The Alibi Man (14 page)

“I was adopted,” I explained.

“But he is the only father you have known?”

“Edward Estes owned the house I grew up in. He had no interest in me beyond how I might be useful to him. And I made a point
not
to be useful to him at all.”

Barbaro said nothing. He looked very serious as he tried to figure me out.

“I can’t believe your good friend didn’t fill you in on some of this last night,” I said.

“All he said was that the two of you were once engaged.”

I laughed. “What a pretty liar you are. You even manage to look innocent. I outright accused him of being a rapist with the potential to be a murderer, and you’re telling me neither one of you brought that up after I left?”

He dragged a hand through his hair and looked away, uncomfortable. “He told me he was wrongly accused and you believed the worst about him; beyond that, I did not want to hear anything from him about you.”

I didn’t really believe him, but it was an interesting position he was taking. I watched him openly and wondered what he was all about.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“That you intrigue me,” I said.

His eyebrows went up, and his mouth curved. “This is a good thing, I think.”

“That depends on what I find out.”

He shifted in his seat, leaning toward me. “You will find,” he said in a low, sexy voice, “that I am a gentleman—as long as you would like me to be; that I am passionate….”

He leaned a little closer and cupped a hand around the side of my neck, his thumb brushing seductively back and forth just along my hairline. My pulse quickened.

“I have only just met you, Elena,” he said, “but already I have decided I have never known a woman quite like you.”

“Oh, I can guarantee that,” I said.

“Hey, Casanova!” The Aussie-accented shout came from a rider I recognized as Sebastian Foster, the tennis player. He sat astride not ten feet from the hood of Barbaro’s car. “You’re up, mate! You’d better hustle.”

Barbaro looked annoyed as he sat back; his hand fell away from my neck.

“Last chukker,” Foster said. “Seven minutes more and you’re a free man.”

“You’ll stay?” Barbaro said to me.

“Of course,” I said, but not for the reasons he wanted, at least not primarily. I was being brought into the fold of the Alibi Club, and I knew without question I would find Irina Markova’s killer among them. It was like being brought into a den of lions. Lucky for me I was an adrenaline junkie. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

chapter
22

         
“HERE’S WHAT
I have for you so far,” Mercedes Gitan said. “Have a seat.”

Landry sat. Her office was extraordinarily neat. The desktop could be seen with the naked eye.

“Cause of death: ligature strangulation.”

“What about the manual strangulation?”

“The hyoid bone was intact. I would expect that to be broken if the killer had choked her to death.”

“Time of death?”

“That’s a tougher call because of the body having been submerged.”

“Guesstimate?”

“She’d been dead maybe twenty-four hours, give or take.”

“Rape?”

“I couldn’t say. There was too much damage to the lower torso from the alligator.”

“What good are you?” Landry asked.

“I can tell you she had oral sex before she died and that she hadn’t eaten any solid food,” she said. “Her stomach contents were semen and a green-apple martini. Find out what time she had dinner and add digestion time. That’ll get you something.”

“How much semen?” he asked.

“A lot. This didn’t come from just one player, pardon the pun,” Gitan said. “This girl did the whole club.”

chapter
23

         
“SO HOW
do you know my father?”

The best defense is a good offense.

I took a seat beside Jim Brody at a table in the 7th Chukker, one of the members-only bars at the International Polo Club. Located in the grandstand, it was smaller and more private than the Mallet Grille and Bar in the clubhouse. An unobtrusive panel door on one end wall led into the Wanderers Room, a small, private dining room with a five-star chef for those intimate dinners among the obnoxiously rich.

Brody hailed the waitress. “We had a client in common a couple of years ago. Dushawn Upton.”

Dushawn Upton, aka Uptown. NBA all-star guard and known wife beater, on trial for soliciting the murder of a pregnant girlfriend. Another sterling character wealthy enough to buy the support and loyalty of Edward Estes.

I was aware of the case—not because my father had been in the news but because the case had
been
the news while I was a captive television audience, languishing in a hospital bed, recovering from being dragged down Okeechobee Boulevard like a rag doll caught in the door of a pickup truck.

“He’s a hell of a lawyer,” Brody said. “Hell of a poker player too.”

“It’s easy to bluff if you don’t have a conscience.”

He looked at me as if he wasn’t sure what planet I was from. “What did he ever do to you to make you such a loving daughter?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all. We have philosophical differences.”

“You didn’t believe Dushawn was innocent?” He tried to look astonished, even amused. I didn’t pretend amusement with him.

“No one believed Dushawn was innocent. The jurors didn’t believe Dushawn was innocent, but they’d been beaten over the head with ‘reasonable doubt’ until they couldn’t see straight. Thanks to my father, another criminal walks away scot-free. A real tribute to our system of jurisprudence.”

Brody raised his eyebrows. He probably wasn’t used to women who had opinions and could speak in compound sentences. This made me intriguing to him, which was a good thing.

