A Three Day Event (33 page)

“Michel, what a trip,
Seigneur
, there are so many things I want to ask you, I don’t know where to start”–

“And there’s lots I want to tell you. You saw me with that journalist. Before I started talking to her, I was sitting on a mountain of secrets. It seems like it’s been forever. I was like a volcano about to blow. I thought I didn’t want to talk about Palm Beach, but–oh sorry, I’m getting ahead of things, do you even know anything about what went down there this winter?”

“I heard rumours for a long time. Sue told the Jacobsons and they told me. I wouldn’t mind hearing the details.”

“Did she say she got it from me?” Suddenly Michel’s voice went from confiding to high alert.

“No way. Don’t worry, Michel, she’s an honest journalist.”

“I suppose it doesn’t even matter now if people did know I blabbed…anyway, but when I finally told her, I felt… I felt like I’d been dragging these big lead balls around and I finally cut the chain to one of them”–

“Michel, did you kill Liam?” It had just jumped out, he hadn’t known he was going to ask. But he realized instinctively that this was the one moment he could count on getting the truth from him–or knowing if it was a lie.

Michel smiled broadly, didn’t clutch or hesitate. His eyes held unbroken contact. “No, Polo. I hated the little creep, but I didn’t have any reason to kill him. He could push my buttons, and I had to smack him around a bit to put him in his place sometimes–and sure I resented him making up that shit about me being gay. But it was the nerve of the guy thinking he could muscle in on my private life that got me mad, not what he was saying about me.”

There wasn’t the slightest doubt in Polo’s mind that Michel was telling the truth. His spirits soared. Sweet, narcotic relief rinsed through him in a sudden rush. He felt like jumping up and hugging Michel, but of course did no such thing. He allowed himself only a broad idiot’s smile of infinite happiness, and a full half minute to savour the information while Michel smiled gently back at him in amused indulgence.

Finally it came to him to ask the obvious question that any real detective would have pounced on at once. Merrily, as though it were nothing but a tedious corroborative formality, he asked, “Then why did you ask Joc to cover for you Thursday night and Friday morning? She told her story very convincingly, by the way, but you didn’t really think I would believe you were sleeping with her, did you?”

Michel squirmed a bit. “Yeah, it was a lame alibi, but I couldn’t think of anything else at the moment. I couldn’t tell anyone I went into Montreal to see Claude.”

“Why is it so hush–hush about Claude? Is she–married or something?”

Michel laughed. “No, of course not. Although she soon will be–to me,” he said with boyish self–congratulation. “I know it’s old–fashioned to want to get married, but we’re going to. My grandparents will appreciate it. No, it’s because of
papa
. If even one person in the horse world found out about it, it’d be sure to get back to him. He’s going to have a shit fit when he finds out.”

“I take it Claude is not in horses, and not rich…”

Michel leaned forward eagerly. “She’s not in horses, she’s not rich, she isn’t into cocaine, she isn’t anorexic. Her parents are nice, ordinary people who treat me like a real person, not some fucking movie star. She’s smart and ambitious, she’s studying hotel management, and she’s the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.” He sat back with an air of satisfied achievement.

This conversation is so much fun, Polo thought. Nothing but good news. What could he say? I am so proud of your values I could burst? Way too sappy. A joke instead, then. “She sounds much too normal to be attracted to a professional horseman. What does she see in you?”

Michel grinned, smacked his knees, stood up and stretched. “Can we get out of this dungeon? It’s kind of creepy.”

Polo bunged up the hole and replaced the mirror. He grabbed his chaps from the bed and threw them back over his shoulder. They started to walk around the circle.
But wait, what about
–

As if reading his mind, Michel stopped, touched Polo’s arm, and murmured shyly, “There’s one more thing you should know about Claude…”

“The tests you mentioned on the phone,” Polo said apprehensively.

Michel blushed, but his eyes danced with excitement. “She’s pregnant.”

Polo took a hit to his gut.
What are you talking about? You can’t have a kid. You’re a kid yourself.
Except that Michel was 24 years old. Why did he keep thinking of him as ‘the boy’ and ‘the kid’?
Say something, stop staring at him as if he just announced he has AIDS.

