Nobody Dies in a Casino (14 page)

And she could see the desk down there with the dead cordless and the picture of the improbable building. The normal clutter of a working desktop was strangely organized. Your regular shuffling of overwhelming paperwork, but the stacking was weird.

Odd-shaped piles … wrong somehow … the stacks too even heightwise and too quickly arranged. Photos, drawings, scripts, diagrams, and junk mail stacked more by size than subject, but the stacks still oddly shaped. What was she looking for?

And the photo of the gigantic building, surely some Hollywood prop engineered with photography instead of actual construction, appeared to have toppled from a pile of what looked like household bills mixed with restaurant flyers and prostitute handbills available on the Strip. Organized by haste and stack height rather than by subject—that was it.

Anyone living in the house would know something was wrong immediately. But at first glance, strangers like police and literary agents might not. Charlie looked back at young Officer Leach with respect.

Charlie learned something about her enigmatic client too. It took a bit of looking beyond the search destruction to know what it was though. One, he was tidy. Two, he was not celibate. Interesting objects had been pulled off closet shelves and dresser drawers, the very least damning of which were condoms, K-Y jelly, scented aerosols, and flavored creams. Various cruel-looking mechanisms. A puzzling array of chains, hooks, ropes, and pulleys. Rotating hooks in the ceiling. All suggested an athletic sex life. Not surprising. But again, he was tidy, or maybe realistic—no mirrors.

Which doesn't mean there aren't hidden cameras and snuff videos.

Well no, but Evan
is
tidy. He wouldn't leave three dead men in his great room. And where the hell is he?

*   *   *

Evan Black returned shortly after the reinforcements arrived. He'd been at the funeral of Patrick Thompson and helped to disperse the poor pilot's ashes from an airplane over the landscape of his family's request. Charlie didn't want to know.

She sat in a canvas deck chair pulled up to a glass-topped table on Evan's pool patio. The white tile had blue Aztec-type markings. So did the table's umbrella, unfurled now to shield them from the sun. She, Evan, Detective Jerome Battista, and an undisclosed person of authority, who would have worn an overcoat on the Fox Network even in this weather, lunched on turkey subs, bottled water, and crinkled potato chips from some take-out.

Charlie finished off her water before unwrapping her submarine, and Mr. Undisclosed, in shirtsleeves instead of an overcoat, pulled another out of a bag at his feet. He wasn't wearing a ring on his wedding finger. But had one recently left an indentation? He handed her the water with a purposeful look, presumably to make a lasting impression.

He probably hadn't witnessed six dead bodies in five days. Now,
that
makes an impression.

All the water took care of her headache and she bit into the sub with more interest than she'd expected to. Moist roasted-tasting turkey slices—not the slimy cold-cut type—smeared with mayonnaise and cranberry sauce, topped with onions, black olives, shredded lettuce, and sprouts.

The men watched her, almost fondly. Men did that. She would not think about it.

Evan patted the elbow she'd bent to allow her hand to feed her mouth. “My lovely agent here is a fast-food connoisseur.”

“Oh, that reminds me.” Charlie grabbed one of the hundreds of napkins that always accompanied these meals to wipe the mayonnaise off her fingers and reached into her purse. She handed him the $200,000 minus the hundred-dollar tip. “Compliments of Art Sleem, body number four.”

Boy, did she have everybody's attention.

Evan looked especially astounded, but he'd earned any worry it might cause him. Charlie figured the more open she was in front of the authorities, the less trouble he could get her into.

She answered her client's look with a wink. Don't ask me for sympathy, guy. Too many bodies under the bridge, and half-assed nonexplanations of things you are intent upon involving me in. Just handing you back a little bit of the grief, my friend. Enjoy.

She popped the air out of her bag of crinkled chips, feeling more in control than she had since Art Sleem and company presented her with matching bullet holes in their foreheads. No sign of struggle, as if they'd lined up for execution. All laid out in a row. And all that blood in their eyeballs and spreading into the carpet. Recent kills. Somebody had caught them searching this house. She was lucky that somebody hadn't caught her.

