by Tami Hoag
“I thought you were dead,” he said gruffly as I got out of my car and walked toward him.
“I’m like you,” I told him. “I’m too mean to die.”
“Tough nut. You always were.” He rolled down the dock in his wheelchair and tossed some fishing gear into a beat-up dinghy.
“Is that thing seaworthy?” I asked, dubious.
He squinted up at me, one eye closed tighter than the other, a filthy old captain’s hat jammed on his head. It was impossible to decide where his sideburns ended and his ear hair began.
“What’s the difference?” he asked. His voice was full of gravel. He fell into a fit of wet, rattling coughing. When it passed, it took him a moment to get his breath back.
“Are you okay?” I asked like an idiot.
“Lung cancer,” he said by way of explanation, like it was nothing. Like he had a cold. “The devil will catch up with me sooner or later. I’ve dodged him one time too many.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, Billy.”
He shrugged, waved it off. In that moment he looked ancient, even though he wasn’t more than in his late fifties. His useless legs canted off to one side as he slouched in his wheelchair. His skin had a strange yellow cast to it.
I didn’t have to ask him if he was in pain. I knew what it was to have your body broken in ways you shouldn’t have survived—and often wished that you hadn’t.
Quint’s legs had been broken with a sledgehammer by a couple of Russian thugs in the employ of an ambitious mob lieutenant. He had been allowed to live for his value as part of the media circus that followed the brutal attack. Free publicity, advertising to one and all that the Russians were not to be fucked with—by anyone.
Arrests had been made, but nothing stuck. The lieutenant and his henchmen had vanished off the continent, probably literally. No one in the Russian community would talk. The police, the feds—all had been powerless to protect even one of their own.
A middle-aged Filipino woman built like the corner mailbox came out of Quint’s bungalow and trundled to the dock. Her brows lowered and she started in.
“Your breakfast is ready. I don’t make good food so you can turn up your nose like Mr. Hoity-Toity and let it go to waste! Come in and eat!
“You!” she said, pointing at me like Uncle Sam on the recruiting poster. “Come and eat. You’re too skinny. What’s the matter with you, you don’t eat?”
Quint rolled his eyes. “Simi. My keeper.”
“I thought you said the devil hadn’t caught up with you yet.”
He barked a laugh and fell into another coughing fit.
I choked down Simi’s greasy rice, onions, hot-peppers, hot-sausage concoction when she was watching and fed a handful to the Jack Russell terrier under the table when she wasn’t.
“I see you,” she barked, facing away from me at the stove. “You feed that dog, he gets gas. You gonna stay and smell his farts, Missy?”
“Oh, go on with you, woman!” Quint growled. “Don’t you have to go to church?”
“To pray for your soul!” she shouted at him.
“Why the hell would you want me in heaven?” he asked. “You won’t be there.”
I snuck the dog another handful under the table.
They swore and shouted at each other for another five minutes before Simi made a rude gesture and stormed out.
“Is she always like that?” I asked.
“Nah. She’s on her party manners. We’ve got company,” Quint said. He took his plate off the table and put it on the floor for the dog. “I don’t care if he farts. He sleeps in her room.”
I put my plate down too.
“So what brings you, Elena?” he asked. “You didn’t wake up today and think you should, from the kindness of your own heart, go and visit an old cripple.”
“You think so little of me, Billy,” I said.
He laughed and coughed. “Like you said, you’re like me. Spill it.”
“Alexi Kulak. Do you know anything about him?”
He may not have been on the job anymore, but guys like Quint never really get out. They keep their eyes peeled and their ear to the ground. At one time, he had known more about Russian organized crime in South Florida than anyone else. I was betting he still did.
He made a sour face. “Why? You’re not dating him, are you?”
“No. But he was in love with a girl I knew. She was murdered over the weekend.”
“And you’re going to ask me if I think he could have done it? From what I hear, that one could pluck your eyes out and have them for a snack.”
“He didn’t kill her,” I said. “He wants to know who did.”
“So he can cut the bastard’s jewels off and shove them down his throat?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I can guarantee. And what do you care what Alexi Kulak wants? Did he give you that fat lip?”
“I tripped and fell and bit my lip.”
“Why don’t you just try to tell me you ran into a door?”
“It’s the truth,” I said, looking straight at him.
One advantage gained from my accident and the subsequent nerve damage: I had no problem telling a straight-faced lie. Of course, I had been a pretty good liar long before that.
“And Alexi Kulak wasn’t there at the time?”
“What’s he into?” I asked, pointedly ignoring his question.
“What isn’t he into? He’s a full-service mobster. Hijacking trucks, extortion, shylocking, prostitutes, drugs. This friend of yours, what was she into?”
