The Alibi Man (23 page)

chapter
39

         
HOOVES POUNDED
the turf as the two horses ran. Maintaining a distance of about ten yards apart, one would advance, then the other, as the ball was struck and chased, struck and chased.

Barbaro swung his mallet with a casual ease that belied the strength behind it. The forehand shot went to Bennett Walker, who miscalculated his angle and distance. He yanked his horse back and twisted in the saddle to make an awkward offside tail shot.

Barbaro had to circle back at a lope to pick up the ball, now traveling at half speed. Just for practice, he brought his mallet across his body to the left side, reached forward and beneath his horse’s neck, let the ball roll across his line, and tapped it back across to his friend.

Again Walker’s timing was wrong. The ball crossed his line five strides ahead of him. He swore loudly, spurred his horse unnecessarily, then hauled back on the reins with such force that the animal’s front feet came off the ground as her eyes rolled back and her mouth came open.

Barbaro rode over and jabbed him hard in the side with the head of his mallet.

Walker glared at him. “What the fuck?!”

“It’s not the mare’s fault you can’t play for shit!” Barbaro shouted. “Don’t punish her for your mistakes!”

He called Walker a few choice names in Spanish and jabbed at him again.

Walker took a vicious swing at him, and Barbaro blocked him with a forearm to Walker’s wrist, driving Walker’s arm up and back.

“You want to fight with me?” Barbaro shouted. “I will kick your ass! I am not some little girl you can knock around!”

They were horse to horse, the polo ponies muscling against each other, ears pinned, the men knocking knee pad to knee pad.

They had this end of the field to themselves. The morning sun was bright and hot, horses and men all sweating, breathing hard. This was supposed to have been a practice, a lesson for Walker, a chance for Barbaro to hit some balls before the afternoon match—the first round in a big-money tournament that would conclude on Sunday on the championship field in front of the grandstand with a thousand or more spectators.

Walker threw his mallet down, staring at his friend and teacher. He looked back down the field. At the far end, a bunch of little kids were milling around on their ponies, gathering for lesson time. There was no one within earshot. Still, he kept his voice low.

“Why don’t you just come out and say it, Juan? You think I killed her, no matter what I say. You think I just go around in the dead of night killing girls.”

Barbaro sat back. His horse settled but remained alert, sensing the tension. “Brody tells me this morning that I need an attorney, that he has hired one for me—Elena’s father.”

“Well, that should narrow down your chances of fucking her,” Walker said. “Too bad for you.”

“I told him no.”

“So you’ll get someone else.”

“No. I will not,” Barbaro said.

Walker digested that, looked down the field at the kids, looked back. “If the rest of us have attorneys and you don’t, that makes it look like we did something and you didn’t. The cops will think they can turn you against us.”

Barbaro said nothing.

“Can they?” Walker asked.

“I don’t want to be a part of this. It disgusts me.”

“Ha!
Disgusts
you? Like you haven’t done your share of partying. Jesus, you’ve screwed more women than most men ever see in their lifetime. You’ve snorted your share of blow. You never looked to me like anyone was twisting your arm.”

“No one ever died because of it,” Barbaro said.

“Look,” Walker said. “You’re a part of this. You think the cops are going to believe you’re a virgin? Take the damn lawyer. We stick together in this, everyone comes out fine.”

Barbaro rested his hands on the pommel of his saddle and sighed, looking down the field to the kids wearing helmets that seemed bigger than they were. Life was still shiny and new for them, filled with innocence and possibility.

“She was dead when I found her,” Walker said. “I don’t know what happened. I was passed out, remember?”

“You were the last man with her,” Barbaro said. “I remember that. I remember you were angry because of it. I remember Irina making fun of your pouting. I remember you didn’t take it well.”

“So that means I killed her?” Walker asked, offended but not quite able to meet Barbaro’s gaze. “She was a cunt. So what? She could suck the white off rice. That’s all I cared about. That’s all you cared about too.”

