Stephanie Caffrey - Raven McShane 01 - Diva Las Vegas

by Stephanie Caffrey

  “You look great,” I said. “Every time I see you, I think I should have gone with C’s. Mine are too big.”

  “That’s crap, and you know it,” she said, smiling. “By the way, your valet guy is gorgeous! He can park my car anytime.”

  “Must be Tommy. Working late.”

  She smiled lasciviously. “Yum! Now where’s this champagne you promised?”

  I got out a couple glasses and poured from the bottle that had been in the freezer. It wasn’t quite cold enough yet, but we didn’t care. We clinked glasses, took healthy gulps, and settled into the two reclining deck chairs on my balcony. The giant fake hot air balloon outside the Paris casino was beginning to glow a deep blue.

  “I was in San Diego the last two days,” I said. “Finally found Mel Block.”

  “So he’s still alive?”

  “Yeah, but not for long. He’s got a nice pad in La Jolla and a little waif who acts as his part-time maid. Anyway, he has a theory that some insiders might have been skimming profits from the casino.”

  “When?”

  “He thought it’s been going on for a while, but he was short on details. More of a hunch kind of thing. He just knows they’ve been paying him an awful lot of money for no apparent reason. He thinks it’s so he keeps his mouth shut.”

  “Wow,” she muttered.

  “So George never mentioned anything about this? He wasn’t suspicious that someone was ripping him off from the inside?”

  Rachel thought about it for a second. “Not that I remember. He would have gone through the roof, though. As hard as he worked for that place—and his dad, too—to think that someone would be stealing from him is pretty scary. Especially if it was his brother-in-law.”

  “No doubt.” We’d managed to polish off our champagne in less than five minutes. I poured us fresh glasses.

  “So does Mel think Cody was involved in this?”

  “He wasn’t sure, but he thought it was possible. So you’re sure George never mentioned anything about this?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. I would remember something like that. If they were stealing from George, they were stealing from me!”

  “Good point,” I said.

  “I suppose you might try talking to Amy herself. I never really talked about business with George, but he and his sister were pretty tight. She might have known if something was up.”

  I refilled my glass again. “That will be a fun conversation. Hi, I’m wondering if your husband was stealing from the casino and murdered your brother when he found out. Can we talk?”

  “Yeah, I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way,” Rachel said.

  “Anyway, it’s too nice a night to talk about business. But I think now I can officially deduct the champagne as a business expense.”

  “Happy to help,” she said. “Can you deduct Chinese food too?” Her eyelids were getting a little droopy. I had forgotten what a lightweight she was.

  “I don’t see why not.” I went inside to get a menu, and we decided on the Happy Family Special, which seemed to come with two helpings of every kind of fried meat I could imagine.

  It was still hot outside, and we sat like steamed dumplings as we waited for our food and watched the daylight fade to black. Rachel was well past her limit for champagne.

  She turned to look at me suddenly. “You getting any these days?”

  “Any what?” I asked.

  She smiled mischievously.

  “What are you, in high school?” I laughed.

  She frowned. “I take that as a ‘no.’”

  “Actually, I should thank you. My little San Diego trip gave me an excuse to get out of town with this guy I kind of work with.”

  “Do tell.” She turned her recliner a few degrees to face me.

  “Mike’s his name. Actually, he’s supposed to be supervising my work during my first year as an investigator.”

  “So…he’s ugly?”

  I chuckled. “Not even close. You should see his abs. Anyway, he’s a Mormon. He might be a little nice for me, actually.”

  “So the answer is, ‘no, you’re not getting any.’” Rachel made a face.

  “Technically, that is correct.”

  Rachel frowned. “What do you mean, ‘technically?’”

  “I mean, mind your own damned business.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Wow. So are you guys an item?”

  “An item? Who says that anymore?” I chuckled. “No, I doubt it.”

  “Hmm,” she murmured disapprovingly. We sat in silence for a minute. “So how drunk did you get this poor young man?”

