by Tami Hoag
Lisbeth closed her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t know how any of this happened,” she whispered. “I don’t understand.”
“I guess people don’t get murdered and beat up and treated like shit where you come from.”
She wasn’t listening to me. She put her hands on her head, as if to hold it together.
“It’s all my fault,” she murmured.
“You must think highly of yourself,” I said.
Confused and offended, she opened her eyes and looked at me for an explanation.
“To think you have the power to control the universe and everyone in it,” I said. “You think if only you could have convinced Irina not to go to that party… You and I both know there was no stopping Irina from doing anything.”
“I begged her not to go.”
“Then you did all you could.”
She looked away and stared out the window. “I wish… I wish…”
“If you’re going to say you wish you’d died instead, save your breath. It wasn’t your call, and that’s just how it works sometimes. Take your breaks when you get them, Lisbeth. Life will turn on you soon enough.
“I made a bad choice once and a man died who shouldn’t have,” I said. “I stood right there and watched him get shot in the face. He had a family, and now they don’t have him, because of me.”
“Don’t you feel guilty?” she asked.
“Yes, terribly. But it hasn’t brought him back, so what good is it? I’ve wasted a lot of time punishing myself. No one’s given me a gold star for it. The world isn’t a better place.
“Nobody likes a martyr, Lisbeth,” I told her. “Now I try to get up in the morning and be a decent human being, do something good with myself, help somebody. I figure that’s the best I can do to make up for my mistake.
“Save yourself the years of self-loathing and substance abuse, and just get on with it.”
Lisbeth stared at me, not knowing what to say.
“What a hell of a mother I would have made,” I said sarcastically. “Donna Reed would be rolling in her grave.”
“Who’s Donna Reed?”
I gave her a look. “You will go to hell for that.”
She didn’t ask me why. Trying to avoid another sermon from the crazy middle-aged lady.
“What I’m saying, Lisbeth, is work off your guilt. Don’t wallow in it.
“How?”
“Help me find out what happened to Irina.”
“But I didn’t go to the after-party,” she said, looking away, staring at the wall as if the memory of that night was playing there on a movie screen visible only to her.
“Where was the party?” I asked firmly. “And don’t tell me you don’t know.”
A big fat tear rolled down her cheek.
“At Bennett’s,” she whispered.
I wasn’t surprised, but still, that hard, electric jolt hit me in the stomach. A conditioned response to the sound of his name. Or the weight of boxed-up bad emotional memories banging into me. And even though it was essentially what I wanted to hear, I felt sick inside.
“Just how involved with Bennett was she?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Was she in love with him?” I asked bluntly.
Another big fat tear.
“No,” she said, but there was a note of uncertainty in her voice. “She didn’t love him.”
“They were lovers,” I stated without any care for Lisbeth’s feelings. Cold hard fact.
She nodded. Two more tears.
“Did she have an agenda?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.
“I’ve heard from more than one person that Irina was angling for a wealthy husband.”
She inhaled a trembling breath. Through all of this she wouldn’t look at me.
“Lisbeth, I know Irina was seen recently by a doctor at a women’s clinic. Could she have been pregnant?”
More tears.
“Was she?”
The nod was almost imperceptible.
“She didn’t love him,” she said again.
“Are you trying to convince me, Lisbeth?” I asked gently. The change-up pitch meant to throw her off balance: “Or are you trying to convince yourself?”
She didn’t answer. I sighed and waited, letting the emotional pressure build inside her. I played back the memories of the photographs I had looked at over the past couple of days. Lisbeth in the pained smile and the purple bikini, standing next to Jim Brody in his swim trunks. Lisbeth and Irina sitting shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek on a poolside chaise, each with an umbrella drink in hand, toasting the photographer, all smiles.
“You miss her a lot,” I said softly.
Her shoulders were shaking as she tried to contain the emotions.
I thought about the vodka in her freezer. Out of place. The snapshots on her refrigerator. Too many of Irina.
“She was your best friend.”
She squeezed her eyes shut tight.
“Lisbeth?” I asked, then paused. “Was Irina more than just your friend?”
“I don’t know w-what you m-mean.”
“Were you in love with her?”
Now she looked at me, shocked, offended… guilty. “I’m not a lesbian! Irina wasn’t a lesbian!”
I had put together enough of a profile to know that Irina was whatever she wanted to be at any given time. There was no doubt she was into guys, but it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear she swung the other way when it suited her. It certainly wasn’t hard to imagine that at those Bacchanalian orgies of the Alibi Club, girl-on-girl action would have been a popular spectator sport—and Irina had loved the limelight.
