by Janet Dawson
Right now he stood at the wash station, playfully nipping the lead his owner held, while his groom rinsed off soapy lather. Molly Torrance looked up and grinned at David. She was about thirty, I guessed, and she looked as sturdy as the scuffed leather boots on her feet. She was heedless of the water splashed on her tweed jacket, khaki slacks, and green shirt. I saw muscles playing along her shoulders and arms as she held her horse. Strong hands, I thought, to work with horses on a daily basis.
I watched as she nuzzled the horse on his velvety nose, and he nuzzled back. Then she gave him an affectionate smack on the rump. The middle-aged groom ran what looked like a squeegee over the horse’s flank. Then the woman handed the halter’s lead rope to the groom and draped an oversize terrycloth blanket over the horse’s shiny copper coat.
“What’s that thing?” I asked David.
“Cooler blanket. It soaks up the moisture. They’ll leave it on about fifteen minutes.”
Now Molly Torrance walked toward us, the grin spreading to her wide brown eyes. She flung her arms around David and gave him a hug. Then she stepped back and gestured toward the big red colt. “How about my baby? Isn’t he a beaut?”
“He is.” A grin lightened David’s usually sardonic face. “I even won some money on him this afternoon.”
“He ran such a good race. I just wish Dad could have seen it.” She stopped. Sadness flickered across her face, telling me her father was gone. Whether dead, or alive and merely absent from the scene, I couldn’t tell. Whatever had happened, it was recent.
She banished the sad look and smiled at me politely as David made introductions. “Jeri, this is Chameleon’s owner and trainer, Molly Torrance. Molly, this is Jeri Howard.”
We chatted for a while, until the groom removed the cooler blanket from Chameleon. Then the vet and his assistants moved in with their testing equipment. The first was a cup on a long stick. Chameleon’s groom whistled softly and the chestnut obligingly let go a stream of steaming yellow urine. When the cup was full, the vet’s assistant transferred the sample to a tube, writing on the label wrapped around the vial.
“Do you train them to do that?” I asked. “Pee on demand?”
“Oh, yes,” Molly said with a laugh. “Whiz when you whistle. Makes testing a whole lot easier.”
The scene was repeated all around us. Then the vet got out his syringe and drew blood samples from each horse. Finally Molly signed off on a release, and we headed out the door, toward the barns.
There were four huge barns at Edgewater Downs, two on either side of a wide, open space that ran north to south. The buildings were very different from the more traditional facilities at Golden Gate Fields, which were long wooden rectangles, arranged in rows covering several acres between the bay and the interstate. These barns were like those at Bay Meadows, over in San Mateo, vast steel squares with high flat roofs. I counted seven wide entrances on the side of the nearest barn, the one that faced the open space. The side perpendicular to it had two entrances, at either corner, but there were windows in between, tack rooms, I guessed. Through the entrances I saw several long shedrows with stalls facing each other.
“These barns are enormous,” I said. “This is the first time I’ve seen them up close. What’s the capacity?”
“They’re the same size as the ones at Bay Meadows,” David said. “Only they’ve got five. We have four. That’s a hundred eighty stalls per barn, seven hundred twenty stalls total. Of course, we’re nowhere near full up for this first race meeting. I’m sure once the word gets out about our state-of-the-art facilities, we’ll get more business.”
The barns on my right, the west side, were numbered odd, and the ones on my left, to the east, were even. As we passed Barn One, David pointed at the row of high windows visible on the wall of Barn Three, looking out at the twenty feet or so between the barns. “There are tack rooms, storerooms, and grooms’ quarters along the north and south walls of each barn.”
He caught my arm and pulled me to one side as a groom walking a big bay emerged from the first entrance of Barn Three. There was plenty of activity in the wide space between the barns. Hot-walking machines lined the exterior of each barn, and there were several washing stations where horses were being soaped and rinsed.