“I wasn’t with her,” Barbaro said. “You took her, and I left. Remember?”

Walker narrowed his eyes. “No. I don’t. You were there. I saw you. Everyone saw you. Do you have someone who can say you weren’t there?”

Barbaro let that one go. “Then who killed her? Everyone else had gone by then.”

“Hell if I know,” Walker said.

“Why can you not look me in the eye when you say that, friend?”

Walker didn’t answer.

“If you don’t know who killed her,” Barbaro said, “maybe it is because you don’t remember what you did. You were the last man with her, then she was dead. Maybe you don’t know you didn’t do it. Maybe you think you did. Maybe you
did
.”

Bennett Walker still wouldn’t look at him.

“Did you choke her during sex?” Barbaro asked. “That is a dangerous game I know you like to play. You were angry. You are always angry with women. You like to get rough—”

“So did she—”

“How do you know you didn’t kill her?”

The seconds seemed to tick past in slow motion.

Finally Walker looked at him. His eyes were flat and cold, like a shark’s.

“What difference does it make?” he said. “The girl is dead. I can’t change that. And I’m not going to prison for it.”

He turned his horse and left the field, leaving Barbaro to stand alone.

chapter
40

         
I SLIPPED
inside Lisbeth’s apartment and quietly closed the door behind me.

“Lisbeth?”

Nothing. Which meant I was free to violate her privacy.

I didn’t go looking for anything in particular. I had learned as a cop that narrowing my focus too much caused me to ignore things that might prove important later on. That was especially important as a Narcotics detective—the ability to absorb every detail around me, to be aware of everything, no matter how insignificant at a glance. That skill had saved my life more than once and saved a case many times.

Lisbeth owned the usual fashion rags, plus a couple of polo magazines—Barbaro on the cover of
Sidelines
—and a selection of tabloids. She drank a lot of Diet Coke, had a bowlful of hardboiled eggs, ate a lot of tuna—solid white albacore packed in spring water. There was a bottle of Stoli in the freezer.

She didn’t strike me as a vodka drinker. I pictured Lisbeth drinking a piña colada, a margarita, a drink with a cutesy name that was sweet and colorful.

Irina had been her friend, though. Irina could pound down vodka like a Russian stevedore. Maybe it was for her.

Like so many people, Lisbeth kept a collection of snapshots taped to the refrigerator door. Many looked the same as what had been on Irina’s computer and in her digital camera. Photos from parties, from polo matches, from clubs. Girlfriends, polo players—several of Barbaro, social players—Brody’s crowd.

Only a few photos of Lisbeth herself. One in shorts and T-shirt, a candid of her holding on to a polo pony by a tangle of reins. One of her in a little black dress and Dior sunglasses, looking very glam.

There was the same photo of Lisbeth and Irina sitting side by side on the poolside chaise as had been in Irina’s camera. And another of the two of them at a tailgating party.

There were several of Irina only. Irina in profile, speaking to someone out of the frame. Irina sitting at a bistro table, having a glass of wine. Irina sitting on the lap of a man whose face had been overlapped by another photo. I turned the corner up. Bennett Walker. I put the corner back down.

I stood there for another moment, thinking: Just as Irina had a few too many photographs of Bennett, Lisbeth had a few too many photographs of Irina.

“Girl crush,”
Kayne Jackson had said. Hero worship. Irina had been everything Lisbeth was not—sophisticated, exotic, worldly, bold, adventurous. My eyes went from the photos of Irina to a photo of Lisbeth with Paul Kenner and Sebastian Foster, a photo of Barbaro and a couple of other players, back to the photos of Irina.

I moved on from the kitchen, down a short hall. The small bathroom was littered with wet towels. A wadded wet T-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts had been shoved into the wastebasket. They smelled of swamp and vomit.

