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

by Janet Dawson

  That jibed with the stories making the rounds yesterday at Edgewater Downs, pointing the accusatory finger at Zeke Ramos. Easy enough to blame him, since he’d disappeared from the backside. But I wasn’t so sure that Ramos was the answer.

  “It’s possible,” I conceded. “I’ve been told that Benita sometimes carried large sums of money. And that she was carrying an envelope full of cash that night. Although I don’t know why.”

  Victor Pascal glanced at his wife, then back at me. “When she came to visit us, which as my wife has told you wasn’t often, Benita would bring an envelope full of money. This she would bestow on us. For Letitia, she would say. When she didn’t come to visit, which was the norm, she sent checks.”

  “So she supported Letitia?”

  Mr. Pascal corrected me politely. “My wife and I support Letitia. She is our granddaughter, our responsibility. Every penny that Benita sent has been put into a trust fund, to be used for Letitia’s education.”

  I thought about the envelope Mike the bartender had seen in Benita’s purse the night she was murdered. A wad big enough to choke a horse, he’d said. Had Benita planned to visit Healdsburg, to see her parents and daughter, to distribute money to salve her guilty conscience?

  “Maybe she was planning to visit you,” I said, voicing what I’d been thinking.

  “That’s what I told Detective Maltesta.” Mr. Pascal nodded.

  Mrs. Pascal roused herself and leaned forward. “But she’d already been here. Monday of last week.”

  “How often did she come to Healdsburg in the past few months?” I asked. “She’d moved from the East Coast to the Bay Area, to ride at the Northern California tracks. Did she come to visit more often?”

  “About once a month,” Mrs. Pascal said. “On a Monday or Tuesday, because there was no racing. For her, the racing was the most important thing. I asked if she was coming for Thanksgiving and she said no, because of the racing. But she promised to be here for Christmas.”

  “So if she was coming to see you this week, she was deviating from her pattern.”

  “With Benita, I don’t know that there was a pattern,” Mr. Pascal said.

  True, I thought. I hadn’t been able to discern one yet. But if Benita hadn’t planned to give that envelope full of cash to her parents, the money had a different destination. But where was it going, and why?

  “Did Benita say anything during her visit last week to indicate that she was experiencing any problems?”

  Mrs. Pascal shook her head. “No, nothing. It was a visit much like the others. She got here right before Letitia came home from school and stayed for dinner. She left when Letitia went to bed. She brought a gift for Letitia, as she usually did. Clothes, a music box, once some jewelry. Always expensive. Too expensive.” Mrs. Pascal’s pursed lips told me she’d had the same thoughts about Benita’s guilty conscience.

  “Last week she brought books,” she continued. “Some of the Nancy Drew stories, and a big book about horse racing. They’re a little too old for Letitia, though. I’ve put them away until she’s reading at that level.”

  I wondered if there was another reason Mrs. Pascal had put away the book about horse racing. Maybe she didn’t want her granddaughter infected with the same bug that had bitten Benita.

  And maybe Benita had wanted to shield her daughter from prying eyes. I thought of the background information I’d gleaned on her earlier in the week, my feeling that her recorded life had begun when she’d started riding racehorses. Now I knew why Benita had been reticent with the press, why she’d cultivated the air of mystery, and why no one I’d spoken with at the track knew she had a child.

  “Granny, I’m hungry.” I heard Letitia’s voice coming from the kitchen, and I automatically glanced at my watch. It was past one, no doubt approaching time for the Pascals’ lunch.

  I stood. “Thank you for the coffee. And the information.”

  “If you find out anything that will help identify our daughter’s killer...,” Mr. Pascal began.

  I nodded and finished his thought. “I’ll be in touch with the police, of course.”

  Both of Benita’s parents were now on their feet, and we moved toward the front hallway. Somewhere behind the stairs that led to the second floor there was a door leading to the kitchen, because now Letitia came through it.

