Nobody Dies in a Casino

by Marlys Millhiser

  From then on, Area 51, or Groom Lake, was referred to as “this installation” and stills and videos of it appeared distant but from every angle imaginable. Many looked to Charlie as if they’d been taken from Merlin’s Ridge.

  The best shots of all were from the inside of some of the vehicles in the caravan and of the two Cherokees with light bars coming close to cameras, the men with threatening sunglasses motioning drivers to stop and then cursing when someone else in the line ahead broke loose.

  “Told you they’d pack some of that stuff out in their sleeping bags,” Toby purred.

  Shots of the dark helicopters on the ground in front and back and of people, some of them kids, pulled from their vehicles and the vehicles searched. There did not appear to be enough searchers, several of whom were shown being bitten by family dogs.

  A chuckling anchor, sitting in for Tom Brokaw, said, “Wait, this gets better.”

  More laughter from those working in the studio with him.

  “Seems just as all forces were mobilized on one front and military Humvees of the plain old camouflage color came bouncing across the terrain to help out beleaguered security personnel, word came that another section of the perimeter had been breached the night before. And another caravan was now leaving from a different direction.”

  Somebody on the ground had videotaped a long line of four-wheel-drive enthusiasts heading through Rachel from a side road onto the paved highway. Studio jokesters added the triumphant score from Star Wars to accompany the sequence.

  “They must have come out behind us.” Bradone sat on the bed, holding her plate on her lap. “I wonder who cut ground censor wires for them? Could we have just been a decoy?”

  Toby Johnson sat on the floor, eating off dishes perched on a corner of the coffee table in front of Charlie. He turned around on his tailbone to face their hostess, reminding Charlie of Evan Black exercising after the big screening.

  “Merlin thinks of everything.” He rotated his coccyx back to his dinner, Charlie hurting for him, and raised those eyebrows again. “But he tries to never be there when ‘everything’ happens.”

  “You know Merlin?” Charlie asked. “He’s really Evan, right?”

  “I’ve met Evan,” Bradone insisted. She’d dressed in black again, pants and comfortable shoes. Black jacket and a black scarf around her hair. She looked like a cat burglar. “He’s not Merlin.”

  “Toby, why did you go off and leave me on Merlin’s Ridge?” Charlie asked.

  “You disappeared over the side. I couldn’t see you in all that orange. I was going to lug our unconscious hostess back to the tunnel and come look for you, but I tripped while still lugging.”

  “I never went over the side.” If Charlie wasn’t responsible for half the grief that was happening around her this week, Evan “Genius” Black had to be. There was simply no one else.

  Though Bradone comes up in your doubts more often than you want to admit.

  What could be her motive? Misled as she is, she’s always trying to help.

  Right now, she was staring murder at the back of Toby Johnson’s head.

  What motive could Evan have?

  For that Merlin caravan thing, he could have a lot. Like Toby said, he could buy video and stills off amateurs—which some filmmakers wouldn’t touch but which Evan could turn into gold. This guy had motive.

  “Toby, did Evan Black set up this Merlin guy and his scam to entice all the UFO and conspiracy nuts out to Groom Lake? As a cover for something he wanted to do or to draw attention to its obvious existence?”

  Toby batted those eyebrows this time. “Pure magic, right?”

  “Oh no, is this the magic event Evan’s been promising would get us all out of this mess?” It would make Charlie’s government look silly if they went after him now for successfully invading and filming and making a motion picture about an “installation” that didn’t exist.

  Charlie looked at Toby Johnson and saw Bob the limo driver again. Add the fake eyebrows, the little round sunglasses, and cover the dark curls with a tam-o’-shanter …

  Toby returned her look. “Got us a flashbulb here, do I see?”

  What he didn’t see was Bradone on the bed behind him pull a small gray pistol from under her pillow.

  CHAPTER 35

  “BRADONE, HE GOT us out of Area Fifty-one alive.”

  Standing on the bed, the astrologer was doing that asinine stance you see on TV, legs spread, knees bent, both arms extended to steady the nasty little thing in her hands.

