Close Call (6 page)

Doyle patted the friendly filly on her neck. He didn’t have to reach up to do it. “I don’t even think she’s fifteen hands tall, is she?” he said. “Probably not,” Eckrosh said. “But I’ve never measured her.”

Doyle smiled and made another note. “The ‘Pocket Battleship.’ That’ll be a good nickname for her.” He saw what he thought was an actual smile on the old trainer’s face. “C’mon into the office,” Eckrosh said gruffly. “I see you know something about what you’re doing. At my age, I don’t have time to put up with nitwits.”

Doyle said, “How old are you?”

“None of your business.”

“Great,” Doyle said, “a publicity man’s dream.” Eckrosh pretended he hadn’t heard that.

***

An hour later Doyle had Eckrosh’s story, or at least enough for that day’s purposes. Eckrosh, he’d learned, had started as a teenager on a small racetrack in his native Nebraska. “I was a jockey, and a lousy one,” Eckrosh said. “Then I got too big to ride anyway, and I switched to grooming horses for a great trainer out there named Marion H. Van Berg. A few years later, I went out on my own. I’ve had horses now for more than fifty years. Rambling Rosie is twenty lengths better than any one I had before.

“Yes, I was married,” Eckrosh said in response to Doyle’s question. “My wife worked with me for years. Died of a heart attack right here at Monee Park five summers ago. Never sick a day in her life,” he said bitterly. Eckrosh clammed up after that statement, and Doyle clicked off his tape recorder and put his notebook in his pocket. Then he thought to ask, “How many people do you have working here?”

“Two. And I’m one of them. The woman out there, Maria, she’s the other one. Hell of a worker. Takes care of all five horses I’ve got and turns them out happy, healthy, shiny, and relaxed. I couldn’t get along without her. Before Rambling Rosie started earning some good purse money, I couldn’t have afforded any other workers. Now that I can, Maria says, ‘No, you don’t have to get no more. I can do this job.’ And she can.

“I’ll tell you, son, she’s a hard working, honest person who’s damned good with horses. She doesn’t drink, she’s here early and smiling every morning, and she doesn’t mind working late. You know how hard it is to find somebody like that these days? I don’t care that she’s a woman, or a Mex, or any of that crap. Plus,” Eckrosh admitted, “I have a hard time keeping help. I’m kind of tough on them if they don’t do things the right way.”

Doyle smiled as he said, “Old school?”

“Old school, hell,” Eckrosh growled. “Just do it right is all I ask. My horses deserve that. So do I.”

Doyle said, “I’d like to talk to Maria, get some background on her.”

“She’s not much of a talker,” Eckrosh said. “Besides,” he said, looking at his watch, “she’s gone by now. She goes home to make an early lunch for her kids before coming back here in the afternoon. She lives about a mile down the road, in that trailer park.”

“Can you tell me anything about her? Where she’s from? How she got started on the racetrack?”

Eckrosh shook his head. “It’s up to her to tell you about herself, not me. Come back some other morning.”

***

It wasn’t until the following Monday that Doyle could fit another visit to the Eckrosh barn into his schedule. In the meantime, he’d done some research. He’d found that the backstretches of American racetracks dramatically reflect the tremendous recent influx of Hispanics into the U. S. population. His interview subject that morning, Maria Martinez, was part of a Chicago racetrack work force that now was more than ninety percent Hispanic, more than half of them women, many with families.

Monee Park provided rudimentary housing for some of these workers; others lived in cheap apartments nearby, or rented in the trailer court. Grooms earned an average of $325 a week—“Jesus,” Doyle said to himself, “that’s not even minimum wage with these hours they put in”—and worked six days a week. At Monee, they started their jobs at six, continued until late morning, then were off until the races began that night if the horses they groomed were entered to run. If so, they would usually remain at the track until nearly midnight. Then, it was back to work by six o’clock the next morning. Doyle shuddered at the thought of such a schedule.

Walking past Tom Eckrosh’s office, Doyle waved a hello. The old man grumped an inaudible reply. Doyle found Maria at the end of the shed row, feeding carrots to Rambling Rosie. Marie agreed to sit down with him at a nearby picnic bench. She brought with her two exercise riders’ saddles, a tin of saddle soap, and some rags. She worked while she talked, first softly and haltingly, then more openly. Doyle found that the less he said, the more Maria told him things he wanted to know.

