“Sounds more like new software.” Like, not a lotta help. “You must have had some opinion last night when you suddenly went all serious and then stayed up running charts.”
“All I really know at this point is that it’s not a good time for you to be in the position you’re in.”
“What position am I in?”
“The position of being in great danger.”
“There’s a good time for that?”
“Charlie, Mars is squaring your sun.” Just the way her modulated tone deepened, that hint of breathiness that crept into it, the dread when she made that ridiculous statement—she could have been a doctor informing Charlie her cancer was inoperable.
Charlie couldn’t swear that the sinking feeling was her stomach, but something somewhere was sinking. “God, that reminds me—Art Sleem, while loading me down with threats he called ‘warnings’ yesterday, said to warn my high-roller friend she better watch out.”
“You’re making that up to get even with me for being so obtuse. He didn’t even know me.”
“No, honest. Maybe he was working for the Hilton too. Maybe they’re onto your scheme. He kept talking about nobody liking counters and casinos are not public property—they’re private. Which, I suppose, means they can make their own rules.”
“I hate to tell you this, but it’s even worse for me to be in a dangerous position about now.”
“What are we going to do? We can’t just keep walking.”
“I can think of three things right off the bat and I’m sure there are more. But we have to make a game plan first. We need to talk to Officer Graden’s widow and to that pilot’s sister, and I think we should visit Loopy Louie’s.”
They turned left onto Las Vegas Boulevard.
“But take heart. Venus is on your part of fortune in your first house. Otherwise”—Bradone shook her head as if in disbelief—“I’ve never seen a chart like yours.”
* * *
They sat at the bar at Loopy Louie’s, Charlie looking longingly at the blackjack tables across the room.
“Don’t even think about it.” Bradone studied a small calendarlike chart that fit in her billfold. “This is no day for you to chance anything. I expect you’ve been on a winning streak the last few of them though.”
“I thought it was all a setup having to do with Art Sleem, after the hot shoe I shared with you, that is. But it was really the planets and the houses and moons rising and stuff, huh?”
“You were in Venus trine.” Bradone took a long swig of cold beer.
Charlie stuck with a diet Coke. “I don’t get you. You serve your guests yak crud and then you drink martinis and beer. What’s the deal?”
Bradone peered over her reading glasses and billfold star chart. “Yak crud?”
“Breakfast on Tuesday, remember?”
“Oh, I thought you knew.” Her laugh, out loud for once, turned heads for some distance, even considering the noise in the place. Trying to hide with this woman around was fruitless. “You seem so intuitive.”
Loopy Louie’s was literally indescribable, and this was Charlie’s first time here. It had still been under construction on her last trip to Vegas and she’d never made it inside the night Pat Thompson died. “Tasted like chalk ground into goat’s milk. Left a coating on your tongue like a hangover gone postal.”
“It was a test of Richard Morse. Your opinion of him was obvious. I had to form my own.”
He apparently passed.
The bartender was dressed like a eunuch, the dealers like sinister bedouins, and the floormen like even more threatening Arab oil guys—black suits with fezzes (red upside-down flowerpots with tassels). The bar girls were draped like belly dancers in gossamer veils and transparent harem pajamas over G-strings.
Even the noise was different. The calliope bleeps of slots elsewhere were cymbals, gongs, tambourines, camel calls, and weird pipe music here. The racing, blinking colored lights meant to stir up excitement in other casinos were muted colors seen though gossamer scarves blown about by ceiling fans and revealing huge lighted scimitars when they parted.
Charlie wasn’t sure whether to be on the lookout for Bogart, Lawrence of Arabia, or the Ayatollah. The more she saw of this place, the more mundane and reassuring Bradone-the-astrologer became.
Charlie plugged a quarter into the video poker monitor embedded in the bar top to calm her nerves and get her drink free. And lost four dollars in quarters as fast as she could plug them in. Expensive Coke.
