by Lex Lander
No inspiration was provided by the sights from the cockpit of Seaspray. The azure seas, the wave tops just high enough to curl into little crescents of foam that sparkled in the sun like diamond tiaras, were stimulating but that was all. The even bluer skies and the procession of cumulus leeching to the foothills of the Pyrenees, north of Barcelona, were far too commonplace to merit more than a casual glance. As I went about and laid a course for my return to Sitges, I reflected how readily one adapts to a benign climate after years of hostile winters (Canada) and endless days of drizzle (UK).
All very agreeable, my lotus eater lifestyle. Hard-earned, certainly, and the million bucks that Mr Carl Heider was shelling out would be the most hard-earned to date. Not only that, if I were to screw up it was likely to be used for my funeral expenses.
Back in port, a little after noon, I plunged into my daily workout: push-ups, sit-ups, ab crunching, a hundred lifts with a pair of 5kg dumbbells. I performed this ritual on the saloon roof. Passersby, usually other boaties, gave me encouragement.
‘Don’t rupture anything vital,’ was this morning’s contribution from Andrew Hawksley, a very British bank manager from Slough, as he cycled past with today’s Daily Telegraph under his arm. His motor cruiser was parked a couple of berths from Seaspray, and we enjoyed the occasional beer together while he gave me advice on stock market movements, and I gave him tips on how to kill people and get away with it.
Not really.
My flight to Heathrow was leaving at 6.20pm from Le Prat. I would set off from Sitges at four by taxi, and expected to make it to the airport inside thirty minutes. Onward from Heathrow tomorrow afternoon to Las Vegas by Virgin Atlantic. Jeff Heider’s wife – correction, widow – lived in Las Vegas, so I would be conveniently placed to interview her, provided she was home. It would make sense to check.
Using the land line number from the dossier provided by Carl Heider, I made the call on my principal cell phone. It was programmed to read CALLER UNKNOWN at the receiving end.
It rang about six times before a recorded message cut in. An impersonal voice that could have been Maura Heider’s but probably wasn’t, invited me to identify myself and leave a number where I could be contacted.
‘Hello, Mrs Heider,’ I said, pitching it warm and friendly. ‘My name’s Freeman. I’m an investigator and I’ve been hired by your late husband’s brother to look into his murder, with a view to succeeding where the police have failed.’
I concluded by asking her to call me on my cell phone. I reeled off the number, including the international prefix for Spain.
Job done, I went to pack. I was making provision for a month away, which meant a large suitcase to go as hold baggage, an overnight bag to accompany me, and a shoulder bag for my iPad and small stuff. No weaponry. Gone are the days when you could smuggle a handgun, even in pieces, on an aircraft. Alfredo rolled up as I was hauling my bags on deck, and I gave him instructions concerning care of the boat. Not that he needed them, being used to my frequent absences.
‘How long you go, Señor André?’ he enquired, fiddling with the stern mooring rope.
‘A month, no more.’
‘Pues, buen viaje,’ he said. Pleasant journey.
The taxi was pulling into the parking lot, about a hundred metres away. I bade Alfredo hasta luego and hauled my bags down the jetty.
The Widow Heider returned my call while I was sitting at a bar in Terminal 1 at Le Prat. It was quiet in my vicinity, and reception was as clear as if she were standing next to me.
‘Mr Freeman?’ she said for openers. I was right about the recorded message not being hers.
‘Himself,’ I said. ‘Is that Mrs Heider?’
‘Ms Beck. I use my maiden name now.’
She had a pleasant, lilting voice, slightly nasal as if she had a cold. I couldn’t place the origins of her accent. New England or thereabouts.
‘Thanks for calling back, Ms Beck. I mentioned what it’s about, didn’t I?’ She didn’t confirm or deny it, so I ploughed on. ‘I was hoping we could meet. It would be helpful to get some background information first hand.’
Silence still ruled. The bartender whisked away my empty beer glass. I signalled him to bring a refill.
‘Are you still there?’
