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

by Janet Dawson

  Sholto and the trainer were winding up their conversation, shaking hands. As the trainer headed back inside the barn, Sholto stuck his notepad and a condition book into the pocket of his jacket. Then he turned and saw me, stopping in mid-step. He stared at me as though waiting for me to speak.

  The man seemed to have regained the composure he’d lost the day Benita’s body had been found.

  “I’d like to talk with you,” I said.

  His dark brown eyes took on a melancholy look as he surveyed me. “Yeah, I suppose you would. I hear you’re a private eye.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Benita’s mother. She said you were up in Healdsburg yesterday, asking questions. You found out about the kid. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “Only part of it. Benita’s still a mystery to me.”

  “She was to me too,” Sholto said. He looked past me at Barn Four, as though seeing Benita’s body lying in the stall, the scarf knotted around her neck.

  “I think you can probably shed some light on who she was, what made her tick. Nate Abernathy says you were in love with her.”

  Sholto’s eyes moved back toward me. “Nate told you that? I didn’t know he knew. I didn’t think anybody knew. Except Benita. And she didn’t care.”

  The groom who had been outside between the barns with the bay horse now led his charge around the corner, followed by the vet and the bay’s trainer, who were deep in conversation concerning the horse’s soundness. The horse whinnied, as though putting in his two cents.

  It was getting a little crowded on our corner of the barn. “Is there someplace we can talk?” I asked.

  “Let’s get some coffee,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Then go up to the rail. There’s a horse and rider I want to watch work.”

  We walked over to the track kitchen and filled up paper containers at the coffee urn. As we moved over to the cashier, I saw some curious looks directed at Sholto and me. By now I was sure my cover was completely blown, and the fact that I was a private investigator was all over the track. Maybe they didn’t know just what I was investigating, but the racetrackers were definitely wondering why I was with Sholto.

  After leaving the track kitchen, Sholto and I walked up toward the rail, where several trainers were observing their horses. Molly was among them, and Darcy was with her. Molly didn’t see me. Her eyes were on the track, where an exercise rider was working one of her horses. But Darcy waved and started to walk over to join me and Sholto. I shook my head quickly and she backed off, with a brief nod that said she understood. By now she knew enough to leave me alone when I was interviewing people on a case.

  Sholto sipped his coffee as he took up a position a couple of feet to the right of one of the trainers, a compact fellow with a sweat-stained Stetson on his head and a stopwatch in his left hand. He stared intently up the stretch where several horses were exercising. Some jogged, others cantered, and the one heading our way was coming at a gallop.

  A chestnut with a rider crouched in the irons breezed by on the rail, and the trainer with the Stetson clicked his stopwatch. This was evidently the horse and rider Sholto wanted to watch. He stared intently as the horse rounded the first turn and entered the backstretch. He sipped his coffee, not saying anything, just watching as the horse moved along the track, into the far turn, and finally into the stretch. As the horse raced past us again the trainer clicked his stopwatch, nodded and smiled, as though pleased with the time he saw.

  The rider stood in the irons and the horse slowed. When the chestnut turned back toward us, I saw that the rider was a tiny sprite of a girl, with wispy blond curls peeking from under her helmet, and the prepubescent figure I associated with gymnasts. Whatever muscle she had was hidden by the faded jeans and the red plaid shirt she wore over a black turtleneck.

  “Is she good?” I asked Sholto.

  “Not bad,” he said, taking another swallow of his coffee. “She could be good, with the right horses, the right races.”

  “What do you look for?”

  He shrugged. “Technique. Style. Guts. Willingness to go for it.”

  I glanced at the girl. She was walking the chestnut now, cooling him out after his run. “Does she have all of that?”

  “Maybe. She’s only seventeen. Her dad’s the trainer. She’s been exercising his horses for several years now. She wants to be a jockey. Thinks she’ll have a better shot at it if she rides back East. She wants me to take her book.”

  “Just like Benita,” I said.

