She Walks in Beauty

by Sarah Shankman

  In his bag he had a crown with only a few rhinestones missing he’d picked up at a pawn shop. He’d dazzle New Jersey’s chaperone with his phony NBC badge and explain that the tape was for a promo for Japanese TV. It’d be beamed by satellite. It was your international beauty coverage. The Japanese were crazy for blondes; it could change New Jersey’s life.

  Did that sound good? Wayne liked it. Besides, these girls were all tits and no brains, so she’d believe anything. All you had to do was wind ’em up and point ’em in a direction and they’d smile and pose and walk and wave and smile.

  Then, once he had the tape, he’d take it over to Michelangelo at his club. He’d paid Dean another hundred to find out where The Man hung. He’d show him the tape, explain about how he could plant the picture in the judges’ brains. The Final Judges. Then Michelangelo would take him on.

  Miss New Jersey would win. Wayne would be Michelangelo’s right-hand man. And that would be that. Actually, Wayne could help Michelangelo in lots of ways. He’d realized, after talking with Dean, he knew a lot about The Man’s business.

  He’d thought, last night, about whether he really wanted that, after he came back in from the Pines, and he’d decided, why not go for it? If it didn’t work out, well, the Pines were still there. But one more shot at the bright lights and the big time. Why not?

  Wayne was rehearsing his speech in his head.

  “Hi, I’m Wayne Ward from NBC, and I’m here this morning to—”

  Christ! What was that?

  Up ahead, the fire door had opened, nobody was supposed to be using that. And this tall, tall as him, skinny redheaded woman was creeping down the hall in her flats, not looking behind her. Not seeing Wayne.

  She had a tape recorder in her hand! She was from some radio station probably, about to horn in on Wayne’s show. He didn’t have time for this. He had a lot to do today.

  Or maybe the old broad had been hired by one of those other state delegations to poison Miss New Jersey!

  Now, there was a possibility. Whatever she was up to, no good, that was for sure, she was creeping along, creeping, creeping, then stopping with her ear to the door.

  See? If she were legit, would she being doing that? She reared back, about to do God knows what, when Wayne pounced.

  *

  The phone was ringing up in 1801.

  “No,” Harry murmured. “Unnmmh-unh.”

  “Harry.”

  “No!” He smothered her mouth with his.

  But she slid away from him and felt for the receiver. “I can’t let it ring. It could be—”

  “Christ!” Harry rolled over and joined Harpo staring up at the ceiling. “It better be Him and not that damned Hoke!”

  It was Win Kelly, Captain Win Kelly from the Atlantic County Major Crime Squad in Northfield, inland on the mainland from Atlantic City, he said, as if maybe she wanted a geography lesson. Which she didn’t. Not right now.

  “I hate to disturb you like this,” Kelly said, letting her know he could hear another agenda in her voice, “but our mutual friend Charlie from Atlanta let me know you were in town—”

  He did, did he? He had told her to stay away from the local cops. “Charlie said you’d been sort of nosing around a fellow you thought was missing?”

  “Kurt Roberts. Well, he’s not. If that’s what this is about, you should talk—”

  “I told him we didn’t know anything about any missing pageant judge, but we do have a couple of other situations here in your hotel, and I just wondered, seeing as how you’d been asking questions—” Kelly sounded like Chuck Yeager. But then, so did Charlie. It was probably something they taught ace detectives when they took those special seminars with the FBI at Quantico.

  “So what’s up?” Sam was motioning to Harry for her pen and notebook.

  “Well, first of all there’s this fellow Douglas Franken who’s been reported missing by his uncle—Tru Franken. You know who he is?”

  “The discount mogul who owns this hotel.”

  “Right. He seems pretty upset that nobody can find his nephew Dougie.”

  “Don’t know either one of them.”

  “Well, the thing is, we found somebody else who’d been missing, though nobody had reported her, a little receptionist to Franken named Crystal. Seems to have been a special friend of Dougie’s.”

  “Nope.”

  “We found her in Kurt Roberts’s room, right next to yours, about an hour ago.”

