Void Moon

by Michael Connelly

  "Eight grand. That's it. But that was for the equipment. She didn't cut me in on anything. She just gave me the eight and cut me loose."

  It occurred to Karch that it was odd that Cassie Black had let Paltz go - and had even paid him - after she had not let Hidalgo live. It was a pattern conflict that he would have to think about. Something had happened in that hotel room and there was probably only one person who could tell him what it was.

  "Where's the eight grand?"

  "In a strongbox in my house. Let's go. I'll show you. I'll give it to you."

  Karch smiled without humor.

  "She tell you about the job when she cut you loose?"

  "She didn't say jack to me. She just cut me loose and got out of the van. I found the eight grand on the front seat with the keys."

  "What about the briefcase?"

  "What briefcase?"

  Karch paused for a moment and decided to let it go. He doubted she would have shared knowledge of the briefcase with Paltz. She had probably recognized the case as being electronically trapped and hadn't even opened it at that point anyway.

  Karch concluded he had all he was going to get from Paltz - except maybe the eight thousand in his house.

  "Come over here," he said, pointing to the hood of the Lincoln. "Put your wallet down on the hood. And your keys."

  Paltz did as instructed, standing at the front of the car while Karch stood to the side by the left fender.

  "You people stole from the wrong people. And she shot the wrong man."

  Paltz dropped his mouth open but then quickly recovered.

  "I don't know what the fuck you're - I didn't steal anything. I - "

  "You helped and that makes you just as guilty. You understand that?"

  Paltz closed his eyes and when he spoke his voice was a desperate whine.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't know. Please, I need a break here."

  Karch looked past him at the surrounding scrub land. His eyes lingered again on the Joshua tree and then moved on. The desert was truly beautiful in its desolation.

  "You know why I come out here?"

  "Yes."

  Karch almost laughed.

  "No, I mean to this place. This specific spot."

  "No."

  "Because thirty years ago when they charted this place and started selling lots to the suckers they had the whole place graded so it would look like it was ready to go, that they'd start building your house as soon as they got your money. It was part of the scam and it worked real well."

  Paltz nodded as though he found the story interesting.

  "My old man bought a lot . . ."

  "That's why you come out, huh?"

  Paltz's conversational tone was forced and desperate. Karch ignored the question.

  "Thirty years is a long time. The ground's pretty hard again but you go anywhere else out here and start digging and you got about a foot of top sand and then after that it's like digging through solid rock. People think it's like digging at the beach. But it isn't close. The earth below the top sand hasn't been touched in a couple million years. The fucking shovel bounces off it."

  He looked at Paltz.

  "So I like it here. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's still hard work but you got about three feet of earth you can deal with. That's all you really need."

  Karch offered a knowing smile. Paltz suddenly took off as Karch knew he probably would. He ran around the sales office and then past the Joshua tree, attempting to use them as a blind. This also was not new to Karch. He stepped away from the Lincoln and calmly walked out to the left of the office to improve his angle. As he moved he unsnapped the silencer from the Sig because it was no longer needed and would affect his accuracy. He trained on the range with the gun without the silencer.

  Paltz was about thirty yards away, moving right to left, his feet kicking up little clouds of sand and dust as he desperately ran in a zigzag pattern. Karch dropped the silencer into his coat pocket and stopped. He spread his feet, raised the Sig in a standard two-handed range grip and traced Paltz's movement. He aimed carefully and fired once, leading the target by about two feet. He lowered the weapon and watched as Paltz's arms started to windmill and he went down face first into the sand. Karch knew he had hit him in the back, maybe even the spine. He waited for movement and after a few moments he saw Paltz kicking in the sand and rolling over. But it was clear he wasn't getting up.

  Karch looked around for the ejected shell and found it in the sand. It was still hot to the touch when he picked it up and put it in his pocket. He went back to the Lincoln and used the key remote to pop the trunk. He took his jacket off and folded it over the bumper, then reached in for his jumpsuit. He stepped into the legs and worked his arms into the sleeves and then pulled the zipper up to his neck. The jumpsuit was baggy and black, chosen for night work.

  He then reached in for his shovel and headed over to the spot where Paltz had fallen. There was a bloom of maroon blood at the center of Paltz's back. His face was caked with sand and dirt. Blood was on his lips and teeth. It meant the bullet had ripped through a lung. He was breathing quickly and hoarsely. He wasn't trying to speak.

  "All right, that's enough," Karch said.

  He leaned down and tucked the muzzle of the Sig under Paltz's left ear. With his other hand he held the shovel by its neck and positioned the blade so that it would block the blow-back of blood. He fired one shot into Paltz's brain and watched him go still. The shell ejected from the Sig clanked off the shovel and fell into the sand. Karch picked it up and put it in his pocket.

  Karch opened the front of the jumpsuit, put the Sig back into his holster and looked up at the sky. He didn't like doing this during the day. It wasn't just being in a black jumpsuit under the desert sun. Sometimes when things backed up at McCarran the airliners were put into low holding patterns out this way.

