Royal Flush

by Stephanie Caffrey

  "Melanie lived in my building in Las Vegas. We were friends," I said, seeing no reason to be completely straight with him.

  Lee fixed me with a skeptical look, but remained silent.

  "She came to me seeking a detective, though, not a friend. Kent had asked her for a large loan so he could pursue a legal claim on his family's property back in England. He claimed he was part of the royal family, in fact."

  Lee straightened up in his chair. "You don't say," he said blithely, dripping with sarcasm.

  I smiled. "I do say. But that's beside the point. The point is that the man Melanie had me investigate—Henry John Kent—was not the man who came to the funeral as her husband."

  Lee looked up at the ceiling, unsure of what to make of this unexpected interruption in his day.

  Mike piped up. "Am I right that no one even knew Melanie was married?"

  Lee nodded. "Until just weeks ago. Apparently they had been married awhile, or several months anyway."

  "And how did the family find out?" I asked.

  Lee flashed a thin smile. "The family accountant called me up and asked. Their taxes are all intertwined, what with the trusts and everything else, and all of a sudden Melanie had filed something jointly. And so I began poking around a little bit to confirm it, and then we all confronted Melanie over Labor Day weekend."

  "So she admitted it but never introduced him?" I asked.

  Lee spread his hands apart and sighed. "It was supposed to be on the horizon. It wasn't as if she was going to keep him a big secret or anything once we found out. It just never happened because she ended up …" He trailed off and then stiffened again in his chair, his face becoming deathly serious. "You think there might be foul play?"

  I grimaced. "I don't know what I think, to be honest. But I'm sure you will agree, what we've told you is something that has to be considered."

  "Of course," he said, nodding vigorously.

  As we sat in a brief but awkward silence, my gaze turned to the roaring fireplace. I wondered whether it was lit all the time, or whether they lit it just for our benefit.

  Mike spoke up. "We're talking with LAPD, although they don't seem to be overly concerned."

  "Detective Weakland?" Lee asked.

  Mike nodded. "I figure he's seen enough weird things in his day that this doesn't move the needle very much."

  "Still," Lee said. "We have to figure out who Melanie's husband really is. Or was."

  "Melanie paid me a retainer," I said, "and there's still a few thousand left. So I'll be working on this, even if the police are too busy to get their hands dirty."

  "That's a little bit comforting, I guess," Lee said, only halfheartedly.

  "So do you think the family will talk to us?" Mike asked.

  Lee shook his head. "If they're going to get involved, it wouldn't be today. It's too much for them to handle. But I will have them contact you if things cool down. You have a card?" He stood up, signaling the end of the meeting.

  I reached into my wallet and pulled out a half-crumpled business card, which Lee took without comment. "And you?" he directed the question at Mike.

  Mike smiled, and indulged Lee by producing his own card, which looked as if it had been printed by an Epson printer hooked up to an Apple II. I stifled a giggle.

  Lee showed us out the front door, and we found to our relief that the rain had let up almost completely. Just as we reached my car, a voice rang out behind us.

  "Excuse me!"

  We turned and found a young woman facing us.

  "My name is Caroline," she said. "I'm Melanie's sister."

  "Hi," Mike said, his voice a little higher pitched than normal. Caroline looked about twenty. Taller than Melanie, she had a fit, statuesque figure and golden blonde hair, with a strong jaw and soft cheekbones. Her gray-blue eyes were piercing, despite the telltale signs that she had been crying recently.

  "I understand you had some information about Melanie," she said, somewhat awkwardly. "My family isn't in the mood to talk to anyone, but she was my best friend. I need to know what's going on."

  I nodded. "I'm sorry for your loss," I said. "We think that the man who was here claiming to be Melanie's husband was actually not her husband."

  Her eyes got big. "We've never met her husband before, so we had no way of knowing. Who is he?"

  "We have no idea," Mike said. "But we're going to figure that out. Did your sister use drugs?"

  Caroline paused, taken aback by the question. "Once in awhile she'd party with her friends, yeah."

