Читать книгу Campbell Young Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - J.D. Carpenter - Страница 4

Debi ran across the parking lot towards the barns. Once again, she was late for work. As she passed the mountain of manure steaming in the pre-dawn light, she pushed back the sleeve of her lumberjack shirt and glanced at the luminous dial of her wristwatch: 6:12. Shorty would be furious. There were just the two of them, and Shorty expected her to be in the barn by 5:45 to lead the horses out to the walking machine before she started mucking out their stalls.

Debi rehearsed her excuse as she rushed along: I’m real sorry, Shorty. I got Jamal to the sitter’s in plenty of time, but the traffic across the 401 was impossible. No. The traffic across the 401 was insane. That sounded better.

As she hurried from the outside darkness into the brightly lit entrance of Barn 7, a familiar mixture of aromas greeted her: sweetness of hay, reek of manure, pungency of liniment. The morning sounds were there, too: rattling of buckets, pawing of hooves, the grooms’ animated chatter as they went about their chores.

When she reached Shorty’s shedrow, she stopped short. Each trainer or groom was expected to turn on the lights for his or her section of the barn, but the lights for Shorty’s section weren’t on yet. Not only was she late, but so, it seemed, was Shorty. She flipped on the lights and listened. While everyone else’s horses were snorting and whinnying in their stalls, her horses—Shorty’s and hers—were moving about restlessly.

She looked in the first stall. The roan filly, Software, was banging her forehead against her empty water bucket. In the next stall the new horse, Prince, was walking in tight circles, and he cast a resentful glance Debi’s way as she looked in. Next to Prince, crazy Gig was weaving, swinging his head left and right as he faced Debi. Gig was a cribber—he would clamp his teeth to the bars of his stall door and suck air—and the leather cribbing strap Shorty used to keep the colt from doing so was still in place. One of the first things Shorty did each morning was remove Gig’s cribbing strap. Where was he? He was never late. And traffic can’t be the excuse, she thought, because he sleeps right here in the barn. “What’s going on, Gig?” she said. “What have you done with Shorty?”

She jogged towards the bunkroom at the end of the shedrow where Shorty lived during the long summer meet at Caledonia Downs. If he’s slept in, she thought, I’ll really give him the gears. And—she smiled at the thought—he’ll never know I was late.

“Heads up!” a voice called, and Debi looked up in time to avoid smacking into the rearing Doll House, Tom Wright’s huge chestnut mare, Tom himself desperately hanging onto the shank. “Whoa, missy, what’s the hurry?”

“Sorry, Tom, I can’t—”

“You know better than to run in the barn.”

“I can’t find Shorty, have you seen him? The horses haven’t been tended to, and I can’t find him.”

“No, I ain’t seen him.” Tom settled the mare and stroked her nose. “You made her all jittery.”

“I said I was sorry. It’s not like Shorty to—”

“I told you I ain’t seen him, and you know better than to run in the barn.”

Debi ran off down the shedrow to the end of the barn and knocked at the door of Shorty’s bunkroom. She knocked again and tried the knob. The door swung inward. Debi leaned into the darkness of the room. “You in here?”

There was no answer.

She reached around the door jamb and flipped on the light. The room was empty. The blankets on the single bed were rumpled, but that didn’t mean anything: Shorty never made his bed. The card table was littered with fast food wrappers, copies of the Daily Racing Form, and a nearly full mickey of Lamb’s Navy Rum, but this, too, was nothing new. Although Debi had never known Shorty to be a neat man in the five years she’d worked for him, recently he’d been getting worse. His gambling. His drinking. In a few short years, he had fallen from being one of the best public trainers at Caledonia—with a foreman, six grooms, eight owners, and two dozen horses—to being an also-ran, a has-been with one groom, three owners, and five horses. Debi corrected herself: four horses. She kept forgetting—or maybe it was some kind of mental block—that Download, an expensive three-year-old colt, had died in his stall two months ago, only days after his owner, an Internet millionaire, had hired Shorty to be his trainer. Debi shook her head. As soon as a small piece of good luck rolled Shorty’s way, a big piece of bad luck followed. She turned out the light, closed the door, and started back towards the stalls. Where the hell’s he got to? she wondered.