Maria hailed, she said, from Guerrero, Mexico. Twelve years earlier, she’d snuck across the border to Tucson with a cousin, leaving her two young children at home with her mother. “I never went to school,” she said. “I don’t know how to read. I struggled a lot in Mexico. That’s why I decided to come here. My husband never helped me at all with the kids before he just went away one day and never came back. He was a bum most his life, drinking and gambling and all that. When I left Mexico in 1994 I had to leave my children behind. I brought them here five years later. My son was a month-old baby when I left. That was very hard for me. But we had no money. I had to find a way to get money. I listened to what people told me about jobs in America.”

After arriving in Arizona, Maria said, she and her cousin made their way to Florida “to work in the fields. I worked on picking tomatoes, picking cucumbers, sweet peppers, squash, picking watermelon. The work is very hard, and it’s very hot there. I started at seven in the morning, and one day I didn’t drink any water until one in the afternoon, just so I don’t waste time. I was running all the time. When I finally went for a glass of water, I fell down. At 2:30 in the afternoon, I woke up in the hospital. They took me there from work, half dead. Ever since, I’ve been bothered by the heat.”

Doyle said, “What brought you to Chicago?”

She gave him a quizzical look. “The bus.”

“No,” he laughed, “I mean, why did you come here? What made you decide to work at the racetrack?”

“Oh,” Maria smiled, “I know what you mean. Okay, there was some people from Florida who were coming here, a family also from Guerrero. They came to Monee Park because they had friends working here. I came with them. First, I worked for a man, a very bad man I did not like, for a long time. Then one of my cousins brought my children to me one summer. That was the same summer I got a job here with Mr. Tom. He is a good man to work for,” she beamed, “a very good man.”

Maria had been rubbing saddle soap into a bridle as she talked, her dark head down, but she looked up when she talked about Eckrosh. “I was a hot walker for this other bad trainer, and I finally quit one day because he was so mean. To me, to his horses. My friend told me Mr. Tom needed a groom. I went and talked to Mr. Tom and told him I could be one, that I was a hard worker. He said, ‘Okay, we’ll see. You start tomorrow.’ I was very happy to get a job with him. He has taught me much about horses.”

She leaned forward. “He pays me more than other grooms get paid, I know that,” she confided. “And I get a bonus when Rosie wins.

“I get to the barn at 5:30 every morning. I come shouting to my fillies and my horses, ‘Mama’ to the fillies, ‘Papa’ to the horses. I teach my horses to be very gentle. I like them as though they were my children.”

Doyle was curious about Maria’s status as an immigrant. Did she have permanent resident status, as some backstretchers did, or was she like many others, an “illegal,” living under the constant threat of an INS raid? He was reluctant to ask her, but she saved him the trouble. “I have a green card,” she said proudly. “Mr. Tom helped me get it. And both my children are doing very well in school here.

“I don’t know much except about horses,” Maria added, “and I wanted my children to learn, and they are learning. My life was very hard, but I thank God I am here.”

Chapter 10

Art Riley had provided them with a detailed plan of Monee Park in a meeting at his downtown office. His instructions to Aiden Lucarelli and Denny Shannon were simple. The equipment they would need for the assignment they already possessed.

Following the floor plan, the two men easily located the locked door that led to the Monee Park money room. This large space, at the rear of the first floor grandstand area, was, as they had been advised by Riley, unguarded from the outside. It contained large amounts of cash, the difference between what people bet on the races and what they won. At the end of each night of racing, a security firm truck picked up what was not needed for the next night and brought it to the bank.

Producing this money was the eighteen to twenty-five percent deducted from each buck bet, depending on whether it was a “straight” wager (win, place, show) or an “exotic” bet (exacta, trifecta, superperfecta, pick four). From this “bite” the track paid horsemen’s purses, taxes to the state of Illinois, and covered operating expenses. Many bettors were unaware that the track owners don’t give a hoot what horses win the races. The bettors are in competition with each other under this pari-mutuel system, with the track taking out the same percentages regardless of whether favorites or long shots win. On any given night at Monee Park, the money room housed hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

Lucarelli and Shannon spent nearly two hours that Friday night in a bar across from the steel door of the money room, an area termed the Winners’ Lounge. They watched as a variety of pari-mutuel employees, carrying cloth bags of cash collected from the mutuel windows around the building, walked to the door, pressed a buzzer to the right side of the door frame, and were immediately admitted. They emerged minutes later, their bags empty.

Nursing only his second Bud Light of the night—he had to be at the top of his game for this—Shannon said softly, “They’re fucking asking for it. The guards must be inside.”

