Murder at the Racetrack

by Otto Penzler

  “That’s thoughtful of you,” Eric said quietly. Then he added, “Do you want me to wait until you can come with me?”

  “Not for this part. You won’t give away anything I’ll want.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He shrugged. “I trust you.”

  And that was that.

  • • •

  He missed watching the workout that morning, in favor of getting an early start on an unpleasant task. As he drove toward Mark’s house just before dawn, he felt a degree of melancholy settling over him. This did not change after he arrived, although the sky had lightened. He had not realized, even in his avoidance, how difficult it would be to come back to Mark’s house. Although he had been away from the house for only a month, there had been some lessening of the intensity of his sense of loss in that time, to a degree he hadn’t realized until now. Grief seemed to have waited for him all that while, just on the other side of the front door, right here with the large pile of this week’s uncollected mail, some of it addressed to a dead man. He set down the stack of flattened boxes, three large trash bags, and the shipping tape dispenser he had brought with him, and gathered the envelopes, magazines, and brochures, and set them on the dining room table.

  Memories and regret followed him as he moved through the house: He could picture Mark, sitting in this chair, just so, in that lazy posture of his, or straddling the back of this one at the kitchen table, his arms folded over the top of it as they talked about—oh, such stupid things. Here’s where I should have asked you what was on your mind, and here’s where I should have let you know that I needed you to stay alive, here’s where I should have told you that you mattered so much to me.

  He moved to the foot of the stairs but could not make himself climb them. Instead, he walked over to the mantel of the living room fireplace. Photos of Mark and Carlotta, Mark and Jimmy, the family together, and—he took this one from its place—of Mark and Eric. Eric, the taller of the two, his arm around his brother’s shoulder. They were smiling at Carlotta as she took the picture—almost laughing, really. What had she said to make them laugh? The joke was gone.

  They were gone. He carefully put the photo back.

  A house full of memories.

  One memory it did not contain, and he again silently thanked Mark for somehow having the presence of mind to kill himself away from the house. He could not prevent himself from imagining Mark, sitting beneath that tree, holding the gun, and feeling so filled with despair that suicide seemed the best choice.

  Were you so lonely, in spite of all of us? Were we just not enough for you?

  He felt a hard, insistent, rising pressure in his chest—it seemed to make his throat swell. He made a sound somewhere between a shout and a cough, then suddenly he was weeping. He struggled against it and lost, gave into it, glad Jimmy wasn’t here to witness him falling apart.

  Eventually, he wore down, and sat benumbed, and not a little ashamed of himself.

  This is accomplishing exactly nothing.

  At least he didn’t feel the pressure. He wasn’t sure the emptiness was a good trade-off.

  He had just washed his face when the doorbell rang.

  Jesus. Not now, whoever you are. He stood very still.

  It rang again.

  Go away.

  A loud knocking, and the doorbell again.

  He waited.

  A muffled voice. “Eric?”

  Donna. Useless to hide; she’d have seen his car in the drive. Why would she be here? In the next second, panic took hold of him and he ran to the front door. He yanked it open and shouted his fear. “Jimmy! What’s happened to him?”

  He wasn’t sure what startled her more, his appearance or his manner. Her mouth formed a perfect, silent “O.” Then, perhaps putting absolutely everything all together at once, she said very quietly, “Nothing, as far as I know. I saw him catch the bus to school. Should we call there to make sure he made it there okay?”

  “No,” he said, completely mortified now. God, she was talking to him as if he were a skittish colt. “No,” he said again.

  She ignored that, pulled out a cell phone, and called the school. She had permission to pick up Jimmy from school, was the emergency contact, and could have handled the call herself. But she handed the phone to him as the office answered.

  Yes, Jimmy was there, and did his uncle need to speak to him? No, he told them, thanks all the same. He hung up and handed the phone back, immeasurably relieved.

  “Thanks, I guess I did need to make that call.”

  “He told me what you were doing today,” she said. “I thought—well, maybe I’m just butting in where I don’t belong and you’d rather not have help.”

  He sighed. “Help would be wonderful. As you can see, I— I’m not doing so hot on my own.”

  “You design robots. You aren’t one yourself. Okay if I come inside?”

  He found himself smiling. “Sure.”

  She discovered the supplies he’d left near the front door, grabbed the trash bags and tape dispenser, and told him to grab the boxes and bring them upstairs. She led the way, hesitated in the upper hall, until he told her which way to turn. They entered the large master bedroom, which had a walk-in closet and full bath to each side. They set up near the closet and bathroom that were Carlotta’s.

  “Why don’t you build the boxes while I start sorting through the small stuff in the bathroom and dresser drawers?” Donna said.

  “Okay.”

  His part of the project went well until he cut his thumb on the jagged edge of the tape dispenser. He swore and brought it to his mouth to stop the quick flow of blood.

  “Are you all right?” Donna asked.

  “Yes. Just clumsy.”

  She came nearer, took his hand, and examined the thumb. She grabbed a tissue from Carlotta’s dressing table and pressed it to the cut. “Had a tetanus shot lately?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. This cut’s not too deep, but I’ll bet it stings.”