  "So were you surprised she overdosed?" I asked.

  "Surprised? Yes and no. I know she was thinking about experimenting with stuff, but I didn't know she was doing it alone."

  I pulled out my phone and scrolled to the picture of the Henry John Kent we'd been tailing in Las Vegas. "Do you know this guy?"

  "No, never seen him," she said. "Who's he?"

  "He's the guy we thought was Henry John Kent. The guy who married your sister in private. But then this other guy shows up at the funeral and claims he's Henry John Kent. So you can see why I'm concerned."

  She nodded, looking concerned herself. "And how did you know my sister?"

  "We lived in the same building. I'm a private detective, and she came to see me about a matter. And then she ended up, well, you know…"

  "What did she want to see you about?" Caroline asked. "She never mentioned hiring a detective to me."

  "Client confidentiality," I said. "Sorry. But if you leave me your number I might have some more questions for you. The rain's picking up again."

  "I don't have a pen or anything—"

  "Just tell me your number, and I'll enter it into my phone," Mike said.

  She gave Mike the number, and we parted ways. The gate opened, and the same guard from earlier came to escort our car out of the driveway. He didn't wave goodbye.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  "Well that was weird," Mike said, easing the car out of the Westons' private drive. Mike did admirably well in city traffic, and we managed to get our things from the hotel and find our way out of the city limits by 4:30. Mike said he needed to catch up on his work the next day, so I'd be mostly on my own. He drove us to his house, got out, kissed me awkwardly on the cheek, and said good night.

  I found myself blushing for most of the drive home. As awkward as it was, I was amazed that Mike had taken that step. An actual show of affection. I wasn't going to hold my breath for a bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates, but I was happy with the development, almost as happy as when Bobby Simmons offered me a quarter if I would hold his hand on the walk home from third grade.

  It was nearly ten o'clock when I plunked my keys down on the countertop, poured myself a drink, and slumped down on my couch. It had not been the most illuminating of trips, and I felt as if I knew less about Melanie's life than I'd known before. Or thought I'd known. Now I knew she was married to a guy who may or may not be royalty and who had apparently fooled Melanie's family into thinking he was someone else entirely. As unsettling as all that was, there was still the very real chance that there was nothing at all unusual about her death, in which case I was just wasting my time.

  I woke up on Thursday determined to get to the bottom of at least one mystery. If I could figure out who Kent actually was, it might set me on a path to learning what had happened to Melanie. And with Melanie being dead, there was no longer any reason I couldn't go straight to the source and talk to Kent himself.

  I didn't feel like hanging out at UNLV the whole day hoping to bump into him. Spending time at my alma mater had made me feel old, and I wasn't going back there unless I had to. The other option was the Bellagio poker room, which seemed to be part of his daily routine. I hit the gym for a half hour, then took a casual walk over to the Bellagio around one, which is about the time I saw Kent playing poker the previous week. The poker room was hopping, but there was no sign of Kent or his little friend, Jojia. I nursed a Diet Coke at the sports bar for an hour, hoping t
hey'd arrive, but all I got for my efforts was an endless stream of losers asking me how much my "services" would set them back. I took it as a compliment, since the hookers who hang out at Bellagio are among the best-looking in the whole business.

  With no sign of Kent anywhere, I wandered over near the Bellagio's convention area to get myself some mocha gelato. Sitting there, I watched a gaggle of middle-aged men parading by in their convention uniforms of sport coats and dress shirts open at the neck. Looking down at my empty gelato dish, I ruminated about the unfairness of the body's use of energy and how I'd very quickly erased all the good work I'd done in the gym earlier that morning. It had taken me thirty minutes to burn 250 calories, but only three to gain them all back. It didn't seem right.

  As much as I loved the Bellagio and its ample number of gelaterias, I did not look forward to a week or more of hanging out there hoping that Kent would show up and play poker. I was stumped. But a creeping sense of guilt about eating a bowl of gelato was nagging at me to get up and get moving, and I found myself walking out of the Bellagio and east on Flamingo Road past Bally's, in the direction of the ratty little weekly hotel where Kent kept his official address.

