by Tami Hoag
Walker was red in the face, and sweat beaded on his forehead. He was used to getting what he wanted. He had clearly been accepted back into the fold of the filthy rich after he walked on the rape/assault back when. He had money and his victim did not. In the eyes of the Palm Beach crowd, that made him a target and her a liar out for hush money.
Landry had looked back over everything he could find on the case. He didn’t think like a billionaire. He thought like a cop. And a cop’s conclusion was that Walker had been guilty and had bought his way out of jail with no more concern than if he had been playing a game of Monopoly.
Walker wanted to hit him. He could feel it, could see it in the man’s eyes. Landry found that perversely amusing, and he smiled.
“You want to knock me on my ass for that?” Landry said. “Go ahead. I’ll be all too happy to haul you in for assaulting an officer.”
Brody intervened. “Bennett, let’s go. The chef is waiting for us.”
The rest of them had been pulled in by the tension. No one said anything while they waited for Walker to respond. When he didn’t, Paul Kenner, the erstwhile baseball player, got up and slapped Walker on the shoulder.
“Let’s go, my man, the steaks are calling my name.” He moved past Walker, turned around, and headed slowly backward in the direction of a door on the far end of the room.
Walker kept his stare on Landry. “The sheriff will be hearing about your behavior from my attorney.”
Landry laughed. “You’re not on the Island now. This is the real world. You can’t threaten me or buy me off for doing my job. If you’re on the list, you’re on the list, Mr. Walker. You’re a potential suspect, like any other potential suspect. And your attitude isn’t doing anything but moving your name closer to the top of that list.”
Rich Boy didn’t have anything to say to that. Landry just stood here. He would have stood there all night, waiting for Walker to back down and retreat. He didn’t have to, but he would have. Walker went with Kenner and Brody toward the door to what was probably some members-only secret dining room. The rest of the club followed.
“I guess that was a group no,” Weiss said.
Landry was watching Barbaro, who went for the exit. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
They followed the Spaniard out. Barbaro turned a corner and went down the sidewalk toward the men’s room, but he stopped and turned to face them.
“I will take your test, Detective,” he said to Landry. “I have nothing to hide.”
“And your friends?”
“Are spoiled, wealthy men. As I told you earlier today: The wealthy are not like you or me. They have certain expectations in how they should be treated.”
“They’re a pain in the ass,” Landry said bluntly.
Weiss had the plastic bag and sterile swab in his hand.
“You want to do this right here?” he asked. “You don’t want an attorney present? You don’t think we’re going to tamper with the sample? You’re not going to sue us for violating your civil rights?”
“I have nothing to hide, Detective. None of your points apply, because you won’t find my DNA to match whatever other samples you may have.”
It took only a matter of seconds. Swab in the mouth, rub the inside of the cheek, swab in the evidence bag, done.
When it was over, Barbaro turned and went back into the building.
Weiss turned to Landry. “How do you like that?”
“I’d be happier if we had Walker’s sample.”
“You got some kind of hard-on for that guy?” Weiss asked. “What’s that all about?”
“Twenty years ago he went to trial on a rape/assault. The case fell apart and he walked,” Landry said. “It was a William Kennedy Smith kind of a thing. Rich kid from a prominent family, victim without a pot to pee in.”
“He said, she said.”
“In the end, she didn’t say. She suddenly refused to testify against him.”
“He bought her off,” Weiss said.
“That’s my guess.”
“That was twenty years ago.”
“Tigers don’t change their stripes,” Landry said. “Especially not if they got away with something once.”
“And in all these years he just hasn’t gotten caught.”
“Who knows? Maybe he started paying outright for rough sex. Maybe he knocks his wife around, keeps it all in the family. I don’t know,” Landry said. “I know he sure as hell acts like he’s got something to hide. I know that I saw a snapshot of him sitting with Irina Markova the night she went missing.”
“I don’t like any of these guys,” Weiss said. “I think they’d sooner lie than breathe. And they walk around with this big air of entitlement, like their shit don’t stink. They should all have to go to jail just for being jerks. Let them see what they’re entitled to in there.”
Weiss left with the sample to take it to the lab. Landry followed him but went back to Robbery/Homicide. At his desk—one of a collection of ugly 1960-vintage tan metal schoolteacher reject desks in the room—he put his reading glasses on, clicked a couple of keys, and brought his computer screen to life.
He brought up the archived newspaper articles about Bennett Walker’s arrest and trial and scanned them again. When he had first dug up the dirt earlier in the day, his reaction to the fact that Elena hadn’t been the one to tell him had been strong. He wasn’t sure he could put a name to the emotions—anger, hurt maybe. He didn’t like being shut out of her life.
