by Tami Hoag
My strategy working undercover had always been to get as much information as possible, as fast as possible; to sketch my illusion boldly and quickly. Dazzle the mark, draw them in close, then hit with the sucker punch and get out. My superiors in the Sheriff’s Office had frowned on my methods because I’d borrowed my style from con artists rather than cops. But they had seldom frowned on the outcome.
Sean’s parking pass still hanging from my rearview mirror, I rolled past the guard at the gatehouse and into the maelstrom of the Wellington show grounds day shift. There were horses everywhere, people everywhere, cars everywhere, golf carts everywhere. A show was under way and would run through Sunday. Horses and ponies would be jumping over fences in half a dozen competition rings. The chaos would work in my favor, like running a game of three-card monte on a corner in Times Square. Difficult to keep your eye on the queen when you’re in the middle of a circus.
I parked in the second lot, cut past the permanent barns and the vet clinic, bypassed the concession stands, and found myself on the show grounds’ version of Fifth Avenue
: a row of mobile tack shops and pricey boutiques in tricked-out fifth-wheel trailers. Custom jewelers, custom tailors, antiques dealers, monogramming shops, cappuccino stands. I hit a couple of the boutiques to pick up trappings for my role as dilettante. Image is everything.
I purchased and put on a wide-brimmed straw hat trimmed with black grosgrain ribbon. Men never take seriously a woman in a hat. I chose a couple of silk blouses and long wraparound skirts made from vintage saris. I made sure the clerks went overboard with the tissue paper, making the shopping bags look full to bursting. I bought some impractical sandals and trendy bracelets, and put them on. When I thought I looked frivolous enough, I went in search of Don Jade.
There was no sign of him or of Paris Montgomery at his stalls. An underfed Guatemalan man was mucking out a stall, head down, trying not to attract attention lest the next stranger be an INS agent. The front of another stall had been removed to create a grooming bay. In it an overfed girl in a too-revealing tank top was grudgingly brushing a dappled gray horse. The girl had the mean, narrow eyes of someone who blames everyone but herself for the shortfalls in her life. I caught her looking at me sideways, her expression sour.
I tipped my head back and regarded her from under the brim of the ridiculous hat. “I’m looking for Paris. Is she around?”
“She’s riding Park Lane
in the schooling ring.”
“Is Don with her?” Don, my old pal.
“Yeah.” And did I want to make something of it?
“And you are . . . ?”
She looked surprised I would bother to ask, then suspicious, then determined she would take advantage of the opportunity. “Jill Morone. I’m Mr. Jade’s head groom.”
She was Mr. Jade’s only groom by the look of it, and by the anemic way she was wielding that brush, she defined the position loosely.
“Really? Then you must know Erin Seabright.”
The girl’s reactions were so slow, her brain might have been in another time zone. I could see her every thought move sluggishly through her mind as she tried to decide on an answer. She dragged the brush along the horse’s shoulder. The horse pinned its ears and rolled an eye at her.
“She doesn’t work here anymore.”
“I know. Paris told me. Do you know where she went? A friend of mine wanted to hire her.”
Jill shrugged, eyes sliding away. “I dunno. Paris said she went to Ocala.”
“You guys weren’t friends, I guess. I mean, you don’t seem to know very much.”
“I know she wasn’t a very good groom.” The pot calling the kettle.
“And I can assume you are?” I said. “Are you interested in moving?”
She looked pleased with herself, like she had a naughty little secret. “Oh, no. Mr. Jade treats me very well.”
Mr. Jade probably barely knew her name—unless she was his latest alibi, which I doubted. Men like Don Jade went for girls who were pretty and useful. Jill Morone was neither.
“Good for you,” I said. “I hope you still have a job to keep after that business with Stellar.”
“That wasn’t my fault.”
“A horse dies like that. Suspicious circumstances. Owners get nervous, start making phone calls to other trainers . . . Business can go downhill fast.”
“It was an accident.”
I shrugged. “Did you see it happen?”
“No. I found him, though,” she admitted with a strange spark of pride in her beady little eyes. The chance celebrity. She could be on the fringe of a dark spotlight for a week and a half. “He was just laying there with his legs straight out,” she said. “And his eyes were open. I thought he was just being lazy, so I slapped him on the butt to make him get up. Turned out he was dead.”
“God. Awful.” I looked down the row of Jade’s stalls—a dozen or more—each of them hung with a box fan outside the bars of the stall fronts. “I’m surprised you still have the fans up, considering.”
She shrugged again and swiped the brush over the gray a couple more strokes. “It’s hot. What else should we do?”
The horse waited for her to drift back a step, then whipped her with his tail. She hit him in the ribs with the brush.
