The Case of the Sin City Sister (16 page)

Eve couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the coke she’d had at the lounge or the coffee and the late dinner. A full stomach and caffeine were both culprits that often hindered her ability to fall asleep. Maybe it was seeing Taylor Hicks live and in person. Her first real concert, if you discounted the piano recitals and visiting chanting monks at the chapel in Pecos. She did get a bit more excited than she tried to let on, and she hoped Daniel hadn’t noticed.

Or maybe the inability to fall asleep had to do with Dorisanne and the dead ends she and Daniel kept running into. Where else did they have to go? What would they do tomorrow? Who had any answers?

Where was her sister?

She turned over in her bed once again, noticing that the clock read 2:15 a.m. She sat up, turned on the light, and reached for her prayer book. She opened it and started searching for the appropriate daily readings. She had missed the day before, so she returned
to the prescribed scriptures and tried to pay attention to the words. She was halfway through the order when she realized she hadn’t remembered anything she had read or prayed.

“I am wide awake,” she said out loud, as if the announcement might shake something loose or help her know what to do with the early morning hours that seemed to stretch before her.

She sat up. “Surely there’s something I can do to move this investigation along.” She closed her eyes and said a short prayer and then got out of bed. And although it surprised her, a thought surfaced that actually gave her some direction.

She dressed, combed her hair, brushed her teeth, grabbed her wallet and room key, and headed out. She stopped at the room beside hers, the room where Daniel was staying, and listened at the door. She thought that if she heard sounds from the television or some noise from inside, if she could tell that he was also awake, she would knock on the door and share her plans with him, invite him to join her. No sounds emerged. And so she tiptoed from the door, making her way to the elevator.

She pressed the elevator button to the lobby and wondered why she hadn’t said anything to Daniel earlier about her discovery at the diner. Her silence about it hadn’t been intentional—at least she didn’t think it had been. When they left the diner they had simply started talking about something, she couldn’t remember what, and then they were at the Rio and there was Misti and Taylor Hicks and the place was so noisy, she had just forgotten to tell him. And now, she thought, well, now it didn’t seem right to wake him up and tell him that little bit of news. She’d just make the trip herself, see if she could find out anything on her own, and
be back in her room, and hopefully in her bed asleep, in a couple of hours.

The elevator stopped and the door opened. She was in the hotel lobby. She noticed the freshly painted walls and the small living room–like setting by the large floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Strip. Unlike the Rio, this establishment had a bar but no casino. She assumed Daniel preferred it that way. She hadn’t asked him too much about his activities while he came to Vegas, but she didn’t think he spent a lot of time gambling. He had mentioned the pool and the buffet, both of which she had not yet experienced; and with all the efforts they were making to try to find Dorisanne or anything about her, she wasn’t sure she’d have much of a chance to enjoy either of them while they were there. She wondered how long they would actually stay, realizing they hadn’t really talked about a departure day.

She recalled that the Captain had not seemed to need a return date from Daniel, that he seemed perfectly content to be on his own. All he had mentioned earlier when they had spoken was that when she got back it was her job to talk to Caleb Alford and break the news about the marriage license.

She headed toward the front door of the lobby and thought about Caleb Alford, this new information about the young miner leaving North Carolina, traveling to New Mexico and getting married and, if it were true, wondered how he must have felt signing the license, taking the vows, agreeing to something he had to know was illegal and clearly a betrayal of his family back home. She thought about the two women, his two wives, and whether they ever had a feeling, some intuition that something was just not quite right.

Then she considered Dorisanne and her marriage and wondered what she knew for sure about her husband, if she had known about his debts before they married, what she might have just discovered that caused them to leave town in a hurry and what the knowledge had done to their relationship.

She walked past the hotel bar, catching a glimpse of the few employees standing around inside, counting tips and smoking cigarettes. One of them, a busboy, stared as she made her way toward the front of the lobby. She gave a smile and walked on, not quite sure where she was going. She headed toward the glass doors and was just about to push them open.

