by Janet Dawson
She washed her hands again. “Want a warm-up?” she asked, setting the kettle on the burner and turning on the gas.
“Yes. You were going to tell me about Byron.”
Molly pulled out a chair and joined me at the kitchen table. “He’s a deadbeat. Can’t hold a job. Always wants to borrow money. Last spring, when we had the horses over at Bay Meadows, Rose inveigled Dad into giving Byron a job as a groom. Of course he was a disaster. Didn’t show up for work half the time, and he was living in a room right there at the track. We let him go, and Rose was very resentful.” She grinned maliciously. “Since Byron wasn’t living at the track, he moved back in with his mom. That may account for Rose being irked. Anyway, for months we heard about how unsupportive we were, not to employ a family member. But the horses come first.”
“Any chance Byron could be making those calls?”
As the teakettle began to whistle, she frowned. She stood and switched off the burner, pouring hot water into both our cups. “I didn’t think of that. He’s such a lazy slug, I wonder if he’d even have the initiative. But...” She set the kettle back on the stove. “The last time he asked for money, Dad and I turned him down flat. He was really angry and said something like, ‘You’ll be sorry.’ That’s not much of a connection.”
“When did he ask for money?”
She thought about it for a moment. “Not long before Dad got that call, the one I overheard.”
“Sounds like I’d better take a look at Byron, then.”
The doorbell sounded, and both of us jumped. “You’re about to get the chance,” Molly said, glancing at her watch. “Hell, they’re early. Why am I not surprised?”
She stood up and I followed her through the living room to the front door. She opened it. Through the screen door I saw a woman of about sixty standing on the front porch, with a round plastic food carrier in her hands. “Well, don’t just stand there, Molly,” she said in an aggrieved voice that still had the flavor of the South. “My hands are full. Open the door for me.”
Molly undid the latch on the screen door and held it for her aunt. Behind Rose Grover, I saw a sulky-faced man with short brown hair, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his loose-fitting blue pants. A beer belly pushed out the front of his mustard-colored sweatshirt. He followed his mother into Molly’s living room and flopped down in the recliner without a word. He reached for the TV remote and flicked on the set. Channel flipping must be a male gene, I told myself, not for the first time. Byron was running through the numbers, each image remaining on the screen for just a few seconds.
“You’re early,” Molly told her aunt, who had disappeared into the kitchen. I followed them and watched as Rose set her plastic carrier on the table, nearly spilling my cup of tea. She removed the raincoat she was wearing, revealing a sturdy figure in a busy floral print dress. She handed the raincoat to Molly.
“I’m surprised we’re not late. My land, such traffic on the freeway. People just drive like maniacs.” Rose sniffed the air. “Whatever you’re fixing smells good. I just hope you haven’t gone overboard with the spices. You know how I feel about spicy food.” She noticed me then, looking at me curiously, with a pair of shoe button eyes. “And who’s this? You didn’t say anything about anyone else coming to dinner. I thought it was just going to be family, the three of us.”
“This is a friend of mine,” she said, draping her aunt’s raincoat over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “Jeri Howard.”
“I was just leaving.” I poured out the rest of my tea and set the cup in the sink, then turned to Molly. “I’ll be in touch.”
Rose Grover had already dismissed me. She tugged the cover off her plastic food carrier to reveal a lopsided two-layer cake, its brown frosting thick with flecks of coconut. “I brought dessert,” she announced. “German chocolate cake, Byron’s favorite.”
Molly pasted on a long-suffering smile and escorted me past the blaring television set in the living room, out to the front porch. Once we were outside she rolled her eyes, then shook her head.
“That woman. I hate coconut and she knows it.”
Chapter Nine
ON MONDAY MORNING THE RED LIGHT ON MY ANSWERING machine was blinking rapidly, indicating I’d received several calls since I left the office Friday afternoon. While water dripped through the Costa Rican Terrazu from Peerless Coffee over on Oak Street, I hit the button and listened to the playback, pen in hand. Two hang-ups, two calls from people who wanted to set up appointments, then one message from a guy who wanted to know if I was the John Howard he went through basic training with in Florida fifteen years ago.
