“I can ask around,” said Gavin politely. “Maybe I can find something out for you. Although usually, they ask you to mail in a tape first.”
Ian nodded sagely. “Exactly. We’ll have to create an audition tape.”
I groaned. “You two aren’t seriously considering this, are you?”
“What’re you talking about?” said Nanna. “It’s a great idea!”
I looked at Wes, who was sitting opposite me, but he just smiled and shrugged. “I’m happy if Gwenda’s happy. If she wants to enter a dance competition with Ian, she should. You only live once.”
My dad and Glenn were deep in conversation about some football team, and my mother was glaring at Nanna for hogging Gavin’s conversation time. Only Karma seemed slightly concerned. So I said to her, “What’s this bad vibe of yours about?”
She shook her head. “It’s not clear. But there’s something bad associated with this dance show. I think it leads to something bad, but I can’t see for sure.”
Nanna turned to Gavin again. “Ian and I’ll mail in a tape. Could you ask around and see what they’re looking for? I’ve already got a pretty good idea, since I watch the show all the time, but I wouldn’t mind some insider information.”
My mother said sharply, “I’m sure Gavin didn’t come to lunch to talk about work.”
“I don’t mind,” Gavin said politely. “I like my work, and it seems like Nanna and Ian really want to enter the show.”
I looked at him suspiciously. He seemed like a perfectly nice guy on the surface, but the men my mother invites home for meals have always turned out to be strange, slimy specimens of human nature.
“Why don’t I change spots with Nanna?” I suggested. “Then you two can chat about the show.”
“Don’t be rude,” said my mother sharply. She wasn’t about to let her hopes for me and Gavin fade away into oblivion, thanks to Nanna’s penchant for dance reality shows. “I’m sure you and Gavin have a lot to talk about, too.”
I sighed. I didn’t mean to be rude, but it was tiring to be set up with all these men, especially when I had a boyfriend.
“I’m looking forward to getting to know you better,” said Gavin with a smile.
Automatically, I said, “I have a boyfriend.”
My mother said, “Whom we’ve never met. I mean, if he really was your boyfriend, wouldn’t he come over for a meal?”
“He’s a cop—he’s working on an urgent case!”
“Sounds like he’s really busy,” said Gavin.
“He is.” I looked at him and smiled. He wasn’t all that bad.
“You know,” said Gavin, “I’m sure you’re like Nanna and Ian—you probably wouldn’t mind some excitement in your life, would you?”
I frowned, trying to decipher what he meant, when there it was. His hot, clammy hand grabbing my upper thigh under the dining table.
Instinctively, I grabbed his forefinger and pulled it backward.
I stopped myself before I could do any real damage. No point breaking a man’s finger just because he was a bad judge of character.
“No,” I said, smiling sweetly at him, “I don’t like excitement.”
Gavin’s face had gone all clenched up, his eyes narrowed in pain.
“Gavin,” my mother said, “are you all right?”
I let go of his finger.
Immediately, the hand disappeared from my thigh, and Gavin took a deep breath in, relaxing his muscles. “No. I mean, yes. I’m all right. I’m fine.”
He didn’t look at me for the next five minutes and focused on his food. Karma started talking to my mother about some mutual friend of theirs, and Nanna and Ian chatted some more about how to enter a dance competition.
“I’m a really good dancer,” Ian was saying. “I can do all kinds of moves.”
“I’m pretty good too,” said Nanna. “I was a real hit at the senior center dances. Everyone wanted to dance with me. Too bad for them I met Wes.”
Wes and Nanna shared a smile, and I found myself smiling at them and feeling all mushy inside.
A voice drifted over from next to me.
“So, Tiffany, do you like dancing too?”
I looked at Gavin in surprise. He was smiling, and he looked as though he’d forgotten all about the finger incident.
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“That’s too bad. I like dancing. I could’ve taken you dancing if you wanted.”
“No, thanks.”
