Smoke & Mirrors

by John Ramsey Miller

  “And you know this how?”

  “It’s what the victim told me.”

  “How do you know he was telling the truth about anything? If he’s committed a homicide, murderers don’t always tell the truth.” White smiled uneasily.

  “Because the victim was semiconscious in the tub when Beals got killed.”

  White leaned in and told Brad huffily, “We’re a legitimate business operation. We do not beat up our customers, and the idea that our management would condone any illegal activity, or order it done, is preposterous. This casino is not owned by the mafia, for Christ’s sake. If we discover a customer is not playing fairly, we take their picture, have them sign a statement admitting their guilt—and they view the tapes themselves as a matter of procedure—take down their names and addresses, and tell them never to return. We blacklist them. We have our reputation and our gaming license to think of. I was a law enforcement officer for thirty years. If Beals was dirty, it is a total surprise to me.”

  “I haven’t accused you of anything, Albert,” Brad said.

  “Was he on duty today?” Winter asked.

  “He went off the clock at noon, I believe. I could check that, of course.”

  “If he hung around after he got off,” Brad asked, “would you have him on videotape?”

  “Our system is digital, but yes, we would have a record of it. But our employees are not allowed to hang around here after they clock out. They don’t gamble here, or in any other casinos, or we fire them.”

  “If he was here after his shift, how would you know that for sure?”

  “We have cameras everywhere and our people would have spotted him if he was in the building.”

  “So if Beals was eating in one of your restaurants, you would have it on tape?”

  “We monitor the entire operation constantly. If I know what time you are interested in, I could locate the corresponding images—although it would be a time-consuming enterprise for our people. But we would be happy to cooperate in any way we can.”

  “If he targeted the victim during his shift and had robbery in mind, I’d like to know if he had a partner working with him. A partner may have killed Beals, or might tell us who did kill him.”

  White digested this for several long seconds. “I’ll put in a request for my people to go over the captures and see if Beals turns up while the patron was here. This sort of thing is something we obviously have to discourage.”

  “You should be able to look at the blackjack player who was assaulted and see who was around him, maybe watching him. Can you do that?”

  “I’ll see that it’s done and you can review the images yourself. If that’s all?”

  “That’ll do,” Brad said. “And if you can give me your contact numbers?”

  “This has my office and cell,” White said as he pulled out a card and handed it to Brad. “I’ll show you out,” he said, standing. “Can I fax you Jack Beals’s next-of-kin information? The personnel office is run by a skeleton crew until eight A.M.”

  “That would be fine,” Brad said.

  After they left the casino, Brad said, “You pick up on that?”

  “That he looked like he was going to pass a watermelon the entire time we were there? Or the fact that he offered to collect the images of our man at the blackjack table without us mentioning his name or describing what he looked like? I did.”

  “If he furnishes the images of Scotoni without calling to ask the particulars, we can ask him how he knew who we were talking about, since he shouldn’t have been able to read our minds.”

  “If he asked Beals to talk to Scotoni, it doesn’t mean he told him to do what he did to him,” Winter said, yawning. “But it could mean that White was working with Beals to rob winners.”

  “It’s late. Let’s get some rest and go after this at first light,” Brad said, holding up White’s card. “By the way, the last number Beals called…”

  “Is the cell number on that business card,” Winter said.

  “We could go back in and ask him about that,” Brad said.

  “He’d just say he didn’t talk to him or that Beals asked his boss a business-related question. He knows Beals called him, and he’ll begin to wonder why you didn’t ask him. Let him do some worrying. Sometimes it’s better just to let things percolate.”

  26

  LOCAL CURRENT EVENTS, MUCH LIKE THE TIME OF day, rarely invaded the Roundtable’s upper offices. Gamblers didn’t bring the outside world in with them, and the staff was too busy collecting their money to care. Pierce had learned from his secretary when she’d come in that morning that a young woman had been killed at the Gardner cotton plantation. The news had opened the door to troubling questions.

