Cash Out

by Marshall Thornton

  “Did you know someone was in that room?” Louis asked me.

  I shook my head.

  Nothing happened for a few minutes, until the maid, or a maid—it was impossible to see faces in the video—came out of 20105 and came down the hall to 20104a. Using a pass key, she let herself in. That happened at 10:46.

  “Is that the same room?” Marc asked.

  “Not really,” Louis said. “Remember I told you they sometimes divide the suites into single rooms or one-bedroom suites. That’s probably divided into two rooms.”

  “Yes, I remember that. But how do we know they’ve done it?”

  “We don’t,” I said, watching as I came out of my room, 20101 and walked down to the elevator. The timecode read 10:48. Less than a minute later, I got into the elevator.

  “You know, the room service waiter has been in that room for a—”

  I was shushed. Sonny had just come out of his room, which was all the way down the hall next to the bridal suite, 20108. When he reached my mother’s suite, he knocked on the door. Someone opened the door and he entered. Again, the angle—and the poor video quality—prevented us from seeing who it was.

  We waited and watched. Nothing happened. 10:50 the hallway was empty. At 10:53 it was still empty. At 10:56, empty. I imagined where I was. Downstairs in the valet area, standing with Marc and Louis. I tried to remember how long I was there, what we said—

  “This is about when he fell,” Louis said. The timecode read 10:59. We waited. The hallway was eerily still. No one came running out of my mother’s suite. Nothing happened at all. 11:02. 11:04. 11:07.

  At 11:09 the elevator opened and Aunt Katie came out, her caftan flowing, a large beach bag thrown over her shoulder. She went down the hall to the suite she shared with my mother. She walked in.

  “Well,” said Louis. “It’s not your Aunt Katie. She didn’t do it.”

  “And your mother’s not in the suite, unless your Aunt Katie is lying.”

  “Someone has to be in there,” I said. “I mean, Sonny didn’t jump, did he?”

  “No, someone let him into the room,” Leon pointed out.

  At 11:14, I got off the elevator and went immediately to my mother’s suite. I knocked and Aunt Katie let me in. Again, the hallway was empty.

  Then, at 11:17 the room service waiter finally came out. His shirt had come out of his pants. He tucked it in, then walked down the hallway. A moment later, the maid came out the same door pushing her cart. She went in the opposite direction, entering room 20108.

  “They just had sex,” Mickey said. “The waiter is fucking the maid.”

  “Someone let him in, though,” I pointed out. “I mean, he was in there a long time, but there’s someone else…”

  “A three-way!” Mickey yelled gleefully. “A room service waiter, a maid and a guest. I think I saw that in a porno once.”

  “Unless…” I said.

  “Unless what?” Louis asked.

  “I mean, unless there’s a way from one suite to the next. Without going into the hallway.”

  “You could climb around the balcony,” Marc pointed out. “I mean, I wouldn’t, and you probably wouldn’t, but someone might.”

  “Someone good at not falling off,” Louis pointed out.

  “Now wait a minute,” Leon said. “No one climbed from balcony to balcony minutes after Sonny fell. Someone would have seen them. There was still a crowd out there staring up at the penthouses an hour later. I had to fight my way through to find a cab to the Liberace Museum.”

  “So, you think whoever pushed Sonny off the balcony was still in the room when Aunt Katie got back, still there when I arrived, and still there when Officer Benton showed up?”

  “It’s possible.”

  We watched as Officer Benton stood in the doorway, and then Aunt Katie and I stepped into the hallway at her instruction. Then, after a bit of conversation, Aunt Katie went back into the suite briefly. When she returned to the hallway we went to the elevator. It was 11:32.

  “Vents,” Mickey said. “They coulda crawled through the vents.”

  “Naw,” Todd said. “My brother-in-law’s an air conditioning guy. My girlfriend and I went to see Die Hard with him and his kids. Man, he ruined the whole freaking movie telling us all about how ventilation don’t work that way and how you’d cut the crap out of yourself if it did. Trust me, nobody crawled through any air conditioning vents. Even Bruce Willis couldn’t do it in real life.”

