Royal Flush

by Stephanie Caffrey

  But just before I arrived at the table, a player at the table next to me pulled his seat back to get up, and the chair's leg managed to hook itself right around my left foot, causing me to trip and fall forward right onto the Omaha table. I had to reach out in front of me to protect myself from the fall, and in the process all of my chips went spewing around the room in seventeen different directions.

  Completely mortified, flustered, and red-faced, my first instinct was to get the hell out of there, leaving my chips behind. A previous version of me would no doubt have done just that. But this was work, and I was disguised, so I would suck it up and sit down. Most of the table had gotten up and begun crawling around on their hands and knees looking for my chips. I bent down to help.

  The other players were careful to reveal any chips they found, not wanting to be seen as opportunists or thieves, especially with all the cameras watching. They placed my red fives and green twenty-five dollar chips on the table, and after a few minutes we had accounted for all but one of them. After I made countless apologies, we all settled into our seats, and the dealer began shuffling the cards.

  My face was still a deep shade of scarlet.

  "That was quite an entrance!" the dealer said, winking at me. "Don't worry about it, honey, I've seen a lot worse." She was a redhead of about sixty, with a kindly face and oversized glasses.

  An older guy next to me chuckled. "Usually it's the exits that are worse. Last week a guy was tipping back vodka lemonades as if they were sweet tea, and after a couple hours he bolted up from the table and then spewed all over the no-limit table on his way out the door. They were cleaning puke off of chips for the next hour and a half!"

  The table let out a collective cringe, but that didn't stop the rest of them from sharing their embarrassing poker stories. There was one about a guy who desperately had to go to the bathroom but had such a good hand that he couldn't leave. You can imagine how that one ended. There was another one about a guy who slipped some Viagra into the drink of the player next to him, and it turned out the guy had a blood pressure condition that amplified the effect of the drug, which led to amusing consequences. You expect to get stiffed when you go to a casino, but not like that.

  All in all, the stories deflected the attention from my gaffe and got me to calm down and focus on the game and on Kent, who had remained mum during all of the excitement. I wondered whether the other players were telling stories because they wanted to make me feel more at ease, or whether they just needed an excuse to blab. My first several hands were the typical dreck that I was used to, so I didn't get into any trouble. Bad hands were easy to play because you just folded. The dangerous hands were the marginal ones that drew you in, got you to bet, and then gave you an ulcer while you tried to guess whether you were beat or not.

  The crap hands kept coming my way, but for once I didn't mind. It allowed me to focus on Kent rather than the action, although I couldn't help trying to read the hands he was playing. Of course some of the hands went all the way to the "river"—the final card overturned by the dealer—in which case he had to show his hand if it was a winner. Some of these hands were less than stellar. For example, he ended up winning one hand on a stone-cold bluff holding nothing but an ace and a six. The hand ended up being a winner when the last two cards the dealer dealt were both sixes, giving him a miracle three of a kind. It was not the kind of hand a good player would have played, as evidenced by the groan from the losing player and the bewildered looks from the others at the table when Kent turned his hand over.

  Eventually Kent's lack of skill caught up to him. It wasn't his playing style so much as it was the simple fact that he was playing way too many hands. Poker is a game of patience, and some would even say boredom. You have to wait for the right hand to get your money in, and the right hand only comes around every ten or fifteen hands. But Kent didn't seem to want to wait. During the course of an hour I saw him play starting hands of Ace-Queen-Seven-Three, King-Queen-Ten-Seven, and all kinds of other hands that might look strong to a novice but were actually quite weak. The general theme was that he was trying to catch magic in a bottle by hitting a miracle inside straight or a long-shot flush, and that was a recipe for losing money. Which he did, in spades. And clubs.

  I wasn't sure how much Kent had started with, but at a table like that it would be several hundred dollars, or even around a thousand. He was taking it well, and so was the girl on the other side of the rail, who had been texting feverishly for most of the time and only half paying attention to the action. I assumed it was her money that he was losing, which meant she must have had some deep pockets. Anything for a prince, I figured.

