Kill Game: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery

by Smith, Dean Wesley

“None of this seems to be funny to me,” he said, then took a bite of a fry that came with his sandwich.

  “I never even knew exactly what his job was,” she said softly. “Married for just short of four years and I didn’t know what he did to make money. And after he was killed, no employer contacted me.”

  “Did he have money?” Lott asked.

  She shook her head slowly. “This is the embarrassing part. I found out after he died he was taking my money. A little bit here, a little there. Even though he said he was supposedly making a living and putting money into our account, it seemed I was supporting us both.”

  “You have money besides your police salary?” Lott asked, his food forgotten.

  “Not a dime,” she said, just about as embarrassed as she had ever felt in her adult life. “He moved into my small apartment with me and he had his own car. I just never noticed because he seemed to be employed. But after he died I discovered all our money came from me.”

  “Con artist,” Lott said. He grabbed his pen and marked it down on his paper.

  “But there was nothing he could con me out of except living expenses,” she said. “I wasn’t even a detective yet and never talked about my job at home. I never brought files home, and he never asked.”

  “You got all his belongings still?” Lott asked.

  “Tossed his clothes, but everything else I have still. Two file boxes is all.”

  “We need to go through that,” Lott said. “You, me, and Andor.”

  She nodded and went to work on her salad.

  “You were young and you had no way of knowing,” Lott said.

  She looked up into his smile. It made her feel a lot better that someone like him actually understood. She had never told anyone that information until now. Not even her daughter. She had tried to protect her daughter as much as possible from information about her father, what little information there was.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “So how long was he normally gone?” Lott asked.

  “Sometimes up to two weeks or more at a time,” she said. “Then he’d be back for three or four days, working at something around Reno, and then gone again. I was so busy being a cop, I hardly noticed, sadly.”

  “And you didn’t pay for his travel?”

  She had to laugh. “On my cop’s salary?”

  “So what was he doing?” Lott asked, writing on his pad as she wrote the same question on her pad.

  “And where did he get the money for the travel?” she asked, adding the question to her pad as well.

  Lott smiled and put his pad beside him, off the table. “Seems to me we have a lot of places to start.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?”

  She also put her pad beside her and for the next hour enjoyed a good meal and the great company.

  If somehow she could put the death of Stan behind her, she might actually be able to really get on with her life. And having help doing that from someone as handsome as Lott was making her feel better by the moment.

  CHAPTER SIX

  September, 2014

  Pleasant Hills

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  THE HEAT SEEMED to be breaking a little the next day when Rogers showed up at Lott’s place about two minutes before Andor. Lott had really, really enjoyed their late dinner last night and had promised her a chicken lunch the next day, straight from the nearest KFC.

  He had gone out about noon and gotten that, since she and Andor were both due at one. The chicken now smelled wonderful sitting on his kitchen table. He already had the paper plates out and a bunch of napkins.

  Somehow, he had refrained from taking a piece early, but his rumbling stomach had told him a few times that he should do just that. There was just something about KFC that could do that to him.

  This time Rogers knocked loudly instead of ringing the doorbell. When he opened the front door, she was standing there with two old brown file boxes stacked in her arms, smiling over the top one at him like a kid over a wall. The boxes were the reason for their lunch. They were going to look through Stan Rocha’s last possessions.

  She looked like she was dressed to go to work as a detective again. Her long brown hair was pulled back and she had on a white blouse under a light brown dress jacket and brown slacks.

  He could feel a slight jolt as he saw her again. He was going to have to watch himself. He really was falling for her. He wasn’t sure, honestly, what he thought about that.

  He had no doubt his daughter Annie would be overjoyed.

  And he had a hunch that Connie would be saying “It’s about time.” Right before she the cancer had finally taken her, she had made him promise he would move on with his life. He had promised, but not believed the promise. Without Connie, there honestly had seemed like no life to move on with.

  But now, after three years, he realized just how smart his wife had been.

  He held the door for Rogers and then took one box off the top as she passed him.

  “Thanks,” she said as she headed for the kitchen and he followed.

  “Wow, that smells fantastic,” she said. “Amazing how KFC uses that smell to sell chicken. I’m hungry.”

  “Me too,” he said. “Haven’t had much since the Bellagio.”

  She smiled at him as she set the box on the counter. “That was fun.”

  “It was,” he said. “And productive. This morning, on the way to KFC, I came up with one more thing to add to the list. What had happened to Rocha’s car?”

  She jerked and then shook her head. “Never once thought of that either. I sure didn’t get it. Damn, I really needed to pay more attention back when this happened.”

  “You were stunned he was dead,” Lott said.

  “Yeah, I had a lot of things going on. But I sure wasn’t much of a detective on my own husband’s murder.”

  “Were you a detective yet?”

  She laughed. “Not for another three years.”

  “Well, I was,” Lott said, “And it never occurred to me to wonder about a car. We just assumed he was killed somewhere we couldn’t find and taken there.”

