The Significant Seven (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

July 9, 2009

At the end of that week—one in which Doyle had again handled the stable entries, arranged for the services of the jockeys Tenuta wanted to use on them, paid some stable bills, placed feed and vitamin orders, and answered numerous phone calls in his role as stable agent—the little trainer invited him to his home for dinner. “I’ll call my wife, Rosa, and let her know you’re coming. Okay, Jack?”

“Fine with me,” Doyle said. “I don’t get many home cooked meals, especially Italian, and I’m big on Italian food.” Tenuta gave him an odd look but didn’t say anything. They walked to their cars, Tenuta saying, “Just follow me. It’s about three miles. Five-eleven South Belmont in Arlington Heights in case we get separated.”

Ten minutes later, Tenuta pulled his maroon Buick Regal into the driveway of a red brick ranch house, motioning Doyle to park behind him. The lawn and shrubbery, Doyle could see, were as well maintained as Tenuta’s racetrack barn. He was not surprised.

The front door opened as they approached. Out stepped a short, dark-haired woman wearing a floral apron over a red blouse and black skirt. “Jack Doyle,” she said, extending her hand, “welcome to our home. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

She smiled warmly as Doyle said, “Thanks for having me.” Rosa then turned to her husband and offered her cheek, which he kissed briefly, giving her shoulder a hug at the same time.

Jack and Ralph sat on the back deck of the house for a few minutes, drinking beer. From under a picnic bench limped an obviously very old dog. “That’s Sammy,” the trainer said. “C’mere, c’mere, you mutt,” he said fondly. He scratched the aged canine’s back for a couple of minutes until Rosa called them in, reminding Ralph to “wash your hands.” Sammy followed Doyle to the dinner table and slowly positioned himself beneath its center. Doyle made sure his feet were not a bother to the dog.

Their first course was a salad that Doyle did not recognize. Rosa, digging into her plate, said, “This is a grapefruit display with French dressing, mushroom croutons, cream cheese balls, on top of red leaf lettuce.”

Tenuta forced down a couple of forkfuls, groaning quietly. Doyle, whose ingestion credo had always been extremely liberal, cleaned his salad plate. Rosa beamed at him. “I’ll bet you’ve always been a good eater, Jack.”

“I certainly have, Rosa.”

Rosa took the salad plates into the kitchen. Ralph leaned across the table. “Jack,” he said softly out of the side of his mouth, “this meal tonight, most of my meals now, come out of a Kentucky cookbook that a friend of ours at Keeneland racetrack sent to Rosa early in the summer. These meals have been going on for over a month, because she’s really into it now. On Sundays, she relents, and we have my pasta, red sauce, veal meatballs. Rest of the week? All these Kentucky adventures. This, from a woman who could cater to angels using her old recipes. But I can’t talk her off it. Whoops! Here she comes.”

Doyle looked on with some trepidation as the next course was set before him.

“Have you ever had a genuine Kentucky Hot Brown?” Rosa said brightly. “It’s a Kentucky tradition, an open-faced turkey sandwich on white toast with bacon strips and a whitish Mornay sauce. There’s Parmesan cheese in the sauce and also a sprinkle as a topping.”

“Well, it must be good, because it’s got good things in it,” Doyle said bravely. “Actually, I have had a Hot Brown. During the time I worked in Kentucky a few years back.” He began to cut the mound of food on his plate into bite sizes. Thinking about his previous culinary experiences in the Blue Grass State, he recalled his first breakfast at Louisville’s famed Brown Hotel, where the Kentucky Hot Brown had been created. He had ordered ham and scrambled eggs that morning and the waitress said, “Hon, you want country ham?”

“What’s country ham?”

The waitress drawled, “Well, it’s cured, and salty, and kind of tough, but tasty. We don’t serve them until they’re a year or more old.”

Doyle had smiled up at this nice lady. “I believe I’ll go with the city ham,” he said.

Tenuta broke into Doyle’s reverie to say, “When you were in Kentucky, that was when you were helping catch that horse killer, right?”

Doyle nodded. Rosa looked from her husband to her guest. “Do I know this story?” she said.

Between scoops of the Hot Brown, Doyle provided an abbreviated summary of his past while he was working on behalf of the FBI. “Is the guy still in jail?” Ralph asked.

“Yeah. Federal prison. Many years to go.”

Rosa said, “There are some real cuckoos in the racing business.”

“I’ve trained for my share of them,” Ralph sighed, “though not crooks like that.” He reached for his wine glass. Glancing at his wife he added, “Including Salvatore ‘Slow Pay Sal’ Rizzo, Rosa’s cousin.”

“Distant cousin,” Rosa huffed.

“Not distant enough,” Ralph fired back. “He was a real pain in the you know what.”

