Lucky Bastard

by Deborah Coonts

  “DeLuca drew to that one year to win a World Series of Poker bracelet—the stuff of legend, but it’s sorta creeping me out right now. So no one asked the woman where DeLuca was?”

  “Apparently not. I didn’t bother trying again, I figured she’d left by now.”

  “She’s gone all right.” I glanced at the girl.

  Two technicians were bagging her hands. One of them pawed through her jeweled feedbag of a purse. The tech pulled out a lipstick and a couple of condoms in pink wrappers. He shook his head at Romeo.

  “Do you happen to know when you called down here?” I asked Jerry.

  “Yeah.” Jerry paused. “Two twenty-one. These iPhones are amazing—all the information at your fingertips.”

  “Got it.” Eighteen minutes after the alarm sounded. Then another twenty give or take until Dane called me.

  “You going to tell me what happened?” Concern crept around the edges of Jerry’s weary voice.

  “Your woman didn’t leave. Somebody buried the heel of a shoe in her neck—the pointy end punctured something important. She bled out all over a new California. I’ll need a list of everyone who had access, keep all the tapes from the cameras in the hallway, and those outside showing the external doors to the dealership, you know the drill.” I rattled this off as if murder were as common as a drunk locking himself out of his room.

  “They killed her with a shoe?”

  “Has a certain style,” I said. “Romeo’s here. Are you going to be around for a while?”

  “Now I am.” Jerry sounded as if the world had just been dropped on his shoulders. “Besides, I got some paperwork to do on this rash of room robberies, but I was going to ignore that until tomorrow.”

  “Sitting behind the desk where the buck stops is overrated, isn’t it? Can I meet you in Security in an hour?” I glanced at my watch. Wow, apparently time also flew when you weren’t having any fun. I thought this was a good thing, but I couldn’t marshal the brainpower to think it through. “Make that an hour and a half.”

  “You got it.”

  As I closed my phone and stuffed it back into the pocket of my pajama bottoms, I turned back to the young detective, who stared at me with old eyes. I gave him a quick and dirty recap of my conversation—he’d already heard my side of it. Glossing over the code word thing, I bartered a bit of self-respect for some sniffing around time.

  “If you’re done with me,” I said, trying not to feel guilty about my contribution to his downward spiral into the morass of cynicism, “I’ve got to dress for the day, then I have some other fires to put out.”

  He nodded. “But—”

  “I know,” I said, interrupting him. “Don’t leave town.”

  Finally, that got a grin out of the kid, which made me feel hopeful. “Your leash isn’t that long,” he fired back.

  I was about to bite off a stinging reply when the kid’s grin faded. “I started to ask if you have any idea who this woman is. No ID in her purse.” The look on his face telegraphed his desire for easy answers.

  “Since she had a code to silence the alarm and call off the dogs, one could assume she either worked here or knew someone who does. And, if that is the case, whoever that is has some answering to do.” I’d pointed him in the right direction, which made me feel a little better about not giving him the whole story. As an insider myself, I owed Frank DeLuca a chance to explain how the woman ended up with his code word before I turned the cops onto him—that’s the way the game was played. But holding out on Romeo didn’t sit too well either—that’s not how our game was played. I’d make it up to the kid somehow. “Mr. DeLuca isn’t going to like this one bit.”

  Romeo paled. From the looks of him, his fracas with Mr. DeLuca’s daughter had included a run-in with the man himself, which was good. Knowing the kid, he’d put DeLuca at the bottom of his interview list, buying me some time.

  I put a hand on his arm. “Before we go any further, could you do me a favor? Check her bra. A lot of the girls carry their licenses and mad money there to outfox the purse snatchers and pickpockets.”

  “Mad money?”

  “If your date gets mad, you can still pay a cab to take you home. It’s a girl thing.”

  “I see.” Romeo didn’t make a note of that little tidbit. “We’ll look, but, even still, I’d appreciate it if you could do a bit of digging, maybe come up with a name.”

