Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 2 - Stellium in Scorpio

by Andrews

  "Could you get Ms. Loomis, please?" I asked.

  "She is very busy. I can handle this with you, if you will tell me about your"—she glanced down at the unfamiliar word—"homo-fucking so that I can help you find it."

  "Get Ms. Loomis, the hotel manager, now!" I said, my tone beyond urgent as I took the note back from her.

  In seconds, the very tired and very thin, but nattily dressed Ms. Loomis stepped out of the door behind the long marble main desk. Her black hair was just this side of lacquered and lay tightly against her head. She had the look of someone who worked for powerful and demanding bosses. I told her that, like many people vacationing in Las Vegas, I had made love in my room, and I then received a letter under the door telling me that my lovemaking was captured for posterity, and if I chose to expose them, they would expose me.

  "And who are they?" she asked.

  "I have no idea," I said, realizing for the first time how hard it is to report an act of near-criminal behavior.

  "So you have no idea what they might be afraid you would expose?"

  "None," I replied.

  "To the precise point, there were pictures taken of you in our hotel, making love, is that what you're saying, Ms. Richfield?"

  "That's what the note says." I laid it on the counter in front of her, looking for a reaction to "homo-fucking," but to Ms. Loomis's credit, she never altered her expression.

  "I want to know who wrote the note, and who took the pictures, and where those pictures are," I said calmly.

  Ms. Loomis looked me squarely in the eyes. "Ms. Richfield, there is no conceivable way that the hotel could take photos or videos of you in your room doing anything." She picked up the phone and rang security. Roy arrived. The same flat-topped, flabby Roy who had shown up to find nobody in our bathtub. I sighed when I saw him, imagining what he would think upon hearing that our lovemaking had been taped, but that there was no tape. Ms. Loomis assumed her most crisp, executive tone in addressing Roy. "Ms. Richfield believes that her privacy was violated with in-room cameras, the images from which are being held by someone in the hotel."

  Roy stared at me. "Pictures were taken of you in your room? Not possible, ma'am. No cameras in any rooms anywhere."

  I stood quietly for a moment trying to decide if I should demand they summon the police. However, I was fearful that the LVPD might find the camera topic less interesting than the same-gender-sex topic. I had no evidence, no perpetrator, not even a suspect. I decided to drop it, drawing the dialogue to a halt by summing up my current needs. "I want security to keep an eye on our room."

  They both assured me they would have someone available at all hours if we rang, and someone would make it a point to patrol the halls. As Roy spun on his heels to execute that order, Ms. Loomis looked deep into my eyes. "I will personally file a report and follow up on this matter, and I will be in touch with you on what we find. It appears to me that despite this terrible thing having happened to you, you have the makings of a lovely vacation, and we at the hotel wish you one." Ms. Loomis gave me a pleasant smile.

  The young golden woman standing at her side replicated her smile and craned her neck slightly to one side to be able to make eye contact with the person behind me, thereby dismissing me with practiced body language. I strolled back over to Callie, who was just getting off the elevator.

  "What did she say?" Callie asked.

  "Well, the 'more-in-tune-than-you-think' young woman at the front desk shouted 'homo-fucking' loudly several times because she couldn't figure out what it meant. After that, Ms. Loomis implied that I looked like I was in love," I said, running my hand up her back and resting it on the nape of her neck, sighing over how good it felt to be there. "Nobody in this hotel knows the answer to anything! The only good thing about the front desk is that I can immediately locate the person who knows nothing rather than having to flag down someone and discover they know nothing. Maybe there's no video of us," I said, tired of the stress it was causing. "Maybe Gloria the Harem Girl slid the note under our door to pay us back for our checkin altercation like a waiter who spits in your soup," I remarked. "But then how would she or anyone know that we had just made love unless they were watching or listening, which gives me the creeps." It could just be someone's attempt to make us nervous—and it’s working, I 'm nervous, I thought. Someone wants us to get the hell out of this hotel.

  "Let's not give it any more energy," Callie said, which I'd learned was the astrological equivalent of forget it, and we headed back to our room.