As she walked back along the shedrow, it occurred to her that there was one stall she hadn’t checked: Bing Crosby’s. She stopped at the door to Bing’s stall and peered through the bars. The horse was standing in the shadows at the back of the stall, his head in one corner. When she clucked to him, he didn’t move. That’s odd, Debi thought. Old Bing always comes when I call him. “Come here, baby,” she said, but the horse didn’t move. Debi looked at him more closely, squinting into the gloom, and that was when she saw his shoulder twitching, his hindquarters shaking. She ran her eyes down his trembling forelegs. And there, on his face, half-buried in the straw, lay Shorty Rogers.

Campbell Young reached for the phone on the floor beside his bed. His fingertips were orange and greasy from the bag of cheesies he’d eaten the night before, and the receiver slipped out of his grip and clattered on the floor. “Fuck,” he said, and picked it up. “What?”

“Daddy!”

“Debi?” he said, instantly alert and struggling with his sheets. “What is it? Are you all right? Is it Jamal?”

“Daddy,” the voice sobbed, “it’s Shorty.”

“Shorty? What about him?”

The clock radio on the bedside table said 6:25. Young had been dreaming. His dream had changed from a chase down a back lane—not a police chase; instead of guns there was a girl with long blonde hair wearing green knee socks and a short plaid skirt who kept disappearing down alleyways and around the corners of garages, her laughter leading him on—to a dream about the racetrack. He was in line at the betting window, and the old man ahead of him was taking forever to place his bet, and Young was becoming impatient because it was already post time and he had a sure thing. Finally Young peered over the old man’s shoulder to see what the holdup was, and instead of money or tickets lying on the counter between the old man and the cashier there was a bloody handkerchief with three teeth on it, and the old man, turning his face towards Young—like the little girl in The Exorcist—was weeping. Young had become aware of a ringing in his head, and at first he’d mistaken the ringing for the bell at the racetrack when the starting gate opens and the horses charge out, but then it dawned on him that the ringing he was hearing was a telephone, and that was when he had awakened.

“He’s dead. He’s been murdered.”

“Murdered? Go slow, Debi. What happened?”

“I found him in a stall. Ten minutes ago. I phoned 911, then I phoned you.”

“I’ll be right there, sweetie. Forty minutes. You still in the same barn?”

“Yes,” his daughter said, the tremolo still in her voice. “Barn 7.”

Caledonia Downs was not in Young’s precinct—he was downtown, and the track was out in the monster home suburbs—but there was no doubt where he was going. Firstly, his daughter was in distress; secondly, he knew a thing or two about horse racing, so if he needed a rationale for treading on someone else’s turf, that was it; and thirdly, he was close enough to retirement that he no longer paid any attention to protocol or procedure. He just did what needed to be done.

But the whole thing gave him pause. Accustomed as he was to death and its adjuncts, it still shook him when the dead person was someone he knew, especially, as in this case, when it was an old friend. Years ago, Campbell Young and Shorty Rogers had been as close as two men married to the same bottle could be. They had been drinking buddies, but because of certain half-remembered things they’d done in each other’s company, they had not been close for almost a decade. Five years ago, however, when Debi had been on the ropes and had come to her father for help, one of the things Young had done to get her back on her feet was to phone Shorty and ask him if he could do him a favour, for old time’s sake, and give Debi a job. Shorty had said yes, she could pick up stalls and walk hots. Debi had been with him ever since. In fact, she was the only one who had stuck by Shorty during his gradual slide from the top of the heap. She had been with him when times were good—she was Shorty’s old route horse Too Many Men’s groom when he won the Horizon Stakes in 1993—and she was with him now, two years later, when he was lucky to win a bottom claimer for non-winners lifetime. It was hard to say what had gone wrong, exactly. Shorty just stopped winning races. He lost his touch. And last October he had been in trouble with the stewards because one of his horses had tested positive for phenylbutazone, a sore-horse drug, and he’d had to serve a thirty-day suspension. His drinking increased. He got in fights. And then, one by one, just about everybody abandoned him: the owners who for years had trusted their horses to him, his fellow trainers, his grooms, his friends; even Bunny, his wife of fifteen years, walked out on him. Shorty seemed to have lost everything and everyone—except Debi.