Funny, neither one of them had done much talking about what their lives were like before they became involved. It had never bothered him. He hadn’t really even thought about it. What was the point in talking about twenty or thirty years back?
Now he felt like she had been purposely holding back on him.
React first, think later. She had every right to be pissed off at him. He’d been a jerk.
He read back through the Bennett Walker articles, read between the lines.
He hadn’t been living in Florida then. He had been aware of the case mostly from catching the odd newscast, and he hadn’t retained what little he had known. Digging up the details had been full of surprises, not the least of which being that Elena was engaged to Bennett Walker at the time.
Walker’s defense attorney had been Edward Estes, Elena’s father. a man well-known for confusing juries by twisting facts and misdirecting focus, and getting his clients off, no matter how dead-to-rights guilty they may have been.
In Walker’s case, Estes had gone with the tried-and-true blame-the-victim defense. The girl was promiscuous, liked rough sex, had an abortion when she was seventeen. She seduced Bennett Walker. She asked for it. She only brought charges against him in the attempt to get him to buy her off.
Landry looked at the photograph of the victim taken in the hospital two days after the attack. She looked like she’d been run over by a truck. Nobody asked for a beating like that. The girl was a bona fide victim.
He could only imagine how Elena would have reacted to her father’s battle plan. She was a person who believed in justice. Her father believed in winning.
Elena had testified for the prosecution against her then-fiance, which must have gone over well with dear old Dad. His own daughter sabotaging his high-profile case, shattering his client’s alibi—that he had been with Elena at the time of the attack.
Stories had then been leaked to the press that Elena was nothing more than a woman scorned, out for revenge; that she had a checkered party-girl past; perhaps she wasn’t mentally stable.
Landry didn’t wonder where those stories had come from. They had come from Bennett Walker’s camp, and the general in charge of Bennett Walker’s camp had been Edward Estes.
Her own father had turned against her to win a case.
“Why would I trust you, James?”
Her fiance turned out to be a rapist, and her father sold her down the river to suit his own purposes.
Why would she trust anyone?
She wouldn’t.
She didn’t.
Including him.
Chapter 26
He was waiting for me, as I knew he would be, at the gate into the Palm Beach Point development. Alexi Kulak.
My headlights washed over him as he stood beside his car. He had pulled himself together since I’d seen him. He looked neat, dapper even, in a tailored brown suit. He had shaved and combed his hair. He looked like a businessman waiting for the auto club to show up and change his flat tire. Impatient.
I pulled my car over, parked it, and reached down into the hidden panel of my door. At least I was better prepared this time.
I got out of the car and walked toward him, my hands at my sides.
“Mr. Kulak,” I said, stopping just out of his reach.
“What have you found out?” he asked, skipping the social niceties.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing? Don’t tell me nothing,” he snapped.
“What do you want me to say, then? Should I make something up?”
“You have a smart mouth.”
“Fire me, then. I didn’t audition for this job.”
I had left my headlights on. I kept my back to the light so I could see him clearly but the glare and my shadow would make it difficult for him to see me. I could see he didn’t appreciate my chutzpah.
“Do you know how I fire people, Ms. Estes?” he asked quietly.
“Fifty-five-gallon drum and forty gallons of acid?”
He smiled like a shark and looked every bit as deadly. “That is a good one. Perhaps I should add that to my repertoire. Would you like to be the first?”
“No,” I said calmly. “Do you want to find out who killed Irina?”
“Yes.”
“Then let me do my job.”
“You spent half the day with those men.”
“Yes, I did. Did you expect me to just ask the group over drinks whether or not any of them killed her? And did you expect any of them to just stand up and say, ”Why, yes, I killed her. Why do you ask?“”
He’d had it with my mouth. He took two aggressive steps forward, bringing a thick hand up to strike me or to grab me.
I pulled the 9mm from my waistband behind my back and planted it squarely between Kulak’s eyes, stopping him in his tracks.
“Don’t you fucking touch me,” I said, in a very different tone of voice.
My anger pushed him back a step, and then another. I stayed with him, never losing the contact between the gun barrel and his forehead. He backed up until he was trapped against his car. His eyes were wide with surprise or fear or both.
“You will never touch me again,” I declared, adrenaline humming through me like a narcotic. “I will fucking kill you where you stand. Don’t think for a second that I wouldn’t do it. I would kill you and stand on your corpse and howl at the moon.”
He was breathing shallowly and quickly. He didn’t think I was bluffing. Good. He needed to know he wasn’t the only unpredictable one in this strange arrangement.
I backed off and lowered the gun to my side. A car was coming toward the gate. The driver opened it with his remote control, drove through and on, never so much as glancing at us in curiosity.
