“Not by choice,” I said sweetly, forcing the half smile, trying to look like trouble, the fun kind. “He used to be my father.”

Brody’s brows went up and he barked a laugh. “Stick around for drinks. I want to hear the rest of that story.”

He climbed up on a mounting block and got on a fresh horse. Whatever his amusement at me, he wasn’t going to let it get in the way of his polo match.

“He knows your father?” Barbaro asked, surprised.

“Small world.”

“Your father enjoys polo?”

“My father enjoys power. He used to race boats. Maybe he still does, I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?” he asked, puzzled.

“I haven’t spoken to my father in twenty years,” I admitted. “Shouldn’t you be getting on a horse?”

He waved a hand in the direction of the field. “I’m sitting out this chukker. These friends of Mr. Brody’s, all are wealthy men who enjoy the game but are not so good with the mallet. They set up the match so in every other chukker each team gets one professional. The rest of the match they spend swinging at one another.”

He stopped talking and focused his full attention on me, taking in the look: Chanel ballet flats, slim white linen cigarette pants, a simple black ballet-neck top with three-quarter sleeves.

“Very chic,” he said, smiling. “Simple, elegant, confident.”

“Well, that’s just me in a nutshell.”

Barbaro chuckled. “Elegant and chic, yes. Simple, I don’t think so.

“Come, sit,” he said. “My car is on the sidelines.”

His car was a British racing-green Aston Martin convertible with buttery tan leather interior and a flag of Spain decal on one corner of the windshield. He held the door for me.

“Nice ride,” I said, settling in.

“I leased it for the season. That way I get a new toy every year.”

“And what do you do when the season is over?”

“I go someplace else and lease another. I’m going to Europe to play for the summer. I have my eye on a Lamborghini.”

“Polo is very good to you,” I commented.

“Modeling has been very good to me. Polo is my passion,” he said. “So, tell me why you have not spoken to your father in so long.”

“Because we don’t have anything to say to each other. It’s as simple as that,” I said. “It’s no big deal. It’s not like we’re related or anything.

“I was adopted,” I explained.

“But he is the only father you have known?”

“Edward Estes owned the house I grew up in. He had no interest in me beyond how I might be useful to him. And I made a point not to be useful to him at all.”

Barbaro said nothing. He looked very serious as he tried to figure me out.

“I can’t believe your good friend didn’t fill you in on some of this last night,” I said.

“All he said was that the two of you were once engaged.”

I laughed. “What a pretty liar you are. You even manage to look innocent. I outright accused him of being a rapist with the potential to be a murderer, and you’re telling me neither one of you brought that up after I left?”

He dragged a hand through his hair and looked away, uncomfortable. “He told me he was wrongly accused and you believed the worst about him; beyond that, I did not want to hear anything from him about you.”

I didn’t really believe him, but it was an interesting position he vas taking. I watched him openly and wondered what he was all about.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“That you intrigue me,” I said.

His eyebrows went up, and his mouth curved. “This is a good thing, I think.”

“That depends on what I find out.”

He shifted in his seat, leaning toward me. “You will find,” he aid in a low, sexy voice, “that I am a gentleman-as long as you would like me to be; that I am passionate…”

He leaned a little closer and cupped a hand around the side of my neck, his thumb brushing seductively back and forth just along my hairline. My pulse quickened.

“I have only just met you, Elena,” he said, “but already I have decided I have never known a woman quite like you.”

“Oh, I can guarantee that,” I said.

“Hey, Casanova!” The Aussie-accented shout came from a rider recognized as Sebastian Foster, the tennis player. He sat astride lot ten feet from the hood of Barbaro’s car. “You’re up, mate! You’d better hustle.”

Barbaro looked annoyed as he sat back; his hand fell away from my neck.

“Last chukker,” Foster said. “Seven minutes more and you’re a free man.”

“You’ll stay?” Barbaro said to me.

“Of course,” I said, but not for the reasons he wanted, at least not primarily. I was being brought into the fold of the Alibi Club, and I knew without question I would find Irina Markova’s killer among them. It was like being brought into a den of lions. Lucky for me I was an adrenaline junkie. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

Chapter 22

“Here’s what I have for you so far,” Mercedes Gitan said. “Have a seat.”

Landry sat. Her office was extraordinarily neat. The desktop could be seen with the naked eye.

“Cause of death: ligature strangulation.”

“What about the manual strangulation?”

“The hyoid bone was intact. I would expect that to be broken if the killer had choked her to death.”

“Time of death?”

“That’s a tougher call because of the body having been submerged.”

“Guesstimate?”

“She’d been dead maybe twenty-four hours, give or take.”

“Rape?”

“I couldn’t say. There was too much damage to the lower torso from the alligator.”

“What good are you?” Landry asked.

“I can tell you she had oral sex before she died and that she hadn’t eaten any solid food,” she said. “Her stomach contents were semen and a green-apple martini. Find out what time she had dinner and add digestion time. That’ll get you something.”

“How much semen?” he asked.

“A lot. This didn’t come from just one player, pardon the pun,” Gitan said. “This girl did the whole club.”

Chapter 23

“So how do you know my father?”

The best defense is a good offense.

I took a seat beside Jim Brody at a table in the 7th Chukker, one of the members-only bars at the International Polo Club. Located the grandstand, it was smaller and more private than the Mallet Grille and Bar in the clubhouse. An unobtrusive panel door on one side wall led into the Wanderers Room, a small, private dining room with a five-star chef for those intimate dinners among the obnoxiously rich.

Brody hailed the waitress. “We had a client in common a couple years ago. Dushawn Upton.”

Dushawn Upton, aka Uptown. NBA all-star guard and known wife beater, on trial for soliciting the murder of a pregnant girl-end. Another sterling character wealthy enough to buy the support and loyalty of Edward Estes.

I was aware of the case-not because my father had been in the news but because the case had been the news while I was a captive television audience, languishing in a hospital bed, recovering from being dragged down Okeechobee Boulevard like a rag doll caught in the door of a pickup truck.

“He’s a hell of a lawyer,” Brody said. “Hell of a poker player too.”

“It’s easy to bluff if you don’t have a conscience.”

He looked at me as if he wasn’t sure what planet I was from. “What did he ever do to you to make you such a loving daughter?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all. We have philosophical differences.”

“You didn’t believe Dushawn was innocent?” He tried to look astonished, even amused. I didn’t pretend amusement with him.

“No one believed Dushawn was innocent. The jurors didn’t believe Dushawn was innocent, but they’d been beaten over the head with ‘reasonable doubt’ until they couldn’t see straight. Thanks to my father, another criminal walks away scot-free. A real tribute to our system of jurisprudence.”