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

by Janet Dawson

  “That he was carrying a buzzer? Hell, no. If he was, he got rid of it as soon as that horse crossed the finish line. Tossed it away, or hid it. I’ve seen those things. They’re small, fit in the palm of your hand. Easy to conceal, hard to catch.”

  I thought for a moment, and came up against the same wall Benita evidently had. If Ramos had been using an electrical device to shock Stella Darling into a first place finish, I’d have a hell of a time proving it. I moved my questions in a different direction. “Tell me what you know about Benita Pascal.”

  “Not much, I’m afraid. I never got involved with her romantically, although I’ve heard rumors to that effect. But it didn’t happen. Not for lack of trying on my part, I might add. But she wasn’t interested. She shut me down. And after she passed on my pass, we got to be friends. Not close. But we’d talk, go out for a drink now and then. That’s all there was to it.”

  “Tell me whatever you can about her. I need to know.”

  He looked at the coffee cup again, then pushed it away. “You’ve got to understand she never talked about herself much. Not the past anyway. I figured she had some scars, the way I do. So I never pushed it. Besides, she was really focused on her career. It was like she left all that behind when she decided to make it as a jock.”

  She’d done a good job of covering her earlier tracks. I’d found that out when I ran a check on Benita.

  “Just tell me what you know, no matter how unimportant you think it might be. Did she ever talk about relationships?”

  Deakin shrugged. “She knew Mickey, her agent, had some feelings for her. But she didn’t reciprocate. I guess it was awkward, at times. I asked her why she didn’t change agents. She said he was the best and she didn’t want to change. There was one other time she mentioned a guy she was seeing. She met him when she was riding in Canada. At the time Benita and I connected, in Florida, she told me it was definitely over, that he was bad news. But... I don’t know. Sometimes you get hooked on someone, even if he’s poison. Or she.”

  A bleak look turned his eyes wintry, and I knew he was thinking of Ann Barnstable, the woman who’d tried to frame him for murder.

  “Does this guy have a name?” I asked. “Or did she ever tell you?”

  Deakin thought for a moment. “He was French-Canadian. From Montreal or Quebec, I think. Yves something. Yves Boussac, that’s it.”

  My head came up with a snap as I pictured the sleek, well-dressed man with the accented voice, the one who’d been talking in French every time I’d seen him at Edgewater Downs during the past week. Pam Cullen had called him Yves. If he was the same Yves that Benita Pascal had been involved with, I didn’t think his presence at the track was mere coincidence.

  I pressed Deakin for more details about the man named Yves Boussac, but he didn’t have any. I changed tack again. “Did Benita ever say anything about her family?”

  “The family’s still here, somewhere in Northern California. I got the feeling they didn’t approve of what she was doing. I guess they wanted her to do the traditional thing, get married and have babies. But all she ever wanted to do was ride horses. She hooked up with a trainer, the way I did, and rode the fair circuit.” Deakin thought for a moment. “Wine. She told me her father and her brothers worked in the wine-making business. So where do they grow grapes?”

  “All over the state.” I tapped the notebook with the pen, trying to guess which buttons to push. “But since she was born in Santa Rosa, that might narrow it down a bit. But not much. Sonoma County, Mendocino County, Napa County are all quite large. Did she ever talk about her childhood, growing up in a specific area?”

  Deakin stopped, then he snapped his fingers. “She said something once about going swimming in the Russian River. In the summers, with her brothers and sisters.”

  “Sonoma County, then.” That narrowed the search considerably. Mentally I looked at a map of the big county north of San Francisco, and thought about which towns were close to the Russian River. “Sebastopol, Santa Rosa? Or the villes. We have Forestville, Guerneville, Geyserville.”

  “It was a burg,” Deakin said suddenly. “She said it was a nice enough little burg, with an old-fashioned square in the middle of town.”

  “Healdsburg.” I could see the old town square, just a few blocks off Highway 101, all the shops and restaurants that surrounded it, the dealers and their tables on the green grass when I’d driven up there one Labor Day weekend for an antiques fair. “It must be Healdsburg. The Russian River cuts right through the southern edge of town.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I’D LOCATED DEAKIN KELLEY, BUT ZEKE RAMOS HAD VANISHED.

