by Janet Dawson
“Thanks for your time.” I stood, but before I slipped the notebook back into my shoulder bag, I asked one more question. “Who do you suspect of setting up your husband?”
“I’ll give you a name,” Gwen Colvin said as she crossed the living room to the entryway. She opened the door as though ready to push me out into the cold November afternoon. “Don’t say you got it from me, though. Gates Baldwin.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
“IT’S TIME I TALKED WITH THAT INVESTIGATOR FROM the California Horse Racing Board,” I told David Vanitzky.
David nodded. “Oh, yes. About Ramos and his hypothetical buzzer?”
“No. About drugging horses.”
“I hope that’s hypothetical too,” he said with a startled look.
“Hypothetical for now.”
It was Sunday morning, and I was in the admin office at Edgewater Downs. Sunday is a racing day. The track had been bustling with its usual routine since early that morning. Even though it had only been just over forty-eight hours since Benita Pascal’s corpse was found in the stall at Barn Four, the routine had done its work in dulling the memory of the murder. Horses had to be fed and exercised, their legs wrapped, unwrapped, and examined. Stalls had to be mucked out, the dirty straw replaced with clean.
And of the thousands of people who would show up this afternoon for the day’s racing card, it was probable that not many knew of Benita’s death. They were more interested in a day at the races, and some of them were there for the seventh race on the card, a major stakes race for three-year-olds.
Darcy had accompanied me to the track. I’d forgotten about it until she hailed me as I was stepping onto my front porch to retrieve the newspaper. She reminded me of our date, made Thursday evening when I told her of my excitement in winning the exacta. Now she wanted to see for herself just what charms the sport held for me. When we arrived, I took her to Barn Four and introduced her to Molly, and the backside. Then I left her there while I went looking for David.
When I entered the administrative offices, Claudia Hollander was at her desk, fielding phone calls. She rolled her eyes and nodded when I asked if she was still fending off reporters.
The door to the directors’ office was closed, and when it opened a moment later, George Avalos, the head of track security, stepped out. He nodded at me and headed for the outer door. David loomed in the doorway and motioned me to join him. Once we were inside, he closed the door again, muting the sound of the phone ringing on Claudia’s desk.
“What prompts this interest in drugging horses?” he asked now.
I told him about my trip to Healdsburg and what I’d learned about Benita’s past. David had never heard of Robert Colvin, the trainer Benita had worked for when she was just starting out. “This whole business of fixing races,” I said. “It does happen, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does,” he said finally. “Though not as often as people think. But horseplayers are gamblers. Somebody’s always out to make a killing at the track.”
“Robert Colvin’s wife told me he lost his training license three years ago. She said he was implicated in a horse drugging incident.” I didn’t tell him that she’d also accused Gates Baldwin of framing her husband.
David leaned forward in his chair. “If Colvin was up to something that got his license pulled, Grady Kline should be able to give you the details.”
“Is he in his office?”
“Probably.” David reached for the phone and punched in a number. He asked for Kline and got put on hold. “He’s the lead investigator in this area for the California Horse Racing Board. The CHRB people work for the state. And like the stewards, the horses, trainers, and jockeys, they move from track to track, depending on the racing season.”
Someone picked up the phone on the other end of the line. David explained the situation to Grady Kline. A moment later he hung up the phone. “He says he can’t discuss any ongoing cases, but since this happened three years ago... Well, the CHRB office is in that corridor leading to the side entrance of the grandstand.” I stood up to leave. “You think something illegal is going on,” he said. “Was Benita involved in it?”
“I don’t know. Deakin told me that Benita was different here than she was back East. Why the change in her personality? Something weighing on her mind? Molly told me that Benita gave Chameleon several bad rides, and that was one of the reasons the Torrances decided to fire her. Did Benita deliberately lose those races? I don’t know. She liked to win. You should have seen her Thursday, when Megahertz and Motherboard lost. She looked as though she was very angry with Gates Baldwin after those races. Baldwin said the horse must have bled through his Lasix. And I thought I saw blood on the horse’s nostrils after the race.”
