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

by Janet Dawson

Darcy said something to Molly, who shook her head. Then Darcy turned from the railing and walked over to one of the coffee carts that dotted the grandstand. I watched as she spoke to the woman who ran the cart, then unzipped the small black waist pack she wore and slipped out some greenbacks. She handed them over to the woman, who then set containers on the counter and began working with her machine, mixing espresso and steamed milk, ladling foam on top of the latte. Darcy sprinkled chocolate powder on the foamy milk, then covered the containers with a plastic lid and headed back toward Molly.

  I grabbed David’s arm again. “The coffee. Stan made his coffee really strong. Everyone knew that. And he laced it with heavy cream. With that concoction, he wouldn’t have been able to taste anything else.”

  David’s eyes widened and he made a fist, his hand tightening on a handle that wasn’t there. “He always had his coffee mug with him.”

  “And he had it with him when he collapsed in the shedrow.”

  Now David was nodding. “Yes. It dropped as he fell. But I don’t know what happened to it.”

  “I do. It’s on a shelf in Molly’s tack room. She says Carlos put it there after the paramedics took Stan to the hospital.”

  I quickly covered the yards between where David and I had been standing and the paddock railing. Deakin and the horse were in the saddling enclosure, and Carlos had the horse by the reins. Deakin threw his leg over the saddle and slid off his mount, removing his muddy goggles and his cap. Darcy stayed outside the paddock, sipping her latte.

  When I appeared in front of Molly and Deakin, they smiled. Then the smiles disappeared as they saw the urgency on my face.

  “Jeri, what’s wrong?” Molly asked.

  “Your father’s mug, the stainless steel one. You said Carlos picked it up after your father collapsed. And he put it back in the tack room.”

  “I don’t know for certain.” She shook her head, as if to emphasize the point. “But he must have. It was just there, a day or so later.”

  “Did anyone wash it out?”

  From the looks on their faces, Molly and Deakin thought I’d taken leave of my senses. On the other side of the railing, Darcy narrowed her eyes and gave me a questioning look, as though she knew what I was driving at.

  “I didn’t wash it out,” Molly said. “Maybe Carlos did. When I saw it on the shelf, I just shoved it back behind some stuff because it reminded me of Dad. It’s been there ever since, until you picked it up the other day.”

  “Why?” Deakin demanded. “What’s going on?”

  “Carlos?” I swooped down on the quiet, middle-aged groom, firing questions at him in my less-than-fluent Spanish.

  No, he answered, startled, clutching the horse’s reins. He had done nothing to the mug, he assured me. He had merely picked it up after the Señor was taken away in the ambulance. He took it back to the tack room and placed it on the shelf and locked the door, waiting until the Señorita returned with the tragic news of the Señor’s death.

  I asked Molly for the keys to the tack room and she handed them over. “You’re going to explain all of this to me, right?” she asked, perplexed. “Just what’s so important about Dad’s mug?”

  “You think?” David asked me as we hurried toward Barn Four.

  “Let’s hope,” I said. “That I’m right. That there’s something left in that mug to test.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  DAVID AND I HURRIED DOWN THE SHEDROW ON THE perimeter of Barn Four, heedless of the curious looks we got from assorted racetrackers, including José, the younger groom, who was raking straw in one of the empty stalls. When we reached the door of Molly’s tack room, I stuck the key into the lock and heard a click as the spring mechanism turned. I pushed open the door. As David and I entered, I flipped the switch and the overhead fluorescent bulb flooded the room with light. I pulled my latex gloves from my purse and slipped them onto my hands.

  “Isn’t that a bit like locking the barn door after the horse?” David asked. “Especially if Carlos picked up the mug and brought it back here.”

  “You never know. There might be a stray print here or there.” I grabbed the arm of Molly’s old office chair and wheeled it over to the bookcase where I’d seen the mug earlier in the week. I sat down, then leaned over and quickly scanned the shelves. The mug was where Molly had set it after I’d picked it up that day, on the middle shelf, barely visible behind an open box of granola bars that hadn’t been there last week and the same untidy pile of catalogs and magazines.

