Vegas Stripped (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 2)

by Stephanie Caffrey

  We hopped out of the van, and Andrew handed me a small note card.

  "Guy's name is Earl Hines Jr., born 1959. That's pretty much all I know about him. He's off the grid."

  We headed up the driveway and Andrew pushed the doorbell. A brief pang of disappointment passed over me when I saw the wedding ring on Andrew's finger. The guy was probably not my type, and he definitely had an attitude, but still.

  The door was open, and through the screen door we could hear the hum of a fan and a baseball game on the radio. Personally, I couldn't imagine not having air-conditioning, but I supposed not everyone had that luxury.

  After a few seconds a young woman of around twenty approached the door cautiously. Her unsmiling face bore a vacant expression, but even so she was pretty despite her torn T-shirt and an absence of makeup. The shadowy remnants of a bruise showed near her left eye. Before she could speak, a man's high-pitched, staccato voice punctuated the air.

  "Git. Back. Here. You know better 'an that."

  The woman retreated, her face still expressionless, and she was replaced by a mountain of a man wearing nothing but a faded pink T-shirt and briefs. He was shaking his head at the woman's effrontery, apparently oblivious to the fact that he had visitors waiting. He finally looked up at us after Andrew coughed out an ahem.

  He looked confused for a second and scratched at the fat rolls surrounding his chin. "Shit," he cursed, "I didn't hear the door. That fan's pretty loud in there. Damn air-conditioning's out again. So what are you folks selling? I sure as hell don't want any." He laughed at his own little joke.

  I was happy to let Andrew take the lead. "We're not selling anything, Mr. Hines. We're here to talk about Mickey Mayfield."

  This caused Hines to scratch his ample belly. He cocked his head to the side and squinted at us. "I s'pose I better put some pants on," he mumbled. "Come on in."

  Hines pushed the screen door open and Andrew and I made our way into a large room with piles of newspapers strewn about a smorgasbord of outdated furniture. With all the shades drawn, it was dank and depressing, and the heavy air suggested an oh-so-alluring mixture of cheap beer and cat pee.

  Hines returned from a back room with some sweatpants on. He looked to be about sixty and walked with a distinct limp, with greasy gray-and-white hair that was unkempt and scraggly. "You guys are good," he announced.

  Neither of us was quite sure what he meant, so we kept our mouths shut.

  "They had an unbelievable coupon, one of those that you just can't pass up. Let me see now. I believe it was a shrimp cocktail, two drinks, and twenty bucks worth of free play, all for fifteen bucks! I mean, how could I not go in there? I didn't even know Mickey worked there. How the hell did you guys even notice?"

  It was beginning to make sense, at least to me. Hines had been to the Copa while Mayfield was working, which was probably a violation of the restraining order's directive that he keep more than a thousand feet away from him. "We're not here about you violating the restraining order," I said. "We'd just like to know what happened the first time around."

  Hines got serious. "It involved some money he owed me, let me put it that way. And what business is it of yours?"

  Andrew whipped out his business card and handed it to Hines, who furrowed his brow at it like it was a moon rock. "What's this supposed to mean?"

  Andrew flashed him his best smile, although I think old Earl was immune to Andrew's charms. "We're just doing a little background work for a friend of ours," Andrew said. "Tell me a little about the money Mayfield owed you. I take it you got a little upset when he didn't pay?"

  "I got a lot upset when he didn't pay. He had to cancel his show for a week after I was done with him. He was black, blue, and even some colors I don't know the names for."

  "What did he owe you for?" I asked.

  Hines was staring right through me, his expression vacant. After a few seconds his eyes returned to meet mine. "We had a business transaction, that's it. Now why don't you people let me alone. I thought you'd busted me for violating the restraining order, so I was willing to give you my side of things. But apparently you're not as bright as I figured you for."

  Hines's expression left no doubt as to his determination to get us the hell out of his house. Andrew flashed him a tight smile and turned for the door. I told Hines to call if he thought of anything else he wanted to share with us.

  "About what?" Hines whined.