  “Is the lady leaving now?” I heard her ask before I saw her. Then she moved into view. She was still dressed in the bright red sweatsuit, but she’d removed her sneakers in favor of white plush bunny slippers with long ears on either side of each foot and black button eyes. She’d also removed Aunt Maria’s shimmery gold skirt from around her waist and replaced it with another length of material, one that looked familiar.

  “May I look at your sash?” I asked.

  The little girl nodded. I knelt on the hardwood floor and held out my hand, running my fingers over the silky blue material. The hue looked different in the pale yellow light from the overhead fixture, but the pattern at the end was unmistakable. A green chameleon.

  “Where did you get that scarf?” Mrs. Pascal asked. “I haven’t seen it before.”

  “Mommy gave it to me,” Letitia said. “It was in her purse. I took it out and it was pretty, so she said I could have it.”

  I straightened and looked down at Letitia. But I wasn’t seeing her. I was seeing Benita as I’d seen her yesterday morning when Molly and I found her body, lying in the scattered straw of the stall, the scarf that choked the life out of her still wrapped around her windpipe.

  If Benita Pascal’s chameleon scarf was tied around her daughter’s waist, that meant Deakin was right. His scarf was the one knotted around Benita’s neck.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  AFTER I LEFT THE PASCAL HOUSE, I DROVE BACK downtown and parked in a municipal lot midway between the plaza and the corner of Healdsburg Avenue and Mill Road. I went looking for a phone booth with an intact directory. When I found one, there was a listing for Robert Colvin. I wrote down the address and phone number, then headed for my car.

  Mill Road turned into Westside Road on the other side of the freeway. I drove west out of town, and once I crossed Dry Creek, I started looking at names and numbers on the mailboxes. I found the Colvin place easily enough, on the north side of the road. There were two signs on the fence near the mailbox. One was weathered wood, peeling after several seasons of rain. The sign informed me that Colvin Stables boarded and trained horses.

  The other sign was new, made of metal painted white with red and black letters. It was decorated with the logo of a real estate firm. The sign told me the property was for sale. It also told me something about the direction of the Colvins’ fortunes.

  I pointed my Toyota up the gravel driveway that stretched for about a quarter of a mile. Just past a stand of oak trees the drive curved to the left. Now I saw a one-story ranch-style house that looked as though routine exterior maintenance had been deferred too long. The drive branched here, with the one on the right leading to a closed double garage. On the left the gravel path continued back past the house to a barn that appeared to be in the same state of disrepair. I didn’t see any horses in the paddock near the barn. In fact, the place looked utterly abandoned. I didn’t see any humans either, until I was out of my car and walking toward the front door. It opened as I stepped up onto the porch.

  The woman standing in the doorway was in her late forties, I guessed, judging from the gray strands in her short untidy brown hair and the lines on her face. She wore blue jeans and a green sweater, both baggy on her thin frame. Her shoes were scuffed brown leather loafers worn over a pair of thick wool socks. She kept one hand on the knob and the other on the doorjamb, gazing out at me with a poker face that didn’t quite disguise the weariness in her hazel eyes and the dark circles underneath them.

  “We don’t board or train horses anymore.” Her voice sounded rusty, as though she hadn’t used it in a while. “If you’re interested in buying, you’ll have to contact the real estate agen
t. His name and number are on the sign.”

  “I’m not here about horses or property,” I told her. “I’d like to talk with Robert Colvin.”

  One side of her mouth turned upward in what might have been part of a smile. “Good luck. He doesn’t talk.”

  “By choice? Or is there another reason, Mrs. Colvin? You are Mrs. Colvin, aren’t you?”

  The smile, if it was that, disappeared. The woman dipped her chin once, stingy with her nod. “Yes, I am. As for why my husband doesn’t talk, he had a stroke a couple of years ago. Doesn’t walk either.”

  “Then I’d like to talk with you.”

  “What about? And who are you?”

  I reached into my shoulder bag and took out my identification. “My name’s Jeri Howard. I’m a private investigator from Oakland. As for what it’s about, it concerns a woman named Benita Pascal.”

  Mrs. Colvin gave a short derisive snort of laughter. “The little bitch. Got herself killed, I hear. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving slut.”