We resumed walking, this time toward Barn Four. At the far corner we entered the shedrow that ran along the south side of the barn. Several of the doors on my right were open. Some showed signs of human occupation, others contained supplies — pails, bottles, bags of feed, and other items I couldn’t readily identify. The stalls on my left had straw piled on the dirt floors, and about half of them were occupied. A roan horse stretched its head toward me and whinnied softly.
“I’m at the southeast corner,” Molly said, leading the way.
“What are those things keeping the horses in the stalls?” I asked, pointing at a single chain coated with thick white plastic. There were hooks at each end, attached to eyes fastened on either side of the stall.
“We call them cross-ties,” Molly explained. “We can’t use rope. Horses just love to chew on rope. In fact, they’ll eat just about anything.”
Just outside the tack room at the end of the shedrow was a rectangular wooden sign on the wall. The board was painted white, and it had sky blue letters in the middle, with dull green trim on all four sides, TORRANCE STABLES, it read. We stopped in front of the tack room. I glanced inside and saw that, in addition to a place to store equipment, it also served as an office.
“Jeri’s the private investigator I told you about,” David said as we watched the groom lead Chameleon into his stall.
“Oh. That.” Molly Torrance’s smile dimmed visibly as she looked at me. That and her words made me wonder just what David had told her about me. “I thought we’d kind of put that on hold, David.”
“That’s not the way we left it,” he said, his voice hardening. “Someone’s harassing you. It has to stop.”
So that’s why I was here. Something was going on that warranted investigating, but Molly Torrance was evidently reluctant to do anything about it.
“Tell me about it,” I said conversationally. “Phone calls, letters?”
Molly folded her arms across her chest and tightened her jaw. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. Then a small orange tomcat galloped through the doorway of the barn. He leaped onto a nearby saddle rack, then flew from there to Molly Torrance’s shoulder, steadying himself with claws dug into her green shirt.
“Ouch,” she cried, but the cat hung on, then settled into a perch on her right shoulder, purring loudly as he leaned against her head, all the while staring at David and me with unblinking green eyes. Molly reached up to scratch the cat behind the ears. “Oh, Pug, you’re incorrigible.”
“So are you,” David said.
“And you’re overreacting.”
“You get threats from some jerk, and I’m overreacting.” David shook his head. “What about the fire? You can’t ignore that.”
“I’m not ignoring it.” Molly’s hand stopped scratching the cat on her shoulder and Pug meowed in protest, glaring at David and me as though it was our fault for distracting Molly. “It could have been an accident.”
“It could have been deliberately set,” David said. “If you ask me —”
“I didn’t ask you. You just decided to butt in. The way you always do.” Molly shook her head. The cat on her shoulder decided he’d had enough disruption and jumped down to the dirt floor, strolling back to the saddle rack. He jumped up to one of the three saddles arrayed there, curled up, and began washing one of his hind legs with a great deal of concentration.
“Wait a minute, time out.” I held my hands up, forming a T. “Both of you back off and tell me what’s going on here.”
They glared at each other, both of them radiating stubbornness and exasperation. “It’s just that —” Molly stopped, clearly hesitant to say anything more.
“Threatening phone calls are one thing,” I said, remembe
ring a case I’d worked on last March, where phone calls had escalated into some definitely scary violence. “A fire is another. Besides, you’ve got me curious. And as David can tell you, I don’t give up until my curiosity is satisfied.”
“Like a goddamn pit bull,” he muttered. I wasn’t sure if he referred to her or me.
Molly sighed. “I don’t want to call a lot of attention to this, and call in the cops or whatever authorities David thinks I should contact. I’ve got my own reasons. They may not be very logical reasons, but I’ve got ’em. You have to understand that.”
“I’ll try,” I said. “Now, start at the beginning and tell me what’s going on.”
Chapter Three
MOLLY POINTED AT THE TACK ROOM THAT SERVED AS the office for Torrance Stables. “All right. Let’s go in there.”