  "You know, about Mayfield's death."

  "He's dead? Shit, I didn't know that." Hines began squinting at the ceiling, rubbing his temples. A pained sigh emanated from multiple bodily orifices. "Now how the hell am I supposed to collect from a dead guy?"

  I shrugged. "If you think of anything important, there might be a small reward involved." I was making that part up, but I figured it was worth a shot. It was clear that Hines didn't even know Mayfield was dead, so it was hard to see him being involved in the murder. But I had a hunch he'd travelled in the same murky swamps as Mayfield, and maybe he knew some other lowlifes who might have had a grudge with him.

  Hines grunted and showed us to the door. I can't say I was overly sad to leave that hellhole.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Andrew was smiling as we left Hines's subdivision. "That was a nice touch," he conceded.

  I'd been fumbling around again with the seat belt, which apparently was only there for decorative purposes. "What was?"

  "I'd already figured he wasn't involved, but asking him to call us got a pretty convincing denial out of him. I guess we can move on."

  My cell phone began buzzing like an angry hornet. I didn't recognize the number, but it was local, so I picked up. I figured it might distract me from Andrew's erratic driving. It was Ethan's mom.

  "Raven, I'm sorry to be bothering you like this, but I just have to know what you really think. Can Ethan beat this? I mean, does he have a decent shot?" Her words were slurring together pretty badly.

  "He's got a shot," I said with deliberate vagueness. Why was she asking me? I was the low woman on the totem pole of his defense team. Surely his hotshot lawyer would have a better idea. "We've got a few leads and some ideas," I added. "Mickey Mayfield had a lot of people who didn't like him. Even his aunt didn't much care for him by the end." It wasn't a lot, but maybe it would allow her to get some sleep at night.

  "Is that it? He wasn't a popular guy?" She didn't sound happy.

  "No, there's more to it. He owed a lot of people money, and he had a bad habit involving young girls. In fact, we just talked to a guy who had a real beef with him and beat him up pretty bad a couple years ago. Things are in process. Don't worry too much." I tried to put a happy face on things, even though she was right: we didn't have any smoking guns or obvious other suspects to point the finger at.

  "Okay," she said. "It's just…" A long, dramatic sigh followed. "I just need to know he's got a real chance."

  "He does. We'll be in touch, okay?"

  When she hung up, I felt a tingling sense of unease permeating my stomach, and it wasn't from the burnt grilled cheese I'd eaten earlier, which, by the way, wasn't doing much to keep me full. I didn't think it was from Andrew's driving either, although that wasn't helping. We were still in Henderson, heading back to the city. I assumed we were going to meet up with the guy who settled a lawsuit with Mayfield, but Andrew hadn't mentioned anything about it since he picked me up.

  "That was a weird call," I said.

  Andrew grunted. "Was that his mom?"

  "Yeah. She was pretty drunk. She was freaking out and wanted some kind of assurance that he can actually beat this thing."

  "What's so weird about that? She's his mom."

  "I don't know. I just got the vibe that she's holding something back. You know, when I met her the first time, she was acting funny too. Like she knew more than she was letting on. What do you think?"

  "About what?"

  I wasn't sure what I thought, either. "Ooh, pull in there," I said, pointing down the street.

>   "Where? The gas station?"

  "No, the Arby's. I'm starving."

  Andrew gave me a look that seemed to say Are you kidding me? But he wisely kept his opinion to himself.

  "You hungry?" I asked. "My treat."

  He shrugged and reluctantly pulled into the parking lot. He found a booth, and I went to the counter to order us some food.

  Andrew's eyes got big when I got back. My tray was balancing two Diet Cokes and a giant pile of sandwiches. "Who else are you expecting?" he asked.

  "Nobody. These are on special. Four for five bucks. So I got eight."

  "What are they?"

  "Beef 'n Cheddars. Onion roll, ranch sauce, melted cheddar, sliced beef. Heaven on a bun."

  "Okay," he said, warily opening the wrapper on one of the piled-up sandwiches. He sniffed at it suspiciously. "But this isn't cheddar. Is it even cheese? This color doesn't exist in nature."

