybe not so much the first time one of these envelopes arrives at my house to be retrieved from the mailbox by Sheila. With all three of our young sons looking on, only the older one hiding a grin, the rascal, his brothers horrified. And maybe not so humorous when such items started coming to my office here and the other offices around the country. After a while, it gets real damn old. I’ve heard the area postal workers find these mailings to be sources of considerable laughter. Well, they are not so to me.”

  Doyle said, “I suppose you’ve no idea who sends these.”

  “You’re wrong there. Under the purple ‘Sincerely’ at the bottom of each bitter letter there is indeed a signature in a bold hand. From some gobshite calling himself ‘Tim of Tipperary.’ He’s been lavish with his postage the last few months.”

  “What is his message? Or messages?”

  Hanratty said, “It’s always some claim about how one of my shops has deprived him of some bonanza he had coming. His repeated charge is that when he wins a bet, the odds I’ve provided are, as he writes, ‘disgracefully feckin’ low, you cheatin’ bastard.’ It’s a sentence he tends to repeat. He’s an expert at irritation.”

  Doyle was puzzled. “I don’t get it. Don’t your bettors set the odds with their wagers?”

  “No, no, not at all, Jack. In our betting shops over here, we determine the odds. We can raise or lower them to reflect supply and demand. I think your Las Vegas casinos do the same thing with bets on football and basketball games, maybe boxing, too, I don’t know. The Vegas fellas, they employ—and so do we over here—a fluid process. Now, horse racing in the States is different. Your punters are betting against each other. That’s your pari-mutuel system. There’s not as much of that here as you have. And none in my shops.”

  Doyle said, “I never knew that. Just as, I guess, many American racing bettors don’t realize they are actually in direct competition with each other. I’ve often heard some satisfied guy say after a winning bet, ‘Well, I’m betting with “house money” from here on today.’ He obviously was not aware that there is no such thing as ‘house money’ at racetracks. Casinos, sure. But our U.S. tracks don’t give a damn what a bettor does as long as he bets. They’re taking out their percentage of every bet made, and so are the states in their taxes. Doesn’t matter to the people who own Heartland Downs or Belmont Park or Santa Anita who wins or loses. What matters to them is the volume of bets placed, what they call the churn.”

  Doyle paused as Katie deposited another pair of Smithwick’s pints on their
table. “Loonch will be right up,” she said. “The sole is grand today, Niall, I’ve tried it.”

  Hanratty thanked Katie and turned to Jack. “Your pari-mutuel system, Jack, I don’t see the joy in that,” he said. “I prefer our way. It’s a contest. It takes brain work on our part, and on that of our customers. We can shift the odds lower if we have a great exposure. Bettors can shop the odds looking for what they think is their best advantage. Kind of an interesting, like, game, you know. A competition. Not just sitting back and slicing off a piece of every Euro passing through.”

  Considering Hanratty’s expanding empire of obviously profitable betting shops, Doyle could certainly understand his host’s thinking. “Niall, what about competitors? Would any of them try to harm you?”

  Hanratty smiled. “I seriously doubt it. True, we had some lively little turf wars, pardon the expression, some years back, when my business was just getting off the ground. But for the most part, things worked out peacefully. Especially after Barry Hoy and a couple of his similarly large cousins had serious talks with a few potential rivals that threatened to show up on the disruptive side. Barry and his lads brought them to their senses, if you know what I mean. It’s rumored one of the real obstreperous fellas, up in Limerick, earned a trip to a hospital emergency room. I know nothing of the details of that, of course. Peace has been reigning for a long time now, I am happy to say.”

  An hour later, they parted with a handshake outside the restaurant. Doyle walked to Nora’s car for his drive back to Dublin. He’d have one more night at her place before his next day’s return flight to Chicago. After his talk with Niall, he decided would phone the worried Sheila and reassure her that her worries were needless, that her husband was, as usual, in control of things.

  He had another satisfying listen to the Van Morrison CD as he headed back up the N27, toward dinner with Nora, he hoped, if she wasn’t working late.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sheets of rain pounded her windshield making the driving, what with the auto’s lights off, very difficult late this spring night. The whirring wipers almost obscured the Swine Research Center sign as she passed it. She cautiously turned into the long drive from the county highway and headed toward the parking behind the Large Animal Building.

  The previous night, she’d used the Google search engine to access and examine the layout of Indiana’s Carmel College School of Veterinary Medicine. Her destination was well removed from the college’s main campus.

  At the far end of the parking lot, she spotted a large truck that was piled high with bales of now sodden hay, and pulled in on the far side of it. The downpour began to diminish. The only other vehicles in the lot were two empty pickup trucks, one with a small horse trailer attached. She quickly reviewed the plan of action she had laid out using the precise information confidentially supplied by a sympathetic Carmel College staff member, one of her fellow ALWD members and a longtime “animal activist.”

  Waiting for the rain to subside, she sat back in her driver’s seat and closed her eyes, remembering a watershed moment in her life. She had just turned thirteen when she accompanied her favorite aunt on a mission for the Equine Rescue Society. It was a cold, gray December morning when they and several other volunteers arrived at the rundown farm outside of Pekin, Illinois. Her Aunt Julia, vice-president of the organization’s area chapter, had been tipped off by an anonymous phone call the night before. According to the caller, “Horace Beasley, that sorry, cheap son of a bitch, is starving his poor horses. He’s abandoned them and moved away. You will never see that bastard. But you better hurry and see them horses.”