  No one had seen Ramos since last night, David Vanitzky told me when I returned to Edgewater Downs late Friday afternoon. Speculation about Benita Pascal’s murder had been swirling around the backside all day, he added as he handed me a cup of coffee. We were on the frontside now, in the admin office.

  “Kelley’s got an alibi,” I told David, giving him the details. Deakin had left the bar at six-twenty and boarded the seven-forty flight to Burbank at San José International, just as the Southwest Airlines attendants were about to shut the gate. “When we left the coffee shop, he followed me over to the Fremont Police Department to give a statement.”

  “I guess that makes Ramos an even better suspect,” David told me. “He’d been sleeping in one of the bunkrooms in Barn Three. It looks like he took his gear and cleared out sometime Thursday night. He was in the bar with Benita and Deakin. He probably saw that envelope of money she was carrying. Now he’s gone, and Benita’s purse is nowhere to be found. It’s possible you were right when you said she could have been killed for the cash she had on her.”

  “Maybe. But I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  “The bartender said they were arguing, remember. I asked Deakin why. He says Benita accused Ramos of buzzing that horse in the second race yesterday.”

  “The one you told me about.”

  “The very same.”

  David thought about this for a moment, as he sipped coffee from his own cup. He looked tired, and I guessed that he’d been at the track all day. Which made me wonder how his boss felt about David’s sideline of racetrack owner cutting into his real job of corporate raider in San Francisco’s Financial District.

  “So Benita and Ramos had a fight over her accusation,” he said finally. “Say Trask was correct in assuming she followed Ramos to the track to continue her argument. They must have come through the back gate while the guard was in Barn Four. The argument escalated and he killed her.”

  I must have looked skeptical, for he offered another suggestion. “Maybe she was looking for the buzzer.”

  I shook my head. “That’s an awfully small needle in a very large haystack. Deakin said if Ramos did have a buzzer, he probably got rid of it as soon as possible. Besides, we’re not even sure where Benita or Ramos went after they left that bar.”

  “More certain than we were this morning,” he said. “We have a witness.”

  “Who saw them together? What time? And is that person absolutely sure?”

  “Not absolutely,” David admitted. “Just possible. The time was between eight and eight-thirty. The witness is Mrs. Holveg. She and her husband were on the backside last night, over in Gates Baldwin’s shedrow. She claims she saw Benita with a man who could have been a jockey.”

  “A description that fits half the men at this track.” I drank some more coffee, then set the cup on the desk and leaned back in my chair, lacing my fingers together. “Isn’t it a little odd for owners to be visiting their horses at what, for a race-tracker, is the middle of the night?”

  “Yes, it is strange,” David said. “But so are the Holvegs. And believe me, stranger things happen. Anyway, when they heard about Benita’s death this morning, they contacted the police. Mrs. Holveg is sure she saw Benita outside Barn Two last night, with a man she described as short and slight, looking like a jockey. That’s a descrip
tion that fits both Deakin Kelley and Zeke Ramos. Now Kelley has an alibi, and Ramos has taken a powder. Ramos sure as hell looks guilty.”

  “Too easy,” I said. “It just feels a little too pat. What was Benita doing in Barn Four? Especially in Molly Torrance’s shedrow. Since Molly fired Benita, she rode for trainers in all four barns, but primarily for Gates Baldwin in Barn Two, and Dick Moody in Barn Three. Ramos lived in Barn Three. Benita had no reason whatsoever to be anywhere near Molly’s stalls.”

  “There could be a dozen explanations,” David said.

  “Granted. We’ve got a couple of scenarios here. One is that Ramos robbed Benita for that wad of cash she was carrying, then killed her, to cover his tracks. The other is that Ramos killed Benita because she was going to reveal that he used a buzzer on the winning horse in yesterday’s second race. Again, to cover his tracks. In both cases, murder seems excessive.”

  “How do you mean?” David asked.

