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

by Janet Dawson

  “Which made it easy to identify the body. Too easy. I’m telling you, someone wanted that car found. And that body.” I leaned back in my office chair and put my feet up on my desk. “It’s not an accomplice you’re looking for, Eddy. Whoever murdered Benita wants you to think Ramos killed her. Just like the killer using that chameleon scarf to strangle Benita, to throw suspicion onto Molly Torrance or Deakin Kelley.”

  “Yeah, but Ramos is the one who had the best opportunity to steal the scarf out of Kelley’s locker in the jocks’ room.” I heard a rustling sound that told me Eddy was unwrapping a stick of cinnamon gum. “I’ll consider all the possibilities,” he said after he’d popped the gum into his mouth. “Anyway, Ramos wound up dead in San José’s backyard. I’m hoping they can turn up some leads. And share them with me.” He paused again. I heard a snapping sound as he chomped on his gum. “Speaking of sharing, Jeri, is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “Why do you ask?” It looked as though Eddy and I were going to have a conversation about poisonous plants after all.

  “I hear Molly Torrance decided to dig up her father and have him autopsied. Kind of unusual, three weeks after the man died of a heart attack. You know anything about that?”

  I took a deep breath, then exhaled it, swinging my legs back down to the floor. “What would you say if I told you I think Stan Torrance was murdered? And I think I know how?”

  “I’m listening.”

  I laid it out for him. He heard me out, then chomped on his gum some more before answering. “Poison, huh? Interesting theory, Jeri, but right now it doesn’t count for shit. If that man was murdered on my turf, I’d say you’d better get me some evidence. Maybe even a few suspects, while you’re at it.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Do that,” he said. “And make sure you tell me what you dig up.”

  “Speaking of autopsies,” I said, “what about the autopsy on Benita Pascal? What can you tell me?”

  He grumbled about the findings being preliminary and sketchy, but I pressed him for a few details. “We don’t have a clear time of death,” he said finally. “She was strangled with the scarf, that’s confirmed. And it looks like she was killed somewhere else and the body was moved into the stall.”

  “I thought so. Does somewhere else mean another location on the track? Or was she killed outside the track, and her body brought onto the backside?”

  “That I can’t tell you. Because I don’t know yet. But if I had to guess, I’d say somewhere else on the track.”

  After Eddy rang off, I replaced the phone in its cradle and turned my attention to the report I’d been writing. I was juggling several cases right now, glad of the business, since I had expenses as well. Where there are cases, there is also paperwork. Except for an appointment that morning with a local lawyer for whom I’d done investigations before, I’d spent most of the day in my office, searching databases, scheduling appointments, making phone calls, and catching up on all that paperwork.

  Even as I finished one report and started another, I kept turning the Torrance case over in my mind. Yesterday, after leaving Edgewater Downs, I’d driven over to Washington Hospital in Fremont. I came up against a dead end in my attempts to find out whether any trace of Stan’s blood remained somewhere in the hospital’s system. The E.R. staff said it was likely the usual samples had been drawn three weeks ago when the paramedics brought Stan to the emergency room after he’d collapsed at the track. But he’d died shortly after arriving, and the blood had probably been routinely disposed of a few days later.

  “What if a sample had been sent up to the lab?” I asked.

  The attending physician shrugged. “Then you’d have to ask the lab.”

  Just then an ambulance pulled up in the bay outside, carrying someone injured in a car crash. I was in the way. I left the E.R. and made my way to the lab. But it was Sunday evening, and the technician on duty in the lab said she couldn’t help me. Come back Monday, she added, and talk with someone in a management or supervisory position.

  In this situation, Molly had more clout than I did. She was Stan’s next of kin, in a better position to demand answers. When I’d called her at home last night, she promised to contact the hospital herself. Now I was waiting to hear from her.

  When the phone rang, I reached for it eagerly. I was hoping it was Molly. Instead I found myself talking to David Vanitzky.

  “I just heard the news about Ramos,” he said. “George Avalos in Security called me after Maltesta called him.”