  “No.” He shook his head. “Not exactly. Benita was unique.”

  “When did you meet her?”

  He concentrated on his coffee for a moment, and I wondered if he was going to answer me at all. “She came East after her kid was born. She worked as a groom and an exercise rider when she had to, all the time cadging rides any way she could, riding claimers at tracks all up and down the Eastern seaboard. Meadowlands in New Jersey, Pimlico and Laurel in Maryland. I first saw her ride about six years ago, at Saratoga. She looked good. She had it all. The style, the technique.”

  “The guts,” I added.

  “Yes. Plus the sheer determination to go all the way. She wanted to win the Kentucky Derby, make it to the Hall of Fame. And she was doing it. Step by step.”

  “She gave up a lot to do it,” I said. “Her child, her family. Relationships.”

  Sholto smiled at this last, a bitter, wry smile, but he didn’t comment. At least not right away. “She didn’t talk about the little girl much. I know she sent money, presents.”

  “Guilty conscience?” I suggested.

  “Maybe. I figured her getting pregnant was an accident. She could have gotten an abortion. But Benita was raised Catholic. She was pretty far lapsed, but that Catholic stuff gets bred into the bone. So she had the baby, and left it with her folks. I guess they were scandalized by the whole thing. Not only their daughter having a baby out of wedlock, but then saddling them with it. To become a jockey.”

  He looked past me as the chestnut we’d just watched, with the seventeen-year-old girl who wanted to be a jockey perched in the saddle, came off the track, walking toward the barns with the trainer and groom alongside. I saw the girl give Sholto a hopeful glance, but he didn’t acknowledge her.

  “Would you want your kid to be a jockey?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a kid,” I told him. “All I know is that it looks like a rough life. I suppose any life as a professional athlete is. Besides, if there weren’t any jockeys, you wouldn’t be making a living.”

  “I guess not,” Sholto said. “If the jockeys don’t make money, I don’t pay my bills. Most of them don’t make it at all, let alone make it big. For every Shoemaker there’s a hundred you never heard of.”

  “Forget about Shoemaker,” I said impatiently. “I want to talk about Benita Pascal. You saw her ride, you thought she had promise, you took her on as a client. She didn’t reveal much of her past, to you or anyone. But you must have observed things about her.”

  “Only one thing comes to mind. It’s a quote from Dickens. About Ebenezer Scrooge. ‘Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.’ That’s what Benita was like. Shell and all. The only thing that mattered to her was her career.”

  “But surely she had a life off the track.”

  “Not much of one,” Sholto said. “Benita was all business.”

  “What about relationships?” He winced, almost imperceptibly, as though the word was painful to him. Because the only relationship he’d ever had with Benita was all business. “I hear she was once involved with a French-Canadian named Yves Boussac.” I watched Sholto as he framed his answer.

  “She dated, now and then. Nothing very serious, though. Just... company, on the rare occasions she decided she needed company. This Boussac...” He said the name as though it left a bitter taste in his mouth.

  “She met him a couple of years ago when she was riding up in Canada, at Woodbine. He gave her a real rush, sending flowers
, expensive presents, that sort of thing. I didn’t like the guy from the start. He’s a gambler. I told her, it looks bad for her, a jockey, to be hanging out with a gambler. She didn’t listen. It was the first time she’d ever acted interested in a man. Anybody else made a play for her, one of the other jockeys, or a trainer or an owner, she’d shut him down. But not this time.”

  Maybe she’d realized something was lacking in her solitary, single-minded existence, I thought. Even as she focused on being in the winner’s circle, there was always an empty apartment or hotel room at the end of the day.

  “How long were she and Boussac an item?” I asked.

  Sholto raised his coffee container to his lips again, then grimaced, as though the contents had gone cold. He looked around for a trash can. There was one about ten feet away, toward the horsemen’s entrance, so he headed for it, and I followed. “About six months,” he said as he dumped the container. “By the time she went down to ride in Florida, I thought it had burned itself out. She never said it was over between them. But he just wasn’t in the picture anymore. Period. I was relieved.”

