Triple Crown (25 page)

George then walked back to his Jeep and threw something onto the back seat, before climbing in and driving off into the night.

I returned slowly to my blanket and went to sleep wondering what all that had been about.

I was none the wiser in the morning.

I woke at three o’clock, slightly chilled, and went back up the stairs to my bed. Diego and Keith were both giving the snoring a rest so I lay down and returned to sleep for another
hour.

I didn’t mention my nocturnal excursion to the others and especially not to George Raworth when he arrived to watch his horses at exercise.

I prepared Ladybird for Victor Gomez to ride a steady breeze over five furlongs. She would be racing on Friday afternoon in the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes, a graded race over nine furlongs for
three-year-old fillies that was named in honour of the yellow perennial daisy with a black centre that is the state flower of Maryland. So all Ladybird needed today was a gentle pipe-opener to
maintain her condition, nothing that would overtire.

Just to confuse people, in 1940, the Maryland Jockey Club decided that, in addition to the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes for fillies, the Preakness Stakes itself would henceforth be designated as the
‘Run for the Black-Eyed Susans’ and a garland of the yellow-and-black flowers would be draped over the winner, to rival the garland of red roses that was draped over the victor of the
Kentucky Derby.

However, there was one slight problem. The Preakness is run in May, some two months earlier than black-eyed Susans come into bloom.

Not that such a trivial matter would be allowed to deter the gentlemen directors of the oldest sporting organisation of North America, one that could boast two US presidents among its former
members. They decreed that the garland would be made using early-flowering, but all-yellow, Viking daisies, with their centres hand-painted black in order to resemble black-eyed Susans.

Nowadays, yellow-and-black flowers of the chrysanthemum family are used but, in all its 140-plus years of existence, the Run for the Black-Eyed Susans has never once seen an actual black-eyed
Susan.

Victor Gomez came back on Ladybird to swap his saddle onto Debenture.

‘Ladybird good,’ he said to me. ‘She win tomorrow, yes?’ He gave me a thumbs up and grinned, not that it was a pretty sight with several of his teeth missing.

‘Yes,’ I replied, raising my thumb back at him. ‘Hope so.’

I walked the horse around for ten minutes for her to cool off before giving her a washdown with soap and water. Next I dried her using a large towel and then brushed her coat until it shone.

I wanted Ladybird to look her best in the paddock, not least because Tony Andretti had told me the previous evening that he would be coming to Pimlico for both Friday and Saturday and I
didn’t want him giving me any grief about poor standards of grooming, even in jest.

‘How about the tests on the semen?’ I had asked him.

‘Still waiting,’ he’d replied. ‘Full results should be in tomorrow. All I can tell you at the moment is that it is definitely horse semen but not from a Thoroughbred. My
professor is still doing DNA similarity tests for other equine breeds.’

So, if it wasn’t from a Thoroughbred, there was no point in me taking hair samples from the colts in Raworth’s barn for comparison. None of them could have been the donor.

I continued grooming Ladybird, brushing out her tail and then trimming a straight edge at the bottom.

As I worked, I thought about the next two days.

It was not only Tony Andretti who would be coming to Pimlico, other members of the FACSA racing section would also be in attendance, and I didn’t want them spotting me as a ringer.

It would be twelve days since I had left them at Andrews Base and, in spite of the fairly vigorous hair growth on my chin and upper lip since then, I was concerned that federal special agents
should be well enough trained in recognition techniques to identify me easily, not least because my beard had not grown dark and concealing as I had hoped, but rather blond and wispy like my
hair.

Since first arriving at Belmont, I had taken to always wearing my LA Dodgers baseball cap, with the peak pulled down low. Here at Pimlico, there were too many press and TV cameras around to
avoid completely, so it was better to be as incognito as possible at all times. So tomorrow, I decided, I would also wear my cheap dark sunglasses to cover my eyes. With luck, the sun would shine
so I wouldn’t look too out of place.

I finished with Ladybird as Victor Gomez returned on Debenture. With two days before his race, he had been given a far sterner workout and Maria walked him round the shedrow for a good
twenty-five minutes to cool.