  “You’re in the city?” David had been spending so much time at Edgewater Downs lately, it seemed a novelty for him to be at his office at Weper and Associates in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center.

  “Yes, I still have a day job,” he said wryly. “Although if I don’t focus on it a little more, Frank Weper is going to be seriously pissed off at me. I was supposed to fly to Denver today to finalize a deal. I put it off a few days and Frank’s not happy about it. But I just don’t feel like I can leave with everything that’s going on at the track. First Stan’s death, then the threats against Molly. Benita’s murder, and now Ramos is dead. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”

  “I have every hope that Detective Maltesta will do just that,” I told him. “And I’m going to do whatever I can to help. You might as well go to Denver. There’s not much you can do here, except pull strings for me at the track. You don’t have to be physically present to do that.”

  “No, I don’t,” he admitted. “I’ve told my partners that you’re working for me. And all the admin staff, including George Avalos, has been told to give you their full cooperation. I don’t have any control over the people who work for the racing board, of course, but I’m sure they are as interested in finding out who’s responsible for these deaths.”

  Particularly if it involves a race fixing scam, I thought, recalling my conversation the day before with Grady Kline and what he’d said about the “integrity of the sport.” The board’s priorities went beyond administering the rules that ran horse racing in California. Right up there on the A list was the need to police the sport. That meant eliminating anything that might shake the confidence of the betting public, anything that might prevent those railbirds and casual weekend bettors from lining up at the parimutuel windows at Edgewater Downs, Golden Gate Fields, or Bay Meadows, ready to lay their money on the nose of a thoroughbred with a catchy name, a good jockey, or promising stats.

  I fielded several more phone calls after the one from David, none of them from Molly. She finally called as I was printing out the last of my client reports.

  “Any luck at the hospital?” I asked.

  “Well...” The way she dragged out the word told me the results were mixed. “Possibly. But it sounds like a real long shot. I went over there after I started the process for the exhumation. I got bounced around all through the hospital’s administration office. The guy in charge of the lab was really nice and said he’d look into it. They do keep blood longer than the E.R. does. Then I wound up talking with someone from risk management. I told her that I’m having Dad’s body exhumed and autopsied, and I told her why. She seemed pretty nervous about the whole thing. I think she’s concerned that I’m going to come back at the hospital with a lawsuit or something in case it turns out he was poisoned and they didn’t pick it up and treated Dad for a heart attack instead.”

  “It’s her job to be concerned,” I told her. “We live in a litigious world. I know. As a private investigator, lawsuits are my bread and butter.”

  “I’m not blaming the hospital,” Molly said. “I just want to know if Dad was poisoned. And if he was, I want whoever did it.”

  “Me too.” I paused. “I don’t know if you’ve heard —”

  “Heard what?” she asked, alarmed.

  “Zeke Ramos was found dead this morning, near Alviso.” I gave her the gist of my phone conversation with Detective Maltesta.

  “Oh, God,” she said when I’d f
inished. “This is terrible. First Dad, then Benita. Now Zeke. They say bad things come in threes. I hope nobody else dies.”

  So did I. We already had three deaths too many.

  I stuck the client report I’d printed into an envelope and sealed it. After printing out an address label, I set the envelope on the postage meter. The phone rang again. I picked it up. “Howard Investigations.”

  I heard a voice that was vaguely familiar, one I couldn’t place, until the caller identified herself. “Ms. Howard? I’m glad I caught you. I’ve been trying to reach you, but your phone has been busy. This is Emilia Pascal, Benita’s mother.”

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Pascal. What can I do for you?”

  “This is very odd,” she said. For a second I thought she was referring to my theory concerning the plants in Benita’s apartment. But she went on, “It came in this afternoon’s mail. I’ve put in a call to Detective Maltesta, but he wasn’t available. I thought you should know as well.”

  “What came in the mail?”

  “A brown envelope, addressed to Letitia. It’s from Benita. I know, because I recognize her handwriting. But it’s postmarked Friday, the day Benita’s body was found. It was mailed from Newark. It’s got too much postage, too many stamps, 1 mean.”