The office would have been crowded with two people inside, and three made it positively claustrophobic. It was about ten feet square, with a small wooden desk shoved against the wall just to the right of the door. The desk held one of those large calendar blotters, showing the month of November. Each square, representing one day, was covered with notations. A small banker’s lamp with an amber shade crowded against a clock radio, a cordless phone rested in its cradle next to an answering machine, and there was a mug containing pens and pencils. A copy of the Edgewater Downs condition book and that day’s Daily Racing Form obscured the upper left corner of the blotter.
Hanging from the wall above the desk was a bulletin board, with business cards, training schedules, and snapshots affixed to the cork with colored push pins. Several of the photos were of horses. Others showed Molly Torrance with a big gray-haired man I guessed was her father. On the office’s three remaining walls hung several clipboards and an assortment of tack — bridles, bits, reins. On the floor to the left of the desk I saw a tack box with the initial T on its lid.
The outer wall, opposite the door, held a high narrow window with a frosted pane. Under this was a low bookcase, its three shelves jammed with books and papers and a small refrigerator, similar to the one I had in my own office. A drip coffeemaker sat on top of it, the carafe half filled with black brew that looked as though it had been sitting there all day.
There were three chairs, one an old office relic with casters and stuffing coming out of the stained brown upholstery on its seat. The others were a pair of scarred old wooden ladder-backs, refugees from someone’s dining room. The seat of one was piled with catalogs advertising horse gear of all sorts. David picked up the catalogs and deposited them on top of the bookcase, motioning me to sit down. He took the other chair.
Molly gestured toward the coffeemaker as though she’d just seen it for the first time. “I’m not much of a hostess,” she said. “Have some coffee.”
She was still reluctant to talk with me. The physical action and small talk involved in pouring three mugs of coffee and handing two of them to David and me was her way of delaying any more serious conversation. I looked skeptically at the substance in my mug, which resembled crude oil. Then I took an investigatory sip and tried not to grimace. I liked my coffee black, but this stuff was strong enough to climb out of the mug and bite back.
Molly saw the look on my face and laughed. “I should have warned you. I learned how to make coffee from Dad. He liked it real strong.”
“Real strong doesn’t even begin to cover it,” I told her.
“Racetrackers get up early. We need the caffeine to jolt us awake,” she explained. “There’s some cream there. That’s what Dad and I use to tame it.”
David had already opened the small refrigerator and reached for a half-pint carton of cream. It was the real thing, I noticed, as he handed it to me. Whipping cream, light-years away from the nonfat milk I usually drank. I poured a dollop in the mug and watched the butterfat float to the top like an oil slick. Another sip told me the coffee had smoothed down some, but it was nowhere near tame.
Molly sat down again, but she didn’t say anything. Instead she looked morosely into her coffee mug. David sat back down on the ladder-back chairs. Mine was somewhat wobbly, and the wooden surface was scratched and gouged. I could feel a tiny splinter poking through the seat of my blue jeans.
“The threats,” I prompted. “When did they start?”
“Sometime before my father died,” she said. “I think. I’m not sure.”
“When did your father die?” I asked. “And how?”
“Two weeks ago tomorrow.” Her mouth tightened, and in her eyes I saw the same sadness that had altered her face earlier, when she’d spoken of her father. “He had a heart attack. Right out in the shedrow.” She glanced at the open door, eyes moving involuntarily to the spot where it must have happened. “We were just about to head over to the receiving barn with the horse we had entered in the fifth race. Dad was standing there with a cup of coffee in his hand, talking to David. Then he clutched his chest and fell over. David started CPR, I grabbed the phone and called 911. The paramedics got there fast. But Dad died in the hospital emergency room.”
Her eyes moved away from the door and she looked past me, at the bookcase, but I could tell she wasn’t seeing that, either. She was replaying that scene, one she couldn’t forget, one that the passage of time would never erase.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said in the heavy silence that ensued. I thought I saw tears glimmering in the corner of Molly’s brown eyes. The wound was still fresh, and the woman was still grieving. I thought of my own father and wondered how long it would take to get over the inevitable whenever it happened. I hoped it wouldn’t, not for a long, long time.
