Chance

by Robert B. Parker

  "I hate to go home without you," she said.

  "Sexual deprivation?"

  "And luggage."

  "At least it's both," I said.

  The phone rang and I answered.

  "Anthony's registered as Ralph Davis," Hawk said.

  "There's a Mrs. Davis with him."

  "He still playing?" I said.

  "See him from here," Hawk said.

  "Hundred-dollar table. He's winning."

  "Think your contact could get one of us into his room when it's empty?"

  "Un huh."

  "Ventura called," I said.

  "Says Shirley's missing, thinks she might be out here."

  Susan was taking a pair of hand-painted cowboy boots out of a bag that had a polo pony imprinted on it.

  "Maybe it's Mrs. Davis," Hawk said.

  "He got instructions for us?"

  "Stay put, watch Meeker. Look for Shirley."

  "Better do what he say."

  "Certainly," I said.

  "Susan and I are reviewing her shopping.

  I'll talk to you later."

  We hung up. Susan was holding up the colorful cowboy boots.

  "What do you think?" she said.

  "You know," I said, "what would be a great look?"

  Susan put her ringer to her lips.

  "I'll try them on," she said.

  She took the cowboy boots and went into the bedroom. Outside the volcano began to rumble. I got up and went to the window. It would be embarrassing to go home and say I'd never seen it. I stared down at the plastic volcano as flame and smoke erupted from the top and fire ran down the sides mixing with the water which flowed from the fountain. This went on for several minutes and then stopped. And the mountain turned back into a waterfall. I stared at it for a while. Maybe it would be embarrassing to go home and say I had seen it. I turned back toward the room. Susan came into the living room with her cowboy boots on and no other clothes.

  "Howdy," I said.

  I'd seen her naked often. But in all the time I'd known her, I never saw her naked without a sense that if I weren't so manly I'd feel giddy. In fact I never saw her at all, dressed or undressed, without that feeling.

  "Every time I buy boots you have the same suggestion as to how I should wear them," Susan said.

  "Well," I said, "you can't say it's not a good suggestion."

  "No," Susan said.

  "I can't."

  "The gold necklace is a nice touch," I said.

  "Thank you."

  "You're welcome."

  Susan's eyes narrowed slightly, and she looked at me sort of sideways as if squinting into the sun.

  "You want to canter on into the bedroom," she said.

  "Buckaroo?"

  "You sure you want to do that now?" I said.

  "The volcano's due to go off again in fifteen minutes."

  She smiled the smile at me, the one that could launch a thousand ships and burn the topless towers of Ilium. She walked slowly toward me.

  "So are you," she said.

  CHAPTER 19

  The next morning Hawk joined us for breakfast. "Where's Anthony?" Susan said.

  "Never comes down till noon," Hawk said.

  "He play till four fifteen this morning."

  "Poor thing," Susan said.

  "It's only seven-thirty. You must be exhausted."

  "We don't get tired, Missy," Hawk said.

  "Just sing some songs, and keep on picking cotton. Little guy in the hat getting kinda frazzled though."

  Bob, the waiter, brought Susan one pancake with honey. Hawk and I had steak and eggs. I had some decaf.

  "Why do they just keep watching him," Susan said.

  "Why doesn't somebody act?"

  "My guess is it's because he's winning," I said.

  "If the little guy is watching him for Julius, or Gino, or Marty, or any combination thereof, they want their money back. Figure they'll wait until he wins as much as he can."

  "And he'll start to lose eventually, won't he?" Susan said.

  "Don't know his system, but Lennie Seltzer tells me he's a loser.

  And everything I know about him supports it."

  I was finished with my breakfast. Hawk was eating his last piece of toast. Susan poured another gram of honey onto her pancake and took a second bite.

  "You got a view on losers?" Hawk said to Susan.

  "You mean once you've eliminated stupidity and bad luck?"

  "Which is eliminating big," Hawk said.

