Salvation Lake (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  I stifled a chuckle as I walked in the door. It had been closed for a while and had changed hands a couple of times since 2008, when a couple of gang members staged a full-scale gun battle in the lounge, but otherwise it looked just like it always had . . . dark, dank, and dirty. The kind of place where you kept expecting to see Luca Brasi and a mackerel holding court in one of the studded Naugahyde booths.

  Rebecca had commandeered a booth along the front wall. She’d changed out of her scrubs and was hiding under a silk head scarf and a pair of sunglasses the size of hubcaps. All very Melina Mercouri, 1963.

  I slid in opposite her. “You develop a sudden urge for bad Italian food?” I asked.

  “What I developed was a sudden urge for deniability,” she said in a low voice.

  “How so?”

  She reached down into her purse and pulled out a manila envelope with an FBI logo adorning the flap. She slid it across the table at me. And then leaned in close.

  “When I sent your Mrs. Townsend’s aluminum foil to IAFIS, I used Sue Orris’s name.” She waved a finger in my face. “Which, as it turns out, was one of the best ideas I ever had.”

  “How so?”

  “Before this ever got back to me, she had three private party queries and a response request from the Las Vegas PD.”

  “Sue gonna be all right with this?”

  “Sue quit last month. Married an Arab guy. Renounced her Christian past. Changed her name to something three feet long and Arabic. Moved to Qatar and is presently aboard his yacht on a world cruise. I’ve been checking her computer to make sure we didn’t have any loose ends.”

  I picked up the envelope. “They get a match?”

  “I didn’t open it.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m an officer of the court. Anybody asks me about that IAFIS request I need to be able to say I have no idea who sent it or what the response, if any, might have contained.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  She got to her feet. “Be careful,” she said.

  “Aren’t I always?”

  Her eyes rolled behind the shades. I sat and listened to the sound of her heels clicking on the floor, until the door opened and closed and all I could hear was Jimmy Roselli singing “Am I Blue?”

  The prints belonged to somebody named Tuesday Jo Hollister. Born 1980, in Elko, Nevada. Orphaned at six. Raised by her grandmother. By the time she was sixteen, she’d also been known as Betty Blew, Cherry Pie, Martha Sweet, and about a dozen other equally clever monikers. Nine prostitution busts before she graduated to extortion at twenty. Did seventeen months for being part of a ring that was rolling tourists in their hotel rooms. But it was the last notation on the page that grabbed my eye. Anyone with any information concerning her whereabouts should contact Detective Sergeant Roscoe Templeton of the Las Vegas PD. An 800 number.

  A mug shot peeped out from under the paperwork. I picked it up. She was just a kid in the picture, but already angry with the world. Same face as Theresa Calder. A little thinner, several bright blue streaks in her hair, but that same lantern jaw.

  I gathered up the paperwork, threw some money on the table, and headed home to pack.

  Sergeant Roscoe Templeton kept me cooling my heels in the squad room for forty-five minutes before inviting me into his office, so by the time I planted my butt in the battered wooden chair, I’ll admit to being a bit testy.

  “You wanna tell me where you got those fingerprints?” he said to me, before I even sat down.

  “Depends,” I said, settling in.

  “On what?”

  “On what you tell me.”

  He sat there and stared at me like he couldn’t believe I’d said that. Cops get that way. You walk around carrying a gun on one hip and the power of the state on the other and you just naturally get to thinking your shit don’t stink.

  “She wanted for anything?” I asked.

  “Depends on what you mean by wanted,” he hedged.

  “Warrants. You know . . . criminal charges. The kind of stuff they pay you for.”

  Long pause. “Not that I know of,” he said finally.

  The spring in his chair creaked and he leaned back and took me in again. Typical cop. Pouchy from all the free lunches, with a head of salt-and-pepper hair so thick it must have taken a weed whacker to cut it.

  “You used to be some kind of private eye,” he said.

  The disdainful half smile on his lips said it all.

  “A while back.”