The last message, received Sunday afternoon, was from an attorney whose office was at Lake Merritt Plaza, several blocks — and several dollar signs — uptown from mine. He sounded impatient to discover that I wasn’t working on a Sunday as well. Well, I had been. Just not there in my office.
The lawyer was a real Type A hard-charger, and he was handling a big bucks personal injury lawsuit. His client was a container shipping firm at the Port of Oakland, and they were being sued by one of the workers who loaded cargo into the containers. The plaintiff claimed to be permanently disabled after an accident involving a forklift, and the lawyer wanted me to check him out. Much as I hated the surveillance routine, these kinds of cases were bread and butter for an investigator like me. Before heading for the racetrack Saturday morning, I’d spent several hours staking out the plaintiff’s house in North Oakland. The resulting videotape snowed the man’s range of movement wasn’t as limited as he claimed.
I set aside the legal pad where I’d written down the messages. The lawyer was evidently getting antsy for the report on the plaintiff, but I didn’t have the videotape at the moment. It was being duplicated at a local copy shop and would be ready sometime that morning.
I fortified myself with a mug of hot black coffee, then I switched on the computer and opened a file on the Molly Torrance matter. I wrote a narrative of what I’d learned Saturday, when Molly told me about the threatening phone calls and the fire that had occurred at her house in Niles, as well as her comments about Benita Pascal and her reason for firing the jockey. Then I wrote down the details of my visit to Niles on Sunday. I made a copy of David’s retainer check on the small copy machine I’d recently purchased, and stuck the copy in the file.
Then I went into my Internet service provider, checked my e-mail, and logged onto a database used by private investigators. I initiated background checks on all the players, hoping I had the full deck. It would take some time to get reports back. In the meantime I moved to the home page of one of the popular Internet search engines and typed in Benita Pascal’s name just to see what came up. Since she’d lost the mount on Chameleon, the horse she’d moved west to ride, the jockey certainly had the most immediate reason for harassing Molly Torrance.
The search engine returned plenty of material on Pascal, due to her growing fame as a woman rider who won lots of races. Her history, however, seemed to go back only as far as when she began making a name for herself as a jockey. That was just the past eight years out of her youthful twenty-six. Whenever she was interviewed, she kept the subject firmly on horse racing, no personal details at all. All she would say about the past was that she’d started on the fair circuit here in California, scuffling around from track to track, riding untried horses or those that were past their prime. Then she’d moved east, where, according to Molly, women jockeys had a better chance of making it.
I went to the online edition of Sports Illustrated and searched for the article that had appeared before the Kentucky Derby. The upbeat and generally favorable profile speculated that Pascal might have a shot at being the next Julie Krone, and Krone was the best-known woman rider these days. Or she had been, until she’d retired at thirty-five. I compared the Pascal in the article with the woman Molly had described, short-tempered and belligerent, the one who’d gotten into a fistfight with a fellow jockey, the jockey who’d given the Torrance horses bad
rides. If Molly’s portrait was true, something had happened to Pascal during the past few months, something that had had a negative effect on her attitude and her performance as a jockey. I was hoping my background check would give me more information to go on.
The next name I typed into the search engine was that of Deakin Kelley. Once again, I got plenty of hits on the World Wide Web, most of them from the online archives of the Los Angeles Times. Here the details were personal, not professional. I was sure Kelley would have preferred it the other way round. But sex and murder are always sensational. And Deakin Kelley, through bad judgment and blind infatuation, had landed in the middle of a juicy scandal.
It read like a soap opera. Arthur “Junior” Barnstable had been a wealthy captain of industry as well as a prominent horse owner. His second wife, Ann, who was twenty years younger than her husband, appeared to have tired of Junior — but not his money. Along came Deakin Kelley, who met Ann one night at a party and fell fast and hard.
As their affair progressed, Mrs. B had convinced Kelley that her husband was using her as a punching bag. The bruises she’d offered as evidence were real enough. Her sister Sheila, a martial arts instructor, had provided the black and blue marks. Kelley became so enraged at Barnstable’s supposed wife battering that he’d attacked the horse owner in the paddock at Santa Anita. Several bystanders pulled him away before he could do any serious damage.