  “Charlie, he’s Merlin.” Her lips drew back from her teeth. “And our murderer.”

  “Don’t forget,” Toby said, the little gun rising with him as he got to his feet and began to raise his hands in the air, “Merlin is also a magician.” And before he’d fully straightened, he leapt with the ease of a gymnast, lifting and spreading his legs so his toes met his outflung hands. Bradone’s shot merely creased the cloth of the saggy butt of her shorts, which he was wearing. When he came down, it was on Bradone, forcing her back on the bed, the little gray pistol his in an instant.

  There was a frantic banging at the door to the hall. Charlie raced to open it, knowing it could be her government come to arrest her, but Toby looked like he might be considering using Bradone’s gun. He yelled for her to stop, but by then the door was open.

  Jerome Battista, two uniforms, and Mr. Undisclosed pushed past Charlie into the room and Toby threw Bradone’s little pistol to the floor.

  You could hear shouts and pounding now all up and down the hall, the strident official voices of police and the confused voices of hotel guests. Loopy Louie’s was being raided.

  * * *

  “We know you were collecting great sums of cash for Evan Black. We know you helped him with the holdup at the Hilton casino by shutting down the electricity.” Mr. Undisclosed drove out of the parking lot behind Loopy Louie’s. A sea of light bars on cop cars strobed the night and, above it all, a harem girl and a camel jitterbugged in neon atop the hotel.

  Who’s we? Who, exactly, are you?

  “We know that on at least two occasions you trespassed on high-security areas. That you stole top secret weapons. The charges against you are astronomical, Ms. Greene. And growing by the hour.”

  Why was she alone with him? Funny how dark it was once you’d left the Strip.

  “We know that you were involved in the murder of Joseph Boyles, Arthur Sleem, and Matthew Tooney. What do you say for yourself?”

  “Nothing until I see a lawyer.”

  “In my business, Charlie”—his voiced oozed condescension, made her want to hit somebody. She wished she had the nerve to make it him—“lawyers are not an option.”

  “If you’re not with Metro or the federal government—”

  “There are higher sources of power. Believe me.”

  “You work for God?”

  The car braked, whirled into an Amoco station, and stopped just short of a parked eighteen-wheeler. Charlie was tempted to make a break for it, but he switched on the overhead light and grabbed her wrist, squeezing it so tightly, her hand went numb and floppy.

  “You are in terrible trouble, lady.” His expression was swearing even if his mouth wasn’t. His teeth looked even more jumbled when he grimaced. “And you are not alone in it.”

  He released her and handed her an envelope. In it were four colored photographs. One of Libby Abigail Greene caught stepping out of her heap of a car to slap the obelisk in front of the gate to their condo complex. Even the still had captured the child-woman’s fluid beauty. The obelisk was supposed to open the gate only to those with cards but often took extra persuasion. Damned thing seemed always to be on the blink.

  Then a photo of Edwina Greene, who said things like “on the blink,” which Charlie picked up through osmosis. Her mother was walking past Colombia Cemetery, where Libby’d been conceived. Edwina, her briefcase in hand, wore a stunning pantsuit and either wore a wig or had found a better hairstylist since Charlie las
t saw her. She was obviously on her way to her office and students at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

  Edwina had turned into an angry but stylish late-late bloomer after her mastectomy. She’d never be good-looking, but she’d certainly experienced a transformation.

  Then a photo of Larry Mann driving out of the underground parking garage at First Federal United Central Wilshire Bank of the Pacific in Beverly Hills, where Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc., had its offices. They’d caught Larry, gorgeous and fully aware of it, at the required stop onto Wilshire.

  They had sent out intimidation photographers to the exact nerve centers of Charlie’s life. They certainly did know where she lived. Whoever “they” were.

  The fourth picture was of a man Charlie didn’t know, but figured it was meant for Bradone’s threatening envelope—he was young, dark-haired, well built—lounging in red swim trunks on a redwood deck, with two cats on his lap.

  “So, do we deal?” the grizzle-haired man asked, and took the photos from her.