  Kent smiled at her and put his hand out, and she didn't flinch as she reached into her cream-colored Louis Vuitton handbag. At the same time that she leaned over the rail and handed him another wad of hundreds, a cocktail waitress arrived to deliver her another drink. I figured the drinks helped with the boredom of having to stand there next to the poker room. I hadn't been keeping an exact count, but the drink had to be at least her fourth one of the afternoon. While she was occupied with the cocktail waitress, I noticed Kent palm a few chips and shove them in his pocket.

  Having participated in very few pots, I was doing okay financially but still struggling with the complexity of the game. After another half hour of folding my hands and watching Kent play bad ones, I figured I'd learned enough about him for one day. He wasn't very chatty, and his seat across the table from me made it hard to engage him. But observing his play and his interactions with his Asian money honey spoke volumes. When I cashed my chips in, I found I was only down twenty-eight bucks, which I counted as a kind of win.

  "Watch your step," the guy next to me muttered as I stood up to leave, drawing a chuckle from the rest of the table. I blew him a big kiss then headed for the bathroom.

  Given the overwhelmingly male clientele of the poker room and sports book, the closest ladies' room was all but deserted. I took the opportunity to remove my ridiculous Guns & Ammo cap and style my hair a tiny bit before venturing back out into the casino. I knew no one was scrutinizing my appearance very carefully, but a girl had to have some kind of standards, didn't she?

  There wasn't much I could do about the horrid plaid shirt, but at least I had made myself look marginally presentable. Just as I was finishing up, the bathroom door opened and Kent's girlfriend stormed in, her face completely white. She ignored me, dropped her bag, and pushed her way into a stall.

  For a tiny little woman, she sure made a lot of noise. I had never heard a vomit like hers—a high-pitched heeeeeeeeeee followed by a grotesque unnnnhhhhh. At first she was dry-heaving, but then all of the drinks and the Ping Pang Pong lunch came up in what sounded like a tsunami of gloppy unpleasantness. I cringed, feeling for her. I knew she would feel a thousand times better in about ten minutes, but that was a long ten minutes.

  Her Louis Vuitton bag lay on the floor outside the stall, spared from the indignity and messiness of it all.

  "You okay in there?" I asked.

  "Unnnnnnnnhhhhhhhhh," came the response. Silly me for asking.

  I eyed the handbag again. The girl was going to be in that stall for awhile.

  I couldn't resist the urge to find out who she was, so I quietly crouched down and began fishing through the bag. I pulled out a beautiful black leather wallet and was not surprised to find a few thousand dollars in hundreds. But it was her ID that interested me the most. I pulled out her Nevada license and took a quick photo with my iPhone.

  Jojia Star Takada. Aged twenty. Lived in Summerlin, an upscale planned community outside town. Rifling quickly through the rest of the purse, I couldn't find any semblance of any student IDs or anything else that would indicate her status, apart from the fact that she was obviously rich. I put everything back as it had been and got out of there before she yakked again.

  On my drive home, I ran things through in my mind. The fact that Jojia was only twenty explained the hefty tip she'd left the cocktail
waitress. I knew from experience that someone was much less likely to be carded by an employee who saw a consistent flow of dollar signs. At least that made sense. The rest of it, not so much. I granted that it was possible for a young girl to be charmed off her feet by a prince, or an earl, or whatever Kent was claiming to be, but standing around watching a guy playing poker was nobody's idea of a good time. My working assumption was nothing more than the obvious, namely, that this Kent guy was a player who had at least two wealthy girlfriends funding his lifestyle. What I'd seen so far wasn't conclusive evidence, but it all pointed in the direction of telling Melanie Weston that she'd have better luck betting at the roulette tables than funding Kent's supposed royal lawsuit.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next morning I put in a call to Melanie to update her on what I'd learned, but she wasn't answering, so I left her a voice mail, a move I immediately regretted. It wasn't as if we were discussing national security secrets, but I figured communications between a client and a private investigator should probably be live, rather than recorded. Without much else to do, I decided to start snooping around for information about Kent's other girlfriend, the deep-pocketed girl who couldn't handle her afternoon booze.