  “Shit, really?”

  “Really, man.”

  The tape had continued, though nothing happened. Then, at 11:48, a maid came out of 20104 with a cart in front of her, the room where the three-way might or might not have happened.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s the second maid to come out of there. There’s no guest in that room. I mean, maybe that was a three-way or maybe they killed Sonny.”

  “But why would the staff kill Sonny?” Louis asked.

  “Bad tipper?” Marc guessed.

  “We’re VIPs, we’re not supposed to tip.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Maybe it was a contract hit.”

  “But we still don’t know how,” I pointed out. “How did they do it? How did they get into the suite?”

  “Oh my God,” Marc said, pointing to the screen. “She just went into our room!”

  17

  Once we calmed Marc down—which was left mostly to me and Leon since Louis seemed unconcerned—I asked, “Could you go back to around eight-thirty that morning?”

  “Not that morning, yesterday morning,” Louis said. That stopped me. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since Sonny died. It felt so much longer.

  “Why do you want to do that? It’s hours before Sonny—” Leon said.

  “I want to see my mother leave her suite.”

  “Oh, yes, that makes sense. You’re right. We should look through everything from eight-thirty on,” Louis said. “Who knows what we’ll find?”

  Todd ran the machines backward by hitting some keys on his master keyboard. Then he ran them forward until he found 8:28 a.m.

  “You want me to keep fast-forwarding, right?” he asked. And, yes, we did. We didn’t want to stand there in the dark for two and a half hours. He ran the tape forward to 8:43, then he slowed down as my mother and Aunt Katie came out of their suite. Aunt Katie wearing a caftan over her bathing suit and carrying a large beach-style tote. My mother dressed in the same velour jogging suit I’d seen her in when she returned to the hotel. This confirmed her alibi. She was heading out for the Flamingo.

  Arm in arm, the two women walked to the elevator. It was clear from the way they were chatting that they were happy, enjoying each other, and were not expecting the events of the day.

  “You can move forward,” I said.

  Shortly after my mother and Aunt Katie got into the elevator, a maid rolled her cart out of the service area. She walked down the hallway looking at rooms. She knocked on the door of suite 20103. After a moment, the door opened. The maid spoke to someone, then turned and took a couple of towels off the cart.

  “That’s me she’s speaking to,” Marc said. “She was really nice. Oh God! Is she one of the killers?”

  Louis leaned in and said, “Better keep going.”

  Todd fast-forwarded the tape. The maid continued to work the floor. She walked by my suite, I remembered that I’d put out a DO NOT DISTURB sign. She didn’t stop. She did stop at my mother and Aunt Katie’s suite. She knocked, waited, and then entered the suite, leaving the door open and her cart in the hallway.

  “Well there,” Louis said. “That’s the maid going into the suite. She could have waited there until Sonny showed up.”

  Then, at about 9:25, Reba came out of her room and walked down to the elevator. As always, she was dressed in black. She carried a small bag with her.

  “That’s Reba,” I said. “According to her mother, she was waiting for Sonny in a room she’d taken on another floor. She must be on the way there.” />
  “At nine-thirty in the morning?” Marc said. I don’t know why he said that. No one had mentioned the time when we thought the maid and the waiter were having a three-way with a hotel guest.

  “Some people like sex in the morning,” Louis said.

  “Some people like sex all day long,” Mickey added with a dirty smirk.

  “But—if Sonny was meeting her after he spoke to Angie, that would be almost two hours. Why was she leaving so early?” Marc asked.

  “Good point,” Louis conceded.

  Reba got onto the elevator and the doors closed. We fast-forwarded again and then, at 9:39, Cotton came out of the bridal suite and walked down the hall to my mother’s room. The maid was still inside cleaning it. He knocked on the open door and then appeared to be talking with her.