  Great. The young detective who had barely graduated from training wheels was throwing me in with the wolves. Of course, that was the role I played. After all, being Albert Rothstein’s daughter did open a few doors …and would give me a few minutes head start before anyone started shooting.

  Dane cleared his throat, making me jump. He’d been so quiet and still that I’d forgotten he was even there, which, given his considerable charms, I had heretofore considered an impossibility.

  “I can tell you who she is,” Dane said, his voice flat, hard, yet with a tremor of emotion.

  Romeo and I turned toward him.

  “You know her?” I asked, not even trying to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

  “Unfortunately.” Dane’s eyes captured mine. “She’s my wife.”

  Chapter Two

  Fighting to keep calm, I stared at the man I had known for almost six months. The man who had tried numerous times to worm his way into my life, not to mention into my pants. The man I had kissed in the Garden Bar, for chrissake!

  He had a wife!

  In my book, there are different levels of lying by omission—gradations starting with the little white lie that did no one any harm and could be overlooked. Progressing to holding your cards close until you knew who could be trusted, which was potentially forgivable. And culminating with the omission so glaring, so deceitful, that drawing a terminal amount of blood was a given.

  Dane had just shot that arrow, an arrow tipped with the poison of betrayal.

  Just as I was working myself up to homicide I remembered reading somewhere that losing a spouse is one of life’s most devastating events, which inched me back from the verge. Ah, the delicate tightrope one walks when a friend turns out to be far less than expected.

  Disappointment, one of life’s greatest conundrums.

  And I could be big…in theory. So, I’d try to be appreciative of his pain, but I needed some answers. Even if I had to hog-tie the man and threaten him with a branding iron, I was going to get them.

  Dane took a deep breath and ran his fingers through his hair. “Her name is…was Sylvie.” Staring over my shoulder at his wife’s body, his carefully constructed mask slipped away, leaving raw emotion, but not the pain I expected. I fought the urge to reach out, squeeze his arm. “Actually, it was Svetlana. She was from Latvia. We met during my first tour in Afghanistan. She wanted to come to the U.S. I was lonely, naïve…a stupid cowboy from Lubbock.”

  Riveted, Romeo and I didn’t move a muscle. I wasn’t sure either of us was breathing.

  “The base commander married us, and that was the beginning of the nightmare.” Dane gave a half laugh, rueful and self-deprecating, as he glanced at me. “As my mother never misses a chance to remind me, bringing Sylvie into our family was like letting a coyote in with the sheep.”

  Several emotions traveled across his face—anger, fear, something else… “After my first tour ended, we came back to the States. She was as sweet as the scent of sage under the warm sun…until all her paperwork came through. Then she turned on me like a cornered rattler. She hated West Texas. Hated me. Hated my family. After a couple of brushes with the law, she disappeared. And good riddance.”

  “You didn’t divorce her?” Why this was the question I chose to ask, I couldn’t fathom. Maybe it was because his rating on my creep-meter hinged on his answer.

  “I was sent back overseas, this time to Iraq. Not having anything to come home to, I volunteered to stay. The Army wasn’t about to turn me down. They were in desperate need of war-tested officers who spoke the local lingo. I’d only been out six m
onths when I showed up on your doorstep.”

  “I see.”

  “I hired a lawyer when I got to Nevada, but, since I had no idea where Sylvie might be, I couldn’t exactly send a process server to hit her with papers. So, I had to publish notices in the paper, a long rigmarole, which took time. But the paperwork has been done and the first notice is due out in the Review-Journal this Sunday.”

  “Whoever killed your wife significantly streamlined the legal process for you, didn’t they?” said Romeo.

  If Romeo’s question knocked Dane off center, I couldn’t tell.

  “I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re driving at. This is a no-fault state, divorces are easy to get and certainly not worth a felony conviction.”

  The detective paused for a moment, staring at Dane, measuring. “Your wife wasn’t trying to shake you down or anything, was she?”

