Stripped

by Brian Freeman

  But after the last murder case he investigated-the case where he met Serena-his roots had been pulled up. He had been at loose ends for the last two months in Vegas, needing to work again. He had thought about getting a PI license, but he couldn’t imagine himself hiding in the desert brush, spying on cheating spouses. Then, with a spin of a slot machine wheel, a Vegas homicide detective had walked off the job with a fortune in his pocket. Suddenly, Stride was back in.

  “Any regrets?” Serena asked. “Wish you’d stayed in bed? Wish you’d stayed in Minnesota?”

  Her voice was light, but he heard a pointed question there. Every now and then, she wanted a reality check on where they were.

  “I definitely wish I’d stayed in bed,” he told her.

  He didn’t take the bait about Minnesota. He knew it was too early to tell about the job and Las Vegas and what that meant for their future. They hadn’t really talked about it, because they both liked things the way they were and didn’t want to screw it up.

  “What’s the case?” Serena asked.

  Stride told her about the body and heard her whistle long and loud when he said the victim was MJ Lane.

  “How come everyone knows about this guy but me?” he asked.

  “If you read my Us magazine in the bathroom now and then, you’d know these things,” Serena said.

  Stride sighed. “I’ve already been told that I’m culturally deprived.” He added, “We’re heading over to MJ’s condo now.”

  “You got a partner with you?”

  “Amanda Gillen,” Stride said.

  “Amanda?” Serena retorted.

  Her voice was loud enough to be heard throughout the truck. Stride glanced at Amanda. She stared discreetly at the lights of the city as he drove, but he recognized a smirk twitching on the corner of her lips.

  “Nice girl,” Stride added.

  Amanda laughed out loud.

  “Uh, Jonny, you do know…?” Serena asked.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I hope this means I have nothing to worry about,” Serena told him.

  “Never assume.” He added, “You’re up early, too. What’s going on?”

  “A cop spotted an abandoned car in the parking lot at the Meadows Mall. I’m picking up Cordy. The uni thinks it may be the vehicle used in the hit-and-run on the boy in Summerlin last week.”

  “That’s good. You needed a break.”

  “Yeah.”

  She sounded more tired than excited. Stride understood. Child killers were the toughest cases to handle, and the death of the boy, Peter Hale, had hit Serena hard.

  “I should go,” Stride told her. They were nearing MJ’s condominium.

  “I know. Me, too.”

  Neither one of them hung up. Even the silence of air on their phones felt like a lifeline, connecting them.

  “Hey, Jonny?” Serena added. “Watch your back. This isn’t Duluth.”

  Stride pulled off Paradise Road in front of the Charlcombe Towers condominium complex. He leaned forward and stared upward through the windshield. The old and the new, he thought.

  The three forty-story white towers, gleaming and new, reached for the night sky on the west side of Paradise. The balconies of multimillion-dollar apartments crept up the building walls like a stairway to heaven. A scant block away, crumbling and dark, was a vestige of old Las Vegas-one of the last of the 1960s-era casinos. A princess of its time grown tired and haggard. Still standing, but not for long. Stride had already learned that old didn’t last long in this town.

  Amanda pointed at the derelict casino, ready for implosion. “Boni Fisso owns it. He’s launching a big new project called the Orient over there, once they detonate the old place. An Asian-themed resort. It’s supposed to cost almost two billion dollars.”

  “Why Asia?” Stride asked.

  “Lots of whales in Japan and Singapore, I guess. And I think they figure China’s the next capitalist up-and-comer. The outside’s going to look like a Ming Dynasty palace.”

  “Too bad MJ won’t be around to enjoy the view,” Stride said.

  He pulled up to the security gate and waved at the guards. Their faces were stony and suspicious, studying Stride’s dusty truck.

  “Should have brought the Spyder,” Amanda told him.

  It took them almost forty-five minutes to talk their way past the guards and into MJ Lane’s one-bedroom condominium, which was midway up the northern tower on the twenty-eighth floor. Inside, Stride snapped on gloves but lingered in the wood-floored foyer. He wrinkled his nose. “Pot,” he said.

