LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

her and Shorty had any kids, but you better check. Find out if Shorty had any brothers or sisters. And find out who might have wanted him dead.”

      Wheeler strode out of Young’s cubicle full of purpose and determination, and while she was checking out Shorty’s family Young set to work on some of the people they did know were involved in Shorty’s life: Percy Ball, the exercise rider; Shorty’s regular jockey, Trinidad Grant; and even Grant’s agent, a shadowy character named Ronald Outhouse. All afternoon Young made phone calls and talked to people he thought might have useful information, but nothing he learned led anywhere. Percy Ball appeared to be nothing more than a not-too-bright drunk. The jockey was clean. His agent had a record—he had served two years for extortion after bilking several old ladies out of their pension cheques by impersonating a bank officer—but there was no immediate reason to suspect him of Shorty’s murder.

      At 5:00 p.m., Young decided enough was enough. On his way out of the building, he stopped by Wheeler’s desk to see what she had accomplished. He hung his head over the wall of her cubicle.

      She favoured him with her blue eye. “You look like a big old moon up there.”

      “Any luck?”

      She nodded and looked down at the chaos of papers on her desk. “I’d say the ex is clean. She and the veterinarian moved to Arizona a year ago. They opened a dog restaurant in Tucson.”

      “A dog restaurant? People eat dog?”

      “No, no, a restaurant for dogs. The dogs eat there. And you were right, she and Shorty didn’t have any children. Shorty had one brother, Harold, but he had Downs Syndrome. He lived in an institution in Barrie. Died six months ago, aged fifty-two.”

      Young was shaking his head. “I like dogs, you know that. I love them. But a restaurant, when people are starving in the streets, all the homeless people.”

      “In fact, his only other living relative that I can find is an uncle, Morley Rogers, who lives up in the Caledon Hills.”

      “It’s a crazy fucking world, Wheeler, that’s all I know. Come on, it’s Friday and it’s past five. Let me buy you a beer. Harold and Morley can wait till Monday.”

      “Thanks anyway, Sarge,” she said, turning to her computer screen, “but I’m going to stay a bit longer. I don’t want the trail to go cold.”

      “You working this weekend?”

      “No, I’m off.”

      “Well good, that’s good.” Young nodded his head thoughtfully. “But let me tell you something, Wheeler: Shorty was a friend of mine, and I will find out who killed him, but he ain’t going to be any colder Monday than he is today.”

      Wheeler just looked up at him—brown-eyed—until he nodded his head again and walked away.

       Saturday, June 3

      Like Wheeler, Young was supposed to have the weekend off, but Saturday morning he went to work anyway. He began to research the people Shorty trained horses for: the old lady, the Internet king, the lottery winner.

      The old lady was revealed to be Helen McDonagh, a wealthy spinster who had maintained a small stable of racehorses for over thirty years. In her youth she had been a champion tennis player. She was a member of the Granite Club and lived with a companion in an old house in the affluent Willowdale area of the city.

      Young was about to shift his focus to the Internet king, but something that Percy Ball had said as he stood in the doorway of JJ Muggs tweaked Young’s interest in the third owner, the lottery winner: “All’s I know is Shorty didn’t like the man.” The man, a former junior high schoolteacher named Douglas Buckley, turned out to have a CV not nearly so straightforward as the old lady’s. In his former life, before he won $8 million by selecting numbers that corresponded to the birthdays of his three children, Buckley had taught physical education and had been a Cub Scout leader, a sports card collector, and a scratch golfer. In those days, he’d driven a station wagon. In his new life, he drove a sports utility vehicle. Young learned some of this information in a phone call to Debi late that morning, but most of it he reconstructed during an afternoon visit he paid to Kathy Buckley, Doug’s wife, in her pleasant, post-war, suburban brick bungalow in the Don Mills area of Toronto. There were beds of white hydrangea out front, the grass had recently been cut, one of the children—a boy—passed through the neatly appointed living room looking like he hated the world, and Kathy herself appeared ready to unravel.

      The day after he won the lottery, according to Kathy, Doug took a leave of absence from Berrywood Middle School—he wanted to resign outright, but she put her foot down—and began spending his afternoons at Caledonia Downs. Although his friends and neighbours were unaware of it, Doug had a gambling problem. And although his children—Jason, fifteen, Jennifer, thirteen, and Jessica, seven—knew nothing of their father’s compulsion, Kathy knew. She had seen him in action during their annual getaways to Las Vegas. “A light came into his eyes,” she said, serving Young a glass of lemonade, “as soon as he stepped into a casino. Myself, I hate casinos—the crazy carpets, the noise. There isn’t a clock anywhere. I’d spend my time shopping or going to shows, but I always knew where to find Doug. He loved the slots, but what he really loved was the horse race room at Bally’s, where he could bet tracks all over North America and watch the races on huge telescreens while young women with hardly any clothes on brought him drinks.” After he won the lottery, again according to Kathy, Doug’s enthusiasm for Scout jamborees waned, and within months of his windfall he had dyed his mouse-brown Brillo-Pad hair jet black, had taken to wearing orange aviator glasses and a diamond ear stud, and had purchased, without Kathy’s knowledge, a three-year-old thoroughbred racing colt named Someday Prince. When Kathy found out about the horse—Doug carelessly left a vet’s bill in a shirt pocket—she demanded an explanation. Doug admitted that several months earlier he had talked to a horse racing writer named Priam Harvey. Harvey, Doug told her, had put him onto a trainer named Shorty Rogers. When Kathy ordered Doug to sell the horse and terminate his relationship with Rogers, Doug simply smiled at her, turned and walked out the front door, climbed into his fully loaded, cowcatchered, pewter-coloured Ford Expedition, drove to the Airport Hilton a mile from the racetrack, and moved in.

      Young asked if Kathy had any photographs of Doug that she could show him. “Jessica has one in her room,” she said. “I’ll get it.” When she returned, she polished the glass of the frame with the elbow of her sweater before showing it to him. The photograph revealed Doug to be muscular, baby-faced, and—Young thought—full of himself.

      As Young was standing up to leave, Kathy asked if he would be speaking to her husband in the near future.

      “I haven’t actually met him yet,” Young said.

      “Well, when you do meet him,” Kathy said evenly, “tell him to drop by sometime and pick up his belongings. They’re in the garage.”

      Young found a phone booth outside a Sunoco station a short distance from Kathy Buckley’s house. He phoned the offices of Sport of Kings magazine and asked to speak to Priam Harvey. He was informed by a receptionist that Mr. Harvey no longer worked there.

      Young phoned McCully’s Tavern. Dexter, the bartender, answered. “Dexter,” Young said, “is Mr. Harvey there?”

      “Right here, Sarge. You want to talk to him, I’ll have to wake him up.”

      “Wake him up.”

      Thirty seconds passed, and a groggy voice said, “Priam Harvey, at your service.”

      “Were you really sleeping?”

      “To whom am I speaking?”

      “Young. Dexter said you were sleeping.”

      “I may have been having a little rest, but I certainly wasn’t asleep. Dexter was exaggerating.” Harvey paused to cough. “What can I do for you?”

      “I need some

Скачать книгу