  Jojia Star Takada had a vibrant and in-your-face online presence. In person, she seemed more quiet and waif-like than anything else, but on Facebook she was a party animal and selfie addict who never seemed to miss a chance to record her debauchery at just about every nightclub in town. In one photo she was posing next to a bottle of Ketel One at Hakkasan, a club at the MGM Grand, and in another, posted just days later, she was making a pouty face at Rain, which was down at the Mandalay Bay. Not being a natural party girl myself, I had only visited the big clubs in the old days when I hired out as an escort for wealthy clients, almost all of whom were expecting to get something "extra" in addition to my escorting duties. Now, I readily admitted to being a party-pooper. I didn't enjoy the thumping noise of the processed music, all the phony kids blowing through wads of borrowed cash they couldn't afford, and I certainly did not approve of eight-hundred-dollar bottles of vodka.

  As I scrolled through page after page of Facebook posts and photos, I found myself feeling little pangs of jealousy. My own narrow social universe consisted of a way-too-horny bouncer, a former male revue dancer, a former customer or two, and a large fern. By stark contrast, Jojia seemed to have a limitless supply of best friends. There were dozens of photos showing her rubbing cheeks with decked-out college girls, many of whom looked like models, and there were almost as many photos of her in amusingly suggestive poses with good-looking young guys. I might have thought that they were all just random people she'd run into at whatever club she was at, except for the fact that her Facebook page was filled with friendly and familiar messages from these same people, often written in the truncated online vernacular used by twenty-somethings typing away on their smartphones. "Luv u c u soon" was followed by "wtf r u drinking" and "OMG how much fun was dat?" You get the idea. Half of her photos had more than two hundred "likes." Curiously, none of the posts showed any sign of Kent.

  Was it really possible to be that popular, I wondered? I had always been popular with boys, although it wasn't exactly because they liked my personality or my affinity for bad puns. Girls, not so much. But I rationalized it with the observation that Jojia was loaded, and was probably a walking ATM for her other so-called friends in the same way she was for Kent. If I had money to burn, I'm sure I could get 2,392 Facebook friends too. Well, maybe twenty-three.

  After a half hour of fascination with her Facebook page, I googled her name again to try to see where the money was coming from. Takada was a very common Japanese name, but I imagined "Star" wasn't a very common middle name at all. The first thing to pop up was a Wikipedia entry about her. The short article said she was born in Okinawa to a shipping "mogul" who controlled two-thirds of the traffic between the island and Japan. A grainy photo showed a young Jojia standing on a beach with her pretty, diminutive mother and her stern-looking father. The rest of the article described her work as a "producer" of contemporary music and videos, although the details were sketchy. The inference I had to draw was that daddy was rich and was funding his little girl's fantasy life of being some part of the entertainment world. It wouldn't have surprised me if Jojia had authored the Wikipedia entry herself.

  I made myself a new pot of coffee, and while it was brewing the armchair psychologist in me perked up. People who lacked both status and money generally craved money first and status only as an afterthought. You can't feed your family on status alone, and so if you're poor you dream about winning the lottery rather than becoming a Nobel Prize laureate or a Supreme Court justice. But if you already have lots of money, status climbing was the next step. How many politicians dating back to the Kennedys and Roosevelts sought to become senators and governors and presidents as a way of bringing glory to themselves and their family names? I wondered if Jojia's relationship with Kent wasn't part of that tradition. Right now she was a nothing, living solely on her father's generosity. But if she could land royalty as a husband—something the Japanese know a thing or two about—that would be a status symbol more powerful than an entire fleet of Range Rovers. The story of an impoverished noble marrying foreign money was as old as royalty itself.

