“Hey, boy, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she murmured to him, wondering where the hell Jessie was, or if Lint were nearby to hear the noise.
The large bay horse suddenly whirled to face Margo, then, without warning, reared up on its back legs, blotting out the hanging overhead lamp in the barn. Margo only saw the horse as a terrible, dark shadow as he flailed his hooves wildly in the air, finally coming down hard and missing her feet by inches.
Trapped against the back of the barn passageway, Margo flung down the lead rope in a sudden panic and tried to decide if she had a chance of slipping past the animal to the lighted paddock at the end of the barn. From there, even if Traveler wheeled after her, she could dive under the fence and be safe.
Margo shouted for help and eyed the distance to the paddock. Suddenly, the crazed animal reared again. Margo crossed her face with her forearms. His front hooves came down hard, striking her solidly in the face and chest, knocking her arms aside and crushing her to the ground.
2
The polo field stretched to the horizon like a piece of emerald-green velvet. Portia was in her car, on the way to the stable for an early evening ride. Unusual for her, to ride alone and so late in the day. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the car’s rear view mirror and saw that she’d forgotten to take off her earrings. They were long, gold chains with swinging clusters of pearls at the end. She made a face. She must look ridiculous dressed in breeches and paddock boots with dangling earrings on! She stopped the car next to the polo field and unscrewed them, tossing them impatiently in her ash tray. Can’t even hack the perimeter of the polo grounds, she thought with annoyance, with all the police still everywhere. At the thought of the police, her mind flashed a picture of Tess. How she wished she didn’t have to remember things, think of things. She resumed driving her car down the long driveway and parked in front of the middle barn. She saw Margo’s Saturn but no other cars. The light was fading quickly. It would be totally dark before she’d even tacked up. She’d have to ride in the ring with the overhead lights on. She sighed heavily.
Why couldn’t Tess just tell the police that she’d gone back to Jilly that afternoon but hadn’t found her? Why did she have to insist that Portia lie for her? It was too nerve-wracking. She had a good mind to just tell the police the truth. That she and Tess had split up less than a half a mile after they’d left Jilly. That Tess had said she was going back to make it up with Jilly--as if anybody would believe that!--hadn’t found her, and had come on back to the stables alone. It was simple and left Portia completely out of it. It was all so selfish on Tess’s part.
Portia opened her Mercedes trunk and pulled her Crosby Prix Des Nations close contact saddle onto the lip. She felt in the bottom of the trunk for her girth and bridle. The sun had completely set now. Somewhere in the stable, she heard a noise. She paused to listen, and the sound wasn’t there.
She looked over in the direction of Margo’s apartment. The lights were out but her car was there. Just to the east of Margo’s place, Portia could see the strips of yellow police tape barring the entrance to one of the pastures.
The autumn will be gone, she thought dully, as she turned back to her car to finish unloading, before they let us ride the polo fields again.
3
“She’ll live.” Kazmaroff spoke briefly into his phone from where he stood in the hallway off the nurse’s station, the busy hospital corridor behind him. The nursing shifts were in the process of changing. The nurses sat in a group behind the long desk of the nurse’s station. The graveyard shift was tiredly briefing the early morning crew over styrofoam cups of steaming coffee as to the status of each of the patients during the night.
Burton nodded in response on the other line. He was at police headquarters, had been since a little before five that morning. He watched the suspect inside the interrogation room through a sound-proof window where the man sat carefully chewing every fingernail on both hands.
“Who found her?”
“Portia Stephens. She called the fucking vet.”
“Oh, well.”
“What was Portia doing at the barn?”
“Intending to ride, it seems.”
“At eight o’clock at night? Okay,” he said. He rubbed his eyes. It had already been a long day.
“But the little barn girl...what’s her name?“
“Jessie.”
“Yeah, she’s here at the hospital. She showed up at the barn at about the same time the paramedics did. Says she was supposed to go over some stuff with Margo. She says that horse is as gentle as a butterfly. She says there’s no way that horse would’ve stomped her.”
“Is there some question as to which horse did the stomping?”
“No, it was that horse all right.”
“Then what is she suggesting? That the horse was drugged?”
“The vet’s running tests on him and his feed now. What about the ex-husband?” Kazmaroff asked, switching the subject. “Getting anything?”
Burton laughed. He looked back at the man visible through a one-way mirror sitting inside the interrogation room.
“You might say that,” he said.
Surprised at Burton’s light tone, Kazmaroff hesitated, then: “Okay, try me.”
“He confessed to wanting to kill her...”
“Yeah?”
“He confessed, even to contracting to have her killed.”
“You’re kidding.”
“But, in the end, he insists, quite tearfully, I might add, that he did not kill her.”
“I’ll bet he does.”
“It’s even better.” Burton found himself remarkably un-irritated with Kazmaroff this morning and wondered if perhaps they needed to deal with each other primarily via telephone in future. “He says he called the hit-man to see if he had done the deed only to find out the guy was waiting for the check to clear before he did anything.”
Kazmaroff burst out laughing. Burton laughed too and was aware that it was the first time in four years of working together that the two of them had ever shared a laugh. It made him feel slightly nauseated.
