The Alibi Man

Chapter 8

I was living in a condo in the Polo Club off and on that winter season, 1987. Taking a break from my second year at Duke, my father’s alma mater.

I was not a good student-not because I wasn’t capable but because it irritated my father, and that was important to me at the time. I had chosen Duke for that very reason, of course.

All my life I had considered Edward Estes to be a father in name only. Even in my earliest memories he was always off to the side, disconnected, present for the sake of appearance. He probably could have said the same of me and my efforts at being his daughter, but I was a child and he was not.

Children are uncanny little creatures. They read the subtext and see the complex subtleties in people. They adjust their own thinking, their actions and reactions, accordingly. Children are closer to, and more trusting of, their intuition, and none of the influences that block and distract us as adults have had a chance to cloud that clarity of instinct.

Edward Estes was not my biological father. I had been adopted as an infant by him and his wife, Helen Ralston Estes. A private and costly adoption I would be reminded of on-at least-a yearly basis, and always in a moment when it could do the maximum emotional damage.

They had been unable to have children of their own. He had been pissed off at his own lack of ability to produce a proper heir and had, through the amazing contortions of his psyche, managed to corkscrew that anger around to direct it at Helen and at me. At Helen because of her insistence to adopt. At me because I was the living example of his physical shortfall.

Helen, a shallow, spoiled child of privilege, had found her life lacking the fashionable accessory all her friends were having at the time: a baby. So she found a baby broker, made a down payment, got her name on the list, and waited impatiently. The exercise would be repeated in exactly the same way, with exactly the same emotional depth, in the ‘90s when she had to have a money-green Birkin bag from Hermes.

Unlike the classic Birkin bag, my trendiness had come and gone with the fashions in Helen’s life. The instant I discovered rebellion at age two, I was handed off to the nanny and was seldom seen in public until I reached the perfect age of cuteness: five. At five I once again became Helen’s favorite doll, to dress up and take out to mother-daughter functions and other ideal photo-op activities, such as riding lessons.

To my good fortune, I was a natural talent on a horse. Not only was I cute as a button in braids with bows and a velvet-covered helmet, I could stick on a pony like a burr and was, in no time, bringing home blue ribbons.

Everybody loves a winner.

Even my father, as much as he disliked me, very much liked the accolades and attention I brought as a budding equestrian star. My talent on a horse became the bargaining chip that kept me from being shipped off to boarding school in Switzerland when I was fourteen and got caught smoking pot and drinking booze with the gardener’s twenty-year-old son. The fact that my photograph would appear in many a magazine on every Palm Beach resident’s reading list allowed me to blow off half a semester at Duke to show horses in Wellington in the winter of 1987.

That was the winter I fell in love with a man for the very first time in my life. I had seen no point in it before then. In my experience and nineteen years of observation, I had only ever seen love go bad, crash, and burn. No one came out happy or unscathed. It seemed to me a much better idea to play around and have some fun and move on when the relationship started to head south, which they all invariably did.

I would have been so much better off if only I had stuck to that principle. But along came Bennett Walker. The day I fell in love with him, I knew that was the day that would change my life forever. I had no idea how true that statement would be, or how tragic.

The Walker family fortune had been made in the shipbuilding business during World War I. During the Depression, they bought up shipping companies and diversified into the steel business. The fortune was doubled, tripled, quadrupled through World War II and subsequent global conflicts. In the ‘50s they had branched into commercial development and real estate.

Most of my father’s money he had made on his own as one of the country’s highest-priced, most sought-after defense attorneys to the rich and infamous. He himself had become a celebrity of sorts over the years by getting guilty wealthy people off the hook for their sins, and was worth more socially because of that than because of the age of his fortune. Old-money Palm Beachers were disdainful of how he came by his wealth-behind his back, of course. When they found themselves in a jam with the law, however, he was always a best and dearest friend.

He knew, of course. And he was both amused by it and resentful because of it. Resentment was my father’s forte. No one had ever carried a bigger chip on their shoulder than Edward Estes.

