A Killing At The Track

  Praise for Janet Dawson’s Jeri Howard mysteries

  Till the Old Men Die

  “Dawson keeps suspense and interest at high pitch.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Take a Number

  “Entertaining, enlightening, and most satisfying.”

  —Mostly Murder

  Don’t Turn Your Back on the Ocean

  “Mother/daughter feuds, family solidarity, an ecological mystery: Dawson blends these familiar ingredients with a chef’s élan.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Nobody’s Child

  “A rich plum pudding of a story sprinkled throughout with memorable characters.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  A Credible Threat

  “As usual, Dawson offers a well-constructed plot and smoothly polished writing.”

  —Booklist

  By Janet Dawson

  KINDRED CRIMES

  TILL THE OLD MEN DIE

  TAKE A NUMBER

  DON’T TURN YOUR BACK ON THE OCEAN

  NOBODY’S CHILD

  A CREDIBLE THREAT

  WITNESS TO EVIL

  WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED

  A KILLING AT THE TRACK

  BIT PLAYER

  A KILLING

  AT THE

  TRACK

  A Jeri Howard Mystery

  Janet Dawson

  Copyright © 2000 by Janet Dawson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in criticial articles or reviews.

  Cover design by Sue Trowbridge, interbridge.com

  ISBN 978-0-9834031-8-0 (ePub)

  ISBN 0-449-00531-3

  First Edition: May 2000

  To my parents, Don and Thelma Dawson

  Acknowledgments

  A great many people assisted me with my research for A Killing at the Track, and I would like to give them their due here.

  Many thanks to trainers Kit Connor Hilling and Jim Hilling for their generosity, knowledge, and expertise. Thanks for answering all my questions, for making suggestions, and for the insider’s look at the backsides of Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields.

  Thanks also to Luci Zahray, who knows just about everything there is to know about poisons. I am indebted to Tom and Lora Estudillo for their extensive knowledge of the history of Niles, and to Donalda Murphy for sharing her memories of growing up as the daughter of a gypsy trainer.

  Thanks also to Paul Nicolo, Clerk of the Scales at Bay Meadows, Bob Gai of the California Horse Racing Board, and fellow mystery writer Lillian Roberts, D.V.M. Other thank-yous to Steve and Carol Santor, Leila Laurence Dobscha, Doris Eraldi, and Betsie Corwin.

  And finally, thanks to William Murray, fellow mystery writer and author of two fine books on horse racing, The Wrong Horse and The Right Horse. He explains handicapping so well I almost understand it.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter One

  THE NUMBER FOUR HORSE WAS A BIG GORGEOUS chestnut named Chameleon. He looked eager to run, his muscles rippling underneath his coat, which glinted coppery red in the fading afternoon sun.

  The colt moved restlessly in his enclosure in the paddock at Edgewater Downs, where trainers and jockeys conferred before the call of “Riders up!” The horse’s groom, a Hispanic man who could have been any age between thirty and fifty, checked the colt’s movements. The trainer was a young woman with a mop of curly brown hair. She wore tan slacks, a green shirt, and a brown tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows. Her only accessory was a sky blue scarf with a dull green border.

  The colors of her scarf matched the silks her jockey wore, sky-blue with narrow green stripes running down each sleeve. The jockey himself was at first glance impossibly small and slender in contrast with the big chestnut he was to ride in the upcoming race. Then he turned and I saw muscle and sinew in his hands and arms. His face was tanned, partly obscured by a shadow angling from one of the enclosure’s upright supports.

  I looked down at the program I held, running my finger along the list of entries for this race, the seventh. It was a contest for three-year-old colts, the distance a mile, and there were eight horses vying for a $58,000 purse. Chameleon’s trainer was also the horse’s owner. Her name was Molly Torrance.

  The jockey in the sky blue silks was Deakin Kelley, and for some reason that name rang a bell. But I wasn’t sure why. According to the check marks I’d made on my program, he’d ridden in three other races today, and had crossed the finish line first in one of them. Four out of seven races, some of them one right after another, might seem like a killing pace, but riding most of the races in the card meant the jockey was popular with trainers, one who could be relied on to try his best to finish in the money. Maybe Kelley was one of the up-and-comers. I must have encountered his name in a newspaper or magazine, although I didn’t as a rule do more than glance at the sports page. Or perhaps there was another reason his name was familiar. At the moment, however, I couldn’t recall why.

  Post time was four P.M., which meant I had about ten minutes to place my bet. The riders were up on their mounts now, perched on their tiny saddles with their feet in the irons, their knees up. Out on the track they assumed the hunched-over riding posture and began warming up their mounts.

  “I like the looks of that number four horse,” I told the man standing next to me as we turned away from the fence surrounding the paddock and headed back through the grandstand. He was tall and lanky, with gray eyes over a hooked nose and tousled hair that was turning silver, despite the fact that he was only in his late forties.

  “Do you?” David Vanitzky curved his lips into an enigmatic smile and his eyes narrowed as he spoke in his characteristic raspy voice. “He’s a better choice than that claimer you bet on in the last race. You liked his looks too.” He chuckled. “And he came in dead last.”

