Royal Flush

by Stephanie Caffrey

  He shrugged. "Not in the emails. I can check the texts and stuff too." He eyed his half a glass of beer warily and then pushed it away with a disgusted expression.

  I shook my head. For someone who worked in a business where naked women writhed around on strangers all day, he was awfully touchy about germs. Carlos flagged down the waitress and ordered another beer, without lime, and kept tapping away at Kent's phone.

  "Same stuff. Nothing that interesting in here from Melanie," he concluded.

  "Huh," I muttered, not sure whether I was disappointed or pleased with the news. I had been hoping that something incriminating might link Kent to Melanie's death. Maybe she had complained about Kent's extracurricular activities, or maybe they'd had a fight. But apparently the phone wasn't worth stealing after all. Even so, a macabre sense of curiosity made me want to read the emails. "Can I take a look? Pull up his emails again."

  Carlos touched the screen a few more times and then handed the phone over to me. He had done a search for "Melanie," which showed all the emails from her in chronological order. Carlos was right. If they had some kind of steamy romance, it didn't show through in their emails, which were businesslike and perfunctory. I clicked the phone off and listened to Carlos brag about one of his investment properties until our food arrived. For a muscular guy, he was a lightweight, and the beer had loosened his tongue. He seemed to be suggesting that if I invested with him, I'd make a small fortune. I guessed that he was probably a little embarrassed that most people only knew him as a strip club security guy, when in fact he owned a string of properties around town and was close to getting his MBA. He wanted to sound like a big shot, but I wasn't in the mood.

  "You're the second guy to pitch an investment to me in the last hour," I whined. "Let's change the subject."

  He apologized and began talking about golf, which was almost worse than real estate. I listened politely and allowed my double shot of tequila to sink in, the familiar soothing feeling spreading throughout my body. But tequila wasn't enough to render interesting Carlos' views on Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, so eventually the urge to poke around some more on Kent's phone proved irresistible. While Carlos prattled on, I touched an "X" on the screen and found my way back to Kent's regular inbox. Half of the emails seemed to be spam, but a name jumped out at me, a name that made my eyes get big and killed my buzz at the same time.

  "Caroline Weston?" I asked, to no one in particular. "Why is she emailing Kent?"

  "Who's that?" Carlos asked, perturbed at the fact that I had been ignoring him for several minutes.

  "Melanie's younger sister."

  "Is that important?" Carlos asked. "I mean, she was his sister-in-law. Why not email him?"

  I ignored him and started reading the email. It was about an upcoming plan to visit Kent in Las Vegas. Tomorrow. Reading between the lines, the visit would not be Caroline's first trip to see him. I started scrolling back, where I found more emails from her. Many of them preceded Melanie's death.

  "What the hell?" I whispered to myself.

  Carlos scooped about five hundred calories worth of guacamole onto a single chip, and then shoved the whole thing into his mouth in a single bite. When he finished, he asked what the big deal was.

  "The big deal? A dead woman's husband was cheating on her with her own sister. Don't you think that's a big deal?"

  He nodded, taking another chip on a long excursion deep into Guacamole Mountain. His capacity for guac seemed unlimited. "I guess you're right," he said. "So you think he liked her more?"

  "Could be," I murmured. I was still taken aback by the revelation that Caroline and Kent were a thing, and I began wondering if it was enough to get the LAPD off their butts and start investigating. And then, despite the tequila, another revelation jumped out at me.

  "Carlos, did I tell you about the fake Kent?"

  He furrowed his brow. "No."

  "At Melanie's funeral, there was a guy there pretending to be Melanie's husband. No one had ever met Kent before, so he was able to pull it off," I explained.

  "Okay…" Carlos wasn't exactly following.

  "But the big question was why Kent felt the need to have a stand-in. Why not just go to the funeral himself?"

  Carlos perked up. "Because he's a killer and he was racked with guilt? Hell, if I offed somebody, I wouldn't go to their funeral. It would be creepy."

  "Yes," I said. "Maybe. But maybe it was because he didn't want someone there to see him, someone he already knew. Someone who didn't know he was married to Melanie."