But he’d threatened to kill Barnstable, in front of witnesses. When the owner was poisoned not long after, with an overdose of a medication for which Kelley had a prescription, suspicion naturally fell on the jockey. However, the frame put together by Mrs. B and her sister soon fell apart, and Kelley was exonerated. Ann Barnstable and her sister had just been convicted of murder, shortly before Molly called her old friend Deakin Kelley to come to Northern California and ride Chameleon. By the time I’d read through the cyberspace archives, I understood the rider’s desire to escape the publicity by heading north for a while.
My phone rang. I logged off the Internet as I reached for it. The caller was the impatient attorney. I placated him, then I locked up and walked over to the copy shop to pick up the videotape and its duplicate, depositing David’s retainer check at the bank on the way back to my office, where I found a messenger knocking on my door.
The envelope he gave me was from Weper and Associates in San Francisco. But when I tore open the flap, the contents had nothing to do with high finance. First I saw a note in David Vanitzky’s handwriting: “Thought you might enjoy a little light reading.” Under the yellow sheet of notepaper was a copy of this year’s California Horse Racing Board Rules and Regulations. I leafed through the tome, which was the size of a trade paperback. My eye fell on a section titled “Posterior Digital Neurectomy,” then I closed the book and tossed it on the shelf behind my desk. Light reading indeed.
I wrote a report on my investigation of the personal injury plaintiff. That done, I walked over to Lake Merritt Plaza to deliver the report and the videotape. Back in my office an hour later, I met with a prospective client, a woman who wanted me to locate her brother, with whom she’d had no contact for over twenty years.
I took down the particulars and made no promises. It was a cold trail, a long time to lose touch with a family member. I couldn’t imagine not having any communication with my family for that long. Dad lived in Castro Valley and taught at California State University in Hayward. We saw each other at least once a week. My younger brother Brian and his wife and two children lived in Sonoma, and my mother was in Monterey, where a whole bushel of aunts, uncles, and cousins also live. I saw them less frequently, but we kept in touch by phone and e-mail.
Nevertheless, I told the client I’d give it a shot. A case is a case, after all.
My workload kept me busy for the next couple of days. And it took that long to glean the information from my background checks of the people who figured in the Molly Torrance matter. Early Wednesday morning I sat down with yet another mug of coffee and the printouts to look at what I had.
Unfortunately, they didn’t shed much additional light on Benita Pascal. She had an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and an excellent credit rating to go with the upscale address. As far as I could tell, she’d never been married. She’d been born in Santa Rosa, up in Sonoma County, but there was nothing to indicate any family ties. Nor was there anything to indicate that she’d suddenly turned into a vindictive harasser.
Deakin Kelley had a decent credit rating, and he owned a house in Arcadia, near Santa Anita. One of the newspaper articles I’d read earlier said something about a father and a sister, and I wondered if they were in Colorado, where the jockey had been born.
There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary on Gates Baldwin or Dick Moody, the trainers who had apparently been rivals of Stan Torrance before his death. Both men’s finances looked a bit overextended, Baldwin more so than Moody, but these days that was fairly common. For all I knew, it was the norm for horse trainers.
When Ron Douglas wasn’t rehabbing that old house he’d bought next door to the Torrances, he was in the computer industry, as Twyla Simpson had told me on Sunday. He worked for a software company in Palo Alto, but what I found interesting was that he’d once worked for Cliff Holveg, who had an office on Page Mill Road. And the address that came up on Douglas’s background check was in the same neighborhood where the Holvegs lived, on a high-priced hillside west of Palo Alto.
Was there a connection between the two men? I wasn’t sure. The printouts in front of me didn’t seem to provide any other link but coincidence.
Then there was the glamorous Mrs. Holveg. Pam Cullen was an actress, according to David, and she was indeed a member of the Screen Actors Guild. I recognized only one of the movie titles listed to her credit, and I didn’t remember seeing her in the film. But there were plenty of people down in Hollywood and here in the Bay Area laboring in relative obscurity. I’d done some little theater work several years ago with some talented actors, none of whom most people had ever heard of.
