by Janet Dawson
“It must be hard, to see someone you care about disintegrating like that.” As I said the words I thought of my own father. He was a history professor at Cal State Hayward, in his sixties, active and vigorous. But what would happen in ten, fifteen, twenty years? Would I have to make the same choices that Deakin and his sister were faced with?
“It’s hard, all right. But not for the reasons you think.” Deakin’s eyes looked past me, as though he was seeing things etched on his memory. “I don’t much care for the old man, and the feeling’s mutual. He’s an irascible old bastard who makes life miserable for everyone around him. When I was a kid, he used to get liquored up. Then he’d yell and break things. And hit me and my mother. Until the day I hit him back.”
Now Deakin glanced back at me, with black humor. “Surprised the hell out of him. He didn’t think his scrawny runt of a son would stand up to him.”
“He used to beat you?”
“Not according to him.” Deakin’s smile twisted until it wasn’t a smile anymore. “As far as he was concerned, he just didn’t believe in sparing the rod. Or his belt.”
“But you take care of him. Why?”
“I do it for my sister,” he said simply. “Ginny loves him. God knows why. But he was never as rough on her as he was on me. Ginny was always his pet. Not a disappointment, like me. So I do it for Ginny’s sake, not his.”
Family obligation, I thought. Sometimes it was a burden shouldered willingly, other times a net, a trap. “Why is he being kicked out of the nursing home in Glendale?”
“He’s disruptive. He gets into fights with the staff and the other patients. And he wanders off.” Deakin shrugged, his shoulders moving inside the jacket. “The old man used to live with me at my house in Arcadia. He got worse, needed someone around all the time to make sure he didn’t set fire to the place. I had a series of hired hands, ranging from baby-sitters to a licensed practical nurse. Never could keep one very long. He kept driving them away.”
He sighed heavily and shook his head. “Then that whole business with the Barnstable murder flared up. I couldn’t deal with him anymore. I told Ginny he’d be better off someplace where people could watch him round the clock. She didn’t like the idea much. But she can’t take care of him either. She’s a staff sergeant in the Army. Up until last summer she was overseas, and now she’s at Fort Benning.”
“So you put him in the nursing home in Glendale,” I said.
He nodded. “Yeah. About a month before I came up here to ride for Molly. He seemed to be all right with it, at first. Plenty of other old guys there to swap stories with. I thought it was going to work. Now this. It’s just one damn thing after another.”
It certainly sounded that way, at least in the life of one hard-luck jockey named Deakin Kelley. “Where’s the scarf Molly’s friend Tina gave you?” I asked.
Deakin looked confused at this shift in direction. “The chameleon scarf? In my gear at the track. I think. I’m not sure. Why?”
“Benita was strangled with one of the chameleon scarves,” I told him.
He swore softly. “Damn. That’s no accident, unless it was Benita’s scarf. And she wasn’t wearing it last night. What if someone wants to make it look like Molly or I killed her? But anyone with access to the Jockey Room could take that scarf out of my gear.”
My stomach was growling again, as though the granola bars had only fueled my hunger. “Look, I haven’t eaten much since breakfast, and I saw a coffee shop back there at Cedar and Mowry. Let’s head over there and grab a bite.”
Deakin looked at the envelope he still held in his left hand. “I’ve got a few more nursing homes to visit. But that can wait. I could use a cup of coffee.”
Chapter Twenty-two
A CUP OF COFFEE — BLACK, NO CREAM, NO SUGAR — was just about all Deakin had. Unless you counted the small green salad. No dressing, no croutons, no crackers. Just a bowl of anemic-looking iceberg lettuce topped with a few pallid carrot strips and a wan cherry tomato the size of a large marble.
I ate my way through most of a cheeseburger with onion rings, then belatedly felt guilty as I watched Deakin. Fork in hand, he poked indifferently at his salad. He’d eaten barely enough greens to keep a rabbit happy. His lack of appetite might have been due to the situation with his father, as well as Benita Pascal’s murder. But I knew there was another reason as well, having to do with the way he made his living.