  I shrugged. “So I bet on horses because I like the way they look. That’s what Grandma Jerusha and I used to do when we went to Golden Gate Fields. She used to bet on horses with really weird names. Or jockeys she liked. She always said she never went wrong betting on Bill Hartack.” David rolled his eyes heavenward. “Win some, lose some. I bet that horse because he was a long shot. Every now and then I like to bet long shots.”

  “There’s a good reason that horse in the last race was a long shot.” David s
hook his head at my lack of handicapping skills. “He should never have been entered in that race. Outclassed all the way. He hasn’t won a race since he broke his maiden. A less-than-illustrious career. Which you would have seen if you’d paid attention to the stats. They tell the story. It’s all there in the numbers.”

  “You and your almighty numbers,” I told him as we stepped onto the escalator. We rode up one level to the clubhouse, where he had a box outside, overlooking the finish line.

  David was a confirmed horseplayer, one who wouldn’t dream of betting until he’d done his homework, as he called it. From what I could tell, that involved studying the performance charts in the Daily Racing Form before he even got to the track. When he’d unfolded it earlier this afternoon, I had noted with amusement that he’d scribbled cramped hieroglyphics in the margins, all in red, green, and blue ink.

  When David first discovered I was the kind of infrequent bettor who wagered because I liked the way a horse looked, or because of the jockey, he shook his head and told me I might as well close my eyes and point. Then he’d launched into a brief lesson in handicapping.

  The primary object, he said, was to eliminate the horses that had limited or no chance to win. Then all you had to do was figure out which horse might have a chance to cross the finish line ahead of the rest of the pack. He talked about speed, distance, surface, and track conditions. Those I understood. I was a little shaky, however, when it came to points of call, fractional times, the significance of workouts, and something called Beyer figs, which evidently did not grow on trees. These statistics, with their strange cryptic notes and columns of numbers, seemed as remote a language as Sanskrit.

  “I defer to your expertise as a lifelong devotee of the sport of kings,” I said now as we made our way back to David’s box. “Since you’ve been hanging around racetracks since you were old enough to bet —”

  “Even before that,” he confessed. “I used to sneak into the old Arlington track outside of Chicago, and get one of the railbirds to place my bets for me.”

  “I knew there was something Damon Runyanesque about you.” I sat down and leaned forward, looking at the horses on the track below. Chameleon was cantering off to my right, near the first turn, which was also called the clubhouse turn. Then I turned to David and peered at his notes. “Okay, what do your numbers tell you about Chameleon? All I can tell from your statistics is that he came in first once.”

  David nodded. “In four starts he’s had a win, two seconds, and finished out of the money in his last race, which was three weeks ago, on a muddy track. He’s not a mudder, so that may have been a factor in his loss. I think he’s about due for another win. But Kilobyte could give him some serious competition.”

  “Kilobyte?” I peered at the tote board, then back at my program. “That’s not the favorite, is it?”

  “No, the favorite is Wall To Wall, number seven. The dark bay with the yellow-and-white-checked silks.” David pointed, and I spotted the bay colt, with his black mane and tail. Then David turned my attention to the tote board in the infield, with its lighted numbers. “Wall To Wall is going off at six-to-five. He’s had two wins in his last three races. The odds on Kilobyte, the two horse, are a little longer, two-to-one. That’s Kilobyte, the blood bay, in the red and black silks.”

  I glanced at the horse, his dark coat ruddier than the other bay, but not quite the russet hue of the chestnut. “He’s had two wins and a second in five races,” David continued. “So the odds are better on those two horses than on Chameleon.”

  “Odds,” I repeated. That was more gobbledygook. I didn’t understand how they figured odds, either. I just knew that thirty-to-one, the odds on the colt I’d bet in the last race, meant that the horse was a long shot.

  The odds on Chameleon were nine-to-two. Even with my limited knowledge of playing the horses, I knew that was longer than the odds on either Wall To Wall or Kilobyte. David had informed me that a horseplayer never made any money betting on favorites, and that much I could see. As a rank amateur, I really did like to bet on long shots. I’d bet on plenty of them in my time, and some of them had paid off. Chameleon was in the middle of the wagering pack, according to the probable odds listed in the program.

  “Well,” I told him, “I’m going to bet on Chameleon, not because of the charts or the odds or because you think he’s due for another win. I’m going to bet on him because I like the way he looks.”

  David laughed. “Jeri, you’d better stick to the two-dollar window. Of course, they don’t have two-dollar windows anymore.” He shook his head. “That’s another thing about horse-racing that’s changed.”

  “Believe me, two bucks is my limit.” I pulled out my wallet and liberated a couple of George Washingtons. “When it comes to poker, I’m strictly a nickel-dime-quarter gal. And when I’m at the racetrack, I quit after I’ve lost my twenty bucks.”

  David grinned. “That’s the wrong approach.”

  “Works for me. I’m self-employed, remember. Don’t have a lot of cash to throw around on horses or cards. Unlike some people. Besides, I picked a winner in the second race.”

