by Janet Dawson
I wasn’t entirely sure I bought Kelley’s explanation. “Are you involved in some sort of relationship with Benita Pascal?”
“No,” he said. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“How about in the past?”
“That’s still none of your business,” he said abruptly, looking past me. I glanced toward the door and saw Molly walking back toward the office. “I can’t tell you any more. Go talk to Benita yourself. She’s here. I just saw her between Barn One and Barn Three, talking with Mickey Sholto, her agent. Maybe you can figure out what makes the woman tick.”
Chapter Eleven
I WAS LESS INTERESTED IN FINDING OUT WHAT MADE Benita Pascal tick than I was in discovering whether the jockey was making threatening phone calls to Molly Torrance. But maybe one held the answer to the other.
Molly gave Deakin Kelley a leg up onto Chameleon’s back. The jockey settled onto the saddle, boots in the irons, and adjusted his helmet. Then he guided the horse down the shedrow toward the door at the southeast corner of Barn Four. Molly and I followed, walking a few paces behind, as horse and rider made their way toward the track, where other trainers were gathered in the chill November dawn. Already there were several thoroughbreds on the dirt oval, cantering, galloping, as the trainers at the rail stood with stopwatches in hand and surveyed their charges with critical eyes.
“Loosen him up, then breeze him six furlongs,” Molly told Deakin. He nodded and urged the horse forward, up the slanted dirt ramp that led onto the track.
“What’s breezing?” I asked.
“It’s running under a hold,” Molly explained. “Moving, but not full out.”
Deakin and the horse moved around the track, first jogging, then cantering. As the chestnut picked up speed, I turned to Molly. “I’m going to go ask a few people some questions. I’ll catch up with you later.”
It was about six-fifteen now, and the sun was just coming up over the East Bay hills. I walked toward the area between Barns One and Three, where Deakin had seen Benita Pascal talking with her agent. They were still there, just outside the northeast corner entrance to Barn Three. She was dressed in brown twill pants and a rust-colored sweater, standing near a saddle rack. He was a man in his mid- to late thirties, with short black hair and a bald spot showing at the top of his head. Sholto had about a foot on his client, and he was so thin he looked gaunt. His black fleece jacket was too big for him, and it hung forlornly from his skinny frame.
I wasn’t close enough to hear what was being said, but the body language of both participants made the audio unnecessary. Pascal was giving Sholto a thorough tongue-lashing. The tight way he held himself told me he didn’t much like it. But he wasn’t biting back, and I had a feeling that, with Pascal as a client, he was used to such displays.
Sholto interrupted Pascal in mid-tirade. He leaned over her. At first I thought he was trying to intimidate her. Then I got a look at his face. What I saw there made me curious. Entreaty, perhaps even pleading. He was talking earnestly, gesturing with long narrow hands. It was as though he was trying to convince her to do something. But she wasn’t having any of it. She spat words back at him. Now Sholto threw up his hands and turned away. He walked past me, his face tight with reined-in emotion.
Pascal’s mouth twisted with anger as she kicked at a loose bit of straw with the toe of her boot. She stuck her hands in the pockets of the twill slacks, fury on her face giving way to a troubled frown. She walked in a circle around the saddle rack, then changed course, coming toward me. Her head was down. Then she looked up, surprised to see me standing in her path, and stopped. For a split second her dark eyes were startled and vulnerable, then they hardened and turned wary. Her mouth tightened. She stared me down and took a step in my direction, as though expecting me to get out of her way.
“Benita Pascal?”
She ran her eyes over my face, sizing me up. “Who wants to know?” The chip was back on her shoulder.
“My name’s Jeri Howard,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“You a reporter?” Pascal glared at me as though she didn’t have much regard for the racing press. That hadn’t stopped her from doing that spread in Sports Illustrated, though. “I don’t give interviews off the cuff. If you want to interview me, make an appointment with my agent.”
“I’m not a reporter. I’m an investigator.”