I leaned back against the vinyl cushions of the booth where we sat, wiping my hands on a paper napkin. “I guess it must be hard to keep your weight down to riding level.”
He smiled ruefully as he set down his fork. “Yeah. Hell of a way for a grown man to live. If I gain weight, I won’t be able to ride. I don’t ride, I don’t make any money. I watch my food intake pretty carefully. A lot of the guys flip.”
I must have looked mystified, so he explained. “Flipping means bulimia. The finger down the throat. It’s fairly common. But I hate it.” He stopped and spread his hands on the Formica surface of the table. “Making weight has never been easy, but the older I get...” He shrugged. “I’m thirty-four. The past few years it seems harder to keep the pounds off.”
“I’ve noticed that myself.” I surveyed the remains of my burger. Deakin’s mention of bulimia made me feel slightly queasy now that I’d consumed the greasy food. I didn’t even want to think about fat grams, cholesterol. Or the fact that I had recently turned thirty-five and I didn’t get as much exercise as I should.
“Short men and fat women,” Deakin said, reaching for his coffee mug.
“I’m not fat.” My defensive hackles went up, along with my eyebrows. “These are comfortable curves.”
A grin transformed his face and his blue eyes glinted with amusement. “Very comfortable. And appealing, Jeri. But I wasn’t talking about you. I’m commenting on the fact that in these politically correct times there are still two acceptable targets. Short men and fat women.”
“Don’t let the fat acceptance people hear you say that,” I cautioned.
“True. But that still leaves short men.” He sipped his coffee and set down the mug.
“I take it you’ve had a few slings and arrows about your size.”
“More than a few.” He smiled again, but this time there wasn’t much humor in it. “I’ve heard nothing but, since I hit puberty and stopped growing. All the guys I went to grade school with shot up like trees. Me, I hit five-two and stayed.” He shook his head. “It was really hard to get dates, y’know. All the girls were taller than I was. I went to the senior prom with my cousin.”
“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” I told him. “So did I.”
He laughed. “Her name was Emily, and she went with me under duress. Said duress applied by my mother and my aunt.”
“His name was Fred. And I asked him. Because I didn’t want to miss the prom. Funny how important it seemed back then.” I looked at Deakin over the detritus of our meal. “So your father used to call you a runt.”
“Most of the time. That was his name for me. His other favorite was ‘Hey, you.’ The old man wasn’t big on endearments.” He huddled inside his jacket and leaned back against the booth. “I take after my mother. She was shorter than me, small-boned and fine-featured. Most of the Deakins are. The old man was big and burly and tough back then. He’s not so tough anymore. Now he’s just old.”
“Where’d you grow up?” I asked.
“Lamar, Colorado. Ever hear of it?”
I shook my head. “Is it up in the mountains?”
“No. High plains, down in the southeastern corner of the state. It’s the county seat of Prowers County, which probably has more cows than people. Mom was from an even smaller town to the east of Lamar, called Granada. Her family farmed there by the Arkansas River for a couple of generations. The old man, he was from Texas originally. He was a drifter, though. He hired out as a laborer on farms, feed lots, anywhere he could. He met my mother when he was working for her father. He got my moth
er pregnant. That’s how I came into the world, about six months after a shotgun wedding.”
He stopped talking when the waitress showed up to clear away our dishes. She asked if he wanted more coffee. He shook his head.
When she’d gone, I prompted him to continue with his story. “Your father stayed put, then?”
“Why not?” Deakin countered. “He had it good for a while, since my grandpa Deakin didn’t want his little girl Mae to have a rough time of it. Even if my grandparents didn’t much care for their new son-in-law.”
“You say for a while. I take it something happened to cause some estrangement between your grandparents and your father.”
“Oh, yeah. When my mother was pregnant with Ginny. I was four. The old man started cheating on Mom. I figure he’d been doing it all along, but he got caught. I remember Grandpa, Mom’s brother, and the old man having it out, a lot of yelling. I was too young to remember most of the details. I just know things got worse after Grandpa died. The way the old man slapped my mother around, I don’t know why she didn’t leave him.”