  He started digging anyway, hoping that wouldn't happen and wondering if this would be the time of coincidence, when his spade would strike bone already in the ground.

  24

  KARCH stood in front of the practice mirror adjusting the tie on his fresh suit. It was a Hollyvogue that had belonged to his father, with Art Deco spirals on it. He was wearing it with the two-tone gabardine Hollywood jacket and pleated pants he had picked up at Valentino's in downtown.

  His pager sounded and he picked it up off the bureau. He recognized the call-back number as Vincent Grimaldi's. He deleted it, hooked the pager on his belt and finished adjusting his tie. He wasn't going to call Grimaldi back. He planned to drop by in person to inform him of the progress he had made.

  When he was done with the tie he went back to the bureau for his guns. He holstered the Sig and snapped the safety strap over it. He then picked up the little . 25 popper. It was a Beretta he could fit in his palm. He turned back to the mirror and held his hands loosely at his sides, the . 25 hidden in his right hand. He made a few moves and gestures, always sure to keep the pistol hidden from view. David's right hand, he thought. David's right hand.

  He then went on to practice the finish, moving his apparently empty hands as if in conversation and then suddenly producing the gun pointed right at himself in the mirror. When he had practiced this enough he put the little gun back into the black silk magician's pocket that he'd had a downtown tailor sew onto the inside rear belt line of his pants - every pair of pants he owned. He then held his hands palms out to the mirror and then brought them together as if in prayer. He bowed his head and backed away from the mirror, end of show.

  On his way to the garage Karch stopped in the kitchen and took a mason jar out of one of the cabinets. He took the top off and dropped the two bullet shells from the desert into it with the others. He then held the jar up and looked at it. It was almost half full of shells. He shook the jar and listened to the shells rattle inside. He then put it back in the cabinet and took out a box of Honeycombs cereal. He was famished. He hadn't eaten all day and the physical exertion in the desert had sapped his strength. He start
ed eating the cereal right out of the box, handfuls at a time, careful not to get any crumbs on his clothes.

  He stepped into the garage, which had been illegally converted into an office, and sat down behind his desk. He didn't need an office in a commercial building like most private investigators. Most of his work - on the legitimate side - came in from out of state on the phone. His specialty was missing persons cases. He paid the two detectives who ran Metro's missing persons unit five hundred dollars a month to refer clients to him. As a matter of policy, Metro could not act on a routine report of a missing adult until forty-eight hours had elapsed since the time of the report. This practice had originated because most missing people were missing on purpose and often turned up on their own a day or so after supposedly disappearing. In Las Vegas this was most often the case. People came on vacation or for conventions and cut loose in a city designed to knock down inhibitions. They shacked up with strippers and hookers, they lost their money and were too embarrassed to go home, they won lots of money and didn't want to go home. There were endless reasons and that was why the police had a wait-and-see attitude.

  However, the forty-eight-hour policy and the reasons behind it did not placate the concerned and sometimes hysterical loved ones of the supposedly missing. That was where Karch and a legion of other private investigators came in. By paying off the cops in the MPU, Karch made sure his name and number were often suggested to people who reported missing persons and didn't want to wait the required forty-eight hours before a search was begun.

  The five hundred Karch deposited each month into a bank account the two cops had access to was a bargain. He drew as many as a dozen calls a month on missing persons cases. He charged four hundred dollars a day plus expenses, with a two-day minimum. He often located the supposedly missing person inside an hour with a simple credit card trace but he never told the clients that. He just had them wire payment to his bank account before he revealed their loved one's location. To Karch it was all another form of sleight of hand. Keep things in motion with misdirection. Never reveal what is in your palm.

  His office was a shrine to a Las Vegas long gone by. The walls were a collage of photographs of entertainers from the fifties and sixties. There were numerous shots of Frank and Dean and Sammy, some individual and some as a group. There were photos of dancers and framed fight cards.

  There were postcards depicting casino resorts that no longer existed. There was a framed collection of gambling chips - one from every casino that opened its doors in the fifties. There was a large blowup photo of the Sands crumbling to the ground after being dynamited to make way for the new era of Las Vegas. Many of the photos were autographed and inscribed, but not to Jack Karch. They were inscribed to "The Amazing Karch!" - his father.

  At center on the wall Karch faced while seated at his desk was the largest frame on any of the walls. It was a blowup photo of the huge neon-gilded headliner sign that had stood outside the Sands. It said Now Appearing FRANK SINATRA

  JOEY BISHOP

  THE AMAZING KARCH!

  Karch looked at the photo across from him for a long moment before getting down to work. He had been nine years old when he saw his father's name on the big sign. His father took him with him one night to watch the show from the side of the stage. He was standing there watching his father perform an illusion called The Art of the Cape when he was tapped on the shoulder and looked up to see Frank Sinatra. The man who was the living embodiment of Las Vegas faked a punch off his chin and asked with a smile if he had an exclamation point at the end of his name, too. It was the most indelible memory of his childhood. That and what happened to his father a few years later at Circus, Circus.