While she did so, I went over to the Preakness Barn to fetch some more straw.

George Raworth’s white Jeep Cherokee was again parked close by. The man himself was out at the track so, having swivelled round on my heel to check no one else was watching, I went to the
far side of the vehicle and tried the door handle.

It opened.

The cryogenic flask was still there but it was now lying on its side behind the driver’s seat with the cap off. I tipped it up. It was completely empty both of liquid nitrogen and of the
semen.

I had a quick look around the rest of the Jeep. On the back seat sat an electric torch and a small cup, along with what looked like a miniature red rubber rugby ball. The ball was about three
inches long, with a short blue plastic pipe extending from one end, and it had ‘Polaroid’ stamped into the rubber on one side.

I knew exactly what it was. I’d once owned something very similar.

It was an air duster, designed to blow a stream of air to remove dust from the lens or the inside of a camera. I squeezed the ball and was rewarded by the same hissing pump sound that I had
heard the previous night.

I was sorely tempted to put the air duster into my pocket but I could see George Raworth in the far distance, coming back towards me from the track with Victor Gomez, and it wouldn’t do to
be caught with it.

I left things as they were, closed the Jeep door as quietly as I could, and moved quickly away. Thankfully, George had been too busy talking to Victor to notice me.

‘ID?’ said the guard at the barn entrance.

I showed him my groom’s pass and he let me through.

The place was a hive of activity, with veterinary staff from the Maryland Racing Commission taking blood samples from each of the Preakness runners for pre-race drug testing.

I stood and watched as one of them inserted a hypodermic needle into Fire Point’s neck just behind his head. The horse was well used to this procedure. He made no movement as the needle
went into his jugular vein and blood was collected into two Vacutainer test tubes, identical to the one I’d passed through the chain-link fence to Jim Bradley at Belmont.

I picked up the straw from the bedding stockpile but, instead of going straight back to my horses, I walked along the line of stalls until I came to the one where George Raworth had stopped
during the night. I took a step forward and looked inside. It was empty.

‘What do you want?’ asked a deep angry voice behind me that made me jump.

‘Nothing,’ I replied automatically, turning round.

The voice belonged to a tall man with ebony skin who was standing in the shedrow, the whites of his prominent eyes standing out against a dark face as he stared at me accusingly.

‘I’m Paddy,’ I said with a broad smile, putting down the bale of straw and extending my right hand towards him. ‘I’m here with Raworth’s crew. My first time
at Pimlico.’

‘Tyler,’ the man replied. ‘I’m with Bryson.’

He slowly shook my offered hand and even grinned at me, exhibiting a fine collection of gold teeth. My overtly friendly approach had completely disarmed his anger.

‘I’m based at Belmont,’ I said. ‘Only here for the big race.’

‘Gulfstream,’ Tyler said, pointing a finger at his own chest. ‘In Miami. Too damn cold up here, for my liking.’ He shivered.

Cold? He must be joking. But I could see from his thick woollen sweater that he wasn’t.

‘Who do you look after?’ I asked.

‘Crackshot,’ he replied with another flash of the gold teeth. ‘He’s out at exercise right now.’ He waved a hand towards the empty stall. ‘I’m doing his
bed.’

Crackshot.

What had George Raworth been doing in the middle of the night outside the stall of the only other horse in the Preakness that most of the pundits gave any chance to other than Fire Point?

My suspicious mind was working overtime.

I led Ladybird from the barn to the paddock about thirty minutes before the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes and walked right past FACSA Special Agent Trudi Harding, the shooter of
Hayden Ryder at Churchill Downs.

She ignored me, not giving me a first glance let alone a second. She was standing with Frank Bannister on a raised platform near the track entrance and they were too preoccupied scanning the
faces of the large Friday crowd to notice the groom passing by right under their noses.

Uniquely in my experience, the paddock at Pimlico was indoors, and not at all what British racegoers would expect. Here, instead of being a parade ring where the horses would walk to be
inspected, the paddock was an area where the horses stood to be saddled in numbered stalls that corresponded to their post-draw positions.