Young usually started his day with a shower, a shave, a one-a-day vitamin with a large glass of extra-pulp orange juice, a lozenge of flaxseed oil, a zinc tablet, a bowl of Grape-Nuts, and half an hour of breakfast television. This morning, however, all he did was feed Reg, his ancient British bulldog, let her outside to stretch and relieve herself, and phone Homicide to speak to Staff Inspector Bateman.

“Do you want Wheeler with you?” Bateman asked after Young had explained the situation. Detective Lynn Wheeler was Young’s partner.

“No, I’m going straight there.”

“She’ll be here any minute, Camp. She could drive herself up, or I could send Barkas or Urmson.”

“No, the place’ll be crawling with their own people. I don’t want to get their backs up. Let me handle it.”

The last thing Young did before leaving his apartment was knock back about three ounces of PeptoBismol. He hated the taste and even the texture of the thick pink fluid, but he’d had a stomach ache for the past three days, and all he could think of to ease it was Pepto-Bismol. That and Tums. Maybe I’m getting an ulcer, he thought, as he locked his front door.

Young walked down the driveway beside his low-rise to the small parking lot where he kept his mini-van. A year earlier, he had been forced to dispose of his previous car, a 1978 robin’s egg blue Plymouth Volare so badly in need of a valve job that an OPP cruiser had pulled him over on the Don Valley Parkway; its driver, a young patrolman with a boiled face, had described to Young how he’d followed a black cloud of smoke all the way up from the lakeshore, curious to discover its source, which had turned out to be Young’s Volare. He’d told Young he could either repair the car or junk it. So Young had gone out and bought a used Dodge minivan, faded maroon, missing its middle seat.

As he fought his way through gridlock towards the track, Young thought about his daughter. A few images of Debi as a little girl flashed through his mind, but they were overtaken by the more disturbing images that always seemed to appear in his mind’s eye of Debi as a teenager, pink-eyed with dope, tattooed and pierced and overweight and filthy. Whenever Debi had come to spend the weekend at her father’s apartment after his separation from her mother, his passing attempts at cleaning up were quickly overwhelmed by his and his daughter’s combined sloth. They never sat down to have a meal together: she would eat her frozen dinners and junk food in front of the television in her bedroom, and he would eat his in front of the television in the living room.

Young stopped for a traffic light. He fished a cigarette out of the pack on the passenger’s seat beside him. He had tried to quit smoking when Jamal was born, but he was too attached to it. He tried to keep himself to a pack a day, but if he was drinking he might smoke two packs. He loved everything about smoking. When he opened a fresh pack, he would push his nose against the silver foil for the raisin smell. Yes, he loved it. Hell, he thought, aside from shortness of breath and heart palpitations and the threat of lung cancer, what’s not to love?

The light turned green, and Young drove on. He remembered the night he’d left his wife. She had grown tired of his drinking, his carousing with workmates, and had given him an ultimatum: “If you don’t quit the force our marriage is over!” He had snorted at the very idea of not being a cop, thrown a couple of changes of underwear into his overnight bag, grabbed his Bob Seger CDs and several unironed shirts Tanya had washed and hung on hangers on the back of the bed-room door, and driven away from his wife and child, a hole in his heart the size of a bus, but absolutely convinced he was doing the right thing. A week later, more or less settled into a malodorous flat above a souvlaki joint on the Danforth, he had wandered—drink in one hand, cigarette in the other—into the bathroom and had stood in front of the shirts he had brought from home. They were hanging from the curtain rod in the shower and still hadn’t been ironed; Young knew that he would never iron them himself—he’d never used an iron in his life—and he knew that without Tanya to look after him, it was going to be downhill for a while.