  Karch looked away from the photo and checked the message machine on the desk. He had three waiting messages. He hit the playback button and picked up a pencil, ready to take notes. The first message was from a woman named Marion Rutter from Atlanta who wanted to hire Karch to look for her husband, Clyde, who hadn't come home from a kitchenware convention in Las Vegas. She was very worried and wanted someone to start looking for Clyde right away. Karch wrote down her name and number but wouldn't be calling back because for the moment he was booked.

  The next two messages were both from Vincent Grimaldi. He sounded annoyed. He demanded that Karch check in with him right away.

  Karch erased the messages and leaned back in his padded leather desk chair. He grabbed another handful of cereal and studied the two stacks of cash on his desk while he ate. He had gone to Jersey Paltz's apartment after the desert and used the dead man's keys to go in, open the strongbox he found in a closet and take the money. One stack was $ 8,000 in one-hundred-dollar bills. The other stack was $4,480 in twenties. Karch figured the $ 8,000 belonged to Grimaldi. Minus the $ 550 Karch had accumulated so far in expenses - $ 500 to Cannon for the Flamingo video trail and $ 50 to Iverson for the plate run. Make it an even $ 600 to cover gas and other incidentals, he decided. The other stack Karch was going to keep free and clear. It had not been part of the caper at the Cleo. It had apparently been Paltz's own savings.

  He put what was his into one of the desk drawers, which he then locked with a key. He took out a preprinted and generic invoice form and wrote out a receipt for the $ 7,400 he would be returning to Grimaldi. He did not put his name anywhere on the form. When he was finished he folded the money inside the receipt and put it in an envelope he then slid into the inside pocket of his coat.

  He sat motionless at the desk for a few moments wondering if he should have deducted more money to cover the trip he knew he would be making to Los Angeles. He finally decided against it and got up and came around the desk to the row of file cabinets beneath the blowup photo of the Sands going down. He unlocked a drawer with a key, looked through the files until he found the one he wanted and then went back to the desk with it.

  The file was labeled FREELING, MAX. Karch opened it on the desk and spread the contents out. There were several police reports and handwritten pages of notes. There was also a packet of carefully folded and yellowed newspaper clippings. He opened these and read the one with the largest headline. It had been on the front page of the Las Vegas Sun six-and-a-half years before.

  "HIGH-ROLLER ROBBER"

  PLUNGES TO DEATH

  BY DARLENE GUNTER

  Sun Staff Writer A man authorities believe to have been responsible for a string of hotel room burglaries of high rollers at Strip casinos jumped to his death early Wednesday when faced with certain capture in a penthouse suite at the Cleopatra Resort and Casino.

  The man's body crashed through the casino's signature atrium ceiling, sending glass showering on players at 4:30 A . M . The body landed on an unused craps table and the incident caused a momentary panic among those in the casino. However, authorities said no one was hurt in the incident other than the man who fell.

  Metro police spokesmen said the suspect, identified as 34-year-old Maxwell James Freeling of Las Vegas, fell twenty floors after crashing through the window of a penthouse suite when he was confronted by a Cleopatra security agent who had set up a sting operation to nab him.

  It was unclear late Wednesday why Metro police were not involved in the sting operation. Also unclear was why Freeling chose to jump through the window in a fatal effort to avoid capture.

  Vincent Grimaldi, the casino's chief of security, was close-lipped about the incident but expressed relief that it occurred during a time when the casino was at its least crowded.

  "We were just lucky it happened when it happened," Grimaldi said. "There weren't many people in the casino at the time. If it had happened during a high-occupancy period, who knows what could have resulted."

  Grimaldi said the casino would stay open while repairs were made to the atrium ceiling. He said a small portion of the playing area would have to be roped off during the repairs.

  After Freeling's death a 26-year-old woman was taken into custody at the hotel and turned over to police officers. She was arrested when she ran to Freeling's b
ody in the casino after his fall. Authorities said that it became obvious by her reactions that she was "involved" with Freeling in some capacity.

  "If she had just split we probably wouldn't have ever known about her," said Metro detective Stan Knapp. "But she ran to the guy and gave herself away."

  The woman, whom police declined to identify until charges are filed, was being questioned throughout the day Wednesday at Metro headquarters.

  Police said that Freeling is believed to have been the highly skilled thief who struck eleven times in the last seven months at casino hotels on the Strip. In each case, a casino guest was robbed of cash and jewels in his or her hotel room by a thief who entered while they slept.

  The thief was dubbed the "High-Roller Robber" by police because the targets were all "players" - hotel guests who wagered and won large amounts of cash. The estimated take from the eleven capers was in excess of $300,000, according to police sources.