Royal Flush (7 page)

As I scrolled through page after page of Facebook posts and photos, I found myself feeling little pangs of jealousy. My own narrow social universe consisted of a way-too-horny bouncer, a former male revue dancer, a former customer or two, and a large fern. By stark contrast, Jojia seemed to have a limitless supply of best friends. There were dozens of photos showing her rubbing cheeks with decked-out college girls, many of whom looked like models, and there were almost as many photos of her in amusingly suggestive poses with good-looking young guys. I might have thought that they were all just random people she'd run into at whatever club she was at, except for the fact that her Facebook page was filled with friendly and familiar messages from these same people, often written in the truncated online vernacular used by twenty-somethings typing away on their smartphones.
"Luv u c u soon"
was followed by
"wtf r u drinking"
and
"OMG how much fun was dat?"
You get the idea. Half of her photos had more than two hundred "likes." Curiously, none of the posts showed any sign of Kent.

Was it really possible to be that popular, I wondered? I had always been popular with boys, although it wasn't exactly because they liked my personality or my affinity for bad puns. Girls, not so much. But I rationalized it with the observation that Jojia was loaded, and was probably a walking ATM for her other so-called friends in the same way she was for Kent. If I had money to burn, I'm sure I could get 2,392 Facebook friends too. Well, maybe twenty-three.

After a half hour of fascination with her Facebook page, I googled her name again to try to see where the money was coming from. Takada was a very common Japanese name, but I imagined "Star" wasn't a very common middle name at all. The first thing to pop up was a Wikipedia entry about her. The short article said she was born in Okinawa to a shipping "mogul" who controlled two-thirds of the traffic between the island and Japan. A grainy photo showed a young Jojia standing on a beach with her pretty, diminutive mother and her stern-looking father. The rest of the article described her work as a "producer" of contemporary music and videos, although the details were sketchy. The inference I had to draw was that daddy was rich and was funding his little girl's fantasy life of being some part of the entertainment world. It wouldn't have surprised me if Jojia had authored the Wikipedia entry herself.

I made myself a new pot of coffee, and while it was brewing the armchair psychologist in me perked up. People who lacked both status and money generally craved money first and status only as an afterthought. You can't feed your family on status alone, and so if you're poor you dream about winning the lottery rather than becoming a Nobel Prize laureate or a Supreme Court justice. But if you already have lots of money, status climbing was the next step. How many politicians dating back to the Kennedys and Roosevelts sought to become senators and governors and presidents as a way of bringing glory to themselves and their family names? I wondered if Jojia's relationship with Kent wasn't part of that tradition. Right now she was a nothing, living solely on her father's generosity. But if she could land
royalty
as a husband—something the Japanese know a thing or two about—that would be a status symbol more powerful than an entire fleet of Range Rovers. The story of an impoverished noble marrying foreign money was as old as royalty itself.

But where did that get me? Nowhere. I still had to face the primary question Melanie had tasked me with, which was whether Kent was even a royal in the first place. My gut and the evidence pointed to "no," but she hadn't given me ten grand just to go to the library and follow her friend around for a few hours. There was also the delicate matter of Jojia's relationship with Kent. I felt as if I had no choice but to tell Melanie, and if she took the news the way
I
would, she'd tell me to drop the whole thing and forget it. Royalty or not, the guy was a two-timer. Anything else I might find out about him was just a footnote.

Melanie wasn't calling me back, so I spent the rest of the day relaxing and food shopping. I broke a cardinal rule—never go shopping on an empty stomach—and came home with a dozen Italian sausages, two onions, and five green peppers, an amount of food I told myself would feed me for a month, even though I knew it would magically disappear in two days.

I grudgingly dragged myself off the couch and forced myself to go the gym in my building. The nice part about working out at four in the afternoon is that you usually have the place to yourself. That proved true today, except for a geezer whose armpit flesh was dangling so low that I was afraid he'd trip on it. After a grueling hour of pretending not to stare at his mesmerizingly flappy flesh, I returned upstairs and threw together a little tomato sauce from a mixture of canned diced tomatoes, oregano and basil, salt, and a dash of sugar. Come to think of it, there might have been a little ketchup involved too. Add some Italian sausage and the bell peppers, and it was an almost carb-free delight.

