The Alibi Man (17 page)

Her own father had turned against her to win a case.

“Why would I trust you, James?”

Her fiancé turned out to be a rapist, and her father sold her down the river to suit his own purposes.

Why would she trust anyone?

She wouldn’t.

She didn’t.

Including him.

chapter
26

         
HE WAS
waiting for me, as I knew he would be, at the gate into the Palm Beach Point development. Alexi Kulak.

My headlights washed over him as he stood beside his car. He had pulled himself together since I’d seen him. He looked neat, dapper even, in a tailored brown suit. He had shaved and combed his hair. He looked like a businessman waiting for the auto club to show up and change his flat tire. Impatient.

I pulled my car over, parked it, and reached down into the hidden panel of my door. At least I was better prepared this time.

I got out of the car and walked toward him, my hands at my sides.

“Mr. Kulak,” I said, stopping just out of his reach.

“What have you found out?” he asked, skipping the social niceties.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing? Don’t tell me nothing,” he snapped.

“What do you want me to say, then? Should I make something up?”

“You have a smart mouth.”

“Fire me, then. I didn’t audition for this job.”

I had left my headlights on. I kept my back to the light so I could see him clearly but the glare and my shadow would make it difficult for him to see me. I could see he didn’t appreciate my chutzpah.

“Do you know how I fire people, Ms. Estes?” he asked quietly.

“Fifty-five-gallon drum and forty gallons of acid?”

He smiled like a shark and looked every bit as deadly. “That is a good one. Perhaps I should add that to my repertoire. Would you like to be the first?”

“No,” I said calmly. “Do you want to find out who killed Irina?”

“Yes.”

“Then let me do my job.”

“You spent half the day with those men.”

“Yes, I did. Did you expect me to just ask the group over drinks whether or not any of them killed her? And did you expect any of them to just stand up and say, ‘Why, yes, I killed her. Why do you ask?’”

He’d had it with my mouth. He took two aggressive steps forward, bringing a thick hand up to strike me or to grab me.

I pulled the 9mm from my waistband behind my back and planted it squarely between Kulak’s eyes, stopping him in his tracks.

“Don’t you fucking touch me,” I said, in a very different tone of voice.

My anger pushed him back a step, and then another. I stayed with him, never losing the contact between the gun barrel and his forehead. He backed up until he was trapped against his car. His eyes were wide with surprise or fear or both.

“You will never touch me again,” I declared, adrenaline humming through me like a narcotic. “I will fucking kill you where you stand. Don’t think for a second that I wouldn’t do it. I would kill you and stand on your corpse and howl at the moon.”

He was breathing shallowly and quickly. He didn’t think I was bluffing. Good. He needed to know he wasn’t the only unpredictable one in this strange arrangement.

I backed off and lowered the gun to my side. A car was coming toward the gate. The driver opened it with his remote control, drove through and on, never so much as glancing at us in curiosity.

“Which one do you suspect?” he asked.

“I don’t have a favorite, and I’m not a psychic. I need a lead, a witness, to catch someone in a lie,” I said. “If you want a quicker solution than that, why don’t you have a couple of your associates beat it out of them one at a time?”

He hesitated, looked a little away from me. Odd, I thought.

“This is my business,” he said. “My personal business.”

Alexi Kulak was the boss in his world. He could have snapped his fingers, and no one would ever see Jim Brody, or Bennett Walker, or any of that crowd again.

I shrugged. “Kill them all and let God sort it out.”

“That is what you would do?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I would do it all quietly, patiently. I would gather evidence and speak to her friends. I would speak to anyone who might have seen her that night, no matter how unlikely it may be that they would have an answer. By the time I went in for the kill, I would have absolutely no question who had murdered her. And I would have absolutely no mercy for that person.

“That’s what I would do,” I said. “That’s what I am doing. If you want to do it another way, that’s your business.”

He sighed and sat back against his car, his broad shoulders slumping. He rubbed his hands over his face. His head was bowed.

“This pain,” he said, rubbing a fist against his chest. “It is a thing that never ends. I want to scream it out of me. It is like a fire, and it burns and burns, and there is nothing I can do to put it out. I am mad with it.”

I actually felt bad for him. What an odd moment. Here was a man so ruthless he probably started his day eating the eyeballs he had plucked from enemies and traitors, and yet he was just a man, and he was grieving and in pain.