So imagine his glee when his rebellious daughter was seen on the arm of the most-eligible-bachelor son of the wealthiest old-money family in Palm Beach. His daughter, who was well-known for choosing wildly inappropriate boyfriends-polo players and rock musicians being my personal favorites. Outside of my riding accomplishments, falling in love with Bennett Walker was the first thing in my life I had ever done that pleased my father. It only stood to reason, I suppose, that it would be the thing that would ultimately destroy what relationship we had.

I left Star Polo in a daze and just started driving. I didn’t think, didn’t plan. I went on autopilot. It was a relief to be numb and empty. The bloody mess that had been the day sank into a dark corner of my mind as I drove. I didn’t hear anything. My surroundings seemed unreal and distant.

My conscious mind had overloaded. Escape seemed like a good idea at the time. But my subconscious had its own agenda, and after miles of blur and strip malls, I found myself driving over the Lake Worth bridge onto the Island. Palm Beach.

Palm Beach is a world of its own, a sixteen-mile-long sandbar studded with palm trees and mansions. The southern half of the island is so narrow, there is only one road leading north. As it widens, side streets branch off and wind around, the exorbitantly expensive half to the Lake Worth side and the obscenely expensive half to the ocean side. The landscaping is so lush it is difficult from the street to get more than a glimpse of many of the grand homes, much less their grand views.

My parents’ house was a pink Italianate villa behind tall iron gates. A cobblestone drive circled a fountain featuring a mermaid perched on a trio of sea horses, pouring water from an urn. More than once as a small child I had been hauled out of the fountain, naked as the day I was born, filled with the joy of freedom, God forbid.

I parked illegally across the street and just sat there. If I sat there another fourteen minutes, a squad car would come by and the uniform inside it would hassle me because I obviously didn’t belong here. The right corner of my mouth quirked upward in what passed for an ironic smile.

I hadn’t set foot in that house in nearly two decades. I hadn’t even driven past. It felt so strange to sit there across the street, looking in the gate. Absolutely nothing about the place had changed. I could have been looking back in time. I half-expected to see myself at ten, at fifteen, at twenty-one, coming out the tall black double doors.

At twenty-one I had come out those doors one day and never returned.

One of my parents was driving a black Bentley convertible these days. It sat parked under the portico. Probably my father. My mother had always abhorred the sun and swathed herself in silk and chiffon to hide every inch of her skin, until she looked like a mummy designed by Valentino. My father was always tan and fit, played golf and tennis, and piloted his own vintage cigarette boat in races on Lake Worth.

I wondered what he would do if he came out of the house, drove his Bentley out the gate, and saw me sitting there. Would he even recognize me? The last time he had seen me I had a long, wild mane of curly black hair. My expression had been furious, and to my horror there had been tears swelling in my eyes.

A year past, in a fit of rage, I had hacked my hair off boy-short and had kept it that way. My expression now was the unchanging, carefully neutral expression the plastic surgeons had given me after nearly two years of reconstructive surgery. And I was now physically incapable of crying.

Self-absorbed narcissist that he was, I doubted he would even see me as anything other than a loiterer. He would have his cell phone out and be speed-dialing the police as he went down the street.

My mother had come to see me in the hospital after my date with the asphalt under Billy Golam’s 4X4. Not because I had called her. Not because she was my mother and had been keeping tabs on me. She had come because her housekeeper had seen my name in the Palm Beach Post when the incident was in the news and had asked her if I was a relative.

Helen had come to see me, but she hadn’t known what to do or say when she got there. I gave her a point for trying to do the maternal thing, even though she had only a passing knowledge of the concept. I bore no resemblance to the daughter she remembered. Not physically or otherwise. I had been gone from her life almost as long as I had been in it.

She had been so uncomfortable that after fifteen minutes I pretended to fall asleep so she could leave.

I asked myself then why I had come here. Wasn’t it enough to have those old memories crack through the scars that covered them? Did I have to come here in person to make the pain sharper?

Apparently I thought so.

What strange irony that Irina’s death would somehow be intertwined with my past and that in wanting to help Irina I would have to face that past, something I had avoided doing my entire adult life.

I started the car and drove away. Drove home.