Kill Game: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  And until she had been shot and then retired and moved to Las Vegas to be near her daughter, she hadn’t noticed that she missed having a man in her life. But now, for some reason, since joining the Cold Poker Gang, she had been attracted to retired detective Lott.

  More than she wanted to admit.

  He had a calm way about him, and seemed frighteningly smart. She had even caught herself a few times looking at his wonderful head of thick, gray hair.

  His daughter, Annie Lott, was one of the best poker players in the world and her boyfriend, Doc Hill, was pretty much acclaimed to be the best. Julia had met and liked them at a few tournaments, and sat next to Annie at one tournament for a few hours. When Annie, who also used to be a Las Vegas detective, learned that Julia was a retired detective, she told her about her father and the Cold Poker Gang. It had sounded wonderful and it had turned out to be to be even better than Julia had imagined it might.

  Julia looked forward to Tuesday night now. Fun poker, fantastic company, and so far she had been involved in solving two cold cases, which had given her intense satisfaction, something she hadn’t felt as an active detective in Reno for years.

  And she loved the banter between the detectives, just like she had never left her department. She hadn’t realized how much she missed talking with people who were blunt, funny, and trying to solve bad things that had happened to people. The gunshot wound had given her an out, but many times she wondered if she should have taken it.

  Now she needed to have some answers as to what happened to Stan. And if the gang would take on the case, she might actually get the answers, good or bad, and feel like finally she could move on with her life.

  They sat in Lott’s kitchen, eating the wonderful-smelling KFC chicken and talking while waiting for Andor. They went from talking about the late-season heat wave to what Annie and Doc had done this summer up in the Idaho Wilderness.

  “They keep wanting me to go with them once,” Lott said, shaking his head.

  “Sounds like fun to me,” she said. And it did. Four days rafting in wilderness area down the River of No Return seemed so distant from poker tables and murders, she loved the idea and had promised Annie she would try it next summer.

  “Oh, no, you too?” Lott asked, shaking his head.

  “The forces are pushing you toward the river,” Julia said, laughing.

  “The force is that daughter of mine.”

  “She is a force,” Julia said, laughing and wiping off her hands after a second piece of chicken. She didn’t realize just how hungry she had been.

  “How come no more kids?” she asked, “If that’s not being too personal.”

  “Not at all,” Lott said, laughing. “Connie often joked I was more married to the job than her.”

  “I know that feeling.” She loved his laugh and his grin. He was a very handsome man who clearly had loved his late wife.

  She had loved Stan as well, but they just weren’t making it when he was killed. In fact, their entire marriage had seemed just off somehow. He had seldom been around and when he was he seemed always too willing to please her.

  She really hadn’t wanted a passive, dull man for a husband. She had always imagined herself with someone strong, able to stand up for himself, and someone who could make her laugh.

  A loud banging echoed through the house, making her jump.

  “What the hell is that?” she asked, glancing around.

  “It’s either an earthquake or Andor,” Lott said, shaking his head and standing, indicating she should just stay put. “I’m betting on Andor. He’s allergic to doorbells.”

  She laughed as Lott went to the door of the kitchen and shouted, “It’s open.”

  A moment later she heard the front door open and then slam close.

  “I smell chicken,” Andor said as he came toward the kitchen.

  “We left you some,” Lott said, sitting back down and smiling at her.

  He came in and nodded to her. “Rogers.”

  “Andor,” she said, nodding back.

  That tended to be most of their conversations except over a poker table. She liked Andor a lot. She had known other detectives like him. Outwardly like a bull in a china shop, but inside very kind and generous and smart.

  He headed over to the fridge, took out a bottle of water, grabbed a plate and napkin and joined them at the big table. Clearly he was used to being in this house and making himself at home. She had never gotten that close to any of her partners in Reno.

  She envied that.

  Andor’s wife had also died a number of years before and from what she had discovered, his entire focus was now solving cold cases. He seemed to have no other life at all that she knew of. She at least played poker and had lunch with her busy daughter Jane once every week or so. When Jane had time to squeeze her in, that was.

  He grabbed a couple of pieces of chicken on his plate and started into it, pulling the skin off with his fingers and eating it with two hands, one sliver at a time like a giant vulture picking apart a carcass. He never picked up the piece from his plate.

  She and Lott both watched him for a moment before Lott smiled at her and she laughed.

  “He eats like that with everything,” Lott said, shaking his head. “I’ve watched it now for a couple decades.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Andor said, still working at the chicken piece, his hands covered in grease. “Why the rush-over-early call?”

  Julia was glad that Lott took the lead when he asked his former partner. “Remember the Stan Rocha case?”

  Andor snorted. “That thing we could never solve? Drove us both nuts. Why?”

  “Meet the widow,” Lott said, pointing toward her.