  I nearly dropped my glass on the floor. “How did you know?” I think was blushing.

  She smiled. “That’s what I would have done.”

  “That’s scary,” I said. “But you would have taken advantage of him. Whereas I merely cuddled.”

  She shrugged. “I’m a cougar. Whereas you’re just a MILF.”

  I snorted. “I don’t have kids, though. I’m not a mom.”

  “It’s more of an age thing. And intent! It’s all about intent.”

  “Huh?”

  She slurped down the dregs of her champagne and smiled ruefully, savoring the topic of conversation. “The cougar is the one on the prowl, the aggressor. But the MILF is the one being hunted. Get it?”

  “It’s not all that complicated, Rachel. I get it.”

  She wasn’t done. “And sometimes, a woman can be both a MILF and a cougar.”

  “Fascinating,” I lied. “I imagine this is the kind of conversation Socrates used to have with Plato.”

  “You’d be surprised. Those horny old Greeks talked about this kind of stuff all the time. It’s just not the stuff they wrote down.”

  I shook my head, exasperated. “If you say so.”

  “It’s true.” Rachel shoved her empty glass at me. “Now fill me up.”

  I poured off the rest of the bottle right before our Happy Family special arrived. It was enough food for a whole family, but somehow it got finished, right down to the last fortune cookie.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The morning news said we had finally been granted a reprieve from the weather with high temperatures only expected to reach the low 90’s. The downside was that I had no more excuses for avoiding my daily jog. I toughed up and got my jogging clothes on. I ran west from my apartment, away from the Strip into a maze of strip malls, warehouses, and the occasional pawnshop. The first half of the jog was a blissful escape. I thought about everything and nothing at the same time. But reality hit me when I turned to head back. I was nowhere in this case. I had learned almost nothing about the Outpost casino except that its head of security was an asshole with sharp fingernails. The only lead I had was what Mel Block had told me at the Del Mar racetrack, but how was I supposed to learn anything about a skim operation if I couldn’t even get inside the place?

  Rachel said it might be worth talking with Amy Masterson, her former sister-in-law. I had poured cold water on that idea. It didn’t take a genius to guess that Amy wouldn’t be in any kind of a mood to help anyone trying to prove her husband was a murderer. And I would be willing to bet that word had already gotten out that I had been sniffing around about Cody Masterson.

  As I cooled down from my jog, a growing temptation was building in me to pawn the problem off on Mike. He had tried to look busy earlier in the week, but I could tell he wasn’t exactly swamped in his own work. It was the dead of summer, and a lot of the insurance people he worked for were probably on vacation in cooler regions like Death Valley, or the Sun. Plus, it might give me an opportunity to get him drunk again.

  I showered quickly and hit the Internet. I had no idea where a jet-set couple like Amy and Cody Masterson might live—a palatial suburban mansion? Lake Las Vegas? A penthouse condo on the Strip? I guessed that they were not listed in the phonebook, and I was right. The two were hardly a publicity-shy couple though, so I figured their home would have been in the newspaper at some point.
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  I searched the Review-Journal‘s website for any stories mentioning their house. Nada. The Mastersons hadn’t hosted any charity galas or political fundraisers, apparently. I decided I might as well pay for the information. Rachel hadn’t said anything about money, and I hadn’t felt like bringing it up. But I assumed if things worked out she’d pay me a small fortune without me having to ask. I had a Westlaw account, and with that online service you could uncover all sorts of legal information about real estate—deeds, easements, title transfers, or even overdue property taxes. Plugging in a search for “Amy Masterson” didn’t produce any hits, but when I used her maiden name, “Amy Hannity,” I found three records. The first hit showed that she had purchased a $755,000 house on the east side of town about eight years ago. The second record, five years later, told me she sold that house for a nifty $400,000 profit, and the third hit revealed that she’d plowed that money into a property assessed at $2.6 million on Champion Hills Lane in the western suburb of Spring Valley, about ten miles away from the Strip. I wondered how much the street’s pretentious name added to the purchase price.