  “I’ve seen a man who I think is Yves Boussac, several times in the past week.”

  “What?” Sholto’s dark eyes narrowed.

  “I could be wrong. You tell me.” I described the man I’d seen with Pam Cullen on two occasions, and once, outside Barn Three, with Zeke Ramos.

  “That sounds like him,” Sholto said slowly. “But what the hell is he doing here in California?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know. Could there be some connection, still, between him and Benita?”

  The jockey agent shook his head. “No. I don’t see how there could be.”

  All the same, it bore looking into. I was eager to see what my backgrounder turned up on Boussac, now that I’d gotten a last name to put with the first. “I take it you were opposed to Benita coming out West to ride for the Torrances.”

  “Yeah, I was. I mean, nothing against Stan and Molly Torrance.” He glanced back to where Molly still stood at the rail, talking with Darcy and pointing out at the track. “I’m sure they’re nice people. But Benita had a mount in the Derby this year, and a hell of a season at Belmont and Saratoga. I was getting calls from trainers all over the map. I could have kept her very busy back East. But no, she had to come West, not even to Santa Anita, Hollywood Park, or Del Mar, mind you, but Northern California. Which doesn’t have the same class of horses you get down south. To ride for a couple of trainers I never heard of. All because she met Molly Torrance last spring in Kentucky and thought she was a nice lady.”

  “If Benita thought Molly was such a nice lady, what went wrong?”

  “Hell if I know,” he said, spreading his hands wide. “Around the track, I hear Molly can be exacting, demanding. So was Benita.”

  “Molly said Benita wouldn’t follow her instructions.”

  “Two strong women — it’s a recipe for conflict.”

  “She also said that Benita gave the Torrance horses bad rides, in several races.”

  He shrugged. “She was having a bad streak. It happens.”

  “No chance she deliberately lost those races?”

  Now he glared at me, furious. “What are you talking about? Benita wouldn’t choke a horse. She was as honest as the day is long. Besides, she was too damn competitive. Winning was everything to her.”

  “Why did she stay?” I asked. “After the Torrances took her off Chameleon, she could have gone back East and worked for all those trainers who were ringing your phone off the hook.”

  “Beats the hell out of me.” He shook his head. “That’s exactly what I tried to convince her to do. Blow this town and go back to New York. But she wouldn’t leave.”

  “Maybe it had something to do with her daughter.” It could have. According to Mrs. Pascal, Benita had visited the little girl several times while she was riding here at Edgewater Downs. Maybe seeing the child she’d given up made her question the wisdom of that decision.

  Sholto had evidently had the same thought. “That’s the only reason I could think of. Her family. The kid. She has pictures of them, back at her apartment.”

  “Where was Benita living?”

  “About a mile from here, an apartment complex in Newark. Just a basic one-bedroom, with rented furniture. Why?”

  “I need to look at her things.”

  “The cops have already done that.” He looked at me as though having someone else pry through what was left of Benita’s life would be a further violation.

  “I know. But maybe I’ll see something they didn’t. A fresh pair of eyes.”

  “Okay,” he said finally. “I’m going over there this afternoon, at two-thirty. Her sister’s coming down from Napa to pick up the stuff. I said I’d help her pack it up.”

  “I’ll meet you there. What’s the address?”

  He rattled off the street and apartment number, then looked at his watch, pointedly indicating that the conversation was over, or about to be. As it was, Sholto had said more to me in the past hour than he had all week. I hoped the information he’d parted with would be valuable.

  Chapter Thirty

  I LEFT DARCY AT THE TRACK, WATCHING THE RACES with David in his box, and headed for Newark on Paseo Padre Parkway, which turned into Thornton Avenue the other side of Highway 84. Benita had lived in a small apartment complex near the town’s City Center. A couple of two-story stucco buildings faced each other across a narrow central court landscaped with jade trees, agapanthus, and other foliage. The lemony yellow exterior walls contrasted with the dark green leaves of the oleander and rhododendrons that softened the boxy shape of the buildings. On the ground floor, wooden fences enclosed patios, while on the second, balconies overlooked the court.

