“You have two sets of headphones, I assume?” I asked.
He nodded. “Of course.”
“Pick an album,” I said. “I’ll make some coffee.”
He nodded, a faint smile appearing on his face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I’m not sure what time I had clunked out, but the sharp pain in my neck told me I had been sleeping for a while. When I came to, my head was bobbed forward, like it did when I slept on an airplane, and my arm was slung over the side of a soft recliner where I’d been listening to Mahler’s Second Symphony along with Alex. An incredibly soft blanket was doing its best to keep me warm. It was a miracle there wasn’t a pool of drool all over it.
I pulled the headphones off and looked around. Alex was gone. He’d probably gone off to his comfortable bed, the kind of thing an intelligent person would do. I got up and stretched and then made my way up the stairs, massaging the back of my neck with my fingers. It wasn’t working.
Alex was sitting at the kitchen table with a steaming cauldron of coffee, poring over the Wall Street Journal. He perked up when he saw me. I couldn’t help wondering if this was a flash-forward, if this was how we’d greet each other every morning. Coffee, a newspaperâa real newspaperâthe smell of fried eggs wafting through the room, a warm smile from Alex, and me feeling like I’d been run over by a truck. It sounded about right, somehow.
“Some night,” he said, folding up the newspaper for future consumption.
I nodded, stifling a yawn. I must have been ogling his giant mug of coffee because he sprung up and poured some for me into an equally grand goblet. I looked at it skeptically, not sure I was up for a thousand milligrams of caffeine.
Alex sensed my hesitation. “Drink up,” he said. “Coffee’s good for you.”
“Is it, now?” I asked wryly.
Alex started fussing around in the kitchen as though he was about to make me breakfast.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “You’re all dressed for work.” Somehow, in spite of our crazy evening, he had managed to look like a million bucks at seven in the morning, with his tailored white shirt and gray slacks, red power tie, and tan belt.
He yielded the kitchen to me and then disappeared upstairs. I made myself some eggs and then cleaned up.
I realized he probably needed to get to the office soon, and since I didn’t have a key, I should skedaddle as soon as possible so he could lock up and go. I figured an Uber car would cost me twenty-five bucks to get home.
Alex reappeared in the kitchen, now with his gray suit coat on.
“You could be a model in one of those catalogs,” I said, smiling.
“Which one?” he asked. “Sears?”
I brushed him off. “No, a good one. Like Brooks Brothers or something.”
He shook his head, uncomfortable with the compliment. “You can stay as long as you like. I can lock up the house with my phone,” he explained, patting his side pocket. “But I’ve got a meeting in a half hour, so I’ve got to run. Oh, and here’s a set of keys for the Land Rover.” He pointed to a key fob on the countertop.
“Oh,” I said. “I can just get a car. But thanks!”
He looked confused. “What do you mean, just ‘get a car’?”
Sometimes I forgot that Alex was a touch older than I was. “I have an app on my phone. I press about two buttons, and a car shows up and takes me wherever I want.”
He nodded skeptically. “I think I’ve heard my secretary talk about that. Anyway, the Land Rover’s yours for the day if you want it.”
This is when it got awkward. The scene was so domestic that I felt like I was supposed to kiss him good-bye. I was sitting there, half dressed, while he was the corporate warrior going off to do battle. I stood up to face him, and he leaned in to plant a delicate little kiss on my cheek. It was very sweet, the perfect thing to do under the circumstances.
“I’ll call you later,” he said and headed out into the garage.
I let out a big sigh and checked the clock. It was almost eight, which meant Carlos might be out of surgery soon. It was tempting to lounge around Alex’s mansion all morning, trying out the different hot tubs, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax. I needed to check on Carlos.
The Uber driver picked me up twenty minutes later. I was relieved to find the driver to be a model of discretion. I was quite a sight, I knew, a disheveled stripper needing a morning pickup from a house I obviously didn’t live in. The whole thing screamed one-night stand or, in Vegas, call girl. But the driver drove away as if I was the most boring fare he’d had in weeks.
“How’d you get past the security gates?” I asked.
“You just flash your Uber tag and they let you through. We come into these places all the time now.” His tone of voice was only mildly suggestive, which I interpreted as a hint that rich guys commonly used Uber to drive their dates home.
At home, I showered and changed into a comfortable outfit suitable for spending the day at a hospital. Yoga pants, athletic top, and a giant thermos of coffee, which was so crucial that it might as well have been part of my outfit.
The waiting room was an interesting place. There were people there who just looked flat-out bored intermixed with a few folks who looked like they were dying of anxiety, as though another minute of waiting would put them over the edge into a full-blown panic attack. I waited in line for a minute and then spoke with the intake receptionist. She was unusually friendly, an island of warmth in an otherwise bleak environment, and promised to check on Carlos for me. I found a seat and began scanning the room, trying to make it seem like I wasn’t scanning the room.
She saw me right away and made a little sour face. It was Carlos’ on-again-off-again girlfriend. They had lived together even when no longer datingâaccording to him, anywayâas a matter of convenience and economics. She had never liked me, even though I was paying Carlos good money to help me with my work. Rightly or wrongly, she saw me as a threat, and now here I was at the hospital. And on top of all that, now I was responsible for Carlos getting shot.