  "Such as Melanie's own sister," Carlos said. He flagged the waitress down for another beer.

  "Wouldn't that be a little awkward? We know, based on these emails, that Kent and Caroline were tight, but I assume Caroline wouldn't have been dating him if she knew he was the same guy who had married her own sister."

  Carlos didn't seem convinced. "But she's emailing him. She knows his name. How many Henry John Kents are floating around in Las Vegas?"

  I nodded. "Right, but look at his email. It says his email address is kent1993@gmail.com. He could have told her his name was Kent Jones or Kent Smith, or whatever, and she'd have no idea what his full name was. Once he met Caroline and decided he liked her, it makes sense that he would have given her a fake name, right?"

  Carlos considered it. "You're saying he wasn't going to tell her his real name, because she already knows her sister is dating a Henry John Kent."

  "Exactly. He tells her he's Kent Smith, or whatever, and since she's never actually met Melanie's husband, she assumes the guy who shows up at the funeral is the real husband. No one would have any reason to doubt it."

  He nodded. "And then Kent can go right on seeing her, and probably bilking money out of her too."

  Carlos' beer arrived, and, uncharacteristically, I declined the waitress's offer to get me a second glass of tequila. My brain's wheels were spinning too fast, but I didn't want to put on the brakes just yet. It was finally starting to fall together. Melanie was a skeptic. After all, she'd hired me to investigate her own husband. So, as far as Kent was concerned, she wasn't playing nicely with his plan to get at her money. My guess was that he'd married her solely to get access to her family fortune, but when his efforts were met with Melanie's resistance, he found another way into the family through Caroline. At that point, Melanie was an impediment, someone who needed to be gotten rid of. It was quite a juggling act. Regardless, to me it smelled like motive to kill.

  "So she's coming to town tomorrow, according to this email," I said. "She's a lot more gushy than Melanie. She's even using the L word."

  "She's in love with that dude?"

  I nodded. "And some of these emails have pictures attached." I had scrolled through a few more from last month. Caroline wasn't shy about sharing pictures of her privates over email, another thing I couldn't understand about the younger generation. Didn't they know that nothing on the internet is ever truly private?

  Carlos bolted upright in his chair. "Hand it over."

  I frowned. "No way. They're compromising. You work at a strip club, for God's sake. Do you need to look at porn too?"

  He considered it for a second. "Yes. Yes, I do."

  I shut the phone off and put it in my bag, which elicited a pouty face from Carlos. "Grow up. Anyway, we have to warn Caroline about this guy."

  He perked up. "Is she hot? I'll do it."

  I sighed and looked up at the stars for guidance, but all I saw was neon. "According to her email, she's flying in at 10:20 tomorrow morning, and she wants him to pick her up because she made a spa appointment at 11:30."

  "Some life," Carlos mused.

  "Well it's not all peaches and cream," I said. "She wanted a two o'clock, but the only one they had available was 11:30. She was bitching about that in the email to Kent."

  "Oh, the horror. I never get a treatment before noon," Carlos said, using a lispy, lilting voice. "It's unheard of."

  I giggled. He could be funny when he wanted to be. But usu
ally he was just whiny. "So I'm thinking, I'll go hang out in the spa and try to catch her there."

  "Shocking," he said. "You? In a spa?"

  "I know, I know, it's hard to imagine. But that's why I earn the big bucks." I looked down at my nails and cringed. "Plus, I can kill two birds with one stone while I'm there."

  Carlos leaned back in his chair, having reduced about six avocados worth of guacamole to a dark green smear at the bottom of the bowl. "Whatever," he said. "But just so you know, men aren't looking at your nails."

  "The smart ones are," I answered. I looked up and made eye contact with the waitress, who brought our check immediately.

  "You're not even going to reach for it?" I asked.

  Carlos spread his hands and smiled. "This is business, right? This is a working dinner, and you're the boss."

  "So I pay, that's how it goes?"

  He nodded. "That's how it goes."