But that was six years ago, and although Jamal’s father had flown the coop long before his son’s birth—or perhaps because of it—Debi had straightened herself out, and Young had straightened out, too. He was still a slob, but he was a much happier slob than he had been back then—for one thing, he had discovered a dry cleaner’s right around the corner, and for another, his daughter and grandson were a daily presence in his life.

By the time Young reached the racetrack, the police had established themselves, and the ambulance crew was standing by. The stall door had been rolled back, and yellow police tape was stretched across the opening. Bing Crosby had been moved to another stall.

A uniformed officer was standing by himself.

“Are you First Officer?” Young asked him.

“Yes, sir.”

“Young, Metro Homicide. What’s your name, and what’ve we got here?”

The man swallowed. “Peebles, sir. To tell you the truth, sir, I think this is an accident scene, not a crime scene. I think the horse just kicked him.”

“Any other detectives here yet?”

“No, sir.”

Young nodded and turned his attention to the stall. The police photographer had set up a light stand that was shining on the straw bedding and on the figure of a man in a dark suit kneeling over the corpse of Shorty Rogers.

Young crouched and lifted the yellow tape above his head and then stood up in the entrance to the stall. “What’ve you got?” he said.

The kneeling man looked up, and the first thing Young noticed were the black-rimmed half-glasses that were the trademark of Elliot Cronish, Pathologist. Cronish slowly rose to his feet and brushed the straw from his knees. “Hardly your neck of the woods, Young.”

“Yours neither,” Young said.

“Regular man’s on vacation.”

“What have you got? Kid over there thinks the horse kicked him.”

“That’s what it looks like, but the young woman who phoned it in—he was her boss,” he nodded down at Shorty, “—she claims it’s murder.”

“Coroner already been here?”

“Come and gone.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Be my guest.” Cronish made a sweeping motion with his arm, like a chauffeur would for someone stepping into a limousine.

Carefully, Young manoeuvred himself into the stall. He swallowed as he looked down at the body of his friend. He wanted to kneel down and stroke him or pat him and say something, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. Cops didn’t do that sort of thing, especially cops with as many years under their belts as Young had. Especially in front of people like Cronish, who would watch such a display of emotion with amusement and file it away.

Shorty was on his stomach. He was wearing blue jeans and a white Toronto Maple Leafs hockey sweater with the number 93 in blue. There was blood spatter on the left shoulder. Young bent his knees and lowered himself into a half-squat. On the left side of Shorty’s head, near the temple, the gray hair was darkly matted with blood.

“What do you know so far?” Young asked.

Cronish looked back down at the body. “Blow to the head. Could have been a kick, like the First Officer said.”

“How long?”

Cronish stretched his left arm and looked at his watch. “It’s 7:45 a.m. My best guess at this point is he’s been dead since midnight.”

Young pondered. “What would he have been doing in a horse’s stall at midnight?”

Cronish smiled and shook his head. “Are you just thinking out loud, Young, or do you really expect an answer? What I know about racehorses you know about, oh, let’s see—opera?”

Young wasn’t listening. “He bunked nearby, I know that. Maybe he heard something. Horse in trouble, maybe. Where’s Debi?”

“Who?”

“Debi. The groom. My daughter.”

“Oh, that’s your daughter?” Cronish smiled his Cheshire smile. “The plot thickens.”

“Where is she?”

Cronish shrugged his shoulders. “Somebody took her for a coffee.”

Young stepped back out of the stall, lifted the yellow tape over his head, nodded to the uniformed officer, and trudged back through the barn and outside through the early sunshine towards a low square building painted Parks Department green that served as the track kitchen and cafeteria. Young was a big man—so big, in fact, that as he passed a pair of exercise boys in their flak jackets and helmets, they looked up in alarm, like two kids in a canoe who’ve suddenly found themselves in the path of a freighter.

Inside the kitchen, as he walked past the counter with its enormous coffee urns and its trays of pancakes and scrambled eggs and sausage and bacon and home fries, he smiled. He smiled because he spotted her—a big young woman in coveralls with a fire-engine red crewcut sitting opposite a smallish-by-comparison young man in a blue uniform—his baby girl, who, thanks to him, had the shoulders and strength and vocabulary of a linebacker.