  He sipped some of his coffee. It reeked of caffeine.

  "With many people for whom gambling is an obsession, there's a lot of guilt," Susan said.

  "They know it's obsessive, and destructive. They see it as a vice. And they are angry with themselves for doing it."

  "Like alcoholics," Hawk said.

  Susan nodded.

  "Yes, and as is sometimes the case with alcoholics, the vice becomes its own punishment."

  "So they gamble 'cause they have to, and lose to punish themselves," Hawk said.

  "Something like that," Susan said.

  "Sometimes."

  "If you right, and Lennie Seltzer right, and we right, Anthony bound to lose and when he start to lose they may just whack him."

  "Who?" I said.

  "Find out when he starts to lose," Hawk said.

  "I was hoping for prior to," I said.

  "You seen any sign of the woman he's registered with?"

  "Nope. Stays in the room as far as I can tell. Eats off the room service menu. She goes out she does it when I'm watching Anthony."

  "Seems kind of odd," I said.

  "It do," Hawk said.

  "No trips to the blackjack tables to cheer on her man? No expeditions to the Fashion Mall?"

  "Unthinkable," Susan said. She had already finished half her pancake.

  "I guess she didn't want to be seen," I said.

  "By whom?" Hawk said.

  "We the only ones watching, until Panama Hattie showed up."

  "Maybe after we go to the airport I'll take a look into that a little."

  "Toward that eventuality," Hawk said, lengthening the initial e, "ah has acquired us a key."

  He handed it to me and I put it in my shirt pocket.

  Bob appeared with the check.

  "You want to chahge it to your room?" he said.

  "Or put it on a credit cahd."

  All three of us looked at him simultaneously. A song of home.

  "You from Boston?" I said.

  "Yeah, Dawchestah. How'd you know?"

  "A wild guess," I said.

  When I signed the check, I overtipped Bob because he talked right.

  Hawk and I drank the rest of our coffee, caffeinated and decaffeinated. Susan finished all but two bites of her pancake, and it was time for the airport.

  Lester was waiting out front. Susan was wearing her jonquil jacket, and carrying her makeup bag as we got into the Lincoln.

  The little guy with the Panama hat was nowhere in sight. No Buick Regals followed us to the airport.

  "What happened to all the luggage you brought out?" I said.

  "Plus the stuff you bought?"

  "The hotel is shipping it for me," Susan said. The hint of a triumphant smirk played at the corners of her mouth.

  "Boy," I said, "now if they could just do that with sexual gratification."

  "Yes," Susan said.

  On the backseat of the Lincoln was a newsprint magazine titled Boobs-Are-Us. I picked it up. The cover featured a woman with a chest appropriate to the title. She had blonde hair and a lot of dark eye makeup and she had her tongue sort of half stuck out. Two pink telephones concealed her nipples.

  "Tasteful," Susan said.

  There was a phone number to call and a picture of a Visa card and a MasterCard, presumably so you could call the blonde right up on the phone and charge it. I looked through the magazine. It consisted of a series of pictures of seminude women, many with the perennially popular littl
e hearts pasted in crucial spots. Each picture had a brief sales pitch, like "shy but sweet" or "nude and naughty." With each there was a telephone number.

  "I like the ad for hot sexy feet," I said.

  "I figured you for that," Lester said.

  "All these years," Susan said, "I've been wasting time on nudity."

  "What happens if you call these folks," I said to Lester.

  "Besides the chilling effect on our relationship," Susan said.

  "Prostitution is legal in Nevada," Lester said.

  "But it's on a county by county basis. It's not legal in Clark County, where Vegas is, so you pay a hundred bucks for a girl to come to your room, get naked, and give you a massage. You want more you make a private deal with the girl. If she wants to. Or I can take you about an hour down the road, next county, and you get it legal in a whorehouse.

  That's why I have the magazines. People ask about the girls and I can steer them to the brothels."

  "Maybe later," I said.

