Eddie shrugged. “Not my department. This is Mr. Tooney. He’d like to have a word with you.”
Mr. Tooney was with the IRS. Charlie had heard tell there were more IRS agents in Las Vegas than any other city in the country. Made sense.
She asked for identification, he showed her a card. She had no idea if it was real or faked. “I hope you are who you say you are, Mr. Tooney, because I have a problem.”
“Yes, you do, Mrs. Greene,” he said quietly. He led her down a wide hallway that led to the auditorium where Ben and family had enjoyed Starlight Express last night, then to a quiet corner of a bar not open until evening.
“What did you mean, ‘Yes you do’?”
“You first.” He brought out a notebook and pencil instead of an electronic notepad.
Charlie told him how and why Ben Hanley had been murdered, told of witnessing Patrick Thompson’s murder and trying to convince Officer Timothy Graden. “Art Sleem probably killed him too. I can prove he did Ben though, Mr. Tooney,” she said when he stopped writing and started doodling, “because if he hadn’t been here, how could he have known about the jackpot?”
She put the pile of bills on the table in front of him as evidence. She hadn’t even had time to count them, but the bills she’d seen were all hundreds.
Mr. Tooney, Matt Tooney, according to the card he’d showed her, counted it swiftly. “Your story is very inventive,” he said. “You should take up writing. But murder is really not my specialty, Mrs. Greene.”
“Miss Greene. Well, what do we do? That man is dangerous.”
“My bailiwick is money. And we have here just short of two hundred thousand dollars.”
“Art Sleem took back a bill to pay the waitress for my breakfast and told her to keep the change.” But then it hit her. “I won two hundred thousand dollars playing the dollar slots? Come on. They don’t pay a jackpot like that with cash anyway.” They present you with a check and an IRS form.
“Actually”—and he brought a check out of his wallet and handed it to her—“you won ten thousand. And here it is, and here’s your tax form.”
“So what’s all this?” She gestured to the piles of bills he’d lined up carefully, with Ben Franklin’s picture facing up and toward him.
“That’s exactly what I and the management of the Las Vegas Hilton’s casino would like to know. Apparently, Mr. Sleem was paying you for something else.”
“Listen, Matt Tooney, that jerk is trying to kill me. He followed me to the pool. He followed me to Fremont Street and to a screening last night. He never stopped threatening me.”
“Screening?”
“At Evan Black’s house. He makes movies, you know.” Charlie didn’t mention the content of the film. Somehow, invading secret government airspace and watching a successful robbery of this very casino didn’t seem like the thing to bring up. Like they say, when dealing with the bureaucracy, don’t offer more than is asked, and she’d already broken that rule. “Maybe Sleem figured once I was dead, he could get his money back. But if you’re going to kill somebody, why give them money? This whole thing doesn’t make sense.”
“Exactly,” said the man from the IRS.
CHAPTER 15
MATT TOONEY SUGGESTED that Charlie go to the police with her story and refused to take the $200,000 off her hands.
Charlie explained she’d been to the police and hadn’t heard back and that she didn’t want the money.
“Everybody wants money,” said the tax man. He ought to know.
“Yeah, right, and nobody dies in a casino. Don’t you care that this poor guy was murdered? That his death was a mistake? That I was supposed to die? That I could be next? I mean, I know you’re specialized, but jeez. And the police can’t do anything until after I’m dead. Probably write it off as pedestrian error or ‘Stupid tourist takes dive off the Stratosphere Tower, sources say she was depressed.’”
“This screening. What was its purpose?”
“It wasn’t a screening so much as a sales pitch for money, far as I could tell. Project was still an idea waiting funding.”
“Money, funding.” Mr. IRS looked at the cash on the table.
“You think Sleem was giving me money for Evan Black’s next project? But why wouldn’t he say so? Why all the threats? Why not just give it to Evan?”
“You’re his agent.”