I pretended not to recognize her and busied myself with my phone for a few minutes. When the woman from the front desk came, I stood up.
“Everything went well,” she said. “The bullet punctured his lung and caused a lot of bleeding, but they were able to repair most of it.”
I smiled, fighting back the tears that began running down my cheeks. “So he’s going to be okay?”
“The doctors are cautiously optimistic,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. “But you won’t be able to see him for a while, unfortunately. Family only.” My pale skin and lack of a wedding ring made it obvious that I wasn’t family, I supposed. “But he won’t be saying much for a few days, anyway.”
“All right,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
I watched the nurse walk over to Carlos’ sometime girlfriend, who stood up and accompanied the nurse back into the hospital. Before the doors closed behind her, she shot me a look. I win, she was saying.
Bitch, I thought. She wasn’t family either, I knew, but she must have talked her way in. Big deal, I thought. When he was back on his feet, Carlos would still prefer me.
I tried to shake out of it on my drive home. I had just received great news about Carlos, but instead of appreciating that news, I was caught up in a morass of jealousy about the fact that his girlfriendâif that’s what she was, this weekâgot to go visit him but I didn’t. It wasn’t fair. The rational part of my brain knew that my inability to visit him was just a tiny blip on the radar screen of life, but it was still bugging me to no end.
And then I laughed at my childishness. As a kid, I could ignore one of my dolls for weeks at a stretch, but as soon as my sister picked it up, it became my new obsession. I had to have it. The same, apparently, was true with men. Carlos had practically been throwing himself at me for years, and with one exception, I’d never reciprocated. But now that someone else was getting to visit him, I wanted to see him
more than ever.
Back in my apartment, I caught up on some sleep and tried to distract myself from thoughts of Carlos. Why did things have to be so complicated? I had just gotten closer to Alex who was suddenly an available and eligible man, and now I found myself pining for Carlos who had been there all along. I wondered if men suffered through such dilemmas or if everything just came easily to them. I suppose it must be easy when all you cared about was one thing.
Thinking of Alex, I began wondering what the police had done with the guy they’d arrested at Alex’s house. Had Owen really sent him there to kill me or just to threaten me, or did he have some other nefarious purpose?
I was getting antsy. Even if the police had taken care of that threat, I still had the problem of Dan’s wife, Laura. The last I’d heard, she was still missing. I called Dan to check in, and he confirmed the news.
“The police have started a file on her, whatever that means,” he said.
“It means about what you expect,” I said. He was smart, and I didn’t need to sugarcoat it for him. “Basically, in domestic cases like this, they give people a wide berth. If a twelve-year-old goes missing, they run a full-court press. But when a grown woman ups and leaves, they’re not going to bust their asses looking for her.”
“That’s about what I figured,” he said. “Frankly, it’s kind of embarrassing. She left me, and that’s all there is to it.”
“She left the kids, too,” I added. “There must have been something going on. I’ll keep working on it, if that’s what you want.”
“Thanks, Raven. I’d really like to find her. Even if it’s just to know where she is and why she left.”
When I hung up, it struck me how far afield Dan’s case had gone. It had started with trying to find out who was stealing money from their blackjack group, but then I had gotten myself drugged by a sleazy minister, and the client’s wife had disappeared. All in all, I was a human wrecking ball, bringing destruction and chaos wherever I ended up.
As I was making lunch, the valet called up to tell me my car had been delivered. Alex was good, I thought. A guy who could make things happen. After lunch, I forced myself to tackle the problem of finding Dan’s wife. I had never worked on a missing-persons case before, and I sympathized with the cops’ laid-back attitude in circumstances like this. If his wife wanted to split, which is apparently the case, there wasn’t any crime to investigate. I was tempted to call up an acquaintance who happened to run the largest private investigation firm in town. I had worked with Philippe Lagarde on a case a couple of months earlier, and the resources his company had were incredible. He could probably track Laura down in a matter of hours, or days. But Dan had hired me to do it, and I could use the experience, especially since Las Vegas was one of the missing-persons capitals of the world. People come here, get entranced by all the flashing lights and slot machines, and then disappear after they lose all their money.
My first stop would be Dan’s neighbors. They might have seen something around the time she left, and they might even have spoken with Laura on her way out. From my experience, just showing up at someone’s house at three in the afternoon wasn’t usually very productive. People were in school or had jobs. So I spent the rest of the day making a double batch of chiliâenough food for a family of eightâand then headed over to Dan’s neighborhood around five.
Las Vegas traffic is bad at almost every hour, but five o’clock was noticeably worse. I finally arrived at Dan’s street, where I did a slow drive-by and then parked at the end of the block. The early evening sun was halfway through its descent, the air still dry and hot but not hot enough to keep a young mom and her son from frolicking around with a soccer ball.
I approached the woman and held out a business card. She was wary, like most people, that I wanted to sell her something she didn’t need. I explained the situation, asking if she’d seen or heard anything, but she was blank.