  “So . . . what’s your interest in Tuesday Jo Hollister?”

  “Curiosity.”

  He gave me another of those long cop stares. Like he was deciding whether or not to have me fed to feral swine. A minute passed, then, inexplicably, his face began to soften. Looked to me like he realized he had nothing he could really threaten me with and figured I’d been around the block often enough to know it.

  “I always had a soft spot for that girl,” he said. “Anybody ever got dealt a bad hand in this life, it was that poor kid.”

  “How so?”

  “I mean, she was still a toddler when her parents . . .” He rolled his eyes. “A couple of the dumbest skagheads on earth . . . decide to cheat some half-ass Mexican drug dealer out of two ounces of heroin.”

  “I take it he was miffed.”

  “I’d have to look it up to get the exact figure, but, between the two of them, I believe he shot them something like forty-one times.” He was shaking his head. “Kid got sent to live with her grandma, way the hell out in the middle of nowhere by Dixie Valley.” He threw a disgusted hand in the air. “One day, when she was about fourteen, she just hitchhiked off and never went back.”

  He got to his feet and walked over to the file cabinet in the corner. I watched as he fingered his way through the contents, found the one he was looking for, and pulled it out. “I was a Clark County deputy in those days,” he said as he motored back across the floor. “Everybody drew jailor duty once or twice a week. That’s how I got to know her. I took her under my wing, you might say. Kept the bull dykes off her. Made it plain that messing with her was the same as messing with me.”

  He plopped back into his seat, flopped open the folder, and began to read.

  “She was fifteen when she first got popped for solicitation,” he began. He looked up at me. “As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Waterman, here in Las Vegas, peddling your ass is quite the cottage industry; we got more hookers than Seattle’s got seagulls.”

  “There is a rumor to that effect,” I allowed.

  “Girl always handled it with class. Never addicted to anything. No greaseball pimps. No screaming, no hollering, no makin’ life hard on the staff, just took her medicine and waited for the bail money to arrive. If it didn’t, she did her time like a trooper and then went right back out onto the street. Ain’t like she had a hell of a lot of life choices, if you catch my drift. Hardly ever been to school. Taught herself to read and write while doing time in the county lockup. All that little girl had was a body like Marilyn Monroe and an intense desire to make her miserable life a little better.” He waved a hand in the air. “No matter what it took.”

  He slid the folder at me. “You can read the rest of it for yourself. Most of it’s pretty standard fertilizer.” He kept his hand on the folder, until I looked up. “It’s what’s not in there that might get somebody killed.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The thing with the Castiglione family.”

  “What thing?”

  He took a deep breath and started talking. “She was still running the same scam, just doing it better. She’d bring some square back to a room someplace, ball his brains out, and then all of a sudden a couple more skells would break down the door, screaming the girl was underage, threaten the poor slob with rape charges, be screaming about thirty years in prison—you know, the usual brand of bull.”

  “Take him for every dime he could muster,” I filled in.

  “’Cept for one night . . .�
� Templeton began. “She workin’ with a boyfriend by then, kid namea Kerry Collins. Word gets around there’s a john over at the Golden Spur askin’ around, sayin’ he likes ’em real young. Offerin’ five grand for something all fresh and dewy.” The expression on his face told me he wasn’t comfortable talking about it.

  He went on anyway. “Make a long story short, Tuesday and the Collins kid try to run their usual number on him, but the kid’s not your usual john. He turned out to be Frank Castiglione’s nephew from Philly.”

  He could tell the name meant nothing to me. “One of the old Vegas families. Owned the Golden Spur, had a big hand in linen service, owned most of the dry cleaners in the city. That sort of thing.” He held up a hand. “Here’s the good part. From what I hear . . . the Philly kid wanted to cut holes in the girl and then fuck her in the holes.”

  My jaw must have been hanging open.

  “Yeah. I know,” Templeton went on. “Some fucking people.