  That froze Andor with a sliver of chicken halfway to his mouth. He looked at her intensely.

  Finally he asked, “Joke?”

  “No joke,” she said, staring into his dark, intense eyes. “Rogers is my maiden name. I never took his. We were separated and not getting along much when he was killed.”

  Andor dropped the sliver of chicken and wiped off his hands, then his mouth, shaking his head the entire time.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “You think the gang should open the case?”

  “I do,” she said.

  Andor again just shook his head, then looked over at Lott. “And what do you think?”

  “I think it’s about damn time we clear that case. It drove us both crazy for a year.”

  “And you think now is going to be any different?” Andor asked.

  “No,” Lott said, smiling. “But now we have the time and we have family help.” He indicated her and she smiled at Andor.

  “You two are nuts,” Andor said, shaking his head as he dug back into the second piece of chicken on his plate. “But I’ll ask the Captain next week.”

  “Thanks,” Julia said, suddenly both excited and scared to death.

  She needed to know what had happened to her husband. But at the same time she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know. She wasn’t sure Jane wanted to know either what had happened to her father.

  But Julia had a hunch that, as good as the Cold Poker Gang was at digging into cold cases, she was going to find out no matter what, now that she had started this ball rolling.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  September, 2014

  Pleasant Hills

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  ANDOR SHOWED UP EARLY the following week before the gang was set to arrive. Lott had been in the kitchen getting a glass of iced tea. The summer heat still hadn’t broken and even though it was only a week from the end of September, the temperature had gone past one hundred yet again. He normally didn’t mind the heat, but this summer it had started early and was lasting longer and he would be glad when the cool nights were back.

  Andor banged on the door and Lott shouted for him to come in.

  By the time Lott had the pitcher of iced tea back in the fridge, Andor tossed a brown file folder on the kitchen table and went for a bottle of water
.

  “The Rocha case?” Lott asked, taking his tea and moving over to the table. The folder looked really thin, far thinner than he remembered it. And had a coffee-cup stain on one side. Somehow his memory had built this case into a huge investigation. It hadn’t been.

  The folder had the standard “Copy” stamped on the outside.

  “That’s it,” Andor said, taking his bottle of water and joining him at the table. “I left out the murder scene pictures of the body. No point. Let’s hope Rogers can add some details because that case is as cold as they come.”

  Lott sat across from Andor and opened the folder, letting the memories of the early case in his career flood back over him. Over twenty-some years as a detective, he had had a couple-dozen murder cases go cold on him. But this had been his first case as a detective. Period.

  And Andor’s first case to go cold.

  So they both remembered it clearly.

  Male vic by the name of Stan Rocha, three shots, killed execution style, two in the chest, one in the head, at close range with a twenty-two. Body left in an empty warehouse off of Paradise Boulevard to rot. No way to trace the bullets, no shells left behind.

  A couple kids smelled the body and called the police. The guy had been dead for a week.

  Some mining company owned the warehouse, but were not using it for anything. The doors were all unlocked. No prints worth dealing with.

  The case was cold almost from moment one. And that fact had driven them both nuts.

  There was a notation in the file that his wife was a cop. They were separated, no issues, and that she was a cop in Reno and had been on duty all week. Andor had called and her chief vouched for that and they had ruled out Rogers as a suspect almost instantly and hadn’t even bothered to interview her, since she sent them a report on what she knew of her husband’s travels, which wasn’t much.

  And Rocha had no other family that they could find, or that his widow knew about. And she had no idea what he was doing in Vegas. She had thought he was in San Francisco looking for work.

  Lott looked at the last page of the file. Neither one of them had even put a hunch of who they thought might be a suspect.

  There were no suspects.

  Lott closed the file and sighed. He felt as hopeless now on this thing as he had back twenty-two years ago. He hated that feeling, almost more than anything else.

  Andor just shook his head. “This one is going nowhere quick.”

  “We’ll see what Rogers has to add,” Lott said, sliding the file back to his partner. “She might have picked up some details after twenty years.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Andor said. “From what she wrote in that report she sent. Looks to me this Rocha pissed off the wrong people and paid the price.”

  “Doing what?” Lott asked. He pulled the file back to him and opened it again to make sure his memory was right. “Says here he had no drugs on him or in his bloodstream. And only twenty-two bucks in his wallet.”

  Again Lott closed the file. The Cold Poker Gang had tried a number of cases like this one over the last year. No leads, nothing. And those cases, for the most part, were still sitting on his bar downstairs next to the poker table. Why did he have a hunch this one was going to join that pile quickly, even with Rogers’ help.

  They didn’t come any colder than this case.

  “So what do we do first?” Andor asked.

  “Interview the widow after the game tonight,” Lott said. “Show her the file, see if something clicks.”

