Stripped

by Brian Freeman

  Serena looked up, surprised. “I didn’t know Boni had a daughter.”

  Humphrey nodded. “Claire Belfort. She took her mother’s name. Claire and Boni had a big falling-out years ago. She’s a folk singer at one of the joints on the Boulder Strip.”

  “Why would she help us?” Stride asked.

  Humphrey shrugged. “She might not. Probably won’t. But if anyone can get you to Boni with a single phone call, it’s Claire.”

  EIGHTEEN

  He parked the Lexus on the lake road in front of an estate where the windows were dark. Whoever owned the mansion was away in the city for the evening, or maybe cruising through the calm waters of the Greek islands. That was what the people in Lake Las Vegas did. They could afford to go anywhere and do anything.

  It didn’t really matter if someone was inside. If they looked out and saw a Lexus parked in front of their house, it wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. Just one of the neighbors taking a nighttime stroll by the water. After all, strangers couldn’t come here. You couldn’t get in without passing through the security gate on the south shore.

  The old woman had played her part well. Smiling at the guard, laughing as if nothing was wrong, as if no one was behind her in the backseat, with a gun. Rolling up the window and driving through the gate, as she did most days. The only telltale sign, which he could see from behind her, was the frantic quivering of her fingers on the steering wheel. Not from Parkinson’s, as anyone might expect from an old woman. This was terror.

  He had spent the late afternoon with her in her house, watching her fear grow, watching the sun set. She was tied to a chair and gagged, eyes wide, following his movements as he went back and forth to the window. When it was night, he was finally ready. He knew she was waiting for him to kill her, and he wondered if her heart finally stopped racing when he simply left the house, took her car, and drove away.

  He didn’t drive far. Just a few blocks down to the lake, where the largest of the estates hugged the water. He had a commanding view from here of the big house dominating the street.

  Waiting.

  He wanted a cigarette but didn’t dare open the smoked windows of the car. Better to let it look deserted, if anyone drove by. He sat, almost motionless, watching the large estate, observing the lights that went on and off from room to room, seeing occasional silhouettes moving behind the curtains. He used a miniature pair of binoculars to see inside and confirm that both of them were still home. Just the two of them.

  Every now and then, his eyes flicked across to the lake. The lights of the resorts twinkled like a fairyland. That was what they peddled here. Illusion,

  He cleared his mind. He had done this many times, and he wasn’t nervous, but the mental lapse with the boy still worried him. He had allowed himself to get angry, to let his emotions spill over. It hadn’t been a problem with the others. He didn’t want it to be a problem again. Not tonight. Not with the rest in the days to come.

  He saw motion in the rearview mirror of the car. Headlights. A long black limousine glided by the Lexus, continuing down the lakeside street and pulling into the driveway of the estate he was watching. The driver didn’t turn the engine off, or switch off the headlights, or toot his horn-it was simply the time for him to be there, and with celebrity assignments, you were always there at the right time.

  The door of the estate opened.

  He raised his binoculars and watched the big man leave the big house and proceed to the rear door of the big limousine. Everything about the man was larger than life. The driver had jumped out and was waiting there, tipping his hat, smiling.

  The car door closed. The front door closed. He watched the limo back out of the driveway and reverse course along the lake road, passing the Lexus as it went.

  He gave it another ten minutes, sitting in silence and darkness. The street remained deserted. Finally, he turned on the car, leaving the headlights off, and rolled the Lexus quietly down the remaining stretch of pavement until he was in front of the large estate. He put the car in park and set the brake but left the engine running. This wouldn’t take long. He was always surprised to hear about the mistakes that other professionals sometimes made, such as turning the car off and finding, when they got back from the scene, that the car wouldn’t start again. A little thing like that could mean twenty-five years to life.

  He studied the mirrors one last time and got out of the car. The SIG-Sauer was almost invisible in his right hand.