  Callie stretched out on the bed, thinking no doubt about what had happened. I wrapped around her, contemplating the evil done to us. It would have been quite a different matter if I were a man. A man could go downstairs, talk to another man at the front desk, and let him know that he was going to punch the lights out of any human being who had disgraced his wife by taping her in the act of making love with her husband. The hotel would bow down and no doubt apologize profusely to the injured couple. Investigations would take place. There would be a great deal of reporting back to the offended duo. Apologetic notes tucked into fruit baskets would be delivered to the room from the manager. Sex would not be the topic. Violation of privacy would be the topic. When I reported the same situation on behalf of Callie and me, I was missing the two key ingredients that could trigger that kind of solicitous response: a marriage license and a chromosomal random act. Papers and penises. Absent those two things, the world is afar more difficult place, and our blackmailer obviously knows that, I thought.

  "I can't sleep with your brain churning." Callie patted me.

  "I'm not moving or making a sound."

  "Your brain is." She propped up on her elbow. "Let me tell you something, darling. Things are what we make them. If you believe things will be difficult and embarrassing, they will be. If you believe they will go smoothly, then they will. We create our own world, Teague. Repeat out loud 'My world will go smoothly,' and then let it rest for a few hours."

  She kissed me and rolled over and went to sleep. I stared at her small, exquisite form, thinking what a positive light force she was. I whispered out loud the phrase she'd given me, wrapped around her, and went to sleep.

  Chapter Eight

  We tried to take our minds off the note we'd received, pretend it was all just a hoax, and think about each other and our vacation. Callie occasionally brought up the topic of Rose Ross, but I called a halt to the discussion. As far as I was concerned, we'd checked—the girl didn't want help. I had no desire to make us a target for someone who didn't want our assistance.

  "Someone's trying to silence her," Callie said.

  "We're done," I politely warned. "Come on, let's just focus on each other."

  I knew Callie loved to gamble, so I took her to the casino to take her mind off everything else. She took off like a happy hound, her nose to the gambling trail, and I followed her. We moved through the casino lobby, which was dotted with slot machines, into the deafening roar of the main casino, where gambling took on the intensity of an illicit sexual encounter. We continued past the walls of mechanized monsters, their crowbar-like arms stretched out imploringly, eating silver dollars, dollar bills, and hotel debit cards as fast as the players could feed them. Men yanked the metal arms down, a whirring sound ensued, the tiny window in the machine erupted with symbols of hurricanes, volcanoes, and double diamonds as players screamed out encouragement.

  "Sevens, sevens, seeevens! Sonofabitch!" a young woman yelled.

  "Come on, baby, come on, come oooooon, baby!" A man's voice was orgasmic as he coaxed his machine, grabbing her metal edges as if he could tilt her into coming up with the right pictures.

  Suddenly across the room a loud synthesized melody twanged out, a red light akin to the one atop a police car flashed above one of the machines, a siren wailed, a woman shrieked, and people stood up and threw their arms over their heads as if they were caught in a police raid.

  "That woman just won a hundred thousand dollars!" Callie said.

/>   "You're psychic, go do that!" I ordered playfully.

  "I wish it worked that way." She grinned back at me.

  We meandered into the arena of blackjack and craps tables, where the winning was decidedly more subdued. The players were more knowledgeable and, therefore, fretful, understanding the odds were not in their favor.

  The line at the blackjack tables was three deep and the craps table was loaded with high rollers, so I suggested we do a couple of spins at the roulette wheel.

  "Give me your lucky number," I told Callie as I pulled out a five dollar bill.

  "Seventy-two."

  "That's your lucky number? Nobody's lucky number is seventy-two. Personally, mine is still sixty-nine." I grinned at her. "Give me a number between one and thirty-six or zero or double zero."

  Callie laid five dollars on the table. "Twenty-eight," she said coolly as the dealer put a single five dollar chip down in front of her. The overhead lights reflected off his ring, a flat gold signet ring bearing a ferocious-looking bird with one leg poised in the air, its claws extended. I drew back. It was the ring worn by the dead man or, if not the ring, one exactly like it.