Rosa said, “Well, yes, Sal could be. Tell Jack about the dogs and Salvatore.”

“I trained for Sal a little more than three years,” Ralph said. “Every year, his horses made money. Not a lot, but more than enough to cover his owner’s expenses. Which he hated paying. The guy was always two, three months behind in his training bills. If Sal wasn’t related to Rosa, no matter how ‘distantly,’ I would have given him the boot.”

Rosa ignored that jibe. She said, “Ralph, get to the dogs.” Then she paused. “Wait,” she said, “let me get dessert. Just take a minute.”

Doyle and Tenuta didn’t make any small talk in the short interim. Doyle concentrated on his friend’s apprehensive expression. Rosa quickly returned and laid the dessert dishes before the men, saying, “This is a mocha-macaroon freeze with lemon curd topping.” She smiled as she took her first bite. Her husband muttered, “Whatever happened to homemade cannolis?” But he dutifully dug in, as did Doyle, who thought this was pretty good stuff. “Go on, Ralph,” Rosa urged, “tell Jack about the dogs.”

“Sal and his wife Myrna bred champion hunting dogs that were used in competive field trials,” Ralph said. “They had this one outstanding dam…”

“Bitch,” Rosa corrected.

Ralph said, “You talking about Myrna? Oh, you mean the mother dog.”

“Very funny. Go on Ralph.”

“Okay, Sal and Myrna breed one litter from this female champ every year. Her name is something like Champion Mannheim Mitzi of Blue Island, some damn thing like that. They called her Mitzi. She’d produce anywhere from five to eight pups each litter. These are German short-haired pointers. And the Rizzos sell them all at big prices. Except this one year.”

Tenuta was smiling, relishing his remembrance. “Five years ago, there was one pup that was a real runt. About half the size of his brothers and sisters. The Rizzos don’t try to sell him, don’t even want dog people to see him, because he could hurt Mitzi’s big reputation. Sal comes to me at the barn one day and says, ‘Ralph, I know I’m behind on my bills to you, sorry, I’ll catch up, blah blah blah. Just to show you my good faith, I am going to give you one of champion Mitzi’s pups.’

“I tell him, ‘Sal, Rosa and I already have a dog. It’s an old lab-terrier mutt we’ve had for years. He’s so smart, I taught him how to find the TV remote control when I can’t. My car keys, too. Our Sammy, he’s all the dog we need.’

“Rosa, this is getting to be long. You want to start coffee?” She gave him a look. “Okay,” Ralph continued, “Sal goes on to say that if we don’t take this puny pup, they’ll have to put him down. He shows me a photo of the little fellow, who is plenty cute, but obviously very small against what Sal called the ‘standard of the breed.’”

Doyle said, “Why would they destroy a well-bred dog like that?”

“In the dog world,” Ralph said, “you got to have pedigree and conformation. A breeder doesn’t want to reveal to the dog world that he’s got some inferior product like this pup. Now, I’m thinking, our Sammy is getting up there in years. I don’t want to see this young little guy go under. I talked to Rosa, and she said, ‘Yes, take the pup. Give that cheap cousin of mine a month off his training bills.’ And we did.”

Doyle could feel old Sammy under the table shifting his weight onto Doyle’s feet as Ralph continued. “It took us about four months to figure out that Sammy and the pup were not having happy lives together. The pup was active all day, the old guy wanted his rest. It wasn’t working out. I’m thinking, ‘I’ve made a mistake. I can’t let the pup ruin Sammy’s golden years.’

“There was a guy stabled near me at Heartland Downs that year named Jimmy Binnard. Nice guy. He owned field trial dogs. He’d race his horses in Chicago six months, then go hunting or trialing or whatever they call it for a couple of months down south each fall. I told him my situation. Jimmy agreed to take our pup that we’d named Shorty. He said, ‘Ralph, I’ve got give you something for him. This is a real well-bred pup. He’s growing pretty good. He’s got a nice look about him, too.’

“‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but he’s just a little guy. His big-time breeder didn’t want to keep him.’ Jimmy, God bless him, would not let it go that way. He said, ‘Ralph, if I do any good with this pup, you get half.’ I just laughed. I said, ‘Jimmy, half of what?’ Jimmy said, ‘He looks smart. He could grow more. You never know, he might turn out to be a good hunting dog. If he does, in a year or so I’ll take him with my other dogs to a couple of field trials in South Carolina where they compete for money. Okay?’

“I said, ‘Sure, Jimmy. Just take care of this little guy.’ So I said goodbye to Shorty.”

Rosa had slipped away from the table, gotten the coffee pot, and come back to pour. She was smiling. She nudged Doyle with her elbow as she set his cup down. “This is the beauty part,” she said.