“Guard,” Lucarelli said. “That’s what Riley found out. One guard, for all that money. They’ve never had a robbery, and they must think they never will.” He laughed as he lighted a Marlboro. They were standing at an island table in the rear corner of the small room. An opened copy of
Racing Daily
was laid out in front of them alongside a track program. They looked like engaged bettors. Underneath the table was a brown satchel, the kind that some serious horse players brought with them on track visits, containing statistics, charts of past races, notes they’d made, graphs of recent betting trends. This satchel was empty. Lucarelli looked at his watch, then up at the television screens on the wall behind the nearly empty wooden bar. Horses were parading postward for the sixth race of the night. “When this race goes off,” he murmured to Shannon.

Seven minutes later, an elderly mutuel department employee named Ray Lokvam stepped out of the elevator some thirty feet from the money room door. He carried a bulging cloth bag over his shoulder and was struggling under the weight of it. Lucarelli and Shannon quietly fell in behind him. As Lokvam tapped the buzzer, they took ski masks out of their dark windbreakers and yanked them over their faces, Lucarelli finishing first, then reaching for his pistol. The door began to open. Lucarelli moved forward and shoved Lokvam through it. Shannon followed, slamming the door closed behind him.

On an old wooden chair propped against the right wall, security guard Paxton Brownlee looked up in astonishment at the two masked men. Before he could move, Lucarelli was on him. He smashed Brownlee across the right side of his head with the gun barrel, sending him crashing to the floor. Lucarelli turned to survey the ceiling of the small room, swinging his gun from one corner to the next. “Not a fucking security camera in here either,” he said with satisfaction, having confirmed Riley’s prediction. “Talk about running a place on the cheap.”

Lucarelli reached down and yanked Brownlee’s revolver from its holster. He tossed it to Shannon, who had backed the bewildered Lokvam against the wall and sat him down next to the unconscious, bleeding Brownlee. Shannon waved the gun under Lokvam’s trembling chin. “Turn to the wall, you old fart. Quick!” Lokvam paled, sweat popping out on his wrinkled forehead. He moved to obey. Shannon took handcuffs from Brownlee’s belt and roughly put them on Lokvam. “Sit on the floor, facing that wall,” he ordered.

Lucarelli had vaulted over the long wooden counter to the aisle fronting shelves stacked with currency. The shortest shelf was packed with $50 and $100 bills. He concentrated on it, shoveling packets into the brown satchel, glancing at his watch, saying “thirty more seconds and we’re out of here.” Shannon grunted his assent, keeping his eye on Brownlee, who was still out. When he noticed Lokvam trying to look over his shoulder at them, Shannon shoved the old man’s face against the wall. He looked at his watch. Then he brought the butt of the gun down on Lokvam’s head. The old man crumpled onto his side.

At the door, satchel in Lucarelli’s hand, they ripped off their ski masks and put them in their pockets. Shannon peered out. No one was close. The small group of patrons of the Winners’ Lounge, as well as the bartender, had their eyes riveted on the televised showing of the seventh race. None of them took their eyes off the screen as, heads averted, Lucarelli and Shannon, Lucarelli with the heavy, money-filled brown satchel, hurried out of Monee Park’s east grandstand exit to the parking lot. Three minutes later Lucarelli’s Taurus was on the nearby highway, heading north to Chicago. The car jerked from side to side as the two men high-fived each other repeatedly, hollering in triumph. They didn’t start to count the money until a half-hour later when they sat at the scruffy old poker table in the paneled basement of Lucarelli’s mother’s home, open cans of beer in front of them. When the count was completed, their high-fiving resumed.

Chapter 11

Word of the money room robbery was all over Monee Park the next morning, most of which Doyle spent on the phone, answering questions from various media outlets. He assured one and all that, despite this damaging incident, the track would be “open for business as usual tonight.”

During a brief lull between calls, Morty said, “Jack, how will there be enough money here to operate tonight? From all I’ve heard, the track is pretty strapped for cash. And credit, for that matter.”

Doyle said, “You’ve heard right. Celia told me a couple of hours ago that her bank won’t give her a short term loan even at a larcenous rate. Her equity line is stretched. The thieves got away with $127,000. That doesn’t sound like a lot to me when you think of a racetrack’s holdings. But, and this is just between you and me, Celia said she’s already scraped the bottom of the financial barrel. She’s in a tough spot.”

Morty scratched his head. “So, where’s the money coming from?”

