A Killing At The Track (The Jeri Howard Series Book 9)

by Janet Dawson

  The house looked like a fire hazard too. It was a two-story stick Victorian with peeling brown paint, missing roof tiles, and a sagging porch that told me the previous owners hadn’t kept it in good repair before Douglas purchased it. Years of neglect, I thought. Lots of work to be done before the house was comfortable, or before the owner could sell it, as Molly said he intended to do.

  I looked farther back, beyond an oleander bush badly in need of trimming, and saw lumber stacked under a large blue nylon tarp. This, and a pile of debris that had evidently been removed from the house, added to its general air of disarray. I could also see the walnut tree that had been a point of contention with Douglas, who didn’t like the Torrances’ walnuts dropping onto his lawn. The tree was about ten feet beyond the rear corner of the Torrance house, and its branches were indeed hanging over the neighboring yard. Though from the condition of Douglas’s lawn, the walnuts were probably an improvement.

  The Torrances had also complained about Douglas, according to Molly, about the garage he’d started to build, without benefit of permits. Douglas’s driveway was on the other side of his house, but when I walked along the fence on the Torrance property and stood under the walnut tree, I could see the raw framework of the structure, taking up space in the next yard.

  I returned to the front, took a retractable tape measure from my purse, then anchored the end of the tape at the front edge of the burned patch, using my bag to hold it down. I measured the span from the patch to the street, a distance of about thirteen feet. It was another eight feet out past the parked cars to the lane of traffic. Twenty-one feet, I thought, a long way for someone to lob a cigarette butt from the passenger seat of a car. A passerby? It was possible. But I didn’t think so. Maybe it’s my suspicious nature, which goes with being a private investigator.

  I retracted the tape and walked to the side fence, where I knelt and examined the burned and crumbling remains more closely. I was looking for anything that might suggest the fire had been deliberately set, but it was really too late for clues. The fire had occurred a week ago today, and the area had been thoroughly trampled by the firefighters, and probably by Douglas, as well as Molly Torrance.

  My next stop was going to be the fire department itself. I wanted a copy of the incident report, to see if the fire department investigator who’d told Molly the fire was accidental had seen something that I hadn’t. I wasn’t sure I could get it on a Sunday.

  I stood straddling the collapsed fence, gazing back toward the street, mentally tossing cigarettes in the direction of the Torrances’ lawn. In the middle of watching an imaginary blaze, I heard a grating voice, pulling me out of my reverie.

  “Hey! What are you doing on my property?”

  I raised my eyes and looked to the left, at the man who’d just stepped out onto the sagging porch of the dilapidated Victorian house next door. He was glowering at me as though I were part of an invasion force.

  Only one of my feet was on his property. However, in the interest of civilized discourse, I lifted the offending foot and stepped back onto the Torrance side of the fence. Then I walked a few paces toward the street and turned toward the neighboring porch so I could get a better look at Ron Douglas.

  He was in his mid-thirties, I guessed, with short, slicked-back blond hair and a beefy torso. He wore loose-fitting jeans and an orange knit shirt that showed off his buffed biceps. Interestingly enough, a burning cigarette was stuck in the corner of his sulky-looking mouth.

  I’d been thinking about tossing cigarettes from passing cars or from the sidewalk along the street. It now occurred to me that if someone stood at the bottom of the steps leading to Douglas’s porch and lobbed a burning something-or-other in the direction of the Torrances’ front yard, it might very well land in that burned patch of lawn. But then I asked myself why Douglas would want to risk setting his own house on fire.

  “What are you looking at?” he demanded as he stepped off the porch onto the cracked uneven sidewalk that bisected his front lawn. He put his hands on his hips and ratcheted his belligerence up a notch or two. Even as he struck the pose, I saw his eyes move past me to the burned patch on the Torrances’ lawn. It was as though he already knew what I was looking at.

  “The fence,” I said. “Wonder what started the fire?”

  “How the hell should I know?” He exhaled smoke along with the words. “You some kind of insurance investigator?”