  I sighed. "Just shut up and try it." I could have lectured him on the increasing wussification of American men, a favorite topic of mine, but I was too hungry.

  I studied his expression as he gingerly bit into the sandwich and began chewing. He took another bite, a good sign. "This isn't bad at all," he conceded.

  I wolfed down one sandwich and then began alternating bites and slurps of soda. It was hitting the spot in an oh-so-good way, and I didn't feel a hint of shame at indulging in front of a new male acquaintance. After all, he was married.

  "So what was all this you were saying about Ethan's mom?"

  In my shark-like, single-minded pursuit of food, I had almost forgotten my train of thought. I finished up the remains of my second Beef 'n Cheddar and tried to utter a coherent sentence.

  "It's just a thought that popped into my head, that's all. You had to be there, I guess, but from what I saw, the relationship between Ethan and his mom is very close. She's a single mom, and he's the only kid, so they've been together for years."

  Andrew grabbed a second sandwich, apparently unbothered by the fact that he had pooh-poohed the very idea of Arby's only minutes earlier. Our eyes met, and he smiled sheepishly. "Can I have some of those sauce packets?"

  He opened a couple sauce packets and squirted the reddish sauce onto his tray liner. With great seriousness he then proceeded to dunk his sandwich in the sauce. The sandwich was gone in about three bites. Andrew was growing on me.

  "Impressive," I said.

  He smiled, reaching for another sandwich. "So she's tight with her kid. And now he's in jail, so she's upset and apparently drinking her sorrows away. Big deal. You think there's something more?"

  "I'm saying I think she might have something to do with it. She seemed as outraged as Ethan that he didn't get that job at the Copa. And it was clear that she viewed Mickey Mayfield as the scum of the earth. You know how these things are. Ethan's success will come eventually, but maybe she didn't want to wait. He's in his twenties, and she's about fifty."

  Andrew didn't seem impressed. "Can she fire a gun?"

  I shrugged. "I'm just putting this out there. I don't have anything worked out yet."

  He mopped up some more sauce with his sandwich. "I wouldn't bring it up unless you have a better idea. Ethan's the client, and we can't just go around accusing his mother of murder without more than a hunch."

  I nodded. He was right—it was a pretty big leap. "I'll think it over some more before doing anything stupid. So what's up next? Are we going to check out the guy who settled his lawsuit?"

  Andrew checked his watch. It was pushing close to eight thirty. "Getting a little late to be making house calls. We couldn't get there until nine, probably. I can do that on my own tomorrow, or maybe Wednesday."

  "Sounds good," I said. Andrew dropped me at home and said he'd get in touch with me when he knew more.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Ethan was on the morning news again, although it was only because he had a preliminary appearance in court at two o'clock. On TV crime shows, defendants were arrested one day and tried before a jury the next, but in the real world there were an endless series of delays, hearings, and motions. I figured Ethan would be lucky to see a trial this year.

  As I munched on some Cheerios, I couldn't shake the idea that Patty might somehow be involved in Mickey Mayfield's murder. Andrew had pooh-poohed the idea, and I agreed with him that Patty probably would not have pulled the trigger herself. She seemed much too…proper. Plus, she would have shown up on some of the security videos without any plausible reason for being in the area. But Patty was so protective of her son that I wouldn't put it past her to try to get rid of Ethan's competition. Especially since she clearly couldn't stand the competition's guts. I couldn't put my finger on it, but she was just giving off a weird vibe that I had trouble explaining to Andrew. And it didn't help that none of our other angles were working out. It was all well and good to find some dirt on Mayfield to possibly create reasonable doubt in the jury's mind, but we were light years away from finding an actual suspect with a pulse.

  By the end of my bowl of Cheerios, I had decided to snoop around into Patty's life a little bit, but I had no idea how to approach such a delicate undertaking. After all, she was my client's mother, and the two of them were extremely close. I wasn't even sure that Ethan would want me to go down that road, even if his mom did prove to be involved. Maybe he'd rather serve the time himself, although I found that pretty doubtful. I had to figure out a way to raise the issue with him without having him flip out on me. That meant I had to go to jail.