David frowned. “The bleeding is serious if you can see it.”
“That’s what Molly told me. Baldwin sounded rather casual about it, when he was talking with Benita after the race.”
“It’s nothing to be taken lightly,” David said. “Megahertz has been placed on the vet’s list for two weeks. That means when that time has passed, the horse has to run five furlongs without showing any evidence of bleeding. If the horse doesn’t pass that test, he can’t race for thirty days. Then there’s another test. And if the horse fails that one, the horse is not acceptable to race. Period.”
“A three strikes situation,” I commented. “Wonder why Baldwin seemed to be shrugging it off?”
Unless he knew something the rest of us didn’t.
“As for Motherboard losing,” David continued, “you said it looked like Ramos did something to Stella Darling to get her over the finish line first. And Benita accused him of using a buzzer, that evening in the bar.”
“Yes, I know. But what if Benita thought Baldwin was doing something to the horses? Something to make them lose instead of win.”
David frowned. “That’s a serious charge. I’ve never heard of Baldwin doing anything shady. He has a good reputation.”
I shrugged and turned toward the door. “So I’ll go talk with Grady Kline. Maybe he can enlighten me.”
I went down the hall in the direction David had indicated and turned into a doorway with a sign to one side that read CHRB. Inside I saw a counter and, to my right, a door leading to an interior office. The young woman at the counter was busy helping a man fill out paperwork for his trainer’s license. When she was free, I gave her my name and told her I was there to see Grady Kline. She picked up the phone and punched in three numbers, then told Kline I was there.
A moment later a man stepped into the doorway and look out at me. “Jeri Howard?”
“Yes,” I said, moving toward him.
“Grady Kline.” He offered his hand and I took it, studying him. He was a compactly built man dressed in brown corduroy slacks and a green flannel shirt. He had fair skin, the kind that burned rather than tanned, and his face was square-jawed with a blunt nose. His eyebrows were the same thick straw as his hair. Below them a pair of brown eyes surveyed me with a no-nonsense expression.
“Come on back to my office,” he said, motioning me through the doorway. I followed him into a large room with several desks. His was the one in the corner, papers neatly arranged around a green desk blotter. On a coaster next to his phone was a ceramic mug with an Edgewater Downs logo. He picked it up and glanced at its contents. “Can I get you some coffee?”
“No, thanks. I’ve had my share this morning.”
“Let me freshen this up, and I’ll be right with you.” He crossed the room to a coffee urn sitting on a table, then came back and waved me toward a chair in front of his desk. When he was seated in his own chair, he looked me over and said, “David Vanitzky tells me you want some information about race fixing.”
“In general, yes. And specifically relating to one trainer.”
“You understand I can’t talk about current investigations,” he said.
“Of course. I wouldn’t expect you to. Let’s talk in general terms first. How does one g
o about fixing a horse race?”
He smiled. “There are lots of ways to alter the outcome. And it’s difficult to pin anything down. When it happens, it usually involves collusion between several people. None of whom will talk on the record. But even fixing horse races has its uncertainties. You can inject something into a horse, but the drug might not have the effect you’d hoped for. You may bribe five out of the six jockeys in a race, and it’s that sixth horse that wins, the one nobody thought had a chance.”
“The one where no one bothered to bribe the jockey,” I finished. “I read once that, back in the seventies, there was a guy who claimed to have fixed hundreds of races at the Eastern tracks. He also claimed he had several top jockeys on his payroll.”
“I read that one too,” Kline said. “I’m not sure anyone can prove it. Or disprove it.”
“So a race fixer could collude with the jockey or the trainer, or meddle with the horse.”
Kline nodded in agreement. “One of the nastiest ways of tampering with a horse is sponging. That’s where a little piece of sponge gets stuck up the horse’s nostril. Thoroughbreds breathe through their noses, not their mouths. When their breathing is tampered with, it can cause choking, even death.”