“Wealthy men. She had expensive tastes.” I shrugged. “The more I find out, the less I feel I knew her.”
“Was she working for Kulak?”
“I don’t know. I got the feeling she led him around like a dog on a leash. But I know she wasn’t buying Gucci handbags with what she made grooming horses.”
“How does a girl like that snag wealthy men?”
“By their libidos, I suppose. She was a beautiful girl.”
“Could Kulak have been using her to get to one of her rich friends?” Quint asked.
“If that was the case, what would he need with me? He would already know whose heart to cut out. He told me she shut him out of that part of her life,” I said.
“The same would be true if she had been working for him in some other capacity,” Quint pointed out. “Those throats would already be cut.
“What made him think you could be useful to him?”
“Apparently, Irina—the dead girl—liked me,” I said. “Though I couldn’t say we were close. We worked together.”
“Doing what?”
“I ride horses.”
“That’s a living?”
“The horse business brought sixty million dollars into Wellington last year.”
“Jesus,” Quint said, impressed. “And you don’t have to get shot it.”
“Not usually.”
“So Kulak knew you’re in that world. Do you run in the same circles as the dead girl?”
“No.”
“Does he know you were a cop?”
“He knows whatever Irina told him. She told him I helped a young girl find her sister last year.”
“What makes me think there’s a lot more to that story?”
“There is,” I said, “but nothing relevant to this.”
“What are you going to do?” Quint asked.
I shrugged. “I want to know who killed Irina too.”
“You didn’t tell anybody on the job up there about Kulak?”
“No offense, Billy, but I’d rather not end up on the business end of a sledgehammer.”
“There’s no guarantee that won’t happen even if you do help him, Elena. He won’t want a loose thread left hanging,” Quint said. “This guy is the real deal. He’s smart, ruthless. Alexi Kulak is as cold-blooded as a snake.
“Do you know how he came into power?” he asked.
“I’m here to learn.”
“The story goes he
got off the plane from Moscow, went up to West Palm, where he was supposed to become a lieutenant under Sergi Yagoudin. Kulak, Yagoudin, and another lieutenant met. Kulak cut Yagoudin’s throat from ear to ear. He killed the lieutenant, put the lieutenant’s prints all over the knife. Then he got rid of that body, but he kept the guy’s hands. I hear he still keeps them in his freezer and uses them from time to time to leave prints at crime scenes.”
“If it was only the three of them meeting, how do you know this isn’t just a heartwarming Russian bedtime story?” I asked.
“It’s true” was all he said. He wouldn’t say more. He didn’t need to. “You’re playing with a cobra, Elena. You will get bitten. It’s just a matter of when and how badly.”
Chapter 18
They sat around a mosaic-tile-topped table imported from Italy. It was three hundred years old and had come from the villa of a wealthy merchant in Florence. It weighed as much as any one of the polo ponies grazing in the irrigated field on the far side of the vast, manicured back lawn and gardens.
Jim Brody believed in living the good life, and he had more than enough money to do it. With nothing but a BA, a big ego, id a good bluff, he had started his own firm in 1979, representing professional athletes in contract and endorsement negotiations. In the beginning, his knack for picking up underestimated athletes about to become superstars had built his reputation. His reputation for big-dollar deals had then brought big-dollar players.
He often called his practice “a license to print money.” And he had no problem spending it.
Two young Hispanic men in white jackets and black slacks served the breakfast. Omelets made to order, bacon, sausage, hash owns, pastries, fruit, three kinds of juice, champagne, and fresh-ground coffee Brody had flown in monthly from a private plantation in Colombia.
His friends gathered here weekly for breakfast. The Alibi Club, they called themselves. Men who shared his passions for money, polo, beautiful women, and assorted other vices. Sebastian Foster, forty-three, at one point the fifth-ranked tennis player in the world. Paul Kenner, forty-nine, former major-league-baseball all-star, one of Brody’s early successes. Antonio Ovada, fifty-one, Argentinian, old money, owner of one of the top polo teams in Florida, breeder of top-dollar ponies. Bennett Walker, forty-five, Palm Beach, old money, Brody had known him for years. Charles Vance IV, fifty-three, CEO of a company that owned a fleet of luxury private charter jets. Juan Barbaro, thirty-three, Spanish, one of the top polo players in the world.
“Have the detectives spoken with you yet?” Ovada asked.
“No.”
“They will. And when they do, what will you tell them?”
Brody looked across the patio, not really seeing the lounge chairs or the pool. “That she was at my party. I knew the girl. That’s not a crime.”
“I suppose not.”
“What will you tell them?” Brody asked.