  Within a few blocks of the Strip, that area of Las Vegas gets dingy pretty fast. The proximity to the Strip has lured all kinds of businesses over the years—hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, and the like—but many of them seem never to take off, which leads to a kind of ghost-town feel about the area. Vacant buildings and gas stations are interspersed with empty lots with garbage strewn everywhere, all resting in the shadow of multibillion-dollar hotels. It was a twenty-minute walk over to the All-Star Motel, but the day was cool for the season, despite the full sun.

  This time I wasn't going to bother with the office or the skuzzy clerk lurking inside. I headed straight for the stairs and climbed up to the second level overlooking the courtyard. A week earlier I had stared across the courtyard at the room for hours on end, but now I found myself wondering which one it was. Was it three from the end, or four? Feeling like an idiot, I walked back to the room I had stayed in and looked back across, trying to remember the proper angle. Kent's place was four from the end, I decided. Without a doubt.

  I knocked, expecting to be met with silence. Instead, I heard a shuffling sound inside and saw the peephole darken ever so slightly. A woman's voice called out.

  "Yes?" she asked.

  I was taken aback, but I recovered. "I'm sorry—I'm looking for a man named Kent. Is this his apartment?"

  The door opened a crack. I couldn't see much, but it was enough to see that the woman I was speaking with was in her sixties and owned at least a half a dozen cats, all of whom had taken the opportunity to purr and whine in unison.

  "I don't know a Kent," she said. "You must have the wrong place."

  It must have been three from the end, I thought. "Do you know any of your neighbors?" I asked, trying to salvage the situation.

  "Why, who's asking?"

  Strike two. I tried the pity angle. "It's about a girl who died in California. She was my friend, and I'm trying to find her husband. This guy would be about twenty-five, brown hair, English."

  The woman thought for a minute. "You must mean my neighbor," she said finally. "You're one room off."

  Now we were getting somewhere. "This way?" I asked, pointing to my right.

  "That's him," she muttered. "Never talked to him, but he's got that accent. These walls are so damned thin," she explained.

  "Thanks," I said, and moved on before she invited me inside to meet her cats.

  My heart was pounding now, aware that I was actually onto something and that I might finally get to meet the man who was at the center of this big mystery. Plus, he might be royalty. I knocked on his door and got no response, although I thought I detected a sound within, or rather the absence of a sound that had been there before I knocked. It was as though he had muted the TV as soon as I knocked.

  "Kent," I yelled.

  Still nothing.

  "This is about Melanie," I said through the door. "I am a private detective, and I know people in the immigration office who would be very interested to talk about this." It was a bluff, but worth a shot. If he really wanted to get his degree, the last thing he'd want was immigration trouble.

  Finally, after another minute, the latch on the door clicked, and the door opened.

  "I'm not Kent," the man said simply, in a proper British accent. It was the guy from the funeral.

  My shoulders slumped in defeat. The stand-in Kent was a trim five-eleven, with unruly black hair and a trace of stubble covering his face. He was dressed in green pajama bottoms and a clean blue T-shirt. The TV was on in the background, tuned to what looked like The Simpsons. At least I hadn't woken him up.

  "May I come in?" I asked.

  He grunted and opened the door for me. The place had a lived-in look, but I had been in apartments and hotel rooms much messier than his.

  I steeled myself and adopted my most authoritative voice. "I'm sorry to bother you like this, but I really need to figure this out."

  "Is this about the funeral?" he asked, scratching himself.

  "Yes, it's about the funeral. If you're not Melanie's husband, who is?"

  "You're not with the police—that's obvious," he said, beginning to toughen up.

  I found myself getting a touch defensive. I pulled out my private detective's license and held it up for him to inspect, which he did. "I'm working with the police, specifically Detective Weakland of the Los Angeles Police Department." I hoped that would be enough to loosen his tongue.

  "So, what do I need to tell you?" he asked.

  "The truth, for starters. What's your real name?"