Bradone McKinley drew a computer printout from her bottomless purse and grew so agitated over it and her calculations, she ordered another Heineken.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have sold the Singer and bought the Stryker,” Charlie said with little sympathy. “Do you run your charts on a computer?”
“I’ve got a notebook in the penthouse loaded with special software. I don’t know how we managed without them.”
The eunuch leaned over the bar to look at Charlie’s monitor. “I never seen anything like that. Must be something wrong with the machine.”
“Nah, it’s just the stars and the houses and the moons falling. You know, trines and stuff. Don’t worry about it.”
The clamor of a gong startled Charlie into dropping the quarter she was about to play and lose.
Shift change.
Blondes replaced red-haired Arab potentates with freckles and steely eyes. Sweating bedouins in full headgear and robes were replaced by already-sweating new ones. Their eunuch pulled off his rubber baldness to scratch a full head of matted hair as his bald replacement stepped into the bar pit.
And a man, even shorter and older and less impressive than Richard Morse, stepped up to the bar between Bradone and Charlie. “I am Louie Deloese. And you, I understand,” he said, leaning down to pick up Charlie’s quarter and handing it to her, “discovered the body of my good friend Arthur Sleem.”
CHAPTER 20
LOOPY LOUIE DID not look Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Arabian, French, or even loopy. He looked inconsequential, small graying mustache and piercing blue eyes notwithstanding. His little office looked even less consequential. “I understand my friend Arthur gave you some money.”
“Two hundred thousand in cash,” Charlie answered. “Did he work for you?”
“Arthur Sleem worked for whoever paid him, Mrs. Greene. As I have learned, to my dismay.”
“Even the government?”
Louie shrugged narrow shoulders. He didn’t look Las Vegas either, in a tweed jacket over a pale blue shirt and frayed collar. “Who has more money than the government?”
There had been no real overt threat as yet, but Charlie didn’t feel safe. It must have showed.
“Mrs. Greene—”
“Miss.”
“Miss Greene, I just want to know what happened to the money and the details of Arthur Sleem’s death. You are in no danger—not from me anyway.”
“I’m just concerned about my friend,” Charlie lied.
“That is no problem.” He opened a side door of his desk, clicked some buttons, and the wood paneling on one wall parted to reveal a bank of monitors like those in the security area of the Hilton. One of them showed Bradone still engrossed in her billfold chart and scribbling things in her notebook.
Is that why she wanted to come here? Couldn’t she have done that anywhere?
Well, she could have been showing more worry over me.
Why? She can tell what will happen to you by her charts.
“You see? Your friend is fine.” But Louie Deloese left the panel open and that monitor on.
“Art Sleem delivered a whole lot of threats, threats that he called ‘warnings,’ along with the two hundred thousand in cash, Mr. Deloese. One of them was that my friend should be careful. What does she have to do with any of this?”
“Where is the money?” he countered.
“I went over to Evan Black’s yesterday to give it to him because I didn’t know what to do with it, and I found the three murder v
ictims instead. The last I saw of your money, it was in the hands of Detective Jerome Battista of Metro Police.”
He nodded and turned to the monitor, chewed on a fingernail. “Miss McKinley is a well-known high roller. She beats the odds more often than is comfortable, but she does not fit the profile of a counter. Arthur might have been asked to let her know subtly, say through a friend, that she shouldn’t push her luck. This is, of course, only conjecture.”
“By the gaming commission?”
Louie gave the eye roll and sigh that signified he was dealing with a doofus—which he was. “Someone at the Hilton casino? Or the Mirage? She frequented both. Or Bally’s? They see her often.” He watched Bradone scribble and drink beer. “Intriguing woman. But high rollers usually pay out better. Now, about Arthur’s demise.”
Charlie, still feeling honesty would be more likely to get her out of this and still feeling intimidated, described how she found Sleem and the others all lined up behind the furniture in Evan Black’s great room, with identical bullet wounds in the center of their foreheads. She wanted to ask him about the third man on the floor of the great room, but she didn’t know how to word it. Like, Who was that balding friend of Art’s who helped him shove Patrick Thompson under the wheels of a car in front of your casino last Sunday night? Instead, she described how Evan Black’s house had been searched.
