Gargantuan_ A Ruby Murphy Mystery - Maggie Estep [57]
By now I’d been lurking around Belmont for a few days and had finally gotten a job grooming for a trainer named Carla Friedman. She was a tiny chain-smoking gal running a small string of claimers and low-level allowance horses. Of course, I’d asked Robert Cardinal, the guy training Darwin, for a job. But he wasn’t particularly friendly and said he didn’t need anyone right now. I’d then looked for trainers with barns close to Robert Cardinal’s. Which is how I’d found Carla. Even though I still didn’t know much about racing, I could tell that Carla was unorthodox in her training methods. She couldn’t afford to hire exercise riders so she galloped her own horses, in a western saddle. I’d watched her galloping a few that morning and it was the craziest sight you’d ever see. All those riders out there with their butts pointed in the air as they galloped and then here comes Carla, riding cowboy-style in that huge saddle, going full steam. She was the laughingstock of the backside but I knew from looking in the Racing Form that she actually won races sometimes, which, she’d told me right off, she attributed more to her knowing massage therapy than anything. She had been a masseuse—a people masseuse—who loved horses, and one day she just woke up with a bug up her ass and went and worked at the track. No one she worked for would let her massage their horses because they thought she was weird, but she worked as a groom and then as an assistant for a few trainers and eventually took out a training license. Apparently she’d rubbed some goodness into her horses because none of them were much to look at. Didn’t move well and had obscure pedigrees. But Carla massaged the hell out of those horses and, in gratitude, they sometimes won races.
Darwin, I knew just by gazing at him right then, was going to win some races too.
I carefully studied his groom, making sure the guy was respectful of the young colt. I started involuntarily making that noise in my throat, the little chirping noise I used to make to Darwin, and though I was standing more than a hundred feet from him, I swear, the little guy heard. His ears suddenly shot forward and he abruptly turned his head in my direction, nearly pulling his groom’s arm out of the socket. I started slowly walking over toward the colt. I was being real conscious about how I was walking and I was thinking over what I was gonna say to the groom.
“Nice-looking colt,” I ended up saying. I was fighting with myself, holding back from throwing my arms around Darwin’s neck and burying my face in that dappled coat of his.
The groom looked me up and down, like he thought I was going to attack him or the colt. After a few long, awkward moments, he nodded a little. He was a young guy, probably barely in his twenties. He was the right height to be a jockey but too stocky. Had sort of rock-musician long black hair and a nose piercing even though he was Spanish and in my travels I’d noticed Spanish guys were a lot less inclined to pierce things.
I don’t know quite how I did it, but I got the guy—his name was Petey—talking to me, warming to me a little. I guess when I set my mind to something, I can be pretty determined, and I needed for Petey to like me, needed to have access to Darwin.
“Yeah, the boss he got hope for this one,” Petey was saying now, scratching between Darwin’s ears—which I found slightly offensive because Darwin had always been fussy about his ears and I was upset that he was letting this pierced guy touch them.
“Yeah?” I said, trying to swallow my discomfort about that tender gesture between my horse and a stranger.
“Yeah, we’re running him next week, I guess. Be his second start but he’s barely three. February colt.”
Of course I knew this as well as anything. That Darwin had been born on February 13. But I just nodded and looked mildly interested.
Eventually,