  “You could say that. Were you here when the fire started? Sunday, a week ago today.”

  “Hell, no. It wouldn’t have gotten that far if I had been.”

  Was he protesting too much? “You’re sure? It was about noon when someone called the fire department.”

  “I’m sure.” He was glowering again, not that he’d ever stopped. He took another drag on the cigarette, then dropped it to the pavement and ground it out with his heel. Then, without so much as an exit line, he turned his back to me and headed around the other side of his house. A moment later I heard an engine roar to life. A silver BMW backed aggressively up the driveway to the street. Douglas threw his Beemer into drive and rocketed past my Toyota, toward Niles Boulevard.

  Not very informative, I thought, as I wrote down his license plate number. And attitude to boot. No wonder Molly Torrance and her father found him to be such a difficult neighbor. There was something about the guy that irked me, as well as making me suspicious. So Douglas wasn’t home when the fire started. Not that I was going to take his word for it. I walked along the sidewalk to the house on the other side of Douglas’s Victorian and knocked on the door.

  Chapter Eight

  “I’M THE ONE WHO CALLED TO REPORT THE FIRE,” Twyla Simpson told me half an hour later. She lived across the street from Molly Torrance. When I found her, she was in her open double garage, sanding the rough and pitted surface of an old gateleg table and drinking root beer from a frosty brown bottle.

  The elderly couple who lived next door to Douglas’s dilapidated house, Mr. and Mrs. Silva, had been away a week earlier, so they hadn’t seen anything. After talking with them, I’d crossed G Street to a couple of houses where no one answered the door. In the front yard of the next house a couple of little girls, about nine years old, were building a fort in the shade of an oak tree, using old cardboard boxes, plastic laundry baskets, and a kitchen step stool. I asked if their parents were home. The girl with the blond ponytail said it was her house and I should talk to her mother. She and her dark-haired companion temporarily abandoned their construction and led me back to the garage.

  After I introduced myself as an investigator looking into the fire a week earlier, Mrs. Simpson, as blond and fair as her daughter, told me to call her Twyla. Then she offered me a root beer from the old refrigerator in the corner, as well as some information.

  “The kids saw it first,” she said, nodding toward the little girls, who’d headed back toward their fort. “I was in the house. Betsy — that’s my daughter — and her friend Allie came running into the house to tell me the fence was on fire. I grabbed the cordless phone and went out to the front yard to take a look, dialing 911 at the same time. It was burning pretty good. The fire department got here in nothing flat. The fire station’s only two blocks away.”

  “So you didn’t actually see how it started?” I took a sip of root beer and sat back in the lawn chair that I’d pulled over from a set along the garage wall.

  Twyla shook her head as she moved the sandpaper in a circle over the scratched tabletop. “No. And neither did the girls. They were out riding their bikes. They’d stopped at Allie’s house, over on Third Street, before coming back here for lunch.”

  “So this was around noon?”

  “Twelve-thirty, I think.” She reached for her own bottle of root beer, took a swallow, and set it back down on the concrete floor. “I was in the kitchen fixing sandwiches. I remember looking at the clock after I finished reading the Sunday paper, and thinking I should start the girls’ lunch. And that was around twelve-fifteen.”r />
  “Lucky the fire burned the lawn and the fence,” I said, “rather than moving toward the Torrance house.”

  Twyla nodded. “Ain’t it the truth? A house fire. God, that’s all Molly would need. She just lost her dad a couple of weeks ago, so she’s had a rough time of it. She wasn’t home. She’s a horse trainer over at that new racetrack, and if she’s got a horse running that day she’s there till all hours. I guess someone called her, though, because she showed up about an hour after the fire department did. Can you imagine coming home from work to find out your house had burned?” She shuddered. As a brand new homeowner, I agreed with her. “I guess the wind was blowing away from the house and toward the fence.”

  “And toward Mr. Douglas’s house,” I pointed out, “which could have caught fire too.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.” Twyla grimaced, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “With all the trash and debris he’s got piled up over there.”

