Dark Horse

by Tami Hoag

“Russians are arrogant.”

  “And what are Dutchmen?”

  He pulled the Mercedes in where I pointed, alongside my Beemer.

  “I am from Belgium,” he corrected. “Men from Belgium are charming and know how to treat ladies.”

  “Slick rascals, more like,” I said. “Ladies should be on their guard, I think.”

  Van Zandt chuckled. “You are no pushover, Elle Stevens.”

  “It takes more than a smile and an accent to sweep me off my feet. I’ll make you work for it.”

  “A challenge!” he said, delighted at the prospect.

  I got out of the car without waiting for him to come around and open the door, and dug my keys out of my hip pocket. The back of my hand brushed over the butt of the gun tucked in my waistband.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said.

  “Thank you, Elle Stevens. You brightened an otherwise boring evening.”

  “Don’t let Ms. Montgomery hear you say that.”

  “She’s all gloom, talking about the dead gelding.”

  “Losing a horse worth that kind of money would bring me down too.”

  “It wasn’t her money.”

  “Maybe she liked the horse.”

  He shrugged. “There’s always another.”

  “Which I’m sure you’ll be happy to supply to the grieving owner for a price.”

  “Of course. Why not? That’s business—for me and for her.”

  “You sentimental fool, you.”

  In the harsh glow of the security light from above I saw the muscles of Van Zandt’s jaw flex. “I am in this business thirty years, Elle Stevens,” he said, a thread of impatience in his voice. “I am not a heartless man, but for professionals horses come and horses go. It’s a shame the gelding died, but with professionals a sentimental fool is just that: a fool. People have to move on with their lives. Owners too. The insurance will pay for the dead horse, and his owner will buy another.”

  “Which you will be happy to find.”

  “Of course. I know already a horse in Belgium: clean X rays and twice as good as that one over the fences.”

  “And for a mere one-point-eight million he can belong to some lucky American and Don Jade can ride him.”

  “The good ones cost, the good ones win.”

  “And the rest can bite through electrical cords in the dead of night and fry themselves?” I asked. “Careful who you say that to, Van Zandt. Some insurance investigator might hear you and think the wrong thing.”

  He didn’t shrug that off. I sensed him tense.

  “I never said anyone killed the horse,” he said, his voice tight and low. He was angry with me. I wasn’t supposed to have a brain. I was supposed to be the next American with too much money and too little sense, waiting for him to charm me and sweep me off to Europe on a buying trip.

  “No, but Jade has that reputation, doesn’t he?”

  Van Zandt stepped closer. My back pressed against the frame of my car’s roof. I had to look up at him. There wasn’t a soul around. There was nothing but a lot of open country beyond the back gates. I slipped one hand into the back of my waistband and touched my gun.

  “Are you that insurance person, Elle Stevens?” he asked.

  “Me?” I laughed. “God, no. I don’t work.” I said the word with the kind of disdain my mother would have used. “It’s just a good story, that’s all. Don Jade: Dangerous Man of Mystery. You know us Palm Beachers. Can’t resist a juicy scandal. My biggest concern in life at the moment is where my next good horse is coming from. What goes on with this show-jumping crowd is nothing but good gossip to me.”

  He relaxed then, having decided I was sufficiently self-absorbed. He handed me his card and dredged up the charm again. Nothing like greed to rally a man. “Give me a call, Elle Stevens. I’ll find you your horse.”

  I tried to smile, knowing only one side of my mouth moved upward at all. “I may take you up on that, Mr. Van Zandt.”

  “Call me V.,” he suggested, his tone strangely intimate. “V. for Very Good Horses. V. for Victory in the showring.”

  V. for vomit.

  “We are friends now,” he announced. He leaned down and kissed my right cheek, then the left, then the right again. His lips were cold and dry.

  “Three times,” he said, Mr. Suave again. “Like the Dutch.”

  “I’ll remember that. Thanks again for the ride.”

  I got into my car and backed out of the line. The back gate was locked. I turned and went back down the road past tent nineteen. Van Zandt followed me to the truck entrance. The lights blazed in the four big permanent barns to the right. A guard stood in the little booth between traffic lanes before the main gates, reggae music blasting from a radio on the counter. I waved at him. He waved me past without a question, his attention on the eighteen-wheel commercial horse van pulling in. I could have had a trunk full of stolen saddles. I could have had a body back there. I might have been anyone, may have done anything. An unsettling thought for the ride home.

  I turned right on Pierson. Van Zandt turned right on Pierson. I watched him in the mirror, wondering if he hadn’t believed me when I’d said I wasn’t an insurance investigator. I wondered what his reaction would be if he saw the photo in Sidelines and put two and one together.

