“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.”
“It was today.”
“I can’t believe you went there without me.”
Landry gave him a look. “What are you? My new girlfriend? Are your latent homosexual tendencies emerging? Should I be watching my back, Weiss?”
“Oh, fuck you, Landry.”
“Not interested,” Landry said. Weiss snatched a breath to bark back at him. “Don’t miss the turn, sweetheart.”
“You never used to be this big an asshole,” Weiss said. “You been taking lessons from Estes?”
“Don’t try to be clever, Weiss,” Landry said. “It just magnifies your inadequacies.”
Weiss leaned out the window and jabbed the button on the intercom for the gate. The person who answered had to go see if Mr. Brody was available to receive them.
Weiss huffed, “Fat bastard’s probably watching us over closed-circuit television. This guy’s so fucking rich, he shits money. He reps Milton Marbray, NBA rookie of the year. He reps half the all-stars in baseball. Money for nothing.”
The ornate iron gates opened, inviting them in. A guy in black slacks and a white jacket greeted them as they pulled up in front of what looked like a Caribbean plantation house. The cars parked on the curved drive in front of the house looked like they had just come out of the exotic-car-dealership showroom-a Jaguar, a Ferrari, a Mercedes, a Porsche.
Landry got out of the car and introduced himself to the servant, showing his badge.
“Mr. Brody is on the rear terrace entertaining friends. Follow me, please.”
As they walked through the center of the mansion, Landry’s attention wasn’t on the dark teak floors or the white walls hung with art that was probably worth more than he made in ten years. His attention was already through the open doors to the terrace, where half a dozen men sat lounging around a table under the shade of an arbor covered in striped fabric.
He immediately recognized Paul Kenner, the ex-baseball player. Elena had told him Kenner was at the birthday party the night Irina went missing. Another guy sitting at the table did beer commercials-some Aussie tennis player from the last decade. The rest he didn’t know.