Edge of the Knife

by A. D. Miller

  “And how is it being used?”

  “Right now it’s not being used at all. When the construction’s finished, three of the parcels will be covered by shops and restaurants. We’re putting a hotel and mixed-used condo tower on the fourth.”

  “All built by Ethan Kovac?”

  “Ethan?” Salas blinked in surprise. “No, his company’s only involved with the tower.”

  “But you think he’s the right man for the job?”

  “Of course. Everyone knows what he’s done in L.A. with his properties. Koda’s the obvious pick.”

  “And you’re not saying that out of gratitude?”

  Salas’s friendly expression stiffened. “Gratitude?”

  Nyman took the notebook from his pocket. “You ran for reelection last year. According to the Ethics Commission, both Kovac and his company contributed very generously to your campaign.”

  “Yes, and we got contributions from a few hundred other people. You might not know this, Mr. Nyman, but Ethan Kovac happens to be a major supporter of progressive candidates. He’s helped a lot of people.”

  “He’s also helping the Republican candidate in the 28th State Senate district,” Nyman said. “As well as the Democratic candidate. The same district where Kovac wants to build a new resort.”

  The stiffness had extended to Salas’ jaw and neck. “You’re suggesting that my support for Merchant South was some kind of quid pro quo?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. But you also got contributions,” Nyman said, glancing at the notebook, “from Kovac’s sister, brother-in-law, and the vice president of his company. All equally generous.”

  Salas rose from her chair. Her voice was cold. “Like I said, I’m leaving early today, so I’m afraid we’ll have to continue this another time.”

  Nyman rose with her. “My guess is that Alana knew about Kovac’s contributions. My guess is she thought Merchant South was a dirty deal. And that’s probably why she came here to see you last week.”

  Salas walked to the door and held it open. “If she thought it was so terrible, why did Freed’s analysis say it was a win-win?”

  Nyman said that he didn’t know. “But then I haven’t had a chance to read the analysis.”

  “Well, I’m sure you can find it somewhere. A man in your profession shouldn’t have trouble digging up dirt.”

  Nyman, saying that she was probably right, made his way to the door. Pausing under the lintel, he turned back to her with a frown.

  “If Kovac’s company is only handling part of the development, who’s in charge of the rest?”

  “Does it really matter?”

  “I don’t know. It might.”

  She said: “Our primary contract for Merchant South went to Savannah Group. They’re the ones who brought Koda on as a partner.”

  “And where’s Savannah Group located? In L.A.?”

  Salas’s eyes, gazing into Nyman’s, were hard and black and calculating. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “they’re based in Las Vegas.”

  Chapter 17

  Nyman drove back to his apartment. In the smaller of the two bedrooms, he took a cracked leather valise down from a shelf in the closet. Into the valise he put a change of clothes, a bag of toiletries, and a mostly full bottle of Gordon’s.

  Moving into the kitchen, he added pieces of fruit from a bowl on the counter and a loaf of bread from the cupboard. Then, glancing at the door of the other bedroom, which had remained closed, he turned off the lights and went down to his car.

  Three hours later he stopped for gas in Barstow. Hot wind blew in off the creosote scrubland, rattling the sign of the service station. While the gas was pumping, he took a stack of business cards from the glovebox and found a card printed with the name Lawrence Sutter.

  He called the number on the card, talked to an answering machine, hung up, paid for the gas, and continued east on the Mojave freeway.

  * * *

  The Lady Luck Inn was a sun-bleached motel on Paradise Road, more than a mile off the Las Vegas Strip. Nyman left his car beside an empty swimming pool and went into the manager’s office, where a teenage clerk sat behind a plexiglass wall.

  “Room?”

  “For tonight, yes. And maybe a few nights after that.”

  “Smoking or non?”

  “Is there any difference?”

  “With smoking you get an ash tray.”

  “Better make it smoking, then.”

  “Thirty-five dollars.”

