Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (56 page)

He returned to devouring his scrambled eggs, leaving me to wonder if I’d have to use an industrial block and tackle to pull this story out of him.

“Fine, so we’ve established that one Kevin Killane, drunken asshole extraordinaire, did not in fact gun his Harley off a cliff and into eternity while screaming defiance at the heavens – got it. So, it was a horse after all?”

Devon put down his fork. He sipped his orange juice, and then set the glass to one side. He stared past my shoulder at the wall.

“It was a horse.”

“Devon?”

“Yes, my Ashley?”

“Uncle Sheridan said you told him what happened, but he also said he was pretty sure you didn’t tell him everything.”

Devon smiled a sad, haunted, tired smile. “You won’t let me get away with anything, will you? You will hunt down the truth and turn it out into the daylight no matter where the trail takes either of us.”

“Devon, I know this is beyond hard on you and on me too, but everything is what I need to hear.”

He sighed out a long breath. He turned from staring at the wall to peering down at the table, as if it might have some helpful advice. Then he looked into my eyes.

“Very well.”

He leaned back in his chair, he crossed his arms, he adopted his crisp, precise, professor-lecturing-on-a-dull-topic voice, and he told me everything.

36. The Tree of Death

“My father owned racehorses, Ashley. He did not love or even like them, he did not appreciate their beauty, he was ignorant of their moods and personalities, he did not care about their wants or needs, and surprisingly enough, he had no interest in making money off their efforts – but in his world, they were one of the shiny ornaments that adorned the lives of the rich, and so he owned them.

“He owned them for the same reason he owned limousines and yachts and the jewelry he draped around the throats of women – it gained him respect, status, pictures on the society pages, all that awful nonsense.

“I loved racehorses. I’d never seen one, only pictures, but I adored their sweaty, shining beauty, their deep glowing eyes, their courage, their determination to persevere even when their legs shattered beneath them – they were heroes to me, and I read about their exploits just as eagerly as I devoured Uncle’s Civil War books.

“One day, when I was ten years old and reading a book about Man o’ War, my father suddenly loomed over my shoulder from out of nowhere.”

“This was at your father’s place?”

“At one of his summer homes, yes – this particular one was on Long Island, in New York. I’d taken my book to a distant corner of the house where he rarely appeared, because avoiding my father’s notice was my primary goal whenever I was under his roof – but that day, he found me.

“He looked over my shoulder at what I was reading and said, ‘You like racehorses, kid?  Want to go see some?’

“Experience had taught me to be extremely shy of going anywhere at all with him, but racehorses? Real ones? I couldn’t resist, and I said yes.”

He paused. He paused, and he looked at the past, looked at what might have been. We all do that, of course – not that anything good ever comes of it.

“Ashley, he came upon me completely by chance – I learned later he’d gone looking for a maid he meant to talk into his bed, a maid who was sensibly trying to keep away from him. It was chance that he found me instead, merest chance that I happened to be reading about a racehorse and not something else entirely, and I’m quite sure it was no more than a chance, mad impulse on his part to offer to take me to see his racehorses.

“He met my mother by chance, he met his death by chance, and do you think if he’d known when I looked up at him and said ‘yes’ that it would lead to his death only a few hours later, he still would have gone?”

“Well, no, right? I mean, assuming he didn’t have a death wish or anything?”

A smile flickered across his face and vanished. “Ashley, are you familiar with the Edgar Allan Poe story ‘The Black Cat’?”

“I’m guessing it involves a black cat who suffers a horrifying and gruesome fate?”

“Yes, and it is also where Poe speaks of ‘the imp of the perverse,’ the human impulse to do things that are hurtful  and wrong for their own sake, for the sheer fascination of bringing down destruction and ruin, even upon oneself – and Ashley, when I think of my father knowing his fate in advance, knowing that if he took me out to the racetrack that day he would destroy himself, me, the future of the Killane family, and unleash a storm of hatred and ruin stretching far and wide over many years?”

Another ghost smile passed over Devon’s face. “He’d have done it in a heartbeat, sweet Ashley. He’d have gone to his death laughing, delighting in the thought of the heartbreak and devastation that would follow in his wake, and he would have told his chauffeur to floor it and get us to that racetrack as fast as possible. I’m certain of it.”

A question occurred to me. “Devon, do you own racehorses? I mean, seeing as how you liked them so much as a kid?” I’d never heard of his having a racing stable, but since the big guy had more shiny, expensive toys than any sane person could keep track of, he could have owned every horse in that year’s Kentucky Derby and I wouldn’t necessarily have known about it.

He turned pale, and shook his head without an instant of hesitation. “God, no. Not after what happened. Never.”

I leaned forward and took his hands in mine. I held his hands, I squeezed them gently, and then I let go, I leaned back, and I looked into those lost blue-violet eyes.

“Devon, tell me what happened. Tell me, and I swear you’ll feel better once you get it out.” I had no idea if that was true or not, but I so needed it to be true. We both did.

“Ashley, I am so far beyond the possibility of feeling better that there are no words to describe that much distance, and not enough light-years to measure it. But I will tell you what happened anyway, because you deserve to know the truth.”

“Belmont Park is a magnificent place, Ashley, so grand that calling it merely a ‘racetrack’ seems cheapening and small. When it was built on Long Island ever so many years ago, back when people care about grandeur and style, it was modeled after the great, sweeping racecourses of Europe, and it is enormous. The main track is one-and-one-half miles in circumference – the largest dirt track in North America, and for all I know, the world – and it holds not one but two turf courses within its infield. Another entire track a mile around and used only for training stands nearby, and the stables are a warren that stretches on forever.

