LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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