  I wrote down the address and phoned Mike. He didn’t sound too thrilled with the idea.

  “If anything, you’re supposed to be working for me,” he said. I wondered if he was a little sensitive about the whole thing. He was the one with the experience, but I was the one working the big case while he chased down small-time deadbeats who were faking neck injuries. I decided to become a damsel in distress.

  “I just don’t know where else to turn,” I said. “I’m toxic. They won’t let me in that casino, and everyone connected with it probably knows I’m trying to bring Cody down.”

  Mike gave me his silent routine.

  “I’ve already done the hard part,” I said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “I found out where she lives.”

  He snorted. “What exactly am I supposed to do? Ring the doorbell and ask, ‘Did your husband do it?’”

  I explained what I wanted to know, which was whether she or her brother had any idea that someone inside the casino was ripping them off.

  “I guess that makes sense,” he said. “If I come in asking whether her brother knew they were being stolen from, it’s not quite as bad as asking if her husband’s a murderer.”

  “Right. All I want to know is if George suspected any kind of embezzlement before he was killed. She might actually be interested in finding out someone thinks they’re being ripped off. If Cody was involved, it’s very possible that she has no idea about it.”

  “And I can bill this?” Mike asked.

  “Of course!” I laughed. That didn’t mean he’d be paid for it, but I didn’t mention that little detail. “I figure she might be home right now actually. It’s only ten. How about it?”

  “You’re driving?”

  “Whatever it takes. I’ll just hide in the car when we get there.”

  I called down to the valet to get my car. When I got downstairs, Tommy was bent over my car polishing the hood. No one seemed to be watching, so I allowed myself ten seconds to admire the view. At what point, I wondered, did I officially become a dirty old woman?

  I headed downtown to pick up Mike at his office, and then we headed west on Vegas Drive, which formed a T with a street called Rampart Boulevard.

  “Nice neighborhood,” Mike said. “They don’t mess around out here.”

  Rampart Boulevard lived up to its name. An imposing twelve-foot stone wall ran the entire length of the street, basically giving the finger to the outside world and anyone who didn’t belong there.

  “Nothing subtle about that wall,” I said. “Gotta keep the riffraff away.”

  Mike chuckled. “Riffraff like us.”

  I had worked at a few private events in homes in this neighborhood—birthday and bachelor parties, mostly—but I wasn’t about to let Mike know that. I drove south along the wall for a few blocks and found the entrance to the subdivision. Summerlin, as the entire community was known, was an upscale development consisting mainly of condos and mansions, and several of the neighborhoods were gated. For some reason, this wasn’t one of them.

  We wound our way around streets with annoying names like Trophy Hills Drive and found the Mastersons’ house at one end of Champion Hills Lane. Another golf course estate. Mel Block’s pad in La Jolla looked downright modest by comparison.

  “That’s the TPC behind the house,” Mike said.

  I gave him a blank stare.

  “Tournament Players Club. They have a PGA event there every year.”

  “Of course. You a golfer?”

  He nodded.

  I sighed. “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

  The Mastersons’ home was not the typical Mediterranean-style villa that seemed so omnipresent in the Southwest. Instead, it was a French-inspired chateau, all stone, complete with a three-story half-turret.

  “Looks like the architect took the design right off the label of a bottle of French wine,” I said.

  Mike smiled. “A French chateau next to a golf course, in the middle of the desert.”

  I chuckled. “Ten miles away from a fake Eiffel Tower, a giant pyramid, and a volcano that explodes every fifteen minutes.”

  “Don’t forget the pirate show,” he said.

  I parked a few houses up the street, and Mike got out. He was wearing his Bible salesman outfit again: short-sleeved white shirt, red tie, gray slacks, black shoes. I moved over to the passenger seat and watched him approach the door. He paused a second before ringing the bell, and in that instant a blond woman in running clothes emerged.