Thursdays were work nights, which meant a shower followed by makeup and a gray yoga suit. The weather was warm and dry, typical for September, so I decided to walk the Strip down to Cougar's just as dusk was fading into night. After twenty minutes of weaving through tourists, I passed the Wynn and Trump hotels at the north end of the busy part of the Strip, which is where the foot traffic thinned out. A turn around the corner got me to Cougar's, where the lead "host," which is what they called bouncers, winked at me and held the door open.

The place was already hopping, especially for a Thursday night. I hadn't bothered to check whether there were any big conventions in town, so I didn't know if I was going to be dancing for accountants or morticians, both of which were more interesting than they sounded, or some other group in town for the week. Morticians tipped better than accountants, but not as well as dentists or chiropractors. The other girls and I would often theorize why that was the case, but it was uncanny how true it proved every year.

Luck was not going my way. It turned out that there were no big conventions going on at all, which meant mostly locals and small groups of tourists. I usually had two or three "regulars" on Thursdays, guys who were nice, or at least non-creepy, and tipped well enough to get a little of what we called "preferred" treatment in the private booths off to the sides of the big room. It was nothing even close to what the guys
wanted
me to do to them, but they paid handsomely for the privilege of being on my favorites list, and I returned the favor.

Despite the busy start to the evening, the place hit a lull around midnight, just when it was usually hitting its full swing. On a break, I started thumbing through my smartphone, and I couldn't resist the urge to check Jojia Takada's Facebook page. There wasn't anything from Jojia on there, but a friend named Hassan had posted
"Hakk tonight??? U know it."
That post had four "likes" plus a comment from Jojia.
"Thinking about it. Ok, screw it, c u there! :)"

I assumed Hakk meant Hakkasan, one of the hottest nightclubs on the Strip. I recalled seeing a selfie of Jojia taken at Hakkasan, and from the photo it didn't look like my kind of place. Lots of neon lights, expensive drinks, and thumping music. I briefly wondered why she spent so much time in clubs when it seemed she had trouble holding her liquor, but I supposed that the bathroom incident at the Bellagio could have been a solitary event. Or maybe she just liked to dance.

I finished a fifteen-minute set at 12:20 and then fielded three lap dance requests, which killed twenty minutes and netted me a cool two hundred, most of which came from a young, balding guy who claimed he was from Finland.

My bouncer-friend Carlos tapped me on the shoulder on my way back to the locker room.

"Slow night," he said. "I don't get it."

I shrugged and fanned my wad of twenties in front of his face.

He smiled. "Guess it's not so slow for you."

"Don't worry about me, Carlos. Hey," I said, on a whim, "you want to go to Hakk?" I assumed that was what the cool kids called Hakkasan.

"To
what
?"

"Hakkasan, the club over at MGM."

He cocked his head sideways. "I'm on 'til three. And since when do you go clubbing?"

"I'm not going
clubbing,
" I said, as though the word were toxic. "It's for a case. And I'll pay you more to come with me than you'll make here." Carlos sometimes rode shotgun with me when I wanted some muscular backup. I had never known him to turn down the opportunity to work with me.

He frowned, considering it. From experience, I knew he would come, but he'd squeal in an effort to get more money out of me. It wasn't going to work.

"I would, but—"

"Just punch out. They'll be happy since it's slow anyways."

"Can't do it. I promised Javon I'd take his spot later."

Now I knew he was bluffing, since he never traded shifts with anyone.

"Suit yourself," I said, and turned away. I put the over-under for the time it would take for Carlos to come crawling back at five seconds. The under won.

"All right," he said, hustling immediately after me.

I turned around and allowed a little smile to creep up my face.

"
Bitch,
" he muttered, knowing he'd been played by a master.

That B word made my smile blossom. It meant I'd gotten under his skin. "Just give me a minute to change, and meet me at your car."