  “Did you open it?” I asked, trying not to let the urgency show in my voice.

  “Of course I did.” Mrs. Pascal was clearly baffled, and her next words told me why. “There was a note. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but Benita wrote it. It’s scribbled on the back of some sort of flyer. And the flyer was wrapped around a thick stack of money. Lots of money.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  BENITA’S FATHER WAS DRIVING FROM HEALDSBURG TO Fremont, Mrs. Pascal told me, so he could deliver the envelope, and the note and money that were inside it, to Detective Maltesta. I thanked her for bringing me up to date. As soon as I’d hung up the phone, I locked up my office and went downstairs to the lot on Franklin Street where I park my Toyota.

  A few minutes later I was on Interstate 880, heading south toward Fremont. It was after two, and the freeway was clogged with cars, though not as bad as it would be in a couple of hours during the afternoon rush hour. I maneuvered my way over to the fast lane and pushed the Toyota up to the limit.

  As far as I was concerned, this latest development put the lid on the supposition that Zeke Ramos had robbed and killed Benita. She simply hadn’t been robbed. Instead she’d mailed the cash to her daughter. Which meant she didn’t have the money with her when she went to the track that evening.

  Why did Benita go back to the track? I asked myself again. What if Ramos had let something slip that night? Certainly he’d been involved in something unsavory. I’d suspected that when I’d seen him taking an envelope from Yves Boussac earlier in the day. And Benita had accused him outright of buzzing the horse. What if he’d given himself away? A chance admission might have compelled Benita to skip the meeting she’d scheduled with me and go over to the track to follow up some lead, hoping to prove that Ramos was dirty.

  I didn’t have the answers to those questions, so I considered others. According to Mrs. Pascal, the envelope had lots of stamps on it, and it had been mailed from Newark, postmarked last Friday. Benita must have mailed it after she’d left the bar that night, around six-thirty or six-forty-five, presumably on her way to our seven o’clock meeting. The Newark post office was on Thornton Avenue, near Benita’s apartment. That was the direction she might have gone if she was headed toward the Mowry Avenue coffee shop in Fremont where she was supposed to meet me. It was the opposite direction from the track.

  That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Benita already had the envelope. It was just a guess that she’d stopped at a post office to mail it. A logical guess if she’d had to buy stamps from one of the lobby vending machines. But there were branch post offices everywhere these days, and one could just as easily buy stamps at grocery stores. And Benita could have had a book of stamps in her purse, as I myself did. Which meant she could have dropped the envelope into the nearest collection box. Doing that hinted at some urgency on her part to get rid of the envelope, to get it out of her hands into the relative safety of a Postal Service drop box before she went over to Edgewater Downs.

  Pam Cullen claimed to have seen Benita on the backside, with a man who could have been Ramos. That encounter had supposedly occurred sometime before eight, or between eight and eight-thirty, depending on which story I believed, the one Pam told me or the one she told the police. I wasn’t even sure I considered Pam Cullen a reliable witness. But if Benita was on the backside, who did she talk with? What had happened after she left the bar? I wanted to know. And two of the people who could tell me were dead.

  Frustrated, I drummed my fingers as I pulled into the next lane and passed a car that was moving slower than mine. It was a quarter after three when I parked in the lot near the Fremont Police Department. When I went inside, I saw a waiting area with a few chairs, and a glass window with a uniformed Fremont police officer behind it. Victor Pascal, Benita’s father, sat in a chair near the door that led back to the police department offices. He looked tired and troubled, as he had when I’d met him on Saturday. Then he saw me and got to his feet.

  “Ah, Ms. Howard. I see that my wife was able to get in touch with you.”

  “Yes. I’m very interested in seeing the envelope and what’s in it,” I told him.

  He reached into the inner pocket of the brown tweed jacket he was wearing. At that moment, the interior door next to the glass window opened and a stocky figure in a gray suit stepped out into the lobby and looked around.

  “Mr. Pascal?” Eddy Maltesta said, focusing first on the man who stood next to me. Then Eddy realized I was there and his eyebrows rose a few notches. “Well, you don’t miss a trick, do you?”