“Was the two hundred thousand meant for Evan’s new project? Why in cash?”
“This, after all, is Las Vegas, Miss Greene.”
“A bet? You were paying off a bet? You gave it to Art Sleem to give to me to give to Evan?”
He did the eye roll for doofuses again. “I was honest with you. Do not pretend you know nothing of Mr. Black’s wager of the century, Miss Greene. He has become a very wealthy gentleman.”
“Free money for his project. Even Evan Black can’t get away with stealing money.”
Deloese shrugged, gestured with both palms upward. “The odds that it would be the Vegas Hilton were minuscule—it has the best security in town. Most, including me, thought it would be here. It was brilliant. So I am assuming your client would know better than to keep his winnings in his home.”
“Stolen money is hardly winnings.”
“I’m a little confused as to whose side you are on, Miss Greene. But I assure you the money taken from the Hilton is minuscule compared to those winnings. Everybody in town wanted in on this bizarre wager.”
“But why did Sleem say it was the money from a jackpot I’d won at the Hilton casino?”
“In a way, it was. But for the lights going out at the casino, which won Mr. Black and, I assume, those connected to him a true jackpot. I saw to it that my relatively small debt to Mr. Black was paid. And then I think my friend Art Sleem decided to become greedy.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Nobody else will tell me anything.
“Because I think you, as a representative of Mr. Black, are not as confused as you pretend. Because those lights went out at the Hilton as you entered it. And because I can help Mr. Black with another problem. Tell him there is a channel, most secure, by which he can move tangible assets. I know he will have other offers, but I think my charges will undercut them. If he’d like to discuss this, my nephew will set up a meeting.”
He stood and reached across the desk to shake her hand in dismissal. “I think I would be very careful if I were you, Miss Greene. There are those who will tie you to the robbery, but even more dangerous are those outraged by the method used so casually to achieve it. And she”—he looked back at the monitor, where Bradone started on yet another Heineken—“she should be careful too, your friend. Arthur was right about one thing. I do not believe the stars will be of much help.”
* * *
Emily Graden lived in a white stucco duplex with a red-tiled roof. Inside, all was white except for yellow furniture, blinds, and carpet. Charlie felt like she’d walked into a daisy.
Emily Graden was packing boxes of dishes on the kitchen table. Emily and her children would move in with her parents until she could find less expensive rent. They were down to a teacher’s salary. The little boys were already with Grandpa, and Grandpa wasn’t well. All this, Charlie and Bradone learned from Emily’s mother before they reached the kitchen. A collection of framed movie posters lined the entry hall, one of them for All the King’s Women.
Graden’s women looked hollowed out and empty, in shock over the abrupt change their lives had taken.
Charlie’d called ahead to explain she had witnessed the accident Timothy Graden was probably investigating at the time of his murder. What she didn’t say was that if she hadn’t insisted he look further into the young pilot’s death, Emily’s husband might still be alive.
Charlie felt awful. She looked to Bradone for guidance. But the astrologer’d had one too many Heinekens or trines in the wrong house—whatever.
Charlie tried to ignore the high chair in the corner, gunk still smeared across the tray and caked on the armrests that held it in place. Libby used to do that. When she wasn’t hurling the whole food dish at the wall.
Emily Graden leaned against the counter in front of the sink, hugging her ribs. She would be a pretty woman when her face wasn’t bloated with grief. She wore the same kind of faded denim jeans as Bradone and Charlie. So did her mother. The great homogenizer, like aprons and hats were once.
“Did you see your husband after I did? Did he say anything about Pat Thompson’s murder or my reporting it?”
“He called. Said he had to look into an accident and might be later than usual, see if I could get Mom to take the kids for a few hours the next morning.” He worked nights, she worked days. “Said he was on his way to the Janet Terminal.”
Emily Graden’s mom made a hissing sound.
Bradone finally came back on-line. “The papers and broadcast-news services gave no details about where the hit-and-run occurred or who found your husband. What happened to his bicycle?”
