by Tami Hoag
He had to concentrate on the things he could do something about.
He turned right off Wellington Trace onto Forest Hill. His stomach was churning.
His memory of Saturday night was fragmented—the early evening images were vibrant, bright, electric; the hours after leaving Players were cloudy, dark. He could remember the sex—the smell of it, the taste of it. He could remember the heat, the rage.
He remembered his hands around her throat, the defiance in her eyes.
He remembered the feeling of dread in his gut when he saw her body floating in the pool.
He must have killed her. She was dead. He didn’t remember.
He turned off Forest Hill into the parking lot and spotted the car.
Stick to the plan. Damage control. Contain and minimize.
Chapter 53
I watched through the foliage that divided Bennett’s property from the yard of the house next door. The house behind me was dark and vacant. People moved in and out of Bennett’s house, carrying things in, carrying things out.
My father was kept at bay outside the front door. I could tell by his body language he was angry. I could easily imagine how he had managed to insert himself into the situation. The Walkers, the Whitakers, the governor, my father. That all added up to privilege.
As I watched the people come and go from the house, I imagined Bennett’s cronies and Irina going up the sidewalk and disappearing inside on Saturday night. And all the dark scenarios of what had played out in that house swirled through my head like a toxic gas.
Not for the first time in my life, I wished I had been adopted by couple of CPAs in Middle America and had grown up to do my four years at a state college, get a job, get a husband, have a couple kids. People who had that life didn’t know the things I knew out the darker side of life. I envied them.
Because I needed to focus on something tangible, I moved toward the back of the property and peered through the branches to catch a glimpse of Bennett’s backyard. The interior lights of the house spilled out through French doors onto the patio and across the dark water of the pool. Deck chairs were scattered around.
I thought of the photograph of Irina and Lisbeth sitting on the chaise together, looking happy and silly. Sitting here, at this pool, in these chairs. I recognized the background and the stripes on the cushions.
Lisbeth had tried to prevent Irina from coming here that night. They had argued. “I begged her not to go,” Lisbeth had said.
“… he told me Irina was dead… that she was dead when he found her in his pool… ”Barbaro had said.
I wondered why he had turned his story around. Why, really. I was just too cynical to believe it was because I had somehow awakened a conscience in him.
But if it was simply to take himself out of the picture of what had really happened that night, if what he had decided to do was hang the murder on Bennett and exonerate himself, why tell a story with a component he couldn’t control?
“I saw Beth—Lisbeth—when I got to the parking lot. …”
Why say that? Unless it was part of the power trip. Unless he knew he could control Lisbeth, because he had seen to it that she would be too terrified to do anything other than what he told her.
That would mean it was a game for him, that he was a monster.
I couldn’t see that, but I hadn’t seen it in Bennett Walker either.
I would have said I was well past being surprised by anything in this life, but in that moment I thought I wasn’t so sure of anything anymore. Maybe that was what came with time and bad experience—the ability to know that no matter what I’d seen, things could always get worse.
And so they would.
Chapter 54
Bennett Walker buzzed his window down halfway, looked at the kid in the car beside him, and said, “I’m not doing this here. I’m not being seen with you.”
He lifted a small duffel bag off the passenger seat. “There’s twenty-five thousand dollars in this bag, just like we agreed. If you want it, come and get it.”
The kid stared at him, his mouth hanging open. There was pizza sauce on his face. For some reason, that image would stay with him: the idiot kid with pizza sauce on his face.
He drove slowly around the end of the buildings, going behind the shopping center, and made his way toward South Shore, checking his rearview mirror.
The kid followed. Of course he did. Greedy little shit.
He took a right on South Shore and drove past Players, then took a left and another left onto the grounds of the old polo stadium, via what had been a service entrance. Abandoned now for several years, the stadium stood sagging, in a shambles from hurricane damage, waiting for progress to come along and flatten it.
Bennett pulled in at the far end of the stadium, parked his car, and got out. Creepy place, he thought. Not like it was in the old days, when the barns were full and the place was electric with the energy that surrounded high-goal international polo. The outdated security lights were lit, but they gave little in the way of light or security and did nothing to dispel the feeling of being in a ghost town.
The kid pulled in beside him, parked his car, and got out.
Neither of them noticed the third car, which killed its lights and stopped just off the road.
“Hey, man,” the kid said, his tone too familiar, like they were contemporaries, friends even. “I can understand you not wanting to do this in front of people. Believe me, I don’t want to make this difficult for you. I’m providing a service. I want my clients to feel comfortable.”