“Daddy!” she shouted when she saw him. She stood, knocking her chair onto its back, and ran into her father’s arms. “Why would anybody want to kill him?”

Young pulled back so that he could see her face. “Sweetie, sweetie, what makes you think he was murdered?” He kissed away a tear. “The horse—”

“The horse!” she interrupted, her eyes blazing. “You think Bing did it? You think Bing kicked him? Bing loved him. Bing loves everybody. Daddy, you know horses. This is an eight-year-old gelding. He’s like a trail horse at a goddamn riding stable. He’s a pussycat. He wouldn’t hurt a mouse, let alone a man, let alone Shorty, who he loved. No, no, somebody murdered him. Somebody murdered him and made it look like an accident.”

“The pathologist says he died around midnight.”

Debi took a step back from her father. “I bedded Bing down myself at eight o’clock last night. Shorty was with me. He did Prince and Softy, and I did the other two. Then I left to pick up Jamal at Mrs. Ferri’s. Shorty wouldn’t have had any reason to go back into Bing’s stall at midnight. Besides, he would have been in bed by ten. Law & Order at nine, a couple of rum and Cokes, then bed. Like clockwork. I’m telling you, Daddy, somebody killed him.”

But Shorty did go into Bing Crosby’s stall around midnight. Maybe he was in his bunkroom and heard something and went to investigate and someone attacked him. Or maybe he was taken there by force. Dragged maybe. Or maybe the First Officer was right, despite what Debi said, and Shorty got kicked in the head. These were among Young’s thoughts as he headed back to Barn 7. Debi had told him about her encounter with Tom Wright while she was searching for Shorty, and Young wanted to talk to him. He found Tom grooming Doll House in her stall. “Terrible business,” Tom said. “Me and Shorty was friends.”

“It’s a shock, all right. You were here early this morning, weren’t you, Tom? Did you see anything suspicious?”

Tom shook his head. “No, I didn’t see nothin’.”

“What about last night?”

Tom paused, currycomb suspended in air. “I tucked this old thing in about seven, seven-fifteen, then I went home. I don’t remember nothin’ out of the ordinary.”

Young nodded towards the stall. “She ran last weekend, didn’t she?”

“Yes, sir, she run second in a starter allowance.” Tom didn’t take his eyes off the mare. “Nice spot for her. She’s entered a week from tomorrow.”

“Any chance?”

“Well, she’s sound as a bell.”

“I’ll take that as a tip.”

Tom shook his head. “Don’t bet the farm. She’s gettin’ a little long in the tooth, ain’t you, Dolly? You ain’t gonna win no stakes races.”

“How old is she?”

“Seven, which is old for a mare to still be runnin’, but like I say, sir, she’s sound and she still enjoys her work.”

“You’ve been around the races all your life, right, Tom?”

Tom was rummaging in his tack box. “Yes, sir, since I was knee high.”

“I remember when you won the jockey championship two years in a row.”

Tom held up a hoof pick. He bent over and lifted Doll House’s off fore. “Seventy-five, seventy-six.”

“That’s right, and I remember the year you finished second in the International on ... what was the colt’s name?”

“Signifier. That was seventy-eight.”

“That’s right, Signifier. My money was on you that day.”

“We didn’t quite get up. Another couple of jumps. Then I went with him to a big race at Arlington. We finished fifth, but you could of throwed a blanket over the bunch of us.”

Young knew Arlington Park in Chicago. One of the great racetracks of North America; Citation and Round Table had set track records there. At Arlington, people didn’t toss their losing tickets on the floor, the way they did everywhere else, they dropped them in trash barrels. Cleanest track he’d ever seen, and the most beautiful, and he’d been to most of the famous ones—Churchill Downs and Saratoga and Santa Anita.