“And you’re…okay with that…”

“
Okay
? I can hardly sleep at night, thinking about how great it’s going to be. Except,” Michel added soberly, “we’re a little nervous. She’s been bleeding a bit, so she went for an ultrasound…I feel like such a shit not to have been there with her.” He chewed at his lower lip. “That’s why I have to tell
papa
. I can’t let her go through this alone anymore.”

Polo nodded approvingly. He hadn’t yet absorbed Michel’s news fully, but one thing he knew without having to think about it was that it didn’t matter whether you were happy or scared shitless. If your girl was in the club, whether you were going to try and talk her into an abortion or see the thing through, you didn’t let her deal with it by herself.

He said, “You’re doing the right thing. So…is that the last lead ball…or is there something else?” Because Michel looked a little relieved, but there was still a cloud, still tension in his face and body.

Michel seemed to struggle with his thoughts a moment. He looked down the corridor, Polo too. They saw Jocelyne working vigorously on Robin’s Song with currycomb and brush. She was giving him the de luxe grooming package, and the saddle was still propped against the stall door. They had time. Michel touched Polo’s arm and signaled the outer door. Polo dropped his chaps on a hay bale, they left the barn, and started walking around the parking lot.

And as they walked, Michel talked. And talked. Soon their footfalls joined cadence, taking on the rhythm of his words, and as they strode up and down the lot, absorbed in their subject and oblivious to the outside world, they might have appeared to an imaginative observer, the two smoothly muscled athletic bodies, the same height, the dark head and the light, in their similarly graceful, loose–limbed gait, like brother acolytes in the cloisters of some equine–worshipping religious order.

“…and Polo, what’s really weird is that, as horrible as it is, these killings for the insurance, it wasn’t what finished it for me. I hated myself, yeah, for not saying anything, but until the last one, breaking the horse’s leg, which was just off the charts for…” he broke off as his voice faltered, and Polo forced himself to say nothing, just keep walking until Michel found his composure. “Anyway, up to then, it was like an external kind of thing. I never saw the dead horses, and this…hit man…he wasn’t one of us. So it was like, yeah it’s criminal, and disgusting, but at least the horses didn’t suffer, and it didn’t have anything to do with me…or it’s what I told myself…and it worked…”

“And then it got personal?” Polo asked quietly.

“Yeah,” Michel said jerkily. His breathing was more ragged now, and Polo hoped he would get it out before he choked up completely. “The horse whose leg got broken, it belonged to Gail Panaiotti. It–it was a good horse, Polo. Grand Prix, I know he had it in him. It was just–he’s difficult, he needs–he needed–a really good rider. And she’s not great. She mainly just pays whatever it takes to get made horses. So she couldn’t ride him, but she hated to admit it. I offered to school him or at least coach her, but she was so stubborn.” He sighed deeply, and went on.

“He started to stop at the higher fences. She wasn’t finding her spots, he had no confidence in her, that was the whole problem. She was okay at Preliminary, but…anyway, after she got eliminated for stopping in one of the classes, at a vertical coming off the water jump, I saw her going to her trailer and coming out again, and taking the horse away from the groom.

“I followed her. She took him to the warm up ring, and she had her groom put the vertical up high. Then she rode him like a maniac back and forth over that jump maybe twenty times. And he didn’t just jump, Polo–he flew over them. And yet he was dying, he was so tired. So I knew there had to be something…and finally I made her stop and I looked at her spurs and…”

Michel suddenly clapped the heels of his hands over his eyes, and barked a short convulsive sob. “Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, dragging an arm across his eyes and sniffing. Polo’s arm was halfway around Michel’s back before he realized it. Just before he made contact he managed to yank it back. Then he jammed his hands into his pockets so he wouldn’t touch the boy. One kind word, one pat on the head, and Michel would dissolve. He had to be left alone, or it wouldn’t happen.

“Electric,” Polo murmured bleakly.

Been there, seen that–the shock spurs, the rapping, the raking over the nailed practice bars, the BB guns blasting on their rumps when they wouldn’t jump over water–
cristi
, how I hated those fuckers. No wonder Morrie lost his taste for the sport when I started riding elite. That was when all this shit started to go down.