  Amy Masterson looked startled. She was obviously on her way out for a run and wasn’t expecting to find someone lingering at her front door. She took the headphones out of her ears, and the two of them talked. After a few minutes she unfolded her arms and seemed to relax a bit. She and Mike went inside.

  Mike was in the house for what seemed like an eternity. After a half hour, I considered sneaking up to the house myself to see what was going on. My womanly sense was beginning to prickle, but I laughed it off. Mike was as smooth as sandpaper, and Amy was married—to Cody Masterson, no less, reputedly the sexiest man in Las Vegas. I convinced myself I had no reason to suspect any hanky-panky.

  The front door finally opened, and Amy showed Mike out. I slunk down in my seat in case she looked in my direction. Mike looked a little unsettled when he got back to the car.

  Mike backed the car up a hundred feet or so and then did a U-turn to get out of the subdivision. I was still crouched down in my seat.

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t know if she bought it or not. But she didn’t exactly throw me out of her house, either.”

  “Did she have anything useful to say?”

  “Not really. She said she didn’t notice any change in George before he was killed. She and her brother talked business almost every day, and she doubted there was any funny business going on with their books. ‘George probably would have known about it,’ she said.”

  “That’s the question, though. Did he find out about it right before being killed? Or was he about to discover it?”

  “Amy didn’t think so. But like you said, who knows whether George might have been hot on the trail. George could have started nosing around, and Cody got nervous and decided to kill him before he figured out what was going on.”

  “Well it looks like another dead end,” I said. “Cody wasn’t at home, was he?”

  “No sign of him. Actually, when I was there she got a phone call from another man, and they sounded pretty, uh, friendly.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “It sounded like they were making weekend plans. I thought that was kind of strange.”

  “And it wasn’t Cody?”

  “No, she called him something else. Eddie.”

  “Huh.” In the last week I had looked at about two dozen pictures of Cody in the newspaper. If I had a man who looked like him, I
wouldn’t be spending weekends canoodling with someone else.

  We hit a long stoplight heading back downtown. “So what were you guys doing in there for so long?” I tried not to sound accusatory, but I was dying to find out.

  He started blushing. “She’s a very friendly woman, let’s just say that.”

  “What happened in there, Casanova?”

  He laughed. “Nothing happened. She just, well, she wanted to show me her bedroom and…”

  The light turned green, and my foot overreacted on the gas pedal. Mike’s head was thrown back into the headrest.

  “Ouch,” he said.

  He deserved it. “So you went up to her bedroom and…”

  “She said it was just remodeled.”

  “I suppose she wanted to show you her needlework too?”

  “No. Eventually she got on the bed and suggested I join her there.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s when I left.”

  “Wow.” That little hussy. I took a deep breath. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to cross-examine you. You’re a grown-up. You can do whatever you want.”

  Mike just looked at me and smiled. I had a hard time picturing him getting angry or losing his cool.

  “Oh, I did learn one other little tidbit,” Mike said. His eyes were sparkling with amusement. “I called her ‘Mrs. Masterson,’ and she busted a gut. She said Cody’s name is bogus. His parents emigrated from Sweden to Minnesota, so he’s first generation. His real name is Lars Bergstrom.”

  I laughed out loud. “Well, it’s no wonder he changed it. Not exactly a showbiz name.” Lars, I thought. That was precious. “But here’s what I don’t get. Amy’s husband—Cody, Lars, whatever his name is—is supposed to be the best looking guy in Vegas. Why would she have a guy on the side and then try to put the moves on you, too?”

  “Maybe Cody’s got someone on the side himself,” he said. “But why are you so surprised? I am pretty irresistible.”

  I decided to play along. “Oh, I don’t blame her at all for throwing herself at you. Especially with that sexy shirt and tie combo you’re wearing today. That Ward Cleaver look is really making a comeback.”