  I shoved the box to one side, reached in and hooked my index finger into the handle of the mug. Then I lifted out my prize, holding it up to the light.

  One ordinary commuter coffee mug, approximately six inches deep. It was about three inches in diameter, slightly wider at the bottom than it was at the top. Its stainless steel exterior had once been shiny but now looked smeared and grimy. There was a bit of straw stuck in the space where the black plastic handle was affixed to the mug. On top was a black plastic lid with a piece that swiveled open, so the person holding the mug could take a swig of coffee without spilling it all over the place.

  I applied some downward pressure on one side of the lid and upward pressure on the other side, using leverage and the lid’s small lip to pry off the top. Then I tilted the mug to one side and held it up to the light, peering at the black plastic interior.

  I wasn’t sure what a lab could do with it after three weeks, but there was definitely something inside Stan Torrance’s mug. A chalky-looking residue coated the lower third. Not all of it had adhered to the surface of the mug. Some had been knocked loose. It looked like pale brown face powder that had collected at the bottom.

  “It’s dried up,” I told David, “but it’s there.”

  “Enough to test?”

  “Maybe. I’ve got a friend at a private lab in Oakland. I’ll get it to him first thing in the morning.”

  I carefully put the lid back onto the mug. Then I reached into the same compartment of my shoulder bag that had held the gloves and took out a plastic bag. I slipped the mug in and sealed it.

  “Are you always this prepared?” David asked, indicating the gloves and bag.

  “If I’m on the job, yes. And my visits to the track over the past week haven’t exactly been pleasure. I don’t ordinarily get up at four in the morning just to watch horses get their exercise.”

  Outside I heard the clopping sound of hooves and voices, signaling the approach of horse and human. I stood up and crossed the small tack room to the door, looking out into the shedrow. Molly and Carlos were approaching, Carlos leading the chestnut that had just run in the sixth race. Then Carlos went about his after-race routine, unsaddling the colt so he could be lathered and rinsed at the washing station just outside the barn.

  “Where’s Darcy?” I asked Molly.

  “Entertaining the horse’s owners in the clubhouse, so I don’t have to.” Molly left Carlos to his work and walked over to join David and me in the doorway of the tack room. She stared at the plastic bag that held the coffee mug, raised her eyes to my face, and fixed me with a determined look. “Now are you going to explain why you were asking all those questions about Dad and that mug? Just what the hell is this all about?”

  David took her by the arm and guided her into the tack room. I shut the door. “I think your father was poisoned,” I said.

  Molly paled under her trainer’s racetrack tan and her mouth moved as though her lips were numb. “What makes you think that?”

  “I was helping Mickey Sholto and Benita’s sister pack up Benita’s things over at her apartment. We found some poisonous plants — oleander, lily of the valley, and foxglove. All of them highly toxic,”

  “I know what oleander can do.” Molly raked her fingers through her curly brown hair. “I once saw a horse die from eating it. What in the world would Benita be doing with poisonous plants?”

  “That’s what I asked myself.” I looked from Molly to David. “Particularly since the oleander and foxglov
e were bagged up and hidden in the vegetable crisper. Then I started thinking about digitalis, which comes from foxglove. All of those plants contain cardiac glycosides, which work on the heart.”

  Molly seemed more willing than David had been to accept my theory that her father was murdered, perhaps because she’d seen what ingesting a poisonous plant did to an animal. Or perhaps somewhere in the recesses of her mind she’d never been convinced her father’s death had been due to natural causes.

  “You think Benita killed my father?” she asked slowly.

  “I’m considering the possibility.” The look on David’s face told me that he was reserving judgment.

  Or it had been set up to look that way. I’d considered that possibility too. But if that was the case, who besides Mickey Sholto had the key to Benita’s apartment? Her killer, the one who’d taken her purse, of course. Either Benita had figured out that Stan was poisoned and was trying to duplicate the means, or whoever killed her wanted it to look as though she was the killer.