He’d still been with Tanya when he’d gone to Chicago. It seemed a long time ago now, although it was only six years. He remembered seeing an old blues singer named A.C. Reed in one of the bars on North Clark Street, which he thoroughly enjoyed, and an exhibit of sculptures at an art gallery Tanya made him go to, which he didn’t enjoy at all. The sculptures were all made of pipes and fittings and all looked like plumbing to him; despite Tanya’s oohing and ahhing, he couldn’t understand how any of it qualified as art. It wasn’t that Young had anything against art—art in general, or sculpture in particular. In front of that same racetrack in Chicago, for example, there was a life-sized bronze sculpture of the great grass horse John Henry, fully extended, Willie Shoemaker aboard with his whip raised, nosing out The Bart in the 1981 Arlington Million. In Young’s opinion, that was art, that was sculpture, but hey, as he liked to tell anyone who would listen, although he wasn’t a complete ignoramus, what he knew about culture you could fit in a thimble.

“You were a fine rider, Tom.”

Tom stood up and stretched his back. “Kind of you to say so.”

“I guess you know my daughter, do you?”

“Your daughter, sir?”

“Debi Young. Shorty’s groom.”

“Oh,” Tom said. “Yes, I bumped into her this mornin’.” He looked up at Young like a pony at a plough horse. “She has to learn not to run in the barn.” He dropped the hoof pick back into the tack box. “How can I help you, sir? Me and Shorty went back a long ways.”

Young said, “We were friends, too, at one point, and he was good to my daughter, and I want to find out whether his death was an accident or whether there’s some other explanation.”

Tom said, “What can I do?”

“You can tell me who else to talk to. Who else Shorty had daily contact with. Jockeys, agents, owners. Whatever.”

Tom took off his grimy fedora and scratched above one ear. “Well, gosh, let me see...”

“Who did he spend the most time with?”

“Oh, well, if you put it like that”—Tom smiled—“that’s easy. That would be Percy Ball.”

“Name rings a bell. Wasn’t he a rider?”

Tom said, “That’s right. Rode a few years at the Fort, and a little bit at Greenwood. B-tracks mostly. Didn’t last long. Couldn’t keep the weight off. Now he’s an exercise rider. Works all of Shorty’s horses.”

“Him and Shorty spent a lot of time together?”

“Oh yes,” Tom said and nodded.

“They drank together is what you’re saying.”

“You could say that, yes, sir.”

“You think Percy might be able to help.”

Tom smiled and shook his head. “He’s an aggravatin’ little so-and-so, and I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, but maybe he knows somethin’.”

“Where’d they drink?”

“JJ Muggs, mostly. It’s in the Caledonia Mall. If he’s not there, then he’s probably at McKenzie’s. You know where McKenzie’s is at?”

Young nodded. “What time’s he usually get there?”

Tom raised his left wrist and squinted at his watch, then shook his head. “Wife gave me this for my birthday, but whenever I wanna know the time, it takes two minutes to figure it out. Blasted thing’s got no numbers to it.” Tom squinted at the watch again. “Let me see, let me see. Well, it’s only nine. He’ll ride his last horse around ten-thirty, so you’re likely to find him over there around eleven, or whenever they start servin’.”

“How will I know him?”

Tom thought. “He’s got a sort of a Beatles haircut, dyed blond. He likes to flip it around for the girls.”

Young spent the next two hours examining the crime scene and talking to grooms and trainers whose horses were stabled in the same barn. The only useful piece of information came from Morrison, the evidence man, who determined that no one had been dragged into the stall. But Young realized that that didn’t prove much, because Shorty was small enough for a strong man to carry. A detective from King County Homicide finally arrived shortly after eleven, delayed, he claimed, by a wee-hours drug-related shooting in the Finch Hills projects, in his southeast quadrant. When he asked Young, somewhat suspiciously, why a detective from downtown was on a case that was, geographically speaking, none of his business, Young smoothed the man’s feathers by explaining his personal interest in the situation and by giving him a rundown on everything he knew. Mollified, the man, whose name was Keogh, invited him to lunch, but Young begged off. “Got a lead to run down,” he said, and Keogh said, “Another time, maybe.”