  The venom in her words was matched by the poisonous anger leaking from her eyes. I shivered, whether from the cold or the proximity to such bitterness, I wasn’t sure. “May I come in, Mrs. Colvin?”

  “Sure, why the hell not?” She dropped her hand from the doorjamb and motioned me into the hallway. “Call me Gwen. Every time you call me Mrs. Colvin, I want to look over my shoulder for my mother-in-law. And she’s been dead ten years.”

  Once I’d stepped inside the house, Gwen Colvin shut the door and led the way into the living room. The interior of the house had the same air of disuse as the outside. The dark red tile in the hallway was scuffed and muddy, and it didn’t look as though the carpet in the living room had been vacuumed in quite a while. The decor could only be described as early clutter. Newspapers, books, and magazines littered the floor next to the high-backed sofa. The painting above it, showing a horse-racing scene, hung at a tilt. I saw a scattering of dirty dishes and cutlery on the coffee table. The objects on the shelves — vases, knickknacks, framed photographs — swam in pools of dust. A couple of plants on the windowsill used to be green but they’d died a long time ago. The drapes were open to the gray November day outside, and the sickly yellow glow coming from the lamp at one end of the sofa didn’t do much to augment the light.

  “You want something to drink?” Gwen Colvin offered, staring down at the dishes. She piled a couple of mugs on top of a plate and balanced them in her left hand while she scooped up a bowl and several spoons with her left. “I’ve got coffee. I live on coffee these days. And cereal.”

  “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  “Suit yourself. I’ll be right back.” She tossed the words over her shoulder as she headed through a doorway that I guessed led back to the kitchen.

  While she was gone I examined the photographs on the dusty shelves. All of them showed horses. Some of them showed people as well. I spotted a younger version of my hostess. The man in the photographs was tall and blond. I picked up one of the pictures, a head-and-shoulders shot of the man I assumed was Robert Colvin. In the background I saw a grandstand and saddled racehorses in a paddock that looked like the one at Golden Gate Fields. Colvin looked tanned and vigorous, a man in his forties who led an outdoor life.

  Not anymore. He was somewhere in this house, now trapped and wordless in his own paralyzed body.

  “That’s Bob,” Gwen Colvin said, returning to the living room. She cradled a red ceramic mug in her hands. “It was taken about a year before he had his stroke.” She sat down on the sofa and waved her hand at a chair near the window. “So what do you want to know?”

  I moved the jacket and the unopened mail that had been tossed onto the chair and sat down. “How did you find out Benita was dead?”

  She put her hands behind her head and leaned back, swinging her loafers up to rest on the coffee table. “One of my old racetrack buddies. I still have a few friends in the game, even though we’ve been out of it for a couple of years. She called me yesterday, after the story hit the papers in the Bay Area. She said Benita had been found in a stall at Edgewater Downs. Strangled. Somebody finally wrung her damn neck.” She laughed again. “If you’re trying to find out who, the line forms on the left. It’s probably somebody Benita screwed, literally or figuratively.”

  “Let’s back up,” I said. “Tell me when you first met her.”

  “Nine years ago. It was the summer before her senior year in high school,” Gwen said, confirming what Mrs. Pascal had told me earlier. “We needed somebody to muck out stalls. Benita was horse crazy. A lot of girls are at that age. She was hanging out at the riding stables south of here, doing odd jobs so she could ride. Bob met her there, and he hired her.”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t think anything about it, at the time. We’d had high school kids working for us before, boys and girls. But Bob never screwed any of them, as far as I knew.” She stopped and swallowed some of her coffee. “Benita worked here that summer, then after school and on weekends through the year. Then when she graduated, she moved out here. We had a little one-room house out beyond the barn. We’d had jockeys and exercise riders staying there before. Benita said she wanted to be a jockey. Bob said she had the touch.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I didn’t think she was any better or worse than any of the other kids I’d seen. They’re all lousy when they start out. Some of them get better. Some of them really shine. I guess Benita improved over the years,” Gwen added grudgingly. “But she was no Julie Krone, not by a long shot, no matter what you read in the sports press. That’s all hype.”