  But people are funny that way, more easily fooled than the average person might like to believe. I didn’t look like the woman in the photo. My hair was short. I hadn’t given the name of the woman in the photo. The only real connection was Sean. Still, the words private investigator would set off alarms. I had to hope Sean was right: that only dressage people read the dressage section.

  I turned right on South Shore. Van Zandt turned left.

  I cut my lights, pulled a U-turn, and followed at a distance, past the polo stadium. He turned in at The Players club. Wining and dining. Part of a horse dealer’s job. A new best friend at the bar in a place like that could turn out to have deep pockets and no self-restraint.

  Van Zandt stood to make a tidy profit selling the Belgian jumper to Stellar’s owner, who stood to collect a fat insurance payoff on a horse with no real future. And Don Jade—who had trained and shown Stellar, and would train and show the next one—stood in the middle of them, taking money at both ends of the deal. They might have all been in Players together right then, drinking to Stellar’s timely demise.

  Erin Seabright hadn’t been heard from since the night Stellar died.

  I dismissed the idea of going into the club. I wasn’t prepared. I gunned my car’s engine, turned it around, and headed home.

  I was about to become a private investigator.

  Chapter 4

  I wonder why I’m still alive.

  Billy Golam had pointed that gun right in my face. In countless nightmares I have looked down the barrel of that .357 and sucked in what should have been my final breath. But Golam had turned and fired in another direction.

  Was living my punishment, my purgatory? Or was I supposed to have chosen to end it myself to pay for my recklessness? Or was I just damn lucky and unwilling to believe it?

  Four-thirty A.M.

  I was lying in bed, staring at the blades of the ceiling fan go around. The guest house had been decorated by a Palm Beach interior designer who had gone amok with delusions of Caribbean plantations. It seemed a cliché to me, but no one had ever paid me to pick out paint chips and pillow shams.

  At four I went out and fed the horses. By five I had showered. It had been so long since I’d had to introduce myself to people and care about what they thought of me that I couldn’t remember how to go about it. I couldn’t shake the idea that I would be rejected on sight, or if not on sight, on reputation.

  What a strange conceit to believe everyone in the world knew all about me, all about what I’d done and what had happened to end my career. I had been a story on the evening news for a couple of days. A sound bite. Something to fill the airtime before the weather came on. The truth was probably that no one not directly in
volved with what had happened, no one not living in that world of cops, had given the story more than the most cursory attention. The truth is that people seldom really care about the catastrophic events of someone else’s life beyond thinking, “Better her than me.”

  I stood in my underwear, staring at myself in the mirror. I put some gel in my hair and tried to make it look as if it had an intentional style. I wondered if I should attempt makeup. I hadn’t worn any since the surgery to put my face back together. My plastic surgeon had given me the card of a woman who specialized in postsurgical makeup. The Post-Traumatic Avon Lady. I had thrown the card away.

  I dressed, discarding a dozen different choices and finally settling on a sleeveless silk blouse the color of fresh-poured concrete and a pair of brown trousers that were so big around the waist, I had to pin them shut to keep them from sliding down my hips.

  I used to care about fashion.

  I killed some time on the Internet, chewed my nails, and made some notes.

  I found nothing of interest on Tomas Van Zandt. His name did not appear even on his own Web site: worldhorsesales.com. The site listed on his business card showed photos of horses that had been brokered through Van Zandt’s business. Phone numbers were listed for a business office in Brussels, a number for European sales, and for two U.S. subagents, one of whom was Don Jade.

  I found several articles about Paris Montgomery in the Chronicle of the Horse and Horses Daily describing recent wins in the showring, talking about her humble beginnings riding ponies bareback in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. According to the propaganda, she had worked her way up the ranks from groom to working student to assistant trainer; succeeding on hard work and raw talent. And charm. And the fact that she could have been a model.

  She had been Don Jade’s assistant trainer for three years and was so grateful for the opportunity, blah, blah, blah. So few people realized what a great guy he really was. He’d been unfortunate to do business with some people of questionable ethics, but shouldn’t be condemned by association, et cetera, et cetera. Jade was quoted as saying Paris Montgomery had a bright future and the ambition and talent to attain whatever she set her sights on.

  Photographs with the articles showed Montgomery going over a fence on a horse called Park Lane

  , and close-ups of her flashing the big smile.

  The smile irritated me. It was too bright and came too easily. The charm seemed insincere. Then again, I’d only just met her for ten minutes. Maybe I didn’t like her because I couldn’t smile and wasn’t charming.

  I flipped the screen shut on my laptop and went outside. Dawn was a pale notion on the edge of the eastern sky as I let myself into Sean’s house through the French doors into the dining room. He was alone in bed, snoring. I sat down beside him and patted his cheek. His eyelids pulled slowly upward, revealing a lot of red veins. He rubbed a hand over his face.