“A friend of mine,” Doyle said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

Doyle had phoned Moe Kellman at his north Michigan Avenue penthouse just before midnight, or two hours after he’d learned of the money room robbery.

Trying to jocularly ease his way toward his request, Doyle had said, “How are you fixed for cash?”

“Comfortably. Why are you calling me at this hour to ask?”

Doyle told Moe what had happened, describing the alarming consequences facing Monee Park. When he’d finished, there was a short silence on the other end of the line. Then Moe said, “Any idea who pulled this off?”

“Not a clue. The money room guards said there were two guys, short, husky, wearing ski masks. And brutal. They gave our men a pretty good going over.”

Moe said, “This couldn’t have happened at a worse time. The proposed video slots bill won’t mean anything to Celia if she doesn’t have an operating racetrack in order to qualify for the license. Jack, hold on a minute. I’ve got to go into my den.”

When Moe picked up the phone in the den he said, “I’ll call Celia in the morning. Later this morning, I should say. You tell her my driver, Pete Dunleavy, will be bringing her a briefcase around noon. Tell her this is a loan, interest free, from me to her. Nothing on paper. Just the way her Uncle Jim and I used to do business in the old days. Naturally, I’ll expect to be paid back once the video slots get up and going.”

“You know,” Doyle reminded, “what Celia needs is nearly a hundred and thirty grand.”

Moe sighed. “Jack, I’m neither deaf, nor forgetful. You already told me that. What I am, though, is tired. Have Celia call me after she gets the money from Pete. Good night, Jack.”

***

Pete Dunleavy was on time and Celia immediately called Jack to let him know the briefcase had arrived. “God bless Moe Kellman,” she said. “And thank you, Jack, for thinking Moe would help. I’ll call Moe right now.”

The press box clock showed 12:11 p.m. He heard Morty say, “Jack, I’m hungry. How about some lunch?” Doyle stood up, stretched, and reached for his sport coat. “Sounds good. Lead the way.”

“Follow me. I’ll introduce you to the best chef in the Midwest.”

Doyle stopped walking. He said, “Morty, I haven’t got time to drive into the city. I’ve got a busy afternoon.”

Morty laughed. “We don’t have to go into Chicago. We’re going right downstairs to the jockeys’ room kitchen. I’ll introduce you to the great Clarence Meaux.”

In the elevator, Morty said “Clarence is a retired jockey from Louisiana. I guess he was a pretty good little rider as a kid. Then he got too big, too heavy. You’re not going to believe it when you see him, but Clarence won more races than any apprentice rider in the country when he was sixteen. That was twenty or so years ago. He rode at a hundred and eight pounds and won more than 300 races. Today, he weighs about one-eighty. He loves to eat. He carries the evidence of that around on him,” Morty laughed.

They entered through the jockeys’ room side door, passing the pool and ping pong tables and the exercise room with its tread mills, cycles, bar bells, weight machines, and jump ropes. Several riders were working out on the equipment. More were lounging on couches, reading
Racing Daily
, or watching television. Others were gathered around a card table where an intense game of Racetrack Rummy was underway, comments loudly being offered not only by participants (“You still the sucker you always been, Julian,”) but also by onlookers (“Aw, shit, don’t do that, man.”)

There was a lunch counter with a half-dozen stools at the rear of the large room. Two wooden tables were placed near the south wall, each with four chairs. Behind the counter was a large refrigerator, two sinks, and a sizeable grill, in front of which sat a short, stocky man with black, slicked-back hair and a pencil thin mustache. Morty said, “Dammit, Clarence, ever since you grew that ‘stache you’re looking more and more like a Bourbon Street pimp. What’s today’s special?”

Clarence Meaux uncrossed his arms and extended a hand. “You must be Mr. Doyle, the publicity guy. You have my sympathies,” he smiled, “ having to work with Mr. Morty here.” He turned to Morty and said “Crawfish étouffée.” Doyle noticed two young apprentices sitting on stools at the end of the counter. “They’re liking it,” Meaux said, as the weight conscious youngsters ate slowly from small cups containing the rich food. “I won’t serve them boys more than that,” Meaux said. “No need for them to eat their way out of a job like I did.”

Once Jack and Morty were seated at one of the tables, Meaux brought over their orders of the day’s special in large bowls, accompanied by a plate of hot French bread. “Baked it just a bit ago,” Meaux said. “Can’t let these jocks see or smell it, though, it’d drive them crazy.”

Doyle dipped his spoon into the steaming étouffée. He said, “Clarence, this is terrific. Where’d you learn to cook like this?”