  “If he was going to rob her,” I theorized, “it would have been easy enough to follow her until she was in a nice, dark, out of the way spot, with no one around. There are lots of places like that on the backside. Then he’d whack her over the head or shove her to one side, grab the purse and run. There wasn’t any need to kill her.”

  “And the other scenario?” David asked.

  “It’s unlikely that anyone could prove Ramos buzzed that horse. Besides, what would happen to him if the accusation were proved?”

  “He could face criminal charges,” David said. “Be set down by the stewards, maybe even lose his jockey’s license.”

  “Worth killing for? Not to my mind. But people have killed for all sorts of reasons. In either case, where did Ramos get that scarf?”

  David shrugged. “It was Benita’s, it was in her purse, the first thing the killer could get his hands on.”

  “Or it’s Deakin Kelley’s scarf, which may or may not be in his gear in the Jockey Room, where Ramos could have stolen it. The scarf really bothers me, though. That, and the location of Benita’s body. Why kill someone, or conceal the body, in Molly’s shedrow? Half a dozen grooms and exercise riders live in those bunkrooms on the south wall, right outside her tack room. The killer could have been seen by any one of them, even if they go to bed early. Strangling Benita with that chameleon scarf and leaving her body in that particular stall suggests that whoever killed Benita wants it to look as though Molly’s responsible.”

  “Molly was home in bed,” David countered.

  “Alone. Unless you count the cat, who doesn’t exactly qualify as a witness. Well, the police should be able to tell us more about where she was killed. But I have a feeling it was somewhere else, here at the track, and her body was moved to the stall. It will take a few days to get the autopsy results, and then I’ll have to convince Maltesta to let me take a look. In the meantime, I’ll have a talk with Pam Cullen.”

  “Good idea,” David said. “She could be mistaken about seeing Benita last night.”

  “Or lying.”

  David frowned. “Why would she lie?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask her. What about Mickey Sholto, Benita’s agent? Where was he last night?”

  Now David raised his gray eyebrows. “I thought all indications were that Sholto was in love with his client.”

  “He wouldn’t be the first man to kill a woman while insisting he loved her.” I thought back to one of my cases from a year ago. “Deakin says Benita knew how he felt about her but she didn’t reciprocate. So where was Sholto last night?”

  “San Francisco, having dinner with a friend,” David told me. “At Postrio. Plenty of witnesses. Only reason I know is because George Avalos overheard Sholto talking with Detective Maltesta. Sholto said Benita’s parents are up in Sonoma County.”

  “Healdsburg,” I said. “Deakin remembered her mentioning it. I want to go up there and talk to the family, but I’d better wait until they’ve been notified of her death.”

  “I don’t know.” David shrugged. “There’s some talk on the backside of a memorial service, but I’ve heard nothing about funeral services. Sholto would know, but he left the track after he talked with cops.”

  I stood up. “Are the Holvegs here today? I must say, for a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, he spends a lot of time at the track.”

  “People that rich generally spend their time anywhere they like,” David said dryly. “But he’s not here today. He only shows up when he’s got a horse running. She likes to play the ponies, though, and she is here. I saw her up in the clubhouse when I went upstairs to watch the first race.”

  “She wasn’t by any chance with a sleek-looking, well-dressed man who spoke French? A man she calls Yves?”

  “The high roller you told me about? The one you saw slipping an envelope to Ramos outside Barn Three?” I nodded. “No, I didn’t see him. George Avalos and I have been keeping an eye out for him since you mentioned seeing him on the backside. That reminds me, we were going to talk with Grady Kline of the CHRB, about race fixing.”

  “It’ll have to wait. But I do have a last name on Yves. If it’s the same Yves. And if it is the same man, it puts a new wrinkle on things. Deakin told me that when he met Benita in Florida a couple of years ago she mentioned a relationship with a French-Canadian named Yves Boussac. Deakin got the impression that Yves had an unsavory past. I’m going to punch his name into my computer databases and see what comes up. But first I’ll head up to the clubhouse and find Pam Cullen.”