I took a business card from my purse and held it out. After a few seconds Pascal took the card, holding it between her thumb and finger as though she thought it might be contaminated. She glanced at it, then stared at me as she stuck the card into the pocket of her slacks.
“Investigating what?”
“I do a lot of insurance work,” I said, which was the truth. “I’m looking into the circumstances surrounding the death of a man named Stan Torrance. I understand you used to work for him.”
Surprise moved over her face, followed by an expression that reminded me of the way my cat looked after doing something she knew she wasn’t supposed to do. That whetted my curiosity. And Benita Pascal was curious too. Whatever line of inquiry she’d been expecting, it hadn’t included Stan Torrance. She masked her interest with an offhand shrug. “The man died of a heart attack. What’s to investigate?”
“It’s just routine,” I said, watching her face. “What can you tell me about Stan Torrance’s death?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Not a damn thing. I was in the jocks’ room when it happened, getting ready to ride. I heard about it when the officials scratched the horse Stan had entered in the fifth.”
“Just tell me what you heard.”
She gave me a skeptical look, obviously wondering why I wanted a thirdhand account when there were others who’d witnessed the incident. Then she seemed to choose her words carefully. “I heard the siren, looked out the window, and saw the ambulance heading for the barn. Then the Clerk of the Scales came in. He told all the jocks that Stan had collapsed in the shedrow, and the horse had been scratched. He said it was a heart attack.” A shadow passed over her face, then she banished it. “I heard later that Stan died in the E.R. Too bad. He was a nice man.”
“You liked him?”
“Yes, I did,” she said, surprised again at the question.
“I’m only asking because I understand you and the Torrances didn’t part on good terms.”
Her dark eyes flickered briefly, and her words were abrupt. “Who told you that?”
“Molly Torrance. She said she and her father fired you.”
“She did at that. After Molly begged and pleaded with me to move out here and ride her damn horse. Then she has the nerve to fire me.”
Interesting, I thought, that she hadn’t included Stan in her last sentence. It sounded as though Molly was the focus of her hostility.
“She says you gave Chameleon several bad rides.”
Benita Pascal’s face suffused with anger, and now I saw rage flashing in her eyes. But only for a moment. She banked the flames, then shrugged as though unconcerned about the accusation that she hadn’t ridden the horse to the best of her ability. I wasn’t quite convinced.
“Trainers always say that,” she told me, her voice level. “It’s a grand old horse-racing tradition to blame the jockey for everything. Up to and including bad weather and the national debt.”
“You appear to have landed on your feet,” I said. “After all, you picked up the mount on Kilobyte.”
“Mickey picked up the mount on Kilobyte,” she said, looking past me in the direction her agent had gone. “That’s his job.”
“So it didn’t bother you that Molly took you off her horse?”
Pascal folded her arms across her chest and shrugged. “Not particularly. I’ve been fired before.” But it had bothered her, I was sure of it. “When you’re good — and I’m good — there’s always another trainer, another horse. What has any of this got to do with Stan Torrance’s death?”
It was my turn to give an unco
ncerned shrug. “I’ve heard that Stan Torrance had an earlier episode of chest pains, back when you were riding for the Torrances.” I was improvising here. While Molly had mentioned the chest pains, she hadn’t pinpointed when. “Did you ever see any indication that he was in poor health?”
“Stan seemed fairly robust for a man his age,” she said in a level voice.
“Nothing upping his stress level? Such as run-ins with owners? Financial problems? Crank calls?”
She narrowed her eyes at this last. “Run-ins with owners and financial problems go with the territory in this business. Crank calls? Stan? Not that I’m aware of. Now, if Molly was on the receiving end of some harassment, I could understand it.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“What’s that matter? You think I might be dropping a dime on Molly?” She laughed derisively. “Well, I guess it’s more than a dime these days. Believe me, there are several people who have bones to pick with Molly Torrance. She’s not the easiest person in the world to work for. And I’m not the only jockey she’s fired.”