  "Place your bets," he warned, putting the wheel into motion.

  "The ring!" Callie whispered.

  "Last chance. Place your bets. Game closed." The dealer put his hand up, warding off any further placement of chips on the numbered felt.

  "Thirty-two!" he announced, deftly sliding chips off the table into a trough and paying the winners in a stack of tens.

  "Where did you get your ring?" I asked.

  "I used to perform in the Boy Review, " he said without looking up.

  I glanced at his name tag, which bore the name Dealer Brownlee. Callie put money on double zero as the wheel spun around again. Twenty-nine came up, and he raked her chip away. I pulled another twenty dollar bill out of my wallet as an older, well-dressed man came up to the table.

  "Mr. Smith, welcome back." Brownlee became downright civil. "What will it be?"

  "Ten on sixteen," Mr. Smith said, pulling a stack of bills out of his pocket, not amounting to ten dollars, but to ten thousand dollars. Brownlee quickly raked in the cash and replaced it with a stack of thousand dollar chips, sliding them onto number sixteen and rolling the wheel again.

  "Staying in the hotel?" Brownlee asked.

  "Yes. Never see my room until about one in the morning, if you call that staying."

  "Well, good luck on sixteen," Brownlee said as the wheel slowed and the round metal ball bounced in and out of numbered slots heading for a berth somewhere in the twenties. By the time it had landed, Mr. Smith had walked away and Brownlee had taken his money for the house.

  Callie and I left the table amazed at the cavalier expenditure of ten grand.

  "Did you see how the guy turned and walked away before he knew for sure whether he'd won or lost? It was like he didn't care either way. It was like he'd just come to give his money away," I said in amazement.

  "The game he's playing isn't happening at that table," Callie said quietly, as if reading the man's mind.

  "What do you mean?" I asked, but Callie had momentarily disconnected from this world to connect to something else—a place that undoubtedly provided her with more answers than I could.

  "You play the slots for a minute. I've got to go check something out," I said, handing her Elmo's leash and putting her in charge of my hound. I walked to the front desk and told Ms. Loomis that I was curious about the bird ring I'd seen the dealers wearing.

  She looked up slowly and smiled at me. "It's a medieval totem, popular in Italy during the Roman period," she said, in the tone of a docent wanting me to feel as if my question had been answered when, in fact, it had not. "The bird motif is very popular in the hotel. You can see it in the gargoyles above some of the pillars, and of course, the Boy Review is famous for its winged finale. It's the longest running show in Las Vegas."

  "So how many years do you have to work here to get a ring?"

  "I have no idea. I don't manage the casino," she said.

  I returned to Callie, who was holding her own at the slots with Elmo standing guard. "Ms. Loomis tells me that the bird ring is a Roman totem. Of course, this is the same woman who didn't know a ninety-pound basset hound was being hidden in her office, so take it with a grain of salt," I said.

  The dealers had changed shifts and the new man behind the betting line had no ring on.

  My cell phone rang. It was Barrett Silvers. After a few moments I hung up and gave Callie a quizzical look.

  "Barrett Silvers is coming to the hotel later in the week and wants to meet with me. She says she has a director with her who wants to talk about my theatrical. I'll believe it when I see it," I said, dismissing the call.

  "She's coming all the way to Las Vegas to bring you a director like a cat dragging a mouse to its master?" Callie stared at me, apparently suspicious of Barrett's motive.

  "A very big mouse! And it's only a forty-five-minute flight." I shrugged, trying to be nonchalant about the call. "I'm sure she does it for writers all the time," I said, thinking that was likely only if she were trying to sleep with them.

  We made a tour of the shops that lined the concourse under the Addizione VIII arch, with Elmo complaining the entire way.

  Callie admired each designer's offering and tried on several fall outfits, modeling them for me. I told her she looked fabulous in every one of them, and she did. She settled on white slacks with cuffs held up by little gold buckles and a matching white V-neck shirt with a gold crest on it.

