She’d once had a close encounter of the carnal kind with one of the more famous of these people and could personally attest to the strength of their beliefs. Fortunately, this particular guy had a few other strengths, not the least of them a fantastic back.
Barry and Terry didn’t pretend Area 51 was nonexistent, and they warned that security forces in restricted areas, “armed response personnel,” were highly professional, heavily armed, and authorized to use deadly force.
Evan Black arrived disheveled and sweating, and Caryl Thompson was crying. How could anybody’s pilot be that young? Obviously, Evan didn’t share Charlie’s fear of flying.
Charlie fought guilt. He was wearing what he’d worn the night before, along with a morning beard, uneven in length and patchy. He had not slept well like she had. He bent to pick up a flyer somebody had slipped under her door.
A sky blue flyer with a golden cross and an unlikely cloud formation in the background that spelled out “REPENT!”
“… should not be allowed to advertise brothel services in the city,” Barry said.
“You’ve got to tell me everything,” Caryl said.
“I already told you,” Evan said.
“I want to hear it from her.”
“FOR THE TIME IS AT HAND,” the inside flap of the flyer said.
Caryl hadn’t changed her clothes either. Charlie got them seated on the couch under the window, where the sky backdrop was blue but the few clouds weren’t spelling out anything.
She tossed the tumbled bedclothes toward the headboard to cover the suspicious stains spilled coffee had left and ordered up juice, coffee, and bagels. Just as she reached for the remote to get rid of Barry and Terry, Terry said, “Yes, and although the crime rate is high in Las Vegas and gaming is often blamed for it, did you know there has never been a murder in a casino?”
“Hell no, they just walk them outside and push them into traffic while everybody’s watching a frigging volcano,” Charlie answered her.
Caryl’s face crumbled into Evan’s shoulder and he sent Charlie a beseeching look.
“Well, folks, now that you know where the safest places in Vegas are,” Barry reassured them, “go out and have some fun.”
Caryl Thompson made no effort to keep the vest in place and her nipples played peekaboo with the atmosphere. She and her brother had been born in Vegas. Their parents divorced and moved to opposite coasts. “But Pat and I both had work flying the ditch and were building hours, so we stayed. And now, now I don’t have anybody.”
“The ditch?”
“Grand Canyon.”
Charlie described the three men on the sidewalk and her suspicions to Evan and a calmer Caryl. Their breakfasts came and both claimed a lack of appetite, then proceeded to pack most of it away.
“You’ll just have to go to the police and tell them who the victim was and that he’d lived and worked here all his life. They’re convinced he was a tourist, too excited about the wonders of Vegas to watch where he was going,” Charlie finished.
“I know, pedestrian error. There is a lot of that going around.”
“Caryl, it was wall-to-wall traffic. If you’d wanted to jaywalk, you’d have had to hop from one car hood to the next. They must have waited for the light to change and cars to begin creeping again and timed a shove to get him to street level at all. He was definitely not himself.”
“I can’t go to the cops.”
“Caryl—” Evan warned.
“You have to. Your brother was murdered.”
Charlie, stay out of this. It is not your business. And you don’t know the dead guy was her brother. And Evan’s looking funny. Vegas may be a great place to have fun, but it’s a bad place to get involved.
“You’re right,” Charlie told her common sense.
“She is?” Evan looked from Charlie to Caryl and back again.
“I am?”
“Absolutely. I’ve told you all I know about your brother’s death. And the police too. It’s up to you now. Would you believe I came here for a vacation?” Charlie stacked their dishes back on the tray, pointedly opened the door to the hall. To hell with her conscience.
“You mean you’re not going to do anything?” Caryl was youthfully plump in only the right places. It gave her a healthy innocence, hard to square with the vest.
“Hey, he wasn’t my brother.”
Evan Black and his lovely pilot left, obviously disappointed in her. What did they expect?
They were trying to use her.
