Cry Wolf

by J. Carson Black

  “Can you describe her?”

  He did, in great detail, down to the top that showed off her midriff and the skinny jeans.

  “Anything about them that bothered you?”

  “Not really . . . ”

  “Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Anything that struck you? Good or bad?”

  “Other than how hot she was? I wasn’t looking at the man.”

  “Anything? Did they mention where they were going?”

  “No. I will say he was in the pain in the ass category.”

  “How so?”

  “We went out to look at the car, you know, for him to look it over and check for scratches, paint, that kind of thing. He was the type who spent, like, an hour going over the car. Must’ve took a hundred photos with his phone. I’m talking like even a speck on the paint. The undercarriage, too. His girlfriend or wife or whatever, she looked annoyed.”

  “Looked annoyed?”

  “Stood there with her arms folded. Sighed a lot. Rolled her eyes.” He had a slight smile on his face, reminiscing. “I think she was flirting with me.”

  Lucky new mother inside to have such a supportive husband, Laura thought.

  “Anything else?”

  “Just that he was full of shit.”

  “Oh?”

  “He went on and on about the Mercedes, like he was some expert. A know-it-all.”

  “Like?”

  “He said he owned a Mercedes just like it, said it was what the big guys in Vegas drove, ‘you know what I mean?’ Wink-wink. Like he was some kind of player. Hinted he was some big Vegas honcho or something.”

  “Big Vegas honcho?”

  “Like, you know, the mafia. That’s what he was hinting at.”

  Laura said to Anthony, “If he felt bad about Aurora Johnson, he didn’t let it stop him from showing off.”

  “You know what?” Anthony said. “He’d make a good character in a movie.”

  They found a motel that DPS could afford (just this side of crappy) and caught a quick dinner in the coffee shop before going their separate ways, and met up the next morning. By then Laura had called around and found the red Dodge Viper in an impound lot.

  They went by and were allowed in to the yard to take a look.

  No signs of violence. The car was messy in back, fast food bags and some junk, which Laura and Anthony photographed and documented. There was a receipt on the floor from a Sonic in Kingman.

  “Did that guy only eat fast food?” Anthony said.

  “There’s the Heineken.”

  “A lot of Heineken.”

  Nine empties on the floorboard in back. The car smelled of it.

  “Maybe it was Aurora?”

  Anthony shrugged.

  Laura didn’t recall the yeasty smell of beer in Perrin’s room. She made a note to ask if he drank beer. There had been no empties in his room back at the Madera Canyon Cabins, but Terry Delmonte cleaned his room while he was gone. Perrin hadn’t been found dead in his car until eight in the morning, and it might not have filtered back to the people at Madera Cabins until later.

  They went through the glove compartment and trunk, sealed everything in them into evidence bags. All ordinary stuff, but you never knew. Anthony ordered a flatbed truck to transport the car down to the yard at the Department of Public Safety in Phoenix.

  “Now what?’

  A lot of receipts pointed to Kingman, which was on the way from Vegas.

  Laura watched as the traffic whizzed by on I-17. “What do you think?”

  Anthony shot invisible cuffs and threw invisible craps. “We’re goin’ to Vegas, Baby!”

  12: Two Liars

  The detective Laura had talked to on the phone was out of the office, but his partner, Stephen LeMer, met with them. He was a large black man with

  a shaved head and a gold loop earring in one ear. Laura had been surrounded by tall men and was beginning to feel small. He gave Laura and Anthony the basics, then led them to another section of the LVMPD and introduced them to Doreen McGill, who worked Vice. Doreen was short, plump and motherly in a gauzy paisley top that clung to her like a mist—but looks could fool you. She had a mind like an X-ACTO Knife, and was very familiar with Aurora Johnson.

  Immediately, the picture changed.

  “Aurora Johnson and Cedric Williams had a falling-out six months ago. She tried to steal some money and he canned her.”