  Molly shook her head slowly. “You’re wrong. I can see her making the phone calls. She had a vindictive streak. And she was really angry with Dad and me because we fired her. Angry enough to do something crazy. I can even see her killing someone, if the circumstances were lined up right. But Benita couldn’t have poisoned Dad’s coffee. She was riding the day he died.”

  David crossed his arms over his chest and nodded. “She’s right, Jeri. Benita had a mount in almost every race that Sunday, including the first and the eighth. She was in the Jockey Room an hour before the first post time and she wasn’t able to leave until she was finished with her last race.”

  Motive, means, and opportunity, I thought. Words to live by when investigating a crime. Even when they were damned inconvenient and forced me to abandon the first and most obvious theory.

  Benita may have had the motive, if her anger at the Torrances, father and daughter, had boiled over to the point where killing one of them seemed like apt revenge for getting fired. It wasn’t a logical motive, but murder is frequently done for the flimsiest and most ephemeral of reasons.

  Means Benita certainly had, if the plants found in her apartment were any indication. There was enough poison in the oleander alone to take out several human beings and a few horses as well. The lily of the valley, in plain sight in the vase, had been sitting in enough water for several cups of toxic tea.

  But opportunity? It wasn’t there.

  If my hunch was correct and someone had slipped a lethal dose into Stan Torrance’s coffee the day he died, he would have become ill shortly after he’d drunk a few mouthfuls. He’d collapsed right before the fifth race, sometime around two-thirty in the afternoon. Benita Pascal had reported to the Jockey Room at eleven-thirty in the morning, an hour before the first race’s twelve-thirty post time. She was required by California State Horse Racing Board regulations to remain there until she’d finished riding in her last scheduled race, which, if she’d ridden in the last race on the card, would have been nearly six on Sunday evening.

  The only other times she’d left the Jockey Room that afternoon, she was clad in colorful silks, boots, helmet, and goggles, walking from the scales to the paddock, to confer with the trainer and climb up into the irons of whichever thoroughbred she was planning to boot home.

  No, the poison must have been added to the mug in the tack room, where anyone walking along the shedrow or in and out of Barn Four could have slipped through the open door and added the deadly dose.

  That kind of access widened the field of potential killers considerably.

  So who else had the motive, means, and opportunity to kill Stan Torrance? Was Benita murdered because she knew the answer to that question?

  “It had to be someone else,” Molly was saying. “Someone who could get their hands on those plants. But that could be anyone. Oleander grows everywhere. That jerk who bought the house next door to me has oleander growing all over his yard. I’ve warned the neighborhood kids to stay away from it.”

  “And there was oleander in front of Benita’s apartment,” I recalled. “As for the other, you could walk through any greenhouse in the Bay Area and collect plenty of specimens.”

  “Wait a minute,” David said, belatedly putting the brakes on all our speculation. “We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here. I’ll grant you, this looks damned peculiar. But there could be some sort of explanation.”

  “Like what?” I argued. “Benita was an amateur botanist?”

  “All you’ve got is a theory, Jeri. We don’t know for sure that Stan was poisoned.”

  “That’s why I want to have what’s inside this mug tested,” I said, holding up the plastic bag.

  “And if what’s in the bottom of the mug can’t be identified?” Molly asked. “Or if there’s not enough of it to run tests? Then what?”

  “There’s another way to find out.” I glanced at David.

  “An autopsy,” he said quietly, looking at Molly as though he knew she wouldn’t like the idea.

  “But...” Molly considered his words and then frowned. “You mean we’d have to dig up my father’s body.”

  “It may be the only way to confirm whether he died of natural causes, or not,” I told her. “A pathologist could run some tests. But it’s your decision. You’re his next of kin.”

  She moved toward the office chair and sat down, considering the decision she had to make. “It’s funny,” she said. “After everything you’ve told me, I think maybe you’re right. That Dad was murdered. Yet I hesitate. Strange, isn’t it? Strange, because I do want to find out the truth. I want to prove it, one way or another. Yet I’m wondering what other people will think when they hear I decided to dig up my father’s body three weeks after he was buried. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

  “Who cares what they think?” David said.