Bennett stared at him. “What the fuck are you talking about, you slimy little shit? You’re a blackmailer.”
The kid held his hands up and made a pained face. “No, no, no. That’s such an ugly word. That’s not what this is at all. You’re paying me a fee to manage some information for you. That’s all. It’s business.
“A man like yourself, you have a name to protect, yet you want to live a certain lifestyle… Think of me like a personal assistant.”
“I don’t want to think of you at all,” Bennett said flatly. “Let’s get this over with.”
He set the duffel bag on the trunk of the kid’s car and unzipped it. “Twenty-five thousand. I’m not sticking around while you count it.”
“That’s cool, Mr. Walker,” the kid said. “I don’t want to put you out.”
Bennett turned and stared at him again. Unbelievable. What was there to say?
“Now, I’m sure you understand this only covers Saturday night,” the kid said.
“What?”
“The information specific to Saturday night,” he clarified. “There’s the other thing we haven’t discussed.”
“What other thing?”
The kid made the pained face again. “I hate to bring it up. I really do. But in light of recent events—”
Bennett advanced on him, towering over him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
The hands went up again. “Last April. End of the season. During the big Super Bowl or whatever you call it in polo.”
“The U.S. Open? What about it?”
“There was a night at Players… a girl… in your car…” the kid prompted. “She wasn’t very happy…”
Everything went cold inside Bennett. A fan, a polo groupie… he came on to him… She wanted it… They went outside…
“She was crying,” the kid reminded him. “You told me I didn’t see anything.”
He had paid the girl ten grand to shut up. She had been all over him in the club. No one would have believed her—without a witness to back her up.
Funny, Bennett thought, he had been agonizing over what he was going to have to do. Now he just acted. He put his hand into the duffel bag, curled his fingers around the short crowbar, pulled it out, and struck Jeff Cherry with it as hard as he could, burying the thing in his skull.
The kid’s head cracked like an egg. Blood and brain matter splattered, but not as much as Bennett had imagined. One hard overhand
stroke, and that was it. He didn’t even have to bother to ill the crowbar free to give him a second whack.
Bennett stepped back and stood there as the kid dropped to his lees and fell over dead.
As simple as that.
He popped the trunk on the kid’s car, put the body inside with half a dozen mostly empty boxes from Sal’s and numerous crumpled Krispy Kreme bags. From the duffel bag he took a couple of small bags of cocaine and planted them among the rest of the trash, making certain to get a little drug residue on the kid’s fingers.
He closed the trunk. When the car and eventually the body were discovered, no one would find it hard to believe the kid had been on the wrong end of a drug deal gone bad. Everyone knew he supplied Players’ customers with recreational substances. Jeff Cherry would be considered just another fatality in the war on drugs.
Damage control.
“A pity it will not go so easily for you.”
He startled at the sound of the voice and spun around.
A square, neat man in a brown suit stood pointing a gun at him.
“You are wondering who I am,” the man said.
His accent was Russian. That realization sent chills through Bennett Walker like shards of glass.
“I am Alexi Kulak,” the man said. “I loved Irina Markova. You killed her. And I have come to kill you.”
As simple as that.
Chapter 55
“The boots aren’t here,” Weiss said. “Either he got rid of them or he’s wearing them right now.”
They stood in front of the house, taking a break, allegedly clearing their heads. Landry wanted a cigarette; the adrenaline was running full-bore. But he forbade anyone to light up within a hundred yards of a scene he was running. He wanted no chance of contaminating the scene in any way that could be prevented. Especially with a defense attorney standing right there watching every move.
“You’re not going to find anything, because there’s nothing to find,” Edward Estes announced.
“We know the girl was here Saturday night,” Landry said.
“You’re not going to find evidence of a murder here,” Estes said.
“Yeah, that’s the smart thing about choking the life out of someone,” Weiss said. “No smoking gun. No spent casings. No bloody lives.”
“You allegedly have the testimony of one man that the girl was ever here,” Estes said. “Has it occurred to you to wonder if that individual might have his own reasons for implicating my client in this? His own guilt, for instance.”
“Why would he bother?” Landry said.
“You might want to ask Scotland Yard that question.”
He’d done his homework, Landry thought—or someone had done it for him. Estes knew about Barbaro’s connection to the case in England. But if Barbaro had killed Irina, why bother to change his story? Barring a surprise witness coming out of the woodwork, no one would have broken the alibi he shared with Bennett Walker.