“I wouldn’t want to be the person who was careless enough to let that electrical cord hang into Stellar’s stall,” I said. “That groom would never work in this business again. I’d see to that if I had anything to do with it.”
The little eyes went mean again in the doughy face. “I didn’t take care of him. Erin did. See what kind of groom she was? If I was Mr. Jade, I would have killed her.”
Maybe he had, I thought as I walked away from the tent.
I spotted Paris Montgomery some distance away in a schooling ring, golden ponytail bobbing, sunglasses shading her eyes as she guided her mount over a set of jumps. Poetry in motion. Don Jade stood on the sidelines, filming her with a camcorder, as a tall, skinny, red-haired, red-faced man spoke at him, gesturing angrily. He looked like a giant, irate Howdy Doody. I approached the ring a short way down the fence from the two men, my attention seemingly directed at the horses going around.
“If there’s so much as a hint of something rotten in those test results, Jade, you’ll face charges,” the red-faced man said loudly, either not caring or else craving the attention of everyone in the vicinity. “This won’t just be about whether or not General Fidelity pays out. You’ve gotten away with this crap for too long as it is. It’s time someone put a stop to it.”
Jade said absolutely nothing, nothing in anger, nothing in his own defense. He didn’t even pause in his filmmaking. He was a compact man with the rope-muscled forearms of a professional rider. His profile looked like something that should have been embossed on a Roman coin. He might have been thirty-five or he might have been fifty, and people would probably still be saying that about him when he was seventy.
He watched his assistant go over a combination of fences with Park Lane
, and frowned as the horse rapped his front ankles and took a rail down. As Paris cantered past, he looked up at her and called out a couple of corrections for her to make to get the horse to bring its hindquarters more fully under itself in preparation for takeoff.
The other man seemed incredulous that his threats had not elicited a response. “You’re a real piece of work, Don. Aren’t you even going to bother to deny it?”
Jade still didn’t look at him. “Why should I bother, Michael? I don’t want to be blamed for your heart attack on top of everything else.”
“You smug bastard. You still think you can get people to kiss your ass and convince them it smells like a rose.”
“Maybe it does, Michael,” Jade said calmly, still watching his horse. “You’ll never know the truth because you don’t want to. You don’t want me to be innocent. You enjoy hating me too much.”
“I’m hardly the only one.”
“I know.
I’m a national pastime again. That doesn’t change the fact that I’m innocent.”
He rubbed the back of his sunburned neck, checked his watch, and sighed. “That’s enough for her, Paris,” he called, clicking the camera off.
“I’ll be on the phone with Dr. Ames today,” the other man said. “If I find out you’ve got connections at that lab—”
“If Ames tells you anything about Stellar, I’ll have his license,” Jade said calmly. “Not that there’s anything to tell.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s a story. There always is with you. Who were you in bed with this time?”
“If I have an answer to that, it’s none of your business, Michael.”
“I’m making it my business.”
“You’re obsessed,” Jade said, turning toward the stables as Paris approached on Park Lane
. “If you put as much energy into your work as you do into hating me, maybe you could actually make something of yourself. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Michael, I have a business to run.”
Michael’s face was a twisted, freckled mask of bitter emotion. “Not for long if I can help it.”
Jade walked off toward the barn, seemingly unaffected by the exchange. His adversary stood for a moment, breathing hard, looking disappointed. Then he turned and stalked off.
“Well, that was ugly,” I said. Tomas Van Zandt stood less than ten feet from me. He’d watched the exchange between Jade and the other man surreptitiously, same as I had, pretending to watch the horses in the ring. He glanced at me in a dismissive way and started to walk off.
“I thought men from Belgium were supposed to be charming.”
He pulled up short and looked at me again, recognition dawning slowly. “Elle! Look at you!”
“I clean up good, as they say down at the trailer park.”
“You’ve never been to a trailer park,” he scoffed, taking in the hat, the outfit.
“Of course I have. I once drove a maid home,” I said, then nodded after the man Jade had argued with. “Who was that?”
“Michael Berne. A big crybaby.”
“Is he an owner or something?”
“A rival.”
“Ah . . . These jumper people are so dramatic,” I said. “Nothing this exciting goes on in my neck of the equestrian woods.”
“Maybe I should then sell you a jumper,” Van Zandt suggested, eyeing my shopping bags, pondering my credit card limit.
“I don’t know if I’m ready for that. Looks like a tough crowd. Besides, I don’t know any of the trainers.”
He took my arm. The courtly gentleman. “Come. I’ll introduce you to Jade.”
“Swell,” I said, looking up at him out the corner of my eye. “I can buy a horse and collect the insurance. One-stop shopping.”