My mother drifted out of her conversation with Karma long enough to overhear me turning down Gavin’s invite. “That’s not true,” she said. “Tiffany loves dancing. I’m sure she’d love to go dancing with you.”
Gavin smiled and put his hand on my knee.
I sighed, rolled my eyes, and pushed his hand away.
“You don’t seem to get it,” I said to him politely. “I’m really not interested.”
Nanna elbowed me from the other side. “Don’t be rude, Tiffany. Gavin’s going to help us get onto Dance Party USA.”
I looked at her in exasperation. Of course, she had no idea that Gavin liked to grab body parts under the table, but I couldn’t help rolling my eyes.
“We should all go to the Dance Party USA audition together,” said Ian enthusiastically. I shot daggers at him with my eyes, but he ignored me. “If we get in, that is.”
“I’m sure you’ll get in,” said Gavin. “It’ll be fun to go together.”
He looked at me and grinned, and I wondered what it’d take for this man to get the message. On the other hand, I was sure that the chances of Nanna and Ian getting through to even the first audition round were slim to none.
“That sounds good,” Nanna was saying. “Now we just have to practice a little and make that audition tape.”
“I can help out,” Gavin said. “I’m happy to help out.”
He looked at me, smiled and put his hand back on my knee.
I pushed it off in an instant and said, “I know Krav Maga. And my boyfriend’s a cop.”
But he continued smiling at me hopefully, refusing to take the hint.
5
Nanna and Ian kept going on about their dance audition, and after lunch we lingered over dessert and coffee. At some point, I managed to switch seats with Nanna without my mother complaining too much—Gavin said something about meeting me for a meal someday, so that seemed to please her.
When we got into the car, I turned to Ian and said, “I wish you wouldn’t be so nice to Gavin! He’s pretty awful.”
I filled Ian in on Gavin’s grabbiness as we drove toward the station, but he just shrugged.
“He’s harmless,” Ian said. “And I really do want to enter this dance thing. I need some excitement in my life. Besides, you probably won’t ever see Gavin again.”
I had to agree with that last statement, so I pushed the man out of my mind and concentrated on what questions we needed to ask about Ella’s death.
The LVMPD offices are housed in a building west of the Strip. The exterior is boring red brick, and the interior is boring white and gray. Ian and I’ve been here so often that most of the detectives know us, and since we tend not to meddle with open cases too often, they don’t mind us too much.
We headed straight to the bullpen in search of Detective Elwood. Ian had called the precinct while I’d been asleep. He’d found out that Elwood had been the detective in charge of the case and managed to get an appointment for the two of us.
Detective Elwood is a chubby, balding man with a perpetual scowl. We’ve run into him on many cases before, and while we didn’t get off on the right foot, I’d like to think that he’s got a grudging respect for us by now. That, plus we’ve been giving him cupcakes whenever we go to talk to him.
He was sitting at his desk, going through some paperwork, when Ian and I arrived. When he saw us, the first words out of his mouth were, “Did you bring any cupcakes?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Ian baked some more of those delicious hazelnut cu
pcakes, but we ate them all! They were even more delicious than those last ones we gave you.”
Elwood’s scowl deepened and his face darkened. He glanced at the mug of stale coffee sitting on his desk and said, “Those hazelnut cupcakes go really well with coffee.”
“Yes, they do,” said Ian brightly.
Elwood stared at his coffee mug glumly. He’d become addicted to Ian’s cupcakes, and he knew it. “I could just go to a bakery and buy a cupcake from them,” he muttered, almost to himself.
“You could,” I said. “But it probably wouldn’t be as good.”
Elwood sighed and looked at us. The question hung in the air, and before he could ask it, Ian said, “It’s okay, we’ll bring you some cupcakes next time we come over.”
Elwood’s lips began to twist upwards in a rare smile, and he stopped himself just in time and looked at us skeptically instead. “You’re not going to forget, are you? Or eat them all up again?”
“We’re not,” said Ian, “I promise.”