  “He might have been,” she said.

  “You remember the make and model number?”

  “I do,” she said.

  He slid the second box next to hers on the counter. “You have the registration in these boxes by any chance?”

  “Nope,” she said, shaking her head, clearly stunned that she had never once thought of her husband’s car. “I would have noticed it and that would have reminded me.”

  At that moment, Andor banged on the door.

  “Grab yourself a bottle of water. Or there’s iced tea in the fridge,” Lott said, turning for the living room again.

  “You want some tea?” she asked.

  “Love some,” he said over his shoulder.

  He reached the small dining area and shouted across the living room, “It’s open.”

  Andor came in, banging the front door closed behind him just as he always did. Lott loved Andor, but at times he moved through life like a bull in a china shop, not really caring what got in his way or what he broke.

  “I’m starving,” he said as he headed across the living room.

  “I got the big bucket,” Lott said, shaking his head and turning back into the kitchen.

  “Perfect,” Andor said.

  When Lott got back into the kitchen, Rogers was pouring them both glasses of iced tea from the glass pitcher he had filled earlier.

  As they sat down and dug into the chicken and corn-on-the-cob side that Lott had added, he filled Andor in on what he and Rogers had come up with last night.

  “So let me get this straight,” Andor said after licking off his fingers from finishing his first piece. “We search for his family. We search missing persons from around the time of his death, give or take. We look through this stuff here, which is his personal information he left with you, and try to figure out what he was doing for money. And we search for what happened to his car. Rig
ht?”

  “Got it,” Lott said, nodding.

  “Well,” Andor said, shaking his head and smiling. “That’s about a thousand more leads than I thought we would come up with in this case.”

  Then he turned and looked directly at Rogers. “What kind of car was he driving and you remember where it was registered?”

  “1989 dark-green Grand Caravan van. He seemed to carry stuff in the back of his van that he kept covered, but I wasn’t sure for what. Always assumed it was for his job. Nevada plates on the van. No clue from what part of the state. I never once rode in it.”

  “Did you two have a joint checking account?” Lott asked as he wrote down all that information on his note pad.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head and looking at the half-eaten chicken leg on her plate. “But I know he had a checking account because he carried a checkbook. But he left no records at my place.”

  Then she stopped and realized what she had just said. “Damn it all to hell! I never thought to check for that either.”

  Lott watched her as she shook her head in disgust at herself and marked down that note on the note pad as well. He did the same on his note pad. Sometimes there were records of abandoned money and accounts, but he wasn’t sure if they could find any accounts or if they did if the accounts would show anything of value. But it was worth looking into. Maybe he could get his daughter Annie to help on that. She and Doc, her boyfriend, had resources to do that sort of thing.

  “And you have no idea what your husband did for a living?” Andor asked.

  “Besides something in construction because he often came home dirty, basically he lived off of me,” she said. “I discovered that after his death. He stayed in my apartment after we were married and I sometimes cooked. But I have no idea how he paid for all his traveling, or where he went all those weeks he was gone.”

  As Lott ate another piece of the luscious chicken, she went on to explain to Andor the same details about the marriage and what she had discovered after her husband had died. And the realization that she knew little or nothing about the man she married.

  “He was a very passive guy,” she said. “Now that I think about it, it’s hard to imagine he made anyone angry enough to kill him.”

  “Doesn’t take anger sometimes,” Andor said.

  “Yeah,” Rogers said. “Then what?”

  No answer to that one.

  Lott knew that nothing about any of this was adding up anymore than it did in 1992. But at least now they had something they could do, some things to trace down.

  That was a start.

  And a starting point was a lot better than they had had twenty-two years ago.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  September, 2014

  Pleasant Hills

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  AFTER THEY FINISHED the chicken and corn lunch, Lott cleared off the big kitchen table and moved the first box over. The light from the afternoon sun streaming through the kitchen windows was filling the room with clear light, and the overhead light filled in even more. It was a bright and comfortable place to sort things. Over the years, he and Andor had done just that at this table numbers of times, usually making Connie disgusted at some of the things they had to sort.

  But she had been amazingly supportive. He had asked her why she didn’t mind them doing things like that at her kitchen table and she had said simply, “At least you’re home.”

  As a detective, he understood that. She had mostly raised Annie with him just being in and out. Amazing Annie had followed him into police work after that sort of upbringing.

  As Lott dropped the first box on the table, Andor looked inside and then dumped it out on the table, spreading out the folders and a couple pens and a few small notebooks.

  Lott took out his yellow legal notepad and across the table Rogers did the same, frowning at the stuff on the table as if she hadn’t seen it before. More than likely it had been decades since she had looked at it.

  Lott picked up one of the spiral notebooks and opened it. Nothing. Totally empty from front to back.

  “Where was all this stuff?” he asked Rogers.