  He wandered down two steps into the living room, which featured a giant stone fountain in the center, two rich leather sofas, and an entertainment system that took up most of the west wall, including a seventy-two-inch high-definition television. The place was a mess, despite the tens of thousands of dollars that someone-MJ’s father?-had plowed into chrome art, a cherrywood dining room set, and chandeliers sculpted out of silver and crystal. MJ treated it like a college dorm. A skin magazine lay open on one of the sofas. Dozens of DVDs spilled onto the floor in a messy pile in front of the television. Remnants of breakfast for two-cereal and soured milk, cold coffee-littered the dining room table; the scent of a half-smoked joint hung in the stale air. He saw men’s underwear and women’s panties on the carpet near the open doorway to the master bedroom.

  “MJ had a guest,” Stride said.

  “And it wasn’t Karyn Westermark,” Amanda added.

  Stride’s forehead furrowed. “How do you know?”

  “No way Karyn wears underwear.”

  Stride chuckled. He studied the unmarked DVDs on the floor and pushed the play button on the digital recorder. An image jumped onto the oversized television screen. Guttural moaning surrounded them from hidden speakers throughout the condo. Stride saw a man spread-eagled in bed, with a naked girl straddling him, her conical breasts dangling over his mouth. He thought for a moment that he was watching a porn film, but this was a home movie. The man on the bed was MJ. He didn’t recognize the woman, but her wiry chestnut hair didn’t match the straight-arrow blond locks they had seen in the security footage of Karyn Westermark at the Oasis.

  “Some guys don’t learn,” Amanda said. “You’d think winding up on the Internet in your own nudie flick would make you a little more careful about this kind of thing.”

  Stride stopped the playback. He noticed a phone and an answering machine on the glass skirt surrounding the gurgling fountain. The red light was flashing. When Stride tapped the button, an electronic voice announced that MJ had three messages.

  “MJ, it’s Rex Terrell. I thought we could trade some secrets. I showed you mine, how about you show me yours? Give me a call, okay?”

  Terrell left a number, which Stride jotted down in his notebook. The call had come in just after noon on Saturday.

  “You know who Rex Terrell is?” Stride asked.

  Amanda shook her head.

  The next message was from Karyn Westermark, short and sweet.

  “It’s Karyn. I’m in town, baby. Seven o’clock at Olives. See you then. Love ya.”

  “So we know they had dinner at Bellagio,” Amanda said. “I wonder if Karyn knows about the brunette in MJ’s latest porno movie.”

  The last message began with several seconds of silence. The tape crackled. Stride heard movements in the background, a man clearing his throat, strains of classical music. Finally, the words came, in a growly voice split by halting, uncomfortable pauses. Gaps where he didn’t know what to say. There was raw pain in his tone.

  “MJ, it’s Walker… please don’t stop listening, don’t delete the message. We need to talk… You’re wrong…”

  Stride hit the pause button. “Walker?” he asked.

  Amanda nodded. “Walker Lane. The producer. MJ’s father.”

  “What you’ve heard isn’t true, and I wish there was something I could say to make you believe that…”

  The last pause went on longer than the others, and Str
ide thought the message was over. Then the voice continued, softer, pleading.

  “I wish you’d come home. I wish to God you didn’t live there… I want to tell you the truth, face to face… I’m going to try your cell phone. If we haven’t talked when you get this, call me.”

  Walker Lane hung up the phone. The time stamp on the recording was midnight, right around the time that MJ and Karyn were entering her suite at the Oasis. An hour before someone followed MJ into the street and shot him.

  Stride looked around the room again. He saw a few framed photos of MJ with various celebrities, mostly women. There was a photo from years ago of a very young MJ with a woman Stride guessed was his mother, but nothing of his father. Not a sign anywhere that Walker existed, except for the smell of money.

  “I wonder if he called MJ’s cell phone. That might explain why Karyn left early and why MJ was upset.”

  “That’s not the voice of a man who paid to have his son murdered,” Amanda said.

  “No. But I want to know what they were arguing about.”