  “Did she do a decent job riding for you and your husband?”

  “Well enough.” She took another sip of coffee and set the mug on the coffee table. “Bob let her ride some horses on the fair circuit that summer. She won about as many as she lost. So Bob decided to give her a crack at some rides at the bigger tracks.”

  “In the Bay Area?” I asked. My background search had told me that Benita had ridden horses on the Northern California fair circuit in her early years as a jockey. There was no information indicating that she’d turned up at Bay Meadows or Golden Gate Fields nine years ago.

  “Not here,” Gwen was saying. “Up in Washington State and Canada. Bob’s from Bellingham, Washington, and he got his start at the tracks up there near Seattle, like Longacres, which is closed now. We moved down here over ten years ago, to be close to my mother, who was dying of cancer. But we were still training for owners up there.”

  “So Benita got a crack at the big-time, way back then.”

  The bitter expression returned to Gwen’s face. “That’s not all she got a crack at. I suppose it started that fall, up in the Northwest. It ended here, in December of that year. On a day like today, gray and gloomy. I came home after a visit to Mom. I found them together, my husband and his girl jockey, out in the little house behind the barn. They were humping away, like a stallion and a mare. I told her to get dressed and pack her gear and get out. I told her if I ever saw her here again, I’d kill her.”

  I pushed away the picture her words had brought. Someone certainly had killed Benita, but I didn’t think Gwen Colvin had made a special trip down to the Bay Area to do it. Her hurt was part of her now, woven into the fiber of her being, like a thread of scratchy wool that makes you itch every time you put on the shirt.

  “Did you know Benita had a baby the following spring?” I asked, watching her face for a reaction.

  “Yes, I did.” Gwen’s lips curved into another bitter smile. “I suppose you think it’s Bob’s. Maybe it is. But don’t count on ever finding out. That little chippy wasn’t too damn particular about spreading her legs. I heard she was more choosy afterward. Concentrated on the dicks that would get her something. Or somewhere.”

  To hear Benita’s mother tell it, her daughter had been an innocent until she encountered Bob Colvin, the evil seducer twice her age. But as far as Gwen Colvin was concerned, the sexual escapade out by the b
arn had been all Benita’s fault. I guess it depends on your perspective.

  Gwen took another swallow of coffee and made a face. “I heard she’d dumped the kid on her folks and headed East to see if she could make it as a jockey at the tracks there. I tried to forget about her, but it wasn’t easy when she started winning races at the bigger tracks. Then she gets her picture in Sports Illustrated. I didn’t know she was at Edgewater Downs until a friend of mine told me. I don’t get to the races anymore, and we haven’t trained any horses in three years. It was all over, long before Bob had the stroke.”

  “Why was it over before your husband had his stroke?”

  “The state pulled his license,” she said baldly. “Three years ago. The California Horse Racing Board accused him of drugging horses. I didn’t believe it and I still don’t. He wouldn’t do anything like that. The man had been training racehorses for over twenty years, without so much as a suspension. No way would he risk it all on a race fixing scheme. It was a setup job. Somebody else covering his tracks by planting evidence on Bob, and I’ve got my suspicions who. It as good as killed him. Why do you think he had a stroke, a man of forty-seven, in perfect health?”

  I could think of a few reasons, the same ones a medical professional might come up with. Just as I could cynically tell myself that Bob Colvin might have been dancing on the edge of legality all those years as a racehorse trainer, until the odds finally caught up with him. But she wasn’t interested in my opinion. She’d already convinced herself that he was innocent of the charge, and she’d also made up her mind about what led to her husband’s debilitation. Earlier, when she’d told me about finding him with Benita, I’d wondered why she’d stayed with him. Now I guessed it was because he finally needed her.

  I heard an inarticulate cry coming from the back of the house. She heard it, too, and she quickly got to her feet, dismissing me. “Bob’s awake. You’ve got to go now.”