‘I’m here. I’m just mulling over your request. The idea of reopening the ...er, incident isn’t very appealing. It’s well into the past, and my life since then has changed for the better.’
The nuances were those of an educated woman. Subconsciously I evicted “broad” from my vocabulary as an appropriate description of Ms Beck. The bit about her life having changed for the better was suggestive of a new beau. Good luck to her, if so. After years as a punch bag for Jeff Heider, she deserved a break.
‘Believe me, I understand. But it’s an unsolved murder, and Carl and your stepson have hired me to solve it. You’re my logical first port of call.’
A soft sigh wafted across the Atlantic air waves.
‘As you wish. When would you like to come here?’
‘If it’s all the same to you, I’ll call you later this week. I’m in Europe as we speak, and I won’t get to Las Vegas until the day after tomorrow.’
‘That’ll be fine. Call me when you’re here.’
‘Thanks very ...’ I began, but I was addressing a dead line.
I tapped the cut-off bar and pocketed the cell phone. I made inroads into my second beer of the afternoon. The conversation had been short and inconclusive. Jefferson Heider, deceased, was last year’s news as far as Maura Beck was concerned. Not that it mattered. I just needed the interview for my manufactured report to Carl Heider. It wasn’t as if I expected anything useful or useable to come out of it. I already knew everything that was anything.
I entered the USA at Las Vegas Macarran Airport. As always, I travelled on my Canadian passport in the name of Jack Henley, an identity that was interchangeable with André Warner.
The air was warm. From the airport I travelled by taxi up the Strip, where night is as day, heading for my hotel, the Renaissance on Paradise Road. The streets were packed with humanity. Everybody looked as if they were happy to be in this city, whose sole purpose is to relieve you of the contents of your bank account.
The cab driver was black, All-American and all mouth.
‘Hey, man, I dig yo accent. Where yo from?’
‘Lots of places.’
‘Yo from Canada?’ He pronounced it Canay-deea.
‘No. Uzbekistan’
Even that only shut him up for as long as it took him to draw his next breath. In the gloom of the back seat of the taxi, while he chatted and I grunted, I extracted my Kindle eReader from my shoulder bag and exchanged the Henley passport that occupied a hidden compartment in the Kindle sleeve, for the newly-minted but prematurely aged Freeman one. From now on, I was James Freeman, US citizen. The photo was of me, but with a crew cut and a moustache. Still recognizably me; the differences wouldn’t bar me from entry. But if ever my cover was blown and I found myself on the run, the me as I was today would wear a pair of glasses and with the other differences would bear little resemblance to the me in the photo.
My only previous visit to Vegas had been for the Jeff Heider contract. That stay had been on the short side, just over a week, which had left little opportunity for sightseeing. For this trip I was booked for seven nights at the Renaissance Hotel. My agenda was thin so maybe I would get to know Sin City more intimately. Apart from my meeting with Maura Beck I had no specific rendezvous, no other witnesses to question. Still no solution to my problem, come to that.
The lobby of the Renaissance was full of exposed brick, circular black furnishings, and people. The woman on the front desk was about my own age but better preserved with glittering teeth, spoiled only by pronounced fangs. She was civil, helpful, and called me ‘Sir’.
The Renaissance has fifteen floors and my room was on the thirteenth. I never stayed on the top floor in hotels. You can get cornered on top floors. The
view from my window was north over a street named Silver Drive and a parking lot. Palm trees were dotted here and there, to soften the effect of so much concrete. None of it was of any interest to me. I had been in the air for sixteen hours, minus two at Philadelphia airport, and I was shagged out. It was about 1pm in Madrid, 4am here in the Pacific Time Zone. Bed was the only answer.
It was sometime after eight next morning when I awoke, firing on most cylinders and ravenous. I breakfasted in my room, followed by an hour in the gym, followed by a two mile jog along Paradise Road. To my right the monorail overhead railway ran down the centre of the divided highway, to my left uninspiring hotels, motels, condos, a filling station, bungalows, all low rise. Paradise Road was not the Strip. The traffic was just as bad though.