  “Mrs. Pascal called me. I really would like to see the note.”

  “I’ll bet you would. It’s evidence.”

  “But maybe I can help you interpret it. Remember, Benita was supposed to meet me Thursday night. For all we know, she was planning to give that note to me.”

  I didn’t quite believe that, but if it would get me in the door, I’d use it. “You really do talk a good game,” Eddy said.

  “Whatever works,” I admitted.

  He thought about it for a moment. Then he sighed and beckoned both me and Mr. Pascal to follow him. In Eddy’s office, I watched as Mr. Pascal removed the envelope from his jacket and handed it to the detective. Eddy held up the brown letter-sized envelope, then turned it over. I could see the name and address of Letitia Pascal printed in blue ink below a colorful mass of stamps. I could barely discern the Newark postmark and Friday’s date. It was torn at the corner where there would have been a return address, and the slit at the top was jagged and uneven, as though someone had ripped the envelope open with a finger.

  “The mail is delivered to our house around noon,” Mr. Pascal explained. “Letitia was home from school for lunch. When she saw that the envelope was addressed to her, she got very excited about getting a letter and opened it. She was even more excited when all that money fell out on the table. My wife immediately called me at the winery and I came right home. We didn’t even notice the flyer right away.”

  “When you looked at it, did the writing on the back mean anything to you?” Eddy asked.

  Mr. Pascal shook his head. “Not at all. We couldn’t make head or tail of it. Just scribbles, as far as I could see. Perhaps only my daughter knew what it meant. Or maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all. I suppose she could have wrapped the flyer around the money so no one could see what was in the envelope.”

  Eddy fingered the opening on the envelope, then reached in and removed the contents. A sheet of blue paper had been folded in thirds, and tucked inside of it was a thick stack of greenbacks. As the bartender at the Backstretch had said Thursday night, it was a wad big enough to choke a horse. Eddy whistled, then he started counting. There were thirty one-hundred-dollar bi
lls.

  “Three thousand bucks. That’s a lot of cash to be carrying in an envelope stuck in your purse,” he said as he wrote out a receipt for Mr. Pascal. “Or to send through the mail. What was your daughter doing with all that money?”

  Victor Pascal shook his head. “Ever since she started riding in Northern California again, she would bring money every time she came to visit Letitia. We never knew when she was coming to see her daughter. She would just show up. So I can only assume that Benita was planning to come to Healdsburg soon, and that’s why she had the money. The fact that she mailed it to Letitia means that her plans had changed and she wasn’t coming. It also means, of course, that the other jockey — Ramos, you said his name was — didn’t rob her. Is he still missing?”

  Eddy gave me a look. Then he turned to Mr. Pascal. “No, Mr. Ramos isn’t missing anymore. He’s dead. His body was found in the San José area early this morning.”

  Shock was evident on Mr. Pascal’s face. “Another death? Another murder?” Eddy confirmed this with a nod. “This is terrible. I was hoping this man could shed some light on... on what happened to my daughter. Surely these two murders are connected.”

  “Possibly,” Eddy said in a noncommittal voice. “I’ll certainly let you know if we turn up anything. Once our investigation is over, this money will of course be returned to you. For your granddaughter.”

  The older man sighed. “Yes, for Letitia. Who now has no mother. Although sometimes I think she never did.” He looked at his watch. “I should go now. It will take me two hours to get back to Healdsburg at this time of day.”

  Eddy asked another officer to escort Mr. Pascal out to the lobby. When Benita’s father had gone, Eddy reached for the flyer and opened it, reading first the printed side, then the side that had the black scribbles on it. He shrugged, then handed the flyer to me. “What do you make of it?”

  I held up the sheet and read a printed advertisement for a band that was appearing at a jazz club in Berkeley, on a date two weeks ago. “It was in her purse for a while,” I said. “See, the paper was folded in quarters at one time. And look at how the corners are frayed and curled. Benita probably picked up the flyer somewhere, folded it and stuck it in her purse, then forgot about it. Then at some point she needed something to write on, and this was the first thing she grabbed.”