The bedroom was a comfortable size, the walls painted lavender. The bed was a tangle of sheets. The wastebasket was full of discarded crumpled tissues. From crying, I thought. Lisbeth had lost her best friend, felt lost herself. A good bet: She was scared. She knew more than she was telling anyone. That was a big load to carry for a little girl from Nowhere, Michigan.

Along the far wall of the room stood a portable clothes rack hung with a condensed version of Irina’s designer wardrobe. Her purse sat on the dresser. Inside: her wallet, her cell phone.

Where would she have gone without her wallet? What girl her age didn’t have her cell phone Velcroed to the side of her head?

A sense of unease filled me and trickled down my spine like water. I turned to face the door.

The closet door stood slightly ajar. I pulled it open to reveal more clothes hanging on the rod and piled in a heap on the floor. And staring out at me from the corner, obscured by long hanging garments and covered by a blanket, a pair of blood-red eyes.

I jumped back with an expletive, then caught myself and tried to refocus.

“Lisbeth? Oh, my God, what happened to you?”

I shoved the hanging clothes out of the way and squatted down to meet her at eye level. She looked like something from a horror movie. The whites of her eyes were filled with blood, making the cornflower blue of the irises seem to glow. Her hair was matted in an insane tangle, studded with dead grass and dried leaf fragments. Her face was so swollen, she was all but unrecognizable.

“Lisbeth,” I said again. “Can you hear me?”

I reached out toward her, wondering if she was dead. But she flinched as I pulled the blanket away.

“Come on. Get out of there.”

I offered my hand and she took it. Her fingers were like icicles. She started to cry as I pulled her from the closet. Wrapped in a long terry robe, she was trembling so hard she could hardly stand and, in fact, crumpled to the floor, curled into a ball, and started coughing—a hard, deep, rattling cough.

I knelt beside her.

“Lisbeth, have you been raped?” I asked bluntly.

She shook her head but cried harder; the sounds from her throat were raw and hoarse.

“Tell me the truth.”

She shook her head again and mouthed the word
no
.

I didn’t believe her. She’d been strangled. I could see the ligature mark on her neck where her hair had fallen out of the way. She’d been strangled so hard the blood vessels in her eyes had burst.

“I’m going to call an ambulance,” I said.

She grabbed hold of my arm. “No. Please,” she croaked, touching off another fit of coughing.

“Then I’m taking you myself. You need to go to the hospital.”

She squeezed my arm so hard, I imagined there would be bruises later.

I pulled the coverlet from the bed and put it around her. I didn’t know what had happened to her, but I recognized what she was feeling now—fear, shame, disbelief. She wanted to wake up and realize she’d been in the middle of a terrible nightmare.

I reached down and stroked a hand over her hair. Lisbeth tried to push herself up into a sitting position.

“…so…scared…” she whispered.

She fell against me, shaking and sobbing, and I put my arms around her and just held her for I don’t know how long, thinking how many times in my younger life I wished someone had done that for me. How nice it would have been just to have someone there, offering support and a safe place to fall.

“You’re safe,” I said quietly. “You’re safe now, Lisbeth. No one is going to hurt you again.”

As we sat there on Jim Brody’s property, I hoped to God what I said would prove true.

“Who did this to you?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“You have to tell me, Lisbeth. He can’t hurt you now.”

“…don’t know…” she said, and started coughing again.

“You didn’t see him?”

She didn’t answer me but pulled away, falling onto her hands and knees and coughing until she choked and gagged. I rested my hand on her back and waited for the fit to pass.

When she quieted, I said, “I’ll be right back, and then we’re going to the hospital.”

I grabbed her purse off the dresser, then went into the bathroom and dug her wet clothing out of the garbage in the bathroom and stuffed it into a laundry bag that hung on the back of the door. I took the stuff downstairs, went and got my car, and pulled it around the side of the barn, parking at the base of the stairs.

A couple of stable hands watched me. One dropped what he was doing and walked toward the other end of the barn.