  They continued searching the condo. Stride expected to find more drugs, and he did: a carved wooden box inside a well-stocked liquor cabinet that contained a large bag of marijuana, a glassine envelope with several ounces of cocaine, and two prescription bottles with what appeared to be OxyContin. The labels had been scratched off.

  “He looks like a high-end user, but not a seller,” Amanda said.

  Stride nodded. He began loading and sealing the drugs in an evidence bag.

  “What’s with the Maserati?” Stride asked, catching Amanda’s eye. “You didn’t buy that on a cop’s salary.”

  Amanda shrugged. “I had to sue the city last year. Discrimination. Harassment. You wouldn’t believe the shit I put up with.”

  “I think I would,” Stride said.

  “Anyway, the city settled with me. The court made the brass say the right things, and most of the obvious crap went away. But they don’t want anything to do with me.”

  “Cops are all men, Amanda. Even the women.”

  “Don’t I know it,” she said. “The settlement was pretty good. Low seven figures. Nobody ever dreamed I’d stick it out. I’m sure they thought I’d take the money and go away, but the hell with that. I bought the Maserati, put the rest of the cash in the bank, and kept on working. It drives them crazy.”

  Stride laughed. He liked her in-your-face attitude. It reminded him of Maggie, his longtime partner in Duluth.

  “It’s been hard on my boyfriend, though,” Amanda added. “I feel worse for him than for myself. We hooked up about six months after I made the change, and that was four years ago. And no, he didn’t know, not at first. And yes, it was a shock. But he’s come around.”

  “I really wasn’t going to ask,” Stride told her.

  “Come on, you were curious. Everyone is. That’s okay.”

  “Guilty,” he acknowledged.

  “You’re lucky, you know,” Amanda said. “With Serena. She’s beautiful.”

  “Yes, she is,” Stride said.

  Serena’s beauty had knocked him over when he first saw her. Long black hair that his fingers couldn’t help but glide through. Emerald green eyes that danced and teased him. Suntanned skin and just a few dry lines creasing her face that told him she was past thirty and cruising toward forty. A tall, athletic body that she worked like hell to keep trim.

  Amanda saw it in his eyes. “You love her, don’t you?”

  “I sure do,” he said.

  “I love Bobby, too,” Amanda said. “He takes a lot of shit, and he sticks around.”

  “That’s worth a lot.” Stride suddenly stopped dead and rolled his eyes. “You picked the name, didn’t you? A-man-da.”

  Amanda grinned slyly. “Most people never get the joke.”

  “Let’s go in the bedroom,” Stride said. He added quickly, “To search.”

  The lush carpet in MJ’s bedroom was black, and so was the furniture, all shining in black lacquer. The left-side wall was built with floor-to-ceiling windows, with double doors in the middle, and Stride could see city lights through the wooden vertical blinds. MJ’s California king was on the opposite wall. A checkerboard comforter, black and red, was half off the bed, and the burgundy sheets were a mess. Stride noticed a condom wrapper on the floor.

  “Check the bathroom, okay?” he said.

  Amanda disappeared through a doorway next to the bed. Stride turned his attention to the desk on the far side of the room, which was a war zone of unopened mail, bank statements, men’s magazines, and receipts from restaurants and hotels. He sat down and began sifting through the piles.

  “More pills,” Amanda announced when she returned. “Lots of Ecstasy. And take your pick-Levitra, Cialis, and Viagra. He could have played tennis with his cock.”

  Stride winced.

  “Anything there?” Amanda asked.

  “I haven’t found a date book or a PalmPilot. He had upwards of ten million in his bank accounts, probably courtesy of Walker. He gambled a lot, all over town and in the Caribbean, too.”

  “Stalkers? Hate mail? Lawsuits?”

  “Not so far.”

  “So what’s our motive?” she asked. “Why would anyone want to kill this guy?”

  Stride rubbed his eyes, feeling the lack of sleep catch up with him. “It doesn’t look like he owed money to anybody. We might have a love triangle going on between Karyn and the mystery brunette in the video, but I think everyone cats around on everyone else in this crowd. Doesn’t seem worth killing over, not with a hired gun. He did drugs, but what else is new? He was having an argument with his dad. That’s as much as we’ve got, and it ain’t much.”