  He sighed. "My name is Dyson. Thomas Q. Dyson. Age twenty-four, hail from Liverpool, and my blood type's O-negative. How's that?" He flashed me a wry smirk.

  "A good start," I said. "How do you know Kent?"

  "Oh, we were mates back in school. Been close ever since. Thick as thieves!"

  "And what brings you to Vegas?" I asked.

  His face showed a half-grimace. "Well, that's kind of a long story. One, poker. Two, a girl. Three, Kent was here. Four, the weather. Some of those things haven't worked out for me. But the weather's still great, isn't it?"

  "So you and Kent were going to take the town's poker rooms by storm? Something along those lines?"

  He looked me up and down. "You know, you're a right proper girl, you are. I should offer you a drink, but all I've got in the cabinets isn't appropriate for a lady to be drinking at this early hour. You want some tea or anything?"

  "No thanks. We were talking about poker."

  "Right, right," he said breezily. "Yeah, er, you nailed it. Kent and I always stayed up late watching poker on television, and we figured how hard can this be? And to start out you need lots of money, because even if you're good, you can go on bad streaks. So Kent was a whiz at rounding up money, mostly from girls and such. But I couldn't keep up. I don't know if it was bad luck or bad playing on my part, but I'm kind of retired from poker. For now."

  I was rolling it over in my head. "Okay, so you guys are buddies. Is he paying your rent here?"

  He shrugged off the question. "You know how cheap this place is? In London a little hole like this would set you back two thousand quid a month, or three thousand bucks. Here it's five hundred."

  I took his non-response as an admission. "So tell me about the funeral."

  He stiffened ever so slightly and crossed his arms. "Now remind me again why I'm talking to you."

  "Because I'm working with the police to help answer a few questions that we have about the woman you pretended to be married to. We don't want to involve the police directly now, do we?"

  He seemed to grasp the undeniable wisdom of my approach. "Okay, the funeral See, Kent said he couldn't make it. Not that he was busy, mind you, but that he just couldn't go. He couldn't bear to see her in a coffin, and to sit through the funeral. They were tight—you know
what I mean? It was his wife. And he came up with the bright idea, you know, that since none of the family had ever met him before, I could go, pretend to be him, and none would be the wiser."

  I nodded along, sympathetic, as though it were a perfectly reasonable approach. "Okay, so he's a sentimental kind of guy? Not into funerals, especially if it's his young wife of only a few months. Did you go to his wedding?"

  He shook his head. "No, nobody did. They did it downtown at one of those dodgy joints where the whole thing takes five minutes. If that. No reception, even. We did have a little party over at the nightclub, but that was it."

  "And what about Melanie? Did you know her at all?"

  "She was too good for him, really, if you want to know the truth. Too good for all of us. Smart, pretty, and really interested in things, you know, things other than just partying and feeling good. It was a shame what happened."

  I nodded. "So she wasn't into drugs much?"

  He spread his hands apart and smiled sheepishly. "I didn't say that. I said she was interested in other things too. Some people our age are, you know, pretty self-centered, especially in the party scene. She did that kind of stuff, but she also did other things. I think she even read books."

  What a freak, I thought, but I kept my sarcasm to myself. "And what about your friend Kent? Was he in love with her, or—"

  "Or was she just a rich girl he could mooch off of? Is that what you mean?"

  I smiled. "That's about it, yes."

  "No," he said, "I think they were really a thing. As I said, she was smart, and she wasn't going to be taken in by him. They seemed very happy, at least when they were here."

  "And is Kent really connected with the royal family?" I asked.

  His eyes got big. "Who said that?"

  "That's what he told Melanie. That's why she hired me, to find out."

  He bit his lip and shook his head back and forth. "No, no, that's all wrong. I didn't know he was going around saying that…"

  "What did you think he was going around saying?"

  Thomas looked me in the eye. "He said some things. We said some things, you know, to get in good with girls. There is so much money here, young money. Kids with trust funds come out here on the weekends and party, and we can spot them a mile away." He looked around at his shabby pad. "Obviously he's better at it than I am."