The sky was pale, the sun hazy, the temperature in the high sixties, about average for the last day of October in these here parts. The air smelled a little strange – carbon monoxide blending with something indefinable, the smell of the desert perhaps, or of a hundred thousand slot machines suffering from burn out. In my running shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, I was cool enough. Sidewalk joggers were a rarity, and ordinary pedestrians even more so, owing to the propensity of Americans to drive any distance greater than next door, and sometimes even then.
The stilts of the monorail curved away to the right as I passed a McDonald’s. Coming towards me was a woman of a certain age in a yellow jogging suit. Her style was more of a controlled stagger than a jog. As we drew closer to each other, she pulled up and raised a hand, palm towards me, like a cop stopping traffic.
I slowed, wary as always of the unexpected.
‘Aren’t you – ?’ she began.
‘No,’ I said, accelerating round her. ‘I’m not.’
‘Hey!’ she yelled in my wake. ‘Fuck you, Bozo!’
Being mistaken for a movie star could be considered flattering. As the star she had been about to name was now about eighty and looking it, I wasn’t so sure. In any case, I wasn’t that much like him: just the colour of my hair and eyes. Maybe the shape of my nose, moderately convex.
My next port of call was a cell phone provider. With my national ID and social security cards, it was a breeze, and by noon I was the proud owner of a Samsung flip top. Not a very smart phone. But then I didn’t want to navigate a drive to Alaska, or watch a thousand movies, or play poker on line. Just make and receive untraceable calls, and the occasional text message.
On a concrete bench in the grounds of the Guardian Angel Cathedral, I used my shiny new piece of technology to test the NYC number on my J F INVESTIGATIONS business card. My call elicited the correct response from the automated answering service. Mr Freeman was out of town, and could be reached on his cell phone blah blah.
Satisfied that that part of my phoney professional ID was functional, I tried to connect with Maura Beck. All I got for my pains was an impersonal message, same as before. Maybe she worked during the day. I left a message of my own, asked her to call me at the hotel after 5pm.
To kill a few hours I went for a saunter on the Strip, ogling the Disneyland-influenced architecture like any regular tourist: the Flamingo, the Mirage, Treasure Island’s open book, Wynns, the soulless column of Circus Circus. In daylight, the buildings were somehow diminished, as if only when blazing light from top to bottom did they come alive. As I ambled, the sky cleared, the sun came into its own, and the temperature rose ten degrees.
Las Vegas’ tallest, the Stratosphere Tower with its squeezed middle, reared into sight as I continued north, beginning to flag now as jet lag caught up with me. As I came alongside the Tower I hailed a cruising Yellow Checker cab, and it whisked my tired body back to the Renaissance.
While I was passing the front desk, a clerk summoned me.
‘Message for you, Mr Freeman,’ he said, and took a neat white envelope from a pigeonhole behind the desk.
‘Thanks.’ I slipped him a buck, and opened the envelope as I headed for the elevator.
Ms Beck will see you at her office at the Pieces of Eight hotel 10.30 tomorrow. Ask for her at the front desk.
Not so much as an “if it’s convenient”. It was convenient, of course, it was why I was here, but it would be nice not to be taken for granted. Perhaps Maura Beck had grown used to being obeyed during her years as Jeff Heider’s wife.
The Pieces of Eight was a hotel-casino combo, like many of the hotels in the city. I counted ten storeys, which rates as low rise in these parts, with a glamorous entrance consisting of gigantic hollowed out gold coins in a row. Pieces of eight, I supposed. Eight of them. Maybe it was somebody’s lucky number. Located at the less fashionable south end of the Strip, across from the Luxor, it was even so an impressive hunk of architecture.
The front desk was the chest-high kind. Just visible over the top was yet another smartly attired young woman with a plastic smile. On the wall behind her was a round digital clock-cum-calendar showing 10:29am and today’s date, November 1.
The young woman welcomed me to The Pieces of Eight.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ever the gentleman. ‘I have an appointment with Ms Beck.’
A little frown marred her otherwise unlined forehead.