“Yeah.” Michel took a deep breath, and another. Polo waited. “Polo, I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff on the circuit. It’s been hard to accept, because, you know, growing up here, you know my father can be tough, I can too, but no horse in this barn ever got treated anything but fair, you know that”–

“
Cela va sans dire
, Michel.
I could never have been friends with anyone who abused horses.”

Michel nodded gratefully, then went on, “And that’s why Gail decided to have him whacked. Because I told her if she ever competed on him again, I’d turn her in to the Association, and she’d be off the circuit. At least for that year. So that’s when she must have decided to…but there was a colic exclusion, so”–

“So now you figure this horse’s death is your fault.”

“Well, it is,” Michel said with sad finality. “And it’s the end for me.”

The day was still humid, and the sun was intense. Polo was suddenly conscious of sweat trickling down his spine. He was also aware of a rolling inner turbulence, as memories he’d thought shoveled under forever crowded and jostled for his mind’s attention. The combination of heat and dampness–like today–and Michel’s guilt. That was why.

The really, really bad memory took the lead, was mounting in him, hot and fast as lava. It wanted out, and he knew its telling was long overdue. Telling would do himself no credit, would never bring absolution, but it might help Michel to know he was not alone in his torment. So this was the time, and he couldn’t think of anyone better placed to understand than Michel, even if empathy was out of the question.

“Michel, let’s sit in the shade a minute.” A grassy bank dotted with wild flowers and flat rocks bounded the parking lot at the far end, and they sat down on adjoining rocks under a maple tree.

“I’ve never told anyone about this before.” Polo felt very calm and detached as he began, and at first the narrative flowed smoothly and coherently.

“Michel, when I was about your age I went out with a rider from Virginia for a while. Andrea was mega–rich, just like yours. I wasn’t serious about her, but she was hung up on me. I was her flavour of the month, I guess, because I was at the top those years. Her family was into horses in a big way. She invited me to spend some time at her place after the Washington show. I’d heard about it–the guys called it ‘the Other White House’–I was curious, and it was close by, so what the hell. Nice rest for my horses before the long drive home, if nothing else.

“The house, the barn, the setting, it was–like Hollywood–it was something else.” Polo shook his head at the memory of the manicured lawns, the undulating pastures, the English gardens, the sprawling neo–classical mansion. “I was–I dunno, kind of dazzled.” Polo grabbed a fistful of long grass, opened his hand between his knees and watched the blades scatter to the ground. Michel watched his own fingers pluck petals off a daisy, listening carefully.

“There were servants who did everything for you. They made the bed, they tidied up your clothes, they brought fresh flowers to your room, cold drinks, whatever you wanted.” He smiled, remembering. “It was wild. I felt like the guy in that story, where the two kids are switched at birth, and it was like I only thought I came from St. Henri, and then I found out I was this prince.

“Anyway, after a day or two, I’m feeling no pain, the food is great, she’s sneaking into my bedroom every night, her parents are treating me like I’m visiting royalty because, after all, I was such a fucking
winner
in those days, right…?”

He paused, squinting out and across the paddocks toward the Jacobson house. He plucked another handful of grass, let it scatter. “So I’m riding every day, hacking out my show horses just to keep them loose, and she’s letting me try out all these beauties”–Polo sensed impatience in Michel–“I’m getting there. Hold on.

“And then on the third day I’m handing off my horse to the groom to put away, and from behind the barn I hear hooves going like crazy and horse noises I don’t like–I had bad vibes right away. So I go out back, and there she is, Andrea, and she’s got her tacked–up horse on the
longe
and she’s driving him at a full gallop, but you can see the horse is crazy tired, I don’t know how long she’s been at it, he’s black and foamy with sweat all over his body, his eyes are rolling, he’s labouring, can hardly breathe, and she’s whipping him on…”

Michel lifted his eyes to meet Polo’s. They were dark with anger and suspense, and his nostrils flared. “Did you grab the whip and break it over her head?”

Polo swallowed hard. He had been wrong about the Claude business. This was certainly going to be by far the toughest thing.

“Actually Michel, I didn’t do a goddam thing. I was kind of–frozen in place. I wanted to do something, but I waited a second too long, which gave me time to think. Bad mistake. Because what I thought was, first of all, it was her house, her barn, her horse”–