  After Pierce had asked Albert White to find out the particulars, White had called his contact in the sheriff’s office, a deputy with a gambling problem that had gotten her indebted to the casino for approximately her yearly salary. She told White that a babysitter on the Gardner place named Sherry Adams had been killed by an errant rifle shot. Whatever had happened, it was a very troubling complication in an already complex and delicate maneuver. But he had been told that his involvement was not required. How the death of the young girl fit in, or didn’t, was chewing on his guts.

  When Tug knocked and opened the door to his office, Pierce Mulvane frowned. He knew by Tug’s demeanor that whatever he was about to tell him wasn’t going to lift his spirits. After Tug closed the door, Pierce locked his hands behind his neck and leaned back in his chair.

  “The sheriff was just here,” Tug said. “He met with Albert.”

  “Yes?” Pierce felt a pang of anticipation in his chest. “What was it about?”

  “It was about Jack Beals.”

  “Yes,” Pierce said, closing his eyes. “What about Beals?”

  “He got clipped.”

  “Clipped.” A white-hot poker in the eye would have hurt less than those words.

  “The sheriff told Albert that Beals was drowning that blackjack-cheating kid out at the Gold Key and somebody killed him while he was doing it. Cut his throat. They’re thinking our security tapes might show Beals scoping him out or somebody watching the kid who was working with Beals.”

  “You know what this means?” Pierce asked, without waiting for an answer. “Police involvement at the worst possible time.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “This requires more careful consideration than I can give it at the moment.” He shifted uneasily in his chair, tapping a pencil on the desk.

  “Barnett thinks the guy who killed him was probably working some strong-arm robbery angle with Beals. Albert told the sheriff he’d check but Beals wasn’t here after his shift, which he said was till noon today. He’ll rig Beals’s time sheets.”

  “No. Sheriff Barnett is out of his element, but he isn’t stupid or lazy. What happens when he interviews the staff? Who knows how many people saw Beals here after noon? Tell Albert to leave the time sheets as they are and say he only thought Beals was on till noon. Albert’s got too many people to know who’s where and when. I need to know who the cheater’s backup was and we need to get to them before the sheriff does. Tell Albert to get on it and brief me before he tells the sheriff anything. Maybe I should put the attorneys between Albert and the sheriff. No big deal. We have plenty of friends who can smooth ruffled feathers.”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  “Tug, the time for mistakes is over. From here out let’s take the word ‘fail’ out of our collective vocabularies.”

  Pierce sat back and closed his eyes again. The situation with the Gardners had to be resolved before Kurt Klein arrived. Unless it was handled, Pierce Mulvane would lose everything he had worked so hard for.

  He had assumed the professional hired to handle things would do so. Pierce told himself that if he had made a mistake, it had been in trusting Kurt Klein’s guy, this mysterious Pablo. Klein had no right to blame Pierce if that Pablo creep had gone crazy and shot som
e kid. But he knew Klein would never accept the blame for anything that went wrong, even if it was completely his fault. No telling what exorbitant rate this Pablo was getting, and from what Pierce could tell, he was making it up as he went along. Killing babysitters and people on the wrong side, for Christ’s sake.

  He hadn’t expected Pablo would bring the authorities charging into the casino. What he’d expected was a tragic and senseless accident, and a trio of freshly dug graves in the Gardner family plot. Maybe that was still Klein’s plan. Maybe the rest was just misdirection.

  Pierce made it to the bathroom, knelt at the toilet, and tried to talk himself out of throwing up, like a sick child would. But his reasoning failed.

  27

  JACK BEALS’S HOUSE WAS TWO MILES FROM THE CITY limits, a small brick ranch house set in a circle of leafless oaks surrounded by soybean fields. The place had a narrow gravel driveway and a neatly kept yard. Winter and Brad climbed out of the Tundra to a stiff northern wind that caused Winter to button his wool jacket against the chill and pull down the bill of his ball cap. The two men slipped on surgical gloves as they approached the front of the house.