At eleven-thirty Young parked his minivan outside JJ Muggs. Inside, he had to wait until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. And there was Percy Ball, just as Tom Wright had predicted, sitting at the bar, his back turned, but the unmistakable blond mop fully in evidence.

Young walked towards him. Percy was wearing cowboy boots, black jeans, and a black vinyl jacket that was supposed to look like leather. When Young was two feet behind him, he said, “Percy Ball?”

Percy hopped off his stool like a man in trouble. He stood there with his chest stuck out, and his head would-n’t stay still, poking this way and that like a pigeon’s.

“Are you Percy Ball?” Young said.

“Who wants to know?”

Young had his badge in his hand. “Police. Used to ride, didn’t you?”

Percy stuck his chest out even further. “Yeah, some. Here and there. Greenwood, the Fort. Out west mostly.”

“Did you ride for Shorty Rogers?”

Percy hesitated. “Some.”

“What’s that mean, some? Did you ride for him or not?”

“I worked horses for him.”

“Ah, you were his exercise boy.”

“That’s right, but he put me on all the best ones. He wouldn’t let nobody else get on the good ones.”

“What good ones? Shorty was fresh out of good ones.”

“He let me ride Too Many Men.”

“Sure, that was his money horse for awhile, but you know what, Percy, that’s old news.”

“Yeah, well, I was the only one Shorty’d let on him.”

“In the mornings.”

“Yeah, in the mornings. That horse was a mean motherfucker. Liked to snap his head back.”

Young looked closely at Percy’s face, the eyes too close together, the broken nose. “The reason I’m here, Percy, is I need to know where Shorty was last night.”

“What’re you askin’ me for?”

“Because Shorty’s dead, that’s why.” He waited, but Percy didn’t react. “You knew he was dead, didn’t you?”

Percy lifted his chin as if his collar were too tight. “Yeah, I knew.”

“You seem real broke up about it.”

Percy shrugged.

“And,” Young went on, “the reason I’m asking you is because you were with him.”

Percy’s bird eyes looked left and right.

“You didn’t just work for him, you were his drinking buddy, right?”

Percy scratched his dirty hair. “We was here.”

“What time?”

“I got here about one or so. I don’t know what time he got here. An hour later, maybe. We was here all afternoon, had a few beers, something to eat. He musta left around seven-thirty. Had to go back to the barn and bed down his horses. I never seen him after that.”

Young waved to the bartender. “Couple of beers here,” he said. Then, to Percy, “Do you think his death was an accident?”

Percy picked at a scab on his knuckle. He didn’t look up. “Shorty knew his way around horses, and besides, that old Bing Crosby wouldn’t hurt a flea. It wasn’t no accident.”

“Who should I talk to?”

“Whoever he owed money to, I guess.”

“Who might that be?”

“Hey, what do I know? Maybe he was in trouble with a bookie.” The bartender placed two bottles on the bar. Percy took one and drank deeply from it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Maybe one of his owners got fed up with him not winnin’ any races.”

“Who were his owners?”

“Old lady he’d been trainin’ for for years. She owns Bing Crosby.” He paused, as if unsure whether to continue. “And some guy who owns a computer store or something. Calls himself the Internet King. He owns the other horses. Shorty only had the two owners.”

“Who owned the colt that died?”

Percy looked up at Young, then away.

Young’s eyes narrowed. “Someone told me about a colt that died. What was its name? Down something. Downtown?”

Still looking away, Percy said, “Download. The Internet guy owned him. Paid a ton of money for him, but he didn’t do much. Won a special weight maiden race at the Fort last fall, which, as I’m sure you’re aware of, don’t mean fuck all, and after that he couldn’t cut it with winners. Anyways, he died.”

“In his stall?” Young asked.

Percy nodded at his beer bottle.

“What killed him?”

“Vet said colic.”

“How old was the colt?”

“Three.”

“Young horse. Otherwise healthy?”

Percy nodded again. “Seemed so.” He finished the first bottle of beer and eyed the second. “Aren’t you gonna drink yours?”