  There was more of a crowd at the track that day than on Wednesday or Thursday, though not as many as the past weekend. I moved through the people in the grandstand, toward the escalator that led up to the clubhouse. Once upstairs, I stood near the parimutuel windows and scanned the room for Pam Cullen, Cliff Holveg, or the mysterious Yves. I made a quick detour into the Turf Club, where I spotted Holveg standing at the bar, deep in conversation with another man I didn’t recognize. I went outside. As the November day faded and the air grew colder, not many people were out in the boxes. I ran my eyes over the people who were. No Pam, no Yves.

  Maybe she’d gone down to the paddock to watch the horses in the next race being saddled. But it was several minutes before post time of the seventh race, which was scheduled to start at four. The horses entered in that race were out on the track, cantering to warm up before being loaded into the starting gate. If Pam had gone to the paddock, I guessed she would be returning to the clubhouse soon. Unless she’d gone home. In which case I’d have to wait another day to talk with her.

  I stationed myself near the escalator, a spot with a clear view of the parimutuel windows and the bar in the nearby Turf Club. A moment later Pam Cullen appeared at the top of the escalator, alone. She was wearing a fur jacket over a bright raspberry-colored ensemble that began with a knit turtleneck and leggings that showed off her impressive figure, and ended with boots made from what looked like some exotic lizard. A tiny purse made of the same lizard skin dangled from a thin cord around her neck.

  She moved quickly over to the parimutuel windows, picking the shortest line, and placed her bet. Then she moved to another line and placed an additional bet. I wondered how many she’d made downstairs in the grandstand.

  She shoved the tickets into the little purse, then headed for the door and out to the boxes. I followed and stood in the doorway, watching as she entered her box, four rows down. She sat down and leaned forward just as the race caller’s voice over the loudspeaker said, “They’re off!”

  “Well-preserved, isn’t she?” The words, and the tone, were tart as a lemon.

  I glanced to my right, at the source of the acerbic comment, and found myself looking at Lina Barnstable, still wearing the red knit pullover and black slacks I’d seen her in this morning. “You know her?”

  “We were inmates at the same exclusive girls school in Pasadena, about a hundred years ago.” She flashed a wicked grin. “Of course, at the time she was just plain Pamela Kolanovsky. And she was a rather dumpy dishwater-blond.
As you can see, she’s no longer dumpy. The hair went several shades lighter. And I understand the breasts are silicon-based life-forms. She changed her name, of course, when she migrated down to Hollywood. Pam Cullen. Starred in several abysmal action adventure flicks. You know the kind, lots of car chases, explosions, and busty broads. Her career, such as it was, is pretty much over, though. Good thing she found a rich husband.”

  She laughed, a raucous, ribald sound that cut through the voices around us exhorting various horses to run. “I’m Lina Barnstable. And you’re Jeri Howard. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “From whom?” I asked.

  “Oh, I have my sources.” Her smile made her look like a self-satisfied cat who had just lunched on canary.

  “I’m sure you do. But are they accurate?”

  She laughed again. “Y’know, I think I’m going to like you. You’re a private investigator. How’s that for accurate?”

  It was right on the mark, and I wondered who’d told her. Just then Ruy Camacho, the poker-faced jockey, appeared in the doorway, carrying a couple of bottles of sparkling water. Without a word he handed one to her.

  “Thanks, lover.” Lina raised the bottle to her lips, then waved a hand in my direction. “This is Jeri, the private detective.”

  Camacho gave me a tiny nod of acknowledgment. He took an equally minute sip of his water and looked right through me with a pair of eyes as black and hard as obsidian.

  “How’s the competition?” she asked him.

  “We’ll blow ’em away,” he said, his voice flat.

  “Your horse?” I asked. “The one I saw being unloaded this morning?”

  “Yes. Isn’t he magnificent?” Lina smiled. “We’re racing him a week from tomorrow. We thought it would be a good idea to train for a few days on this track.”

  “Who is the competition?” I directed my question to Camacho.

  “Chameleon. I can beat Kelley any day.” He said it matter-of-factly, as though it was a given. I certainly had to give him points for self-confidence. “And Kilobyte. Who doesn’t have a jockey.”