  Aunt Julia led the way past the small, weather-beaten house toward the paddock fence behind it. Then she halted, hand going to her mouth as she gasped, “Oh, my God.”

  In front of them were four horses, two browns and a black and a gray. They were in appalling condition, their ribs showing, sores festering on their legs. They hardly had the strength to raise their heads to look at the visitors.

  Aunt Julia opened the gate and entered the paddock, hands extended. She chirped and called out and, finally, one of the old brown horses struggled to make its way to her. It stopped and glanced at the water trough, which was frozen solid. Then it raised its head and looked at the visitors with filmed eyes and an expression of puzzlement and pain that would never be forgotten by the visitors.

  The Rescue Society’s horse van arrived an hour later. By then, the gray mare had laid down and died in the frost-rimmed grass, despite all their efforts to keep her on her feet.

  The three survivors were helped gently into the horse van headed for the Rescue Society farm nineteen miles away. The little, emaciated black gelding died en route. The other two horses survived and eventually were restored to good health and given good homes.

  Late that memorable afternoon, walking back to Aunt Julia’s truck, the sun suddenly slashed through the winter cloud cover. But it did nothing to raise their spirits. She could even tonight hear Aunt Julia’s impassioned voice saying, “No animal should ever be mistreated like that. They depend on us for almost everything. They deserve our love. Most of all, they deserve our respect.”

  The rain suddenly stopped and she sat forward in her seat. She put on her gloves, pulled down the black raincoat hood over her head. Ready. Set. She ran across the parking lot to the door her fellow ALWD member had promised her would be left unlocked. She closed it quietly. The interior of this building was lit by ceiling lights set at a dimmed level. No problem. She knew where she had to be. Third stall from the left. Poking her head out of it, watching intently, was a two-year-old filly named Fullerton Avenue, who had been just recently donated to the Carmel vet school by her Chicago owner after being injured in training, an injury that would prevent her from ever competing on the racetrack. Thus, her retirement and donation to the school.

  She paused for several moments to speak softly to the wide awake, nervous Fullerton Avenue, who was eyeing her apprehensively until she finally settled, accepting the presence of this stranger. Perhaps happy for the unexpected late-night company.

  “At least they’ve fed you well while they’ve demeaned you,” she whispered, stroking the horse’s long brown face.

  Then she reached into the pocket of her rain jacket for the loaded syringe.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Feeling not a bit jet-lagged as he settled in the backseat of the taxi taking him into Chicago, Doyle dialed his home message machine. He trolled through robo-call offerings of reduced mortgage rates (he didn’t have a mortgage), “virtually free” electricity billing, offerings of life insurance rates so absurdly low that he laughed aloud. Ahmad, his driver, looked back over his right shoulder. “What you call good news, then, sir?”

  “Hardly. Just nonsense news,” Doyle said before continuing.

  Next came a series of eight messages from the FBI, each of the last seven more urgent than its predecessor. Tirabassi and Engel alternated in asking, then pleading, then ordering Doyle to return their call ASAP. He decided he’d wait until he was home before doing so.

  Ahmed drove directly to Jack’s northside Chicago condo without further comment or question. Doyle was impressed.

  “Ahmed, how do you know so much about the city? Where to go? According to that license pinned up on the dashboard, you’ve only been driving a cab six months.”

  A wide grin appeared under Ahmed’s impressive mustache.

  “I study…I am what you call a slick study, since I got here.”

  “Quick study,” Doyle said, immediately wanting to retrieve his automatic reaction in correcting his driver.

  Ahmed, unfazed, turned the final corner toward Doyle’s address, slowed, and pulled carefully into the No Parking space in front of the condominium building.

  Jack paid the fare and added a sizeable tip.

  ***

  After unpacking his suitcase, Doyle went to the ref
rigerator, grabbed a bottle of Guinness, and sat down at his desk before reaching for the phone. He quickly reviewed the FBI messages. Then he called Karen’s number. She picked up on the first ring.

  “Jack. Where are you? We’ve been trying to contact you. We’ve got bad news. Another horse killing.”

  “Aw, damn,” he said. “I was in Ireland for a few days. Sorry to hear this. Where and when did this killing happen?”

  “Two nights ago at Carmel College over in north central Indiana. Same MO, same result. And same kind of ALWD message left behind. This creep not only has a murderous bent, but he seems to enjoy rubbing our faces in it.”

  Tirabassi came on Karen’s speaker phone. “Where the hell were you, Jack? I thought you promised us you’d concentrate on this case. And you went, where, to Ireland?”

  “You know damn well I went to Ireland. Your vast organization could easily figure out my travel schedule. Damon, I had some business over there. Took a couple of days. I didn’t think I need your permission to use my passport. Remember, I’m a volunteer here.” He slammed the Guinness bottle down on the desk.

  Karen came back on. “Sorry to be so critical, Jack. It’s just that we’ve got to get to the bottom of this posthaste. Our Super is seriously on our backs.”

  “Karen, that I understand. But look at it from my standpoint. All I can do is use my racetrack contacts, keep my ears open, hope to get lucky. What you’ve got here is some lunatic driving Midwestern highways at night going about what is obviously undetectable criminal business. I don’t know how you expect to stop this jerk. You can’t station twenty-four-hour surveillance at every veterinary school in the country.”