“I just handle his writing contracts and his dealings with other writers for the agency. I mean, I don’t do finance stuff. In fact, I don’t do most of his stuff.” Truth be known, most of the contract work is done by the lawyers anyway.
* * *
Charlie didn’t know where to start, but, fed up with a helpless situation and fortified by anger, a poached egg on milk toast, and a skinny latte with nutmeg, start she would.
But first she ran upstairs to change into shorts and sandals and check out the voice mail message from the office. Ursa Major was dropping the option on Letters to Morticia. Another disappointment. She called Larry to discuss how he would break the news to the author—gently. “Poor guy was counting on that money.”
Her little purse stuffed with enough money to pay off her mortgage twice, she had the doorman hail her a cab for Evan Black’s house. Charlie was so charged by the time she got there, she sent the cab on its way before she realized no one was home. This was a gated community, with a live guard at the gate, but Charlie was on the list of people to be admitted, and the guard must not have noticed Evan leaving.
She stood next to a propped-up dead palm tree and saw something she hadn’t last night in the dark. Evan’s house was on a lake. A lake in the desert.
Unable to raise anybody by pushing the buzzer on the gate to the courtyard, she walked around the high pretend-adobe wall until she came to the lake and stepped easily around the wall’s end. A sleek cabin cruiser sat almost completely still on the glassy dun-colored water. Evan’s backyard consisted largely of pool and fancy tiles. The clear blue of the water in the pool dazzled.
The front might be gated at the road into the development and at Evan’s courtyard, but the back of the house, mostly window, was wide open. Charlie could see many houses similar to this along the lakefront—stucco, tile roofs, impossibly stilled boats tethered at most of them.
Traffic was not that far away, yet it was quiet here. The unrippled water made no sound, even the incessant air traffic from McCarran seemed muted. Eerie, like walking around in a void. Only the sound of Charlie’s shoes as she crossed the gorgeous blue-and-white figured tiles that cracked and buckled and just plain came loose at irregular intervals.
Charlie had little patience with female-in-jeopardy novels. But every now and again, that primordial fear men needed women to feel, so it was worth their valor to go out and kill mastodons, overtook even Charlemagne Catherine Greene.
Losing some of her determination, she decided to see if she could get into the house to use a phone to call another cab. If not, she’d hike back to the gatehouse and ask the guard there to call her one.
All these houses, set close together along the lakefront, were two and three stories high but long and narrow—allowing access to both street and lake for the maximum number.
She walked along the windows, one panel of them after another. Here is where the living took place in this house. The whole first floor was one great room with kitchen, dining room, lounge, and office space sharing the sunlight and lake view. Comfortable, beautifully thought out and coordinated, this was a different house from the one she’d seen last night. There were two sides to this house, as there appeared to be to Evan Black.
Among the panels of windows were doors with glass panels of their own and doorknobs. She tried one, expecting it to be locked. It was. But at the other end of the length of windows between pool tile and house, a door stood ajar on the kitchen end, where she’d started. Why hadn’t she noticed it?
Because in this direction you can see it better and you were too busy ogling somebody else’s private space. That’s wh
ere you began snooping and your concentration was off.
I’m not snooping. And it could have been opened just slightly behind my back while I walked this way. To lure me in.
But a barely visible wire along the bottom of the window line, which was about knee level on Charlie, made her retrace her steps to the suspicious door. Even less perceptible were tiny round sensors attached to the framework between windows.
A fairly quaint alarm system. I could deactivate that with scissors.
It must be deactivated already if the opened door didn’t set it off.
It could signal the guardhouse at the main entrance instead of making lots of noise here.
What do you really know about these things?
Nothing but what I read in scripts and manuscripts. You can pick up a lot that way. Like recognizing that somebody else already deactivated it—it’s cut right here.
Two ends of the wire drooped in defeat at one edge of a window frame.
That’s stupid. Cutting it should send that signal to police or the guardhouse.