“You might try two doors down,” she said, pointing at a larger pink stucco ranch. “They’re pretty close, I think. We just moved in last year, so we don’t know everyone,” she explained.
I thanked her and moved along to the next house, which was three down from Dan’s. It looked pretty dead, but I rang the bell anyway. It came up a blank. The mom next door was watching me closely but trying to make it look like she wasn’t. I supposed it wasn’t every day that a private investigator showed up in a nice little suburb like this.
The pink stucco ranch had matching pink rocks in the front yard and a bluestone walkway leading up to the front door. The shades were all drawn, so I couldn’t see anything inside. I rang the bell and waited. Once more. Just as I was turning on my heel to leave, the door opened a crack. It was a small girl of about seven. She didn’t say anything but just stood there staring at me.
I began to ask if her mom or dad were around when a tall, thin woman in her thirties appeared behind the girl and fixed me with a stare that could not be described as friendly and welcoming. She wore a tight ponytail and looked like she was about to go jogging. I appreciated that people didn’t like being disturbed by strangers at the door, but most of them hid their displeasure behind a smiling mask. She didn’t feel the need to bother, apparently.
The woman shooed the girl away and stared at my business card. When I explained my very modest mission, she seemed to soften a hair.
“She’s missing?” she asked, sounding genuinely concerned. “I swear, I thought I just saw her a couple of days ago. Or maybe it was three,” she mused.
I nodded. “She’s only been gone a few days, so that would make sense. What we’re trying to get a handle on is whether she left voluntarily, or whether⦔ I trailed off, not wanting to give voice to the unlikely but unpleasant alternative.
“They weren’t happy, if that’s what you’re asking,” the woman said after a brief moment of contemplation. I sensed she had decided to cut to the chase as the most effective means of getting rid of me quickly.
“Right,” I said. “I’m wondering if you saw anything, though. Or if she said anything specific about leaving. People leave all the time, especially in Vegas. But when there are kids involved, it’s much rarer.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Especially for the woman. There are days when I want to leave, but there’s just no way.” She had been staring past me into the street, but then our eyes met, and I sensed she felt she had revealed too much about her own life.
“That’s why Dan’s concerned,” I said. “It would be completely out of character.”
“Well, like I said, I thought I saw her just the other day. And she hasn’t said anything to me, so I don’t think I can be very helpful. I could reach out to her, I suppose. Send her a text or something. Would that help?”
I nodded, wondering why I hadn’t thought of it. “I was just about to suggest that,” I lied. “You’ve got my business card, so please let me know if you hear anything from her.” I offered my hand, and the woman shook it. As I left, it occurred to me then that I hadn’t even asked her name or gotten her cell number. It was a failing I filed away among the countless others with the hope that in time I’d learn.
There was no activity at Dan’s house. Only one of the other neighbors was home, and he hadn’t seen or heard anything, either about Laura in particular or about the couple’s relationship in general. I offered him my business card, which he brushed off but then, upon reconsideration, decided to take. From the creepy vibe he was giving off, I assumed he was going to go Google my name and do a little cyber stalking. As I drove back home, the lingering doubt began creeping back into my thoughts. I was leaving a lucrative job as a stripper mainly because I hated dealing with creeps, but I was replacing that job with a less lucrative one that also required dealing with creeps. I shook my head at myself and looked in the rearview mirror.
“Only you,” I said to my reflection. “Only you would do something like this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I had resolved to wake up before noon,
but I didn’t recover as quickly as I used to from a night of dancing until three. Noon came and went unnoticed. By one o’clock, I was rolling around under the sheets, fighting the reality of another day at the office. I had to find Dan’s wife, and then I had to go back to Cougar’s to cash in on the Friday night crowd. A little voice inside me told me I wouldn’t have to do any of that if I married Alex. I could sleep in as long as I wanted, roll out of bed whenever I wanted, and have a cook fix me eggs, sausage, and bacon, extra crispy. Well, the cook part was a stretch. Alex was too down-to-earth to hire servants. But still. If I was the lady of the houseâ¦
I shook myself out of it and made a pot of coffee, the effects of which I didn’t sufficiently feel until the third cup. I didn’t even kid myself that I’d go to the gym. Hemming and hawing about whether or not to go would have wasted precious time, especially since the answer would always end up a resounding no. By two o’clock, I got my car at the valet and headed across town to the place where Laura worked. I figured she would have friends there, someone she could have confided in before she left.
Laura’s employer was a technology company housed in the top two floors of a tan four-story office building. The building was part of an office park that encircled an oval green space with a small park and palm trees galore. There was a receptionist’s desk at the entry, but it was occupied only by a pair of ferns and a sign directing visitors to the building directory on the wall.
I took the stairs up, peering into the large windows at all of the worker bees going about their daily business. By the third floor, I had convinced myself that my jobs weren’t so bad after all. I couldn’t imagine myself dressing in business casual every day and filling out reports or giving sales presentations as if any of that stuff mattered. I wanted to be on my feet, moving around and seeing the world, not cooped up in some cubicle taking orders from a guy with a night-school MBA. But then again, I had a way to rationalize just about anything.
Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4) Page 17