Detective Battista held out a hand still smeared with mayo and wearing a wedding band. Evan handed over the money. But Battista, who looked more like a male model than a cop, asked Charlie the obvious question instead of Evan Black. “One of the dead men gave you this money for Mr. Black? When?”

“Well, that's what Matt Tooney thought the money was for, anyway. He's body number six. As well as IRS.” And Charlie described her morning.

Evan waited for the half of her sandwich he knew she wouldn't eat and she gave it to him. The other two stared at her, baffled.

“There's only three bodies in there—not enough for you?” Mr. Undisclosed asked. Baggy eyes and jowls, beer belly, gray hair clipped to within an inch of its life. “Oh yeah, the one in the casino. I'm still missing two bodies.”

“She's very imaginative for an agent.” Evan hugged her.

Detective Battista cut through the crap. “So, why did you come out here, Miss Greene?”

“To give Evan the money. Even the IRS wouldn't take it off my hands. I don't like wads of unexplained cash and thought I'd dump it and all the trouble it might bring on Evan.”

“Don't listen to her,” the writer/director/producer said with his beguiling grin. “She loves me. Honest. Best agent I ever had.”

“So, the other two bodies,” the fed insisted.

“Patrick Thompson—the native Las Vegan and pilot for the nonexistent airline that flies workers in unmarked planes to Groom Lake and who did not die by pedestrian error on the Strip—he's number one, and number two was Officer Timothy Graden.”

“You were at the scene of the hit-and-run that killed Tim Graden?” Battista's sleek face tensed, dark eyes focused to a squint.

“No, but I did witness Thompson's murder and explained it to Officer Graden, the only one in authority there who would listen to me. And look where it got him.”

“Do I detect a certain leap in reasoning here?” the fed asked. “The bicycle cop was a victim of a hit-and-run because you told him about what you imagined happened to Thompson? And as I'm counting, we suddenly went from not enough bodies to too many. There's still one unexplained.”

“I told you, didn't I, that there were two goons who walked Pat Thompson out of Loopy Louie's?”

“Oh yeah, and shoved him under traffic that wasn't moving.” The fed—what else could he be?—started in on the guy method of handling problems with those lower in the food chain. His condescending smile directed around the table showed the overbite of preorthodontist days.

“Same kind of traffic it would be tough to get killed in jaywalking,” Charlie countered. “Anyway, the bald corpse, number five, was Sleem's accomplice in this.”

Undisclosed went for the gold. “And what would you say, little lady, if I told you that Mr. Arthur Sleem worked for the government of the United States?”

“Then I'd say the government's in a whole lot of trouble.”

“Told you—conspiracy. Right?” Evan beamed at the two other men and would have hugged Charlie again if he hadn't caught the look in her eye in the very nick.

CHAPTER
17

“A
TRIPLE MURDER
at the Las Vegas home of producer-writer, Evan Black, the young genius behind such award-winning films as
All the King's Women,
a fictional exposé of presidential fornication throughout history, and the hilarious docudrama of attempts to hide bungling at the highest levels of corporate America—
The Accountant in the Wardrobe
—starring Mel Gibson and Tom Hanks, has left the Lakes neighborhood and Las Vegas police stunned.” This was Barry on the local evening news. He couldn't have gotten through that whole sentence if not for the fact that he spoke even slower than Frank Sinatra used to sing and so could breathe after every three words and you didn't notice.

Did he and Terry work morning, noon,
and
evening broadcasts? Charlie sprawled in an enveloping chair in front of a mammoth TV that lowered from the ceiling on command in Bradone McKinley's really swell accommodations high atop the Vegas Hilton. She accepted a chilled gin martini from Reed the butler. It might be poison, but it had to be a hundred flights up from yak crud. And this had been
one long
afternoon, baby.

Evan Black, “the young genius,” spread out on a floor pillow at her feet, using her chair for a headrest. “Hey, what about
Waiter, There's a Government in My Soup?
”

“Never got released.” Richard Morse cuddled with their hostess on a couch so puffy, all Charlie could see was his head.

“Still the best film I ever made.”