Charlie applied a trace of eye shadow, tried to improve on her hair, and grabbed her purse. This time, she would listen to common sense and leave well enough alone. If poor Pat the pilot’s sister couldn’t talk to the police, Charlie sure as hell wasn’t going to. Evan Black wasn’t telling all either.
“I’m on vacation.” Charlie yanked the door open to a blonde who stopped just short of knocking on Charlie’s forehead.
“I am too.” The blonde withdrew her knuckles, tightened her tit and ass lines, and walked into the room as if it were hers. “How’d you know? I mean, that I was outside the door before I could even knock?”
“I was on my way out.”
Charlie’s visitor looked around the room, checked the bathroom. “Are there two of you?”
Actually, sometimes there are, me and my common sense. “Not at the moment.”
“I’m Tami.” Tami reached into a back pocket of her jeans and withdrew a tightly folded note. “Are you Congdon and Morse, Inc.?”
“Uh … I’m part of it.”
“I understood this was going to be a guy gig, but I’m flexible.” Tami stretched a well-muscled body to prove her point. Her eyes were an even deeper blue than Caryl’s.
“He didn’t tell me you were coming.”
“Hey, got it. You’re a couple who want to go home with fantasies to keep things hot for months, right? Well, I’m your girl.”
“Poor Richard.”
“I can take care of poor Richard anytime.” Tami dropped herself to her knees, and her halter to her waist. “And you too.”
Tami reached for the snap on her jeans and for Charlie’s crotch.
CHAPTER 3
IT WAS STILL early. There was only one blackjack table operating in the Hilton’s casino downstairs, where acres of crystal hung from the ceiling, at odds with the arcade decor below it.
Charlie made a third player at the table and accepted a free Bloody Mary from the breakfast cocktail server. This was party-twenty-four-hours-a-day town. Right?
Besides, Charlie’d earned it, rescuing herself just in the nick from a fate worse than death. She’d convinced Tami the bodybuilder to hurry next door and relieve Richard Morse of his anxieties and no doubt a good portion of his cash. The agency didn’t cover Tamis as an expense, surely. Did Tamis take Visa?
Charlie might be on vacation, but she had an early dinner date with a local book author at an outdoor restaurant at the Flamingo around six and she was determined to enjoy the rest of the day before that, no matter how many people were struck dead around her. One always dined with Georgette early because the author was in bed by 8:30. Charlie had the feeling Georgette Millrose was not going to be a happy date.
There were six decks in the shoe—a clear plastic box with a ramp on its face that delivered one card at a time—all mixed up together. Dealers rarely played the shoe down much over halfway. Treasure Island had the reputation for dealing down the farthest. With three players at the table and ten burn cards shoved into the discard box, she couldn’t know how many face cards and aces had already turned up.
An intense guy on one side of Charlie played a roll of hundred-dollar bills, three at a time, instead of chips. The woman to her left sat whimsically relaxed, seemingly daydreaming, checking her watch as if passing time until a companion arrived to take her to breakfast. But blackjack is a fast-moving game, and her signals to the dealer were on time and to the point.
The dealer was of the silent, stoic variety Charli
e preferred. She found the chummy, garrulous types a distraction.
Lights flashed, zipped, and careened around the room, glinting off crystal facets. Metal tokens clanked into slot trays, and a few levers ratcheted. Whistles, calliope bleeps. Vacuum cleaners buzzed before the true crowds descended again. And this was one of the more staid of Vegas’s casinos. No wonder nobody died in these places. No quiet place to do it.
Charlie’s overly acute hearing, the result of her inability to indulge in loud music as a teen due to tone deafness, could be both a boon and a vexation.
Her aging, horny boss, her close call with his lusty entertainer, even what they could possibly be doing at this moment, the body in the gutter last night, Evan Black the important. Had he insisted Charlie talk to the police again, she would have. But he’d acted disappointed that she wouldn’t and reluctant to have her do it. Granted, by the time Evan saw the pilot, he was not readily identifiable. And Caryl with the peekaboo nipples—they all faded as the game took hold. Mercifully, the background noises blended, then receded.