“The dumb bastard accepted a check?” Kazmaroff asked, still laughing.
“Yeah, the hit-man’s as stupid as the ex-husband.”
“What are you going to do?’
“Let him cool his well-heeled heels awhile,” he said. “I can hold him a few more hours so I thought I’d run down another lead and let him sit here and chew his fucking nails down to the knuckles.”
“What lead?”
The tension snapped back between them as quickly and palpably as a rubber band shot from a sling.
“Just something. Probably nothing.”
“Why don’t you bore me with it? Since we are both working this case together?”
“I told you--”
“Give me a break, man!” Kazmaroff snarled. “You’ve been telling me all along the husband’s the one. Now he turns up with a fucking confession and you’re tracking down some other lead? I don’t believe it. Listen, you want to take personal time off, just say so, don’t give me any bull-shit about following some lead you--”
Burton held his temper and carefully, purposefully, broke the connection.
4
Tess returned the phone to its cradle. Her brow was pinched in an expression of worry and fear. She walked to the hall mirror in her condo and stood there a moment, reflecting on the phone conversation, and on the face she saw before her.
Quietly, she reached into the drawer of the hall table that sat under the mirror and pulled out a tube of lipstick. She applied the bright color to her lips, smudging the corner of her mouth with her shaking hand.
She stared into the mirror, watching the fine lines criss-crossing her eyes. A tiny vein pulsed unattractively under one eye and the lipstick looked garish against her too-pale face. She continued to stare into the mirror.
Fuck you, Jilly, she thought.
5
Burton tossed the notebook on the desk and
eased back into his desk chair. His mind fought to push the personal agendas out and back and away. He turned to stare at a photograph of the crime site. Without even a corpse to help keep him focused, he forced himself to concentrate on examining the bloody setting of Jilly’s last moments on earth.
He and Kaz had combed the area surrounding the farm in a perimeter measuring nearly a half mile. Burton knew, of course, that there was no reason to believe she hadn’t been buried a little further out, or stuffed in a car trunk and dumped in the Chattahoochee, for that matter. But the bloodhounds had covered an even wider area with no joy. As a result, they’d eliminated the actual stables as a possibility for Jilly’s last resting place. After all, she would have to have been killed, then dragged back to the barn area and buried or hidden, in the middle of people saddling horses and taking lessons and driving in and out. He shook his head. It didn’t make sense. Before the attack on Margo, he had searched the clearing, two barns, all the stalls and even had the pond dragged. They’d brought bloodhounds in to cover the entire area. Nothing. No body. No murder weapon. Burton had checked all three pastures to see if anything had been freshly buried in one of them.
The attack on Margo had forced him to cordon off the barn buildings again. This time, it wasn’t just a look-see; they’d be taking careful samples of everything from the blood on the straw floor to the mouse droppings that went with it.
Stupid!
Burton tossed the photograph down in disgust. He wasn’t paying attention these days, he was logging in his time, there in body and not much more. He wondered how badly he’d compromised the case so far, and made a note to be on hand later in the afternoon when forensics combed the tack rooms and stalls.
He stood up and stretched his back. It wasn’t yet ten in the morning. He planned on keeping Mark Travers in the interrogation room another four hours at least. The man had wept nearly the whole interview earlier that morning with Burton. And it wasn’t because he mourned his ex-wife.
Funny, Burton mused, the thing that he and Kazmaroff had found so amusing--the only thing, in fact, they had ever found amusing in tandem--was the one thing, i.e.--making fun of Mark Travers--that was loaded to the gunnels with coincidental ironies. For example, although Burton had no doubt that Kaz was genuinely disgusted with the stupidity (not to mention depravity) of Travers’ actions, the two detectives had laughed, in large part, because they were enjoying ridiculing a member of a moneyed social class--the very class that Kazmaroff attempted on a daily basis to pass himself off as a card-carrying member of.
Burton scratched his head and lifted a cold cup of coffee to his lips. He’d never thought about it before but maybe there was something more complicated behind Dave wanting to grace the cover of “Town & Country.” And if that’s true, and it’s really a lack of self-confidence covered up by the avalanche of reeking swagger that he, Burton, was continually repulsed by, then maybe, just maybe, there was a glimmer of a possibility that they might have a meeting point. After all.
Like I give a shit, Burton thought with a grimace, and tossed the coffee in his trash can.
The phone rang on his desk. It was Kazmaroff.
“I’m leaving here, Jack,” Kazmaroff said, obviously choosing to ignore the way their last conversation had terminated.
“Great, go out to the barn. I’ll be out in a couple of hours.”
“After you check out your private lead.”
“That’s been moved to this evening.”
“You don’t want to admit she’s involved and man, you know she is up to her surgically-tightened neck! She’s not a witness, Jack! She’s a fucking suspect! Are you crazy or something?”
Burton forced himself to look back at the photograph on his desk, the mangled tall grass doused with crimson. He tried to bring a picture to mind of Jilly doing something... what? in that clearing. Instead, he saw himself and Tess lying nude in the grass. He was kissing her, stroking her bone-white skin.
Stop it! Stop it!
“You still there, Jack?”