  “Anyway . . . she’s bleeding all over the joint, screaming bloody murder; hotel security shows up and gets things under control; she wants the cops, but security convinces her they’ll take care of it, which is, of course, a crock of shit, ’cause the family owns the hotel and they ain’t about to be making trouble for one of their own, no matter what kind of sick motherfucker he might be.

  “But she won’t go away about it. Goes to the cops, goes to legal aid, goes to the DA, makes so goddamn much noise the cops got no choice but to charge the Philly kid with aggravated assault, which is the point where Frank Castiglione completely loses his dumbass dago mind. Frank decides he’s had enough of this big-mouth whore and her boyfriend showin’ no respect for his family. Sends one of his old-time button men out to shut them up. Guy namea Boris DelMonte. Coupla days later a pair of off-duty county mounties are out in the back of a lumberyard in Henderson, looking for lumber to build a picnic table, when they walk in on Boris nailing the Collins kid to a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood with a nail gun. I mean, they catch his big hairy ass red-handed.”

  He shrugged. “Kid’s dead. Boris’s got three prior felony convictions, which in this state means you’re spending the rest of your days up at Ely sweatin’ bullets, so Boris does the only thing he can—he rolls over on Frank Castiglione. Guess he figured he was dead either way. The off-duty cops testify, Tuesday Jo testifies. Frank, who’s about seventy-five at the time, pulls fifteen to life for conspiracy to commit murder. Worse yet, the family loses its gaming license. Probably costs them fifty million a year.”

  “And the girl?” I asked.

  Snapped his fingers. “Disappears,” he said. He pinned me with a gaze. “I only left the case open because I was hoping someday somebody’d find her remains out in the desert someplace and maybe I could put her in the ground. You know, decent-like. Until I got that IAFIS query, never even occurred to me she might be alive.” He made a rude noise with his lips. “Boris didn’t last a week in prison. Had a little accident. Tripped and fell three stories down the cellblock. Frank popped a brain aneurysm about two years later.”

  He put his hands on the desk and leaned down into my face. “I’d like to be able to tell you this was just between us, but it ain’t.”

  “It’s clean on my end,” I said.

  He choked out a short, dry laugh. “The second that IAFIS request saw the light of day, the Castiglione family knew about it. Trust me on this. This is a connected town. Everybody’s in everyone else’s pocket. They ain’t the players they used to be, but they ain’t chopped liver either. They know you’re with me right now. They know where you’re stayin’.”

  “I’m not staying anywhere,” I said.

  “Good. Keep it that way. Whenever you get done here, you get yourself back on a plane to Seattle, ’cause none of these goombas can hold a job, but they sure as hell can hold a grudge. It’s in the blood, I think.” He tapped my forearm with a thick finger. “They ain’t gonna forget about this . . . now or ever. They’re gonna be lookin’ for that girl until every one of them’s in meatball heaven. You keep that in mind.”

  I said I would.

  He picked up the file. “You can take this down to interview room three. Give it to the duty sergeant when you’re done.”

  He stood up.

  “You didn’t ask me if she was still alive,” I said.

  “That’s ’cause I don’t want to know,” he said. “I’m five months from retirement. Last thing I need is for a couple of those greaseballs to show up at my back door.”

  He walked over and opened his office door.

  I picked up the file and took the hint.

  I was halfway down the hall when he called, “Hey.”

  I stopped and walked back.

  He checked the corridor. “They’re gonna want to find out what you know, Waterman. Here . . . Seattle . . . wherever. They’re gonna come for you.”

  “I can take care of myself,” I assured him.

  Tuesday Jo’s file was pretty much as advertised. Sad. According to her parole officer at the time, she’d been in the process of moving up to the escort service level of the business when the thing with the Castiglione family hit the fan.

  When you figured in the dates, Charlie Stone in Vegas showed up the same week Tuesday developed a sudden need to leave town. A girl with her skill set would have had little trouble enrapturing a horny, half-drunk car salesman, and, truth be told, marriage not only got her out of Vegas but was a significant step up the social ladder as well.