“You feel like you’re caged with a demon,” I said. “You can’t escape it. You can’t run away. There’s nowhere to hide.”

He looked at me, and his face shone with tears he had tried to wipe away. “You’ve known this pain?”

“I know what it’s like to want so badly to reverse the past that I would have turned myself inside out to do it,” I said quietly, thinking of the day Deputy Hector Ramirez had taken a hollow-point bullet in the face, blowing out the back of his skull and leaving his wife a widow and his children fatherless. Because of me. I knew what that pain was. The pain of guilt.

And I knew all about the pain of loss. Not of having a dream just fade away, but of having it yanked away and smashed before my eyes. I refused to let the faces surface in my mind. The pain came anyway, like an old friend who would just walk in the front door without knocking.

“Let me do my job, Mr. Kulak,” I said. “Then you can do yours.”

Without waiting for him to say anything, I went back to my car, did a U-turn on the street, and drove back toward Wellington.

“I would speak to anyone who might have seen her that night, no matter how unlikely it may be that they would have an answer.”

My own words came back to me, as did the vision of the strange woman who had approached Barbaro and me in the parking lot at Players the night before.

…no matter how unlikely…

chapter
27

         
I SWUNG
into the drive-through at Burger King for sustenance to go, then continued on down Greenview Shores to South Shore. I pulled into the lower parking lot at Players and sat there for a while, trying to choke down a few bites of a chicken sandwich. I didn’t feel like eating. I felt like drinking.

It had been a long and taxing day already, and the night was young. My head spun with flashbacks of Landry, and Barbaro, and Bennett Walker. I could see Billy Quint squinting up at me from his wheelchair. I could see Bennett’s cold, flat eyes as he stared at the waitress in the 7th Chukker and the look he gave me when he said,
“I’m surprised you didn’t go into sex-crimes investigation.”
Taunting me, and enjoying it.

In point of fact, I
had
gone into Sex Crimes when I got my detective’s shield. It hadn’t lasted long. My captain called me “overzealous,” sent me for a psych evaluation, and transferred me to Narcotics, where everyone was a little bit crazy and overzealousness was considered a virtue.

I had secretly been relieved, afraid that if I stayed in Sex Crimes I would have ended up killing a suspect out of my own fury and hurt.

Fury and hurt. My emotions were bouncing between the two like the ball in a game of Pong. If I thought about it long enough, I would realize how exhausted I was, and I would start thinking about what a mess my life had been to date and how I didn’t see it getting any better. And things would go downhill from there.

Instead, I took the Burger King bag and set it on the hood so that my car wouldn’t have that nasty BO stench of cold, uneaten fast food when I got back into it later.

I looked around the parking lot, casually walked around, stared hard into the night, where the sodium vapor light faded to black and the parking lot gave way to grass and trees. Though I had the creepy feeling of eyes staring back at me, I couldn’t see anyone. Maybe later.

As I approached the front of the club, I pulled a snapshot of Irina and Lisbeth out of my clutch and walked up to the valet stand. The kid working was tall and gangly and looked like a goose with acne. His eyes went wide at the sight of my fat lip.

“You should see the other guy,” I said.

“Huh?”

The future of America.

“Were you working Saturday night?”

“No.”

“Do you know anyone who was working Saturday night?”

“Yeah…”

He paused so long I thought he had gone catatonic.

“…Jeff was.”

Jeff looked up as he came around the back of a white Lexus, stuffing his tip money in the pocket of his baggy black pants.

“Jeff was what?” he asked.

“Working Saturday night,” I said.

He cut his friend a look like he had just ratted him out to the homeroom teacher. This one was a foot shorter than the other one, with orange hair and a cowlick.

“Yeah,” he said reluctantly, as if he would have much preferred to lie to me. Little weasel.

“Did you see this girl?” I asked. I folded Lisbeth’s half of the photo back and showed him the other half, tapping a finger beneath Irina’s face.

He barely glanced at it. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Maybe you should look again,” I suggested. “For more than a nanosecond.”

He glanced at it again. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“You don’t know?” I said sternly. “Are you gay?”

He looked me in the eyes for the first time, shocked that I might think so, particularly in front of his cohort, who started laughing. “No!”