  I shook my head. "You're lucky you have…" And then I trailed off, thinking better of it. I was about to compliment his impressive biceps muscles, but I thought better of it. He was liable to take even the mildest compliment as some kind of invitation to ramp up his efforts to hit on me.

  "Yes?" he asked.

  "Never mind."

  Carlos was standing up to go.

  "You can leave the tip," I said. Before he could protest, I walked out, right onto the Strip.

  He rushed after me. "You should let me walk you home," he said, panting.

  "I'll be fine," I said, smiling. I blew him a kiss and headed south, back to my apartment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I woke up early on Saturday morning. Too early. After tossing and turning and flailing around under my sheets, fighting the fact that I was awake for the day, I resigned myself to being up at 7:25 and made myself coffee and eggs. Apart from dancing at the club that night, the only other thing on my agenda was to meet up with Caroline Weston at the spa around 11:30. I stretched myself out like a lioness and then held a yoga pose while gazing out my window. The coffee hadn't kicked in yet, so my brain was still functioning at zombie level when I heard an unusual "bing" sound.

  It had come from Kent's phone, which was down to the dregs of its battery life. It turned out that he'd received about a dozen emails overnight, most of which were from people I didn't know and seemed to be about some kind of private joke. The one that dinged was from Caroline. Her flight was on time, and she was excited about seeing him.

  I hit the gym but gave up after a half hour. My heart just wasn't in it. After a trip to the grocery store and some well-earned lounge time on my balcony, it was time to hit the spa. Many of the casino spas were fantastic—world class, even—but of course they catered to hotel guests who were willing to pay for their overpriced services. Caroline had wisely made an appointment at Jade House, a spot known to locals as being on par with the Canyon Ranches of the world but at half the cost.

  A half a mile off the Strip, Jade House was Asian-themed but staffed, as far as I could tell, exclusively by white and Latino masseuses, hair stylists, and nail techs. I got there fifteen minutes before Caroline's appointment was to begin, and told the receptionist I was meeting a friend. Killing time was easy in any halfway decent spa waiting room, which this one called a "relaxation room." First, there was the ubiquitous menu of services, which listed everything from a basic pedicure to the ninety-minute full-body massage, which you could follow up by being wrapped in Atlantic kale. I had never ventured beyond the basics, but I figured it was only a matter of time before I would be signing up for an anti-aging "neck and décolletage" treatment or an "ageless oxygen boost" complete with "vitamin infusions" and an unexplained "revitalizing" ritual. Like a fancy restaurant, the menu listed the prices in words rather than numbers, as if that softened the blow.

  The music piping through the speakers was relaxing, but something was nagging at me. When I checked my phone to get the time, it dawned on me. If I had Kent's phone, he might not have gotten the email from Caroline that asked him to pick her up at the airport. In my own life, I checked email on my laptop and on the iPad, but I knew that some in the younger crowd relied exclusively on their smartphones to communicate with the outside world. As the minutes ticked by, I began thinking Caroline might miss her spa appointment.

  She didn't. At 11:33 she marched through the door, a spindly tower of salmon-colored yoga gear topped by a model's face and blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. Acting as if she owned the place, which she probably could, she approached the receptionist and informed her that she was ready for her treatments. The receptionist flashed a thin smile and told her to take a seat. Caroline found a chair a couple seats away from me.

  How to approach such a delicate matter? It's hard enough to talk to a complete stranger, but when the punch line is that your boyfriend was married to your recently deceased sister, and oh, by the way, he might also have killed her, it was never going to be anything but awkward.

  I steeled myself and cleared my throat. "Excuse me, you're Caroline, right?"

  She looked up from her magazine, a confused expression passing over her face. "Um, yes? I don't think I know you, though. I'm sorry." Her tone was polite, yet cagey.

  We made eye contact for a few more seconds. I had hoped she'd remember me from our brief talk last week, but she was the kind of socialite who probably met hundreds of people a month. And I wasn't one of the stand-outs.

  "Raven McShane," I said, scooting over to sit next to her. "Your sister hired me to—"

  "The detective? Right, now I remember." Her face lit up with a glowing smile. "What a coincidence! Don't you just love this place?"

