Nobody Dies in a Casino (28 page)

Charlie studied the interplay between Toby and Bradone. She kept slicing glances his way. He kept pretending he didn't notice. Charlie kept trying to remember who he resembled.

But they were all startled at the ease with which Toby triggered the dead bolt of the connecting door to Charlie's room. He looked at them and shrugged. “What can I say? I'm a magician.”

Richard's room was a suite with a separate bedroom and a dressing room. Charlie's room was the extra bedroom to the suite. She checked the closet and found Richard's clothes still hanging there. In her own closet, the safe still held Charlie's computer, the wardrobe drawers all her panties. Her companions helped her cram everything into her luggage.

*   *   *

Showered, shampooed, shaved, deodorized, teeth brushed, contacts soaking, and wearing her glasses, which she never let anyone see her in but Libby and her neighbors in the condo complex. Clean jeans and soft gauze bandages, purchased in Alamo, under her shirt. And not arrested yet. Charlie savored the moment.

Nothing rotated here in Bradone's room at Loopy Louie's. No scimitars. The bed square, the TV on a corner table. This room was not as exotic as Mitch's, but the wallpaper featured endless lines of camels parading between endless palm-filled oases and rolling sand dunes.

Toby, showered and wearing one of Charlie's sleeping shirts and a pair of Bradone's shorts, opened the door to the room-service bedouin. Charlie could smell the coffee.

Bradone, dressed in two skimpy towels, one on her hair and the other wrapped around her body, barely, signed the tab, paraded to her purse and pulled out a bill that pleased the bedouin as much as her attire. “I know you aren't housekeeping, but could you see that we get more bath towels, soap, glasses, and whatever? And the evening newspaper? There's another one of these for you if they are all here in under ten minutes.”

Everything was there before Charlie got her second sip of coffee. Rich people know how to get things done. Must have something to do with compounding.

Charlie had a creamy Allah omelette without camel fries. She and her stomach had begun to settle in when Bradone passed her a section of the newspaper and pointed out a small article at the bottom of a page.

LONGTIME LAS VEGAS RESIDENT KILLED IN ROBBERY
.

Hilton Hotel food server, Ardith Miller, shot at bus stop, apparently for her tip money, authorities say.

“I told you so.”

“Now listen to me, girl.” Bradone shook a disciplinary finger at Charlie. “You had nothing to do with that death. People are robbed all the time, and sometimes it gets violent. She waited on thousands of people, who have no more reason to feel responsible for it than you do.”

“Probably got killed for that hundred-dollar bill Art Sleem tipped her for my breakfast.”

“You know how many hundred-dollar bills there are floating around this town? Tips all go in a pool and are divided up at the end of a shift anyway. The busers share in them, and the tax man too.” Bradone's distress over her extraterrestrial rape had been replaced by an angry control.

“Shut up. Listen to this,” Toby shouted, pointing at the TV.

“Metro spokeswoman, Camilla Hardy, has finally released some information on the triple murders at the home of filmmaker Evan Black.” Different news team, different channel. Two guys this time, but they followed two identical replays of the Depends commercial, seen on Barry and Terry's channel.

“Police are now disclosing that the three victims, Matthew Tooney, Arthur Sleem, and Joseph Boyles were all murdered at different places in the house and then moved to one location in the family room.”

“They have confirmed that not all three were killed with the same weapon,” the other guy added. Both late forties, one in a blue blazer, one in a tan. “Sources say two were killed by the same gun and one, rumored to be Tooney, by a different-caliber weapon. Matthew Tooney has been identified as an investigator for the insurance company covering the casino at the Las Vegas Hilton.” This was the tan blazer with the homey smile. So Tooney wasn't IRS. Maybe that's why he let Charlie keep the money.

The blue blazer had a squint that gave him a more serious demeanor. “The other two victims of last Thursday's shooting spree, Boyles and Sleem, had been employed as security for several casinos on the Strip, most recently, Loopy Louie's.”

“Also, sources close to the Metro Police Department say that only a few thousand dollars of the money, stolen in the daring raid on the Las Vegas Hilton's cage in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, was missing.”