"I'm driving?" He protested.

"I walked here."

He pouted, as though asking him to drive the three miles to the MGM was like asking him to walk across hot coals. I rolled my eyes and headed back to my locker.

My yoga outfit was not going to fly at the club, which I knew had a dress code, but I had plenty of slinky outfits in my locker. Unfortunately most of them were a little
too
revealing—about the kind of stuff you'd expect a stripper to wear around a strip club, or the kind of outfit your slutty friend might wear at Halloween. I found a dark red cocktail dress and squeezed into it. On my way out I deliberately refused to check myself in the mirror, afraid of what I might see.

Carlos raised an eyebrow at my outfit when I met him at his car, a black Mustang GT with whiplash-inducing acceleration. Wisely, he kept his mouth shut.

We climbed in, and he pulled out of the parking lot with a loud and unnecessary thrust of the accelerator. The Strip at one in the morning was just getting warmed up. Throngs of tourists packed the corners, waiting for lights to change, slurping away at their yard-long glasses of watered-down margaritas. The High Roller observation wheel (don't call it a Ferris wheel, the locals said) was lit up ostentatiously, offering its passengers a 360-degree view of Las Vegas in all its glory. We caught mostly green lights through the heart of the Strip, passing Caesars Palace and Bellagio on my right, and then the City Center complex and Monte Carlo. Carlos got into the left lane and turned left on Tropicana, where we eased into a U-turn and then into the valet parking lane at the MGM Grand.

To say that the MGM Grand valet gave me a once-over as he helped me out of the car would not do justice to the prodigious gander down my top to which he helped himself. In fact, he ogled me so thoroughly that it made my skin tingle, which was a hard thing to accomplish after my decade of exotic dancing. I flashed him a thin smile and bit my lip, remembering that I was the one who'd spent ten grand on fake boobs and was currently dressed in clothes more commonly worn as a gag Halloween costume. What the hell did I expect? I figured I should have been upset if he
didn't
leer at me.

As Carlos stepped into the lights under the valet area, I grimaced.

"You know they have a dress code, right?"

He shrugged. "These babies get me in the door anywhere," he said, before laying a big smooch on each of his bulging biceps.
Classy.
He was decked out in the standard bouncer attire, which was designed to accentuate his muscles in an effort to dissuade potential hooligans from causing mischief. His off-white T-shirt clung to his massive pecs, and the aforementioned biceps were threatening to rip the fabric on his short sleeves.

It wasn't a bad look, but it wasn't going to work at the club.

"Let's get inside and look around first," I said. "We might have to go shopping."

Carlos pouted again, which drew a stern elbow in the ribs from me.

We walked into the MGM Grand and immediately went up the escalator, which led us right to Hakkasan. Not that we needed directions. The thumping music coming from within would have made it more than obvious. A modest line of glittering girls and young men extended out the door. I left Carlos behind and approached the door, squinting at a sign posted outside. The dress code was pretty basic, but it did require a collared shirt for men. I should have expected that.

I sighed. "I don't think there are any clothing stores in here, but I'm sure they have a gift shop."

Carlos cringed. "This is gonna mess with my image, isn't it?"

"Almost certainly," I said, grabbing his left bicep playfully. It was like grabbing an over-inflated football.

"Try this one," he said, thrusting his right arm toward me.

I gave it a squeeze. "Impressive."

He seemed quite pleased with himself. "Now it's my turn to squeeze something," he said, staring at my cleavage.

"Dream on. And we're in the middle of a giant casino, you troglodyte. Come on, let's go."

Carlos's lusty ways had long ago ceased to bother me. In the years he'd worked at Cougar's with me, he had openly proposed all kinds of sexual acts, and he was never shy about abandoning his bouncer duties in order to take in one of my acts. It was flattering, to be honest. With all the beautiful and younger naked ladies surrounding him, I was still clearly his favorite. And now that we sometimes worked together outside of the strip club setting, he was growing on me. On the side, he was attending business school at UNLV, and he owned a string of apartment buildings, which he also found time to manage.