  “Doesn’t sound like I have anything to deal with. Even if you’re with the CIA or the FBI, you have to let me have a lawyer, don’t you?”

  “Let’s start with what you used to turn the lights out at the Hilton.”

  “It’s attached to the bottom of my purse, which is not with me because I left it out at Merlin’s Ridge.”

  “That’s another strike against you, lady. You and your friends making a laughingstock of patriots. You don’t deserve to inhabit the same planet with those intent on keeping sensitive information and weapons out of the hands of our enemies and keeping our country safe.”

  Even with the thudding of her pulse in her ears, the car was quiet after the sirens and panic and shouting and screaming at Loopy Louie’s. What could have forced the Las Vegas police to go public on a gambling night on the Strip? “Why are you and Battista raiding Loopy’s?”

  “Battista’s looking for that illegal gambling money you helped Black accumulate. My friends and I were looking for you and your coconspirators. You and Louie Deloese helped Black set up this Merlin business to make security at Groom and the objectives of the base itself a laughingstock. Now I’m going to let you out of this with your life on one condition—you’re going to tell the truth to the press.”

  “I don’t know what the truth is.”

  “You will.”

  “That’s a very interesting ring. Is it real turquoise?” You weren’t wearing it when I saw you last, but Battista was wearing his plain wedding band. Arthur Sleem wore one like yours, as did Eddie, the floorman, and, she’d be willing to bet, Joseph Boyles. Whoever murdered Sleem and Boyles took those rings. “Is it a wedding band?”

  Charlie received no answer as they whizzed by the open gate to the Lakes subdivision, where Evan Black lived.

  * * *

  Charlie sat between Richard and Mitch on floor cushions, Evan’s screening room pitch-dark. Mitch snorted like the red bull on the highway this afternoon. “Where the hell were you? I was worried sick.”

  “Out at Groom Lake with Bradone.”

  “Oh great, helping her detect, I suppose. Will you never learn? Oh honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  “I’m not crying. And I’m not honey.”

  “Don’t these guys know it’s against the law to kidnap people? I don’t believe this.” Richard and Mitch had teamed up to find Charlie and were in Mitch’s room when the raid hit. “They hauled us out here without official or nonofficial explanations. Christ, Charlie, we were in a paddy wagon and the driver says he’s neither police nor government, they just cooperate with each other sometimes. He says, ‘I’m private, so your butt’s mud, man. You don’t have any rights.’”

  “I think these are the ex-ARP reverse militia nuts Evan told us about.”

  “Quiet on the set,” Mr. Grizzlehead said.

  Only a select few of those rounded up at Loopy’s had been brought here, led into the room in the dark.

  “Ladies and gentlemen—”

  Lights came on screen. Charlie and Bradone stood in the orange glare on Merlin’s Ridge, hair waving in odd jags, as if electrified instead of windblown. Bradone covered her ears with the heels of her hands, her mouth open in a scream. As usual, there was no sound in Evan’s screening room. Mel and Toby must have been behind them on the ridge longer than Charlie realized.

  The camera couldn’t begin to encompass the thing rising up out of the valley as a backdrop to Charlie and the stargazer or even to suggest its size. All the frames showed was a tiny portion, and that it was moving up.

  The camera distorted the reality by making it look as if she and Bradone were actresses working in front of orange stage smoke. Charlie hit the dirt and grabbed her friend’s ankles. The astrologer fell forward and both began their slide over the edge.

  Mitch snorted again. Charlie had visions of him and his parts trotting down the highway to Rachel.

  Before Bradone’s rump tilted over the edge, the camera tilted up and the view was of what was inside the orange mist.

  Spielberg figures, scrawny and long-limbed, walked in and out of view. One came up close and its benevolent oval-shaped head without hair or ears or nose came into focus. One of the almond-shaped eyes that turned up at the outer corners winked.

  To Charlie, the message here was that everything was safe, all explained, under control, no threat the government couldn’t handle. This is the version she was to tell if they were to let her leave. She figured she was a spokesperson because of the unwanted and inaccurate publicity about her being Mitch Hilsten’s girlfriend.

