Читать книгу Campbell Young Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - J.D. Carpenter - Страница 13

Young was out at Caledonia Downs by 6:00 a.m. Officially, he had the day off, but he figured he could kill four or five birds with one stone: he could watch the morning workouts, interview Shorty Rogers’ regular jockey, Trinidad Grant, and Trinidad’s agent, Ronald Outhouse, visit with his daughter, and stay for the after-noon’s card of racing. He’d be back on Sunday with Trick, of course, but this was a special treat. He was excited about watching the morning workouts—the rumble of hooves as the horses galloped out of the mist at the head of the stretch—and propping himself against the rail with the trainers and grooms and hot-walkers and clockers.

But just as he stopped his minivan at the backstretch gate and showed his badge, the gathering clouds let loose, and even though plenty of horses would still do their workouts, Young decided the rain was too heavy to stand out in and jogged from the parking lot to Barn 7, where he found Debi mucking out a stall.

“Daddy!” she said, dropping her pitchfork. She stepped out of the stall and hugged him. “What are you doing here?”

“Business. I’m looking for Trinidad Grant and his agent, a guy called Ronald Outhouse.”

“Well, you’ll probably find Outhouse in the track kitchen, hustling mounts. Trinny’s most likely still out at the training track. You don’t think they had anything to do with—”

“No, sweetie, I just want to ask them some questions. I’ll catch up with you later.”

The rain had let up, and Young walked out to the training track. He wanted to catch the last of the work-outs. He stood at the rail for a few minutes, one railbird among many, before he recognized the small man standing near him with a pair of binoculars raised to his eyes.

“Morning, Mr. Wright,” he said.

Tom Wright lowered his glasses. “Oh, it’s you, Detective.”

“You working Doll House?”

“No, she ran yesterday. She’s all tuckered out. I expect she’s snoozin’ in her stall.”

“How’d she do?”

“Never got untracked.”

“I forgot she was running. Guess I saved some money.”

“She’s back on July 2. Mile and a sixteenth. It’s a Sunday, I think.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Looks like a good fit for her, but as I always say, Detective, don’t bet the farm.” Tom raised his glasses to his eyes again. “So how you doin’ with the Shorty Rogers case?”

“Still chasing down leads. Actually, that’s why I’m here. I’m looking for Trinidad Grant.”

Tom lowered his glasses again. “Well, you’re in luck,” he said, and pointed at a black horse cantering past them. “That’s him right there.”

Five minutes later, Young and Trinidad Grant were walking towards the track kitchen. Grant was small and handsome and looked like Harry Belafonte.

Young said, “You know my daughter, Debi Young?”

“Sure, I know Debi.” Grant looked carefully up at Young. “She’s with Eldridge Carver, right?”

“That’s right.”

“He’s good people. He’s my homey.”

Once inside the kitchen, Grant led Young to a table in the corner occupied by a cadaverous man smoking a cigarette. Pale and unshaven, he was wearing an Expos cap and had a Racing Form and a Hilroy scribbler open in front of him. “Ron,” Grant said, “this is Detective Young. He wants to talk about Shorty.”

The man nodded at Young. He crushed his cigarette in the ashtray and lit a fresh one. “I got you a mount in the eighth.”

“Excellent,” Grant said, as he and Young sat down. “Any chance?”

Outhouse shrugged. “Not much.”

“How many I got altogether?”

Outhouse checked the Hilroy. “You got the favourite in the first, you got a two-year-old in the third, first-time starter, and this one in the eighth.” He turned his attention to Young. “So, what can we do for you?”

“Answer a couple of questions is all.”

“Fire away.”

“Mr. Grant, am I right in thinking that you rode most or all of Shorty’s horses, and that you, Mr. Outhouse, arranged those mounts with Shorty?”

Grant nodded, and Outhouse said, “Right on both counts.”

“You were on good terms with Shorty?”

“You asking me or him?”

“Both of you.”

They looked at each other. “Yeah, we was on good terms with Shorty,” Outhouse said. “He wasn’t the same man he was a couple years ago, before he lost all his owners, but he was square with us.”

“He drink too much?”

Outhouse smiled, and Young saw his crooked yellow teeth. “Way too much.”

“Did he owe anybody money?”

Grant said, “He always paid me on time. I never had any complaints.”

“As far as you know, did he get along with his owners?”

Outhouse said, “I didn’t like his new owners much. That Khan guy, he spent way too much money way too fast, with no clue what he was doing.”