I held the picture up. “A girl who looks like this comes prancing in here dressed to kill, looking like more money than you’ll ever make in your lifetime, and you don’t know if you saw her.”

“We were really busy,” he said, evading my gaze. “It was some rich guy’s birthday party.”

“She came out this door, late. The party was breaking up. Only the diehards were left.”

He was squirming like the kid who threw the baseball through the neighborhood witch’s window and got caught.

“Do you know why I’m asking you?” I questioned.

A black BMW 7 Series pulled in.

Jeff started leaning toward it. “I have to work.”

“It’s my turn!” the goose protested.

“It’s his turn,” I said. “You have to share, Jeffrey.”

He wanted to snap his fingers and become invisible. I tried again.

“Do you know why I’m asking you if you saw this girl Saturday night?” I didn’t wait for another stupid answer. “Because she’s dead, Jeff. She came here Saturday and had a good time. And then she left here, and someone took her somewhere and strangled her to death and threw her body in a canal to rot and be eaten by an alligator.”

The kid made a nauseous face. “Wow. That’s sick.”

“Yes, it is. Is your memory coming back to you? Did you see her leave here Saturday night?”

He stared at the photograph, then looked away, frowning. “No,” he said. “I didn’t see her.”

A Porsche pulled into the drive.

“I’ve gotta go,” he said, and bolted like a skittish horse.

I watched him, imagining him working Saturday night. A busy evening, money walking in and out the door. Big tippers. Someone slips him a little something extra to lose his memory. Just between us men—wink wink.

The goose came ambling back, oblivious of any tension around. He glanced at the picture.

“Hey, I know her,” he said. “She’s so hot!”

“You’ve seen her around here?” I asked.

“Yeah. She comes here a lot.”

“With anyone or alone?”

“With some other girls.”

“Have you ever seen her with a man?”

“Sure.”

“Who?”

“I dunno.”

I wanted to reach my hand into his brain and pull the information out.

“Let’s try it this way,” I suggested. “Always the same man? Or different men?”

“Different guys.”

“Younger? Older?”

“Older. Old rich guys.”

“If I brought some photographs by, do you think you might recognize any of them?”

“I dunno….”

Even I can beat my hard head against a brick wall for just so long.

“Do you have a cell phone I can call you on?”

“Yeah.”

I dug a small notebook out of my bag. “What’s your number?”

He recited his number to me. I thanked him and went into the club, thinking I deserved a drink after that.

The gorgeous Kayne Jackson was tending bar again. Eye candy in a painted-on black T-shirt, biceps rippling as he prepared a cosmo to send away with the waitress.

“So, Kayne Jackson,” I said, taking an empty stool near him. “What are your goals in life?”

He glanced up at me and smiled. “Ketel One and tonic, big squeeze of lemon?”

I gave him the half smile. “There’s nothing more valuable or more dangerous than a bartender with a good memory.”

He chuckled as he scooped ice into a tumbler. “I’m not dangerous. Where did you get that lip?”

“They were having a sale at Wal-Mart. Lifelike, isn’t it?”

“Looks like it hurts.”

“Nothing a little vodka won’t cure,” I said.

“I’ve heard that story before.”

“Everybody confesses to their bartender. Considering this crowd, I’m sure you’ve got stories that would make the average person’s eyes pop out.”

“I’m valuable because I’m discreet,” he said, pouring the Ketel One. “Or I wouldn’t have this job.”

“Hmm…” I wondered if he drove a Maserati. Blackmail could be a profitable little side job. “I imagine some of your patrons value your discretion enough to pay you a little something extra on the side.”

“I have some generous customers,” he said, noncommittal as he squeezed the wedge of lemon.

He set the drink in front of me and went to the other end of the bar to take an order. I watched him pop the caps on a couple of beers.

“Back to my original question,” I said when he returned. “What do you want to be when you grow up, Kayne?”

He shrugged as he rinsed out some glasses in the sink. “This is it.”

“To be a bartender?”

“Do you think there’s something wrong with that?”

“No. I’m surprised, though,” I confessed. “You’re a young, extremely handsome, and charming man. You could be a model, an actor. Nothing against your profession, but I doubt your tips raise you to the same tax bracket as a Ralph Lauren model.”

“You’d have to ask Juan Barbaro about that,” he said. “I do okay.”