“I’m not making any promises,” I said. “Everyone knows how much I love cupcakes!”
Elwood looked at me glumly, and I felt sorry for him.
“It’s okay,” I reassured him, “I was just kidding.”
He scowled. “You’ve got a terrible sense of humor.”
“I keep telling her that,” said Ian. “But I guess she makes up for it by being a good investigator.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, “we’re here to talk about the Ella Miller case.”
Elwood sighed. “Of course you are.”
“You’re not going to give us a hard time about the info, are you?”
“Like you gave me a hard time about the cupcakes?” Elwood shook his head. “Wait here, I’ll go get the files.”
I resisted the urge to peek at Elwood’s paperwork while we waited for him.
A few minutes later, he was back, and he flipped through the file before handing it over to us.
“Ella Miller was killed near Balzar Avenue,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you two what that part of town’s like. Who in their right mind goes there all alone after nine o’clock at night? Anyway, we found the body at two a.m., and forensics put time of death at between ten and eleven at night. Shot through the stomach, three times. No witnesses. No purse or jewelry found on the body, indicating it was a mugging. We talked to the victim’s associates, but nobody had any motive to hurt her. Nothing to indicate that this was anything premeditated.”
I flipped through the file quickly and then handed it over to Ian. The file said pretty much everything that Elwood had told me, and Ella’s list of “associates” included the people that Fiona had told me about, plus her coworkers.
I said, “It says here that the autopsy found traces of calamari salad in her stomach.”
“So?” said Elwood. “Not like calamari salad is rare.”
“No. But it’s not the kind of thing you’d cook at home.”
Elwood shrugged. “Maybe she ate out, then went for a walk near Balzar. Or maybe she ordered in.”
“In which case, she’d have had leftovers in her fridge, but the file doesn’t mention any. Plus, how’d she get to that neighborhood anyway? It’s not like she could’ve walked. And the report says you talked to the cab companies, but she hadn’t taken a cab.”
Elwood rolled his eyes. “So you got me. But we talked to the neighbors, and nobody’d given her a ride or seen her getting picked up.”
“Doesn’t mean she wasn’t picked up.”
“Yeah,” Elwood admitted. “That’s the most likely explanation. Someone picked her up around dinnertime and all the neighbors were too busy with their own lives to notice.”
“So who picked her up? Nobody you interviewed said they’d given her a lift that night.”
“Maybe she met someone online,” Elwood suggested. “You know, using one of those phone apps. And the man picked her up and took her to dinner, where she had a calamari salad.”
“And then he dropped her off near Balzar Avenue?”
“Maybe they had a fight.”
I thought about Handsy Gavin. Maybe Ella’s date had gone bad and she’d left the car in a rush… but wait, why was I buying into Elwood’s theory?
Ian finished going through the file and said, “You talked to Ronan Hastings.”
“We did. And he had an alibi for that night—he was at a party with a bunch of his friends.”
“Did you ask him about the fight he’d had earlier with Ella?”
Elwood rolled his eyes. “Look, you’re a cop in Vegas, you don’t mess with rich people, okay? Because doing that just results in a call from the mayor, and then the chief has to tell you to lay off.”
Ian said, “So you didn’t really ask him about his fight with Ella?”
“Sure we did,” said Elwood. “He told us he’d been in a bad mood that day and took it out on the lawyer. Nothing personal.”
I pressed my lips together, not really believing that story. “And you followed up on his alibi?”
“Of course,” said Elwood. “Went through the list of ten friends he’d given us and called three of them at random. They all said that Ronan had been with them all night.”
I frowned. “Hmm.”
“Ronan’s got nothing to do with Ella’s death,” said Elwood. “I know he’s telling the truth, I can just tell.”
I trusted Elwood’s instincts much less than I trusted Karma’s.
Ian and I rifled through the file a little more and tried to chat with Elwood, who remained adamant that Ella’s death must’ve been a random act of violence. But the more I looked at the report, the more I felt like something was missing.