“You’ve had a rough go of it, haven’t you?” I said softly. “You came down here thinking you were going to get a job, make some good money, meet people, have fun. Maybe you thought you’d meet the love of your life, I don’t know. But you got something very different from what you bargained for.
“You got sucked in with Brody’s crowd, you got overwhelmed. You’re a good kid, Lisbeth. You didn’t know anything about that world. Fast, shallow, amoral. In a way, you had the clearest vision of what it was, and how wrong it was. You come from a normal place populated with normal people. There’s nothing normal about how these people live. Everything is a game, and they’re entitled to have whatever they want until they don’t want it anymore. And then they just throw it away, like it never meant anything to them.”
From the outside looking in, to people who have to worry about paying their mortgage and their electric bill, the world of the wealthy seems easy and wonderful. But every kind of life has its price and its pitfalls. In a lifestyle where there are no boundaries, it becomes a challenge to find one’s true self. If everything comes easily, there is no way to establish worth. And if nothing has real value, then there is no way to gauge satisfaction or accomplishment or contentment.
That was Bennett Walker’s world. He had everything anyone could possibly want, yet he was never satisfied. He had taken everything there was to take—except perhaps a human life. And in a world where nothing meant anything, why not take that too, just to see what it might be like to play God?
Bennett had always believed the world should run according to his plan. What if Irina had decided to disrupt that plan? What if she had decided she could get what she wanted by getting the upper hand on Bennett? What if she had told him she was pregnant, and that she expected him to marry her?
I could imagine the wrath that would set loose in Bennett Walker.
“Did you think something might happen that night, Lisbeth?” I asked. “Is that why you tried so hard to keep Irina from going to the after-party?”
“I’m really tired,” she whispered. “I want to go to sleep now.”
I considered pressing her harder but decided against it. Emotional battery was a good start. I would save sleep deprivation for later.
I didn’t allow myself to feel guilty about it. Lisbet
h was alive, Irina was not. Lisbeth would recover. The best I could do for Irina was vengeance. If I had to further manipulate, deceive, and abuse this girl to get it, so be it.
“One last question,” I said. “Did you ever see Bennett Walker— or any of the rest of them, for that matter—hurt Irina physically?”
She didn’t answer me. Either she was faking it or she had in fact fallen asleep. It didn’t matter which. I didn’t need Lisbeth Perkins to tell me Bennett Walker was capable of hurting a woman.
I knew that firsthand.
Chapter 45
“I knew he was up to no good,” the gate guard said. J. Jones. She pursed her lips and shook her head as she narrowed her eyes at the photograph of Bennett Walker. She was the size of a small upright freezer.
“How’s that?” Landry asked.
“Because men that good-looking are always up to no good,” she said, looking at him like he was stupid. “And he never drives that car. What’s he doing in that car? He’s always Mr. Big riding around in his Porsche or his this or his that. He ain’t ridin‘ around in no Volkswagen. Him and that dark-haired foreign guy. Ooooh! I got to say, I do like lookin’ at that one.”
“You’re sure it was him?” Weiss said, tapping at Bennett Walker’s head with his ballpoint pen. “You’re sure it was Sunday night?”
“Am I sure?” she said, offended by his obvious stupidity.
“Am I sure? That’s my job. That’s what I do. Are you sure you’re a detective?”
“I have to ask that one every once in a while myself, Miss Jones,” Landry said, straight-faced.
Laughter exploded out of her like a cannon shot. Her massive chest rose and fell like a ten-foot sea. “You got a sense of humor,” she declared.
“No,” Landry said. “Not really.”
The guard turned back to Weiss. “Honey, I’m working here in the middle of the damn night. Someone comes, someone goes, I’m gonna know it. That’s what passes for excitement here. You think I’m just sitting around doing my nails all night? You think I’m just watching movies?”
“Were you here Saturday night?” Landry asked, pressing on.
“No. I was off Saturday. I have a life, you know. I’m not just sit-tin‘ in this place my whole life like a veal.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Weiss said impatiently. “We’ve got the tape. Let’s go.”
Landry thanked the guard and left the booth behind Weiss, who was already halfway to his car.
“So?” Weiss said. “That’s gotta be enough for a search warrant for Walker’s house. Videotape and an eyewitness who puts him in the dead girl’s car.”
Landry’s phone rang. Elena. He held a finger up at Weiss and took the call. “Landry.”