  “It does,” he admitted.

  “Good thing it’s the left thumb. Better rinse it off and see if Mark’s bathroom cabinet holds anything you can put on it. I just looked through Carlotta’s bathroom, and there’s nothing but makeup and skin-care stuff in there.” She barely kept the disdain out of her voice.

  He thanked her, tried not to feel too bad when she released his hand, and went into Mark’s bathroom. He washed off the cut, opened the cabinet, found a tube of antibiotic cream and a box of Band-Aids.

  As he was replacing them, he noticed a yellow-orange plastic pill bottle on a high shelf, nearly full. He took it down and read the prescription label. Valium. Mark’s sedatives, prescribed not long after Carlotta’s death—the expiration date on the pills was nearing. Judging by the bottle, Mark had hardly taken any of them. Eric put them back and shut the cabinet door. He avoided looking in any of the mirrored surfaces and braced himself against the sink, again filled with an overwhelming sense of having failed his brother.

  “Do you have good handwriting?”

  He turned to see Donna standing at the open bathroom door. He straightened. “Yes, why?”

  “I don’t. You should make the list. Unless you want to do it on a laptop or something?”

  “What list?”

  “Donation list—you’ll need it for taxes.”

  So Carlotta’s closet was emptied while he took dictation. Donna’s steady calm helped him to level out his own emotions. What he saw as “the outfit Carlotta wore that last Christmas,” with attendant memories, she described as “woman’s two-piece blue silk suit, size eight.”

  At the same time, she wasn’t cold. Her regard for Carlotta was evident to him, demonstrated in the way she folded each item with exquisite care and placed it in a box. And because every now and then, she would pause, and leave something hanging by itself. He didn’t object. Eventually, she came back to these items. In the end, the only thing remaining in the closet was a box with Carlotta’s we
dding dress in it. “Let’s let Jimmy decide on that one when he’s a little older,” she advised.

  He agreed with this, then said, “I can’t thank you enough. I mean that. I don’t know how long it would have taken me to do this on my own. I hope I haven’t wrecked your day.”

  “It’s a good day for this, as it turns out. Nothing in crisis, and no horses entered in anything until the weekend. I did everything I needed to do and came over here. The rest, my staff can handle. What else do you have to do here?”

  He hesitated, then said, “I’m going to need to do it in stages, I think.”

  “Sensible. Anything you can take with you and work on away from here?”

  He nodded. “Papers and lots of mail.”

  They moved into Mark’s upstairs library. “I’ve gone through the desk in here once, so we could probably pack it up fairly quickly. The books I’ll deal with later.”

  She boxed up the contents of Mark’s desk, keeping each drawer separate, as he gathered loose papers from around the room, then went downstairs and gathered the mail. He came back up and was watching her empty the last drawer, when he said, “Hell’s bells.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t believe it. Some engineer I am.”

  She waited.

  “The desk. I think it has a secret compartment. I never realized it while I was sitting at it.”

  “How can you tell now?”

  “The drawer is too short.” He showed her how the desk’s width was greater than the length of the drawer. He looked more closely. “There’s a panel at the back.”

  He set out to find the device that would open the panel. He enjoyed solving this kind of puzzle, but all the while, he found himself equally concerned that this would be where he would find at best something that might overset all the legal work that went into settling Mark’s estate, and at worst, some horrible secret that Mark could not bear to be known, perhaps even some other cause for his suicide.

  “Maybe I should leave,” Donna said.

  “Please don’t,” he said, more vehemently than he intended. He looked up at her and added, “I know I can trust your discretion.”

  “Thanks.”

  A few moments later, he heard a satisfying click, and the panel slid back, revealing a large manila envelope. Eric removed it, looked for any other contents, and found none. He tested for other secret compartments and, satisfied that he had discovered the only one, put the panel back in place and then turned his attention to the envelope.

  It contained two file folders. He pulled the top one out. The front of the folder was stamped, COPPER COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. The label had two lines of type: “Halsted, C.” and the date of Carlotta’s death on the first, and a long unfamiliar number beneath that. He opened it, saw the first horrible photo, and quickly shut it.

  “The accident investigation?”

  “So it appears,” he said shakily. “My God…”

  “You going to be okay?”

  “Yes. Yes. It just—I hadn’t ever seen—”

  “No, of course not.”

  He sat in silence for a moment, then placed the folder back in the envelope.

  “Probably hid them here so that Jimmy wouldn’t go through what you just did,” she said.

  “Yes, I’m sure that’s the case.”

  “Can you keep that away from him at the house?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I have a safe.”

  “Mark must have had a reason for keeping it.”

  “Beyond his obsession…” he broke off.

  “I’m just saying, maybe when you aren’t so angry with him, you can take a closer look at it.”

  “I’m not ang—well, okay, maybe I am. I’m not going to throw it away, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “No, something like this won’t frighten you for long. You’ve got more spine than your brother ever had. More than Carlotta, for that matter.”

  He thought she was wrong on both counts, but found he didn’t have an ounce of energy left for an argument.