“Over the next year, Jimmy Binnard trains Shorty for the field trials,” Ralph said. “This little guy develops, grows big, turns out to be a multichampion down there in the Carolinas. His second year there, he wins $28,000 in prize money. Jimmy sends me my half! After Shorty had won his first two or three trials, who shows up at the barn one morning but Cousin Slow Pay Sal. He must have heard about how good Shorty was doing. Sal makes some small talk, gives me a check for about half of what he owes me in current training bills. Then Sal says, this is the kind brass balls he’s got, ‘And Ralph, how’s
our
pup doing?’ I said, ‘You mean the little runt you were going to kill? He’s doing fine. Now get the hell out of here.’”

Doyle said, “I love it. What a jerk, Slow Play Sal.”

Ralph said, “They were different, Sal and Myrna. The three years I trained for them, they would tell me when they were having Champion Mitzie Schmitzie or whatever her name was bred. They would observe the breeding. Then, and I am not making this up, they would breed themselves.”

Rosa, blushing, said “Ralph, you don’t have to tell that,” and retreated to the kitchen carrying the dessert plates.

Doyle said, “Come again?”

“I am saying that every year for three years when the Rizzos bred their champion dam, bitch I mean, they would be active along those lines themselves. Myrna had a baby a year three years in a row.”

“The dog breeders breeding after breeding their dog?” Doyle said, laughing louder than perhaps he should have.

Rosa came back to the table. “That’s enough, Ralph,” she said. “Jack, how about some more dessert?”

“Don’t mind if I do. Thanks.”

She said, “Would you like a little grappa to go with it?”

“I would,” Ralph said.

Rosa said, “I’m not asking you, hon. I know what it does to you.”

“I know what it does to me, too,” Doyle said. “I gave up grappa a couple of years back. Used to drink it with my friend Moe Kellman until I had hangovers that made me seriously consider suicide. Wonderful stuff while it’s happening, brutal stuff the next day.”

“I’ll just get you men coffee, then.”

Chapter Thirty

July 11, 2009

Joe Zabrauskis drove the 323 miles from his Northbrook, Illinois, home to his northern Wisconsin property in six and a half hours, including his stop for lunch in Green Bay at Brett Favre’s Steak House. He loved the place. A life-long Chicago Bears fan, Joe liked nothing better than entering enemy territory and finding Packer backers to josh with. They were almost always good-humored and disrespectful to people they referred to as FIBs, “Fucking Illinois Bastards,” providing great fun for Joe, an Illinois native with longtime ties to the Badger State.

Zabrauskis began to anticipate his departure days in advance. Rising early as he always did before going to the main office of his extensive beer distributorship, he drank coffee in the early morning mist on the back patio of his house, imagining that he was already smelling the northern pines, hearing the sounds of gently lapping lake water that awaited him.

The solitude he enjoyed this one summer week each year served to invigorate him, restore his spirits for the other fifty-one. For many previous years, Joe had joined male relatives in Wisconsin during fall deer season. Then had come a marked increase in hunting accidents involving both livestock and humans. Each autumn, some cows would be fatally misidentified as deer by hung-over, once-a-year hunters. Some large dogs, too. Five years before, a man had somehow mistaken his next-door neighbor for a doe and shot her dead from a distance of two-hundred feet. After that, Joe acceded to his wife’s pleas to give up these autumn adventures. He told her he would confine himself to his summer getaways.

Joe arrived at the cabin that had been in his family for half a century in late afternoon. By the time dusk dropped onto Lake Cedar, he had caught a walleyed pike legal sized enough to be his dinner, plus several less sizeable bass that he returned to the cold, dark water.

The cabin was isolated on a two-acre stretch of lakefront property, blocks from the nearest home. Across the lake there were hundreds of acres of state-owned land that could not be privately developed, thus promising protection from boating crazies and Jet Ski enthusiasts from the cities.

As was his custom on these trips, Joe erected a small tent in the clearing north of the old cabin. He kept his beer and perishables inside the building in the refrigerator, an appliance still referred to by his mother as “the icebox.” When he was a boy, there was nothing he enjoyed more than sleeping outside at night, hearing the wind riffling the nearby pines, loon calls resonant across the water. The week after Christmas, when Zabrauskis brought his family north for a vacation of cross-country skiing, ice fishing, snow mobiles and watching college football bowl games, the seven-room cabin was put to full use. But not when he was alone on the property in the summer, his favorite time.

Even though he was sleeping outside, Zabrauskis spent much of his first night airing out the musty cabin, sweeping up mouse droppings, washing the windows. He hated to think of this cherished place being anything but in great shape.