“Maybe she figured she had no place to go. Or that she had to keep the marriage together for you and your sister.”
Those feelings were fairly common among battered wives, I knew. But Deakin’s next words told me he wasn’t buying it.
“My sister and I would have been a hell of a lot better if she’d taken us and gone home to her family. I wish she had. They’d have taken her in. They didn’t have any more use for the old man than I did.” He grimaced. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. It’s water under the bridge. My mother died in a car accident years ago. And the old man’s been hanging around my neck ever since, like a damned millstone. Nothing’s going to bring Mom back, or change the past.”
He was right, of course, and it was time to steer the conversation to the more recent past. “How did you get started riding racehorses?”
“There was a racetrack in Holly, Colorado,” he said. “East of Lamar and Granada, near the Kansas border. Back when I was in high school they had quarterhorse racing on the weekends, in the spring. I always liked horses. My grandpa used to let us grandkids ride one of his old quarterhorses, a big gelding named Mr. Stubbs. We’d put a bridle on him and ride him bareback. When we were youngsters, we’d have to climb up on a fence out in the barnyard just to get on that horse’s back.”
He smiled at the memory. “Of course, I stayed little. Since I was so small, one of my cousins said I ought to look into being a race rider. That was my senior year in high school. I didn’t have the grades or the inclination to go on to college. Not that we had the money either. So one weekend I went to the track in Holly and talked with one of the trainers. He started me out as an exercise rider. I followed him around the fair circuit in Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, then one day he put me up on a horse, as a jockey. I lost. But I won my first race a month later. I kept winning, then I moved from quarterhorses to thoroughbreds. I’ve been riding races ever since.”
“How and when did you meet Stan and Molly Torrance?”
“Ruidoso Downs. It’s a track in south-central New Mexico,” he said. “Stan was training horses down there, about twelve years ago. Molly was just about to graduate from high school. I saw her at the track one day, and I thought she was just about the prettiest girl I’d ever seen.” He smiled. “We started dating, one thing led to another. We were seriously involved all through the summer and into the fall.”
“Then you broke up?”
“It was my doing,” Deakin said. “Molly was eighteen, I was twenty-three. Cocky, full of myself. My career was just starting to get off the ground. I wanted to move on, to the big tracks, the big purses, the big time. I wasn’t much interested in settling down.”
“Are you sure that’s what Molly wanted?” I asked.
He shrugged. “No, I’m not. But it seemed like it at the time, at least to me. I thought Molly wanted more out of the relationship than I was ready to give. At least that’s what I told myself as I hit the road out of town.” Now his voice took on a note of regret. “I’ve seen her off and on through the years, after they moved to Southern California. I ride at the tracks down there regularly and I’ve been up on plenty of horses trained by Stan and Molly. Every time I see her again, I feel like I’ve missed something.”
“So what’s going on between you and Molly? Right now?”
“You mean besides the fact that she’s the trainer and I’m the jockey?” He flashed his blue eyes at me. “Not as much as I would like to have going on. I like her a lot. It’s possible I love her. But right now she views me as an old friend. And former lover. Emphasis on the former. If our relationship is going to move in another direction, it’ll take time. I’m willing to give it the effort.”
“So you’re trying to rekindle the romance.”
“I suppose you could say that,” he told me. “But it’s a hell of a time to talk about romance. What with Stan dying, and now Benita. Not that I can be all that romantic with your friend Vanitzky rattling all the skeletons in my closet every time I look at Molly.”
I leaned back in my seat and laughed. “He seems to have a few skeletons of his own rattling around. One of them showed up at the track this morning, an ex-wife. I believe her name is Lina Barnstable.”
Deakin’s face took on an expression of pure horror. “Lina? She’s here? Hell and damnation.”
“She’s here, all right. With one of your colleagues. A rather sinister man named Ruy Camacho. I take it you’re acquainted with the former Mrs. Vanitzky.”