  “I’d hear from her periodically. Always a hurried phone call from some truck stop or cheap motel. She moved around a lot.” A hard look flashed across Dane’s face. “Of course, she was always running low on funds and in some trouble. Although, she never sounded too panicked. Believe me, the woman could take care of herself.”

  “Did you give her money?” Romeo didn’t even glance up from his pad as he scribbled notes.

  “Sometimes. I’d wire her just enough to get out of the scrape she was in, but not enough to run too far. I thought if I could get a bead on her I could…well, I could solve a few of my own problems. But she was always one step ahead.”

  “What kind of problems?” This time Romeo looked up, his eyes steady, unreadable; his expression open, encouraging.

  “Once in a blue moon, she’d call my folks, hassle them. My father has a bad ticker. Her last call put him in the hospital for a week. I told him she was blowing smoke—she wouldn’t hurt them and couldn’t hurt me. But he’s a stubborn cuss, tough as an old boot and as ornery as a longhorn.”

  “Apparently not as tough as he thinks,” I said. “Why would she care about them?”

  “She was looking for me.” He trailed off. “They wouldn’t tell her where I was. The whole thing upset them tremendously.” He paused, collecting himself. “Once she got the bit in her teeth, she took it and ran with it. She wouldn’t let go.”

  “A beautiful face with a mile-wide mean streak,” I summarized. “Pretty is isn’t always as pretty does, is it?” I asked, because apparently I needed to rub a little salt in his wound as salve for my own. Not a proud moment. The minute the words escaped I felt the flush of shame. I needed to get a grip.

  “If you found your wife, what was your plan?” Romeo prompted.

  “Divorce her ass and hand her over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.” He glanced at me. “They’re the ones who kick the illegals out, right?”

  “In theory,” I said, not wanting to open that can of worms. Vegas had more than its share of illegals and I’d never seen even one of them shipped back to wherever they came from. But that was above my pay-grade. We rounded them up, what the government did with them after that was anybody’s guess. Whatever it was, most of them were back within a day or two, with new identities, applying for the same job.

  “They can send her to Hell for all I care.”

  “That’d be a one heck of a bus ride,” I remarked, because sarcasm hid the hurt.

  “This time when Sylvie called, it was different, wasn’t it?” Romeo probed. Once the kid latched on he was like a tick on a dog.

  “Yeah. Not only was she right in my backyard, but this time she was scared, really spooked, you know?”

  Dane looked at me. I nodded, but again resisted any show of sympathy—even if I believed him, I wasn’t letting him off the hook that easily.

  “Someone was following her—at least she thought they were. And they wanted to kill her.” He glanced at the lifeless form of his former wife. “Guess that much she got right.”

  “What’d she get wrong?” I asked.

  “Huh?” Dane went still as his eyes met mine

  “You said, ‘that much she got right.’ That implies she got something wrong. What?”

  “I didn’t mean it literally.” Dane’s eyes shifted to look over my shoulder. “It’s just a saying.”

  “I see,” I said, as I captured his eyes and stared him down. Why did I have the feeling the guy was being as honest as a cardsharp in a rigged game?

  “Did she say who was after her or why?” Romeo asked. He paused in his note taking as his gaze drifted between Dane and me.

  Shifting his attention to Romeo, Dane pressed his lips into a thin line and shook his head. “No. She called me during the poker game, around one. She said she’d play for a while, maybe an hour more, pretend everything was business as usual—her words, not mine.”

  “So somebody was watching her?”

  “That was the impression I got, not only from her comment, but from the way she talked. She was holding her cards close, acting like maybe somebody was eavesdropping.”

  “Was she still playing when she called?”

  “No, taking a break.”

  “So it could’ve been anybody in the room who was listening,” Romeo said under his breath, as if talking to himself as he jotted a note. When he’d finished, he looked up, meeting Dane’s eyes. “She wanted you to meet her here?”

  “No.” Dane’s eyes held steady, his voice didn’t waver. “She wanted to meet me in Delilah’s.”