Grant nodded. “He spent a quarter-mill on a colt with a crooked leg. Turned out to be an expensive mistake. He’s one of these guys who makes a pile of money in some kind of business—in his case it was computers, right?—and then he thinks, ‘Well, I know everything about computers, I guess that means I know everything about racehorses.’ He didn’t ask for advice, and nobody offered him any.”

“The horse with the crooked leg,” Young said. “That the one that died?”

Grant nodded. “Yeah, Download.”

“The vet said it was colic. Seems unlikely for a three-year-old.”

Again the two men looked at each other, then Outhouse said, “Far as I know, colic can happen at any age.”

“What about Percy Ball?” Young said. “He was Shorty’s drinking buddy, right?”

“One of them,” Outhouse said.

“Well, how did Percy figure in all of this? He told me one of the other owners, a guy called Doug Buckley, was offered a hundred grand for Someday Prince, and he wanted to sell, but Shorty wouldn’t go along.”

Grant said, “Shorty owned part of that colt, he had every right—”

“That Buckley,” Outhouse interrupted, “was another bad owner Shorty picked up. Get-rich-quick guys.”

“Did Buckley have any reason to go after Shorty?”

Outhouse shook his head. “Buckley’s a jerk-off. I seen him in his green suit and his white shoes and white belt and those stupid fucking sunglasses. Even if he did have a beef, he don’t have the balls to do anything about it.”

“Well, what about Percy then?” Young said. “Why would he offer up all this information on Shorty and Buckley unless there was something in it for him?”

Grant started to speak, but Outhouse raised a hand to stop him. “Shorty’s dead,” he said, showing his crocodile grin, “and there’s no harm saying certain things were this way or that way, but Percy’s still alive, at least for the time being—he’s not too bright, that lad, and he gets himself in enough trouble without no help from the rest of us—and here in Shedrow one thing we don’t do is we don’t rat each other out.”

His stomach ache once again in evidence, Young was standing at the bar waiting for Dexter to pluck a pickled egg out of the jar for him when he heard laughter behind him. He turned and saw Jessy walking away from the table where Priam Harvey and Trick were sitting, and the two of them were killing themselves over something. The music on the jukebox was drowning out whatever they were saying, but Trick was laughing so hard there were tears in his eyes. He seemed to have recovered from his Thursday night funk. The new waitress, Freedom, was nowhere to be seen. Young wanted to go back to the table and ask them what was so funny, but he was waiting on Dexter, who was still trying to lift an egg out of the jar with a spoon.

“Where’s your tongs?” Young asked. “Usually you always use your tongs.”

“Fucked if I know,” Dexter said. “Ask Jessy. She’s always moving stuff.”

Young looked back over at the table. Trick was mopping his face with a paper napkin, and Harvey was going on about something. Young felt an urge, a physical need, to go back to the table. He was missing out on something, he didn’t know what, but it was something good, something funny. Seeing Trick laugh like that was a rare enough occurrence, and he hated to miss out on it. He turned back to Dexter, who was still bent over the jar, pink tongue visible at the corner of his mouth. “Fucker keeps sliding off,” Dexter said.

“Forget it,” Young said. He took a step away from the bar, his eyes fixed on his laughing friends, then stopped as Dexter said, “Got it! I got it!”

By the time Young had paid for his egg and walked back to the table, Trick and Harvey were back to their normal unsmiling selves. “What was so funny back then?” he said.

“Back when?” Trick said.

“Two minutes ago, the two of you were laughing your heads off, and two minutes later you can’t remember?”

“Oh that,” Trick smiled. “Mr. Harvey asked Jessy to bring us some wings, so she said, ‘How many?’ and Mr. Harvey said, ‘Forty,’ and she said, ‘How do you want them?’ and he said, ‘What are the choices?’ and she got pissed off because he knows what the choices are, but she’s always polite to him, right—Mr. Harvey this, Mr. Harvey that—so she says, ‘Mild, medium, hot, suicide, or honey garlic,’ and he says, ‘Bring us forty medium,’ and she says, ‘Okay,’ but then he says, ‘But Jessy, make sure you only bring us left ones.’ ‘What ones?’ she says. ‘Left ones,’ he says. ‘We only want left wings.’ ‘Are you serious?’ she says. ‘Why do you only want left ones?’ And Mr. Harvey says, ‘Well, most chickens are right-winged, and consequently their right wings are tough. We only want left wings, because they’re more tender.’” Trick started to crack up again.

Young’s eyes narrowed, then he turned to Harvey. “So what did she say?”

Harvey shrugged. “She didn’t seem to find it amusing. She said, ‘I’ll give you a left,’ then she stomped off. Is that a pickled egg you’ve got there?”