Ian and I mused about it on the short drive home.
“If someone’s murdered,” said Ian, “usually the motive’s love or money.”
“And Ella had no wealth worth killing for.”
“So, the motive must’ve been love.”
“But according to her sister, she wasn’t seeing anyone.”
“Maybe it was a secret. Maybe she was seeing someone who needed privacy. Maybe she was seeing Ronan!”
“I don’t think it’ll be that simple,” I said. “But I don’t think Ronan’s as innocent as Elwood says he is. We’d better go talk to him and see if he’s hiding something.”
6
Ronan didn’t sound all that pleased when I called and introduced myself, but he wasn’t explicitly rude either.
“I can meet you in a few hours,” he said. “But I can’t talk long.”
I assured him that our conversation wouldn’t take too long, and then Ian and I stopped back at my apartment. I called in sick at the casino; it’s not something I like to do, but I wanted to talk to Ronan as soon as possible. Thankfully, nobody at the Treasury gives me grief for my occasional sick days, and I knew that my shift would be covered by someone else.
Ian brought Snowflake over to hang out with us, but she chose to jump back on top of the fridge and watch us with curious blue eyes.
Ian said to me, “Maybe we can make some of those lemon-buttercream cupcakes we talked about before we need to go meet Ronan.”
I couldn’t help getting swept up in Ian’s enthusiasm for making the cupcakes, but I felt a twinge of guilt. Every now and then, I’d help Ian with his baking, which meant that I’d soon have the ability to make cupcakes whenever I felt like it. But I’d never learned to do actual cooking; at this rate, my diet would soon consist mostly of cupcakes.
“Maybe we should learn to make some healthy food,” I said thoughtfully. “You know, stir-fried veggies and stuff.”
Ian looked mystified. “Why?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “It seems like the adult thing to do.”
“Well, you’re always bringing leftovers from your parents’, and we order takeout a lot, and there’s always microwave meals. You can make salads and sandwiches.”
“Lots of cafes serve only salads and sandwiches,” I said, feeling a littl
e better about the whole thing. “But what if… my mother keeps saying that I need to learn to cook if I want to get married. Maybe she’s getting to me.”
Ian whipped up some eggs in a large mixing bowl and poured in some sugar. “I never thought you’d be eager to get married.”
I chewed my lip thoughtfully and wondered about my relationship with Ryan. “I like Ryan a lot,” I said as Ian added some lemon extract and melted butter to his mixture. “But I’m not sure where we’re going. I mean, we’ve never talked about long-term stuff, and he hasn’t even met my parents yet.”
“Mostly because you kept the relationship a secret from them,” Ian reminded me.
“I know,” I admitted. And then there was Stone. For a long time, I’d felt something between us, something that had exploded when finally, one day, we’d kissed. However, the next day, men in dark suits had shown up looking for him, and Stone had had to go underground. I’ve finally learned the truth about Stone’s past, and I’m waiting for things to clear up—but even if they do, Stone’s always warned me that he’s not a relationship person. And now that I know about his past, I don’t blame him.
“Ryan seems like a great guy,” Ian said. “Really nice. And he seems to want to get more serious with you.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. “I’m just not sure myself.” Because of Stone, I thought to myself. Who I hadn’t even seen in ages.
Ian had added some more ingredients to his mixture while we’d talked, and now it had taken on the thick, yummy-looking consistency of cupcake batter.
“What about you?” I said as Ian went to work on the frosting. “Are you really taking a break from women?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I just don’t know how to make progress. Vegas isn’t a great place to look for people who want real relationships.”
I sighed. “Yeah. It’s easier to stick to loving cupcakes and kittens.”
Ronan was staying in the Presidential Suite at the Mauritian Casino, an upscale place on the north end of the Strip. We had to take a special elevator up that stopped in front of the entrance to his suite, and when we knocked, Ronan opened the door himself.
Dancing With Danger in Las Vegas Page 3