  Susan made a sound that in someone less elegant would have been a grunt.

  "Well, keep it in mind," Lester said.

  "I get a nice commission on that."

  He pulled the car up in front of the airport.

  "I'll be here," he said.

  I walked with Susan through the brief wedge of dry heat into the air-conditioned terminal. We went along the concourse past the people on their way home desperately trying to recoup with one last dollar in one last slot until we got to the security gate.

  "Did anyone follow us out here?" she said.

  "No. Once they located Anthony they jilted me," I said.

  "That would suggest that it was Anthony they were looking for."

  "Yes."

  "Do you think he's in danger?"

  "Hawk's with him," I said.

  "I wish you knew if there were danger, where the danger was coming from," Susan said.

  "Where's the fun in that?" I said.

  We stood silently for a moment. Then Susan put her arms around me.

  "I love you," she said.

  "There's a certainty," I said.

  "Maybe the only one."

  "Maybe the only one necessary," I said.

  She nodded as if I'd said a smart thing and smiled up at me.

  "Take care of yourself," she said.

  "I'll call you."

  "Often," she said.

  We put our arms around each other and kissed each other gently. This kiss was loving but not big and smoochy. Susan never did big smoochy kisses while wearing lipstick.

  "You got your ticket," I said.

  She held up the ticket which she had in her left hand. Then she put her right hand on my face for a moment and turned and went through the gate. Watching her I felt the little knot in my stomach that I always felt when I left her. She walked a ways down the concourse, and looked back and waved and then turned a corner and was out of sight. I still stood for a moment, looking at the last place I had seen her, being careful not to be routine, while I became the other guy again, the one I was without her. It took a couple of minutes. And then I was him. He wasn't a bad guy; in fact sometimes I thought he had strengths that the other guy didn't have. Certainly he wasn't worse. But he was no one I wanted to be all the time. I turned back and headed for Lester and the Lincoln.

  CHAPTER 20

  When I got back to The Mirage there were a couple of Las Vegas detectives waiting for me with a hotel security guy in the corridor outside my room. When I put the key in my door, one of them showed me his badge. "Your name Spenser?"

  I confessed to it, and unlocked the door.

  "May we come in?"

  "Sure," I said.

  They looked for a moment at the security guy.

  "Let me know if there's anything you need," he said.

  Both of the cops looked at him without speaking. The one who'd showed me his badge nodded slightly. The security guy went off down the corridor and we went into my room.

  "Nice," one of the cops said.

  The one who'd showed the badge was leathery and tall and gray haired with a thick gray moustache. His partner was much younger with stylish blond hair, wearing good clothes.

  "This is Detective Cooper," the gray-haired one said.

  "I'm Detective Sergeant Romero, Las Vegas Police Department."

  "You know I'm a famous detective, and you came here looking for crime stopper tips," I said.

  "Never heard of you," Romero said, "until we found your card at a crime scene."

  "Pays to advertise," I said.

  "Oh good," Cooper said, "a funny one."

  "Yeah," Romero said.

  "Makes it so much nicer when they're funny."

  "Just think of me as lighthearted," I said.

  "Tell me about the crime."

  "Woman's been killed," Romero said.

  "Couple Mex cleaning workers found her body in a vacant lot this morning when they got off work."

  "You know who she is?" I said.

  "No, we thought we'd bring you over, see if you knew."

  "Sure," I said, "let's go."

  The vacant lot was a half mile down the Strip behind an out-of business restaurant. There were half a dozen cop cars parked there, a fire department rescue truck, a vehicle from the coroner's office, and a couple of civilian vehicles. They took me to the body.

  "This is how we found her," Romero said.

  She was naked, lying on her back with the desert sun baking down on her. There were a couple of bruises on her face, and one eye had swollen half shut. There was bruising on her throat. And the tip of her tongue protruded slightly between her swollen lips.

