Royal Flush (10 page)

"We had so much fun last time," I reminded him. Well
I
had fun, anyway. He had not put up too much of a fight when I tried to get him drunk, but the drinks ended up putting him to sleep rather than lowering his inhibitions. My brain involuntarily flashed back to visions of Mike in his swimming trunks.

He remained silent on the other end. Since it wasn't an outright "no," I knew he would end up saying yes. I decided to mess with him.

"That's okay," I said, nonchalantly. "I'll just ask my friend Carlos. He's always up for a trip."

Mike's knee-jerk reaction would have impressed Pavlov himself. "No, no, I'll come. I'm just trying to figure out how to rearrange my schedule."

"Mmm hmm," I said, unimpressed.

"You're talking about tomorrow, right? Not anything crazy, like right now."

"Right. I don't see any point in rushing out there."

"Okay. If you can pick me up at the office, I could make it work around noon," Mike said.

Apparently I was driving again. Having seen his old Buick, though, I didn't mind.

"Done," I said, and hung up.

I felt pleased that I was
doing
something, even if it would very likely end up being wasted effort and expense. I found myself standing by the window, staring out at the Strip, basking in my own sense of self-satisfaction. That was precisely the moment my nose began to crinkle. And then the smoke alarm sounded its shrill, insistent beacon, almost as though it were designed to annoy and cause deafness rather than save lives.

Crap
. I ran to the kitchen and opened up the oven door. Staring me in the face was a blackened, smoking circle of something that used to be pizza. I rushed around and stood up on a chair to turn off the smoke alarm, nearly falling flat on my ass in the process, and then turned on the oven fans, which seemed barely to put a dent in the black smoke billowing out of the oven. Opening up my windows helped eventually, with a warm breeze blowing in from the northwest.

It wasn't as if I'd ruined a soufflé, but that pizza was the last vestige of food I had in the house, and ordering food meant a half hour wait. In desperation, I concocted a dinner out of vanilla ice cream, three spoonfuls of peanut butter, and a handful of chocolate chips that I'd found buried deep in the corner of my pantry. If I'd had any whipped cream, it would have been perfect. Having gone from starving to food coma in record time, I slumped down on the couch and binge-watched the last season of
Downton Abbey
until about two in the morning. Apart from the fact that my client had died, it was a pretty good night.

As promised, I picked Mike up at the office at noon, and we headed out to I-15, the freeway heading southwest to Los Angeles. To break the drive up, I insisted on showing Mike the world's largest thermometer, in Baker, California, where I also treated him to gyros and a strawberry shake at Mad Greek, the kind of greasy spoon Greek restaurant that was all things to all eaters.

I let Mike drive for the second leg of the trip while I fiddled on my iPhone. In my haste, I hadn't booked anything for the night.

"What do you think, Marriott or Holiday Inn?" I asked.

"Marriott," he said immediately. "It's Mormon-owned."

I smiled. "Can't argue with that. You get a discount?"

He laughed. "Not by a long shot. But where are you thinking? LA's a big place."

It was a good question. Being near Melanie's house might give me better access to her family, but I also wanted to talk to the cops, who were downtown.

"I don't think it matters that much," I said. "We have a car. And we don't even know what we're looking for yet."

Mike turned and looked at me. "Ten grand is a pretty nice retainer. Otherwise…" He trailed off.

"Otherwise, why go to all this trouble, right?"

Mike nodded. "Exactly."

"Yes, she paid me a lot, and there's a lot left over. So instead of trying to figure out who I should return the money to, I'm going to work it off."

Mike was silent. I wasn't sure if he was fully on board with my course of action, but he wasn't my boss. And I figured most people would have just kept the money
without
doing the extra legwork, so I wasn't going to lose any sleep over it.

We reached the outskirts of LA just as rush hour was heating up. When you're resigned to a fate of not moving anywhere very quickly, it makes the delay much more tolerable. We were prepared for it, but I was thankful Mike was driving. One reason I lived so close to my job was that I was a clinical road-rageaholic, taking every other driver's failure to use a turn signal as a personal insult. With Mike behind the wheel, I could space out and let him question everyone else's lane changes and screeching stops.

