Part 3 (1/2)
was just Dean Soren's effect on me. ”I'm riding a couple of Sean's.” ”You don't look strong enough to ride a pony.” ”I'm fine.” ”No, you're not,” he p.r.o.nounced. ”Who is Sean using for a vet now?” ”Paul Geller.” ”He's an idiot.” ”He's not you, Dr. Dean,” I said diplomatically. ”He told Margo Whitaker her mare needs 'sound therapy.' She's got headphones on the poor horse two hours a day, playing the sounds of nature.”
”Gives Margo something to do.”
”The horse needs not to have Margo hovering around. That's what the horse needs,” he growled. He
sipped his umbrella drink and stared at me.
”I haven't seen you in a long time, Elena,” he said. ”It's good you're back. You need to be with the
horses. They ground you. A person always knows exactly where they stand with horses. Life makes more sense.”
”Yes,” I said, nervous under his scrutiny, afraid he would want to talk about my career and what had
happened. But he let it go. Instead, he quizzed me about Sean's horses, and we reminisced about horses Sean and I had ridden in years past. Marion brought my cheeseburger and I dutifully ate.
When I had finished, he said, ”You said on the phone you had a question.”
”Do you know anything about Don Jade?” I asked bluntly.
His eyes narrowed. ”Why would you want to know about him?”
”A friend of a friend has gotten mixed up with him. It sounded a little sketchy to me.”
His thick white brows bobbed. He looked over toward the jumper barn. There were a couple of riders out on the jump field taking their mounts over colorful fences. From a distance they looked as graceful and light as deer bounding through a meadow. The athleticism of an animal is a pure and simple thing.
Complicated by human emotions, needs, greed, there is little pure or simple about the sport we bring the horses into.
”Well,” he said. ”Don has always made a pretty picture with some ragged edges.”
”What does that mean?”
”Let's take a walk,” he suggested.
I suspected he didn't want anyone showing up to eavesdrop. I followed him out the back of the cafe to a row of small paddocks, three of them occupied by horses.
”My projects,” Dr. Dean explained. ”Two mystery lamenesses and one with a bad case of stomach ulcers.”
He leaned against the fence and looked at them, horses he had probably saved from the knackers. He probably had half a dozen more stashed around the place.
”They give us all they can,” he said. ”They do their best to make sense out of what we ask them to do- demand they do. All they want in return is to be cared for properly and kindly. Imagine if people were like that.”
”Imagine,” I echoed, but I couldn't imagine. I had been a cop a dozen years. The nature of the job and the people and things it had exposed me to had burned away any idealism I might ever have had. The story Dean Soren told me about Don Jade only confirmed my low opinion of the human race.
Over the last two decades, Jade's name had twice been connected to schemes to defraud insurance companies. The scam was to kill an expensive show horse that hadn't lived up to potential, then have the owner file a claim saying the animal had died of natural causes and collect a six-figure payout.
It was an old hustle that had come into the spotlight of the national media in the eighties, when a number of prominent people in the show-jumping world had been caught at it. Several had ended up in prison for a number of years, among them an internationally well-known trainer, and an owner who was heir to an enormous cellular phone fortune. Being rich has never stopped anyone from being greedy.
Jade had lurked in the shadows of scandal back then, when he had been an a.s.sistant trainer at one of the barns that had lost horses to mysterious causes. He had never been charged with any crime or directly connected to a death. After the scandal broke, Jade had left that employer and spent a few years in France, training and competing on the European show circuit.
Eventually the furor over the horse killings died down, and Don Jade came back to the States and found a couple of wealthy clients to serve as cornerstones for his own business.
It might seem inconceivable that a man with Jade's reputation could continue on in the profession, but there are always new owners who don't know about a trainer's history, and there are always people who won't believe what they don't want to believe. And there are always people who just plain don't care. There are always people willing to look the other way if they think they stand to gain money or fame. Consequently, Don Jade's stable attracted clients, many of whom paid him handsomely to campaign their horses in Florida at the Winter Equestrian Festival.