  Andor shook his head. “I’ll leave that one up to you, partner. I got a date with eight hours sleep after we’re done tonight. Last damn thing I want to do is dream about the Rocha case.”

  Lott nodded and just stared at the thin folder.

  There just wasn’t much there. And twenty-two years in the past was a long time.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  September, 2014

  Bellagio Hotel and Casino

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  AFTER THE GAME ENDED in Lott’s basement at about ten, Lott had told her that he had wanted to interview her and brainstorm about the case. But he said he didn’t feel right doing that in his own kitchen. Something about the fact that he had never done anything like that in the past kept him from wanting to do that now. He had told her that he and Andor and other detectives over the years had sat at that kitchen table and talked about cases a great deal. But actually doing a sort-of interview in the kitchen didn’t seem right.

  So he had suggested to her that they go down to the Cafe Bellagio to get something to eat.

  She had agreed at once. She told him she liked the place, since it had nice booths and comfortable tables and chairs, mostly surrounded by plants. It was always open. She had eaten many a meal there while playing in poker tournaments.

  They took separate cars to the casino and when she arrived, he was already being seated in a booth that looked out at the entrance and had more than enough privacy.

  “You know all the cop short cuts?” she asked, laughing as she slid in across from him.

  “That and I use valet parking,” he said, giving her that grin she was starting to really like, more than she really wanted to admit. He had a strong chiseled chin, intense dark eyes, and a sense of humor she was just starting to see. He was fantastically handsome for a man of any age.

  “That’s cheating,” she said.

  “More money than the desire to walk in this heat very far.”

  “Yeah, there is that,” she said. “This is my first fall down here. Does it ever cool down?”

  “Eventually,” he said. “At least I remember it does, but you know how old cop memories can be?”

  “No, how?”

  “Shot to shit,” he said.

  She groaned as the waiter handed them both menus and took their drink orders. Even though it was after ten in the evening, they both ordered iced tea. Clearly he was a late night person as she was. She liked that.

  After they both had ordered—him a BLT and her a chicken salad—he turned to her.

  “Are you sure about opening this? Got to ask.”

  She had asked herself that same question a dozen times over the last month and that many at least since last week. She needed to know what had happened, if that was even possible. And from the look of the thin file they had on the murder, they were all starting from scratch decades late.

  And she really, really appreciated that he was worried about her feelings on this. Made her like him even more.

  “I am,” she said, nodding like she really was sure. “Let’s do this. Fire away, detective.”

  Lott reached down and picked a lined yellow legal pad off the seat beside him and slid it to her. Then he put another in front of himself. “We don’t trust only one of us to write everything down. We’re going to find the answer in the details and we both need to figure out those details.”

  “Worried about our old memories, huh?” she said.

  “That, and just making sure we miss nothing.”

  She nodded and pulled the legal pad in front of her. He slid her a pen so she wouldn’t have to dig one out of her small purse.

  She was relieved beyond words that he was organized on this, at least this much. The murder of her husband had been so much of a part of her life that she had put away, she had no idea how to organize any of this.

  “Let me start,” he said.

  “Please,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Do you have any idea as to his family background?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “He didn’t much like to talk about anything in his past and in the four years we were together and married, it never once came up. We eloped, so no one but us was even at the wedding.”

  “So you don’t know anything about his mother or father or family?” Lott asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, feeling amazed that was still her answer after all these years. When he died, she half expected someone to contact her from his family, but no one ever did.

/>   “That’s where we start,” Lott said.

  “I agree,” she said. “That’s bothered me right from his death.”

  She wrote “Family???” at the top of her blank page and felt a lot better.

  Then she had a thought while staring at that word. She looked up at Lott. “Maybe someone missed him at one point or another?”

  “You mean if he disappeared, someone might have filed a missing person’s report?” Lott asked, frowning at her.

  “Exactly,” she said. “He was in Reno on business when we met in May of 1988. We were married three months later. I sort of bullied him into it, I think. He traveled a lot during those marriage years, always on business of some sort or another. I think it had something to do with construction because he often came in dirty, like he had been on a construction site.”

  “So you thinking we look at missing person’s reports from 1988?” Lott asked. “I like that.” He went to writing.

  She did the same thing.

  “And not only 1988,” she said, wondering why she hadn’t thought to check earlier, “maybe he never told his family about me and when he was killed in 1992, they filed a report then.”

  “Well,” Lott said, writing as she went to write her thoughts down as well. “That’s going to keep us busy.”

  “Easier now than in 1992,” she said. “But chances are it will be a dead end.”

  “At least it’s a path,” he said. “We don’t have many good ones at the moment with this case.”

  “Boy, don’t I know that,” she said.

  They were served their late-night dinners and after the waiter left, she decided to confess something to Lott.

  “Promise you won’t laugh?” she asked as she picked at her salad.