Deakin was more than acquainted with Lina Barnstable. I knew that from what Molly had told me this morning. But I wanted to hear the story from his lips. His reaction to the news that she was at Edgewater Downs spoke volumes.
“It never rains but it pours.” Judging from the look on his face, Deakin wasn’t talking about the weather.
The waitress stopped by the table again, waving her carafe of coffee. This time Deakin said yes. She topped off his cup with a brew that looked as though it had been sitting in the pot too long. Deakin gazed at it as though he’d rather have something of an alcoholic nature.
“Yeah, I have some history with Lina,” he admitted, reaching for the cup. “It’s been two years, close to three. When I knew her, she called herself Lina Pasmore. She kept the Pasmore name after she divorced her first husband. He was quite a bit older and had a pile of money. Even kept the name while she was married to Vanitzky. That’s one reason I didn’t even know she was married to the guy, until she told me she’d left him.”
Deakin shook his head. Then he swallowed a mouthful of coffee and grimaced, whether at the coffee or the memory, I couldn’t be sure. “Now you know why your friend David gives me the evil eye every time he sees me. He figures I had something to do with his marital bust-up. But I’m here to tell you it wasn’t all my doing. Lina likes men. She doesn’t stay with anyone very long. Ruy Camacho’s her latest, and I have to say, he’s lasted longer than I did.”
“I thought maybe David’s attitude toward you had something to do with Molly.”
The look on his face turned defiant, with some embarrassment showing around the edges, especially since we’d just been talking about his feelings for Molly Torrance. We both knew why. In the past, he hadn’t been particularly circumspect about where he slept, or in whose bed. That was why David Vanitzky was chary about the jockey. And it was certainly that old black magic of sexual attraction that got Deakin into the web of Lina’s sister-in-law, Ann Barnstable, who had killed her husband and measured her lover for a frame.
“I know I’ve got a bad reputation. You want to hear about the time I decked another jock in the paddock at Aqueduct and got set down by the stewards?” he challenged. “Or the time I got drunk and trashed a motel room near Pimlico? I thought all of that would have shown up when you ran that background check on me.”
“Actually it did,” I told him. “As well as a few other peccadilloes. I just think David’s
being protective. He’s known the Torrances a long time.”
“I’ve got news for you and Vanitzky. Molly’s thirty. She can take care of herself.”
“Time out,” I said. “What happens between you and Molly is your business, and hers. At the moment, there’s another woman I want to discuss with you. The one in the morgue. What were you, Benita, and Zeke Ramos talking about at the bar last night? The bartender said it looked as though you were arguing.”
“I wasn’t arguing with anybody,” Deakin said. “I was trying to keep Benita from ripping the hell out of Zeke. Which wasn’t easy. She was pissed at him.”
“What about?”
He sighed. “She accused him of buzzing the horse, the one he rode in the second race.”
“Stella Darling. Came zooming from the middle in the stretch and finished first.”
Deakin nodded. “Well, according to Benita, the zooming wasn’t the horse’s idea.”
“I wondered about that race. I thought Motherboard was going to win.”
“So did Benita. She was already hot because Megahertz didn’t finish in the money in the first race. She hated to lose. Hell, so do I. But she was really on a tear last night. Cussing out Gates Baldwin and jumping all over Zeke.”
“Why was she angry at Gates?” I asked, remembering the scene at the track the day before. She’d spoken sharply to the trainer after Megahertz had done poorly, when Baldwin had told her the horse bled through its Lasix. Then after she lost the second race, she’d looked as though she was ready to attack the man again. Did she suspect him of doing something to the horses?
“I don’t know why she was mad at Gates,” Deakin was saying. “Couldn’t make head or tail of it. Then Zeke came in and she jumped down his throat, said he was packing a buzzer during the second race. He told her she was crazy.”
“But did he deny it?”
Deakin thought for a moment. “Not in so many words. He said something like, prove it.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any way to prove it.”