“What?” a voice above her in the darkness said. “What wrong?”
She pushed Eric off and sat up.
“Where you going?”
“Can’t you hear it?” she said. “I’ll go see what he wants.”
“He old, Miss, he forget in a minute. Stay here. I make you happy, I make you say my name.”
The banging continued.
“I can’t stand it.” She stood up and felt her way along the wall for the light switch.
“Ow, my eyes!”
“Be quiet!” she hissed.
Tying the sash of her dressing gown as she hurried barefoot down the hall, she almost collided with Kevin coming around the newel post. “Oh!” she said. She laughed nervously. “You scared me.”
“Sorry, Miss. I hear him from down in my room, so I figure I better have a look. I expect you’s asleep and don’t hear him.”
She glanced back along the hall at the light cast through the open door of her bedroom. “That’s okay,” she said. “It’s me he wants. I’ll take care of it.”
“You sure, Miss? I don’t mind.”
She looked again down the hall. She grasped the young man by the shoulders and turned him bodily towards the head of the stairs. “You just march yourself back to bed, mister. I’ll handle it.”
She waited until she heard his door close downstairs, then returned to her room. Eric was snoring face-first into a pillow. She turned off the light and eased the door shut behind her as she stepped back into the hall.
Morley Rogers was still half-heartedly banging the trowel against the headboard when she walked into his room. The lamp on his bedside table cast a yellow pall. “What is it?” she said.
“I’ve lost my Bible,” he said weakly. “I had it with me when I went to bed, but now it’s gone.”
She padded across the carpet to his bedside. She lifted the bedclothes with her left hand and swept around with her right. “Here it is,” she said, and handed it to him. “It was in bed with you all along.”
“All’s well,” he said.
“Good night then.” She started out of the room.
“Miss Sweet,” he said.
“Yes?”
“There’s something else.”
“What?”
He patted the mattress beside him. “I’ll show you.”
Young and Tanya walked side by side down the steps and joined the lineup of people waiting to view the corpse of Shorty Rogers. Young was surprised that it was an open casket, given the head wound Shorty had suffered, but he was even more surprised that the ceremony was taking place outside in a public place, a picnic ground. He looked around at dogs chasing Frisbees and aproned men in flip-flops flipping burgers. When he turned back to Tanya she had transmogrified into Shorty in his blood-spattered Leafs jersey. “Camp,” Shorty said, “who do you like in the sixth?”
Young woke up. The stomach ache was back. It was as if someone were tightening a vise on his guts. He curled into a fetal position. He must have groaned, because from her side of the bed, Jessy asked him what was wrong. “Nothing,” he said. “Just a gut ache.”
When Young got to work that morning, Staff Inspector Bateman told him that his counterpart at King County Homicide had given him the okay to make Young lead investigator on the Shorty Rogers case. Things were slow enough at Homicide that Bateman could spare him and his crew for the time being, and things were hectic enough up at King County that they were grateful for the help. Young gathered his detectives in the conference room and assigned complete criminal, professional, and personality profiles on all the people who had attended Morley Rogers’ meeting. He instructed Detective Gerald “Big” Urmson to find out what he could about Stirling Smith-Gower, the environmentalist, and he told Detective Anthony Barkas to research the socialite, Summer Caldwell. When he added Richard Ludlow to Wheeler’s worksheet, she was excited, but her smile disappeared when she looked up at Young’s face. “My God,” she said, “what’s wrong with you? You’re pale as a ghost.”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just a gut ache.”
“How long have you had it?”
He shrugged. “I had one last week, then it went away. Now it’s back.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
Young shook his head. “It’s just a gut ache, Wheeler. Or heartburn, or whatever. It’ll pass.”
“Maybe it’s an ulcer.”
Young lifted his head to include Big Urmson and Barkas. “Okay, listen. Three o’clock tomorrow we’ll meet here again and sit down and see what we know.”
This time, instead of phoning the offices of Sport of Kings magazine, Young phoned McCully’s first off, and, sure enough, Dexter said, yes, Mr. Harvey was at the bar. When Harvey took the phone, Young asked him if he would dig up whatever he could about Percy Ball and if he could attend the 3:00 p.m. meeting on Thursday. “On both counts, happy to oblige,” Harvey said. “Perhaps I’ll recoup my seventy dollars.”
Satisfied that they had enough information on the lottery winner, Doug Buckley, for the time being, at least, Young turned his own attention to Mahmoud Khan, the Internet King, owner of Dot Com Acres.
Thursday, June 8
The stomach ache was still there when Young woke up, and he had to bring new supplies of PeptoBismol and Tums to work with him. At 3:00 p.m., when he assembled the members of his team in the conference room, the pain had changed from sharp, irregular jabs to a deep and constant ache.
When everyone had poured themselves coffees and the donuts had been passed around, Young asked everyone to sit down. He began by introducing Priam Harvey. Harvey was already known to the others as a local character, someone Young often referred to with great respect as a horse-player, writer, drinker, and all-around intellect, but this was the first time they’d had anything to do with him. “Mr. Harvey has offered to help us out with his specialized knowledge as regards the racetrack,” Young explained, “so make him feel welcome.”
Next, Young reviewed the information that everyone was so far privy to: Delbert Chester “Shorty” Rogers, fifty-two, had been found dead in a stall at Caledonia Downs Racetrack early on the morning of Thursday, June 1. It was subsequently determined that Rogers had been fatally struck by a weapon—perhaps a baseball bat—with a horseshoe attached to it. Horsehairs had been placed on the wound to make it appear that Rogers had been kicked to death by a horse. But tests showed that the hairs were not from the thor-oughbred Bing Crosby, whose stall Rogers was found in.
“Okay, you first,” Young said to Tony Barkas. He checked the list in front of him. “Summer Caldwell.”
Barkas, who was stocky, intense, and olive-complected, said, “Okay. Summer Caldwell’s been married three times—her first husband died in a plane crash, the second of cancer—she does a lot of charity work, she’s a member of the King City in-crowd and attends all the parties of the rich and famous, and she’s a fanatic about flowers and gardens. I think it’s pretty much unlikely that Mrs. Caldwell was involved in the murder of Shorty Rogers: she has no criminal record; she and her present husband, who’s a land speculator, own a million-dollar property on the third hole of the golf course, and they’ve got homes in Nassau and Costa del Sol; and her pretty much regular placing behind Morley Rogers in the King County Beautiful Garden Competition does not, in my opinion, make her a priority suspect in the murder of her main competition’s