“You can have it.”

Young studied Percy a moment, dropped some money on the bar, and walked outside into the sunshine.

He was unlocking the door to his minivan when a voice behind him shouted, “Hey!” Young looked up. With one hand Percy was shielding his eyes from the sun, and with the other he was holding open the side door of the bar. “He had three!”

“Three what? Who had three?”

“Shorty. He had three owners. Picked up a new one. Guy won the lottery or something. Dresses like Saturday Night Fever. Shorty claimed a colt for him. Won his first race for them, and won it very impressive, too. He was supposed to run him back Sunday in the stake. I don’t know what’ll happen now. All’s I know is Shorty didn’t like the man.” Then he disappeared back inside the bar, and the door closed.

Detective Lynn Wheeler came into Young’s cubicle at Homicide at 2:00 p.m., shortly after he had returned from his visit with Percy, to tell him that the patholo-gist, Elliot Cronish, had called. Wheeler knew there was no love lost between the two men. Young complained that Cronish never took anything seriously. He was more interested in the murderer’s modus operandi than he was in the pain and suffering of the victim.

“What did he want?” Young asked. He was sitting at his desk. She was standing beside him. Because he was so tall and she was so much shorter, their eyes were at the same level. Wheeler had a physical peculiarity: one of her eyes was brown and the other was blue. When she was being especially businesslike or when she was angry, she somehow drew Young into her brown eye. When she was happy or light-hearted, he found himself staring into the blue one. Right now he was looking into the serious eye, the brown one.

“It was about your friend,” she said, tucking her blonde pageboy behind her ears. “After they took the body back to the lab and cleaned it up, they found a mark.”

“What kind of mark?”

“Dr. Cronish described it as horseshoe-shaped. Above the left temple.”

Young frowned. “Shit. I was so sure.”

“About what?”

“That he’d been murdered.”

“They found horsehairs, too. Stuck in the wound.”

“Horsehairs? Well, that ices it, I guess. Shorty got kicked to death by a horse that everyone swears up and down wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

That night Percy Ball partied in an empty tack room in an empty barn at the far reaches of the backstretch of Caledonia Downs Racetrack. With him was a young man named Marvis and a woman whose name Percy never learned. As an exercise rider Percy considered himself superior to the other two, who were both grooms.

Marvis had a cube of hashish wrapped in foil. He said Percy and the woman could have some if they paid him ten dollars each. Neither of them was carrying any money, but they promised to pay him the next day, so he agreed. He slid the end of a safety pin into a small chunk of hash, and the three of them, squatting like peasants in the smelly room, inhaled the smoke through a plastic drinking straw.

Later, the woman, who was skinny and tattooed and had dyed her short, spiky hair lemon yellow, sat beside Marvis and traced her fingers through his cornrows.

They were drinking Black Ice, and after a while Marvis lay down and went to sleep.

Because the barn was not in use, its power had been shut off, and now, as dusk fell, Percy picked up the flashlight Marvis had brought with him and, accidentally-on-purpose, flipped back his blond hair in its beam. When the woman didn’t react, Percy said, “Both of us, we dye our hair, eh. Same colour, almost.”

The woman took the flashlight from Percy’s hand and showed him a tattoo of a scorpion on the back of her neck. Then she pulled up the left sleeve of her T-shirt and showed him a tattoo of a teddy bear on the point of her shoulder. Percy asked if she had any other tattoos, and could he see them. She said no, but he didn’t know if she meant that she didn’t have any others or that he couldn’t see them.

There was a silence, and soon the woman seemed to forget about Percy and resumed playing with Marvis’s cornrows.

Percy set his chin. He reached for the flashlight and turned it off. In the darkness, he said, “You like black guys, do you? You like doin’ it with black guys?”

The woman scrambled to her feet and bumped and stumbled her way out of the tack room. Percy thought about going after her—he had a jackknife in his pants pocket—but even though the beer was all gone, he was content to stay where he was. He wished he had some snacks, though—Bar-B-Q Fritos, maybe, and a couple of cans of Dr. Pepper.