  But where did that get me? Nowhere. I still had to face the primary question Melanie had tasked me with, which was whether Kent was even a royal in the first place. My gut and the evidence pointed to "no," but she hadn't given me ten grand just to go to the library and follow her friend around for a few hours. There was also the delicate matter of Jojia's relationship with Kent. I felt as if I had no choice but to tell Melanie, and if she took the news the way I would, she'd tell me to drop the whole thing and forget it. Royalty or not, the guy was a two-timer. Anything else I might find out about him was just a footnote.

  Melanie wasn't calling me back, so I spent the rest of the day relaxing and food shopping. I broke a cardinal rule—never go shopping on an empty stomach—and came home with a dozen Italian sausages, two onions, and five green peppers, an amount of food I told myself would feed me for a month, even though I knew it would magically disappear in two days.

  I grudgingly dragged myself off the couch and forced myself to go the gym in my building. The nice part about working out at four in the afternoon is that you usually have the place to yourself. That proved true today, except for a geezer whose armpit flesh was dangling so low that I was afraid he'd trip on it. After a grueling hour of pretending not to stare at his mesmerizingly flappy flesh, I returned upstairs and threw together a little tomato sauce from a mixture of canned diced tomatoes, oregano and basil, salt, and a dash of sugar. Come to think of it, there might have been a little ketchup involved too. Add some Italian sausage and the bell peppers, and it was an almost carb-free delight.

  Thursdays were work nights, which meant a shower followed by makeup and a gray yoga suit. The weather was warm and dry, typical for September, so I decided to walk the Strip down to Cougar's just as dusk was fading into night. After twenty minutes of weaving through tourists, I passed the Wynn and Trump hotels at the north end of the busy part of the Strip, which is where the foot traffic thinned out. A turn around the corner got me to Cougar's, where the lead "host," which is what they called bouncers, winked at me and held the door open.

  The place was already hopping, especially for a Thursday night. I hadn't bothered to check whether there were any big conventions in town, so I didn't know if I was going to be dancing for accountants or morticians, both of which were more interesting than they sounded, or some other group in town for the week. Morticians tipped better than accountants, but not as well as dentists or chiropractors. The other girls and I would often theorize why that was the case, but it was uncanny how true it proved every year.

  Luck was not going my way. It turned out that there were no big conventions going on at all, which meant mostly locals and small groups of tourists. I usually had two o
r three "regulars" on Thursdays, guys who were nice, or at least non-creepy, and tipped well enough to get a little of what we called "preferred" treatment in the private booths off to the sides of the big room. It was nothing even close to what the guys wanted me to do to them, but they paid handsomely for the privilege of being on my favorites list, and I returned the favor.

  Despite the busy start to the evening, the place hit a lull around midnight, just when it was usually hitting its full swing. On a break, I started thumbing through my smartphone, and I couldn't resist the urge to check Jojia Takada's Facebook page. There wasn't anything from Jojia on there, but a friend named Hassan had posted "Hakk tonight??? U know it." That post had four "likes" plus a comment from Jojia. "Thinking about it. Ok, screw it, c u there! :)"

  I assumed Hakk meant Hakkasan, one of the hottest nightclubs on the Strip. I recalled seeing a selfie of Jojia taken at Hakkasan, and from the photo it didn't look like my kind of place. Lots of neon lights, expensive drinks, and thumping music. I briefly wondered why she spent so much time in clubs when it seemed she had trouble holding her liquor, but I supposed that the bathroom incident at the Bellagio could have been a solitary event. Or maybe she just liked to dance.

  I finished a fifteen-minute set at 12:20 and then fielded three lap dance requests, which killed twenty minutes and netted me a cool two hundred, most of which came from a young, balding guy who claimed he was from Finland.