“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