My interest zoomed in on Benita Pascal, and not just because of the long list she’d just mentioned. She’d been awfully quick to make the connection between harassment and Molly Torrance. Since Molly was indeed on the receiving end, it made me more than a little curious about the jockey and how she might fit into all of this. Was Benita Pascal trying to deflect suspicion from herself?
“Who else has she fired?” I acted as though this was the first I’d heard of it.
“Zeke Ramos. She promised him mounts, then she reneged. Same song and dance she gave me.” Now Benita’s anger came back in full force, fury and injured pride. “She said she didn’t like the way I handled her horses. Well, there are plenty of trainers back East who like the way I ride.”
Then she stopped. Shutters came down in her eyes, masking the emotion.
“Who besides Zeke Ramos has a grudge against Molly?” I asked.
Benita laughed, and malice colored her voice. “You should talk to Mrs. Holveg. The glamorous Pam might have a few things to say about her husband and Molly Torrance. Ask her why Kilobyte and the other Holveg horses are now trained by the Baldwin stable instead of the Torrance stable.”
Benita’s implication was unmistakable. I kept my face clear of expression. “That really doesn’t have anything to do with Stan Torrance’s death. Although I will talk with Mrs. Holveg, about what she may have seen the day he died.”
“Make sure you talk with Gates Baldwin, too,” Benita said. There was an enigmatic smile playing on her lips. Then, before I could speak, she turned on her heel and walked away from me, into the shedrows of Barn Three.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Benita Pascal, I thought, as I headed back toward the track. Molly stood back from the railing, talking with a silver-haired woman dressed in blue jeans and a matching jacket. Molly introduced her as Ellie Fredericks, another trainer. “Good workout?” I asked, nodding toward Chameleon as Deakin walked the horse down the incline that led off the track.
“Good enough,” Molly said. She waved a hand at Ellie Fredericks, and we set off toward Barn Four. I slowed my pace and Molly matched my steps. Once Deakin was out of hearing range, I turned to her. “I talked with Benita Pascal. Interesting woman. Angry at you. And there was something else there. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.”
“I guess you didn’t just come right out and ask her if she was making those phone calls.”
I shook my head. “No. I figured if she was, she’d deny it. I gave her the insurance investigator cover story, then alluded to the calls. She told me there are a few people who had bones to pick with you.”
Molly frowned. “Did she really? Well, she has the biggest bone, since I fired her.”
“She implied that it might be Pam Cullen, Cliff Holveg’s wife.” Molly shot me a startled look. “She also implied you’d been having a relationship with Cliff Holveg and that was why the Holvegs pulled their horses from the Torrance stables and made Gates Baldwin their trainer.”
“Oh, did she?” Molly’s lips thinned into an angry line. “It’s true I dated Cliff two or three times last summer. It’s not like I kept it a secret. And I don’t make any claims to sainthood. But he was separated from Pam at the time. She’d even filed for divorce, or so he told me. All I know is they’d been living apart for months. I wouldn’t have gone out with him if it had been otherwise.”
“Where was Pam during the separation?”
“Down in L.A. pursuing her acting career. Which evidently isn’t going anywhere, because she changed her mind about losing her meal ticket and came back up here in September. The divorce papers are on hold, as far as I know. I suppose until Pam changes her mind again.”
“What about the Holvegs moving their horses to Baldwin’s stable?”
Molly shook her head. “I don’t know what happened there. It was not long after Pam came back. I’d stopped seeing Cliff, of course. Then out of the blue Cliff came to Dad and told him he was giving the horses to Gates Baldwin. Dad was really upset. He’d been training Cliff’s horses for two years. This was the first sign of trouble. Maybe Pam had something to do with it. Or maybe it was Gates. He’s a sneaky underhanded son of a bitch.”
She didn’t elaborate on just why she didn’t like Gates Baldwin. But she’d said the other day that there was a longstanding rivalry between her father and the other trainer. “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”
She shook her head again. “No. That’s it. I don’t know who’s making those phone calls and I don’t know why.”
I didn’t have the answers, either, I thought as I watched the laughing banter between Molly and Deakin as Carlos lathered Chameleon’s chestnut hide outside of Barn Four. Despite the fact that Benita Pascal had steered me toward a few other potential suspects, I still considered it possible that Chameleon’s former jockey had made the calls.
