“So. What brings you here, Bill?”
“Her,” I said.
*****
Julie’s story was believable-so believable, in fact, that the sheer detail of it had me re-creating it visually in my mind as she walked me through it.
Archie Carpin lived on a three-thousand acre ranch in North Texas along the bank of the Red River. There he kept quarter-horses and ran an underground still operation that could have rivaled any of the smaller commercial distilleries in Dallas or Milwaukee in sheer quantity of output. But he kept himself respectable in the eyes of his neighbors, which were few in number. He liked it that way. “The less seen, the less said,” was one of the little one-liners that he was likely to drop at any given moment.
Julie had met the man at a strip-club in Vegas, just off the main drag. After her show he’d motioned her over, bought her a series of watered-down drinks, engaged her services for the evening and once she was ensconced in his hotel room proceeded to ply her with drugs. And she was all too willing. Whatever it was he was after, it apparently wasn’t sex, as he hadn’t so much as laid a hand on her.
No. What the man was into was domination: the subjugation of the spirit and the life of a person-and like the fly to the Venus Flytrap, Julie was drawn in. He dripped money and played a covert game of mental and emotional warfare that in a short space of time drained enough of her life force to make her little more than his personal slave. She’d stayed with him for six months, leaving behind her life in Vegas and following the playboy to Miami-where he kept his drug connections-and Houston, where he kept his offices in a downtown high-rise oil company building, and finally to the North Texas ranch. Then, two months before our first breakfast together, Julie did something that only Julie could have done. She pulled the rug out from under Archie Carpin, robbed him blind, and didn’t bother hanging around to take his temperature afterward.
That first morning in my office I had wanted to break into a fit of uncontrolled laughter when Julie had told me what she had done. What I hadn’t known at the time was how she’d done it. After she was finished this time I no longer felt so much like laughing. For the first time I began to see things from Carpin’s point of view. And let me tell you, if it had been me, after the stunt she’d pulled, I’d have found her and very quietly shut her up for good, money or no money.
Here’s what she did.
A fellow cannot amass a great deal of ill-gotten wealth without making some enemies along the way, and this was definitely a fact in Archie Carpin’s case. Also, I have met few men who do not have a weakness of one kind or another. Carpin’s weakness was horses, and his chief enemy was a fellow named Ernest Neil, his chief competitor. Neil ran a quarter-horse ranch just south of Navasota, Texas and like Carpin, he ran some of the best horseflesh on the hoof. Neil and Carpin had been at each other’s throats since the 1970s when the only pari-mutuel horse-betting to be had was across the state line in Shreveport, Louisiana. On about the same day ten or more times a year during the spring both men loaded their horses onto their sleek trailers and trucked them two hundred miles across Texas and over the Louisiana border to compete against each other.
All this Julie had gleaned from Lefty and Carl.
And, of course, before I could ask it, Hank was asking her himself: “Who are Lefty and Carl?”
Julie loved horses. While she was at Carpin’s North Texas horse ranch she spent a good deal of time down at the stables, within spitting distance of the ruddy waters of the Red River. She loved to ride and it was the one bit of freedom that Carpin allowed her to enjoy, probably because he cared for the animals more than he cared for Julie, and she was kind to Carpin’s horses. She very soon learned all of the horses by name, and they, in turn, became used to her. She made it a point to get friendly with Carpin’s jockeys who were a pair of short yet irascible men named Lefty Jorgenson and Carl Sanderberry. Lefty and Carl soon had her giving them a hand mucking out the stables, keeping the horses’ hooves clean, feeding and watering them, grooming them, and the sundry other chores that are an everyday affair at any well-run horse operation. They had no way of knowing she was up to no good.
And, of course, she nosed around the still. When Carpin caught her at it he beat her within an inch of her life and confined her to his walk-in bedroom closet for a week and put her on rations of little more than water and cocaine.
After a week of pleading with him for freedom, she clammed up. The next morning Carpin let her out.
Thereafter, Julie spent even more time with the horses and, consequently, in the company of Carl and Lefty.
Carl liked to chew tobacco and spit. Also he liked to talk his head off. He would just as soon talk to himself if no one else was around, but if someone, or anyone, for that matter, happened to be handy, they were sure to get an earful. Carl-an aging Aggie from College Station-liked to try to tell stories of the old days with himself and a young Archie Carpin and the boys, but he usually managed to tell them wrong and Lefty had to correct him “just to keep the record straight,” as he would say.
One story that Julie heard again and again was how, in 1979, one of Archie Carpin’s best quarter horses foundered while at the stables in Shreveport on Friday evening before the Saturday race. Carpin blamed Ernest Neil for it, even though he had no proof of foul play. The horse, a two-year old stallion by the name of Julliard Dare had to be put down. The next day Ernest Neil’s horse, Pressure Cooker, came in first against some pretty long odds. And that’s where Julie got her idea.
I gave the woman some credit. She could be resourceful. Also, she understood men all too well. I found it more than a little intimidating.
As she coldly described how she set Carpin up I found myself wondering if I was possibly as gullible myself, or perhaps I was being gullible just by taking her story at face value when I should have ditched her from the get-go. The blood drained slowly from my head and pooled in my gut as I listened.
“So I said, duh! What’s this guy got? He’s got a half-million dollars worth of horses and he’s got a ten million dollar moonshine operation and there are greased palms from Texas all the way to Washington, D.C. He made money from supplying name brand whiskey knock-off for bars from Houston all the way to Chicago. Carl and Lefty talked a little too much. Archie’s payoffs came in installments. Also, because of his appetites-you know, horses and drugs-he was always one step ahead of bankruptcy. With his pay-offs coming in installments, they were vitally important, but vulnerable.”
“So you intercepted one of those installments.” I said.
“Yeah. I did,” she said, waving her hands for emphasis. “Only I didn’t know it was one of the big ones.”
I could tell that she was getting a bit tipsy. It was our third beer each. Regardless, I was enjoying seeing her animated like that.
“It was easy,” she said. “I got hold of Archie’s little black book, the one with all the guys in it from the old days; guys that Carl and Lefty would talk and laugh about. And I found it: Ernest Neil. It had a number next to it. A few days later when I got access to a phone I called the number and got this old guy.”
“Neil?”
“Nah. A jockey. Jolly Mortensson. Worked for Ernie Neil.”
“Yeah?” Hank said, prompting her to continue.
“So Ernie helped me set it up. He handled some of the footwork from his end. But it was up to me to make the switch.”
“Where’s the money?” I asked. It was the first time I’d asked it.
“That’s just a… a little tiny detail… a small part of the problem,” she said.