My instincts went on point. He must have felt the tension in me through his touch, but he didn’t have time to react.
“Is there a problem here?”
Landry. Guilt washed over me like cold water almost before I recognized the voice. I knew how this had to look to him, like exactly what it was: an intimate conversation between his now-former lover and the most eligible hot polo star on the circuit.
“No. We’re good,” I said. “Detective Landry, this is Juan Barba-”
“We’ve met,” Landry said, with the kind of distaste that suggested he hadn’t been impressed. “Take your hand off, the lady…”
“The lady doesn’t object,” Barbaro said.
“Is that right?” Landry said.
I turned to face him, forgetting how I looked.
His eyes went wide. “Did he do this to you?” he demanded, jabbing a finger at Barbaro.
He wouldn’t have heard me if I had tried to answer. He had already turned on Barbaro like an attack dog.
“Did you do this to her?”
Barbaro took a healthy step back and raised his hands. “No!”
Landry didn’t hear him either. He advanced aggressively. “I don’t know what they do where you’re from, Paco, but you strike a woman here, we throw your ass in jail.”
“Landry,” I said, thinking I might have to hit him with something to get his attention out of the red zone. “Landry! Detective Landry!”
Finally he glanced at me.
“I took a fall,” I said. “If some guy did this to me, do you think he’d be alive to tell the tale?”
He didn’t want to believe me. He wanted to pistol-whip Barbaro. But he looked at me hard and I lied to his face.
“No one hurt me.”
His gaze went from me to Barbaro and back and forth, not trusting either of us.
“No one hit me.”
Landry gave me the cop face. He was angry. I could feel it coming off him like steam. If he chose to believe Barbaro hadn’t assaulted me, then he had to go back to the original issue: why Barbaro had his hand on my arm, and why I hadn’t objected. It was a no-win situation all the way around.
“I need to have a word with you, Ms. Estes,” he said. “Regarding the murder of your groom.”
“Elena?” Barbaro asked. “Would you like me to stay with you?”
“No. Thank you, Juan. It’s fine.”
He was frowning at Landry. Landry was glaring at him.
Men.
I started backing down the sidewalk. “I assume you would like o speak to me in private, Detective Landry.”
He didn’t say, but he broke off the stare-down and followed me.
“Nothing like the smell of testosterone on the night air,” I commented.
“You think this is funny?” he snapped.
“I don’t know what ‘this’ is.”
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, stopping me with. hand on my arm.
I stared at the point of contact. “Take your hand off the lady, Detective.”
He let go but didn’t apologize. The concept was unknown to him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I was having a conversation with an acquaintance.”
“An acquaintance? Since when?”
“Since it’s none of your goddamn business,” I snapped back.
“It’s my business if it’s been more than two days.”
I actually gasped in surprise, the statement was such a sucker punch.
“Why don’t you just call me a whore to my face?” I suggested. Two days ago you thought we should move in together. Now you think I’ve been screwing a polo player on the side all along. You are such an asshole.“
“I think you already said that yesterday.”
“Oh? Has something changed since then?”
He started to say something, checked himself, took a step back, and regrouped. I just stared at him and shook my head.
“I don’t want you hanging around with this crowd, Elena,” he confessed. “It’s not safe.”
“With what you apparently think of me, why would you care?” I asked. “Why don’t you just leave me alone? I know what I’m doing.”
“It doesn’t matter. There are more of them than there are of you.
“You think they’re going to cart me off like a pack of jackals?” I asked, not that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind in that instant Barbaro invited me to go somewhere alone with him. “Do you know something I don’t?”
“I know a lot of things,” he said cryptically.
I looked past his shoulder. Barbaro was hanging by the entrance to the stands, watching, waiting. He couldn’t hear us, but I’m sure his read on our body language was that Landry and I were anything but friends. Good. I didn’t want the Alibi Club thinking I still worked for the SO; bad enough that they knew what they knew about me.
“Really?” I said to Landry. “Do you know that these guys are going to back one another up no matter what? Do you know their parties usually end up being clothing optional-which, by the way, I don’t know from experience, as hard as that may be for you to believe. Do you know that they call themselves the Alibi Club?”
“The Alibi Club?”
Point to me. He didn’t know. I had managed to one-up him. I still had that edge, that need to grab a lead, a piece of evidence before anyone else could. Once a cop…
I glanced past him again just as Barbaro went back into the building.
“Who told you that?” Landry asked.
“Lisbeth Perkins. She argued with Irina at Players that night because she didn’t want Irina to hang around for the after-party.”
“But she did anyway,” Landry murmured.
He turned away from me, thinking, sorting out puzzle pieces in his head. I knew the look.
“What do you know?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
“What do you know?” I asked again, knowing he wasn’t going to tell me. The autopsy, I thought.
“You know what happened to her,” I said. “You know how she died, what the killer did to her. You know if there was one killer, more than one killer.”
He said nothing.
“She was my friend, Landry.”
He made a face. “Don’t call her your friend. You never did anything but complain about her attitude.”
“So? I used to complain about your attitude when I still considered you a friend. I guess since that’s not the case anymore, I shouldn’t expect you to tell me anything.”
He shrugged. “You sure as hell didn’t tell me anything.”
“About what? I’ve told you everything I know, everything I’ve been able to find out.”
“You didn’t tell me about you and Bennett Walker,” he said. “Why is that? You had to know I would find out.”
“I didn’t tell you because it isn’t relevant. It was twenty years ago.
“I’ll bet it’s relevant to you.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning you’re thinking Walker did Irina.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” I said. “It’s becoming more and more apparent that you don’t know anything about me n any way that matters.”