  “I noticed. Looks like he’s got a lot of plans for remodeling.”

  “It’ll take plenty of money to make that place livable,” she declared. “Douglas bought the house last March. At the time, I was glad to see that For Sale sign come down. The house had been empty since old Mrs. Braganza died. As you can see, she wasn’t able to take very good care of it. I thought Douglas was going to live in it, you see. But he’s, like, a speculator.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He bought it so he could sell it,” Twyla said. “For lots more money than he paid for it. Me, I’ve lived here most of my life. But over the past few years there are a lot of new people in Niles. I see a lot of young couples buying up these old houses around here and fixing them up. To live in them, like most of us would. Because they think this is a nice community. I don’t have any problem with that. But Douglas doesn’t live there and he’s not interested in Niles. He just wants to fix that house to sell it. He told Mr. Silva he does that all the time, and that he thought he could get twice what he paid for that house. I think he’s dreaming.”

  “Where does he actually live?” I asked.

  “Somewhere over on the Peninsula,” she said, waving a hand in the direction of the bay and the large finger of land on its western shore. “I hear he works in the computer industry, as well as buying up houses to fix and sell.”

  “It looks like he’s doing a lot of the work himself,” I said. “So he’s here most weekends.”

  “Yeah. And sometimes during the week. He keeps odd hours. I have to say, I don’t much like the guy. He’s not very pleasant to talk to, and whenever he backs that Beemer out of the driveway, he doesn’t even look to see if anyone’s in the way. One day he almost hit one of the Wong boys who was riding past on his bike. He acted like it was the kid’s fault for not getting out of his way. Most of the neighborhood kids avoid Douglas. He gets really crabby if any of them set foot on his yard.”

  Douglas did strike me as the type of guy to have a low crabby threshold. “Does he have any friends? Or visitors?”

  Twyla tilted her head to one side and considered my questions. Then she shook her head. “No, he doesn’t have many visitors. With a personality like that, I’d be surprised if he had friends. But I think he’s got a girlfriend. Sometimes I see him with her. She’s a tall blond. Flashy dresser, drives a Mercedes.”

  “Was Douglas here during the fire?”

  “I think so,” Twyla said. She raised her eyes from the table to me, and thought about it for a moment. “His Beemer was in the driveway. And so was the woman’s Mercedes. I’m sure I heard his power saw while I was reading the paper, right before I went into the kitchen to fix lunch.”

  “But you didn’t see him?”

  She set aside her sandpaper and ran her hand over the tabletop, testing its smoothness. “No, I didn’t. Come to think of it, I didn’t see him when the fire department was there, putting out the fire. The whole block was out in the street, watching. Now, if a guy was home and he heard a siren heading toward his house and then stop, he’d come outside to see what was all the commotion. Wouldn’t you think?”

  “Yeah, I would.”

  I asked Twyla if the firefighters had tried to locate Douglas, but she’d been giving her own statement to one of them and hadn’t seen anything else. I thanked her for her time and the root beer, then headed for the fire station, which was at the corner of F and Second streets. I wondered again if Douglas was lying about not being home during the fire. If he was, why?

  At the fire station I identified myself as an investigator and requested a copy of the incident report. I was told it would take a few days. My stomach was growling so I walked the short block to Niles Boulevard and looked around for a place to get a pastrami and rye. It was past three when I downed the last crust. Given the early hour that Molly Torrance went to the track, I figured there was a good chance she might be home by now. Unless she had a horse running in a later race, as had been the case yesterday. I was in luck. As I pulled up to the house on G Street, I saw Molly unloading groceries from the back of a beat-up Chevy Blazer.

  “Hey, what are you doing here?” she asked as I came up the driveway.

