I loafed around for a while before realizing it would be wise to transfer the iPhone video of Mayfield to my computer, where it would be safer. On my full screen, you could clearly tell that it was Mayfield, not that I wanted to see his lumpy, ghost-white body on a larger screen. I wasn't exactly sure you could identify the two girls as underage, but that would be up to the cops and the DA to figure out. Thinking about it made me a little sick to my stomach. Carlos and I had managed to catch Mayfield in flagrante on our first try, which made it pretty likely that he'd been regularly having sex with underage girls out in the desert. It seemed like the only thing that might have stopped him would have been a good run at the craps tables.
Looking at the video reminded me that I hadn't yet heard back from Detective Humes. She had seemed busy and distracted when I'd called her, but it wasn't like I was reporting a cat stuck up a tree. I had alleged that an adult male was having sex with underage girls. Kind of a big deal. I hoped she had followed up on it, even if she hadn't bothered to return my call. Still, it seemed odd. After all, except for Carlos, I was the only witness, and I was the one with the video evidence on my computer. I gave her another call, but only got through to voice mail. Maybe Detective Humes had bigger fish to fry. But still, as one of Nevada's female citizens, the department's blasé attitude toward sexual assault was making me more than a little angry.
I called Ethan's cell phone at three o'clock on the nose. No answer. Apparently no one wanted to talk to me today. While waiting for his return call, I blew a half hour browsing my way through an Italian cookbook. I had already tagged half the pages with little Post-it notes, but in typical fashion I'd never gotten around to actually cooking anything. That would require things like produce, pasta, olive oil, and spices that weren't salt and pepper. I had nothing on my schedule until work at ten, so I settled on a recipe and hopped into my car to go food shopping.
After picking up some tomatoes, penne, cream, and cheese, I set to work preparing a vodka cream pasta. The recipe called for about a half bottle of vodka, and I was a little reluctant to dump so much in, especially since I knew the good stuff would be boiling off before it ever hit my mouth. I found myself getting bored as the sauce simmered and the vodka reduced. I flipped on my TV just in time for the five o'clock news.
I was staring blankly into the pan of simmering vodka and pasta when the TV news anchor uttered the phrase "breaking news." Jarred out of my trance, I turned up the volume and sat down to watch the story. A young blonde reporter wearing a grim expression was stationed outside the Copa, where she reported that a press conference was about to begin. At 5:01 the camera panned away from the reporter and cut to a podium, where several police and media types were huddled. The police chief, a gruff-looking man of about sixty, moved to the podium, gripped both sides, and leaned into the microphone. He had done this before.
"As many of you have heard, Mickey Mayfield was shot and killed last evening in the employee parking lot here at the Copacabana hotel and casino. Since the murder was called in late last night, we have deployed all available assets and launched one of the largest and most comprehensive investigations in Las Vegas Police Department history. I can assure you that no aspect of this case will be passed over while we hunt down whoever did this and bring him to justice. I will now take any questions you might have."
I ran back to the stove and turned the flame to low. Mayfield's murder was stunning news, and it made me feel more than a little stupid for not checking the news all day. Here I was mindlessly cooking pasta when half the town was riveted by a news story that actually involved me and the best-paying client I'd ever had.
From the chief's remarks, it was obvious to me that the cops didn't have a suspect in custody yet. If they'd had someone locked up, they would have done everything they could to brag about how their crack detectives had successfully solved the case in record time. It was also obvious to me that there were no serious leads in the case yet. The chief's brief remarks had hinted at a long, drawn-out investigation involving lots of manpower, overtime, and taxpayer funding.
But even if these facts were also obvious to the reporters gathered at the Copa, they felt the need to hammer the chief on whether there were any suspects in custody and what kind of leads the department had. He handled their questions gracefully, but he was forced to find about twenty different ways to say that he just didn't have much useful information to share at the moment. The takeaway was that the department simply had no idea who had shot Mickey Mayfield last night. It was obvious that no new information would be forthcoming out of the Q&A, so I put the TV on mute and went back to the stove to finish up the pasta.