“My father led me into that stable area, into a world of horses and people, dogs and cats and chickens, a thousand different fascinating accents humming in the air, and his breath was stinking with alcohol.

“ ‘Follow me, kid, my horses are around here somewhere in this damn hole …’

“I trailed after him, keeping well back of his stumbling, swaying steps, and darted glances at all the rows upon rows of stalls we passed, and at all the hundreds of beautiful, regal horses who lived in them – some turning their curious long faces to stare at the newcomers, some eating, others sleeping, and many standing outside being groomed or bathed.

“The pictures from my books were alive and right in front of me, and I’d never been so excited – if that limousine had deposited us right outside General Lee’s tent minutes before battle was joined at Gettysburg, I could hardly have been more excited.

“My father led me closer to his death, down one tree-lined path after another between the barns, and I itched to sprint off and explore on my own.

“Heroes with four legs stood wherever I looked, their coats shining in the sun, and I wanted to meet every last one of them – but I did not dare disappear out of my father’s sight just yet. When he was drunk, his concentration on a goal – such as beating me, shouting at me, or getting me to follow him somewhere – was fierce and single-minded; but once we reached the stables where his horses were quartered, he was likely to lose focus and be distracted by something or other, and then I might be able to slip away without being noticed.

“It was even easier than that. We turned a corner into yet another lane flanked by stables on either side, as more curious heads poked out of stalls to look us up and down. My father stopped, looked around at me, and waved at the peaceful, tree-shaded kingdom before us.

“ ‘These are all my horses, kid, so go look at ‘em …’ His voice trailed off as he peered about, and then he added, ‘Think I’ll go find that stupid trainer of mine – bastard needs to be reminded that as the guy who pays the bills, I’m the one in charge of this fucking pony show.’

“He stalked away, I was dismissed and forgotten, and that was quite all right with me.

“The last two hours of my father’s life were a paradise. I petted velvet noses, fed carrots into greedy mouths, and I didn’t even mind when some of the horses snapped at me or slung an angry kick my way – the stress of racing and of being confined to a stall for upwards of twenty hours a day makes some of them a bit temperamental, but it was all the same to me, I was in heaven.

“Dogs sniffed at my heels and cats aimed lazy stares at me, chickens scattered out of my way and a goat nibbled at my sleeve – the companionship of other creatures soothes horses whose nerves have been rubbed raw by competition and travel, and so any racing stable will have a small army of furred and feathered animals wandering about.

“I met them all, and every clucking hen and shrieking rooster might as well have been some exotic denizen of Africa or Asia. I threw sticks for the dogs, I talked to several unimpressed cats, and once when I heard a sudden huffing breath behind me, I turned and looked right into the eyes of a llama, of all things.

“The people were even better.”

He paused to sip his orange juice, while I picked at the remains of my cold omelet and wondered just what variety of Technicolor nightmare was waiting at the end of this story.

Devon forged onward, setting his orange juice aside. “You see, Ashley, the greater part of the people working at the stables of any American racetrack are much like the people who raised me, all those countless maids and cooks and servants – they work long hours for little pay, and they are a world unto themselves. Many of them are Hispanic in origin, and so I heard bantering and gossip and discussion in Spanish all around me. It was like coming home.”

“Bet you talked their ears off, huh?”

He smiled, and it was a lifetime before I saw him smile again.

“I did. As you might expect, they were rather surprised by the sudden arrival of a pasty white boy who spoke fluent Spanish and in more than one dialect, but soon they were answering my thousands of questions, showing me each horse in their care, and telling me all the individual peculiarities of their charges.

“I carried blankets, washed out leg bandages, handed sponges to a groom giving a bath to a restless, anxious filly, and filled enough water buckets to drown an army. I could not have been happier.

“Fifteen minutes before my father died, I helped a young woman from El Salvador scoop grain into a series of feed buckets. She explained which bucket went to which horse, why different horses received different portions and types of grain, and somewhere in the distance I heard the familiar sound of my father shouting at someone.

“I tried not to listen, but even over the radios blaring frantic music from a dozen different Spanish-language stations, there was no escaping that man’s voice.

“It seemed he’d found that trainer he was looking for, and was subjecting the man to a lengthy drunken lecture on every incompetent mistake being made with each and every horse unfortunate enough to be Killane property.

“The wrong races were entered, the daily rate charged for training was ruinous, this animal was given medications it did not need, that one was a cheap and lazy sort who should be shot, and the trainer’s employees were all ‘fucking wetback spics’ who should also be shot.

“The young woman I was helping – her name was Maria Hernández, I remember – saw me trying not to look in his direction, and asked me in Spanish if I knew that awful drunk man. I was so ashamed to say he was my father, and I apologized in every way I knew how for his behavior – but she just gave me a brave smile and a braver hug.

“She reassured me that his ranting wasn’t my fault, and that I couldn’t help being his son. She repeated the same soothing things that so many housekeepers and gardeners and bodyguards had said to me over the years, and in the background he just kept getting louder.

“ ‘A drooling retard could do a better job!’

“I didn’t want to, but I turned and looked at him anyway, in the same way that bystanders can’t help but stare at the smoking, tangled wreckage of a fatal car accident.

“My father stood perhaps a hundred feet away, yelling into the trainer’s face while pointing back at a horse shifting nervously at the end of a lead shank being held by an equally nervous groom.

“It seemed he felt that the animal had lost its most recent race because the jockey had given it a poor ride, and the fact that my father had no idea what he was talking about did not stop him from cursing the jockey for being incompetent, screaming at the trainer for choosing the wrong jockey, and condemning the groom for speaking Spanish and existing. Had he thought it would understand, I imagine he also would have blamed the horse for being born.”