  “He canned his best prostitute?”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “I heard she was his ‘bottom girl.’”

  “She was one of his prostitutes a long time ago, but she wasn’t any good. He was friends and business partners with her brother so he hired her to work in their shop.”

  “Shop?”

  “High Fidelity Audio Systems. SISTMZ on the license plate of his Jaguar XJL. He has a few legitimate businesses—the shop she worked in installed audio systems in cars. High end stuff. She had a head for numbers so she worked the books. Unfortunately, she also had a head for drugs. He tried her as one of his girls, because face it, she had looks to die for, but she just didn’t have the right stuff.”

  She launched into how he kept his prostitutes in line.

  “These guys, they use the carrot and the stick. Shit, they’d use an iron on you if you didn’t please them. Cords, whips, chains, you wouldn’t believe it. Slavery, pure and simple. These girls may look like a million dollars, they may act like they came out of charm school, they drive Mercedes and dress in designer clothes, but they’re slaves nonetheless. It’s all about control. Build ‘em up, knock ‘em down. Manipulation. They’re just like any other commodity, but I gotta tell you, you need a real cruel streak to be a pimp in this town. The more sadistic, the better, as far as they’re concerned. Cedric brands his girls with a bullet tat on the inside of their forearms.”

  Laura thought: like Aurora had.

  “Williams is particularly vicious, but he knew with her that just cutting her loose was gonna be worse than any beating or slicing he could do to her. From what I hear, she was needy. Beautiful—an absolute knockout a couple of years ago—but she went downhill fast. He knew that treating her like he didn’t want her would hurt her more than anything else. Demoting her to accountant. No more fancy cars, no more glamorous nightlife or shopping sprees at Nordstrom. She was the lowest of the low—she couldn’t cut it, and whatever friends she had probably dissed her to her face. My feeling is, if she latched on to another guy and took off, he wouldn’t cry himself a river. He’d already destroyed her in every other way.

  “You want to talk to him?”

  “We do.”

  Cedric Williams A.K.A. WMD looked pretty much the way she thought he’d look. There was the shaved head, the earring, the mustache and the hennaed goatee—two thin lines of fire ants trickling down either side of his mouth, looping down to net his jaw. Very GQ. His suit was a cross between tan and buff in color, his shirt cream-colored. The kerchief folded to a perfect triangle in his suit pocket was pastel salmon. Diamond-encrusted rings, a watch that had to cost in the tens of thousands. Yet it was understated enough not to be ostentatious.

  He led them down a short hallway past a supply room that looked as ugly as any auto supply room—fluorescent lighting, rows and rows of parts, the smell of rubber and grease. They reached a closed door at the end of the hallway. He slid a card in the door alarm and they stepped into a wonderland. The first thing Laura noticed was a fountain in the center of the room. The place looked a little like Caesar’s Palace if Caesar’s Palace had a low ceiling. There were statues and palm trees growing in pots, and a desk that you could command the Starship Enterprise from.

  “Plush,” Anthony said. Laura knew he was seeing a stage set for one of his screenplays.

  Cedric Williams sat down behind his desk and nodded for them to sit. The chairs were gorgeous like the rest of the place, and comfortable besides.

  “You want to know about Aurora?” He picked up a gold letter opener an
d ran it around in his fingers. His manicure was perfect. Laura didn’t bother with manicures, but she knew it was perfect anyway.

  “That girl is a sad case. I told her she had a problem, but she didn’t listen to me.” He shook his head, his face a monument to regret. “But she couldn’t kick it.”

  “She did your books?”

  “She had the title, but I kept her around mostly because she was hot. People come here, they like something good to look at.” He smoothed his goatee, looked thoughtful. Laura suspected he did this a lot. “Where you find her?”

  “In Arizona.”

  “Arizona? Went to see Delmar, then, that it?”

  “Delmar?”