  “Stan kept a small desk in the apartment, plus some of this stuff was in his part of the closet and in his chest of drawers. I put receipts and stuff in the folders as I found them in his clothes pockets and such.”

  Andor nodded and picked up one folder.

  Lott waved the notebook. “Empty.” He dropped it back into the box.

  Rogers slid him another notebook and it was empty as well. In the meantime, Andor was sorting receipts looking for anything that might give them a lead.

  “How are you sorting?” Lott asked as Andor started two piles.

  “One for Reno, one for out of the Reno area.”

  “Good idea,” Rogers said, taking another folder full of receipts and starting into them.

  Lott did the same with yet another folder, sometimes finding it hard to figure out even a name on some of the faded bits of paper. As detectives, they were used to this kind of work and used to doing it carefully. It always felt to him like a combination of doing a puzzle and a treasure hunt. Sometimes pieces fit, sometimes they found the one treasure that would lead them to solving the case.

  For an hour they worked mostly in silence, getting through both boxes, sorting out pens and a couple of empty keychains with names outside of Reno on them, plus all receipts.

  Then when they had all the Reno paperwork pulled and all items that were Reno-based back in one of the boxes sitting beside the table, they looked at the remaining piles in front of all of them.

  “I got Boise receipts,” Andor said, “Salt Lake receipts, Winnemucca receipts, and Las Vegas receipts.”

  “The same in this pile,” Rogers said, indicating the one in front of her.

  “Exactly the same with mine,” Lott said, getting a little excited at the prospect of actually seeing Rocha’s life have a pattern. “So we sort by city.”

  They went back to work and after another half hour had four piles of receipts from out of Reno filling the middle of the table.

  “I had no idea he traveled this much and this far afield from Reno,” Rogers said, shaking her head. “I sure wasn’t much of a wife not knowing what her own husband was doing.”

  Andor laughed. “I doubt this had anything to do with you. My gut sense is telling me your husband had a con going of some sort and that’s what got him killed.”

  Lott nodded. He agreed with his partner, even though the idea of that clearly hadn’t made Rogers happy. He couldn’t imagine how she was feeling discovering this, even after all these years.

  They spent the next hour sorting through and getting a general timeline on the receipts for each town. It seems that over the years he went from one town to the other like he had a route.

  Lott made out a timeline on his notepad of the general times Rocha had been in each city. It seemed, in general, his stays never seemed to last for more than three or four days at a time, usually once every three weeks. Just as Rogers had said was his pattern in Reno.

  Then they focused on the Vegas papers since they knew the most about Vegas. Food receipts, gas, and so on.

  “What’s missing here?” Andor said after all three of them looked through the hundred pieces of paper from Vegas.

  Roger shook her head, but Lott saw it almost at once when Andor asked the question.

  “No hotel,” Lott said. “Where was he staying during all this time here in Vegas over all these years?”

  “Oh,” Rogers said. “I’ll be go to hell. Where was he staying?”

  “These cover summers, winters, year-round for a number of years,” Andor said. “He couldn’t live in his car during the summers.”

  “And there were no other hotels that I saw in any of the other places either,” Lott said.

  “So who was he staying with?” Rogers asked. “In all of these places. No hotel receipts at all. None.”

  “We figure that out,” Andor said, “a
nd we might have our first lead.”

  “What the hell were you doing, Stan?” Rogers asked, staring at the piles of paper on the tabletop, as if they would give her an answer.

  And Lott knew that eventually they might.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  September, 2014

  Boulder Highway

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  AFTER THEY GOT DONE sorting receipts on Lott’s kitchen table, they planned their attack on the case.

  Julia was stunned at how much she had already learned about her ex-husband. It had never occurred to her to sort those receipts like that. Or even look through them. After she got the news of his murder, she had just boxed up everything and tossed the two boxes in the top of a closet.

  A couple of weeks after that she had sold his desk and given his clothes to The Salvation Army. She had just cleaned him from her life and gone back to work and having his baby. She still wasn’t sure why she needed this solved now. Part of it was because she was attracted to Lott. She knew that.

  And part of her knew she could never really be in another good relationship until this was cleaned up. Or at least until she made an attempt to clean it up.

  But it was amazing how much more she now knew about her former husband than she knew when married to him. That just made her sad that her one and only marriage had been such a sham. What did that say about her?

  After sorting the receipts, their plan was pretty simple. Andor was going to head downtown to the police station and see if he could get some searches running for missing persons in the Boise and Salt Lake areas, using Stan’s picture and the make of his car. And see if the car was impounded back in 1992 somewhere here in Vegas.

  The impound information would be quick, but the missing person searches would take time in two other states.

  Lott was headed to the DMV before they closed to try to get a trace on the registration of the car.

  And she was going to take the receipt addresses and names and see if she could make a pattern of the area where most of the Las Vegas receipts were grouped. Almost all of them were along the Boulder Highway, they knew that much from just looking at them. They had figured that giving them a closer look might give them at least a center to work from.