“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 aid 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 recognized as Sebastian Foster, the tennis player. He sat astride lot 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 the grandstand, it was smaller and more private than the Mallet Grille and Bar in the clubhouse. An unobtrusive panel door on one side 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 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 girl-end. 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.