  “She had herself what you’d call a hot and heavy relationship. Before she came out here. That was a long time ago.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Five, six maybe? I bet she got homesick. How she doing?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” His smile turned upside down. Laura could tell it was just for show. Aurora didn’t mean anything to him, and he was letting her know that. He added, “Now that’s a shame.”

  “Aren’t you curious what happened to her?”

  He shrugged, and Laura couldn’t help but be impressed by the cut of the shoulders on that suit. “I would guess she came to a bad end.”

  “She did.”

  He sat back in his expensive leather chair, tapping the tip of the letter opener against the expensive wood of his desk. He looked thoughtful. “How did she shuffle off this mortal coil?” he asked.

  “Violently.”

  His eyes widened, but his face remained immobile. “Someone killed her?”

  “You think someone wanted to kill her?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. Girl could get under your skin. I bet you know the kind. Who was she with again?”

  “I didn’t say she was with anybody.”

  “I bet I know. It was that white guy, am I right?”

  “White guy?”

  “After she quit here, I ran into her on the Strip—she was with this white guy, looked like a pussy faggot to me, you know what I mean? She said he was an accountant.” Shook his head sadly. “Man, what a suckup. He wanted to impress me. Maybe she told him stories about some of the good times. Looked to me like he was comparing shoe sizes, right there. You know what I’m sayin’?” His smile suddenly went away, and his face was hard. “She messed up, that’s all you need to know. An’ now look where she’s at. Six feet under.”

  Laura called Detective Greg Wyland in Winslow. “Do you know of anyone named Delmar, last name unknown. He might have been a friend of Aurora Johnson’s—the reason she went to Winslow.”

  “That name sounds familiar. Let me check my records and get back to you.”

  It didn’t take long. “Delmar Jones was a small-time drug dealer who got himself killed eight months ago.”

  “How did he die? Was it a drug deal?”

  “Nope. It was an accidental death. He was drunk and on a ton of drugs and walked right into the path of a train coming through.”

  “You’re sure it was an accident?”

  “The guy who investigated is pretty damn sure.”

  Good enough for her.

  From Cedric’s palatial office they plied the other side of the street—Sean Perrin’s place of work. He was an accountant for a swimming pool supply company. He had nothing to do with the casinos.

  They spoke to the manager Ahmad Zohar, a soft-looking man who appeared to be in shock. “I couldn’t believe when he left. He didn’t say anything, just didn’t come in one day. I called his house, I called his cell. It was like he vanished.”

  “He never let you know why?”

  “A couple of days later he called. He said he was ‘on the run’. He was always talking that way about stuff—his nickname around here was Secret Agent Man—but this time he did sound scared.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “Said he was helping ‘a damsel in distress’. Yeah, I know. But that’s how he talked some times. Kind of . . . courtly. He told a lot of stories. So he’s really dead? Maybe he actually was on the run.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “No, except he gave me the place to send his last paycheck to. In Arizona.” He dug through the files. “Ah, here it is. 14509 Candelaria Way, Tucson, Arizona.”

  Laura looked at Anthony. “You think this is his sister’s house?”

  “Could be.”

  “So maybe he planned to go see her after all.”

  Laura asked Mr. Zohar if Sean Perrin had ever mentioned a sister.

  “Yeah, he told me she was loaded.”

  “Loaded?”

  “He told me she had a lot of money and a deadbeat husband.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He said he was worried because he tried to kill her once.”

  “The husband?”

  “Yeah. On a cruise, he said. Poisoned her food.”

  Anthony cleared his throat. Laura knew what he was thinking: Another lie from Sean Perrin. Considering the problems cruise ships had been having of late, it was far more likely Ruby would have succumbed to a bad case of food poisoning.

  “Did he say why?” Laura asked.

  “I got the impression the husband didn’t want to wait around for her to die so he could inherit all her money.”

  Laura pictured Ruby Ballantine at her store on 4th Avenue. She didn’t look rich to her. She wore clothes you’d buy at Kohl's. Laura knew, because she bought at Kohl's.