  “Really?” Sam sat up and stared at the wall between the two suites as if she ought to be able to see right through it. “In Roberts’s room? I didn’t hear a thing.”

  A testament to the soundproofing in the Monopoly, or, what with the bubble bath, the rose…

  “A maid found her this morning. Head of housekeeping called security, who called us. They should have found her last night, when they were doing turndown, but since nobody’d been in Roberts’s room for a few days, I guess they were letting it slide—”

  “Is she dead?”

  “Crystal? Nah. She’s a real good nose breather, though. She’d been tied naked to the bed with her panties in her mouth. She was pretty hungry, probably’ll have a head cold, and was mad as hell. Said a fellow employee, actually former fellow employee, Franken just let him go, named Wayne Ward, tied her up. Said he was going to send her up some company, though nobody ever showed. We wondered if this same Ward might have something to do with Dougie’s being scarce, and it’s interesting Crystal was in Roberts’s room. You know anything about this, by any chance?”

  Wayne. Wayne Ward. She put her hand over the receiver. “Harry? What was the name of that guy who popped you in the lip?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Detective Win Kelly, Major Crime Squad.”

  “Oh.”

  “Babe, is there any chance he knew Kurt Roberts?”

  “Well, it was Roberts’s room he was coming out of when I ran into him that morning.”

  “We’ll meet you downstairs in the coffee shop in about half an hour,” Sam said into the phone.

  49

  People loitering outside in the hallway, it didn’t make any difference. Lana wasn’t in her room. She’d given her chaperone the slip.

  She’d started out her morning trying on the dozen blond wigs her chaperone had found for her—that and trying to calm down.

  It didn’t help that her chaperone kept saying that Cher wore wigs. Dolly Parton wore wigs. She didn’t give a damn who wore wigs. She wanted to get her hands on the bitches who had hidden the little tiny razor blades in her brush that had zipped handfuls of her hair right off at the roots.

  She’d called Michelangelo and given him an earful about it. No one could do this to a DeLucca. He’d said he couldn’t agree more, but she thought it sounded like he was reading the paper at the same time.

  Never mind. Just wait till this was all over. Her Uncle John knew plenty of people all over. Those two bitches could run, but they couldn’t hide.

  Then she tried to read some Carl Sandburg, because he was one of Marilyn’s favorite writers. She thought maybe that’d help her calm down. He wrote about Lincoln, one of Marilyn’s heroes. Well, Lana tried. She’d tried and tried, but she just didn’t get it. All those big words didn’t make her feel any better. They made her feel stupid.

  Next she sent her chaperone out to get her a turkey sandwich, no, she didn’t want the one from room service, and a big glass of milk.

  With her gone Lana could tuck into the bottle of champagne in her minibar. She knew champagne calmed her down, and just like Marilyn, she drank it from a special glass with her name engraved on it.

  She was sitting, just like Marilyn, wearing a bra and nothing else—she never wore panties—sipping champagne and bleaching her upper lip when suddenly she had an idea. Maybe she’d go get her evening dress from its hiding place downstairs in the wine cellar, safe from those bitches. Run through her Sugar Cane routine one more time.

  So she drained her glass
, found the key, threw on a pink sweater, a pair of white slacks, and her fluffiest wig. She’d take the stairs and call it exercise.

  *

  Darleen Carroll stepped off the elevator on 15 just in time to see Lana slip through the stair door marked Exit in green lights. She called Lana’s name, but Miss New Jersey kept going.

  Damn! Here she’d just gotten up her nerve to apologize, and she was going to have to chase the silly twit all over the hotel.

  But there was no other way around it. The elevators were too slow, and she didn’t know what floor to go to. Lana could be headed anywhere.

  So Darleen pounded down the stairs after her. If she’d known this was going to be a foot race, she wouldn’t have worn her gold mules. “Lana! Lana!” she called. “Wait up.”

  Below, Lana walked faster, then picked up speed, holding on to the stair rail and almost sliding. Her heart was in her mouth. Had those bitches sent someone else after her? Well, nobody was going to catch Lana. Nobody. Nobody.

  *

  “Could you come back later?” Harry called to the maid at the door. “We’ll be out in about five.”