  “I was hoping for Tom Cruise,” he said in a voice full of gravel.

  “Sorry to disappoint. If a horse dealer named Van Zandt comes around, my name is Elle Stevens and you’re looking for a groom.”

  “What?” He pushed himself upright and shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “Van Zandt? Tomas Van Zandt?”

  “You know him?”

  “I know of him. He’s the second-biggest crook in Europe. Why would he come here?”

  “Because he thinks you might buy horses from him.”

  “Why would he think that?”

  “Because I pretty much led him to believe it.”

  “Uh!!”

  “Don’t look offended,” I said. “That expression emphasizes the lines around your mouth.”

  “Bitch.”

  He pouted for a moment, then caught himself and rubbed his hands over his face—outward and upward from his mouth. The ten-second face-lift. “You know I already have a European connection. You know I only work with Toine.”

  “Yes, I know. The last honest horse dealer.”

  “The only one in the history of the world, as far as I know.”

  “So let Van Zandt think he’s wooing you away from Toine. He’ll have an orgasm. If he comes around, pretend you’re interested. You owe me.”

  “I don’t owe you that much.”

  “Really?” I said. “Thanks to you, I now have a client and a career I didn’t want.”

  “You’ll thank me later.”

  “I’ll exact my revenge later.” I leaned over and patted his stubbled cheek again. “Happy horse dealing.”

  He groaned.

  “And, by the way,” I said, pausing at the door. “He thinks I’m a Palm Beach dilettante and that I’m leasing D’Artagnon from you.”

  “I’m supposed to keep this all straight?”

  I shrugged. “What else have you got to do with your time?”

  I was almost out the bedroom door when he spoke again.

  “El . . .”

  I turned back toward him, one hand on the door frame. He looked at me, uncharacteristically serious, a certain softness in his expression. He wanted to say something kind. I wanted him to pretend this day was like any other. We each seemed fully aware of the other’s thoughts. I held my breath. One side of his mouth lifted in a smile of concession.

  “Nice outfit,” he said.

  I waved at him and left the house.

  M olly Seabright lived in a two-story stucco house on the edge of a development called Binks Forest. Upscale. Backyard on a fairway. A white Lexus in the drive. There were lights on in the house. The hardworking upper middle class preparing to face another day. I parked down the street and waited.

  At seven-thirty kids in the neighborhood began drifting out of their homes and wandering past me toward the school bus stop at the end of the block. Molly emerged from the Seabright house pulling a wheeled book bag behind her, looking like a miniature corporate exec on her way to catch a plane. I got out of my car and leaned back against it with my arms crossed. She spotted me from twenty feet away.

  “I’ve reconsidered,” I said as she stopped in front of me. “I’ll help you find your sister.”

  She didn’t smile. She didn’t jump for joy. She stared up at me and said, “Why?”

  “Because I don’t like the people your sister was mixed up with.”

  “Do you think something bad has happened to her?”

  “We know something has happened to her,” I said. “She was here and now she isn’t. Whether or not it’s something bad remains to be seen.”

  Molly nodded at that, apparently pleased I hadn’t tried to falsely reassure her. Most adults speak to children as if they’re stupid simply because they haven’t lived as many years. Molly Seabright wasn’t stupid. She was smart and she was brave. I wasn’t going to talk down to her. I had even decided not to lie to her if I could help myself.

  “But if you’re not a private investigator, what good are you?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “How hard can it be? Ask a few questions, make a few phone calls. It’s not brain surgery.”

  She considered my answer. Or maybe she was considering whether or not to say what she said next. “You were a sheriff’s detective once.”

  I might have been that stunned if she had reached up and hit me in the head with a hammer. I who wouldn’t talk down to a child. It hadn’t occurred to me Molly Seabright would run home and do her own detective work online. I felt suddenly naked, exposed in that way I had earlier convinced myself was unlikely to happen. Blindsided by a twelve-year-old.

  I glanced away. “Is that your bus?”

  A school bus had pulled up to the curb and the children gathered there were clambering aboard.

  “I walk,” she said primly. “I found a story about you in the computer archives of the Post.”

  “Only one? I’m offended.”

  “More than one.”

  “Okay, so my dirty secret is exposed. I was a detective for Palm Beach County. Now I’m not.”

  She understood to leave it at that. Wiser than most people
I’ve known three times her age.

  “We need to discuss your fee,” she said. Ms. Business.

  “I’ll take the hundred you offered and we’ll see what happens.”

  “I appreciate that you’re not trying to patronize me.”

  “I just said I’d take a hundred dollars from a kid. Sounds pretty low to me.”

  “No,” she said, those too-serious eyes staring at me through the magnifying lenses of the Harry Potter glasses. “I don’t think so.” She put her hand out. “Thank you for accepting my case.”