  The exterior windows were fitted with formidable burglar bars, and the front door was a steel security model painted stone gray.

  “Looks like Beals was paranoid,” Brad said, taking an envelope out of his pocket. Opening it, he poured into his hand the ring of keys they’d found in Beals’s pocket.

  Two dead bolts later, Brad pushed open the front door and they stepped into Jack Beals’s living room. Blackout shades made the house as dark as a cave, so using the light from the open front door, Brad found and flipped on the lights.

  The living room furniture was spare, but tasteful and expensive. A sleek leather couch and matching side chairs faced each other over a maple coffee table set on a real zebra-skin rug. The light fixture was a sphere crafted of wide ribbons of bird’s-eye veneer shaved so thin they were translucent. Two oversized abstract paintings hung on the walls and a freestanding bar near the door to the kitchen was topped with an ice bucket, a pitcher, and several bottles of liquor.

  A plasma TV had been positioned on a sleek credenza, which Winter opened. It contained a video/DVD player and stereo setup that shared a pair of surround-sound speakers with the TV. Winter opened the drawers and thumbed through stacks of movies on DVD.

  The master bedroom revealed a bed on a platform of polished wood, a large bamboo rug, two matching chests of drawers, and another abstract painting on the wall over the bed. “Not set up for spend-the-night guests either,” Winter waxed.

  The door to the walk-in closet was open, with the clothes neatly ordered on shelves or hung precisely on rods. A camera case sat on the floor. Inside the case Winter found a video camera.

  The bathroom was spotless.

  A steel security door with a dead bolt indicated that the room down the hall was probably not a guest room. One of the keys opened it, and Winter found the light switch beside the door. A row of fluorescent fixtures illuminated the room like high noon in Miami. The windows were plated in sheet metal, the floor covered with heavy canvas painted battleship gray.

  This room was about as different from those in the rest of the house as a pig and a parrot. In a cabinet, behind sliding sheets of Lexan, a dozen pistols hung by their trigger guards on pegs. Some, like a SIG P-210 and a beautifully engraved Colt National Match 1911 with a four-digit serial number, were expensive. Three tactical shotguns fitted with high-intensity flashlights formed a row on one side. There were two AR-15s, one with a scope.

  A pair of electronic earphones hung on another peg.

  Two reloading presses were mounted on a sturdy table. Stacked red plastic bins at the rear of the table held cartridge brass in various calibers, bullets, powders, and primers. Hard long gun cases stood together under the table along with three pairs of hunting boots. Targets pinned to the walls held groups of interlocking holes from handgun practice.

  An aluminum rifle case leaned against the wall. Winter put it on a table and opened it to find a tactical rifle with a camouflage composite stock and a very substantial scope.

  Brad lifted the gun to read the markings on the barrel.

  “Dakota T-76 Longbow in .338 Lapua Magnum,” Brad said. He opened the bolt and sniffed the chamber. He smiled. “It’s been fired recently. I think we might not be dealing with your Styer after all.”

  Winter felt momentary relief that Beals might have fired the round that took Sherry Adams’s life. But the feeling didn’t last but a moment. “Even without my business card, it doesn’t wash. He was a very neat young man,” Winter said as he took the weapon and looked it over. “Why would he put this one away without cleaning it?”

  “It’s an expensive rifle,” Brad said. “Five to eight grand. Maybe more. The optics could run four or five.”

  “But there’s nothing here that shows he was the kind of marksman who could make a thousand-yard shot. This is the only real sniper rifle he had, and there are no rifle targets here. And,” Winter said, “he wouldn’t have left the brass behind. Aside from a ballistics match, he was a reloader and a neat freak. Doesn’t fit.”

  Winter opened a side compartment in the gun case, where he found a dozen clove-scented red toothpicks. There were also four loaded rounds and leather shooting gloves.

  “So, it still might not be your Styer,” Brad insisted, his eyes widening. “Looks like the toothpicks and the gun belong to Beals. He could have intended to leave the toothpick we found behind his ear on Scotoni’s corpse.”