  I smiled, but inside I was cringing at the unfortunate business I was about to bring up. "Uh, actually, I met you here on purpose."

  I let the statement sink in—then I continued. "You see, in looking into your sister's death, I've found out some information."

  Her eyes were searching me, confused but eager to hear more. "Yes?" was all she managed to get out.

  "Well, let me ask you a quick question first. You're here to see your boyfriend, right? What's his name?"

  She frowned, ever so slightly, probably wondering how I knew so much about her plans. But she played along. "His name is Kent. Kent Montgomery. Why?"

  I nodded, solemnly. "Actually, his name is Henry John Kent. The same Henry John Kent who was married to your sister."

  Her eyes got big. "That can't be," she whispered. "I met her husband at the funeral. You saw him there yourself. He's a bigger guy, darker hair."

  "That wasn't Henry John Kent," I said. "His real name is Thomas Dyson. He's a friend of Kent's, from the same secondary school in England. Dyson's a small-time con artist. And unfortunately, Kent is a big-time con artist."

  She was about to speak when the spa therapist called her name. Caroline looked up at her and held her index finger aloft, asking for a minute. "This is all too much right now," she said, her lip quivering. "I have to go. But do you have proof of any of this? I think we need to talk some more."

  "I agree," I said. I fumbled around in my purse and handed her my business card. "Give me a call. But be careful. The reason I'm telling you all of this is to protect you, not to hurt you. Understand?"

  She nodded silently. Her mind was a thousand miles away as she stood up. She headed into the spa like a woman going to the gallows. I felt bad for ruining her spa treatments, whatever they were, but the information was too important to keep to myself.

  The receptionist gave me a funny look as I headed out, having not partaken of any of the spa's smorgasbord of treatment offerings. Being used to funny looks, it didn't bother me. What bothered me was what was waiting for me outside. Parked right next to my Audi was a late model white Range Rover, which I had to assume was Kent's car. I knew he would have dropped Caroline off at the spa, but I wasn't expecting him to hang around while she was inside, which could easily be two hours.

  But where was he? I looked around the neighborhood. There was a ga
s station, a Wendy's, a small motel called Hennessey's High-Ball Hotel, and right next door was a small liquor store, whose signs bragged about thirty-packs of Michelob offered at only $18.99, a thought that produced an involuntary shudder in me. I wasn't about to go hunting around for Kent, since at best that would be an awkward rendezvous. He probably wouldn't buy the idea that it was purely coincidence that I was at the same spa as Caroline, and he might wonder how I knew she'd be there. And if he connected me to his missing cell phone, it could be a heap of trouble. A vague sense of uneasiness began creeping over me, motivating me to stop standing around and to get in my car. I started it up and got myself out of there. Mission accomplished, kind of.

  I had done my duty and warned Caroline. She could take or leave the information as she saw fit, but I expected she'd want to know more. A lot more. The story I had told her was like something out of a soap opera, and if I were her I wouldn't believe it without some proof.

  Back at my apartment, I still felt a sense of uneasiness. My contacts at the LAPD had gone dark, so I didn't know whom else I should report my findings to. Carlos had agreed with my analysis, which I thought was self-evident: the fact that a husband has been dating his wife's sister, unbeknownst to both of them, is a highly suspicious little nugget of information, particularly when the wife ends up dead only a few months into their marriage. Does it automatically mean he's a murderer? No. But it's a piece of the puzzle no one in law enforcement had looked at.

  I forced myself to try to take a nap that afternoon, expecting my body to fight it as it usually did, but I found my consciousness willingly drifting off into a peaceful slumber, a refreshingly simpler world where everyone told the truth and no one overdosed on heroin. It was a world where instead of being a soon-to-be-washed-up stripper, I was a highly respected actress married to Johnny Depp. When I awoke after almost an hour, I resolved to stop thinking about Melanie anymore. I had gone above and beyond what her retainer had required, and I'd even put myself at risk by unearthing the little scheme Jojia had going on with Charles, and, I assumed, Kent as well.