Shedrow (5 page)

“You really think so?”

“I’d like to try him at a mile and a sixteenth or a mile and an eighth on dirt. More on that later. Will you join us for dinner, Anthony? We’re going to Joe’s Stone Crab.”

“I’d love to if there’s room.”

“I’m here alone so it will just be the two of us and Greg Jacobs, our Ocala trainer and his wife. I’m sure you’d enjoy speaking with them.”

GIANNI DIALED his wife’s cell phone as he left Gulfstream Park.

“Did you see the race?”

“I had to show some houses. About all I could do was look at the chart online from my office. It was a close one, huh?”

“Did you tape it at least?” Anthony asked.

“I couldn’t, Anthony.”

“You could have used the timer. Well, I’ll get the stakes tape from the track. A grade II win second time out—I want that one for
my collection. Is someone in the car with you, Janice?

“No, it’s a CD.”

“It sounds like someone yelling.”

“RULE NUMBER 14: ORIGINALITY CAN BE DANGEROUS. YES, ORIGINALITY MAY ACTUALLY BE DANGEROUS.”

“It’s called Gorilla Marketing. It has some great ideas for promoting my real estate sales.”

“Oh.”

Gianni turned on the CD player in his rental car. The tape of theatre selections was still in the deck. A tune from
Song and Dance
played.

Don’t want to know who’s to blame

It won’t help knowing

Don’t want to fight day and night

The tape also continued in Janice’s Mercedes:

“WEAPON # 16: DIRECT MAIL LETTERS. THIS POWERFUL TOOL...”

“Can you hear me, Janice?”

“Yeah, but it sounds like you’re in a wind tunnel.”

“I have the top down and some music on.”

“Where are you anyway?”

“I’m headed south on Collins Ave. I’m meeting a few people for dinner at Joe’s Stone Crabs.”

“Nice.”

“You could have come, Janice.”

“RULE 19: IDENTIFY AND CREATE YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE.”

“Well, I didn’t. When are you coming back?”

Don’t run off in the pouring rain

“My flight is due in around 5:30 Sunday.”

“I’ll see you then,” she said.

“WEAPON NUMBER 21: FAX ON DEMAND…”

Take the hurt out of all the pain…

Tell me on a Sunday please…

“Bye.”

The security gate at Palm Beach Downs requires a code to be entered onto a keypad, but the code is posted in the window of the unmanned gate house. In years gone by, there must have been some need for a higher level of security. Now, most of the trainers who stabled horses at the training center preferred the low key feeling, much quieter than the larger and more modern Palm Meadows, just one exit up the Florida Turnpike.

Gianni drove through the gate and down the dirt road that led past the training track, a mile-long oval with a pond in the center of the track. On the opposite side of the road were six barns, all painted pale yellow with maroon-colored tin roofs. Gianni pulled up to the second building and parked alongside a row of four palm trees that bordered the end of the barn.

GIANNI WAS A FREQUENT visitor to the barn the morning after a race, and he was surprised to see Stu Duncker there
when he drove up to Willard’s barn. Unlike Gianni, Stu rarely saw his horse except on a race day. He was accompanied today by a large man, at least six feet tall with a round belly spilling through the suspenders that held up his chino work pants. He had a balding head, a rotund and ruddy face and a generally odious demeanor.

“Morning, Anthony,” Duncker said. “I have someone I would like you to meet. This is Chester Pawlek. Chester, meet Dr. Anthony Gianni.”

The big man had a pronounced stutter, not consistent, but awkward when it appeared. “Stu tells me you’re one of the best s-s-surgeons in New York City.”

“Stu is very kind,” Gianni said.

“Chester is in the construction business in New Jersey,” Duncker said, “and he has a growing stable of thoroughbreds. He’s bought some damn good ones in New York, as well as in Florida and Kentucky.”

They were standing in the shedrow. In one of the stalls, a groom held a horse’s halter while a blacksmith braced the horse’s foot in a hoof jack and nailed a shoe into place with a rhythmic “whack, whack, whack.”

Alison McKensie emerged next from a stall further down the shedrow. “Congratulations, Dr. Gianni,” she said. “How about our boy there!”