While the pasta finished cooking, I fired up my laptop and checked online to see if there was any more information there. The newspaper story was about as enlightening as the police chief had been. Nobody knew much about the crime itself, but since it wasn't every day that a local celebrity got gunned down, the paper had a half-dozen stories about Mayfield as well as a couple of hastily written interviews with other local celebs expressing their outrage at the murder and offering their condolences to Mayfield's family. The phrase "thoughts and prayers" was repeated ad nauseum. A short obituary had already been cobbled together. Somehow, it neglected to mention the fact that Mayfield was a pervert and very probably a felon.
The pasta proved to be a winner. For a moment I was proud of myself for cooking, but I couldn't deny the fact that the heavy cream and vodka had done most of the heavy lifting. It was hard to screw up a meal like that. I chased it with a couple scoops of coffee gelato and a Diet Coke. My phone rang while I was finishing up the dishes.
"Raven? It's Ethan. We need to talk. Would you mind coming over to my place?"
"Is this about Mayfield?"
"Of course it's about Mayfield," he said.
I thought for a second. "I've got to work at ten, but I could swing by for an hour or so. I tried calling earlier, but you didn't pick up. Where do you live?"
He gave me his address out in the burbs. It was a twenty-minute drive, but it was only about 5:30 and I'd have plenty of time to get back and get myself all primped up for work. I plugged his address into my phone's GPS and headed down to my building's valet.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I drove east on Tropicana Avenue over to Boulder Highway and then veered south toward Henderson. Ethan's place was a large modern ranch house with mature palm trees and a baby-blue 1960's Cadillac parked in the circle drive. It was beautiful but not exactly a palace. I knocked and waited nearly a minute before someone answered the door. It wasn't Ethan.
If there's such a thing as hate at first sight, I soon found myself on the receiving end of it. A fiftyish brunette with excessive makeup and overdone hair was arching one brow at me and giving me a well-practiced stink-eye.
"You must be Raven," she said as though the utterance of my name caused her some unspeakable pain. "Come in."
"And you are?" I asked.
"Patty Stark."
I stared blankly at her.
"Ethan's mother," she explained, exasperated. She had a hint of an accent, possibly from Tennessee or Kentucky.
"Very nice to meet you. Have I done something to offend you? You seem—"
"Unenthusiastic?"
I shrugged. "That's as good a word as any."
"Well, no offense, but Ethan told me what you really do for a living. It's not ladylike. You probably think of me as old-fashioned, but that's just how I was raised. I'm not going to apologize for—"
"That's all right. I didn't ask for an apology." I wasn't going to stand there and listen to an opinion I hadn't solicited and didn't give two rips about. I wasn't exactly proud of how I made most of my money, but it wasn't like I put a gun to her head and made her watch a show. "Is Ethan here?"
She sniffed at me. "Follow me."
She led me through the living room and past what looked like a bedroom, where the muted television was tuned to the ongoing local news coverage of the murder. We moved
to a large room in the rear of the house that had most of the shades drawn. Ethan was sprawled in a leather recliner with one of his legs dangling over the armrest. He was wearing a T-shirt and soccer shorts, making him look even younger than his twenty-six years. His attention was focused on some kind of action-adventure game on his PlayStation, or whatever it was. I had tuned out of the video game world after a fleeting flirtation with the Super Mario Bros., but it seemed most of the men I knew were playing video games more in their twenties and thirties than they had as teens.
"Ethan, your guest is here." She said it with the same enthusiasm she might have felt in announcing that the IRS had arrived to perform an audit.
Ethan finished killing a few more bad guys and then pressed pause. He gave his mother a look, and she eased out of the room so we could be alone. He pointed me to a gray couch, where I cleared away a few magazines and took a seat. Somehow this wasn't how I pictured Ethan's bachelor pad.