  “Then how—”

  “She didn’t show, okay?” Dane bit off the reply. Taking a deep breath, he paused and ran a hand through his hair. “I fell for it, even after all this time. Christ, I’m a fool.”

  “Fell for what?”

  “If that woman was a pro at anything it was giving me the slip.” He chewed on his lip and turned inward. From the look on his face the conversation he was having with himself was heated. “I had given up finding her and was on my way to the garage when I noticed the door to this place. It hanging open at this hour didn’t seem right.”

  Personally, none of this seemed right, but I didn’t say that part. I was willing to acknowledge that the time he spent looking for her could explain some of the time gap in his story, between the alarm and his call to me.

  “Did she work here?” I asked.

  Dane shook his head. “Sylvie didn’t work. She found a sucker, then bled him dry.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that you might be walking in on something going down?” I asked Dane. The guy should have stupid tattooed on his forehead.

  “It occurred to me.” Dane shot me a glare. “But I’m pretty good at taking care of myself.”

  “So you went and pulled a Lone Ranger.”

  “I thought I could handle it.”

  “Well, cowboy, it didn’t quite work out so good now, did it?” Didn’t the guy know even the Lone Ranger had Tonto?

  Then it hit me: Was that the role he expected me to play?

  ***

  Without a glance at Dane, I turned on my heel and forced myself to walk calmly toward the land of the living. Wringing the man’s neck was starting to look like a viable solution to several problems, which had me worried. Usually I didn’t resort to contemplating homicide this early in the game. A killer had recently been in this room, breathing the same air. Was murderous intent communicable? Who knew? Regardless, with bloodlust coursing through my veins, I knew I needed to put some distance between me and Prime Suspect Number One before I creased his skull with a tire iron.

  Once out of the showroom, rational thought trickled in, filling some of the emotional gaps in my logic. Calmness—okay, a diminished level of murderous intent—returned as I ducked under a paper sign that had come loose from its mooring and now dangled, one end still firmly affixed to the ceiling, the other dragging the ground. The sign, hand-painted in red on butcher paper, welcomed all the poker players. I wondered what nimrod had approved it. Had the request come through my office, I would have required the banner to be professionally printed. />
  Quality control, a never-ending quest in an increasingly tacky world.

  Crossing the hallway, I pushed through the service doors, turned to the right and headed down a back hallway leading toward the main building of the hotel. Somehow I didn’t have it in me to traipse through the public areas in my purple flannels and ripped and worn Rebels tee shirt, even though the hotel would be sparsely populated at this hour. And, to be honest, no one would pay any attention anyway.

  My thoughts returned to Dane and homicide. It’s funny how often those went hand in hand, like peanut butter and jelly…or guns and bullets.

  Perhaps I was overplaying my hand, making the punishment worse than the crime. I wasn’t that mad…well, maybe about the Lone Ranger thing…and the lying thing…and the being married but not wearing the hardware thing…

  Okay, I was seriously steamed. And scared. Yup, the emotions were redlining. Not good. And so not helpful when trying to problem-solve.

  A set of spring-loaded double doors on my left flew inward. I dodged two housekeepers staggering under armfuls of neatly folded, bright white towels. Pressing my back to the wall, I waited until they passed. From behind their towers of terry cloth, they never saw me, jabbering as if they hadn’t a care in the world. What was that like? I couldn’t remember. And why did it feel as if I had an anvil sitting on my chest? My knees threatened to buckle under the weight.

  Leaning my head back, I closed my eyes and focused on the cool hard surface of the wall under my shoulders. I took a moment to simply breathe, pulling as much air into my tight chest as possible. With each breath, the panic subsided…and I started seeing stars. Too little air will kill you, too much will make you hyperventilate. There was a lesson in there somewhere, but balance had never been my forte.

  Pushing myself from the wall, I continued toward the main hotel, willing myself to walk slowly, to think—there was very little worse than an emoting female who threw logic out the window. And that was so not me—at least not the me I used to be. The before-Teddie me.