“Should I give him your regards when I see him, then?” he asked.

“Only if you want to ruin his evening,” I said sweetly. “And when will that be? I’ll put it on my calendar.”

“Some disease-of-the-week charity shindig at Mar-a-Lago next week.”

How surreal it seemed, sitting there, suddenly one degree of separation away from my father after twenty years of living in an alternate universe. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the idea of him knowing anything about me. I didn’t want to be in his head.

I didn’t want to imagine my mother thinking about me, wondering what I was up to. Which meant I had managed to convince myself that neither of them had ever had a thought about me in years. Out of sight, out of mind. It was easier for me to think that. Easier for me to stay away.

If they wanted to reach me, they had to know where I was. My name was in the papers the year before, connected to the Erin Seabright kidnapping case, connected to Sean. If they wanted me to be a part of their lives, they could have reached out then. They didn’t.

“This is looking entirely too serious,” Barbaro said, taking a seat next to me. “What has he done?” he asked, nodding his head toward Brody.

“We were just reliving old times,” I said.

“No sense in doing that unless they were the kind of old times that make us smile and laugh,” Barbaro said.

That would have severely limited my ability to converse, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

The waitress delivered a round of drinks. Her eyes never left Barbaro. She managed to put her cleavage in his face as she bent over to get the cocktail napkins just right. He graced her with a polite smile as he said,
“Gracias.”
But his attention was on me.

Impressive. All the godlike playboys I had ever known wouldn’t have shown that kind of restraint, no matter how much they wanted to retain my attention.

“Elena works with horses,” he said to Brody.

For a second, Brody looked a little confused, trying to put together the fact that I was the daughter of Edward Estes but worked in a stable. But he was at least as good a poker player as my father, and the confusion was hidden so quickly anyone else might have thought they had imagined it.

“I prefer to make an honest living,” I quipped, toasting him with my drink. “I ride for Sean Avadon.”

“I don’t know him. He’s not into polo.” This said as if no one outside polo was worth knowing.

“No,” I said. “But don’t feel bad. I’m sure he doesn’t know or care who you are either.”

Brody laughed, loud and from his belly. “I like her, Juan,” he said to Barbaro, as if Barbaro was presenting me as a prospective concubine. “She’s got sass. I like sass.”

“It’s your lucky day,” I said. “I’m overflowing with sass.”

“Elena worked with Irina Markova,” Barbaro said.

Brody didn’t miss a beat. He must have been something at the bargaining table. “Irina. Nice girl. Terrible shame what happened.”

“Yes,” I said, though it had become quite clear to me that “nice girls” didn’t run with this crowd. “We’ll miss her. I understand you saw her that night she went missing.”

Brody nodded as he took a sip of his thirty-year-old scotch. “She was at the party at Players. I think she gave me a dance, but I have to say, as the guest of honor, I was having too good a time to remember much.”

“You don’t remember if she was at the after-party party?” I asked. I could have been a hell of a poker player myself.

“There was no after-party that I know of,” Brody said. He looked away from me as he dug into the breast pocket of his aloha shirt.

“I must have misunderstood,” I said. “I thought someone told me there was. I guess she could have said maybe there was an after-party.”

“Who’s that?” he asked, glancing at me from under his brows.

I shook my head. “Not important. Obviously I misheard.”

“Tony Ovada drove me home. We sat and smoked cigars,” Brody said, pulling one out of his pocket like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

“Are you sure you’re not your father’s daughter?” he asked. “This is sounding a lot like an interrogation.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, sitting back. I took a sip of my vodka tonic. “What can I say? That’s what passed for conversation in our house. I grew up thinking cross-examination and redirect were normal components of social intercourse.

“Irina was a friend. I want to see her killer brought to justice.”

“So do I,” Brody said.

“I just think someone who saw her that night might know something, might have seen something and not even realized it.”

Brody made a motion with his cigar. “Juan was there. Did anything strike you as odd, Juan?”

“Elena and I have already had this conversation,” Barbaro said. “I wish I could say I saw something, heard something, but I was busy having a good time, like you, like everyone.”

Brody lit the cigar, took a big pull on it, and exhaled, looking up at the smoke.

The attraction of cigars is entirely lost on me. They smell like burning dog shit.

“Maybe we should establish a reward of some kind,” he said. “Money talks—or makes people talk.

“I’ll do that,” he said, making the executive decision. “I’ll call that detective. What was his name?”

“Landry?” I asked.

“What’s a good amount for a reward? Ten thousand? Twenty? Fifty?”

“I’m sure that’s up to you,” I said. “That’s very generous of you, whatever you decide.”

He waved it off. “It’s the least I can do. I feel responsible in a way. After all, she was last seen at my birthday party.”

“Except by her killer,” I pointed out.