I took the keys, grabbed my gun out of the box in the door, and ran back upstairs.

Someone had attacked this girl, brutally, viciously. And the odds of this being a random act, all things considered, were long. She had been involved with Brody’s club, friends with Irina; she had been seen talking to me, and I was not to be trusted.

Brody had tried to give me the bum’s rush, had tried to tell me Lisbeth was gone even while we stood beside her car. I had to get her out of there. Certainly Brody hadn’t attacked Lisbeth himself. He wouldn’t be that careless, but there was no reason not to think he might have paid one of the barn hands to do it.

For all I knew, whoever had done this to her might have believed he had left her for dead. God knew she looked like she shouldn’t have survived.

When I got back to her room, Lisbeth was curled up, chin on her knees, leaning against the foot of the bed.

“Come on, Lisbeth.”

She didn’t respond, just stared at the floor.

“Come on!”

She shook her head slowly. “No,” she whispered. “Leave me alone.”

“That’s not happening, Lisbeth. You can get up and come with me, or I can drag you out of here by your hair. Get up.”

She said something so softly, I couldn’t make it out. She said it again, and again.

I should die? I should have died? I could die?
I wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I told her. “But it’s not happening on my watch.”

I grabbed her by the upper arm and started toward the door, dragging her.

“Goddammit, Lisbeth. Get up!” I shouted. A strong sense of urgency began to fill me, like a balloon growing larger and larger.

She started to cry again and pulled against me.

“Stop it!” I snapped.

I could hear voices outside. Two men speaking Spanish. I glanced out the window and caught a glimpse of two men down by my car.

As threatened, I wrapped a hand in Lisbeth’s thick wet hair, my fingernails biting into her scalp, and yanked her toward the door.

She cried out but stumbled along beside me. Tears streamed down her swollen face as I marched her down the stairs.

The men looked up at me.

“Hey! What you doin’ with her?” one shouted at me. He was stocky, neatly dressed in pressed jeans and a Western shirt. He wore a cowboy hat and a Fu Manchu. The barn manager, I assumed.

“I’m taking her to a hospital,” I said.

“She don’ wanna go with you.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “I’m not going to let her die. Are you?”

“I think you better let her go,” he said, bringing up some attitude, trying to block the passenger door of my car.

“I think you better get the hell out of my way.”

“I’m callin’ Mr. Brody,” he said, pulling out his cell phone.

“Yeah? You call Mr. Brody. You do that. How about I call the sheriff’s office? And they can call the INS. How about that?”

The other guy got nervous at that.

“How about I tell the detectives you did this to her?” I said.

“I didn’ do nothin’ to her!” he shouted.

“Yeah,
jefe
? Who do you think the cops will believe? You or me?”

The nervous one had taken a couple of steps to my left, to Lisbeth’s left. He took a couple more, angling over but edging in toward the girl. The boss took a step in the other direction.

I reached behind my back, curved my hand around the butt of my gun.

“Back off!” I shouted at the one closest to Lisbeth, drawing my weapon and pointing it at his face. His eyes went wide.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the boss make his move toward me. Without letting go of Lisbeth, I swung my arm around and backhanded him across the face with the gun. He dropped to his knees, putting his hand to his cheekbone, where the gun’s sight had cut him.

The nervous one ran as I swung back toward him. Off to get reinforcements.

I yanked the car door open and shoved Lisbeth into the passenger seat, then ran around to the driver’s side, got in, dropped the gun, started the engine.

Dust flying, gravel spewing, the BMW fishtailed around the end of the barn. A horse being hand-walked toward me reared and bolted sideways, kicking out at the groom. The horse got away. The groom shouted obscenities at me as I roared past.

Rubber squealed and burned as I swung out of the driveway onto the road and put the pedal down. I was past the white Escalade coming from the other direction so fast, Jim Brody’s face didn’t register until a half mile later.