Grandma banged two skillets and a saucepan into a box and threw in a can opener to enhance the racket. Grandma was about to kick them out. You didn’t have to be intuitive to know that. “You don’t have no right to come in here and ask questions of a grieving widow. Shouldn’t have let you in. But she said to.”
“It’s okay, Mom. I assume the bike is back at the station. He took his own car to work. He told me he was going to check something out on his own before involving the department.”
Grandma opened a drawer, took out a cleaver, and studied it.
“But they found him out on the road to the Cherry Patch. Said I shouldn’t want everybody to know about that.” Emily looked at Bradone as if she might consider trusting her. What secret powers did the stargazer have? Besides a compelling personality and a tankful of Heineken.
“The pedestrian killed on Las Vegas Boulevard that night was a pilot who flew workers out of the Janet Terminal, and for producer Evan Black on his off-hours,” Charlie said.
“I know. His sister phoned. Wanted to know if the department had found the vehicle that ran Tim down.”
“Have they, Emily?” Charlie just wanted to get this over with and get out of there.
“Apparently it was a limo like the ones used by several services that ferry men out that way. They’re looking for the driver.”
Brothels were illegal in the city but existed less formally than the legal whorehouses in the county that advertised in the city (even on top of taxicabs). Limo services made a good business transporting vacationing johns out to the flesh and back.
“Was his car damaged?” Bradone insisted. “Was he in it when he was hit?”
“It was in the ditch, out on One Sixty.” Tears came then, without sobs. Emily reached for the Kleenex box next to her.
“Emily, you got two kids, and a daddy with one foot in the grave. What’s the matter with you?”
“Tim wasn’t going to any whorehouse, Mom. He was dumped out there after he was run over. And these women look like they believe
me.”
CHAPTER 21
CARYL THOMPSON’S CONDO was white stucco on the outside with a red-tiled roof too. It was attached to three other condos on a street of similar combinations, all with tiny front yards and gated patios at the four corners.
Inside, Caryl’s home was largely beige. Beige furniture, carpet, and blinds. Tall dried wheat grass in a floor vase. Three-story, with a drive-in basement garage. Two humongous cats moved over on the sofa to make room for Bradone and Charlie.
At Bradone’s insistence, they’d dropped in without calling first this time, giving Caryl less time to fabricate answers to questions she’d expect to be asked. The astrologer reasoned that since Charlie was Evan Black’s agent and Caryl worked for him, they’d gain admittance.
Dressed in sweats, sweat, and stringy hair, still gasping after her run, Patrick Thompson’s sister sprawled on a recliner. A concrete gargoyle leered from the hearthstone of a gas-log fireplace.
The feline who chose Charlie to torture began kneading her thighs through the denim of her jeans, hard enough to make her squirm.
“Why did you call Timothy Graden’s wife?” Charlie wedged an index finger under each of the offending paws to pry the pricking nails loose. “If you didn’t think your brother’s death was murder?” The fat cat hissed and bit Charlie’s thumb before crawling off her and onto as much of Bradone’s lap as its obese partner had left vacant. “I mean, you wouldn’t go to the police, so you must not have thought it was. Or is it that you are just as involved in whatever Patrick was that you’re afraid to?”
“Look, my brother is dead. My parents just left, hallelujah, and I must have run ten miles to get those two disasters out of my system. And now you turn up. I have to shower and get to work.” The bones in Caryl’s face looked larger without makeup, her eyes smaller. “How did you know I called Emily Graden?”
“We just came from there.” Charlie sucked her thumb and tasted blood. “Was your brother run over by a limo too? The kind that takes johns out to the Patch? Did you think it might be the same one?”
“Having them both run over the same night—of course I wondered. And, yes, I’m just as involved as he was.” Caryl pulled the stringy hair up off her face and neck and knotted it behind her head. “And now you are too, Charlie Greene,” she said, and shrugged. “Involved, I mean. These people don’t take prisoners.”
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