"Shame about Mickey," he said.
"It's horrible. I just saw it on the news. I had no idea until I was cooking dinner."
"At least I got the day off. They cancelled all the shows. It wouldn't have looked right to go out there and perform."
"No doubt," I said.
Ethan took a deep breath. "There's just one problem with the way things happened. I was there."
"You were where?"
"There. At the Copa. I didn't see him get killed. I probably wasn't there exactly when it happened, because I would have heard the gunshot. But it won't take them too long to find me if they check the tapes from the security cameras in the casino. And I'm sure they will. They're probably going through them right now."
"Okay," I said, "but why is that a problem? You work there."
"I know. But it was long after my show. Three hours after. And I'm not known for hanging around that place. It's not exactly my scene, if you know what I mean."
"Yeah, but so what? Why would anyone care that you were there? What aren't you telling me?"
"That's why I wanted to talk. I haven't exactly told you everything." He wasn't kidding. I decided to keep mum about the fact that I'd seen him following Mayfield around a few nights earlier. "I went to see Mickey about a week ago. In his dressing room. I just wanted to talk to him, to figure out how in the hell he got the job over me. But he knew I must have resented him for it, because he was very defensive about it right from the beginning. I was trying to be very polite, honest. But it got a little out of hand, and I said some things."
My eyebrows rose of their own accord. "What kinds of things?"
Ethan paused before speaking. "Basically, I said I was going to destroy him. That he'd never work again. That he was a hack and a cheating scumbag. Those kinds of things. Then he called me a little bitch, and…" He trailed off.
"Wow. Was it just you two, or—"
"That's the problem. I thought it was just us, but he's got a huge dressing room. It's actually a suite. There's a tiny little side room with a bed in it. I think it's there in case any hot groupies come back to the room after the show. Not that anyone would want to sleep with him."
"So someone was in there?"
"Yeah. His manager was in the other room making a call on his cell phone, and he heard the whole thing."
"Ugh," was all I could think to say. This was going to be bad. "Can you remember exactly what you said to Mayfield? You didn't use the word 'kill,' did you?"
"No, I would never say that. I wasn't going to kill him. At least at that point."
"What?"
Ethan looked up at the ceiling and let out a long, deep sigh. "Okay. The other night, after my show, I went back to my dressing room and had a few drinks. And then a few more. My mom hates it when I drink here, so I have to do it in private. Sometimes I go a little overboard. I'm trying to cut back, but you know how it is. Anyway, I kept thinking about him, and what he'd said to me, and basically what a piece of trash he was. I found myself getting angrier and angrier as the night went on. I mean, I started pacing around in there and got myself worked up in a real serious way. I don't remember it all, but I know I was talking to myself and I broke a glass against the wall. I was basically foaming at the mouth."
I already knew the rest of the story, but I decided to keep that to myself.
"So I checked the time and knew Mayfield's show was going to let out soon. And I knew he usually played craps across the street at MGM after his shows. So I was going to follow him home and then beat the living shit out of him. I had a baseball bat in my trunk, so I was all set. It seemed like a great idea at the time."
"So what happened? Couldn't you find him?"
"No, I found him all right. He went over to MGM, lost about fifty grand, and stormed out of there. He was pissed. I followed him in my car out to the desert, almost to Pahrump. I have no idea where he was going, but after an hour or so of driving, I started sobering up. I thought, what the hell am I doing? He's not worth it. So I turned around and came home."
Ethan's explanation of that night's events cleared up one nagging mystery for me, but that didn't do him any good. He was screwed, and he knew it.
"So you threatened to destroy the guy, in front of a witness, and then a couple days later he ends up shot to death. And you were in the immediate proximity at the time of the murder, and video evidence will confirm this. Is that basically where we are?"
He nodded. "That's about it."
"And there's nothing else that you're leaving out of the story? You don't have a gun, do you?"