  As he walked up the driveway, he felt a glimmer of hesitation, which he tried to quell. Then he understood-he knew her. In almost every other case, he had faced a stranger, whose story he didn’t know, but he had been with her and liked her. She seemed lost, a victim, a little like himself. He came up to the oversized front door, rich with wood and brass, and thought how small she seemed in these giant surroundings.

  It didn’t matter in the end. Everyone was a victim sooner or later. That was what the voice in his head said, the one that had always been there, guiding him.

  Amira.

  He rang the doorbell. A few seconds passed. He grew uncomfortable, bathed in the porch light. His gun was sheltered behind his right thigh.

  She labored to open the door, and when she did, she smiled at him, recognizing him. There wasn’t any fear in her face.

  “Oh, hi,” she said in her girlish voice. Pretty. Vulnerable. “Didn’t you get the message?”

  Those were her last words. When she saw the gun, she only had an instant to become confused and then afraid, and then it was over. You couldn’t afford to hesitate when you had any doubts. Ten seconds later, he was back in the Lexus, with the windows open to disperse the acrid smell of smoke, driving back toward the hills that led into the city.

  NINETEEN

  Serena ordered a bottle of sparkling water and a champagne glass. She found a table for two near the stage and tipped the waiter twenty dollars to remove the other chair.

  She hated being in a casino by herself, where she had to fend off drunken passes all night and watch drinks being poured that reminded her of what she couldn’t have. But Stride had suggested that Boni’s daughter, Claire, might respond better to her, one on one in the casual setting of the club, than to the two of them together.

  The Boulder Strip casinos mostly attracted locals, people in the know, who assumed their odds here were better away from Las Vegas Boulevard (not likely) and that they could be higher rollers with more perks on a smaller stake out here (true). Serena knew that Cordy was a fixture at Sam’s Town, the largest of the Boulder casinos, a few miles to the north. He poured thousands of dollars into their greedy hands each year, but they treated him like a king in return.

  The joint where Claire sang, called the Limelight, wasn’t in the same league as its bigger cousins like Sam’s Town, Arizona Charlie’s, or Boulder Station, and didn’t include an attached hotel. It was on the deserted southern end of the highway, where there were still acres of dirty, open land, interspersed with RV parks, adult superstores, and pawnshops. A few housing developments had begun creeping in at the edges, as the suburbs expanded their hold on the desert.

  The Limelight had been recently renovated over the skeleton of a long-shuttered roadside casino, a beer-and-nickels joint where fights used to break out nightly and down-on-their-lucks gambled away their last few dollars. No one was sorry to see it go. The Limelight wasn’t upscale, but it was one of the few venues in town that featured live country music for the price of a couple of drinks. She and Stride had dropped in a few times. It was barely more than a bar, with a matchbox gaming room for tables and slots and a claustrophobic showroom with green walls, a long bar with video poker machines, and about fifty circular tables squeezed without much breathing room in front of a narrow stage.

  She sipped her water and watched the tables filling up quickly. Claire Belfort obviously had a reputation. Anyone could fill the club on Saturday night, but it was Tuesday, and that meant the crowd was coming to see her. Serena had been ready to assume t
hat Boni’s money had paved the way for his daughter’s career, but now she wasn’t so sure. The Limelight was a dive, but the people who came to the shows knew music.

  At nine o’clock, Claire’s band took their places. It was a typical country arrangement, with fiddle, bass, drums, and steel. The lights went down in the showroom, and overhead cans lit the stage. The band opened with a keening, melancholy tune, and Serena recognized it immediately as one of her favorite songs: “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” a bitter elegy about the plight of Kentucky coal miners. Serena had heard Patty Loveless sing it, and Patty was a tough act to follow.

  Then, from offstage, she heard a smoky voice wrapping itself around the lyrics and weaving all the pain in the world into the music. Claire’s voice could have stood up to the demands of the blues. It was strong and filled with emotion, but with a nuance in her expression that Serena had only heard in the most mature country singers. She sounded a little like Allison Moorer, with a voice so sorrowful and hypnotic that Serena found it arousing to listen to, and irresistible, like one of the Sirens.