‘Ms Beck?’ Then the smile returned, brighter and whiter than before. ‘You mean Mrs Heider.’
I rested my elbows on the desk top. ‘Aren’t they one and the same?’
They were, it transpired. With that little confusion behind us, I was directed to elevator no.1, cautioned not to use any of the others as only no.1 actually went to the top. Top floor, exclusive elevator. Maura Beck/Heider was beginning to sound like a biggish fish in the Las Vegas pool.
A disembodied female voice announced my arrival at the tenth. I stepped out onto a plush white carpet that almost swallowed my feet. Four doors leading off, of which the nearest stood open. I took this as an invitation, and entered an ante room with desk and the usual accoutrements of a reception office, including a clone of Ms Plastic Teeth. In fact, they were so alike I pondered on the possibility that she had run up the stairs to get here ahead of me. If so, she must have been super-fit; she was breathing normally.
‘James Freeman,’ I said, ‘to see Mrs Heider or Ms Beck. Either will do.’
She wasn’t playing name games today.
‘Go right in, sir,’ she said, pointing with a pencil at another open door.
On the other side of the door, the first impression was of the view across Las Vegas. McCarran Airport was less than a mile away; to the left was the Luxor with its orange Sphinx’s head, then in ascending order towards the north, I identified the MGM Grand, the hulking Monte Carlo Resort, the slender slab of the Mandarin Oriental; Planet Hollywood, Bellagio, Flamingo, all of them iconic in their fashion. Beyond the Flamingo, the buildings melded together and diminished into the haze. All of this set against the bluest sky you ever saw. Beyond the city the great beige sweep of arid hillside that played host to Las Vegas, this nothingness bisected by the grey ribbon of Interstate 15 that linked Vegas to Salt Lake City.
The second and more lasting impression was of the view inside the office, of the back of Maura Beck standing by a water machine, filling a plastic cup.
She was wearing a royal blue straight sleeveless dress, hemmed at mid-thigh level. It set off her figure, which was lean with subtle curves. Her legs were bare and pale, which surprised me, as most Las Vegans seemed to sport all-over tans. Nicely shaped though, even with the unflattering flat soles.
When in North America or the UK I instinctively used miles, feet, and inches for measurements and distances. In Europe I used metric; it seemed the natural thing to do. The exception was height, be it a person or a building, which I always estimated in feet, no matter which part of the globe I was in.
So it was with Maura Heider. In her flats she was about five feet eight.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
She turned to face me, the cup in her right hand. She gave a small start, slopping some of the water. Recovering almost at once
, she wiped spilled water off her hand onto her dress, switched the cup to her left hand, and extended her right to be shaken. The photo hadn’t done her justice. In particular the blue eyes, which were eerily beautiful. She could have found work as a hypnotist any day. Now too I remembered the gemstone whose colour they matched – lapis-lazuli. Even if the rest of her face had been ordinary, her eyes would have made it extraordinary. The rest of her face was not ordinary. Prominent cheekbones that needed no make-up to emphasise them, cupid’s bow lips, naturally full. Her hair was longer than in the photo, and secured rather unflatteringly with a bow in the nape of her neck. That said, with her looks she could have gotten away with a crew cut.
‘Ms Beck, I presume,’ I said. ‘I’m James Freeman.’
No smile. Just a vestige of a nod. She made a vague gesture towards the other side of the office.
‘This is Nick Heider. He’s a lawyer.’
Now it was my turn to start. I hadn’t noticed the other occupant, a good-looking guy of about thirty with black hair, sitting in a lounge chair. My surprise was total, for a different reason.
‘You called your lawyer because of me?’
‘Not my personal lawyer, the company’s.’
‘Hi there,’ Nick Heider said, staying seated. He was attired in a charcoal grey, three-piece suit; his burgundy red tie was knotted with geometric precision. ‘As well as being a lawyer, I’m Carl’s son, and Vice President of Finance for Heider Promotions. I run the show when he’s away. Maura manages the casino.’ He flapped a hand at a lounge chair identical to his, with a coffee table in between. ‘Sit down, won’t you?’