And yet Charlie registered the pit boss’s belt buckle, silver and turquoise, with a finger ring to match, the hair on the back of his hands as he turned to keep watch on the dealers at various games around him. The way those hands flexed at his side as if surreptitiously exercising, the crooked seam in one pant leg.
The low cards were playing out. And the kings.
The eye in the sky, circled with crystal lashes, kept watch on the pit boss and the placing of chips at the tables. Charlie did not have the memory to be a card-counter, but with a six-deck shoe that would probably only be played down four decks anyway, she didn’t know how anybody could tell how many face cards might be left.
The black globes pocking the crystal and two-way mirrored ceiling offered a decorative contrast, reminding Charlie of alien bug eyes. They held camera eyes instead, taping people and activities in the crystal cavern. No wonder there weren’t any murders in the casinos—they’d be documented in the process.
The best places for blackjack were downtown on Fremont, the original Glitter Gulch, where there were casinos that advertised single and double decks. That’s where the dedicated locals played.
The reason Charlie and Richard and everybody at Congdon and Morse used to prefer to stay at the Vegas Hilton was the relative absence of children. Now, with the new Star Trek Experience wing, there were more families evident. But here in the old casino, one rarely noticed them. And Richard had some kind of deal on rooms at this hotel. Even if she lost money gaming, it was a cheap vacation.
Charlie was aware on some level of the odors of stale tobacco, spilled beer, dead perfume, sweat, and the chemical deodorizers out to kill them all.
The guy next to her ran out of hundreds and left the table, muttering something about this “filthy town” and the “blasted world.” Charlie couldn’t tell if he was a Kiwi or an Aussie. She’d never doubted she could lose at gambling. But she also thought she could win. Gamblers are optimists. The shoe was emptied and refilled with brand-new decks, the pit boss peeling the cellophane wrappers off himself.
After the next deal, Charlie, with an ace and a five, scratched for a hit and so did the woman on her left, but by pointing at the table in front of her. She wore her bangs heavy to cover the wrinkles on her forehead, had her hair colored that sandy brown so popular these days, and sported a bemused smile that only toyed with her lips but fairly sparkled in her eyes. She dressed in loose-fitting cream slacks and jacket over a cream silk shell, gold chain necklace, and earrings. The only contrast, the deep tan of her skin and the blue shading on her eyelids.
The woman in cream and gold began to win and she began to play with two and then three black chips at a time and then stacks of the hundred-dollar tokens. The bemused smile turned to silent laughter. She straightened in her chair.
The dealer grew more tense than formal now. The pit boss settled behind him and stayed.
Everybody’s guilty until proven innocent in Vegas.
Charlie figured most of the cameras behind the bug eyes overhead were zooming in on this table too, to make sure nobody on either side of the table cheated the house.
This was a hot shoe. There was a streak going here.
Even the security rooms and halls in “that other casino” have cameras taping everything that goes on. Charlie knew, because a few years ago two cops were taped beating a purse snatcher caught in a casino. They were taped beating and threatening to sodomize him with nightsticks. God, you couldn’t even die in that mysterious security area all casinos have without being documented.
In fact, Charlie had never heard of anyone just dying in a casino, simply dropping dead of something. Older, and often hugely overweight, people were common in these places.
Charlie’s other mind was making money. But nothing like the cream-and-gold woman, who laughed, never making a sound.
* * *
“It was awesome,” Charlie told her boss as they lay side by side on webbed deck chairs by the pool. This recreation deck on the third floor was also awesome. All eight acres of it.
“She counting?” Richard sprawled on his back, trying to hide the bruises forming there.
Charlie would save Tami for later ammunition. Tami had apparently not mentioned Charlie. “I don’t think so. It’s like when the shoe changed, she knew it would be hot. Like she waited for it to get dealt down less than maybe a fourth of one deck and got interested. She kept checking her watch though. Wonder if that means anything.”
“Sounds like you made your move then too. You’re supposed to be the psychic—maybe she was watching your reactions.”