  It wasn’t the maid. It was Rashad. “Mr. Zack? Junior and I are here with the video we’d like to screen for you.”

  “Yours.” Sam pointed at the door, pulling on a bright yellow sweater and black-and-white checked trousers. “Captain Kelly is waiting.”

  Harry threw open the door. “You guys don’t know about calling?”

  “I know that this is a heinously inappropriate intrusion upon your privacy and your time,” Rashad began. Behind him Junior stood on one foot and then the other. When he saw Harry, he almost bolted.

  Harry held up a hand like a traffic cop. Junior still thought he was a detective. “Stop. Junior, I’m—listen, we’ve got to get downstairs. I’ll explain later.”

  Junior still didn’t look too sure.

  “Cool it,” said Rashad. “Chill, man. The dude’s not lying.”

  Harry said, “We’ll meet you back here in an hour, but we’ve got to go.”

  “Great!” Rashad’s smile was blinding. “We’ll wait right here in the hall.”

  “Hi, Rashad. Junior.” Sam smiled, bustling out past them. “So much for our leisurely morning in bed,” she hissed in Harry’s ear as they headed for the elevator.

  “Hey! Who answered the phone? Did I answer the phone?”

  “Listen, why did Wayne Ward slug you in the mouth? And why does Junior think you’re a cop?”

  Harry gave her his professional insurance investigator shrug.

  *

  By God, Darleen said to herself, panting, seriously out of breath, she was going to catch this bimbo and apologize to her if it was the last thing she ever did.

  And it might be. Even the workouts with Guido, her personal trainer in Newport Beach, hadn’t prepared her to run down 15 flights of stairs in her high heels, which is why she’d kicked them off on 14.

  Lana made it through the stairway door on the ground floor about 10 seconds ahead of her. It was a good thing the girl had all that shiny platinum hair—which Darleen spied at the end of the hall up ahead flashing past a sign that said Employees Only.

  50

  This was even better than he’d planned. Wayne pulled his red Mustang right up to the front door of Va Bene. This was super.

  The doorman was trying to wave him away, but Wayne just ignored his signal, stepping out of his car, right up in the man’s face.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Amato.”

  The doorman took in Wayne’s cap, on backwards so it read Wayne Delivers, his T-shirt, tattered jeans, and Reeboks. Wayne knew that look. Guy cleared $4.50 an hour, trying to make him feel like dirt. Like salesclerks in fancy department stores. Now that was one thing about the help in FrankFairs. Mr. You Know Who insisted that they treat everyone as if they were absolutely bursting with innate worth. Which they were, of course—except this bozo, who was about to be full of something else in about half a second.

  “No way,” the doorman said.

  “No way what? No way Mr. Amato’s here or no way you’re going to let me see him?”

  “Neither. Beat it.”

  So Wayne slammed the butt of his .38 into the side of the guy’s head and stepped over him.

  *

  Win Kelly was a big man with a thick shock of prematurely white hair who spent a lot of time tucking his shirttail back into his gray slacks.

  He asked questions in that dry Chuck Yeager voice, and, like Charlie, still had some humor in his blue eyes. That was a wonderment, Sam thought, after all they’d seen. Kelly had mentioned that he used to be with New York City Vice until he grew up and realized he didn’t need to beat up on himself that bad every day just to think he’d done some good.

  It was a philosophy Sam found interesting.

  “So, I guess we don’t need to go borrowing trouble, worrying about this Roberts, too, if this,” he looked at his notebook, “Cindy Lou Jacklin can vouch for his being safe and sound in the Bahamas.”

  “Well,” said Harry, as much as he hated to, “you know, nobody ever did exactly follow up on that.”

  What was he getting at? Well, they’d just taken old Cindy’s word for it, hadn’t they? No one had seriously considered that Cindy Lou might be lying.

  Win Kelly shrugged. Well, anyhow, they’d put out an APB on this Wayne Ward, who, by the way, had a very interesting sheet and shouldn’t have been employed in a casino hotel anyway, the Gambling Commission being very strict about employees’ priors, even if they weren’t handling money.

  What exactly did Wayne do here? Sam was curious.