Joe’s practice was to rise very early each day, make a fire in the outdoor pit, and cook a big breakfast of bacon, eggs, and brew coffee improved by a shot of Christian Brothers brandy, a staple of many northern Wisconsin diets. After scouring Lake Cedar for fish from his small motor boat until late morning, he’d go into nearby Antigo for a couple of glasses of beer and a sandwich at Weasel and Betty’s tavern. Everyone there knew him, Big Joe from Chicago. Early in the afternoon, he returned to the cabin for a nap. His favorite time of the day was late afternoon, when he went out again to fish, this time from a canoe in the pools of water beneath a stretch of overhanging pines on the west end of the lake.

***

After spending most of the day replacing some rotted portions of his pier, Orth was relaxing inside his cabin, watching a DVD of Ultimate Fighting Championship highlighted bouts. He looked on appreciatively, gripping his bottle of Leinie, as that brutal sport’s current heavyweight champion, a big, blond man from nearby northern Minnesota, dismantled his opponent. Orth’s cell phone went off just as the bout concluded in a cascade of loser’s blood.

“Yeah.”

Sanderson said, “He’s there, Number Four.”

“Got you.”

Two hours later, Orth followed Sanderson’s directions to Zabrauskis’ remote cabin. He parked two miles down the road in a stand of trees just off an old logging road. Put on his camouflage outfit, blackened his face, and began almost two days of boring, scrupulous observation of his target, equipped with binoculars, a sleeping bag, dried food, and a vault of patience. The second night, he used his cell phone to call Sanderson. As usual, they kept it short. “Things okay?” Sanderson said.

“He’s in my sights. I’ve got it figured. I’ll be done by dawn.” Orth buried the phone under a tall pile of brush.

Observing Zabrauskis for those two days, Orth had come to admire the man’s discipline, sense of order, qualities that Orth respected. Joe Z followed the same routine each night. He set the outdoor fire that he would light the next morning, prepared the battered iron coffee pot to be set upon the grate over the flames. “This guy is as regular as a master sergeant,” Orth whispered to himself the second night. “All the better.”

Zabrauskis that evening had caught a bunch of pan fish. He cleaned them and fried them in the black iron skillet he always used for his meals here. After dinner, the big man sat in a camp chair next to the fire pit, watching the night advance, completely content in his northern retreat. He stomped the glimmering fire out at just before eleven. Orth watched as Zabrauskis stripped to his shorts and duck walked through the flaps of the canvas tent, just as he had the previous two nights at about this time.

Orth waited until half past midnight. He slipped on his night vision goggles and stepped out of the nearby woods on his way to the tent. A cloud mass briefly obscured the bright moon, and Orth dropped to his belly and crept forward. He heard snoring as he neared the tent entrance. Carefully parting the tent’s opening, he saw Joe Z deeply asleep on his side. Orth crawled forward. He stopped when he was next to the big man. Orth reached over his shoulder and took from his back pack the weapon he’d brought. He had thoroughly tested it during his two days and nights of waiting and observing. It did, indeed, transmit a powerful electrical pulse affecting the nervous system. Orth was convinced that this was the real deal, what police officers all over the country were now grateful to have in their hands. The recipient of voltage like this was immediately rendered incapacitated.

Zabrauskis stirred, sensing something. He had been sleeping on his left side. He turned his head and saw the night-goggled, black-faced figure crouched beside him to the right. For an instant, Joe Z imagined he was in the midst of a science fiction-driven dream. He shook his head to clear it. He felt a pressure on his back as he attempted to turn over.

Orth was quick. He jammed the Taser X21 into the middle of Joe Z’s back and pulled the trigger. Zabrauskis shuddered as he was hit by the electrical charge, then lay still.

Orth turned the Zabrauskis onto his back. He straddled his torso. Zabrauskis was stunned and helpless. Orth grabbed the small pillow that had lain under the big man’s head and clamped it down over his face. For a second or two, the powerful old lineman instinctively attempted to fight his way out of this death trap. No go. Orth pressed down and took Joe Z’s breath away.

As he’d predicted to Sanderson, Orth was out of the woods well before dawn. He drove the speed limit south, not to his cabin, but to Wittenburg, where he pulled into a highway rest stop and went to sleep. When he awoke, he had breakfast at popular local diner. Before leaving Wittenburg, he bought ten pounds of the famous smoked bacon sold at the Neuschke’s outlet. It was a breakfast treat once described by the late
New York
Times
critic R. W. Apple as the “beluga of bacon.” Orth never read what he knew to be the leftist
Times
, but he enjoyed this smoked meat. He’d seen the quote from Apple in the meat company’s promotional material. Orth found it humorous that he was for the first and only time in his life in agreement with the fucking liberal media, at least on this subject.

At the end of the week, when Joe Z’s frantic family asked local authorities to locate him, animals had gnawed Joe Z to little but bones. The report was “dead for two or three days, cause unknown.”