  "You look so good in it I want to take it off you," I said softly.

  She danced over and kissed me on the lips in front of the clerk, who asked if I was buying. I smiled and said, "I think the person who gets kissed buys."

  We went upstairs to our room. I had Elmo on his lead, and I carried the shopping bags full of pants, shirts, and shoes. Callie put the keycard in the lock and popped the door open, entering ahead of me. Elmo followed right beside her.

  "Come on, let's go to the sauna," I said, dumping everything onto the overstuffed armchair. "You could use a little relaxation after a hard day of Barbie-dolling it."

  "That is a rude, dismissive chauvinistic remark," she said, giving me a sensual kiss. "Besides, gyms can give you horrible diseases from other people's sweat," she added, unaware of the irony that we were both wearing sweats. Well, I was wearing sweats—she was wearing designer apres ski pants that were sweats for people who don't sweat.

  "Rose uses the hotel gym and sauna about this time every day and we might see her there."

  "How did you find that out?" Callie stared at me.

  "I'm psychic," I said and then added when she gave me a raised eyebrow that while she was trying on clothes this afternoon, I was talking to the young clerk who did stagecraft work for the Boy Review. She knew Rose's schedule because they used to go to the sauna together sometimes after rehearsal.

  Minutes later, we exited the elevator at the penthouse level and entered the gym and sauna. Callie wasn't a workout person. It wasn't that her muscles weren't strong and that she wasn't well built, she just didn't believe in the process. "Tell your mind what you want your body to look like and it will do it for you. You don't need a lot of clanking metal with seats that other people have sat on," she said.

  "You wipe the seats off," I said.

  "You wipe them off. I'm not sitting on them at all."

  I glanced up to see Rose Ross wrapped in a towel and headed for the steam room. I alerted Callie. She jumped into action, apparently forgetting what vermin might thrive in moist heat, and demanded that we strip and follow her. We were wrapped in large white towels and inside the cedar-lined hot box before you could say Legionnaires'.

  Rose seemed nervous but relieved to see us, and I hoped she was anxious to talk. Callie set the stage, explaining that she was psychic and that she could sense things about people and that she knew Rose was afraid. I assured Rose that whatever she told us would be in
confidence.

  "People on the ghoul pool list do die. I don't know if they were chosen to be on the list because they were sick like people say or if they were put on the list and then that caused them to die," she said.

  "But they draw the names randomly, don't they?" I asked.

  "They say they do, but someone always holds up the bowl containing the names to be drawn. I mean, a lot of people touch the bowl, and this whole town is one big magic trick. Something is happening underground but no one talks about it, and you can't figure out who knows and who it's safe to talk to. I know, it sounds ridiculous but..."

  "You've got to stay in contact with us," Callie said.

  "That could be hard," she said as the door opened and two older women emerged through the fog. Rose exited without even telling us goodbye, obviously frightened and suspicious of everyone.

  We toweled off quickly and pulled on our sweats, heading back to our room.

  As we passed the casino, I tugged at Callie's sleeve, indicating we should just go by the roulette wheel one more time. The mystery of the ring had me baffled. There never seemed to be more than one dealer wearing a bird ring at any given time.

  We had no sooner stepped up to the table than a man approached and put down ten thousand dollars in cash. Dealer Brownlee brightened. "Mr. Emerson, how are you this fine day? Staying at the hotel?"

  "Your front desk is pretty busy. I'll be lucky if they check me in by midnight. Put it all on fourteen," he said and the dealer froze for just an instant, as if Mr. Emerson had chosen the wrong number, but he dutifully placed the bet nonetheless. The wheel spun, and we all waited to see if the ball landed in the fourteen slot. The wheel slowed, the ball landed, and jumped, and jumped again. It just missed fourteen. We looked to the man for a reaction, but he had left the table, disappearing into the crowd.

  "Lotta money," I remarked.

  "They're not betting, they're buying," Callie murmured. I stared at her, not understanding what she was saying. "I dreamed that sentence last night. I just remembered. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, I have to remember this."