  I parked my Toyota at the curb and walked up the sidewalk between the buildings, looking for the apartment number Mickey Sholto had given me. It was on the second floor of the building to my right, accessible by the exterior stairway at the center of the building, which led up to a landing and four doors. I knocked on the one marked B, then tried the door handle. It was unlocked, so I pushed open the door and entered.

  Sholto had described the place as a basic one-bedroom, and that it was. Standard off-white paint on the bare walls, ivory vertical blinds drawn to one side of the sliding glass door that provided the only outside illumination, generic beige carpet covering the floor. To my left was the living room, about ten by fifteen feet. Beyond the glass door was a balcony with nothing on it. To my right was a small dining area and a walk-in kitchen separated from the living room by a counter. Both rooms were dark. Straight ahead I saw a short hallway leading to the bedroom and bathroom.

  Benita had, however, selected the furniture, even if she’d rented it rather than bought. A bright purple print sofa added a splash of color to the living room. A couple of black cubes at either end of the sofa held lamps, both sleek modern jobs with halogen bulbs. On one of the cubes, I saw a TV remote that went with the large screen TV against the wall opposite the sofa. It sat on a mobile stand made of black metal. Below it on a shelf was a DVD player.

  Next to the television was a black metal bookcase with a portable CD player on its top shelf. The two shelves below it held an assortment of disks and paperback books, lined up in neat rows. A couple of the paperbacks deviated from the arrangement, pulled out from the ranks and then left lying on the bottom shelf. I picked them up and examined them. One of them was a worn copy of Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. The other was Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

  I was pondering Benita’s choice of reading material when I heard a noise in the hallway. As I glanced up, Mickey Sholto walked in from the bedroom. “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said. “Her sister’s not here yet.”

  “The place doesn’t exactly look lived-in.” I waved my hand at the bare furnishings. The glass-topped table in the dining area had a black stand and two chairs with curved backs. There was no place that on the table surface to indicate that someon
e had ever consumed a meal there. Just a rounded vase made of dull black glass, with a sprig of drooping flowers stuck in it.

  Sholto began speaking, and I turned my attention to him. “She wasn’t here but a couple of months. It’ll take us an hour or so to clear this place out, and then I’ll have the rental company come pick up the furniture.” He rubbed one long finger against his chin. “Benita owned a co-op apartment in Manhattan. That’s where most of her stuff is. I’ll have to deal with that when I get back East.”

  “Did Benita have a will?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah. I don’t know what’s in it. I contacted her attorney. But I’m willing to bet she left everything to the kid. I think she already made her parents the guardians.”

  “The kid’s name is Letitia,” I told him. For some reason his calling the little girl “the kid” bothered me, perhaps because of the impersonality of it. Maybe he was trying to keep that part of Benita’s life at arm’s length.

  I heard footsteps climbing the stairs outside, and voices that went along with them. Someone knocked on the door, then tried the handle, as I had. The door swung open and I saw a woman about my own age, with a broad-shouldered young man in his early twenties. I saw in her face some resemblance to Benita. But the dead woman’s older sister didn’t have the rider’s thin, whipcord body.

  Nor did she have the chip-on-the-shoulder, in-your-face attitude I’d seen in my brief encounters with the jockey. Instead, Benita’s sister looked like an ordinary woman who had steeled herself to perform a necessary duty so that her parents wouldn’t have to.

  “Mr. Sholto,” she said, looking at the man who stood beside me. “I’m Carla Erasmus. We spoke on the phone yesterday. This is my cousin, Toby Cortez. He’s come to help me with Benita’s things.”

  “There’s not that much, like I told your mother on Friday,” Sholto said with a shrug. “Between the four of us, it won’t take long to pack it up. I got some boxes. And her luggage is still in the closet.”