We decided, for cost purposes, that staying downtown was much more practical than staying near the neighborhood where Melanie's family lived. The Marriott was just what we needed, a comfortable place to settle down and a jumping-off point to go exploring. The long drive followed by the traffic fiasco had made us both tired and hungry, and we decided to be boring and get Mexican food at a place only a block from the hotel. By then it was 7:30, and there wouldn't be any work done that night. Mike wasn't up for a margarita, even with all my powers of persuasion, and so the night was over almost before it began.

Being used to going to bed at three in the morning, I had trouble getting to sleep and ended up half-watching reruns of
The Big Bang Theory
. The other half of me was wondering what Mike's problem was. I could tell he liked me. At least, I could tell he found me attractive, which for a man was ninety-eight percent of the battle. While working with him the last three months, I'd caught him making dozens of furtive looks and taking extra peeks, and it even seemed that he didn't mind it when I busted him. Maybe it was his way of communicating without actually communicating. But I had decided I wasn't going to play the desperate
I-need-a-boyfriend-now
kind of girl. At least for now. Men could smell neediness, and it wasn't what they were looking for.

Although those were my noble, parting thoughts as I drifted off to sleep, Tuesday morning had me back to reality, posing in the mirror with the three different workout tops I'd brought to see which one would generate the most drool from a certain member of the male sex who was all but guaranteed to be in the hotel gym that morning. And he was. When I arrived, Mike was almost effortlessly pushing seventy-five pound dumbbells up in the air. I counted seven perfectly controlled reps, and who knows how many he'd done before that. When he sat up, we exchanged smiles in the mirror on the wall. Given the way he normally dressed, which at best could be described as inspired by the dad on
My Three Sons,
Mike was a sight to behold, decked out in a blue Under Armour T-shirt and green athletic shorts.

"Funny seeing
you
here," I said. It sounded dumb even while I was saying it.

Mike was panting a bit from his last set. In his workout clothes, he reminded me of an NFL quarterback in his prime. His light-brown hair was darkening with touches of perspiration, and at six-foot-two he was built but not beefy, with that clean-cut look and chiseled face that seemed to be a prerequisite to play quarterback as a pro. The blue shirt accentuated the gray-blue of his eyes.

"I guess we both get up early," he said, glancing at the clock on the wall, which said it was just past seven-thirty.

"Yeah," I muttered. Suddenly I was the shy one in the relationship. Breathing heavily, only a few feet in front of me, Mike's athletic frame dwarfed me. The gym was clearly Mike's element, where he was on his home turf.

"When do you want to get going?" he asked.

Not surprisingly, I hadn't formulated too much of a plan. But I had something, at least.

"I emailed Philippe LaGarde," I said. "He gave me a couple of people he's friendly with in the LAPD. People who might be able to cut through all the red tape and give us some answers." LaGarde ran the top-end detective agency in Las Vegas, and we'd had a recent collaboration that made both of us look good. He had been in the business almost forty years, and he knew
everybody
.

"So you want to go to HQ first, right?" Mike asked.

I nodded. "I've got three names of higher-ups, so at least one of them should be around."

We agreed to meet up for a nine o'clock breakfast in the hotel, where we lingered over a shared newspaper in an effort to avoid the morning rush. The paper was silent about Melanie's death, except for the paid obituary in the local section. It said the funeral would be Wednesday at 10:00, which meant tomorrow.

"Funeral tomorrow," Mike said. "Kind of quick, right?"

"Maybe. We heard about her death on Sunday, when the news reported it, but the reports said she died earlier, probably Saturday."

He shrugged. "Never been to a Presbyterian church before."

"We're going to the funeral?" I asked. "I hate funerals."

"That's where all her friends and family will be. And any enemies, probably, too."

I was skeptical. "If you say so. But I don't think she was the kind of girl who had enemies. I'm just looking to provide a fuller picture of what happened, that's all."