  Worked for Charlie.

  She relaxed, began thinking of real life again. Libby and her damn Eric and car and employer. Keegan Monroe and his damn novel in Folsom prison, even Edwina and her hot flashes. And all the stuff coming down at the office. Ulcer thoughts. Oddly comforting.

  But then memory images of what she’d really seen in that orange cloud intruded. The shapes barely visible inside the billowing orange gases had been vague rectangles and squares and a few triangles. Charlie’s first thought was of an endless rotating array of office cubicles as seen from overhead, with small moving shapes inside each.

  But hey, if it meant she could return to her life with all its demands and drawbacks and rights, Charlie could believe in little bald aliens with no eyelids who could wink anyway. Cool by her. Noooo problem.

  Well, aren’t we Little Miss Spineless? Where’s your sense of integrity? Justice?

  Got lost in the deep mud.

  “Is that what you saw on Merlin’s Ridge, Bradone McKinley?”

  “No,” Bradone’s sense of integrity answered clearly off to the right of Charlie’s little grouping.

  “And you, Charlemagne Catherine Greene?”

  “Yes.” You betcha.

  “Charlie?” Bradone sounded hurt and surprised.

  “Was it really, Charlie?” Mitch sounded incredulous. But then, like Bradone, he too was an abductee.

  Charlie’s world was drowning in flakes. Who needed aliens? Different shots of the base, with the buildings cleverly cropped or clipped or somehow “disappeared” from the frames and the runways looking like geological anomalies, or riverbeds maybe.

  But someone whose voice Charlie didn’t recognize had the temerity to ask, “You the guys denying access to any new Groom Lake photos on the Internet? Blaming it on the provider?”

  A light scuffle and the speaker was silenced. Could it have been Toby?

  The next question sounded after frames of a plane aloft, dropping orange flares near the black mailbox (now white under its graffiti) for the Medlin Ranch.

  “Is that the other orange thing you saw, Charlie Greene?”

  “Absolutely.” Charlie was a convert. Her government needed to do this stuff. In private. And it had some serious muscle in this room, official or not.

  Next came a big orange balloon, which was not the fascinating thing she saw suspended over the forbidden air base, ris
ing on air and not sitting still.

  “I saw that too,” she offered before Mr. Undisclosed could even ask. She’d confess to anything orange.

  The show went on for maybe another half hour, very boring and inaccurate, but Charlie Greene confessed enthusiastically to the authenticity of every scam deployed. Bradone’s sense of integrity had stopped complaining altogether, but Charlie’d heard no more scuffling and hoped her misguided friend had seen the light. Took more than a stock market to keep you afloat in this world.

  The medium-sized screen was left lighted from behind, a tall, round dunce’s stool placed before it. The screen light went out, and when it came back on, the shadow shape of a stocky man sat there, one leg extended so the foot could reach the floor, the other knee bent, its foot resting on a lower stool rung. Sitting straight, he had his hands placed somewhere in the darkness of his front.

  But the slight repetitious movement of one arm identified him. The flexing of the hand—carpal tunnel syndrome? Some urge to strike out? Insane-behavior control?

  “Name?”

  “Edward G. Hackburger,” Eddie, the floorman at the Las Vegas Hilton, answered.

  “And your connection to the place shown on the piece of movie just played?” The questioner was not up on film lingo.

  “I worked ARP on Nellis for twenty years before becoming head of Hilton security. The two ladies in the stage smoke were guests of the Hilton. And after watching Starlight Express two hundred times, I know stage smoke.”

  “And why are you here?”

  “I’m investigating the robbery of our casino last week.”

  “Did you know Arthur Sleem, Joseph Boyles, and Matthew Tooney?”

  “Yes, sir. Sleem and Boyles used to work ARP on Nellis with me. Matt worked for the company insuring the casino at the Hilton.”

  “Have you ever been employed directly by the United States government?”

  “Not since the marines thirty years ago, sir. ARP service is provided by independent security companies.”