  It was funny about that, said Kelly. Tru Franken, and an odd bird he was, didn’t want to get very specific, but Kelly had asked to see his setup. Ward did surveillance, which all the casinos did to some degree, watching the action on the gambling floors—which was perfectly kosher. But Ward took it a few steps further. Kelly was talking about video cameras, taping, esoteric high tech stuff. Voice-overs.

  Voices? Did he say voices?

  *

  Who was that woman? Lana was running as fast as she could through the back of the house. Maybe she ought to stop and ask one of the busboys for help.

  But she was almost to Mr. Franken’s private wine cellar where her dress was hanging. Though she’d have to say when she’d tucked her dress in there yesterday with the man who was a friend of Michelangelo’s, it looked to her like most of the stuff on the floor wasn’t wine, but orange pop.

  Now she only had to make it behind the big green door up ahead and then turn to the right, unlock the wine cellar with the key on the chain around her neck, and she was home free. Then she’d grab her dress and wait inside for the crazy lady to get lost.

  *

  “I’m so sorry,” said Vic, the captain who always took care of Michelangelo. “I hate to disturb you, but there is this man outside who insists that he has an appointment. I’m sure he doesn’t, Mr. Amato.” Vic rolled his eyes. “But before we send him away, I thought you ought to know—”

  Ma was dining alone today. He’d just finished a plate of spedini, one of his favorites. Italian bread with melted mozzarella smothered in a light anchovy sauce. It wasn’t good for his arteries, but it was good for his soul. That, with a glass of dolcetto, slightly chilled. Then a green salad with a small bottle of San Pellegrino. A little espresso.

  The good food took his mind off his problems. Sometimes Michelangelo felt that the weight of the whole world rested on his shoulders. Well, his world, anyway.

  The boys who worked lookout said his mom was out of the house every day. He knew there was something going on they were afraid to tell him. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  Then there was Lana, a real pain in the butt if there ever was one. Who’d she think she was, Vito Corleone, ordering hits left and right? Those girls took my dress; do ’em. On the other hand, she was Big John’s niece, and under Ma’s protection. It was hard to know where the boundaries might
lie in Big John’s eyes.

  One thing he’d decided, Miss DeLucca getting on his nerves, the hell with a fix. There was no money changing hands on the pageant anyway, so it wasn’t like he was going to make anything except some goodwill with Big John. For that there were other avenues that were less complicated.

  But the next thing he knows, Angelo Pizza calls him up and says not to worry, he’s heard Ma wants the girl to win, he’s got it wired.

  What the hell did that mean? Angelo was a good man, but Ma would rather he didn’t branch out on his own. Ange hadn’t served all that time in Danbury for having New Jersey’s most creative criminal mind, even when he was young. And what with Ma’s recently expanded bookmaking business, the heavy investments in IBM equipment and several telecommunications concerns, he wasn’t interested in bringing any unnecessary attention to himself. ,In the feds’ eyes where there was smoke there was fire,. And now, now, there’s strangers tracking him to his club. A man couldn’t enjoy a quiet meal without some jerkoff interrupting him.

  “Bring him in,” said Ma. Maybe this was the time to make an example. Show what respect demanded. Word would get out on the street, and at least he could eat a lunch in peace.

  *

  Lana was standing right in front of the wine cellar door. The little woman, whoever she was, with the multicolored hair piled up on top of her head was breathing right down her neck.

  “Lana!” she screamed, practically in her ear. “Lana, wait!”

  Wait, her ass. Lana leaned over, pressed her chest right up against the lock, fiddled with the key—the chain she was wearing it on around her neck was just long enough—click, got it, great, jerked open the door.

  “Wait! Wait! There’s something I’ve got to tell you!”

  Lana put one foot in the door, turned, and grabbed at what was closest, anything to get this broad off her tail, reached up and snatched off her long blond wig and tossed it at the woman’s face.

  “Ouch!” Darleen yelped. For Lana had grabbed the key too. The chain broke, and the key popped Darleen right in the mouth.

  Lana slammed the door shut. Whew! Safe at last. Maybe there was a point to the chaperones after all. At least they kept the crazies off.