  “You going to be okay driving home?” she asked. “Maybe we should head back—we’ll get home just before Jimmy gets out of school if we leave now.”

  He agreed. She insisted on following him on the drive, and he found himself glancing into the rearview mirror often, comforted each time he saw her big pickup truck there.

  • • •

  That evening, after Jimmy had fallen asleep—and after a period of time spent wondering if Donna might really be signaling him that she was receptive to being dated by him, or if that was wishful thinking on his part—Eric began to go through the mail from Mark’s house. He was surprised to find it included two envelopes from two separate law enforcement agencies. One was from the sheriff’s department in Osita County, the county where Mark had died. That one was addressed to Eric. The second was addressed to Mark, and was from the sheriff’s department in this county, Copper County, which shared a border with Osita County.

  He opened the one addressed to himself. A “final notice” (Final? When had there been any previous ones?) saying that Mark’s Corvette must be picked up from the Osita County Sheriff’s Department impound yard within thirty days, or it would be sold at auction. It had been released to Eric as trustee of Mark’s estate per a court order. What Eric considered to be outrageously high storage fines must be paid as well. He sighed. All of California’s counties were cash strapped, so fines were levied at every possible turn.

  Well, now he had something on tomorrow’s to-do list as well.

  He opened the other one. A letter from Detective Michael Wade, saying he had repeatedly tried to contact Mark without success, and apparently the phone number he had for Mark was no longer in service. Would Mark please give him a call at his earliest convenience? Detective Wade had finally received the lab reports he had been waiting for and had a few questions for Mark. He apologized for taking so long to contact him again, but as he had explained before, the county crime lab had an overwhelming backlog of cases. He wanted to assure Mark that despite these unavoidable delays, the investigation was continuing.

  Eric looked at this more closely. Beneath the date was a reference to a case number.

  Eric moved to his office safe and, entering the combination on its electronic keypad, unlocked it, and removed the envelope he had placed there earlier in the day. He removed the file folders. The number in the letter was the number on the folder he had so hastily put away this afternoon.

  There was an ongoing investigation into Carlotta’s death? It wasn’t clearly ruled a single-vehicle accident?

  He forced himself to open the folder, quickly flipping the photos over and concentrating on what had been written and diagrammed within. That he was looking at photocopies was evident. Did Detective Wade give him a copy of the whole file? No, clearly some pages were missing. He wondered if Mark had sweet-talked someone else into getting the information to him. Entirely possible, knowing his charming brother. How old was this report?

  He looked at the last notation in the file. It mentioned that the detective had followed up with the lab about samples of white and red paint, thought to have transferred from the vehicle that struck the SUV, being sent to the lab, along with several pieces of a broken headlamp. Something about the date of the notation nagged at him. He went back to his safe and took out his copy of the will. The codicil about Zuppa Inglese had been added that week.

  He went back to the folder and read more carefully.

  An hour later, Eric was convinced that at the very least, another vehicle had been involved in the fatal accident, and that in all likelihood someone had intentionally forced Carlotta off the road. Debris found at the apparent point of impact, skid marks, tire impressions. Footwear impressions—of someone who had walked partway down the slope and back, but never called an ambulance or police.

  Eric set the folder aside, staring off into the night for a time, wondering if his rage would cool before dawn.

  T
he second folder contained an assortment of loose notes and pieces of paper. One was a map, upon which someone, presumably Mark, had marked three locations: the restaurant from which Carlotta began that last drive; Shackel Horse Farm, where Mark and Jimmy waited; the place where she was killed.

  Another was a photocopy of a credit card bill. He had seen a second-generation copy of it in the other folder—presumably, Mark had given the original to the detective. After studying it, Eric saw that it included a charge for gasoline on the date she died.

  A bill for Carlotta’s cell phone. The others were slips of paper with brief notes made in Mark’s handwriting. The time she left the restaurant. The time she bought gas at the gas station. Michael Wade’s business card.

  But who on earth would want to kill Carlotta? Mark would probably be a suspect, but anyone who looked closely into their lives would learn that he was devoted to her, and would see that her expertise and skill were a key part of the restaurants’ success.

  The more Eric thought about it, the more likely it seemed that this was a case of hit and run, or road rage. A stranger, not anyone who knew her.

  He studied the map again and realized that not only was Mark’s home much closer to the Shackel Horse Farm than the restaurant, the three locations were in a triangle and did not lie along the same route. Leaving the restaurant, she took a different road to go to the farm than she would have taken to go home. Unless someone knew that she was on the way to the farm exactly at that time, on just that night—was it possible?

  The only people who knew her plans were Mark, Jimmy, Shackel, and perhaps a few of Shackel’s workers. Maybe the veterinarian, if there had even been one there, but anyone who was attending the birth of the foal wouldn’t have been able to lie in wait for Carlotta. Detective Wade had interviewed the last two people to see her alive. Two restaurant workers, who knew she was excited about the birth of the foal, but who had no idea that she had gone toward the horse farm—both thought she was going home. Neither had any idea where Shackel Horse Farm was located.