  Things didn’t get interesting until I got to the “KNOWN ASSOCIATES” section. She’d started out working the pedophile angle. She’d dress up in pigtails and Mary Jane shoes and let some slimeball drag her back to a roach motel way off the strip, give him a little bit of action, and then, just about the time the guy figured he was gonna get his knob polished, the door would burst open and her parents would come rolling in. “Oh God, what have you done to our baby? We’re calling the police.” The whole nine yards. The same sex scam hustlers had been running for a couple thousand years now.

  It was the pair playing Mom and Dad who got my attention. Margery Tildon and Franco Rollins. A pair of lifetime low-life grifters with rap sheets from here to eternity, both of whom were presently doing short time in Arizona for grand larceny. I’d seen the faces before. Twice. In both sets of wedding pictures.

  The rest of it was pretty run of the mill. I stayed at it for an hour or so and then returned the file to the desk sergeant.

  Walking out the front door onto MLK Boulevard was like walking into a blast furnace. Musta been two hundred degrees in the shade as I picked my way through the parking lot, trying to recall the color of my rental car. If it hadn’t been for the fob that let me blow the horn, I’d probably still be out there looking for it.

  The steering wheel was so hot I had to crank the air up full blast and sit there long enough for it to cool down. How people lived in this heat was a mystery to me.

  I flipped on the GPS and plotted a route back to McCarran International Airport. Fifteen minutes later, I’d turned off Interstate 15 onto Wayne Newton Boulevard and took the big loop back under the freeway. I was humming “Danke Schoen” as I nosed into the underpass and very nearly rear-ended a green Cadillac that was stopped in the deep shade. My heart was still dancing in my chest when I felt another car tap my rear bumper.

  A glance in the mirror told me everything I needed to know. Black Lincoln Town Car. All four doors open. Four guys in bad suits jumping out. I slammed the transmission into reverse and floored it; the sounds of broken glass and fractured metal suddenly tore through the air, as angry voices rose toward the ceiling and clouds of smoke billowed from the rental car’s tires. One of the guys in the Lincoln got in the way of a slamming door and went down in a heap.

  I jammed it into drive and blasted the car in front just as my driver’s window exploded, showering me with a crystal wave of safety glass. I crimped the wheel all the way to the left and put the pedal to the metal. Something thumped int
o the headrest as the rental car shuddered for a moment, then ripped the rear bumper off the Cadillac as I tried to shoulder my way past.

  The guy behind the wheel of the Cadillac smoked the tires, crumpling the passenger door and grinding me into the concrete wall. The rental car screamed as the rough wall peeled the paint from the driver’s side. The engine was beginning to knock; smoke was roiling out from under the hood.

  Just as I shuddered to a complete stop, the passenger-side window evaporated. I lashed out with a foot as a hand reached for the door handle.

  “Goddamnit,” I heard somebody shout.

  A forearm was thrown across my throat. I tried to scream but couldn’t force anything out. I heard the metallic sound of the seat belt unlatching in the second before I was dragged from the seat. The pavement drove the air from my lungs.

  After that, it was pretty much assholes and elbows. They were on me like a pack of rats. Within thirty seconds, they’d rolled me over and bundled my hands together behind my back with a pair of plastic flex-cuffs.

  As I was lifted from the ground, somebody pulled a bag over my head. Last thing I remember seeing was the Lincoln pulling up next to me and the trunk bouncing open.

  After that, I think maybe I passed out. When I came around, took me a minute to figure out I was in the trunk of a moving car. I was lying on my side, sweating buckets and starting to cramp up. Scared shitless didn’t begin to cover it. I’d been afraid before. Lots of times, but never like this, never to the point where I was totally convinced that my moment here on earth had come and gone. That I wasn’t going to make it home from this one. The only reason I wasn’t dead already was that they wanted to ask me questions. Soon as that was over, they were going to pull my plug and then leave me out in the desert somewhere. I had no doubt about it. I was seeing vultures.