“How come,” Charlie asked, “we're the same age, but you're a young genius and I'm not young anymore?”

“Because you're not a genius. Geniuses are supposed to be old, so, if they're not creaky yet, they're young.”

Since Evan's house was a crime scene under investigation, they let him pack an overnight bag and told him he'd have to spend the night elsewhere. He was going to spend it in Richard's room since Richard would be up here.

“Last night,” Terry took over, “Black reportedly held an advance screening of an as-yet-unmade film, using raw footage of various scenic wonders of our area, including Area Fifty-one and Yucca Mountain, amazing special effects, and even, get this, footage of the robbery at the Vegas Hilton's casino.”

“That Black's always out ahead of the crowd, isn't he?”

“Yes, Barry, and it sounds like Vegas will be in the movies once again. Sources say that none other than Mitch Hilsten will star in Black's latest flick.”

Except for a helicopter video of the Lakes subdivision, busy with emergency vehicles, and another of Detective Jerome Battista refusing to talk to reporters as he entered a building, the only visuals the broadcast had for this segment were stills. Stills of Evan, Mel, Tom, and Mitch. And then one of Charlie.

“You gotta have a new picture taken,” Richard remarked. “Haven't looked like that since Libby caught puberty.”

“Black was reportedly attending a friend's funeral today and the bodies of three men, as yet unidentified—”

“I can identify them,” Charlie said.

“Shut up,” Evan said.

“… discovered by Black's Hollywood agent, Charlie Greene,” Barry said.

“If this gets picked up by the networks, you couldn't get better publicity,” Bradone the astrologer told Evan the genius and predicted, “People will be throwing money at you to get in on the ground floor.”

“They already are,” Charlie said.

“Shut up,” Evan repeated, and asked Bradone, “How much you in for?”

“Don't listen to him,” Charlie's boss warned his new girlfriend. “That's not how funding goes.”

“Life's not legal without the middleman, huh, Morse?”

“Georgette Millrose,” Terry began, and a pub photo flashed on the screen.

“Talk about needing a new photo.” Charlie could hear the sour grapes in her voice. “She hasn't looked like that since World War Two.”

“… local celebrity and author of twenty-some romance-filled thrillers, announced today that she would be signing on with Jethro Larue at the Fleet Agency in New York.”

“What, she hired a publicist?” Everybody knew midlist writers were not news, especially in their hometowns. “How'd she get that kind of press release on TV?” Charlie waved away Reed and another martini, as did Bradone. The guys accepted.

“No dead grass under that Jethro Larue,” Richard Morse pronounced. “Face it, you were just coasting with her.”

“But you're the one who told me not to—”

“Shut up,” Richard said.

Charlie and Evan had spent the afternoon answering questions both separately and together and were still on the pool patio when the bodies were carried out. They'd offered up skin cells, hair and blood samples, and mouth swabs. Evan looked patiently through the mess of the upstairs and could find nothing missing, nor in the rest of the house either. Charlie did, but kept her mouth shut.

When Battista and Mr. Undisclosed grew intimidating over what the murdered men might be doing in the house, what the burglars might have been after, and whether he or Charlie thought the dead men might be the ones who'd searched it, Evan refused to say more without his lawyer. Charlie continued to keep her mouth shut.

Over a simple supper of baked potatoes, leafy salad, and hot crusty rolls, whipped up on a moment's notice by Brent the chef, Charlie asked Evan about the picture of the exaggerated building. The simple baked potatoes were topped with a creamy wine sauce creation—thick with hunks of real crab-meat, button mushrooms, pearl onions, raw asparagus tips, and every kind of tasty tiny herby thing. So it took him awhile to answer.

“That's not fake. It's the DAF. Starwars Device Assembly Facility. That was a real picture we took, from very high up. Been building it since Reagan to assemble weapons we don't need anymore. It's over by the little town of Mercury.” He turned down Brent's wine choice and ordered another of Reed's martinis. Not to be outdone by the younger man, so did Richard. Bradone McKinley's amusement threatened to make a breakout.

Charlie also turned down the wine. One, it was white. Two, she had enough of a buzz on one martini.