When she had composed herself enough to speak again, her voice was colored with the guilt that those left behind often feel. “He seemed like he was in good shape, for a man his age. But I should have seen it coming. It’s just that I always thought of him as being indestructible.”
“You can’t predict those things.” David’s voice sounded weary, as though he’d told Molly the same thing over and over in the two weeks since the elder Torrance’s death. “Hell, I thought Stan was as healthy as one of these horses.”
“Yes, you can. Predict it, I mean. If you’re paying attention. And I wasn’t. Paying attention to Dad, I mean.” She favored David with a fond, rueful smile. “And horses aren’t always healthy. If you look at ’em cross-eyed they’ll break down. You wouldn’t believe what can go wrong with them.”
Now Molly looked at me again, brown eyes wide above her bitter black coffee. “You see, he had another episode in September. Chest pains, I mean. He brushed it off, said it was just indigestion. I kept after him, and finally he agreed to go and see his doctor for a checkup. When I asked if everything was okay, Dad said he was fine. But he wasn’t.” She shook her head.
“After Dad died, I talked with his doctor. He said Dad had been exhibiting some symptoms of heart disease, and he — the doctor, I mean — had suggested some lifestyle changes. You know, cut back on the red meat, butter, eggs. And no cream in his coffee. The doctor also wanted to schedule some tests. The treadmill, that sort of thing. But Dad told him he was too busy. Busy...”
She shook her head again. “We’re always busy. We’ve got twelve horses in our string. Some we own, and others we train for other owners. We work long days. Dad had been working especially hard with Chameleon. If only he’d listened to his doctor. Or Rose.”
“Who’s Rose?” I asked.
“My aunt, Dad’s sister. She was always after him about his diet, reminding him that their father — my grandfather — died of a heart attack. It happened before I was born. Things like that run in families, I guess.”
Molly set the mug down on the desk so hard some of the coffee sloshed over the rim, splashing onto the desk blotter. “Now Chameleon’s going places, and Dad isn’t here to see it.”
David reached out, took Molly’s hand and squeezed it. She returned the squeeze. I watched something unspoken pass between them. He and Molly were obviously close. Close enough for him to b
e concerned about the phone calls she’d been getting, and her refusal to call the authorities. That was evidently why he’d decided to involve me.
Molly hadn’t mentioned her mother, only an aunt. I guessed Mrs. Torrance was out of the picture, dead or departed in some other fashion, and quite some time ago. Was David a father figure, now that her own father had died? Knowing him as I did, I wouldn’t have ruled out a romantic involvement, either.
I steered the conversation back toward those threatening phone calls. “So your father died two weeks ago. And you think he started getting phone calls before then. Any idea for how long?”
“No. Not really. You see, he didn’t tell me about it.” She pulled her hand free of David’s and leaned back in the old office chair. “I suppose he didn’t want to worry me. That’s the only explanation I have. I only found out by accident, a few days before Dad died. We’d just gotten home from the track. I was getting ready to take a shower, and the phone rang. I picked up the extension in my bedroom about the same time Dad picked up the call in the living room. I listened in.”
She looked guilty at having done so, as if hearing again some long-ago admonition not to snoop. At times one has to snoop, though. How else are you going to find out anything?
“Could you tell if the caller was male or female?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I supposed it could have been either a man or a woman. But I think it was a woman.”
“What did the caller say?”
Molly wrinkled her nose with distaste. “A lot of obscenities and disjointed talk, mixed in with a bunch of threats like ‘I’ll get you.’ That’s the gist of it. ‘I’ll get you for what you did.’ Stuff like that. After this... person hung up, I threw on a robe and went out to the living room. When I asked Dad about it, he said he’d gotten several calls like that, at home, and here at the barn. But he wasn’t sure when it started. A week earlier, he thought. He said he didn’t know what it was about. Just some crank, he said. I agreed with him then.”