Not until she was inside did Charlie realize the front of this great room was open to three stories. A balcony with a staircase at each end connected the second story to this one. A second balcony extended out over the first. All three floors sharing the sun and view. Blank digital clocks on oven and microwave told her the electricity had been cut before the alarm system.
A cordless phone sat upended on a cluttered desk on the back wall under the balconies. A photograph of an enormous building, literally dwarfing the cars and trucks parked around it, caught her attention as she picked up the cordless. And found it dead.
It needs electricity too, stupid. Maybe we should sort of ooze on out of here?
This is the scene in amateurish mystery novels where the female sleuth, instead of listening to her good sense, climbs the stairs and finds a body. Knowing better, Charlie Greene headed straight for the door she’d entered.
And found three.
* * *
Charlie’s head pounded in rhythm with her shoes pounding the pavement back to the gatehouse. She’d tried ringing bells at the locked gates of several courtyards along the way but was answered only by barking dogs who fell silent the minute she retreated.
“This fries it. I’ve had it. I’m out of here.” She knew she was talking out loud and didn’t care. “Six bodies in five days. Gotta be a message there somewhere.”
Walking in this direction, she could see that, though Evan was on a lake, most of the homes backed on canals where they could run their boats out to the lake.
One thing for sure, Art Sleem would never demand his two hundred grand back. He hadn’t been dead long, but dead he was. Charlie hadn’t needed to check to see if he’d wet his pants to know that.
She’d wandered farther into her mysterious client’s home than she’d realized to pick up the phone, absently snooping along the way.
When she turned back toward the getaway door, the bodies lay lined up behind two couches and a long chest with its lid open and what looked to be jumbled rolls of paper inside. Art Sleem lay along the chest. He was hidden from the windows, but if she’d been looking in the other direction instead of at the posters of Evan Black’s films on the rear wall on her way to the phone, he would have been visible to her. The other two had the privacy of the couches to be dead behind.
It was hot and still with all the pavement and decorative rock and white stucco reflecting back the sun. And a long way to the guardhouse.
She could still smell the bitter scent of gunfire she’d curiously overlooked until she saw all the dead.
But it had been the crack of an upstairs floorboard that sent Charlie Greene out that kitchen door on the run.
CHAPTER 16
CHARLIE RETURNED TO the murder scene in a squad car with Officer Leach. The guard at the gatehouse swore he’d let only one unauthorized man into the subdivision and that because the man had official government identification. That would have been Tooney flashing his IRS card for the last time.
“How’d the other two get in here?” she asked the officer when she’d demonstrated how she gained entrance and explained the squeaky floorboard upstairs.
“Probably rented a boat. Tied it up behind some other house. Takes more than a little water and a gate to keep out the bad guys.”
After determining the bodies were all indeed dead ones, Officer Leach ordered her out of the house and around the wall, drew his sidearm, and crept up the stairs before she’d even reached the pool. He didn’t look old enough to be a cop. She was back in the kitchen the minute he disappeared.
Art Sleem wasn’t wearing his turquoise ring. And the other man who wasn’t Matt Tooney had an indentation on his ring finger.
Officer Leach was up there for what seemed an inordinately long time. Charlie grew more curious about up there and less enthused about down here with the dead men.
Careful not to touch the banister, she climbed the stairs, knowing she was still shedding skin scales and hair dust or something to confuse the crime scene. But Charlie figured she’d already done the damage when discovering the bodies to begin with.
The next floor was the main level from the street side. Here were the foyer and the butler’s pantry, where she and Evan had dispersed the crystal last night. A small formal living room and dining room dominated one side of the house, the other taken up by the two-story screening room and elegant his and her bathrooms.
The bedrooms must be off the balcony above. Funny how brave she felt up here now with one cop, young but armed. And there were reinforcements on the way. Floorboards do creak on their own. Houses settle. Probably a lot when at the edge of a lake.
This house seemed to hold its breath as Charlie ascended to the third and final floor.