And if I was any good at reading people, and I thought I was, something else was going on at Edgewater Downs. Whatever it was, Benita Pascal knew more than she was telling.
Chapter Twelve
DEAKIN KELLEY TOLD ME HE’D SEEN ZEKE RAMOS ON the track earlier, exercising a horse for Dick Moody. There were no horses on the track now, because a man on a tractor was dragging a harrow around the oval, getting the surface ready for the next round of training. I remembered Molly saying that Moody stabled the horses he trained in Barn Three.
Once I entered the vast structure, I saw a young woman standing outside a tack room. Like many of the others I’d seen around the backside that morning, she wore jeans and boots. Her red knit shirt had long sleeves with a hole at the left elbow. A riding helmet hung by its chin strap over her arm, while in her right hand she held a large red plastic barrette. She was twisting her long straight hair into a bun. As I walked toward her, she jabbed the barrette into place and closed the clip. Then she plopped the helmet on top of her head and adjusted the chin strap.
“You looking for Moody?” she asked. As she moved toward me, I saw that she’d been standing in front of a sign that told me this was where Dick Moody stabled his string of horses. She raised her hand and jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “That’s him down at the end of the shedrow. But I wouldn’t bother him now. He’s with some owners.”
I looked past her and spotted the trainer and the owners about thirty feet away. They stood near a stall, where the head and neck of a chestnut thoroughbred were visible. It was obvious Moody had once been a jockey. He was barely five feet tall, and though somewhat heavier than his riding weight, he still looked wiry and strong. He had gray hair and plenty of wrinkles. I guessed he was past sixty, but he could have been younger. Many of the people who worked with horses at the track were weathered by constant exposure to sun and wind.
The two people with Moody were silver-haired and patrician in both their looks and manners. The man was intent in his conversation with the trainer. As I watched, the woman opened her expensive-looking embroidere
d purse and took out a plastic storage bag full of little orange carrots. The horse knew what was coming and whickered softly, then drew his lips back and went after the bag with his big yellow teeth.
The woman laughed, then took one carrot from the bag and placed it on her palm, holding her hand out flat in front of the horse’s searching muzzle. The carrot disappeared so quickly it was as though it had never been there. The woman fed the horse another carrot, earning a quick look of disapproval from the trainer. But he didn’t say anything to her.
I turned back, intending to ask the young woman in the helmet if she knew where I could find Zeke Ramos, but she’d gone into the tack room and I saw her talking on the phone. Instead I headed down one of the middle shedrows. Near the end I saw two grooms, conversing in Spanish. One held the reins of a bay horse, while the other knelt, wrapping the horse’s forelegs.
“Dónde está Zeke Ramos? “ I asked.
The two grooms conferred, then informed me in Spanish that Ramos had stepped outside for a smoke, somewhere on the west side of Barn Three, which faced San Francisco Bay rather than the wide passage between the barns. I asked what he looked like, and they told me he was wearing a yellow shirt today.
I turned to the left and walked along the exterior shedrow. A right turn brought me to the wide doorway. I could see the Dumbarton Bridge in the distance, but I didn’t see a man in a yellow shirt. All I saw was a black and white barn cat, crouching on a bale of hay watching a chestnut with a white blaze circle the nearest hot walker.
Then I saw two men step from the space between Barns One and Three. One of them was small, dressed in boots, jeans, and a helmet with goggles stuck on his black hair. His bright yellow sweatshirt had red lettering and some sort of advertising logo on it.
The other man was taller. A wide-brimmed brown hat obscured his hair, and his face was equally hidden by a pair of black sunglasses that mirrored the morning sunshine. He was better dressed than Ramos, in well-cut brown slacks, a beige shirt, and a brown jacket draped over his shoulders. Something about him was familiar, but I couldn’t place him until he took a silver cigarette case from the inside pocket of his jacket and opened it, holding it toward Ramos.