  But the damage didn't disguise her. It was Shirley Ventura Meeker, her white body dimpled and pudgy in the comfortless sunlight.

  "Know her?" Cooper said.

  "Name's Shirley Ventura. She's married to a guy named Anthony Meeker. I don't know which name she used."

  "Coop," Romero said.

  "Start checking the hotels. Try the MGM Grand first."

  Cooper had a small notebook.

  "Meeker with two e's?" Cooper said.

  "Yes."

  Cooper scribbled in his notebook for a moment.

  "Got a next of kin?" he said.

  I told him and he wrote it down and headed for the car.

  "How you know her?" Romero said.

  "Her father hired me to find her missing husband."

  "You find him?"

  "Not yet."

  "And you think he's out here?"

  "Yeah."

  "So you came out looking for him."

  "Yeah."

  "She come out here with you?"

  "No."

  "So what's she doing here?"

  "Maybe she came out to look on her own."

  "You know where she was staying?"

  "No."

  "Think she found her husband and he killed her?"

  "I doubt it," I said.

  "He doesn't seem like that type, what I hear.

  And I'm pretty sure she was too dumb to find him anyway."

  "You know, the husband?"

  "No."

  "Got a picture?"

  "Yeah."

  "Might want to borrow it."

  "Sure."

  "Got any thoughts on this?"

  I shrugged.

  "Maybe if you told me what you know so far."

  A police photographer appeared. Romero took my arm and steered me carefully away from the crime scene, so the photographer could take pictures. We leaned against the back wall of the defunct restaurant. It was late morning and the dry heat lay hard and flat over everything.

  "Couple Mex night workers, got off work at six this morning, say they were just cutting through the lot on their way home. Except home isn't in that direction. I figure they scooped a six-pack from the hotel kitchen and came out in the lot to drink it."

  "Going to notify robbery?"

  Romero smiled.

  "Probably not," he said.
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  "Anyway they found her and one of them called us and here we are. You see the way she was when we found her. No clothes. No purse. Mexican could have taken it, but I don't think so. If they had, they wouldn't have called us."

  I nodded.

  "M.E. will want to look at her more closely but it looks like the cause of death was manual strangulation."

  "She been raped?"

  "Almost certainly."

  "And somebody beat her up."

  "Yeah. Happens a lot with rapes."

  "I know," I said.

  "Where'd you find my card."

  "On the ground near the body. I figure it was in her clothes, maybe tucked in her bra or someplace, and it fell out when the guy made her disrobe."

  "How'd you know I was at The Mirage?"

  "There were two phone numbers written on the back. We called them both. One was the MGM Grand. They never heard of you.

  The other was The Mirage. Bingo!"

  "What happened to her clothes?"

  Romero shrugged.

  "Maybe it happened someplace else, maybe he brought her here."

  "Why would he do that?"

  Romero shrugged again.

  "If she disrobed someplace else, what did my card fall out of?"

  Romero shrugged again.

  "You trying to make this harder than it is?" he said.

  "What happened to the purse?" I said.

  Romero shrugged.

  "She was traveling," he said.

  "She probably had cash."

  "Why take the purse, which is incriminating? Why not take just the cash, which isn't?"

  "Guy was in a hurry," Romero said.

  "Took the purse and beat it.

  Emptied it out later. We'll probably find it empty someplace. Or he emptied it where he undressed her. Left it there. Give me a little time, pal. I just got on the case."

  "Didn't take her rings," I said.

  "Or the necklace."

  "Didn't want to get caught trying to turn them over," Romero said.

  "Maybe he took the purse because he didn't want us to know who she was."

  Romero shrugged again.

  "Maybe he took the clothes for the same reason. You hadn't found my card you wouldn't have, excuse the expression, a clue."

  "Maybe," Romero said.

  "We find out where she's registered, might help. I figure the thing happened sometime between dark last night, say nine o'clock, and six A.M. this morning. You account for yourself during that time?"

  "I was with my sweetheart," I said.