  Nyman paid, accepted his key, took a tourist brochure from a rack beside the door, and followed a concrete path to his room.

  Taking the bottle of Gordon’s from his valise, he poured gin into a plastic cup from the bathroom and sat down on the bed, unfolding the brochure so that its map of the Strip lay spread across the bed. Then he took the phone from his pocket and found the photo Patrick Choi had sent him.

  He drank the gin and studied the map and photo. More than once he enlarged the photo and tried to read the lettering on the signs that were blurred in the window behind Alana Bell’s smiling face. Apart from the overlapping L and V, nothing was legible.

  At a quarter to six he circled a spot on the map, showered, shaved, dressed, and left the motel.

  A twenty-minute walk brought him to Las Vegas Boulevard and the casinos of the Strip. A crowd of tourists, sweat-soaked and clutching glasses and bottles, shuffled slowly along the sidewalk, ignoring the panhandlers at their feet.

  Nyman followed the crowd north, passing New York-New York and the MGM Grand and coming eventually to Kasbah, a glittering tower of paneled glass, where he stopped and looked across the street.

  There, at the base of another casino tower, stood a collection of luxury stores. Riveted to the façade of the Luis Vuitton store was its logo: an overlapping L and V.

  He turned and went into Kasbah.

  The casino’s theme was vaguely North African. In the center of the lobby a pair of escalators rose and intertwined to form a kind of minaret, disappearing into the billows of Berber-like cloth that hung from the ceiling.

  He rode the escalator up through the billows to the mezzanine, where a glass wall looked out on the Strip. Standing at the glass and looking down on the boulevard, he was more or less level with the Vuitton store’s logo.

  “Looking for someplace to go tonight?”

  A woman in a cocktail dress had stopped beside him. One hand was on her hip; the other was holding out a piece of glossy cardboard with a picture of a martini glass on it.

  “Two-for-one happy-hour drinks at Souk,” she said, winking.

  Nyman accepted the coupon and looked at the other side, which showed a paragraph of fine print.

  “Souk is a club here?”

  The woman nodded. “On the main floor, next to the sportsbook. Maybe I’ll see you there.”

  She winked again and started to move away to the next customer, but Nyman touched her arm.

  “Sorry, but maybe you can help me. I’m looking for a friend of mine. She was here two weeks ago.”

  He showed her the picture of Alana Bell. The woman’s seductiveness went away and she took the phone in both hands, studying the picture.

  “Wow, she was standing right here, wasn’t she?”

  “This would’ve been sometime on Friday, July first,” Nyman said.

  “Sorry, I don’t recognize her. We get people coming through here all the time. Tons and tons.”

  “You were working that day?”

  She frowned, calculating. “Two Fridays ago? No, that would’ve been Jordan’s shift, I think.”

  “Is there a way I could talk to Jordan?”

  “Not really. They don’t let us give out contact info. Which makes sense, when you think about it.”

  “What about someone who could tell me if my friend had a room here?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry—that’s the hotel side of things. Good luck finding her, though. She looks nice.”

  She smiled and moved away with h
er stack of coupons.

  Nyman stayed for a time beside the glass, looking down on the Strip. The sun was edging behind the towers, leaving parts of the boulevard in shadow and bringing out the lights that shone on the Bellagio’s fountains. As he stood watching the fountains his phone rang.

  He took it from his pocket. “Hello? ... Lawrence, yes, thanks for calling back ... No, just five minutes ... Right. I have one more thing to do here, then I’ll be there ... Perfect. Thanks.”

  He rode the escalator back down to the lobby. People with luggage were lined up at the marble-topped registration desks, waiting to check in. Nyman took up his place at the end of the line. After ten or fifteen minutes a smiling clerk beckoned him forward.

  “How can I help you?”

  Taking the phone from his pocket, he laid it on the marble and said in a sheepish voice: “A colleague of mine is in town, and I just realized she left her phone in my office. I was hoping to return it.”