In the late nineties, one of those horses was a jumper called t.i.tan.
t.i.tan was a talented horse with an unfortunately mercurial temperament. A horse that cost his owner a lot of money and always seemed to sabotage his own efforts to earn his keep. He earned a reputation as a rogue and a head case. Despite his abilities, his market value plummeted. Meanwhile, t.i.tan's owner, Warren Calvin, a Wall Street trader, had lost a fortune in the stock market. And suddenly one day t.i.tan was dead, and Calvin filed a $250,000 claim with his insurance company.
The official story pieced together by Jade and his head groom was that sometime during the night t.i.tan had become spooked, had gone wild in his stall, breaking a foreleg, and had died of shock and blood loss. However, a former Jade employee had told a different tale, claiming t.i.tan's death had not been an accident, that Jade had had the animal suffocated, and that the horse had broken his leg in a panic as he was being asphyxiated.
It was an ugly story. The insurance company had immediately ordered a necropsy, and Warren Calvin had come under the scrutiny of a New York State prosecutor. Calvin withdrew the claim and the investigation was dropped. No fraud, no crime. The necropsy was never performed. Warren Calvin got out of the horse business.
Don Jade weathered the rumors and speculation and went on about his business. He'd had a convenient alibi for the night in question: a girl named Allison, who worked for him and claimed to have been in bed with him at the time of t.i.tan's death. Jade admitted to the affair, lost his marriage, but kept on training horses. Old clients either believed him or left him, and new pigeons came to roost, unaware.
I had learned pieces of this story from my research on the Internet, and from Irina's gossip. I knew Irina' s opinion of Jade had been based on the stories she'd heard from other grooms, information that was likely grounded in fact and heavily flavored with spite. The horse business is an incestuous business. Within the individual disciplines (jumping, dressage, et cetera) everyone knows everyone, and half of them have screwed the others, either literally or figuratively. Grudges and jealousies abound. The gossip can be vicious.
But I knew if the story came out of Dean Soren's mouth, it was true.
”It's sad a guy like that stays in business,” I said.
Dr. Dean tipped his head and shrugged. ”People believe what they want. Don is a charming fellow, and he can ride the h.e.l.l out of a jump course. You can argue with success all you want, Elena, but you'l never win. Especially not in this business.”
”Sean's groom told me Jade lost a horse last weekend,” I said.
”Stellar,” Dr. Dean said, nodding. His ulcer patient had come to our corner of the paddock and reached her nose out coyly toward her savior, begging for a scratch under the chin. ”Story is he bit through the cord on a box fan hanging in his stall and fried himself.”
The mare stepped closer and put her head over the fence. I scratched her neck absently, keeping my attention on Dean Soren. ”What do you think?”
He touched the mare's head with a gnarled old hand, as gentle as if he were touching a child.
”I think old Stellar had more heart than talent.”
”Do you think Jade killed him?”
”It doesn't matter what I think,” he said. ”It only matters what someone can prove.” He looked at me with those eyes that had seen-and could see-so much about me. ”What does your friend's friend have to say about it?”
”Nothing,” I said, feeling sick in my stomach. ”She seems to be missing.”
O n Monday morning Don Jade's groom, Erin Seabright, was to have picked up her little sister to take her to the beach. She never showed and hadn't been in contact with her family since.
I paced the rooms of the guest house and chewed on the ragged stub of a thumbnail. The Sheriff's Office hadn't been interested in the concerns of a twelve-year-old girl. It was doubtful they knew anything about or had any interest in Don Jade. Erin Seabright's parents presumably knew nothing about Jade either, or Molly wouldn't have been the only Seabright looking for help.
The ten-dollar bill the girl had given me was on the small writing desk beside my laptop. Inside the folded bill was Molly's own little homemade calling card: her name, address, and a striped cat on a mailing label; the label adhered to a little rectangle of blue poster board. She had printed her phone number neatly at the bottom of the card.