  Claire walked into the light from the corner of the stage. She kept singing, as applause erupted and then turned into a hush as people listened to the song. She had long, strawberry blond hair, with wavy ends that swished around her shoulders. Her face was angular, with hard edges and dimples in her cheeks, and a small birthmark in the hollow of one dimple that made her face both imperfect and attractive. She had piercing, intelligent blue eyes. She wore an untucked pink silk shirt, with its top three buttons undone, black pants that clung to her slim legs, and razor-thin stiletto heels. Light glinted on her gold hoop earrings.

  She came to the very front of the stage, directly above Serena, singing a poignant story about a grandfather in the nineteenth century who went back into the coal mines to feed his family, only to die there like so many others. The music was haunting. Serena found herself staring up at Claire on the stage, enraptured. Their eyes met, and a strange, electric sensation passed between them. Serena passed it off as her imagination, but it felt real and intense.

  When the song ended, with Claire whispering the last few lines over and over like a ghost, Serena found herself on her feet, applauding. She saw the flush in Claire’s face and the way she thrived on the energy of the crowd.

  Claire moved on to another country ballad and followed it with a rockabilly foot-stomper, then a medley of bluegrass covers. All of them were sad songs, with lyrics about loss and surrender and death, the kind of song that would ring false with a lesser singer. Claire brought them to life, made them real and sorrowful. In every tragedy she sang about, she found an inner longing that Serena could relate to and remember.

  Her eyes kept coming back to Serena. Speaking to her. Teasing her. This wasn’t Serena’s imagination. When they looked at each other, Claire’s lips would crease into a small smile, not of humor or irony but of kinship. It was almost as if Claire were singing to her. Or that was how it felt.

  Serena found herself being seduced.

  It was a sensation from long ago that she hadn’t felt for years. She wasn’t drinking anything but water, but she felt drunk anyway. The music and smoke made her light-headed. Claire’s voice felt like soft hands on her body, and Serena felt naked and exposed.

  It was electrifying.

  An hour later, Claire opened her dressing room door with the same dark smile. Her skin glowed with sweat from her performance. Her eyes, seeing Serena, were bright and curious.

  “I’m Serena Dial,” Serena told her. “I’m a homicide investigator with Metro. I’d like to talk with you.”

  Most people folded and became putty hearing what she did. They started spilling years-old secrets. Claire just arched an eyebrow to show her surprise and opened the door a little wider, so that Serena could squeeze past her.

  The dressing room was small and dreary. Yellowing linoleum stretched across the floor. The ceiling was made up of water-stained foam panels, and aluminum pie pans on the floor caught occasional drips that plinked like music. There was a sleeper sofa on the right and a card table with several chairs around it. Hangers holding Claire’s costumes dangled from a clothes rack on wheels. She had a refrigerator, a sink, and a bathroom at the rear.

  Claire gestured to the sofa and the card table. “Take your pick.”

  Serena sat in one of the card-table chairs.

  “Can I get you a drink?” Claire asked. When Serena shook her head, she added, “I guess it would be bad form to offer a joint to a cop.”

  Serena laughed. Claire retrieved a bottle of water from the refrigerator and slouched into one of the other chairs, her long legs stretched out, her elbow on the table. She opened the water bottle with slim, delicate fingers. “Serena Dial,” she said. “Great name.”

  “Thanks.”

  Claire leaned over and combed her hand through Serena’s black hair. “I love your hair, too. What do you use?”

  Serena told her, feeling embarrassed that it was just a cheap shampoo.

  Claire nodded and rocked back in the chair. “I guess detectives don’t talk about those kinds of things. You’re tough, right? Detectives are tough. Shouldn’t you be fat and wear a bad suit, instead of being gorgeous?”

  “This is my after-hours look,” Serena said with a smile. “During the day I’m fat and wear polyester.”

  Claire smiled. “Did you like my show?”

  “I thought you were amazing,” Serena told her honestly. “Why aren’t you in Nashville?”