  “Your colleague is a guest here?”

  “I think so, yes. Her name’s Alana Bell. A-l-a-n-a.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we’re not allowed to give out information on who’s staying with us.”

  Nyman said that he didn’t need any information. “I just want to make sure I’m returning the phone to the right place. If she’s staying here, I’ll leave it with you and you can give it to her.”

  The clerk hesitated, looking from Nyman’s face to his dull gray suit and navy tie. Then she turned to her computer, tapped out something on the keyboard, and a moment later shook her head.

  “I wouldn’t advise you to leave the phone with us, sir.”

  “You’re saying she’s not listed as a guest?”

  “I’m saying our records indicate that you’d be better off looking for her somewhere else.”

  “And your records would include someone who checked in as long as two weeks ago?”

  “Yes, sir. They include everyone. Now is there anything else I can do for you?”

  Picking up the phone, Nyman thanked her for her help and moved away toward the main doors.

  He was nearly out of the building when he glanced back over his shoulder and saw the woman in the cocktail dress riding down the escalator. She’d put away her coupons and was talking to a tall, heavily built man with pale blond hair and a plastic cord wrapped around one ear.

  At a gesture from the woman, the man turned to look in Nyman’s direction. Their gazes met momentarily; then the doors swung shut and Nyman was back among the tourists on the Strip.

  Chapter 18

  Long rays of evening sunshine came in through the entrance of the Flamingo, filling the gaming floor with light. The noise of slot machines and roulette wheels followed Nyman across the floor and over to the Garden Bar, where drinkers sat on stools overlooking an imitation nature preserve.

  At the end of the bar, hunched over a video-poker screen, was a thick-bellied man in his late fifties. He drank steadily from a can of Diet Coke, tapping the screen to manipulate his animated cards. The skin of his face hung in loose folds; his eyes were partly covered by bifocals.

  Nyman sat down on the stool beside him and asked if he was having any luck.

  Without looking up from the game, Lawrence Sutter said: “Been in this town thirty years, Tom, and I never had any luck. Never worked a murder case, either.”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “For you, maybe. Want to tell me the details?”

  Nyman told him. While he listened, Sutter signaled the bartender for another Diet Coke and a bowl of pretzels. When Nyman finished, Sutter reset the game and leaned back on the stool, finally looking at him.

  “You tell Joseph any of this?”

  “Most of it.”

  “What did he think?”

  “That I was wasting my time.”

  The new soda and pretzels arrived. “As long as you’ve got a paying client,” Sutter said, “nothing’s a waste of time. But it does sound a little iffy.”

  “That’s why I called you. To fill in some of the gaps.”

  The eyes behind the bifocals became apprehensive. “Which gaps?”

  “The development company that’s based here, for one thing. Savannah Group. Anything you can tell me about them?”

  “Real estate’s not exactly my specialty, Tom.”

  “Surely you’ve heard something.”

  Sutter took another drink, then shrugged. “Little things in the paper, maybe. They started out here in the eighties or nineties—building apartments, I think. Made enough money to start doing bigger projects around the country.”

  “And their critics?”

  “What about their critics?”

  “Suppose Alana Bell came here to try to stop Savannah from going forward with Merchant South. How do you think they’d react?”

  Sutter shook his head. “Not with murder, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s no sense in it. Any firm their size is going to have plenty of critics, most of which are a lot more dangerous than some grad student. What kind of threat could she be?”

  “She was helping her professor analyze one of their developments.”

  “An analysis that came out positive, from what you just said. And anyway, you don’t kill somebody because of a bad report. Developers deal with that kind of thing all the time.”

  Nyman conceded the point. “What about Ethan Kovac, then?”

  “He’s the nightclub guy?”

  “Among other things,” Nyman said. “Savannah contracted with him to operate the hotel for Merchant South.”