“You’re not secretly a wannabe polo star? A spy? A high-priced gigolo?”

He smiled, and female hearts all around the room skipped a beat. “Why do you ask?”

I laughed. “I don’t buy trouble, but you’d be worth your weight in gold in Palm Beach.”

He pretended to shudder. “I don’t need money that badly. And I prefer my ladies be under retirement age.”

And who could blame him? The median age of the Island’s residents was creeping up toward the speed limit. Plastic surgery was a growth industry.

“So draw the line at the bedroom door,” I said. “Do you have any idea what a walker can make during season?”

“Escorting old ladies to charity balls isn’t my idea of a good time,” he said. “I enjoy what I do, the people I meet. It’s fun.”

“You make a lot of friends here,” I said.

“Yeah.”

The waitress came by, gave him an order, and gave me the once-over and a dirty look. Little bitch.

“You said you knew Irina.”

“Yeah. She was something.”

“Do you know any of her friends? Girlfriends she might have confided in?”

He started to shake a martini. Muscles rippled in his chest and upper arms.

“My opinion: Irina had acquaintances and rivals, not friends. She didn’t strike me as the kind of girl who would confide in anyone.”

“Rivals?”

“The girls that run with that crowd all want the same thing, and there are only so many multimillionaires and handsome polo players to go around.”

He gave me a funny look. “You worked with her. You must know more about her than I do.”

“It’s becoming clear to me that I didn’t know her at all,” I said. “What about Lisbeth Perkins? She was a friend.”

“Girl crush.”

“Lisbeth is gay?”

“No,” he said. “It was more like hero worship. Irina was glamorous, exotic, sophisticated, self-assured.”

Everything Lisbeth was not.

“Did Irina ever come in here with a boyfriend?”

“Nope.” He poured the drink and added two olives.

“Did she ever leave here with a boyfriend?”

“Not that I noticed,” he said, “but my vision gets poorer and poorer as people move toward the door.”

“Would an infusion of cash improve that?”

He shook his head.

“Did an infusion of cash cause that problem?”

“I have other customers,” he said, and started to turn away. His left hand was braced against the bar. I reached out and caught his wrist.

“She’s dead, Kayne. If you know something, it’s worth a hell of a lot more than a big tip off the books. It’s one thing to turn a blind eye to an affair. Irina was murdered. If you know something about that but you tell the police that you don’t, you’re committing a crime. You could be charged as an accessory after the fact.”

He pulled away from my touch, frowning. “I don’t know who killed Irina. If I did, I would tell the detectives. Do you want another drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“Then that’ll be six-fifty.”

He walked away. I finished my drink, left a ten on the bar, and went back to the lobby. I was frustrated. There were people around who had information, but there was no getting it out of them. Selfish, conscienceless bastards. Maybe I should have given Alexi Kulak a list of their names.

I went downstairs to the restaurant on my way to the ladies’ room and spied Sean sitting by himself, eating a pork chop and reading
POLO
magazine. He didn’t look up as I approached his table. He didn’t look up as I took the seat across from him.

“You look lonely back here,” I said.

“I didn’t feel up to having company,” he said. The guilt trip. I guess I deserved it.

I sighed and leaned my forearms on the tabletop. My mother would have been mortified to see it.

“I’m sorry about this morning,” I said. “I shouldn’t have implied you weren’t supportive. My God, you’ve been the only support I’ve had for most of my life. You know what that means to me.”

My eyes started to burn. I would have had tears in them if not for the damage caused by “the Incident,” as my attorney liked to call it.

Sean’s expression softened, and he reached across the table and put his hand over mine. “I love you, honey,” he said sincerely. “I don’t want to see you have to open the door on all that misery.

“I hate Bennett Walker at least half as much as you do. If he was involved in Irina’s murder, I want to see him in prison. But I don’t want this to tear you up, El. I remember what it was like during Bennett’s trial, what it did to you. It broke my heart.”

There was a lump in my throat the size of a crab cake. I had to look away from him to compose myself. My eyes went to the magazine he was reading, but I didn’t really take it in.

“Yeah,” I tried to joke. “Made me the neurotic mess I am today.”

He took my chin in his hand and turned my face sideways, scrutinizing my lip. “If that scars, I have the perfect doctor to fix it.”