I agreed with him. It was nasty. “Has there been any sponging in California?”
“Fortunately, no. But there were some sponging incidents in Kentucky recently. We get other sorts of race fixing. I’m thinking of a well-publicized case in Southern California a few years back, when a gambler bribed a jockey to hold back a horse during a race. Both the gambler and the jockey did time. As for here, in Northern California, there was an incident where a couple of Nevada casinos refused to pay off trifecta bets on a race at Bay Meadows. The FBI looked into that one.”
“So if someone wants to fix a race, how would he do it?”
“It’s easier to make a horse lose a race than to make it win,” Kline said.
“Unless the jockey uses a buzzer, to shock the horse into running like hell.” Which is what, apparently, Zeke Ramos had done on Thursday. File that one under difficult to pin down, however.
“Buzzing. Yeah. Haven’t seen that in a while,” Kline said. “More often than not, a jockey will hold a horse back when the horse wants to run. As simple as that. Or run the horse to the lead and burn him out, so that he doesn’t have anything left for the stretch. Of course, you’re talking about a rider who weighs about a hundred pounds, and a horse that weighs upward of a thousand pounds or more. Whether the rider can make the horse do what the rider wants is the biggest variable in horse racing.”
“And if a trainer wanted to fix a race? Could he use drugs? I know drugs are common on the backside, what with Lasix and Bute. But those are legal. I understand that sometimes trainers inject cortisone into horses’ joints.”
“Cortisone’s not illegal,” Kline said. “The problem with cortisone, as the track vet will tell you, is that instead of being used as part of a program to help the horse recover from an inflamed joint, it may make the horse look great, so the trainer will run him before he’s ready. Then you get a horse with worn-out cartilage and arthritis. Lasix is used to prevent pulmonary bleeding, as I’m sure you’ve heard. It’s administered by the track vet, four hours before a race.”
“Why is it used so often in California?” I asked.
“The vet could tell you more about that than I could. I know there’s been some research indicating that horses raised in higher altitudes and cooler climates have fewer pulmonary bleeding problems. Which may explain why we have so many bleeders in California, where we have a low, coastal climate. As for Bute, horses get sore when they run. Bute’s an antiinflammatory. It’s not considered a performance-enhancing drug, which means using it might make the horse run better. Clenbuterol is. Or at least some people think so.”
“Clenbuterol? I’ve never heard of that one.”
Kline spread his hands on his desk. “It’s a drug that can improve a horse’s breathing. It’s sometimes given to horses suffering from the heaves, which is like emphysema. It was illegal in the United States until a couple of years ago. Now it’s legal for horses with chronic pulmonary disease. But it can only be used during training. In California, horses can’t race with clenbuterol in their systems. The problem is, once the drug is in the horse, it tends to stay there. I’ve seen tests showing that clenbuterol can remain in a horse’s system for twelve to thirteen days.”
“So a trainer could swear up and down he hadn’t given a horse clenbuterol in nearly two weeks, and the horse could still come up positive.”
“I might buy that once or twice,” Kline said with a smile. “But not on a regular basis. We had another investigation a couple of years back in Southern California. Twenty horses tested positive for clenbuterol, at three tracks, involving seven trainers. I can’t comment any further on that. However, I do know that about the same time in New Jersey, six trainers pulled some heavy suspensions because of clenbuterol.”
“Let’s move on to the specific case that interests me,” I said. “About three years old, involving a trainer from Healdsburg named Robert Colvin.”
Kline nodded. “Colvin. Yeah, I remember him.”
“I heard Colvin’s training license was pulled because of his involvement in a horse-drugging incident.”
“More like several incidents,” Kline said. “We got a tip that Colvin was drugging his horses, and had been for a while.”
“Who tipped you off?”
Kline leaned back in his chair. “It was anonymous,” he said. I had the feeling he knew, but he wasn’t telling me.
“What sort of drug was Colvin using?”