  Sutter’s response was interrupted by a ringing in his pocket. Apologizing, he took out his phone and had a terse, profane conversation with someone on the other end. When he hung up his jaw was clenched and he was signaling the bartender for his check.

  “I’m going to have to run out on you, Tom. Got a new kid working surveillance that can’t go an hour without some kind of disaster.”

  Nyman said he was sorry to hear it. “Nothing too serious?”

  “Nothing more than incompetence.”

  Rising from his stool, Sutter squinted at the receipt the bartender had handed him.

  Nyman, watching him, said: “Before you go, there was one other favor I was going to ask.”

  Sutter signed the receipt. “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Joseph says you do contract work for some of the big casinos. I’m guessing they keep a database of the names of their recent guests.”

  “Some do, yeah.”

  “Which means they might be able to tell us where Alana Bell stayed while she was here.”

  Sutter put away his wallet and exhaled. “Look, Tom, the more favors I ask of these guys, the less likely they are to answer my calls.”

  “I know it’s an imposition. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

  Sutter didn’t try to hide his annoyance. Reaching again for his phone, he told Nyman to stay where he was and walked toward the nature preserve, putting the phone to his ear.

  Nyman ate a pretzel and watched the ducks swim in circles in the pools beside the Paradise Buffet. When Sutter came back he was shaking his head.

  “Talked to a guy at Crown Gaming. They’ve got no record of any Alana Bells at any of their hotels in the last month.”

  Nyman took out his notebook. “Which casinos does Crown own?”

  Sutter told him.

  Nyman wrote down the names and nodded. “Thanks. That narrows it down, at least.”

  “You’re going to try your lost-phone story at more places?”

  “As many as I can.”

  Sutter made a clicking noise with his tongue. “I see now why Joseph likes you. You got the same lust for punishment.”

  * * *

  Leaving the Flamingo, Nyman made his way across the pedestrian overpass to Caesars Palace, where he repeated his lost-phone story at the reservation desk. He did the same at the other casinos on the nort
hwest side of the Strip, then moved to the northeast side. Each time the answer was the same.

  At ten o’clock he left the Strip and tried hotels and motels on quieter streets. The desert air, still well above a hundred degrees, had the sharp dry smell of gunpowder. He walked more slowly than before and related his story with less enthusiasm.

  A few minutes before midnight, a tall, thickly bearded clerk nodded and said: “She was here, yeah, but it looks like she left about two weeks ago.”

  Nyman was at a small hotel off Desert Inn Road. The walls were covered in wallpaper made to resemble black crepe. Arranged around the lobby were chairs in white leather. The color scheme extended to the tuxedo the clerk was wearing and the flowers—black orchids and white roses—that floated in a bowl beside his computer. According to its sign, the hotel was called Tryst.

  “Checked in on Friday, July first,” the clerk said, looking at his computer, “and left at some point after that.”

  “What do you mean, at some point?”

  “She paid for three nights, but she never bothered to check out, so we’re not sure when she left.”

  “Why didn’t she check out?”

  The clerk smiled coldly. “If all you want to do is return her phone, it shouldn’t matter either way.”

  “She’s a friend of mine. I’m worried about her.”

  “Then you should’ve told her you’ve been hanging on to her phone for two weeks.”

  Nyman, after a pause, took a business card from his wallet and put it on the desk. “The woman we’re talking about was murdered two nights ago.”

  “We’re under no obligation to talk to private investigators,” the clerk said.

  “Maybe not, but it would be the decent thing to do.”

  “Assuming this card is real, and your story is real.”

  Nyman took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and put it on top of the card.

  The clerk nodded. “All right. Let’s see what we can do.”

  Chapter 19

  The pulse of dance music seeped through the crepe-covered walls as Nyman watched the clerk consult his records. Occasionally the street-door opened and people came in: women in short metallic dresses and men in untucked collared shirts. Without glancing at the registration desk, they crossed the lobby and disappeared behind a curtain of red brocade.