  “That confirms that he didn’t send your mother the invitation to the Flamingo,” Louis said. “He’s obviously expecting her to be in her room.”

  “And she wouldn’t have said anything about what she was doing, since she assumed he already knew,” I said.

  A moment later, Cotton turned around and returned to the bridal suite. Then, almost as soon as Cotton’s door shut, Becky came out of her room and down the hallway to the elevator.

  “Her mother said they were together when Sonny fell,” I pointed out. “She must be going to her mother’s room.”

  “You have tapes for other floors, don’t you?” Louis asked. “If we knew what floor her mother is on, we could verify that she went—”

  “I’m sorry, man,” Todd said. “We only have cameras on the penthouse floor.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Most hotels barely have their casinos covered. The only reason this floor has surveillance is because of high rollers.”

  And mobsters, I thought. It didn’t seem like a good idea to actually mention that though. It did, however, make sense. If the police came to arrest them, they’d have a record. If someone came to whack them—er, take care of business—their survivors would know who. Well, maybe not who, the video quality was pretty poor.

  Four minutes passed after Becky left the floor. Then, another maid came out of the service room pushing a cart. She went directly toward my mother’s suite. Weaving between the two carts, she entered the suite. We waited. Finally, the first maid came out. She was still arguing with the second one, hands gesticulating wildly.

  “What do you think they’re arguing about?” Louis asked.

  “A man,” Mickey said. “That’s all women ever argue about.”

  I doubted that was true but didn’t say so. I was sure women argued about all sorts of things. The first maid pushed her cart to the service room and left the floor.

  “I’d say they argued over territory,” Louis said. “Look.”

  The second maid pushed her cart into my mother’s room and shut the door behind her. That was odd.

  “They aren’t supposed to do that, are they?”

  “What?” Louis asked.

  “Push their carts into the room. Shut the door.”

  “No, they’re not supposed to,” Marc agreed. “So what’s that about?”

  “She’s one of the killers and she just got rid of the real maid,” Leon said.

  “So you think they’re professional killers? That it was a hit?”

  “Isn’t that obvious?”

  I glanced at the time code in the lower right of the screen. It was 9:58. Twenty-some minutes before we’d begun watching earlier. The hallway remained quiet. Quiet. Quiet. Todd kept fast-forwarding. Then it was 10:33, and Marc and Louis were leaving their room again.

  “Well, that’s it,” Louis said.

  “It was very interesting,” Marc said.

  “Could we go back to after Sonny fell?” I asked.

  “What are you looking for?” Louis asked.

  “I want to see what time Becky and Reba came back to their rooms.”

  “We stopped around eleven-fifty,” Todd said. “Start there?”

  “That would be great, thanks.”

  In less than a minute we were back to where we’d stopped. Aunt Katie and I were led to the elevator and taken downstairs. Then the maid came out again.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “She went into my mom’s suite, didn’t she? And now she and her cart are coming out of the suite next door. How did they do that?”

  The maid went to the service room and disappeared, presumably going down in the elevator. Nothing happened. Todd sped the tape forward. At 12:05, Brace Ryland got off the elevator and walked down to the bridal suite. Though I couldn’t see, presumably Cotton opened the door to the suite and after a brief exchange allowed him to come inside.

  Nothing happened for a couple of minutes. Then the elevator opened and a distraught looking Becky ran down the hallway to the bridal suite. Frantically, she pounded on the door.

  “She obviously knows her husband is dead,” Todd said.

  “Who told her, though?” I asked. “Detective Ryland is in the bridal suite with her father. Was she with her mother the whole time? It’s almost two and a half hours.”

  “Does it matter?” Louis asked. “The one thing we do know is that she wasn’t in your mother’s suite.”

  “True. But as nearly as we can tell no one else was.”

  The door to the bridal suite opened and Becky fell inside, presumably into her father’s arms.

  “That feels like a performance,” Leon said.