“The money from the casino robbery, found near the door of the separate security building behind the hotel yesterday morning, had been stuffed into black plastic garbage bags.”

“That's why all the reporters and TV trucks pulling up to the Hilton when I came to get you, Charlie. I thought it was you and Mitch that attracted them.”

“There's Ardith, the waitperson.” Charlie pointed at the stilled frame of black plastic bags lying up against a metal grate and several people walking away. One bag had bills spilling out of a tear in its side. “The one with the thick ankles. She'd come to work after all, but left with a stash.” Poor Ardith. If Charlie had been her age in her job, she'd have grabbed extra cash too.

“Now you know it's not your fault,” Bradone told Charlie.

“The real mystery to all this is why steal money and then return it?” The blue blazer tightened his squint on this one.

But Charlie knew. “Because Evan and crew made more money for the conspiracy project by collecting on a bet that you couldn't pull off the robbery than if you'd kept the money, huh, Toby? You guys never planned to keep it, did you?”

The second-unit gofer gave her a bland smile and raised his eyebrows in a way that reminded Charlie of Bob, the limo driver.

“That's why that phony screening before Mitch got here. All those people were in on the bet or represented others who were, right? That's why the cash, only—Evan's going to fund the conspiracy project with bet money, he won't have to pay back from profits—it's free money, not a loan. It's probably all under the table, so no taxes either.”

“They don't call the guy a genius for nothing. Nobody thought he could pull it off without hurting anybody. The odds were something else.” He shook his curls. “It was beautiful. Even I was impressed.”

“Is that why it hardly made the headlines?” Bradone asked.

“Word was out on the street for anybody tuned in. But nobody thought it would be the Hilton. It's got the tightest security. Most of the betting favored Loopy's or one of the casinos on Fremont. I didn't know until the last minute. They didn't let me in on anything much because of my uncle Louie. I figured they had you pegged to douse the lights for them, Charlie. Maybe they picked the Hilton because you had a room there. Only in Vegas, man.”

“… no new leads in the disappearance of heartthrob Mitch Hilsten and girlfriend, Hollywood agent Charlie Greene, who have been missing for over twenty-four hours.

“Friends say the two have been estranged recently and may simply be off making up in private.”

“What friends? If Libby sees this, I'm dead. If Edwina's been saying that, she's dead.”

“And now here's Greg Torpor with sports. Hey, Greg, how about those Atlantic No Doz, huh?”

“Yeah, Don,” Greg wore a sports shirt, with hair trying to grow out of the open collar, “it was a great weekend for football and the No Doz too. You know?”

Just as the music and all these huge black guys in helmets revved up, Bradone hit the mute.

“What is it with women?” Toby Johnson complained, and went back to his lamb curry something.

There'd been no news of Merlin's Caravan on the local newscast, but there certainly was on the national.

“Yes!” Toby raised his fork at the screen when their hostess unmuted the set. “Way to go, Merlin.”

This segment made much of the fact that the supersecret air base was simply not acknowledged by the United States government and then showed the signs forbidding photography of this or any part of “this installation.”

From then on, Area 51, or Groom Lake, was referred to as “this installation” and stills and videos of it appeared distant but from every angle imaginable. Many looked to Charlie as if they'd been taken from Merlin's Ridge.

The best shots of all were from the inside of some of the vehicles in the caravan and of the two Cherokees with light bars coming close to cameras, the men with threatening sunglasses motioning drivers to stop and then cursing when someone else in the line ahead broke loose.

“Told you they'd pack some of that stuff out in their sleeping bags,” Toby purred.

Shots of the dark helicopters on the ground in front and back and of people, some of them kids, pulled from their vehicles and the vehicles searched. There did not appear to be enough searchers, several of whom were shown being bitten by family dogs.

A chuckling anchor, sitting in for Tom Brokaw, said, “Wait, this gets better.”

More laughter from those working in the studio with him.