  “Dumb luck,” he said, heckling me. His smile grew broader, with more than a hint of devilment in his eyes.

  “I don’t care if it’s dumb luck or not. It looks like I might break even today. So how much are you down, Mr. High Roller?”

  “I’m not a high roller,” he protested. “I’m just a horseplayer. And you don’t want to know how much I’ve dropped today. It might give you the vapors.”

  “Since when have you known me to have vapors, Vanitzky? Hell, you’ve probably lost more this afternoon than I made this week. But then, I suppose you can afford it. You’re the big corporate robber baron with money to throw around. Excuse me while I go place my humble but honest bet.”

  “I’ll go with you.” He unfolded himself from his chair. We headed back inside the clubhouse to place our bets.

  Downstairs in the grandstand the floors were concrete, the seating decidedly utilitarian, and the comestibles came from a variety of fast food stands. Upstairs, the clubhouse offered more in the way of amenities. Once David and I entered the building through the wide doorway, our journey to the parimutuel windows was cushioned by a thick beige carpet.

  The track made it oh-so-easy for the betting public to part with its greenbacks. I had the choice of handing my bucks to a real live human at one of the windows, or I could place my bet at a computerized terminal with a touch screen. And just in case I was out of cash after backing a loser in the last race, there were automated teller machines conveniently located at both ends of the row of parimutuel windows.

  I opted for the human touch and got in line. Then I noticed I was at one of the windows for large bets only. That was definitely the wrong line for me. I shifted one line to my left, then looked up to examine my surroundings. The clubhouse walls were pale blue, decorated with big paintings of racehorses. Colorful jockeys’ silks hung from the high ceiling, like fluttering mobiles. Here and there I saw the racetrack’s logo, a stylized blue wave in a brown circle.

  Someone jostled me and I looked to my right, coming face-to-face with a man so chic and well-put-together that he made me, in jeans and a sweater, feel positively dowdy. He was standing in the big bucks line, looking like a million dollars. Some of it was in his clothes and the big gold watch on his wrist. Sleek and dark-haired, with clear olive skin, melting chocolate brown eyes, and sensual pouty lips, he wore black slacks and a beautifully tailored sport coat over a burgundy silk shirt. He was smoking a short, narrow cigar despite the No Smoking signs posted all over the clubhouse. But so were half the other people I saw around me. My nose wrinkled involuntarily at the cigar’s acrid odor.

  “Pardon. Je m ‘excuse.” He gave me a hundred-watt smile full of Gallic charm as he whisked the cigar from his mouth and held it away from me. Then his turn came at the window and I saw him open a thin black leather wallet and extract a sheaf of bills, all large denominations.


  Now it was my turn at the parimutuel windows. I handed my two bucks to the bespectacled clerk on the other side of the counter and told him I was betting on the four horse, Chameleon, to win. He punched a keypad and a pasteboard ticket spat from the maw of his machine. I took it and stepped away from the window, looking for David. He was talking to a couple of other men near the doorway. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I walked over to a long narrow planter filled with yellow, orange, and bronze chrysanthemums and sat down on the bench next to it, surveying the clubhouse and the people who filled it.

  A lot of them were older and dressed to the nines. Horse owners, perhaps. I spotted the fashion-plate Frenchman just outside the doorway, talking with an equally elegant woman. She was a tall, statuesque blond whose hair fell in platinum waves past her shoulders as she tilted her head back and laughed loudly, the sound cutting through the surrounding chatter. She was dressed in swirling scarlet silk, with lots of gold jewelry. Her red pumps had heels so high they looked uncomfortable.

  My attire was more casual, like that of the trainers who had come upstairs to watch their charges run. And that guy over there in the rumpled khakis and the brown windbreaker, he looked like a serious gambler, the kind who lived at the track.

  Directly across from the parimutuel windows was the glass-enclosed Turf Club restaurant, which had white table-cloths and served pricey California cuisine. The bar at the back, serving both the Turf Club and the clubhouse, was a long sleek expanse of polished wood with a shiny brass rail, beckoning the moneyed horseplayer who’d just dropped a bundle on a sure thing.

  Fancy schmancy, as Grandma would have said.

  She and I went to the races regularly in the years before she’d died. Usually the track was Golden Gate Fields, tucked onto a sliver of land between Interstate 80 and San Francisco Bay, in Albany, just north of Berkeley. But sometimes we’d cross the San Mateo Bridge to the Peninsula, and go to Bay Meadows.

  When Grandma and I went to the track, we’d never been so upscale as to pass through the portals of the clubhouse. It cost more to get in there, and we wanted to spend our money on bets, not frills. No, we walked on concrete rather than carpet, milling around in the lower-level stands with the rest of the ordinary folks, as well as the hard-core horseplayers with racing forms and tout sheets stuck into their pockets. These last were called hard knockers, plungers, railbirds, and they spoke in a language all their own. Grandma and I listened, fascinated but uncomprehending, to all the talk about maidens and claimers and the morning line.