“No, she started it. I just went with the flow.” Charlie’d come out about thirty thousand dollars richer, thanks to the woman of the silent laughter, who must have made more like several hundred thousand. The dealer, pit boss, and hard-faced suits that gravitated toward the pit weren’t laughing. “And if I were psychic, Richard, I’d be rich by now. It’s not like this is my first trip to Vegas.”
“Just don’t spend it all in one place.” Richard the Lion-hearted, as he was known around the office, had a hickey.
“It’s all going to the college fund.”
Richard raised to an elbow to wipe the steam off his sunglasses with his towel. He had protruding eyeballs that gave him a certain air of authority for no good reason. “What, she’s changed her mind again?”
“That, she’s good at.”
Libby Greene, seventeen, had been waffling about college for the last three years. One time, she wanted to be an astronaut, another an archaeologist, then a stripper, then a doctor in sports medicine, your regular model, movie star, even housewife. She’d been through many careers in her mind, for most of which, neither she nor her grades qualified. Actually, Libby Abigail Greene’s qualifications for model and movie star grew more apparent by the month.
Charlie would rather the kid find some rewarding skill to keep her satisfied, fed, happy, and as independent financially as she was temperamentally. Charlie had a life. She hoped the same for her daughter. “She gets her braces off next month.”
“Oh, Jesus. Don’t waste your money on the college fund.”
“Think I’ll get it wet.”
The water was just cool enough to refresh at the weeny end, cooled enough at the deeper end to be invigorating without being uncomfortable. I won thirty thousand dollars this morning. Saw a murder happen last night. And don’t remember when I’ve enjoyed life more than I do this day. Something’s wrong with the script here.
“You look better when you’re all wet, know that?” Richard Morse told her when she returned to the lounge chairs. “Now don’t get huffy on me, babe, Because I been thinking about your problem.”
“Which problem?” Charlie gathered her things, her “all wet” chilling in the dry October breeze up here, and headed for the concrete Grecian Jacuzzi, Richard trotting along behind her. Built to fit twenty-four, according to the sign—you could have crowded in another t
en easy. Formed and rounded in mysterious ways to accommodate couples, the molded underwater bench rimming the tub suggested the sign meant twelve couples.
There was only one man in the Jacuzzi when they arrived, bubbles foaming almost to his chin.
She and Richard crawled down into the couple niche farthest from the man in the circle, as people do when they have all the room in the world.
“The thirty thousand problem—wait, is this before or after taxes?”
After—and I don’t believe it either. “Before.”
“Oh, well … still, Charlie, you know what you should do with it?”
“Gamble it away?”
“Stock market.” The wise man with the Tami hickey nodded sagely and slid down into the frothing hot water up to his chin too.
“Same thing, right?”
“Not at your age, babe. You think you’re independent because you have a job and a mortgage. Take those away and you’re on the street, and your kid too. Time you began to think about compounding.”
Richard Morse, the second bane of Charlie’s life, her mother being the first, was nothing if not mysterious. Her daughter was just young, and there was always some hope for improvement in that quarter. “Compounding what?”
“Dividends. DRIP. Face it, babe, we’re in a risky business here.”
“Who isn’t?” Take your hunk pilots, for instance.
“Yeah, but we know it. We need to plan for the future. Charlie, you listening to me? What’s wrong with you?”
Charlie belatedly figured out what was wrong. That other guy in the Jacuzzi with them? He was one of the two heads who’d walked away from a murder on the Strip last night.
CHAPTER 4
“GEORGETTE, HOW WONDERFUL to see you again.”
The outdoor café at the Flamingo Hilton had real flamingos in a garden-pool-courtyard paradise and other exotic feathered and leafy things. It also had paths and nature signs for the educationally inclined and trash music that drowned out miniature waterfalls and surviving birdsong. They sat at a table shaded by the monstrous backdrop of the Flamingo, an umbrella, and a wilting palm imported from California.
Nobody Dies in a Casino Page 2