“Which one do you suspect?” he asked.
“I don’t have a favorite, and I’m not a psychic. I need a lead, a witness, to catch someone in a lie,” I said. “If you want a quicker solution than that, why don’t you have a couple of your associates beat it out of them one at a time?”
He hesitated, looked a little away from me. Odd, I thought.
“This is my business,” he said. “My personal business.”
Alexi Kulak was the boss in his world. He could have snapped his fingers, and no one would ever see Jim Brody, or Bennett Walker, or any of that crowd again.
I shrugged. “Kill them all and let God sort it out.”
“That is what you would do?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I would do it all quietly, patiently. I would gather evidence and speak to her friends. I would speak to anyone who might have seen her that night, no matter how unlikely it may be that they would have an answer. By the time I went in for the kill, I would have absolutely no question who had murdered her. And I would have absolutely no mercy for that person.
“That’s what I would do,” I said. “That’s what I am doing. If you want to do it another way, that’s your business.”
He sighed and sat back against his car, his broad shoulders slumping. He rubbed his hands over his face. His head was bowed.
“This pain,” he said, rubbing a fist against his chest. “It is a thing that never ends. I want to scream it out of me. It is like a fire, and it burns and burns, and there is nothing I can do to put it out. I am mad with it.”
I actually felt bad for him. What an odd moment. Here was a man so ruthless he probably started his day eating the eyeballs he had plucked from enemies and traitors, and yet he was just a man, and he was grieving and in pain.
“You feel like you’re caged with a demon,” I said. “You can’t escape it. You can’t run away. There’s nowhere to hide.”
He looked at me, and his face shone with tears he had tried to wipe away. “You’ve known this pain?”
“I know what it’s like to want so badly to reverse the past that I would have turned myself inside out to do it,” I said quietly, thinking of the day Deputy Hector Ramirez had taken a hollow-point bullet in the face, blowing out the back of his skull and leaving his wife a widow and his children fatherless. Because of me. I knew what that pain was. The pain of guilt.
And I knew all about the pain of loss. Not of having a dream just fade away, but of having it yanked away and smashed before my eyes. I refused to let the faces surface in my mind. The pain came anyway, like an old friend who would just walk in the front door without knocking.
“Let me do my job, Mr. Kulak,” I said. “Then you can do yours.”
Without waiting for him to say anything, I went back to my car, did a U-turn on the street, and drove back toward Wellington.
“I would speak to anyone who might have seen her that night, no matter how unlikely it may be that they would have an answer.”
My own words came back to me, as did the vision of the strange woman who had approached Barbaro and me in the parking lot at Players the night before.
… no matter how unlikely…
Chapter 27
I swung into the drive-through at Burger King for sustenance to go, then continued on down Greenview Shores to South Shore. I pulled into the lower parking lot at Players and sat there for a while, trying to choke down a few bites of a chicken sandwich. I didn’t feel like eating. I felt like drinking.
It had been a long and taxing day already, and the night was young. My head spun with flashbacks of Landry, and Barbaro, and Bennett Walker. I could see Billy Quint squinting up at me from his wheelchair. I could see Bennett’s cold, flat eyes as he stared at he waitress in the 7th Chukker and the look he gave me when he said, “I’m surprised you didn’t go into sex-crimes investigation.” taunting me, and enjoying it.
In point of fact, I had gone into Sex Crimes when I got my detective’s shield. It hadn’t lasted long. My captain called me overzealous, sent me for a psych evaluation, and transferred me to Narcotics, where everyone was a little bit crazy and overzealous-less was considered a virtue.
I had secretly been relieved, afraid that if I stayed in Sex Crimes I would have ended up killing a suspect out of my own fury and hurt.
Fury and hurt. My emotions were bouncing between the two like the ball in a game of Pong. If I thought about it long enough, I would realize how exhausted I was, and I would start thinking about what a mess my life had been to date and how I didn’t see it getting any better. And things would go downhill from there.
Instead, I took the Burger King bag and set it on the hood so that my car wouldn’t have that nasty BO stench of cold, uneaten fast food when I got back into it later.
I looked
around the parking lot, casually walked around, stared hard into the night, where the sodium vapor light faded to black and the parking lot gave way to grass and trees. Though I had the creepy feeling of eyes staring back at me, I couldn’t see anyone. Maybe later.
As I approached the front of the club, I pulled a snapshot of Irina and Lisbeth out of my clutch and walked up to the valet stand. The kid working was tall and gangly and looked like a goose with acne. His eyes went wide at the sight of my fat lip.
“You should see the other guy,” I said.