“Down home in New Iberia,” Meaux replied. “Nearly everybody around there can cook. After my apprentice year was over, I rode three more years, starving myself, winning just a few dozen races every year, and getting heavier all the time. You remember years ago that old Boston Red Sox pitcher name of Frank Sullivan, or O’Sullivan? I heard he talked about himself one time as being ‘in the twilight of a mediocre career.’ One of them northern jockey agents told me that. Cracked me up. I knew exactly what that pitcher meant. I wasn’t going nowhere anymore as a rider. So I hung up my tack, started hanging around the New Orleans Fair Grounds. Made a little money putting on crawfish boils and barbeques on the backstretch on weekends. Then one day, Mr. Louie LaCombe, he ran the track then, told me they needed a man to do the cooking in the jocks’ room. Was I interested? Damn right! I work Fair Grounds in the winters, then come up here to Monee in the summers. Want some more étouffée?”

Doyle said he would if he could, “But I’m full. It was great. I’ll have to put in an extra hour in the gym tomorrow to make up for it.” Morty said, “I wouldn’t mind.” Meaux got up and went behind the counter.

“Clarence is a good guy,” Morty said appreciatively. “And you should taste some of the other stuff he makes when he’s in the mood. Not just the crawfish étouffée, like today, but things like peppered shrimp, one of the best things I’ve ever had. And he’s always got a great pot of gumbo on the simmer back there.”

Meaux had overheard Morty. Placing the étouffée in front of Morty and sitting down at the table again, he said, “Special occasions I maybe do some catfish remoulade, crawfish casserole, maybe creole chicken….”

Doyle said, “Clarence, I’ve got to get on your mailing list.”

Meaux sat back in his chair, obviously pleased. He patted his rounded, white aproned stomach. “You like all that stuff?”

“I surely do.”

“Good,” Meaux said. “I’ll let you know next time I put together a little feast down here. Course,” he added, winking at Morty but so Jack could see it, “you got to be prepared to eat, well, a lot of things. Am I right, Mr. Morty?”

Morty laughed before dipping another piece of the hot bread into his now nearly empty étouffée bowl. “Tell Jack that Cajun story you always tell people,” Morty said.

Leaning back expansively, rounded midsection straining the white apron, Meaux said, “This baby crawfish is out walkin’ with his mamma along a ditch outside New Iberia. The baby crawfish goes on ahead, but pretty quick he comes flyin’ back down the ditch to mama. She says to him, ‘What’s the matter?’ He says, ‘Look at the big thing over there!’ Mama says, ‘Don’t worry none about that, no. It’s just a cow.’

“They keep on walkin’ along that ditch, the baby crawfish up ahead again. Pretty soon, back he comes again in a big hurry. His mama says, ‘What now?’ He says, ‘Look at the big thing right there.’ His mama says, ‘That’s just a dog. He won’t hurt you none.’”

Meaux’s eyes were crinkling up as he smiled. He patted his stomach and paused, holding back a little, until Doyle said, “So?”

“So, these two move on ahead, the mama going in front for awhile. All of a sudden the mama crawfish turns around and heads back in a hurry, speedin’ right up to the baby crawfish.

“Baby crawfish, all scarified now, asks his mama’s what’s wrong. The mama crawfish says, ‘Just start runnin’. That’s one of them Cajuns up there ahead. They’ll eat anything!”

Doyle laughed and Morty did, too, although he was familiar with the story. After Clarence signaled to the dishwasher to bring over the coffee pot, Doyle said, “Clarence, I’ll bet you’ve got some good stories from your riding days down there in Louisiana.”

“Oh, yeah, but I couldn’t have you writin’ about none of the best ones, no.”

“Why not?”

Clarence said, “There was some stuff went on down there in my day, ‘specially at the little bush tracks, that you wouldn’t want to be tellin’ racing fans about.”

Doyle grinned. He said, “Like what?”

“Well, at some of them small tracks down there in those old days, everybody took their best shot most all the time. What stewards they had was either half blind or all the way asleep. Us boys’d try ‘bout anything to win a race. There’d be trainers lightin’ up their horses with coke, jocks hittin’ ’em batteries. The motto was ‘Hop ’em. Shock ’em. Bet ’em and brag on ’em.’

“Naw, Mr. Jack,” Clarence said, “no need for you to be tellin’ those old stories to anybody.” He got to his feet. “How ‘bout you fellas tryin’ some of my bread puddin’ just came out of the oven?”