The Alibi Man (22 page)

chapter
37

         
“LANDRY.”

He picked up on the third ring. I had been hoping for voice mail.

“If that party moved from Players to Walker’s house, every car that went there is on tape in the guard shacks at the entrances to the Polo Club,” I said without preamble. I was beyond social niceties.

“But we don’t know where the party moved,” Landry said. “Polo Club management is making right-to-privacy noises. They aren’t cooperating without a warrant.”

“Damn.”

“We’re working on it,” he said. “We’ll get it. I’m sorry about last night.”

It took me half a minute to digest that.

“I was way out of line,” he said. “It doesn’t matter why.”

“No,” I said quietly. “It doesn’t.”

I hung up. Not out of anger, but because there was no point in continuing the conversation. He didn’t try to call me back.

I drove out to Star Polo, to the barns, in search of Lisbeth.

“She’s not working,” one of the hands told me in Spanish. “No one has seen her today.”

“She went someplace?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Is her car gone?”

“No. Her car is here.” He pointed out the end of the barn to a sporty little red Saturn convertible.

I thanked him and went to have a look at the car. Where would she have gone without a car? It was a fair hike back into town. I doubted anyone would choose to walk it.

Did she have a hot date the night before? We she sleeping in with Bennett or one of his pals? I doubted it. Lisbeth was in over her head with these people, and she knew it. With Irina gone, I suspected she didn’t know what to do, how to get out of being one of the girls with this crowd. She was probably scared. And rightly so. Her best friend had been murdered.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d quit her job. And like any horse person in Wellington during the season, immediately I wondered if I could poach her to take Irina’s spot at Sean’s. That would endear me to Jim Brody.

“Elena!”

And there he was in a blue button-down shirt and riding breeches, his belly spilling over at the belt.

“Good morning—I hope,” I said, feigning apprehension. “I was coming to look for you.”

“Well, here I am,” he said, jovial as ever.

I walked away from Lisbeth’s car to where he stood on the drive. “I want to apologize for last night,” I said.

“There’s nothing for you to apologize for,” he said. “Ben was out of line.”

“Nevertheless—”

“I didn’t know him back then,” he said. “But I’ve known him for quite a few years. He can be a real prick, but under that he’s a decent guy.”

A decent guy who openly cheated on his mentally unstable wife with girls half his age. Someone had apparently lowered the bar on decency since I last checked.

“We just shouldn’t be allowed within twenty feet of each other,” I said. “There’s too much history.”

“Well, that shouldn’t preclude the rest of us from enjoying your company,” he said. “You don’t really think he had anything to do with Irina’s murder, do you? I can tell you he was quite fond of the girl.”

“Fond?” That came out exactly how it shouldn’t have.

Brody didn’t take offense. In fact, he chuckled. “Maybe that’s not quite the right word. Irina liked to have a good time. She was strong, knew what she wanted. She would have made something of herself. She was hungry.”

“That’s not always a good thing,” I said, thinking of the bill from the Lundeen Clinic and what that might have been about. “I guess it all depends on what one wants. Maybe Irina wanted too much.”

His brows lowered ever so slightly. “There’s no such thing,” he said. “You know what they say: Nothing succeeds like excess.

“Who did say that?” he asked. A twitch of a brow, a twinkle in the eye. He was trying to move me off topic.

“Oscar Wilde,” I said. “It didn’t work out so well for him. He died destitute in a rented room.”

“Well…” He frowned. Tough to find a snappy comeback for that.

“Live ’til you die, that’s what I say,” I said, forcing the happiness aura. “Grab the gusto and all that.”

“I’m all for that,” Brody agreed. “That’s what we all should do. That’s what we can learn from this tragedy.”

“I would rather learn who killed her first and hope I have the luxury of time to reflect on the moral to the story later,” I said.

He didn’t like that. Life would have been so much easier for him if he could have distracted me with a shiny piece of jewelry or a trip to Bermuda. That’s the trouble with women: We’re so less easy to impress once we’re past the age of blushing and giggling.

“I can’t help you there,” he said, quickly losing all patience with me. “In fact, I’ve been advised not to talk about the girl at all.”

“Advised? By whom?”

“My attorney,” he said, looking me square in the eye. “Your father.”

That news should have come as no surprise, yet it still delivered an unwelcome kick. My father had just come one step closer into my life.

“Well,” I said, “you’re paying dearly for that advice. You’d better follow it.”

“I have a feeling you never did,” he said.

“No,” I said.
And I paid dearly too.
“But then, no one ever looked at me as a possible murder suspect.”

“I’m heading that off at the pass,” he said. “The best defense is a good offense. I didn’t have anything to do with that girl’s death, and I’m not allowing anyone to make it seem as if I did.”

I wondered what had happened to precipitate that move. Had Landry or Weiss pushed that button? Had the media?

The news hounds would be catching up to speed soon. I was surprised it hadn’t happened already. The instant they got wind of the men last seen with Irina, they would be rabid, particularly when Bennett Walker’s name surfaced. I knew for a fact that would be happening even while I stood there in the driveway of Star Polo with Jim Brody.

I knew because I had made the phone calls myself.

It’s never too late to be bitter or vindictive.

“Was there anything else I can help you with?” Brody asked. “I don’t mean to give you the bum’s rush, Elena, but I’m due to be somewhere.”

“No, no,” I said, glancing back at Lisbeth’s car.

“I brought some things for Lisbeth,” I said, lifting my purse for him to notice. “Some photographs I thought she might like to have from Irina. I know they were close.”

“Haven’t seen her,” he said, looking around. Pretending to look for her, I thought. “I don’t think she’s here.”