“Fantastic, Alison, and due in large part to your hard work in the morning.”

“I love that horse,” she said, “though I must say, the older he gets the harder he is to handle. Do you know we only have one groom who will go into the stall with him?”

Stu and Chet walked off across a grassy area in the direction of the training track. Alison raised her chin toward the large man. “Get a load of him,” she said.

Gianni took a bag of carrot pieces he had brought and offered a piece at a time to Chiefly Endeavor. The horse took each piece from the palm of Gianni’s hand, crunching and swallowing a few pieces at a time, then following each swallow with a grunt and a strong pull on the nylon covered chain that stretched across the top of his stall door. When he grabbed the chain with his mammoth teeth, the whole door shook and the chain clanged.

“What do you mean?” Gianni asked.

“The fat guy,” she replied. “I heard them talking to Jeff earlier. He wants to buy a majority interest in the horse, and he was throwing some pretty big numbers around. I don’t know, Doc. I just get bad vibes from the guy.”

Chiefly Endeavor stretched his neck out of the stall, then turned his head to the side, as if imploring for more carrots. Gianni obliged.

“Well, my share’s not for sale. It doesn’t matter what the offer is.”

“I know that. You’re the only partner I’ve actually seen around the barn. Anyway, go in Jeff’s office and look at the photo of yesterday’s win in the
Daily Racing Form
. It’s a great shot.”

“I’ll take a look right now.”

“And I have to keep moving, Doc. Lots to do yet.”

“I know, don’t let me hold you up.”

She yelled something in Spanish to one of the hotwalkers, and the fellow ran off into one of the stalls. One of the other Hispanic men taunted the first, yelling “
Corra, corra
.”

“
Usted tambien
,” Alison yelled.

The first fellow howled.

Gianni was increasingly curious about Chester. He had thought him to be rather unctuous after their brief exchange. He walked over to join the two men along the rail of the training track. On his way, he passed a young boy playing with a dump truck in the dirt. The boy made a groaning sound, imitating the roar of a truck as he moved his toy across the ground.

On the track, horses went by, some in a slow gallop, others breezing for the clocker. Chester stood at the rail next to the eighth pole, a distance marker with black and white horizontal stripes, topped off by a cast iron horse head. Chet’s ample belly hung over the top of the metal railing and his large, red hands gripped it tightly.

Duncker said, “Anthony, Chester has expressed interest in buying into Chiefly Endeavor, and of course I am obligated to present the offer to each of the partners. He has offered $750,000 for any of the partners who agree to sell their one-quarter ownership interest. Bushmill will of course remain as the managing partner per the original contract. I will offer no opinion as to what a partner should do, though I am always happy to see a share price appreciate ten times in less than a year. I would have called you tomorrow, but since we are all here, I thought I would present the offer and I can follow up tomorrow. So you’ll have a little time to mull it over.”

“I won’t need any time. My share is not for sale.”

“I somehow expected you might say that,” Duncker said. “They tell me you’ve become quite attached to that colt.”

Chester lumbered off across the lawn without a word.

STU DUNCKER SUBSEQUENTLY presented the same offer to Brad Hill and the other two partners. Hill refused but each of the other two accepted Chester’s offer. The two partners who accepted the offer were provided a handsome return on their original $75,000 investment. It also provided Chester with fifty-percent ownership in Chiefly Endeavor, and it meant that Gianni would have to spend more time around Chester Pawlek.

“Dr. Gianni, you have a call from the ER on line two, Dr. Moravic.” He thought he had finished with patients for the day and sitting at his desk, was about to begin reviewing his mail.

“Hello Stan, what surprise do you have in store for me this evening?”

“We’ve got a pretty nasty injury. Forty-two year old male found himself on the wrong end of a machete. Probably some sort of mob war deal. Anyway, he is conscious, alert, and there don’t appear to be any other injuries. But his face is literally filleted open from an area just below and well lateral to the eye, extending down below the border of the mandible. The laceration is at least 12 centimeters, probably longer. The most amazing thing is that the blade went cleanly through and also split the jaw bone apart in a saggital plane. You see it on the PA view of the skull. The whole cut looks like it was done with almost surgical precision.”