“What the fuck’s it look like?”

“May I have a bite?”

“Here, take the whole damn thing!”

Harvey’s eyebrows raised. “What’s wrong with you?”

Young shook his massive head. “I hear you guys laughing and I think how great it is, how I don’t even have to be a part of it or anything, or know what it’s about, it’s enough just to see the two of you laughing like that, and when I get back over here and ask what it’s all about, what was cracking you up like that, I find out you were making fun of Jessy.”

“I wasn’t making fun of her,” Harvey laughed. “I was just—”

“You were just seeing how far you could take it.”

Trick said, “He didn’t mean anything, Camp.”

Young kept his sights on Harvey. “How are you coming with Percy Ball? Anything to report? No, don’t answer, let me guess. You’ve been too busy, right? Too many magazine articles? This is the third time you said you’d do it and you haven’t. What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

Harvey watched Young until he was done. “Are you doing her?”

“What?”

“Are you doing Jessy? You seem awfully protective of the wench. Doesn’t he seem that way to you, Arthur?”

Trick said, “I’d leave it alone if I were you, Mr. Harvey.”

“No, I’m serious.” He sat up straighter in his chair. “Are you doing the barmaid?”

Young came around the table, grabbed Harvey by the lapels of his rumpled white plantation suit, and lifted him into the air like a father would an insolent child. “You sorry drunk,” he said, “if you were half a man I’d break your neck.” Then he did a half-turn, dropped Harvey on the floor, and steamed for the exit.

Outside, the streets were quiet. The stars were out. Young’s gut was bothering him, so he tried to walk it off. He headed south on Donlands to Cosburn, then turned west and walked across to Pape, then north to O’Connor and back east towards McCully’s. While he was walking he thought about disappointment, how everything turned to shit: Trick was a good man who deserved to be happy, but after the shooting his life turned to shit; Young’s relationship with Jessy was okay at first, but they were basically fuck-buddies, that was all, and that, in Young’s opinion, was pretty much shit; even his notions of friendship were shit, as was evident tonight—he had tried to repay a favour Priam Harvey had done for him by giving Harvey a chance to earn a few bucks, but now that, too, had turned to shit. Nothing was what it was supposed to be. Everything was disappointing; everything turned to shit. There weren’t many things you could count on in this life, that was for sure. Dogs, maybe. But that was about it. But even dogs had their shortcomings: horrible breath, that was number one, plus they liked to roll in dead things.

When Young returned to McCully’s twenty minutes later, Trick was still there, his wheelchair parked at the same table as before. There was no sign of Priam Harvey.

Young sat down. “I realized you had no way of getting home.”

“If I’d wanted to go home,” Trick said, “I would have done just that.”

“How?”

“Boum-Boum.” Boum-Boum was a cab driver who drove a wheelchair-accessible Econoline van.

“What if Boum-Boum wasn’t available? Maybe it’s his night off, or he phoned in sick. Don’t be stupid. Any other cabbie’d probably just dump you on the sidewalk. How would you get up the stairs?”

“I’d pay him extra if I had to. Don’t worry about me. And don’t call me stupid. Dropping Mr. Harvey on the floor, that was stupid. Don’t you need him for the investigation?”

“Yeah, well, he’s got a big mouth. Anyway, you could do just as good a job. Better.”

“I already told you no. No means no.”

“Mr. Harvey was supposed to dig up the dirt on Percy Ball, who my guess is the key to the whole business, but he just keeps on finding excuses. What do you want, your own office down at Homicide?”

Trick shook his head. “I’ll admit I’m interested in the case, but the way things are today, unless I knew how to operate a computer and the Internet and web-sites, all that sort of thing, I’d be no use to you.” He lifted his left hand, palm up. “Look at me, Camp. I’m a prisoner of my limitations.”

“So that’s what you want? You want somebody to give you lessons on how to operate a computer?”

Trick didn’t answer.

Young said, “At home or at Homicide?”

Trick said, “At home.”

“Why not at Homicide? I’d get a car to pick you up every morning, bring you to work. Drop you off at home, too, unless we’re coming here, which in that case I could drop you off myself if I’m not too drunk.”

“When are you not too drunk?”

“Hey, be nice, I’m offering you your old job back.”

“I’m not sure you have the authority.”

“You watch. I’ll talk to Bateman, and you’ll be back at work on Monday.”

“No, brother, I’m tempted, and I’ll take a computer course if you think you can set it up, but I’d rather work at home.”

Young spread his arms. “Why?”

“I don’t want people looking at me.”

“They look at you here.”

“No, they don’t. They just stare in their beer.”