  “Yeah,” Louis agreed. “She didn’t seem upset when we saw her. Angry. Annoyed. Inconvenienced. But not upset. Not like this.”

  “Is that it, man?” Todd asked. “Have you seen everything you need?”

  We looked at one another.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think we have.”

  “Should we wake Angie?” Marc asked. “We have to tell her what we saw.”

  “Why don’t we wait,” I said.

  Since her suite was now a crime scene, I had the feeling she was sleeping with Cotton. I mean, he was her fiancé. Waking her would be awkward and embarrassing. And, I wasn’t sure we wanted to tell Cotton what we’d seen. I mean, it looked like a professional hit. Right? That was the only thing that made sense.

  But who ordered it? The Outfit? Linda Cotton? Becky?

  “We can’t just go back to bed,” Marc said. “I’ll never sleep.”

  “There is someone we could talk to,” Louis said.

  “The night manager?” Marc guessed.

  “That’s what I was thinking. What do you think, Noah?”

  “That’s not a bad idea.”

  We walked to the front of the casino and up to the registration desk. After we asked for Teo, it barely took any time at all for him to get there. I suspected his office was somewhere behind the registration desk.

  As soon as he saw us, he said, “I heard about the tragedy. I’m so sorry, of course. Is there anything I can do to make your party more comfortable?”

  “We have a few questions.”

  “Oh, yes.” He looked us up and down and then said, “I believe it’s called The Fruit Loop. I know that’s offensive, but I didn’t make it up. It’s off Paradise Road. There are several bars and a bookstore.”

  I was confused. “Wait, it’s four in the morning. You can’t think—”

  “Las Vegas is a twenty-four-hour town.”

  “Oh my God,” I couldn’t help saying.

  “That’s good to know,” Louis said. “But we have other questions.”

  “Oh, all right. Ask me anything, I’m well versed in what Las Vegas has to offer.”

  “Would it be difficult to steal a maid’s uniform?” I asked.

  “Why on earth would you—” He stopped himself. Clearing his throat, he continued, “I could get you one. What size would you like?”

  “No, no, God no!”

  “We want to know if a guest could obtain a maid’s uniform without asking you,” Louis explained.

  “Absolutely not. We have a linens room in the employee area.
Guests would never even see that.”

  “Could uniforms be purchased from employees?” Marc asked.

  He shook his head. “We have very simple inventory controls. Maids and waiters come in and get a uniform, then return it at the end of their shifts. Most hotels make their employees purchase the uniform themselves and bring it home for cleaning, but we’ve always thought that was unfair.”

  “Can the uniforms be purchased elsewhere?” I asked.

  “They are custom made for Lucky Days. The fabric is a very particular green. Why are you asking these questions? Has someone on the staff been rude to you?”

  It really wasn’t a good idea to answer his question. We certainly couldn’t tell him that we’d seen the security tapes, Mickey and Todd might get into trouble. And in a mob casino trouble could be very dangerous.

  “The service elevator, is that open to the public?” I asked.

  “No, of course not. There are EMPLOYEE ONLY signs everywhere,” he said.

  “But you could ignore those,” Louis pointed out.

  “We take a dim view of our guests doing such things,” he said. I wondered for a moment how dangerous a dim view actually was.

  “Is there a way to get between suites?” I asked.

  “The hallway.”

  “Other than the hallway,” Louis said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Without going into the hallway or crawling over the balcony, is there a way to get from one suite to another?” Louis elaborated.

  “Some of the rooms are connected to allow flexibility. If the suite is unreserved, then we have the option of splitting it—”

  “But the suites themselves,” I said. “They’re not connected, are they?”

  “No, of course not. Really, I could be so much more helpful if you’d tell me what this is all about.”

  He sounded on the verge of refusing to answer any more questions, so I said, “Actually, you’ve been very helpful. We appreciate it so much.”

  “Yes, so helpful,” Marc said.

  “Thank you,” Louis added.