  I hadn't been inside the business end of jail in almost four years. It's a long, embarrassing story involving a neighbor's cat, his balcony, and an exploding pickle, and it landed me in the big house overnight. Luckily, the DA's office had no idea what to charge me with, so the prosecutor let me go the next morning.

  When I arrived a little after eleven o'clock, I quickly learned that visiting hours were over. Luckily, that was only true if you were a friend or relative of the inmate you wanted to visit. For "professionals" like me (this took some convincing of a very skeptical desk clerk), however, visiting hours were all day long. Except for the lunch hour, as the desk guard informed me no fewer than three times.

  It took about twenty minutes before Ethan emerged to meet me. He was surprised but obviously happy to have a visitor. I didn't quite know what to expect. It wasn't like on TV, where you have to look at the inmate through glass and speak on a little telephone. Instead, the officers left us alone at a blue steel table in a cavernous, somewhat depressing room. I suppose they figured with the metal detector and all the cameras watching, there was only so much funny business that could go on under their noses.

  "So how are things in here?" I asked. "Should I have brought you anything? I didn't think of it until just now."

  "No thanks, I'm fine. I'm kind of a celebrity in here. Everyone's been very nice." He was wearing a blaze-orange jumpsuit and had a three-day growth of stubble, but other than that he looked pretty damned good.

  I decided to cut to the chase, since the lunch hour was rapidly approaching. "Ethan, I'm getting a strange feeling about your mom. Do you think there's any chance in the world that she could have been involved?"

  He cocked his head in confusion. "What do you mean, with Mayfield?"

  "Yes. It's a long shot, but I thought I should float it past you. It's probably nothing, but…"

  He looked off to my left and stared into space for what felt like an eternity. At least he hadn't slapped me, I thought. I was just about to utter a polite ahem when Ethan snapped out of it.

  "Sorry, I'm just going through everything in my head. My mom is a very nice, kind woman. But honestly, she gets a little creepy sometimes. She's very protective. In high school she'd go into school and argue with teachers who gave me anything less than a B. And one time she slashed the tires of a critic who gave me a bad review. Can you believe that? She went to the newspaper and spotted him leaving the office. His picture was in the paper every week next to his column, so he wasn't too
hard to find. After she followed him home, she waited 'til it got dark and then plunged a utility knife into all four of the guy's tires. She's a gangster."

  I sat back in my chair. My hunch suddenly didn't sound so crazy, and Ethan himself seemed to think it might be a possibility.

  "How long ago was that?" I asked.

  "This is when I was on American Idol, kind of near the beginning. So about three years ago."

  I decided to state the obvious. "Murder is a big jump from slashing tires."

  Ethan nodded. He looked off into space again for a moment before speaking. "It is, but the motivation is the same. And there's a lot more at stake now. I think she took this Mayfield thing even harder than I did. What makes you think she could be involved?"

  I thought about it for a minute. It wasn't anything concrete, just some little things. "Remember when I met her for the first time? I saw her in the next room watching the news coverage about Mayfield's murder, but then five minutes later she denied knowing anything about it. And she got really upset when she heard that you had threatened him. That seemed to throw a wrench into her plans. It's not much—more women's intuition than anything."

  Ethan nodded. "Well she's no murderer, that's for sure. There's no way that woman would even be in the same room with a gun. Back in Tennessee my grandpa had a few rifles, and that was one of the reasons we moved out of there. My mom was on edge all the time. Of course, part of that was because my grandpa drank whiskey all day and aimed them at her and my uncle."

  I smiled. "But what if she got someone to help her?"

  Ethan sat back and stiffened. "James," he whispered. Something had clicked in his head.

  I gave him a blank look meant to convey, Who the hell is James? It worked like a charm.

  "My mom has this boyfriend, kind of. He's this guy who used to be in the time-share business and now just sort of hangs around. Complete mooch. He's always got these big plans for what they should do with my money."