The doors to the bar opened and Bennett Walker stepped in. His hair was slicked back, and he wore a pair of black Gucci wraparounds, despite the fact that the sun had already begun to slip over the horizon. He was halfway to our table before he realized I was sitting there. He hesitated, but I didn’t give him a chance to escape.

“What interesting timing you have, Ben,” I said dryly.

Barbaro frowned at me.

Bennett sat down across from me. “The joke’s on me, I guess.”

“Something like that.”

He waved a hand at the waitress, and she turned and went back to the bar to get his drink without having to ask what he wanted. A regular. Maybe too regular. He looked a little rough around the edges.

“Surprised to see you here, Bennett,” Jim Brody said, his face neutral.

Bennett shrugged. “A guy’s gotta be somewhere. Why not among friends?” He looked directly at me and said, “Exception noted, Elena.”

Brody raised an eyebrow. “You two know each other?”

“In a past life,” I said.

I could see the wheels turning in Brody’s head. He would be all over this. He hadn’t made his fortune without knowing the background on every client—and every adversary—he had: their mother’s maiden name, the date they lost their first tooth and their first job and their virginity. He had probably known before anyone that Dushawn Upton was capable of having a pregnant woman killed.

He would have the story on my relationship with Bennett Walker with the snap of his fingers. He now knew my father was Edward Estes. He probably knew that my father had been Bennett’s defense attorney. Not hard to put the pieces together. My life was a jigsaw puzzle for ages nine and up.

“Mr. Brody has decided to offer a reward for information leading to the arrest of Irina Markova’s killer,” I said to Bennett.

“Good thinking,” he said, glancing at his friend.

A vaguely strange response, I thought. Good thinking because it would help the case, or good thinking because it would take away suspicion? Was Jim Brody’s generous offer tantamount to the Alibi Club version of O.J. hunting for the real killer? In that case he could make the reward as extravagant as he wanted, because he knew he would never pay out.

“You might as well write the check to Elena,” Bennett said. “She claims to have a nose for this kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing is that?” I asked, not quite able to keep the edge out of my voice. “Knowing a criminal when I see one?”

The waitress arrived with his drink and gave him the same treatment she had given Barbaro. Bennett shoved his sunglasses back on his head and gave her his undivided attention, but there was a coldness in his eyes that made my skin crawl.

“Elena was a police detective,” he said, as the woman walked away, with his eyes on her ass.

“Are you surprised I would know that?” he asked, turning to look at me.

“I’m surprised you would bother to,” I said flatly. “Am I supposed to be flattered?”

Brody set his cigar down and stared at me. “A detective? What kind of a detective? Homicide?”

“Narcotics.”

“Oh, no,” Bennett said, without emotion. “I’ve broken your cover.”

“I don’t need a cover. I don’t have anything to hide,” I said. “Besides, I’m not in that line of work anymore.”

“Then why are you here?” he asked pointedly.

“I was invited for my charming company and witty repartee. Why are you here? Besides soaking your liver in vodka for the third night in a row—that I know of.”

From the corner of my eye I could see Barbaro looking unhappy or angry or both.

“I’m surprised you didn’t go into sex-crimes investigation,” Bennett remarked. “Rabid as you are on the subject.”

Barbaro leaned toward him, raising both hands in front of him.

“Enough,” he said quietly. “None of us came here to have a bad time. Enough.”

“I didn’t start it,” Bennett said, petulant.

“No. You’re never responsible for anything,” I returned. “You pass gas and it’s someone else’s fault.”

“Jesus Christ,” Brody said. “The two of you sound like you’re married.”

I looked away from Bennett, pulling in a slow deep breath, trying to rein myself in. I am and always have been my own worst enemy. I should have kept my cool with him. I should have at least pretended not to be affected by him. But my emotions regarding Bennett Walker had been held inside me like a festering abscess for a very long time. The person who said time heals all wounds didn’t know jack shit.

“No,” I said to Brody, trying to force the half smile. “I narrowly managed to escape that fate.

“I should be going,” I said, sliding out of my chair. “After all, I’m not a member of the club, am I?”

If any of them caught the double entendre, they didn’t let on. I had taken a couple of steps toward the door before Brody spoke.

“Don’t leave on his account,” he said, gesturing toward Bennett with his cigar.

“It’s okay, Jim,” Bennett said. “It’s not the first time Elena’s run away.”

I wanted to slap him. I wanted to choke him the way he had choked Maria Nevin twenty years past. The fury that seared through me was fierce. He wasn’t more than two feet away. It took everything I had to keep my hands at my sides.

“Do you really want to do that, Bennett?” I asked quietly. “Do you really want to push me? You, of all people, should know better. You, of all people, should know I don’t give a rat’s ass what other people think of me or of anything I do.

“You want to be back in the news?” I asked. “You want to have the Maria Nevin case dug up and spread out for the media to feed on all over again? Because if you push me, I guarantee that’s what will happen. You can put your family through that. You can have reporters camped on the doorstep of your house, following your wife everywhere she goes, hounding her—”