He laughed. "No. Never shot one, actually. So there won't be any residue or whatever on my hands. I figure that should help."
"Maybe," I said. "But there are pretty easy ways to get rid of gunshot residue. GSR is just powder and little particles. Its absence won't prove much." I felt happy that some of my night school detective course was paying off. Or maybe I'd seen that on CSI.
"So you're saying I'm screwed?"
"Not necessarily. But it might help to hire a lawyer. You know the cops are going to come knocking at some point. Might as well get out ahead of it."
"Won't that make me look guilty? Innocent people don't just go around hiring lawyers."
"Maybe. It's up to you. It might not look good in the court of public opinion, but I don't think the cops care. If they come knocking, they're probably going to arrest you whether you've got a lawyer or not."
"Any recommendations?"
I thought for a minute. I had a number of good customers who were lawyers, but hanging out with strippers did not necessarily correlate very well with legal acumen.
"Sorry," I said. "Ask around. You're a celebrity. You've gotta know some people who've gotten in trouble with the law."
"I suppose." A smile crossed his face. "Actually, I know just the guy."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ethan got up and found his cell phone, which had been wedged into the cushion of the recliner. He flicked his fingers across the touch screen and then put it up to his ear. He waited about fifteen seconds and then hung up.
"I'll send him a text," he said, not taking his eyes from his phone.
"Who?"
"Buddy of mine. Got caught with a few kilos of somebody else's drugs last year. Had a great lawyer—got him off."
A faint ahem announced that Mrs. Stark had rejoined us.
"Ethan," she scolded, "I think you really ought to tell me what's going on with all this." Her eyes were fixed firmly on me.
"It's about Mickey Mayfield," he said. "I might be in a little trouble."
"Oh? What about him?" Her pitch rose almost imperceptibly, as though she was taken off guard.
"Didn't you hear? He was killed last night."
Her face showed only a hint of surprise. "No, I didn't know that. I can't say it upsets me in the least, though."
She'd had the TV tuned into the local news coverage, so I don't know how she missed it. It was all they were talking about. I didn't ask for an explanation, though. She already hated me enough as it was
.
"I told you I hired Raven to find some dirt on him," Ethan said, "so I called her over here to talk about Mayfield. The thing is, I was kind of in the area around the time he was killed."
"In what area?"
"At the casino. In the parking lot."
"I don't see why that should matter," she said. "You didn't kill him, did you?"
"No, of course not." Ethan filled her in on his predicament and the threats he'd made against Mayfield.
Patti Stark was now wearing a look of deep concern. "Do the police have any suspects?"
"Not yet. But it's not long before they come for me. His manager's probably already told the cops about my threats. I'm kind of surprised they're not here already."
"I didn't know you threatened Mickey," she said. "Why would you do a thing like that?"
"I was mad at him. You said yourself that he had no business taking that job away from me."
"Yes, but…" She trailed off, lost in thought. "I need to sit down."
Mrs. Stark eased herself into the recliner that Ethan had vacated. She was staring blankly at the paused video screen when a loud knock came at the front door.
"Henderson Police. Open the door!"
"Fuck," Ethan said. "Might as well let them in."
The two of us walked quickly to the door. "I'm opening the door," Ethan announced loudly. Probably a smart move. No sense getting shot in some kind of misunderstanding.
He gingerly turned the knob and opened the door very slowly. It wasn't an army of cops, but it was close. Two uniformed officers had their guns at the ready. When they saw Ethan was unarmed and peaceable, a middle-aged plainclothesman waved them off and approached the door.
"Mr. Longoria, we have a warrant for your arrest."
Ethan only nodded. "I didn't kill him," he said in a whisper.
"Please turn around so the officer can place the handcuffs on you."
Ethan complied, his face ashen. His mother joined us as the detective began reading from his Miranda card. He finished reading Ethan his rights as the officers led him down the driveway to one of the squad cars.
Vegas Stripped (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 2) Page 7