I held Ladybird’s head as George Raworth and Keith made her ready.

First they placed a thin chamois cloth onto the horse’s bare back to prevent slippage. That was followed by the saddle pad, weight cloth, numbered saddle cloth and finally the saddle, all
of them held in place by a wide strap passed under the belly and secured tightly to buckles on either side of the saddle. Over the top of everything, for added safety, went a three-inch-wide
webbing over-girth.

Satisfied, George gave Ladybird a friendly smack on her rump as Keith and I led her up the ramp under the jockeys’ room, back into the daylight, and onto the track. George issued jockey
Jerry Fernando with some last-minute instructions and a leg-up into the saddle before I handed the horse over to one of the outriders.

Unlike in England, where a horse runs free to the start under the control of its jockey alone, those in the United States are led to the gate by an outrider on a ‘lead pony’, one
pony to each runner.

Whereas a ‘pony’ is properly defined as a member of an equine breed in which normal mature horses stand less than fifty-eight inches tall at the withers, the lead ponies at
racetracks are often retired Thoroughbred racehorses, and therefore are not ponies at all.

But no one seemed to care as the excitement built.

I watched on the big screen as the horses, plus the ponies, circled behind the starting gate that was situated right in front of the grandstand.

The crowd for the Preakness the following afternoon was expected to be three times bigger but, nevertheless, there was a loud cheer as the gates flew open and the nine runners in the feature
race of the day surged forward.

Victor Gomez had been right.

Ladybird was good. Very good.

She led from start to finish, holding off a late challenge to win by a neck.

Understandably, George Raworth was delighted, coming out onto the track with me to lead the horse into the winner’s circle.

I could see both Bob Wade and Steffi Dean standing by the rail. I pulled the peak of my cap lower and kept my eyes down but I think the special agents were more interested in each other than in
anyone else.

I had realised that being a groom was, in fact, a very good undercover persona. Grooms were invisible, even more so than waiters in restaurants. Anyone looking my way was staring into the eyes
of the horse rather than into those of the man leading it.

I knew of one trainer in England who could readily identify every horse in his hundred-strong yard just by looking at it, even in the rain, but he couldn’t tell his stable staff apart, one
from another. Irrespective of their real names, he simply called all his lads ‘John’.

While Ladybird’s owner, trainer and jockey were receiving their trophies from the star of a TV soap opera, Maria and I walked the horse from the winner’s circle to the post-race
testing barn.

Here we waited with the horse for almost an hour, whistling and pouring water until Ladybird finally acquiesced and supplied the urine sample the testers required.

Maria was not her usual ebullient self, not speaking to me once during the wait.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ I said, but she didn’t understand the idiom. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked slowly instead.

She nodded. ‘OK.’

‘Then why don’t you say something?’

This time she shook her head. ‘No talk.’

I thought she almost seemed frightened.

‘What has Diego said to you?’ I asked.

‘No talk,’ she repeated. ‘Diego, he say no talk.’

‘Or what?’ I asked.

She definitely appeared frightened this time. She looked all around her with wide eyes and then whispered. ‘Diego say he cut me if I talk to you.’ She traced a fingernail down her
cheek from a tearful right eye all the way to her chin.

Diego was getting to be more than just a nuisance. He had clearly decided that it was easier to intimidate his cousin than me, and he was probably right. The sooner he was dragged off in chains
to Rikers Island the better.

George Raworth came into Ladybird’s stall when I was still brushing her down after washing away the sweat of her exertions.

‘Well done, my girl,’ George said, patting the horse on the neck in love and gratitude. ‘Great job, Paddy. Now for the Preakness tomorrow.’

He even patted me on the back as well.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘Let’s hope so.’

‘Hope doesn’t come into it,’ George said with a laugh. ‘I believe Fire Point is a sure thing.’

He should know, I thought.

‘The professor thinks the semen is probably from an American Quarter Horse,’ Tony Andretti said when I called him at eight o’clock on Friday evening.
‘The DNA doesn’t match that of any known stallion held by the National Quarter Horse Registry but it closely resembles other Quarter Horse DNA records that are available, as if the
source was possibly related.’