"So you can keep the money with a clear conscience," Mike mused.

I shot him a look. "Yes, so I can keep the money. Between the two of us, I'm the only one who's met her, and my best guess is that she'd want me to look into this rather than just sending the money back to a family that doesn't need it."

Mike smiled. "If you're fine with it, I'm fine with it." He said it in a way that made me think the opposite was true.

I changed the subject. "Think it's safe to venture out yet?"

"I don't think it's ever safe, but now's as good a time as any."

We got our car out of the parking garage and headed into downtown. The navigation system had us going down Beverly Boulevard, which at some point would turn into First Street, where the police headquarters was. The traffic was rough, but not as bad as I feared. I had conned Mike into driving, so I was taking in the sights myself.

"There it is, over there," I said, pointing. The familiar glass police headquarters, which had starred on dozens of TV shows, stood about a block away.

"That's not the address, though," Mike said. He kept driving until the GPS told us we were in the right place. Amazingly, it was right.

"Must be a new building," I said, stating the obvious. The new LAPD headquarters was about fifteen stories tall, an angular structure made up of blocky gray stone and shimmering green-blue glass. We found a parking garage on the next block and pulled in.

As we walked into the police administration building, we entered a bustle of busy-looking cops and other functionaries. The difference was that these people all had ID badges, and we were just a couple of out-of-towners who'd wandered in off the street. There was no directory where I could look up names and phone numbers, but there was a small visitor desk staffed by two all-business gray-haired women who looked as if they could be sisters. Patty and Selma from
The Simpsons
came to mind.

I nudged Mike and handed him a piece of paper from our hotel's scratch pad. "Here are the three names I have."

He frowned at me but then got with the program. The women were both watching us, mildly curious about our intentions. I waited about ten feet back while Mike went to talk to them.

I couldn't hear the conversation, but the look on the women's faces told the whole story. The one on the right, who had a haircut that she must have received at a Marine's barracks, was arching her right eyebrow at Mike as though he were claiming he just saw an alien spaceship land on the roof. The other one kept making furtive glances at me. I had done my best to dress professionally, but I had the sneaking suspicion that the officer saw right through my getup and knew I was trouble.

It was clear that the two officers were immune to Mike's charms, so I sidled up behind him and waited for the right moment to butt in. The women began frowning at a computer screen.

"Did you mention LaGarde?" I whispered.

"They never heard of him," Mike said. "You have a Plan B?"

"Did they even call upstairs?" I asked.

"No, I didn't get that far."

"I'm sorry, ma'am," I said, using my most obsequious voice. "We drove all the way from Nevada to talk to one of these officers."

"Well, they're not expecting you," said the one on the left. She had a point. I was beginning to get upset because calling in advance would have been an easy thing to do, and I had botched it.

"All I'm asking is that you call their office, and mention that a friend of Philippe LaGarde would like ten minutes. That's all."

The one on the right, who was appropriately named Officer Stark, finally picked up the phone and punched a few numbers. She was doing her best to make it seem as if she was granting me the favor of the century.

Officer Stark apparently had no luck with the first number, but on the second try she began nodding and murmuring. I heard her mention LaGarde's name. After a long wait, she nodded gruffly and hung up the phone.

"Someone will come down for you," she said curtly. Between the two of them, I could sense their disappointment that we had been granted an audience. "You can wait over there," she said, pointing at a bench near the turnstiles.

Mike and I milled around the expansive lobby for a few minutes, inspecting the plaques and stars memorializing fallen officers, many of whom were in their twenties when they lost their lives on the job. It was a sobering reminder that my own life really wasn't so bad. Or so dangerous.

Eventually we were greeted by a thirty-ish uniformed cop, a hulk of a man with short black hair whose thick, nerdy glasses didn't seem to fit on his wide face. "Follow me upstairs, please," he said.

Mike shot me a look that I interpreted as
this guy takes himself way too seriously
, although Mike could just as easily have meant that he thought the guy looked like a steroid-ridden dork. Both would have been true.