“Don’t you find that strange?” I asked. “Her car is here.”

“She probably went somewhere with a friend,” he said, and started moving away from me.

“You’re probably right.”

I thanked him for his time and went to my car. He climbed into his Escalade. I followed him out the driveway. He turned left, I turned right. When I had gone a mile or so, I turned my car around and went back.

I went inside the barn, found the same hand I had spoken with earlier, and told him I had something to give Lisbeth and wanted to leave it outside her door. Did he know where she lived?

Oh, yes, she lived upstairs, over the stable. Go out of the barn and take the stairs on the left. He would show me. I told him that wasn’t necessary and thanked him.

No one paid any attention to me as I went up to Lisbeth’s apartment. From the landing I could see a rider going down the driveway with three polo ponies tethered together on either side, taking them out for a jog. I was out of sight of the wash racks. In the other direction, a thick row of trees screened the stable area from the view from the big house.

I tapped on the glass in the door and waited. Tapped a little harder and waited. I tried the doorknob. Locked.

Through the glass and a sheer curtain, I could see the living area of the tiny apartment. A couch, a chair, a messy TV cabinet, a coffee table strewn with magazines. A breakfast bar dividing off the minuscule kitchen.

I tapped on the glass one last time, then pulled a couple of simple lock picks from my bag and invited myself in.

chapter
38

         
“I HAVE
some news for you, Detective Landry,” Mercedes Gitan said as she stuck her head out the door of the autopsy suite.

“Good news?”

“Depends on your point of view,” she said. “Come on in. We just finished up a drowning victim.”

“Hell of a way to start your morning,” Landry said.

Gitan pulled her cap off, setting free a mop of curly black hair, and tossed the cap and her gloves in a laundry bin. “Sad. A young woman with her whole life ahead of her.”

“So was Irina Markova. What’s the word?”

“Toxicology came back.”

“Drugs?”

“Ecstasy. A lot of it.”

“That’s no big surprise, considering what kind of party she was at. A lot of X, a lot of sex.”

“She was an active participant. No date-rape drugs.”

“Anything under the fingernails?”

“Actually, yes. Her own skin,” she said. “She was probably trying to dig her fingers under whatever it was she was being choked with,” she said, pantomiming the action.

“Anything else?”

“Some tiny bits of leather fibers. I think she was strangled with a thin leather strap or cord. The fibers I removed from the neck wound also appear to be leather.”

“But nothing that might give us a clue to her killer.”

“Sorry, no. Are you desperate?”

“No. I’ve got a couple hot prospects, but my life would be a lot easier if I could say ‘You did it. And here’s the proof.’”

“My life would be easier if George Clooney would sweep me away to his villa in Italy,” Gitan said.

“Ha-ha. I’d better get out there and face the lions,” Landry said. “It’s going to be a long, bad day.”

“My office has taken a half dozen calls from the media already this morning and another half dozen from the powers that be telling me not to talk to the press. These hot prospects you have, I take it they’re not the usual suspects.”

“Not by a long stretch. Big bucks, social standing, pains in the ass.”

“Oooh…an honest-to-goodness juicy Palm Beach scandal,” Gitan said, pretending excitement.

“Move over, William Kennedy Smith. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

“Well, here’s your bonus of scandalous dirt and motive: your vic was pregnant.”

“Shit,” Landry whispered. No need to decipher the bill from the Lundeen Clinic after all.

“Showed up in the blood tests,” Gitan said. “There was so much damage to her lower torso from the alligator, there was nothing for me to find in the exam.”

“Let’s keep that to ourselves for now,” Landry said. “I can still use the DNA threat.”

“My lips are sealed.”

Landry thanked her and walked out into the sunshine. It was hot. He unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and rolled them up as he walked back across the parking lot to the justice center.

From a distance he could see the news vans and reporters scattered in individual spots that gave good background. The shit had officially hit the fan. Someone had ferreted out or passed along the information as to who the suspects might be in Irina Markova’s murder. There was no other big case going on that would warrant this kind of attention.

Landry took a detour and went to his car, still far enough away that no one was paying any attention to him. He backed out of his spot and drove slowly down the row toward the building to get a closer look. As he sat there, a black sedan with a driver and a man sitting in the back rolled past. The license plate read:
ESTES ESQ.

Edward Estes. Elena’s father.

The great man had arrived. Now the show would begin.

Landry’s phone rang.

“Landry.”

“Weiss. We’ve found Irina Markova’s car.”

The show would go on with one less in the audience, Landry thought as he turned left and headed out of the complex. He had more important things to do than watch Edward Estes shoot his mouth off—like proving Estes’s client was a killer.

“This guy’s a deputy,” Weiss explained as Landry got out of his car. “He works security here on the side. So he got the BOLO on the car, and here it is.”

“You called CSI?”

“They’re on their way.”

Irina Markova’s car was a sporty little dark-blue Volkswagen Jetta. The windows were closed. It sat parked among a few hundred cars in the lot of the Wellington Green mall.

“Are there cameras out here?” Landry asked, looking up and around at light poles.

“No.”

“All right. Did you look inside the vehicle?”

“Through the windows,” Weiss said. “I didn’t touch anything. There are no visible signs of blood or anything. There’s sand and dirt on the floor mats. And a partial footprint. It’s faint, but it’s there.”

“Yeah, I see it,” Landry said. “Let’s make sure they get a photograph of it before anyone touches the mat.”

“What do you suppose the odds are the guy left us any prints?” Weiss said.

“Slim and none if it was one of Brody’s crowd. Those guys are too smart not to have wiped it down. Maybe we’ll get a couple of head hairs. Better than nothing. Damn, I wish they had cameras out here.”