  “Yeah,” Mr. Zohar was saying. “I would’ve loved to get a load of a sister of his. He said she was very athletic. If she looks anything like his wife and children . . . Are they all right?”

  “Yes,” Laura deadpanned. She assumed they were alive and well, but of course they weren’t his wife and they weren’t his children. No need to tell Mr. Zohar that. She did ask, “Did you ever meet them?”

  “Sadly, no. But I saw photos.”

  Oh, yes. The photos. Laura smiled and thanked him.

  From the look of his apartment, Sean Perrin seemed to be living on a very frayed edge. Most of the other residents were college students living in their first home away from home. The place dated to the seventies, hanging on by its fingernails to the forgotten part of town, several blocks from the Strip. The area was a jumble of pawn stores, dollar stores, and auto repair shops.

  His place was neat but worn. There were the photos the sister claimed were from Huffpo, in cheap frames. He did have a nice TV and sound system, and a queen-sized bed. The carpet was not shag exactly but it was old-fashioned and cheap. If you were going to name it, the color would be “Dirty Tan”.

  It was hard to believe, but his papers were neatly kept in files. Unfortunately, it was all run-of-the-mill stuff-—rent, cable, Internet, etcetera. The laptop LVMP had taken was still awaiting its turn at Forensics. The whole apartment was generic and had the look and feel of an old motel room. Even the bedspread was in motel colors—floral print, the teal and green variety, with a matching bolster. Again—circa 1970s Best Western.

  They went through everything, although there wasn’t much of it.

  “I wish to God we had his phone,” Laura muttered.

  “No shit. This place looks like Mannix lived here.”

  Whatever inner life Sean Perrin had, he’d shared with people in terms of lies and exaggerations and stories. But he hadn’t bothered to lie to himself.

  “If this was a Sherlock Holmes novel,” Laura muttered, “It would be called, The Strange Case of the Generic Man.”

  Anthony stared at the white popcorn ceiling. “Poor son-of-a-bitch. You see it all the time in this town. What a downward spiral. Even his ‘bottom girl’ was on a race to the bottom.”

  “Someone came after him, though. He was running from something.”

  The answer, she thought, wasn’t at work. And it appeared he had not known Aurora Johnson for very long. Whether it was chivalry or a need to imp
ress someone, he’d gone off on a jaunt with Aurora Johnson, and she’d ended up dead of an overdose.

  But who would follow him all the way to Arizona just to take his life?

  And who would do such a bang-up job of it?

  That hit showed real talent.

  Anthony said, “Maybe it was a gambling debt.”

  “If it was,” Laura said, “It would have to be a big one.”

  They spent the next day and a half showing his picture to the croupiers and bouncers and managers of the casinos.

  Many knew him to look at, but as a gambler he didn’t ring any bells. One floor man remembered him working the quarter slot machines.

  “High roller,” Anthony muttered as they walked out of the air-conditioned but shabby Sultan Casino and into the blasting heat of a May afternoon in Vegas. The casino was one of the last remaining stragglers from the seventies.

  “So what do we have?” Laura asked.

  “What it looks like is he met Johnson somehow—maybe she turned tricks on the side, who knows?—and she asked him for help.”

  “You mean, help me skip town, honey, the mafia is after me.”

  Anthony shrugged. “He fancied himself a player. Swashbuckling was right up his alley.”

  Laura covered her eyes and squinted against the lowering sun. As usual, Vegas was teeming with tourists. “So he tries to help the damsel, and when he goes out for a walk in the wee hours of the morning, she’s doing God knows what.”

  “Yeah, only God does know what. PCP and Ketamine.”

  “So he thinks what she told him was true—that her boss was after her, that she really was his bottom girl and he knew how that went—”

  “Only this time, it wasn’t like that. ‘Cause she wasn’t a bottom girl, just a low-rent accountant like him—”

  “Two liars.”

  “Yeah, they were made for each other.”