Pam Cullen was also a tall blond, I thought, recalling the woman I’d seen on Saturday. And according to the printout in front of me, the Holvegs owned a Mercedes. Could she be the woman Twyla Simpson had seen visiting Ron Douglas? Considering they were neighbors over in Palo Alto, it was possible that they were friends as well.
Molly’s head groom, the man I’d seen Saturday at the barn, was Carlos Gomez. He was an unlikely choice for the anonymous caller, as Molly had pointed out. The middle-aged man who worked with the Torrance horses spoke heavily accented English, and he didn’t appear to have any reason to target Molly. She said she trusted him, and that he’d worked for the Torrance racing stable for eight years, ever since she and her father had moved to Northern California from the Los Angeles area.
Gomez was terrific with the horses, Molly added. He’d worked with them back in Chihuahua, where he had a wife and children to whom he sent most of his paycheck. He was legal, she assured me. He had to be, to get a groom’s license. I reached for the regulation book David had sent over and consulted the index. Sure enough, the California Horse Racing Board required occupational licenses for everyone who worked in and around the track. I read through the requirements listed in the book, as well as the grounds for denial, then I turned my attention back to the printout.
Gomez and his nephew José, a recent addition as a groom, lived at the track, like most of the grooms and exercise riders, in one of the small square rooms opposite the shedrow where the Torrance horses were stabled.
Zeke Ramos, the other jockey Molly had fired recently, had a drunk driving charge on his record, several years old, but little else. He lived in Fremont, not far from the track.
The rap sheet that piqued my interest was that of Molly’s cousin, Byron Grover. He’d been arrested twice, once for passing bad checks and once for vandalism. I thought of what Molly had said when I was at her house Sunday night. Byron was always trying to borrow money, and he�
�d made threats the last time she turned him down.
So I wouldn’t discount Molly’s cousin Byron as a suspect. Except for one thing. Molly thought the caller was a woman. Which meant Benita Pascal still looked good for it, I thought, stacking the printouts and putting them into the Torrance file.
I called the Fremont fire department, inquiring about the report I’d ordered. It was ready, so I drove down to Fremont. Once I had the report, I sat in my car and read through it.
The fire station had received Twyla Simpson’s 911 call at 12:38 P.M. They were on the scene by 12:40 P.M. It hadn’t taken long to extinguish the fire. I scanned the witness statements, finding those of Twyla and several other neighbors. Toward the end of the report there was a brief statement from Ron Douglas saying he hadn’t been home and hadn’t seen anything. The cause of the fire was inconclusive, but the investigator who’d written the report had put in print his speculation that the blaze had been started by a discarded cigarette.
Inconclusive. Discarded cigarette.
Maybe it was an accident. Maybe the fire didn’t have anything to do with the threatening phone calls Molly Torrance had been getting. But there had to be a link. Why else would the caller mention the fire?
I tossed the report onto the passenger seat and started the car, heading for Edgewater Downs. It was early afternoon and there was racing today, but the parking lot at the track was barely half full. A glimpse at the grandstand showed a sparse crowd. Not many people could take time on a workday to go to the races. And as I’d read recently, enthusiasm for the sport of kings was waning, as the old railbirds died out. Racetrack attendance was down all over the country. People younger than me, like Darcy, couldn’t see the attraction of watching horses run around an oval. And if you want to gamble, there are lots of other alternatives, from casinos to the state-run lotteries. It seemed the glory days of racing were long gone.
I parked in the lot at the horsemen’s entrance and walked toward the gate leading to the backside, the one with the big sign that read LICENSED AND AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. I stepped up to the window of the guard shack to the left of the gate and gave my name to a security guard wearing a windbreaker with the now familiar racetrack logo on the front. David had promised me a pass of my very own. My investigator’s license didn’t cut much ice here, but when I clipped the badge to my jacket, I joined the ranks of the authorized.
