“I’m glad you decided to join us after all,” he said. “Have a seat. I’ll have Reisa get you something to drink.”

“This isn’t exactly a social call,” Mari said, her gaze skating across the faces of the assembled personalities and coming back to rest on Bryce. “I thought you should know-since you were a friend of his-MacDonald Townsend is dead. He killed himself sometime last night.”

Bryce’s features folded into an appropriate expression of grim disbelief. “Jesus, you’re joking.”

“My sense of humor doesn’t run that black. He’s dead.”

Ben Lucas shoved his chair back, legs scratching against the flagstone, and rose to come stand beside Bryce. Shoving his sunglasses on top of his head, he scowled at Mari as if she had been the one to pull the trigger. “Townsend is dead? Christ, what happened?”

Mari shrugged. Her hands found the pockets of her baggy jeans and slipped in, fingers knotting into tight fists. A gentle breeze swept across the terrace, blowing a chunk of hair across her face. She tossed it back with a jerk of her head. “I couldn’t say. I don’t think he left a note. I stopped by his place this morning because, well, he knew Lucy and I thought we could just talk, you know. I found him in his study.”

“That must have been terrible for you,” Bryce murmured. He closed the distance between them and hooked an arm around her shoulders, steering her toward a seat at the table where Sharon sat stonefaced, her eyes narrowed.

“Sit down.” He looked over his shoulder at the housekeeper hovering near the French doors. “Reisa, will you bring Ms. Jennings a cognac?”

“No, thanks,” Mari said. The scotch she’d consumed at Townsend’s had long since burned off. Her mind was achingly clear, and she intended to keep it that way as long as she was in this snake pit. “Just a Coke would be fine.”

Bryce frowned a little, but nodded to the woman.

“I wonder if the police have called Irene,” Lucas said to Bryce. He cut a glance at Mari, his mouth set in a tight line. “Mrs. Townsend,” he explained. Before she could acknowledge that in any way, he focused on Bryce again. “I’ll call her. It’s better if this kind of news comes from a friend.”

“Yes, of course. Use the phone in my office,” Bryce said, rubbing his chin. “In fact, I’ll come with you. I’d like to offer any help I might be able to give.”

The two disappeared into the house. Mari curbed the urge to follow them. She wasn’t sure what she had hoped to gain by breaking the news. Bryce didn’t strike her as the sort of man who would break down under the weight of an overloaded conscience, and confess. Nor was she about to confront him with any of her nebulous suspicions. That would be a good way to get dead if he turned out to be an evil overlord, a good way to make herself a powerful enemy, in any event.

A strained silence descended on the pool-party crowd. Samantha Rafferty slid down into the seat Lucas had vacated and pulled the oversize man’s shirt she wore close around her. Her dark eyes were wide with uncertainty now that Bryce had left her side. Sharon sat stiffly in the chair across from Mari, an ice sculpture in St. Tropez swimwear. Across the way, the bimbob rolled over on his chaise and flexed his buttocks.

“MacDonald Townsend,” Uma said as she picked up half a dozen slices of star fruit off her plate and crammed them all into her mouth at once. Her face pinched into a knot as she chewed, an expression that might have been concentration or a commentary on the tartness of the fruit. She wiped the juice from her over-inflated lower lip with the back of her hand. “Did he used to be on Days of Our Lives?”

Sharon rolled her eyes. The bimbob made no comment.

“Do you think she knows about the phone call?”

Bryce swiveled his chair behind his massive teak desk, elbows on the armrests. “It doesn’t make any difference. The call will be a matter of record. All anyone has to do is check Townsend’s phone bill to see that call was made. On the other hand, no one can prove I ever received the message.”

He plucked up a microcassette from the desktop and tossed it to Lucas. “Damned answering machines. Always on the blink.”

Lucas walked the cassette between his fingers. “No one would expect you to answer a call in the middle of the night. There’s no staff on at that hour to take it for you.”

“Just that damned machine,” Bryce said, practicing his frown. “I’ve been meaning to get a new one. Maybe if I had… well, I suppose I would have been too late in any case.”

“Nice.” Lucas nodded. “A small show of conscience and regret. Very believable.”

“I could have been an actor,” Bryce conceded, “but it wouldn’t have been nearly so exciting.”

There was no question he would have been too late to save Townsend even if he had made the effort. He had listened to the tape first thing that morning. After a tearful, rambling monologue of confession and accusation had come the sound of a small explosion. Townsend had left his suicide note on the answering machine and recorded his own death. Self-destruction in the age of technology.

“He never had any nerve,” Bryce said without compassion. “I detest a man with no nerve. It’s just as well he’s dead. I couldn’t have stood watching him grovel and whine much longer.”

Lucas tossed the cassette up and caught it with the same hand. “As long as he didn’t leave behind anything that might be incriminating to the rest of us.”

“He didn’t have anything on anyone. He wanted to be a player, but he had no leverage in the game.”

“He might have left behind a signed affidavit for all we know,” Lucas said, a small line of worry digging in between his brows. It was the same look he used in court to put doubt in the minds of jurors. He tossed the tape up again.

Bryce rose from his chair and snagged the cassette in one fluid move. He gave the attorney a steady look. “He didn’t.”

With a flick of the wrist he pulled the tape out of the cassette, set it ablaze with a twenty-four-carat-gold lighter, and dropped it into the Baccarat ashtray on his desk.

BRYCE PERSUADED Mari to stay. He was the only one who made any effort to do so. She declined the offer of a swimsuit. It didn’t seem wise to get half naked with this crowd. For one thing, she didn’t consider herself to be in the bikini league, bodywise. Her self-esteem was already reeling from Rafferty’s rejection. She really didn’t need to compare belly buttons with the likes of Uma Kimball or Sharon Russell. Especially Sharon, whose figure belonged in a Frederick’s of Hollywood window display.

Besides, with the possible exception of Samantha, she trusted none of them. Lucas tracked her every move with his shark eyes. Sharon’s gaze was clinically cool, like that of a scientist watching a mouse in a maze. The bimbob was on another planet and Uma was from another planet. Mari felt as if she’d fallen into an alternate reality, one that was littered with corpses and shadowed with menace.

Bryce played host with a subdued air. He chose to sit with her in the shade, Samantha to his right side and an untouched glass of scotch in front of him.

“He was distraught over Lucy’s accident,” he said, tracing patterns in the condensation on the glass. “I suppose that was part of it.”

“They were that close?” Mari asked, her eyes on his bony hands as he fondled the tumbler. The action seemed borne of impatience rather than a need to soothe some inner restlessness.

Bryce’s eyes cut to her sharply, though he didn’t move a muscle. His voice was perfectly calm. “He gave Lucy the money to buy the ranch. She didn’t tell you?”

“I suppose I didn’t really want to know. I’m not a big advocate of illicit affairs.”

Samantha shifted uncomfortably in her chair, ducking her head as if she wanted to make herself very small and disappear. She had gone in and dressed with obvious attention to detail, like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s closet. It somehow made her seem just as vulnerable as she had looked in the bathing suit. Mari thought of Will and bit her tongue for punishment.