“The after-party was at Bennett Walker’s house in the Polo Club. Lisbeth told me.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
He clicked the cell phone closed and said to Weiss, “The party was at Walker’s house. Now we have enough for a warrant. Let’s go nail his ass.”
Chapter 46
I prowled around my living room with my cell phone in my hand, trying to decide what to do next. I could go to Bennett’s neighborhood in the Polo Club and ask around to see if anyone saw him murder a girl Saturday night. That would go over big.
I could see it: security handing me over to Landry to be arrested for criminal trespass while he was executing a search warrant at Bennett’s house. How convenient.
He didn’t need me asking the neighbors anything. He would have uniforms doing KOD duty (knocking on doors) while he oversaw what went on in the house.
He would be trying to get a search warrant, I knew. If I had been in his position, that was what I would have been trying to do. I wondered how far he would get before my father stuck a wrench in the wheels of justice.
If he hadn’t already at some point in his career, Landry was about to find out that there was a different set of rules for men like Bennett Walker and Edward Estes. The iron hand of justice would put on the kid glove. People who would have been ready to jab the needle in the arm of any other murderer would suddenly back down. The district attorney would be more willing to accommodate a deal.
Hard time? Surely, Mr. Walker—whose father-in-law footed the campaigns of practically every Republican candidate in the state—hadn’t intended to strangle the girl. It was probably an accident. Perhaps time in a minimum-security facility with a good tennis court in exchange for a plea to involuntary manslaughter…
But what was I thinking? My father would never entertain the idea of a plea. He would run the state ragged in a full-blown CourtTV trial. He would reach deep into Bennett’s coffers and call expert witness after expert witness. The state’s budget for the trial would be pocket change by comparison. The state’s attorney would be begging for five bucks to get ink pens and legal pads for the table. Edward would be forking over five or ten grand a pop for people with degrees to take the witness stand and convince the jury to buy a nickel for a dime.
At least this time the victim couldn’t recant her testimony in exchange for a six-figure payoff.
Restless, I went to look in on Lisbeth. Whether she had been faking it or not when I left the room, she was well and truly out now. The lamplight from the bedside table touched her face with an amber glow. She looked about twelve, with her thick, wavy mane spread out across the pillow. A little girl still dreaming about becoming a princess.
I went in and covered her with a cashmere throw and touched her forehead to check for any sign of a fever.
Elena Estes: Mother Earth.
The cell phone vibrated in my hand. I walked out into the hall and answered it.
“Elena? It’s Juan. I need to speak with you.”
“Here I am,” I said. “Have at it.”
“No, no. Not this way. I want to see you.”
“Why?”
“You are not making this easy for me,” he said.
“Well, I know that’s how you like things, but I’m not in the mood for it, Juan. Lisbeth Perkins has been beaten, strangled, and half-drowned.”
“What?” he asked with what sounded like genuine shock. “Lisbeth? When did this happen? How did this happen?”
“Last night. She did night check, then someone grabbed her.”
“Oh, my God.”
“I’m trying to decide if I should be upset about that or if I should just shrug it off,” I said sarcastically. “Especially seeing as she isn’t dead, she just wishes she was. What do you think?”
“I think you are trying to make a point I’ve already taken.”
That gave me pause.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, soul-searching.”
“It’s good to know you have one.”
“I suppose I deserved that,” he said.
“I suppose you did.”
He heaved a sigh and tried to regroup. “Please, Elena. Meet me. Or I can come to you. Whatever you prefer.”
I preferred not to have him come to my home, where my only witness was passed out cold in the bedroom. I had no reason to trust him. Even money said someone in that clique had attacked— or paid someone else to attack—Lisbeth. There was no doubt in my mind they had put their heads together the night before, after finding out about my past life with the sheriff’s office. Brody knew I had been pumping Lisbeth for information. So did Barbaro.
Instead of trying to take me out of the equation, they did the easier thing and turned on Lisbeth. Easier to turn off the faucet than to make the bucket disappear.
“What’s it about?”
“Bennett.”
I said nothing.
“Meet me downstairs at Players. I want to speak with you before I go to the detectives. Please, Elena, give me that chance.”
He was going to turn on Bennett. I couldn’t have been more shocked… then hopeful, then suspicious.
“A soul with a conscience,” I said. “Seems too good to be true.”
“Meet me, please,” he said.
; “I’ll be there in twenty,” I said, and closed the phone.
Chapter 47
A couple of TV news vans had taken up residence in the main parking lot at Players. Python-size tangles of cord had been snaked from the vans up to the prime exterior-shot spots, where blinding white lights and screens stood on spider legs, ready for the on-camera talent to step in front of them.