  “Unless we’ve got a psycho on our hands.”

  Stride got up from the desk. He thought about the killer on the videotape, leaving his fingerprint for them. “Yeah, that’s something we have to consider.”

  He saw a newspaper folded on the nightstand next to MJ’s unmade bed and picked it up. The pages were already yellowing, and he saw when he checked the date that it was more than three months old. He read the headline:

  IMPLOSION TO MAKE WAY FOR “ORIENT”

  There were photographs covering most of the front page. Boni Fisso shaking hands with Governor Mike Durand over an architectural model of the lavish new resort. The showroom of the old casino in its heyday, forty years ago, with near-nude dancing girls onstage. A billowing dust cloud from one of the earlier casinos that had been leveled in a few seconds with the efficiency of a bomb.

  “Have you ever seen an implosion?” Stride asked Amanda.

  “Yeah, I worked security when they brought down the last tower of the Desert Inn,” she said. “It’s awesome. An implosion always means a party around here.”

  Stride nodded. He saw a back issue of LV, the city’s monthly magazine, lying under the newspaper. There was a corner photo of the same old casino on its cover and a teaser headline beside it:

  ONE CASINO’S DIRTY SECRET

  Amanda spied over his shoulder. “He lives upstairs, you know, if you want to say hi.”

  “Who?”

  “Boni Fisso. He owns this whole complex, like the hotel across the street. I’m pretty sure his penthouse is in this tower.”

  Stride knew Boni Fisso’s reputation. He was one of a dying breed of Las Vegas entrepreneurs, a holdover from the mobbed-up days before the city went corporate. Fisso had to be over eighty, but he still looked suave and sharp in the newspaper photos, an old man who hadn’t slowed down. He was short, barely five-foot-six, but built like a fire hydrant that you could kick and kick and never dent.

  “What’s your take on Boni?” Stride asked. “Is his money clean?”

  “That’s hard to believe, but no one’s ever proved otherwise,” Amanda said. “Gaming Control has had him in their sights for years, but they never had the goods to put him in the Black Book. Either that, or Boni has juice with some politician on the inside. Either way, he’s been able to play the game. Pr
etend he’s like Steve Wynn, just an honest developer and philanthropist.”

  “Does Boni have a connection to MJ?”

  Amanda shrugged. “Not that I know of. Why?”

  Stride gestured at the magazine and newspaper. “It looks like MJ was very interested in the new resort.”

  “Well, his balcony looks right out on the implosion site. He was going to watch the Orient rise from the ashes for the next couple of years if someone hadn’t ventilated his skull.”

  Stride nodded. He knew Amanda was right. It was nothing significant. Even so, something niggled at him. Little things did that to him-colorless pieces of the puzzle that didn’t fit. MJ had too many fish to fry in this city. Drugs. Parties. Women. Why keep a months-old magazine by his bed?

  What was it about the Orient project that was so important to him? A two-billion-dollar development, underwritten by a man whom everyone suspected of mob ties. That was certainly worth killing over, if someone got in your way-but Stride didn’t see how a playboy like MJ could be a threat to a man like Boni Fisso.

  Stride wandered across the bedroom to the double-width glass doors that led to the balcony. He unlocked them and stepped outside. A breeze made the vertical blinds slap and twist. There was no furniture outside, just a long stretch of iron railing and a view toward the north end of the Strip. He grabbed the railing. His heart fluttered a little in his chest at the height. He imagined MJ standing here, high on cocaine, wondering if he could sprout wings and fly. The young are stupid, Stride thought. He realized that MJ probably never came out here, probably never even opened the door. He had Karyn Westermark naked in his bed, and probably countless other women, and that was a better view than all the lights of the Strip combined.

  Stride stayed outside anyway. He wondered, just for the briefest moment, if he could fly. It was cool and beautiful up here, late September weather, when the worst of the heat was over and the nights had a taste of fall. To the east, there was a ruddy glow where the sun inched up to dawn above the mountains, but the valley was still wrapped in night.