  “This is a setup,” Winter said firmly.

  “You think Styer set Beals up? Think he knew Beals well enough to know about this room? Came here and planted the weapon after he killed him? Happened to have had a key to the house and this room?”

  “Maybe or maybe not. I could get past the locks in a couple of minutes.”

  “You said Styer always works up close.”

  “Only with his primary targets, and I’m sure he was trained in long-range marksmanship,” Winter said as he studied the handgun targets pinned on the walls. He noticed by the holes in the corners that one of them had been unpinned and pinned numerous times, and the others hadn’t. He moved closer and pulled out the pushpins holding the top of the target, letting it fall so it was held to the wall by only the bottom pins. It revealed a metal front to a safe imbedded between the studs.

  “Check the keys,” Winter said. “There should be one that fits this.”

  One key slid into the lock and turned easily. Winter opened the door and took a deep breath.

  “Christ,” Brad said. “We need one of those bill-counting machines.”

  A dozen DVD cases sat on top of several neat stacks of currency. Each was carefully labeled with a date.

  “Looks like we need some boxes,” Winter said.

  28

  AFTER LEAVING THE MAJORITY OF THE EVIDENCE they’d gathered from Jack Beals’s house in the sheriff’s vault, the two tired men picked up fast food hamburgers and went to Brad’s house to eat and get Winter settled. Winter had checked out the DVDs so he could watch them away from the prying eyes of the other deputies. Where Styer was involved, the less that people knew, the better.

  Brad lived in a two-story brick house on a tree-lined street near downtown with a muscular—and suspicious—Labrador and pit bull mix named Ruger. Brad showed Winter to a guest bedroom on the second floor. A few minutes later, the two men were sitting downstairs in Brad’s den wolfing down the hamburgers they’d brought home. Ruger sat beside Brad’s recliner, his dark eyes glued to the new guy seated in the recliner opposite his master.

  “Ruger’s a handsome dog,” Winter said. “Bet he keeps strangers out.”

  “He’s actually a she,” Brad said. “She’s just big boned. Aren’t you, baby?”

  Despite Brad’s continuing admonitions, Ruger growled at their guest from time to time. Deer heads mounted on the walls stared out through glassy eyes and stuffed ducks on plaques flew
imaginary circles around the furniture. Framed family pictures included one of a younger Brad Barnett in Marine fatigues. In the snapshot, he was holding a scoped rifle in the crook of his arm.

  “I guess you’re wondering what the friction between me and Leigh is about?”

  “None of my business,” Winter said. “But she does remind me of this girl I knew in grade school. Alice Murphy went out of her way to make my life hell. Whenever she saw me, she’d either stick out her tongue, rub my hair the wrong way, or pinch me. At a class reunion years later she told me she’d had a horrible crush on me in the third grade, and when I ignored her, she gave me a hard time to get my attention. Didn’t seem like that to me at the time, of course. I mean, she terrorized me.”

  Brad smiled. “I went with Leigh from the sixth grade through high school,” he said. “She was something back then. A finer, better looking, and sweeter girl never drew a breath. All the way up until I joined the Marines. I wasn’t ready to go to college, and she was, and there was no war on then.

  “Leigh’s mother died from a heart attack a few weeks after I entered boot camp. No warning. She just closed her eyes while sitting in her chair watching some TV sitcom. Leigh and her father didn’t even notice until the show was over. They thought she’d fallen asleep. That’s the way to go out.”

  “I like to imagine I could die in my sleep,” Winter said.

  “During my four years in the corps, we drifted apart. Each time I came home, our thing was more strained and since we weren’t together like before, our differences were more obvious to us. And I picked up drinking in the corps out of boredom. Leigh rarely drank and she had no patience for a drunk. We didn’t fit the way we had before and I wasn’t the same person I was when I left. She couldn’t cope. In my defense, I was a cocky jerk with a beer in one hand and a large chip on my shoulder. I was TPP positive then.”