“Yeah.” It was a croak more than a voice.
“You always liked the ex-husband as the perp, right? Well, you got him; you’ve talked to him, and you can’t see it, can you?”
“No,” Jack admitted. “First impressions only.”
“Sometimes that’s all a detective’s got.”
“Funny how poorly that tends to hold up with the D.A.”
“You know what I’m talking about. If you’re going to interview Tess Andersen without me, you gotta be thinking she could’ve done it, damn it! Is that what you’re thinking, Jack? Is it?”
“I’ll be at the barn after twelve,” Burton replied. “Coordinate with the agent until I get there. Make sure every blade of straw, every lump of horse shit ends up in a box or a baggie, check out every splinter or injury any one got after the attack on Margo. And talk to Lint and Jessie again.”
“Yeah, right. See you at twelve.” Kazmaroff’s voice was full of disgust.
Burton hung up, then walked to the window of his office. He had a beautiful view of the parking lot. He turned and picked up the phone and gave orders to have Mark Travers released after three o’clock. Then he called home to tell his wife he’d have to work late tonight.
6
The martini was ice-cold, with three olives. It was Tess’s second. Burton hadn’t appeared yet and she felt she needed the fortification.
Mia Spago’s was nearly empty, as she expected it would be on an early Thursday evening. Tess sat at the bar, her profile to the restaurant’s main entrance. She wore a pale gray Armani jacket over a silk blouse and jeans. She’d taken some time deciding what to wear tonight. She didn’t want to appear to be the rich-bitch party girl she was sure Dave Kazmaroff was advising his partner she was. A Gucci pin held a Milanese shawl in place across her right shoulder and breast. She lit another cigarette.
“Another martini?”
She shook her head at the bartender who moved away, polishing glasses.
She hated feeling this way. Why couldn’t she just think of him as a man instead of a cop? Relax, darling, she told herself. He won’t come as a cop tonight. You know he won’t.
“Been waiting long?”
Burton was at her elbow and Tess fought an impulse to check to see if he were wearing sneakers.
“Oh! You surprised me. I expected you to come through the front door.”
Burton motioned to the bartender.
“Whatever the lady’s having.”
He seated himself at the bar next to her.
“You okay?” he asked her, frowning. “You look a little shaky.”
Tess forced herself to keep her hands quiet.
“Well,” she said trying to sound light and joky, “it is a little like withdrawal, not being able to ride.”
“It’s just temporary. He’s being well-taken care of.”
“I can’t imagine he is. By that stupid Margo? I’ve forbidden her to even dream of getting on Wizard. The last thing I need is for her to undo months of training by one little hack-among-friends along the back trails.”
“I didn’t know you didn’t like Margo.”
“I...” Tess took a sip of her drink as the bartender brought Burton his.
“I’ve always wanted to try one of these,” Burton said.
Tess blinked as if he’d suddenly lapsed into Urdu.
“A martini?” she said.
“Yeah, I’m kind a domestic-brew guy, I guess.”
“Oh, well, anyway, I mean...it’s not that I don’t like Margo. I guess she does her job well enough, but she constantly wants to be friends, you know?”
“Is that a pretty repulsive idea, I guess?”
Tess blushed and smiled at Burton.
“Am I being questioned formally tonight?” she asked sweetly.
“Sorry.”
Burton set down his martini and picked up Tess’ hand, surprising her, calming her, which surprised her again.
“Margo was attacked
last night at the barn.”
Tess withdrew her hand and put it to her mouth.
“The same person who killed...?”
Burton shook his head.
“No, no, well, not directly, any way,” he said. “She was trampled by a horse.”
Tess looked at him in horror.
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
“The horse had been drugged. I guess he’s normally a pretty gentle animal. We got the results back this afternoon on his feed and it’d been tampered with.”
“Margo...”
“She’s in the hospital. She’s going to be okay, although Couple of broken bones. Ribs, arm. She’s lucky. She never got hit in the head.”
“‘Lucky’.”
“Well, you know. Hey, did you put a name in for a table?”
Tess nodded and they were silent for a moment.
“I was glad you called,” she said.
“Yeah, well, as I said, I’m not sure why I did, and I gotta warn you, I’m not sure part of it’s not official, you know?”
Tess smiled.
“Am I a suspect?”
“Everybody is at this point. Sorry. You’re not very high up on the list if it’s any comfort.”
“Thanks, I guess it is, somewhat. Have you tracked down Jilly’s ex?”
Burton nodded and signaled to the bartender to refill both of their drinks.
“Enough said about that the better,” he said. “The man’s an idiot. I don’t know how he manages to live alone and care for himself.”
Tess laughed.
“I think it’s one of the things that appealed to Jilly. Mark’s...I don’t know, incompetence, I guess.”
“Yeah, he’s ‘incompetent’, all right.”
“But he’s sweet.”
“I’ve seen the dearest old grandmas right after they’ve butchered their sons-in-law. Sweet doesn’t cut much when it comes to homicides.”
“I guess not. Is he higher up on the list than I am?”
“You could say so. Although I’d rather not talk about that little rat’s ass tonight if it’s all the same to you. Excuse the language.”
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