Maybe this was how he got his kicks, Landry thought: kill a girl, pin it on a friend, watch the fireworks. His friends were all wealthy, influential men. Wealthy, influential men didn’t go to prison for crimes they didn’t commit. It seemed they hardly ever went for crimes they did commit.
“You have not one shred of physical evidence the girl was here, in this house, on the night in question.”
Landry said nothing. Even if they came up with trace evidence— hair, bodily fluids, whatever—they wouldn’t be able to say it had been left the night of the murder. Estes would parade a bunch of hired guns into the courtroom—if they ever got the case to trial— and pound reasonable doubt into the minds of the jury.
They needed something irrefutable. Something that couldn’t have been in Bennett Walker’s house before the night of the murder, something personal to Irina. It wouldn’t surprise Landry to find out Walker videotaped his sexual conquests. He had that kind of ego. But even with a videotape, it could be difficult to prove the when of it unless the date and time feature of the camera had been turned on.
He thought about Irina’s things they had picked up that day along the canal: a small, cylindrical handbag, gold encrusted with rhinestones. Inside the bag: a cherry-red lip gloss, a compact, an American Express gold card, three twenties, two condoms. No cell phone.
Estes was droning on. The usual defense-attorney crap about how his client was going to sue the sheriff’s office for harassment and how they would all live to regret fucking around with him and his big ego.
Landry pulled his phone out of his pocket and called Elena. She answered on the first ring.
“Elena. It’s Landry,” he said. “Your father is one colossal asshole.”
Edward Estes shut his mouth for the first time in hours and stared at Landry, suspicious.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Elena said. “Has he threatened to ruin your career yet?”
“A couple of times. Weiss thinks we should take up professional poker.”
“Money for nothing.”
“Listen, what’s Irina’s cell phone number?” She gave it to him. He thanked her and ended the call. “Hell of a girl you raised there, Mr. Estes,” Landry said. Though I have a feeling she is who she is in spite of you, not because of you.“
He turned and went back in the house, dialing the number Elena had given him. Weiss followed.
“It’s a long shot,” Weiss told him. “What are the odds that the battery still has juice?”
“Fuck the odds.”
“I’m just saying.”
Bennett Walker was into power, adrenaline, conquest. A man like that liked to have reminders of his prowess. Souvenirs.
As he walked through the house, Landry saw those souvenirs all around: photographs of Walker playing polo, racing boats, downhill skiing. Tanned, good-looking, the big white victory grin, one hand raised in triumph and a hot babe presenting him a trophy on the other.
The phone on the other end of Landry’s call rang and went to voice mail. He dialed again. The same thing.
He went into the master bedroom—a stark, modern space at odds with the traditional European style of the house. The bed was dressed in crimson silk on white cotton sheets, but it looked as if it hadn’t been properly made in days. Clothes were strewn over chairs and dropped on the floor. There were dirty drinking glasses on the nightstand, and the place stank of sweat and stale sex.
“Unless he’s doing her,” Weiss said, “the maid hasn’t been in this room for a while.”
Landry shushed Weiss and hit redial on his phone.
The sound was faint. Muffled. But it was there. Landry didn’t know one piece of music from the next, but Elena would later tell him the song was by Beethoven—Fur Elise.
Walker had sandwiched the phone between his mattress and box spring near the head of the bed, handy for a bedtime lullaby.
Edward Estes was still ragging on Paulson when Landry walked out the front door again.
“What kind of evidence do you think would be convincing, Mr. Estes?” Weiss asked. “To prove Irina Markova was here the night she was murdered?”
Estes didn’t even glance at the detectives. His eyes went straight to the cell phone covered in pink crystals Landry held in his gloved hand.
“How about a voice from beyond the grave?” Landry suggested, hitting the button to play the phone’s greeting.
“This is Irina. Please leave message. …”
Chapter 56
I had already started walking back to my car by the time Landry called to ask for Irina’s phone number. What a Perry Mason moment that would be, I thought, showing the victim’s found cell phone to her killer’s attorney. Aside from the obvious incriminatory value of the phone being at the house, there would very likely be photographs from the evening’s festivities stored in the phone’s memory.
I hoped Landry had that moment of victory right in front of my father.
Bang, bang, Daddy. There goes another nail in Bennett’s coffin.
He would probably mour
n the loss of Bennett going to prison more than he had ever mourned the loss of me walking out on the family. And why not? Bennett was the son he should have been able to sire for himself: handsome, intelligent, ruthless, without conscience. A chip off the old block.