Two small bedrooms with a connecting bath. A master suite with a huge bath/dressing/exercise room combined. All thoroughly searched and left undone.
The young cop stood next to the Jacuzzi in the master bath, talking to Dispatch on his cellular. He gave Charlie a hard look but went back to his conversation.
“Looks like a burglary as well as murder. Bedrooms torn up. Downstairs put back together, but in a hurry. Up here, it appears the perpetrators had no time to return rooms to normal. May have been surprised by Miss Charlie Greene, Evan Black’s agent, or so she says, entering from below. Could have easily made their way out the front from the second story when she entered on the first. Yeah, she’s here,” and he mouthed to Charlie, “Don’t touch a thing.”
She nodded and looked around instead.
Despite his reputation for thrift on his projects, Evan lived well. His Malibu home was grander than this. The last she knew, he was planning to build a third home in either Sun Valley or Telluride. And she knew of a condo on Kauai.
Even with the king-sized mattress pulled off the innerspring, there was something about the care with which the bedding had been stripped but not quite removed. It appeared to be placed in folds on the floor, suggesting the searchers had intended to return things to normal.
And the young officer was right about the first floor too. Charlie wouldn’t have noticed, but, now that he’d suggested it, she could see how the rolls of paper, maps maybe, had been put back in the chest, but not neatly enough to allow the lid to close.
And she could see the desk down there with the dead cordless and the picture of the improbable building. The normal clutter of a working desktop was strangely organized. Your regular shuffling of overwhelming paperwork, but the stacking was weird.
Odd-shaped piles … wrong somehow … the stacks too even heightwise and too quickly arranged. Photos, drawings, scripts, diagrams, and junk mail stacked more by size than subject, but the stacks still oddly shaped. What was she looking for?
And the photo of the gigantic building, surely some Hollywood prop engineered with photography instead of actual construction, appeared to have toppled from a pile of what looked like household bills mixed with restaurant flyers and prost
itute handbills available on the Strip. Organized by haste and stack height rather than by subject—that was it.
Anyone living in the house would know something was wrong immediately. But at first glance, strangers like police and literary agents might not. Charlie looked back at young Officer Leach with respect.
Charlie learned something about her enigmatic client too. It took a bit of looking beyond the search destruction to know what it was though. One, he was tidy. Two, he was not celibate. Interesting objects had been pulled off closet shelves and dresser drawers, the very least damning of which were condoms, K-Y jelly, scented aerosols, and flavored creams. Various cruel-looking mechanisms. A puzzling array of chains, hooks, ropes, and pulleys. Rotating hooks in the ceiling. All suggested an athletic sex life. Not surprising. But again, he was tidy, or maybe realistic—no mirrors.
Which doesn’t mean there aren’t hidden cameras and snuff videos.
Well no, but Evan is tidy. He wouldn’t leave three dead men in his great room. And where the hell is he?
* * *
Evan Black returned shortly after the reinforcements arrived. He’d been at the funeral of Patrick Thompson and helped to disperse the poor pilot’s ashes from an airplane over the landscape of his family’s request. Charlie didn’t want to know.
She sat in a canvas deck chair pulled up to a glass-topped table on Evan’s pool patio. The white tile had blue Aztec-type markings. So did the table’s umbrella, unfurled now to shield them from the sun. She, Evan, Detective Jerome Battista, and an undisclosed person of authority, who would have worn an overcoat on the Fox Network even in this weather, lunched on turkey subs, bottled water, and crinkled potato chips from some take-out.
Charlie finished off her water before unwrapping her submarine, and Mr. Undisclosed, in shirtsleeves instead of an overcoat, pulled another out of a bag at his feet. He wasn’t wearing a ring on his wedding finger. But had one recently left an indentation? He handed her the water with a purposeful look, presumably to make a lasting impression.
He probably hadn’t witnessed six dead bodies in five days. Now, that makes an impression.
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