  “Some initial sleuthing.” I grabbed a couple of sacks and followed her into the house. The living room was small but tidy, furnished with old pieces that looked as though they’d been bought secondhand. The high-backed sofa was covered with a daisy afghan crocheted in blue and yellow, and I saw a recliner upholstered in brown and rust. Rugs in varying sizes were scattered on the hardwood floors. There were lots of plants in the windowsills, and a couple of low bookcases. I leaned over to examine the books and saw that many of them had to do with horse racing, including the Dick Francis paperbacks. But there was also a hardbound set of Jane Austen.

  “Want some tea?” Molly called from the kitchen.

  “Sure.” I walked back to join her. She had the grocery sacks lined up on the blue and white linoleum floor. She filled a battered copper teakettle with water and set it on the gas burner. Then she began unloading her groceries. I grabbed a couple of boxes of cereal and opened the first available cabinet.

  “Over there on the left,” Molly directed. “What did you find out in your sleuthing?”

  I shoved the cereal onto its appointed shelf and picked up some canned goods. “I was here earlier. Took a look at where the fire burned the grass and the fence. Met your neighbor, the charming Mr. Douglas.”

  Molly snorted derisively as she opened the refrigerator and loaded in a carton of milk and a couple of packages of cheese. “He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?”

  “He wasn’t exactly friendly.” I stacked cans of beans and stewed tomatoes in the appropriate cupboard. “Wanted to know what I was doing on his property. Since I only had one foot over the line at the time, I thought he was overreacting. I measured distances. I’m inclined to agree with you. It seems unlikely the fire was started by a stray cigarette butt tossed from a car or from the street. I did notice that Douglas smokes.”

  “He’s got a cigarette in his mouth every time I see him,” Molly said as she tried to find room in the refrigerator for a carton of cottage cheese. “So do some of the people at the track. Drives me crazy. You’d think with all the stories of barn fires and horses getting killed, they wouldn’t smoke. Even though the new barns are made of steel, all it would take is a breeze blowing a butt into a stall full of straw.” She shuddered. “You think maybe Douglas started the fire when he tossed a cigarette away?”

  “It’s possible. But at this point it’s just speculation. I didn’t see anything that tells me what did start the fire. I did request a copy of the report from the fire department, which I should have in a couple of days. Maybe they found the remains of a cigarette butt, and that’s why the investigator told you the fire started that way.”

  Molly sighed. “Not much, huh?”

  “It’s early yet. I’m going to do background checks when I get to the office tomorrow.”

  The teakettle began whistling, and Molly turned off the
gas. She offered me a choice of tea bags, and we both opted for herbal. Cup in hand, I sat down at the kitchen table. Molly took a sip of her tea before setting it on the counter. She opened the cabinet next to the stove and took out a square glass baking dish. Then she tore the plastic cover off a package of boned and skinned chicken breasts.

  “You’ll have to watch me fix dinner,” she said, rinsing the raw chicken under a stream of water at the sink. “I’m about to be invaded.”

  “By whom? Deakin Kelley?”

  She shook her head as she arranged the chicken in the baking dish. “Deakin’s riding a horse in the eighth. And I wouldn’t mind him coming over for dinner. Not that he’d eat much. Jockeys are always worried about their weight. No, this is more of an obligation than a pleasure. It’s my aunt Rose — Rose Grover. And Byron.” She made a face.

  “Let me guess,” I said, sipping tea. “You don’t much like Aunt Rose and Byron.”

  “No, I don’t. I’ve never cared to spend much time with them. But now that Dad’s dead, Rose feels that she needs to come over and keep me company.” Molly washed her hands with antibacterial soap and dried them on a dish towel. “Rose is a whiner. Nothing ever goes right for her, and she’s been complaining nonstop for damn near sixty years. The best course of action is usually just to listen and nod.”

  “And Byron?”

  Molly didn’t answer. Instead she opened a cupboard and began rummaging in a collection of spice containers. Some basil here, some oregano there, a couple of rosemary sprigs, and a pinch of tarragon. Then she added cloves of garlic and the contents of a can of tomato sauce, tore off some aluminum foil to cover the baking dish, and stuck it in the oven.