“Seems just as all forces were mobilized on one front and military Humvees of the plain old camouflage color came bouncing across the terrain to help out beleaguered security personnel, word came that another section of the perimeter had been breached the night before. And another caravan was now leaving from a different direction.”

Somebody on the ground had videotaped a long line of four-wheel-drive enthusiasts heading through Rachel from a side road onto the paved highway. Studio jokesters added the triumphant score from
Star Wars
to accompany the sequence.

“They must have come out behind us.” Bradone sat on the bed, holding her plate on her lap. “I wonder who cut ground censor wires for them? Could we have just been a decoy?”

Toby Johnson sat on the floor, eating off dishes perched on a corner of the coffee table in front of Charlie. He turned around on his tailbone to face their hostess, reminding Charlie of Evan Black exercising after the big screening.

“Merlin thinks of everything.” He rotated his coccyx back to his dinner, Charlie hurting for him, and raised those eyebrows again. “But he tries to never be there when ‘everything' happens.”

“You know Merlin?” Charlie asked. “He's really Evan, right?”

“I've met Evan,” Bradone insisted. She'd dressed in black again, pants and comfortable shoes. Black jacket and a black scarf around her hair. She looked like a cat burglar. “He's not Merlin.”

“Toby, why did you go off and leave me on Merlin's Ridge?” Charlie asked.

“You disappeared over the side. I couldn't see you in all that orange. I was going to lug our unconscious hostess back to the tunnel and come look for you, but I tripped while still lugging.”

“I never went over the side.” If Charlie wasn't responsible for half the grief that was happening around her this week, Evan “Genius” Black had to be. There was simply no one else.

Though Bradone comes up in your doubts more often than you want to admit.

What could be her motive? Misled as she is, she's always trying to help.

Right now, she was staring murder at the back of Toby Johnson's head.

What motive could Evan have?

For that Merlin caravan thing, he could have a lot. Like Toby said, he could buy video and stills off amateurs—which some filmmakers wouldn't touch but which Evan could turn into gold. This guy had motive.

“Toby, did Evan Black set up this Merlin guy and his scam to entice all the UFO and conspiracy nuts out to Groom Lake? As a cover for something he wanted to do or to draw attention to its obvious existence?”

Toby batted those eyebrows this time. “Pure magic, right?”

“Oh no, is this the magic event Evan's been promising would get us all out of this mess?” It would make Charlie's government look silly if they went after him now for successfully invading and filming and making a motion picture about an “installation” that didn't exist.

Charlie looked at Toby Johnson and saw Bob the limo driver again. Add the fake eyebrows, the little round sunglasses, and cover the dark curls with a tam-o'-shanter …

Toby returned her look. “Got us a flashbulb here, do I see?”

What he didn't see was Bradone on the bed behind him pull a small gray pistol from under her pillow.

CHAPTER
35

“B
RADONE, HE GOT
us out of Area Fifty-one alive.”

Standing on the bed, the astrologer was doing that asinine stance you see on TV, legs spread, knees bent, both arms extended to steady the nasty little thing in her hands.

“Charlie, he's Merlin.” Her lips drew back from her teeth. “And our murderer.”

“Don't forget,” Toby said, the little gun rising with him as he got to his feet and began to raise his hands in the air, “Merlin is also a magician.” And before he'd fully straightened, he leapt with the ease of a gymnast, lifting and spreading his legs so his toes met his outflung hands. Bradone's shot merely creased the cloth of the saggy butt of her shorts, which he was wearing. When he came down, it was on Bradone, forcing her back on the bed, the little gray pistol his in an instant.

There was a frantic banging at the door to the hall. Charlie raced to open it, knowing it could be her government come to arrest her, but Toby looked like he might be considering using Bradone's gun. He yelled for her to stop, but by then the door was open.

Jerome Battista, two uniforms, and Mr. Undisclosed pushed past Charlie into the room and Toby threw Bradone's little pistol to the floor.

You could hear shouts and pounding now all up and down the hall, the strident official voices of police and the confused voices of hotel guests. Loopy Louie's was being raided.

*   *   *