  “What, this isn’t glamorous?” Claire replied. She caught one of the drips from the ceiling in her hand. “I don’t do this for the money, and here I can sing whatever I want, whenever I want. In Nashville, people would want to control me.”

  “Like your father,” Serena said.

  Claire pursed her lips. “Yes, like my father. Am I supposed to be impressed that you know about him? It’s not a secret.”

  “But you don’t advertise it.”

  “No, I don’t. He probably likes it that way, too. Is that why you’re here? To talk about Boni?”

  Serena nodded. “In part.”

  “What’s the other part?” Claire asked, taking a drink of water.

  “To tell you that you might be in danger.”

  “That’s intriguing,” Claire said. “Will you be the one to protect me?”

  “This isn’t a joke. Two people are dead.”

  Claire nodded. “I never said it was a joke. But why would anyone want to kill me? Because I’m Boni’s daughter? We may be estranged, Serena, but someone would have to be a fool to do that. I know my father, and you’re a cop, so I guess you do, too. Boni would eradicate them. Torture them. They’d wind up in a cornfield like Spilotro.”

  “I don’t think whoever is doing this cares about that.” Serena explained about the deaths of Peter Hale and MJ Lane, and the connection that had brought the detectives back to the forty-year-old death of Amira Luz. She added, “Have you ever heard of Amira?”

  “No” Claire said. “Boni never mentioned her. But I wasn’t born until later that year.”

  “How about Walker Lane?”

  “I know of him, of course, but that’s it I wouldn’t have been able to tell you he had anything to do with my father.”

  “Why are you and your father estranged?” Serena asked.

  Claire didn’t answer. She put her bottle of water between her lips and drank again. Then she took one of Serena’s hands in hers and turned it over, palm upward. Serena didn’t pull away. Claire used her middle finger to lightly trace a line down along Serena’s palm to her wrist. Claire’s finger was moist from the condensation on the bottle.

  “I can read palms, did you know that?” she said, with mischief in her voice.

  Serena played along. “What do you see?”

  “Well, we already know you’re tough.”

  “Rights”

  “You’re a cop, so I’m going to hedge my bets on your life line. Your love line is broken, I’m sorr
y to say.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Definitely.”

  “I can also see that you had a passionate affair with another woman when you were young.”

  Serena yanked her hand away. “What the hell is this?”

  Claire raised her own hands in surrender. “Easy, okay? It was a joke.” She added, “But methinks I touched a nerve, Serena”

  Serena realized her heart was pounding. “No, you just surprised me.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it,” Claire replied smoothly. “I was reading my own palm. That’s my story. I’m gay, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Did Boni not approve?”

  “That’s part of it”

  “But only part?”

  Claire sighed. “I spent my first twenty-eight years with Boni running my life, like he runs everything around him. I’m his only child, and he wanted me to follow in his footsteps. I went to UNLV, got a master’s degree in hotel administration, all so I could take over the business whenever he was ready to hand it over. That’s what I wanted, too. He bred all his ambition into me.”

  “So what happened?” Serena asked.

  Claire’s face was emotionless. “He had to make a choice between me and the business. The business came first. Big surprise.”

  Serena guessed that she was covering something up. “What about your mother?”

  “She died giving birth to me. It’s always been just me and Boni. At least until I walked out. I decided I wanted to be my own person, not some clone of my father.”

  “You sound pretty tough, too,” Serena said.

  “I told you, I was reading my own palm. Anyway, that was more than ten years ago, and we’ve hardly spoken since. He makes overtures from time to time, but I’m on my own now. I don’t want him to buy me. It drives him crazy. I’m the only person in the world he hasn’t been able to dominate.”

  Serena felt sure that Claire must be very much like her father. Stubborn. Dominant. She imagined that they must have had titanic fights over the years. It impressed her that Claire had stood her ground. That was what she had had to do herself, along the rocky road from her mother to Deidre. People who promised to save her and then betrayed her.