  “Let them think, and let them talk,” I said. “I’m counting on it. When word gets out that your father’s body is being exhumed — and why — it might make whoever killed him nervous. Nervous enough to make a mistake.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  ON MONDAY MORNING MOLLY TORRANCE AUTHORIZED the exhumation and examination of Stan Torrance’s body.

  On Monday morning I took Stan’s coffee mug to a private lab in Oakland, where I asked my friend the lab tech to analyze its contents and report back to me as soon as possible.

  And that same Monday morning, a couple of Cargill Salt Company employees checking evaporation ponds on the marshy southern rim of San Francisco Bay found Benita Pascal’s leased Lexus sedan, abandoned on a narrow dirt access road near the Alviso Slough.

  Zeke Ramos was slumped in the passenger seat. He’d been shot in the back of the head.

  “I guess that blows the robbery theory,” I said when I heard the news.

  “Not necessarily,” Eddy Maltesta told me. “He could have had an accomplice.”

  I shook my head, though the detective couldn’t see me. He was in Fremont and I was in my Oakland office, with a cup of coffee in one hand and the telephone receiver tucked between my ear and my shoulder.

  Detective Maltesta had called to tell me about Ramos, as soon as he got the word Monday afternoon from the San José police, in whose jurisdiction the body, and the car, had been found. I’d evidently made the detective’s approved list. Most police officers don’t care to have a private investigator mucking around in a homicide investigation. But it seemed I was in Eddy’s good graces since Friday, when I’d located Deakin Kelley and shepherded the jockey over to the Fremont Police Department to make a statement.

  Or maybe the detective was trying to find out if I knew anything he didn’t.

  As I had the day before, I wondered about the advisability of bringing up the subject of poisonous plants. I’d just been cruising the Internet, confirming what I remembered about the toxicity and effects of the three plants found in Benita’s apartment. Again I decided against it. It had taken a lot to convince David yesterday, although Molly had been
an easier sell.

  No, it was probably too early to bring up the plants. For now, I concentrated on poking holes in Eddy’s theory that Ramos had killed Benita for the cash she was carrying.

  “Oh, come on, Eddy,” I said, setting my coffee mug on my desk. “I’m not buying a robbery gone sour.”

  Eddy Maltesta laughed, a sound that came rumbling through the telephone wire. “Mrs. Holveg saw Benita at the track Thursday night. With someone short and slight, someone who looked like a jockey.”

  “Friday you thought that someone was Deakin Kelley,” I argued. “But it wasn’t. Now you think it was Ramos. But it could have been anybody. Besides, I don’t take much stock in what Mrs. Holveg says. I talked with her yesterday, and she told me she’d seen Benita before eight that night. I understand she told you it was between eight and eight-thirty.”

  “That’s true,” he said, after a pause. He didn’t like the idea of the discrepancy in her story any more than I did. “So what was Ramos doing in Benita’s car?”

  “If Ramos killed Benita for the money — which I doubt — and took her car — which I also doubt — he’d have been long gone by now. Not hanging out down in the South Bay, waiting for someone to find him.”

  “Maybe the accomplice took him out.”

  “And left a shiny new car like that? I don’t think so.”

  “Shiny new car like that,” Eddy said, “is awfully easy to trace. Particularly since we had it on the want list.”

  I had to admit his comment had some merit. But I wasn’t going to give him any points.

  “There are easier ways to dispose of a body. Dump it in the slough, for one. This is, of course, assuming you don’t want the body to be found. Now, if you do want the body to be found, leaving it in a shiny new car on a road that cuts through a salt evaporator is about as visible as you can get. Did the San José cops find any money on Ramos? Large denomination bills, in an envelope like the one Benita was supposedly carrying in her purse?”

  Eddy laughed again. “Are you kidding? Nothing in his wallet but a California driver’s license. And a jock’s license issued by the California Horse Racing Board.”