“We’d had our eye on him for about a year, because several of the horses he trained tested positive for clenbuterol. He almost got suspended over that, but there were questions about the lab procedures. That put the positive results in doubt.”
“You were saying that Colvin almost got suspended over the earlier positives for clenbuterol. So why was his license pulled? Another positive?”
“It wasn’t clenbuterol,” Kline said. “This time it was cocaine.”
“Colvin or the horse?” I asked, surprised.
“The horse.” At the look on my face, he laughed. “Oh, yeah. The Horsemen’s Protective and Benevolent Association did a study several years ago. Found trace elements of twenty-one prohibited substances in about a hundred urine samples taken from winning horses in California races.”
“Trace elements. That means not a lot, just a little.”
“Right,” Kline said. “Trace elements meant the study was pretty damned inconclusive. There were some charges against a couple of trainers that got dropped for insufficient evidence. You go over to the backside, and you’ll get an argument about whether a little bit of cocaine or clenbuterol or corticosteroid is going to affect the performance of a one thousand pound racehorse.”
“I take it you had more than a little bit of cocaine where Robert Colvin was concerned.”
“Had him dead to rights,” Kline told me. “He hadn’t used it on the horse yet, but we found the stuff. We got a tip that Colvin was going to inject cocaine into the horse’s joints. The horse was a claimer that had never won a race until three weeks earlier, when he came in first by three lengths, in a race where he was seriously outclassed. We did a urine test, as we always do on the winners, but didn’t come up with anything. Then, when the horse was scheduled to run again, we got the tip. We searched Colvin’s barn at Golden Gate Fields. Found the coke and the syringe hidden in a saddle rack.”
“You’re sure it was his?”
Kline nodded. But he didn’t tell me why he was so certain.
“Why would Colvin take the risk of doping the horse to win?”
“We discovered he was having financial problems,” Kline said. “He’d bet heavily on this horse. I figure he got greedy. And his judgment went out the window.”
“When I spoke with Colvin’s wife yesterday, she told me he was innocent
, that he’d been set up by another trainer.”
“That’s what he said at the time,” Kline said. “But given the evidence we had, and the earlier incidents involving clenbuterol, the board came down on him hard. You have to understand, Ms. Howard, the CHRB is concerned about the integrity of horse racing. If the betting public thinks racing is dirty, they’re not going to come to the track and spend their hard-earned money. So we do everything we can to make sure that horse races don’t get fixed, including listening to anonymous tips, and doing constant urine tests on the horses.”
I nodded, recalling the urine and blood samples I’d seen being collected in the testing barn. “What if the horse has been given something that doesn’t show up on your lab screen?” I asked, toying with an idea. “Something that’s not on the list of prohibited substances you’re looking for?”
He was silent for a moment. “Then that’s a problem.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
I LEFT KLINE TO HIS DUTIES AND HEADED IN THE DIRECTION of Barn Four, where I’d left Darcy. I was sure by now she’d had her fill of watching Molly Torrance go through her morning training routine. I had just passed a hot walker outside of Barn Three when I spotted Mickey Sholto up ahead, standing in the corner doorway leading to Barn Three. I altered my course to intercept him.
He was talking with a trainer I’d met earlier in the week, so I stopped a few yards from him and waited. I was close enough to hear part of their conversation. Sholto was arranging for a jockey whose name I didn’t recognize to ride the trainer’s colt next week, at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. I remembered what David had said earlier, about how mobile things were in this business. Both jockeys and horses moved regularly across the country.
Since he worked primarily on the East Coast and was well-known as Benita’s agent, it hadn’t occurred to me that Sholto might have another client riding here in Northern California. But evidently he did.
A groom led a blood bay out into the space between Barns One and Three. I watched as he jogged the horse up and down, while the bay’s trainer and a vet watched. Then he stopped and the vet picked up the horse’s left hind leg and flexed it, talking all the while to the trainer as he ran his hands over the animal’s hock.