“Is the bleeding controlled?’

“We packed the wound with gauze. There’s no active bleeding now.”

“How about the facial nerve?”

“Grossly intact. I think the cut was far enough distal so that most of the branches were spared. I might have noted just a slight weakness when he closed his eyes tightly. I’m sure you’ll be a better judge of that. All in all, I’d say he’s one lucky bastard. I don’t know what the attacker was aiming for, but he managed to miss all the vital structures.”

“Have the police been there?”

“Yeah, but the guy’s not talking. Naturally he was just minding his own business, didn’t know the attacker, and blah blah. But the police know the guy and he clearly has some mob ties. He’s actually a rather likable sort, well-mannered in a tough guy way.”

“I assume the plastics resident has evaluated him?”

“That’s another issue, Anthony. We were paging him for at least a half hour before we called you.”

“Jesus Christ, who’s on?”

“The senior resident on call is Matt Kantor. The first year guy has been totally swamped doing minor stuff in the ER at the County.”

“Have them keep trying Kantor, will you please. What the hell is it with these guys anyway?”

“This isn’t the first time for him, I guarantee that.”

“I’ll be in shortly.”

Matt Kantor eventually answered his page and prepared the patient for the OR. The injury was too extensive to repair in the emergency room, but it needed to be repaired as soon as possible.

Both the resident and the attending anesthesiologist were there
when Gianni and Kantor entered the surgeons’ dressing room. Kantor was a short, stocky Korean lad who had been adopted as an infant and brought from Seoul to the United States. His parents were wealthy New Yorkers who had no other children and probably coddled the youth from infancy, Gianni thought.

Larry Rosen was the attending on call, and he already had his anesthesia resident’s ear when Gianni came in.

“Anthony, we meet again.”

“Hello, Larry. Sorry to have to be the one to drag you in here tonight.”

“No big deal, if it wasn’t you it would have been someone with some bogus emergency. Like the patient who’s been lying around the hospital for three days and suddenly becomes an emergency when the surgeon is done with his office schedule. You know how it goes. But I saw your guy and he clearly needs some attention.”

They reassembled in the OR suite. Rosen was talking non-stop to the resident. He was an effective teacher, actually. On the OR table, the patient had already been anesthetized and an endotracheal tube placed through his nose. The injury had filleted his face open from a point above the right ear and extending down below the jaw. The internal part of the wound looked like a piece of raw steak, bright red against the dark complexion of the patient’s skin.

Gianni then began to quiz his own understudy. “Okay Matt, what’s the pertinent anatomy here, what are we worried about?”

“Well, I checked the facial nerve and it looks like all of the five branches on the face are grossly intact.”

“After we’re scrubbed you can recite for me the course of the facial nerve from its origin on out to the terminal branches, including
all of the branches.”

“You mean the five on the face?”

“I mean those five plus the six before those. Why don’t you think about that.”

“Um, okay.”

“And what else are we concerned about here, Dr. Kantor?”

“The parotid duct.”

“Do you think it got cut?”

“I’m not sure. I thought we’d look under better lighting in the OR.”

“All right,” Gianni said. “Go ahead and scrub, he’s intubated already and I want to get a photograph or two for the record.” He snapped three photographs of the wound, then joined Kantor in the scrub room. In the OR, they prepared and draped the patient for the procedure. Kantor asked for some music.

“Is it okay if I play one of mine, Dr. Gianni?”

“It’ll probably keep me awake, at least.”

“Can we put in that Bon Jovi tape?” Kantor asked the circulating nurse.

“Believe it or not, I have a Bon Jovi album myself,” Gianni said.

The music began to play:

Why you wanna to tell me how to run my life!

“Great song,” Kantor said.

“Figures,” Gianni said.

Who are you to tell me if it’s black or white!

“So where do you want to start, Matt?”

“With the jaw fracture, inside to out. Right?”

“That’s fine. We should be able to get enough exposure to place a small plate right through the wound.”

He began a careful blunt dissection, cut through the masseter muscle and aligned the bone fragments. Gianni adapted and secured a small bone plate to fix the broken fragments together.

“Now how about that parotid duct, Matt?”