“That I saw her at the party. I didn’t see when or with whom she left. I was with you, here, for the rest of the night, drinking your most expensive scotch and smoking illegal Cuban cigars.”
“Me too,” Kenner said.
“And the woman you were with?” Ovada asked. “What will she say?”
“Nothing. She doesn’t want her husband to know. I don’t want him to know either. He’s the size and temperament of a grizzly bear.”
“I’ve met him,” Foster said. “You definitely need an alibi.”
“You slept with her too?” Kenner asked.
“Yeah. Nice piece of ass, but not worth getting my legs broken.”
Bennett Walker, in dark glasses, hungover, shifted restlessly on his chair.
Charles Vance sliced a piece of sausage on his plate and chewed enthusiastically. “Home with my wife,” he said. “The in-laws are sitting. I wasn’t at the party more than an hour. I have witnesses.”
Brody looked down the table at Barbaro.
“I was passed out on my friend’s pool table,” the Spaniard said with a grin. “You know how to throw a party, Patron. Bennett was a corpse himself the next day. Neither of us would have been of any use to a woman. Isn’t that so, my friend?”
Walker looked at him, distracted, and lifted a hand as if to say, whatever, then got up from the table and went into the pool house.
“What’s his problem?” Kenner asked.
Barbaro shrugged. “Too much vodka at Players last night.”
“Is his wife having trouble again?” Vance asked.
“Who can know? She is always a fragile creature, is she not?”
“I’d wish him my sympathy,” Vance said, “but considering what I gained marrying her, she doesn’t seem like that much of an inconvenience.”
“You don’t have to live with her,” Kenner said.
“Neither does he,” Vance pointed out. “When was the last time Bennett crossed the bridge to the Island?”
Walker emerged from the pool house and came back to the table. His hair was wet and slicked back.
“How’s Nancy these days, Ben?” Brody asked.
“She’s fine. Helping her mother plan some charity event. Keeps her mind occupied.”
Walker’s wife was the daughter of one of the wealthiest old-money families in Connecticut. A beautiful but emotionally unavailable girl, Nancy Whitaker seemed to live in her own world much of the time, doped to the gills just so she could function, in and it of mental hospitals and sanitariums.
Some people had been surprised when it was announced the very eligible Bennett Walker was going to marry her. Other people looked at the net worth of the two families and saw a merger, not a marriage.
That was seventeen or eighteen years in the past. Brody hadn’t yet made the Palm Beach scene, but he’d been aware of Bennett Walker. Walker’s alleged rape and beating of a local girl had been in the national news. Privileged heir to a huge fortune accused of taking what he wanted and walking away scot-free in the end. The stuff of tabloid headlines.
The marriage to Nancy Whitaker a year later had given the impression that Bennett had settled down, that clearly he was a good guy, otherwise the Whitakers would never have allowed their daughter to marry him.
The reality was that the Whitakers had married off their problem child, the Walkers had gained business and political connections worth millions, and Bennett’s wife’s condition allowed him the freedom to do as he pleased. Not a bad trade-off, Brody thought.
“So, everybody’s covered,” he said.
They always made certain of that, watched one another’s back. That was what the club was all about. No man went without an alibi if he needed one. One of them always covered. Hookers, mistresses, drugs, booze, gambling—whatever the vice, one of them always covered for another.
It had seemed harmless for the most part, in the beginning. Who cared who fucked who? So what was the big deal, telling a little white one for a buddy with a small cocaine problem? Company money lost on a sure-thing bet in the fifth race at Gulfstream? Not a problem. They covered for one another.
As he sat there looking at his friends, all of them with secrets of their own, he wondered if any one of them had ever imagined covering for a murderer.
Chapter 19
Kulak never showed at the address Svetlana had sent Landry. At least not in the two hours he had sat on the place fore going home to catch a couple hours of sleep. She had probably sent him on a snipe hunt, he thought. Svetlana and the gang at Magda’s would be having a laugh on him later. Whether the woman had lied to him or not, he didn’t consider visit to the bar to have been a waste of time. He’d made an impression. He’d gotten his word out. That word was sure to pass to Kulak.
“You look like shit,” Weiss pointed out as they drove out South Shore to find Star Polo. Weiss was behind the wheel. It made him feel important. Landry was too hungover to care. “What happened to you? Did you get dragged behind a truck or something? I thought you went home last night. You look like you slept in your car.”
“I went and got drunk,
” Landry said. “I stopped at that Russian bar and pounded down some vodka. You should do that once in a while, Weiss. Loosen up your sphincter.”
“You went there without me?” Weiss said in the Tone. “We agreed we would wait until today.”