Like flipping a switch, Van Zandt’s face went from courtly to stormy; the gray eyes as cold as the North Sea, and frighteningly hard. “Don’t say such stupid things,” he snapped.
I stepped away from him. “It was a joke.”
“Everything with you is a joke,” he said in disgust.
“And if you can’t take one, Van Zandt,” I said, “fuck you.”
I watched him struggle to put Mr. Hyde back in his box. The mood swing had come so quickly, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t given him whiplash.
He rubbed a hand across his mouth and made an impatient gesture.
“Fine. It’s a joke. Ha ha,” he said, still clearly angry. He started toward the tent. “Forget it. Come.”
I didn’t move. “No. Apologize.”
“What?” He looked at me with disbelief. “Don’t be silly.”
“Keep digging that hole, Van Zandt. I’m stupid and silly, and what else?”
The muscles in his face quivered. He wanted to call me a bitch or worse. I could see it in his eyes.
“Apologize.”
“You shouldn’t have made the joke,” he said. “Come.”
“And you should apologize,” I countered, fascinated. He seemed incapable of performing the act, and amazed that I was insisting.
“You are being stubborn.”
I laughed out loud. “I’m being stubborn?”
“Yes. Come.”
“Don’t order me like I’m a horse to be moved from one place to another,” I said. “You can apologize or you can kiss my ass.”
I waited, expecting an explosion, not sure what would happen after it came. Van Zandt looked at me, then looked away, and when he turned back toward me he was smiling as if nothing had happened.
“You’re a tigress, Elle! I like that. You have character.” He nodded to himself, suddenly enormously pleased. “That’s good.”
“I’m so glad you approve.”
He chuckled to himself and took my arm again. “Come along. I’ll introduce you to Jade. He’ll like you.”
“Will I like him?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t care what I liked or didn’t like. He was fascinated that I had challenged him. I was sure he didn’t get much of that. Most of his American clients would have been wealthy women whose husbands and boyfriends had no interest in horses. Women who gave him undue credit simply because he was European and paid attention to them. Insecure women who could be easily charmed and manipulated, impressed by a little knowledge, a little Continental elegance, and a big ego with an accent.
I had witnessed the phenomenon firsthand many times over the years. Women starved for attention and approval will do a lot of foolish things, including parting with large sums of money. That was the clientele that made unscrupulous dealers a hell of a lot of money. That was the clientele that made dealers like Van Zandt snicker and sneer “stupid Americans” behind the client’s back.
Park Lane
came out of the tent with Jill the groom in tow just as we were about to step into the aisle. Van Zandt snapped at the girl to watch where she was going, muttering “stupid cow” only half under his breath as the horse dragged her away.
“D.J., why can you not find any girls with brains in their heads?” he asked loudly.
Jade stood at the open door to a tack stall that was draped in green and hung with ribbons won in recent shows. He calmly took a drink of Diet Coke. “Is that some kind of riddle?”
Van Zandt took a beat to get it, then laughed. “Yes—a trick question.”
“Excuse me,” I said politely, “but do I look like I’m standing here with a penis?”
“No,” Paris Montgomery said, coming out of the tack stall. “A couple of dicks.”
Van Zandt made a growling sound in his throat, but pretended good nature. “Paris, you’re the quick one with the tongue!”
She flashed the big grin. “That’s what all the fellas say.”
High humor. Jade paid no attention to any of it. He was looking at me. I stared back and stuck out my hand. “Elle Stevens.”
“Don Jade. You’re a friend of this character?” he asked, nodding at Van Zandt.
“Don’t hold it against me. It was a chance meeting.”
The corner of Jade’s mouth flicked upward. “Well, if there’s a chance, Tomas will be right there to take it.”
Van Zandt pouted. “I don’t wait for opportunity to come and knock on the door. I go and invite it politely.
“And this one came to steal your groom,” he added, pointing at me.
Jade looked confused.
“The cute one. The blonde,” Van Zandt said.
“Erin,” Paris said.
“The one that left,” Jade said, still looking at me.
“Yes,” I said. “Apparently someone beat me to her.”
He gave no kind of reaction at all. He didn’t look away or try to express his sadness that the girl had left. Nothing.
“Yeah,” Paris joked. “Elle and I are going to start a support group for people without grooms.”
“What brought you looking for Erin in particular?” Jade asked. “She didn’t have very much experience.”
“She did a good job, Don,” Par
is said, defending the missing girl. “I’d take her back in a heartbeat.”
“A friend of a friend heard your girl might be looking to make a change,” I said to Jade. “Now that the season has started, we can’t be too fussy, right?”