“You need a cab?”

The question surprised her, and she turned in the direction it had come from. Behind her a man was sitting at the front desk. He looked to be in his late fifties, wore glasses, a shirt, and tie, and held a stack of receipts in one hand and was working on a calculator with the other. Perhaps he was the night manager or auditor going over the day’s profits.

“Yes, I guess I do,” she answered, still standing where she had stopped.

He pressed a button somewhere behind the desk.

“It’ll be a few minutes,” he reported.

Eve nodded and glanced toward the front door.

“You’ll see him when he drives up. I’d stay inside if I were you. It’s a bit chilly out there.”

Eve turned again in his direction and smiled. “Okay, thanks.”

She felt odd being out that late, not so much afraid or conflicted about what she was doing, just odd. She had certainly been
awake at two o’clock in the morning before. She often struggled with sleep, having battled insomnia since she was a teenager, but usually at the abbey she could go to the chapel or take a walk on the grounds. She sometimes even started breakfast for the community, baking bread or grinding coffee. She actually enjoyed the early morning hours, the time of being alone, unnoticed, uninterrupted.

Since she had been back at home in Madrid with the Captain, she sometimes just got up and sat in the kitchen, drank a cup of tea, and read mysteries or the stories of the saints. Occasionally, she would take a walk up the road that overlooked the sleepy town below, listen for coyotes, gaze at the stars. She was accustomed to being awake while the rest of the world slept.

Here, however, in a strange hotel in a strange city, being awake at this time of night didn’t feel as natural to her. There were bright lights still beaming and traffic moving along the streets, and there were other people all around. She was unaccustomed to sharing the night hours with anyone. And even though none of what she was experiencing frightened her, it did make her feel out of sorts.

“There he is,” the man behind the desk announced, and she looked out the front windows to see a yellow cab pulling into the hotel driveway.

“Thank you,” she said as she opened the door.

“Be careful out there,” the man added.

Eve felt a slight shiver at the man’s caution but simply waved as she got into the cab. Precaution had never been advised on her many other sleepless nights, and she thought about how being careful had never been a need in the wee hours of the mornings in New Mexico. She thought more about the man’s warning,
giving her decision to leave Daniel and go out on her own a second thought.

The driver waited. She shook away the fearful thoughts, shut the door, and noticed the driver eyeing her in the rearview mirror.

“Where you go?” the man finally asked with a halting accent, breaking the silence.

“Oh.” She realized that he was waiting for her instructions. She recalled Pauline and the woman at the diner and the costumes they were both wearing, the way she had figured out her sister’s neighbor worked on the casino floor, serving drinks to gamblers, the way she seemed to know she would be working at that time of night.

“Caesar’s,” she said, her voice clear, a sign of her resolve. “The casino at Caesar’s.”

He punched a button on the meter and they took off.

TWENTY-SIX

Eve emerged from the dank, stuffy cab as a man in a sharp gray suit opened the door for her. As one door opened, several more followed, and instantly Eve moved out of the dark night and into a grand palace lobby. It was bright inside Caesar’s Palace, as if it were the middle of the day.
Bright and busy
, Eve thought, making her way around the card tables, blackjack tables, she thought, and slot machines. Several of the sections were closed, but the ones that were open had at least three, maybe four customers sitting together. The high-end poker room was full, she noticed, knowing what it was only because of the sign on the closed glass door. Six tables, all active with workers and gamblers playing their games.

There were several men in suits and ties standing near the tables, several employees attired in similar gold uniforms, dealing hands of cards, separating chips, and calling out numbers to gamblers at their stations. She saw a couple of women serving drinks, but neither of them were Pauline, and so she kept walking.

She ended up in a row of slots, one near the back of the casino, the only row without someone sitting in front of a machine and playing. She sat down in one of the seats to think about how she might get a waitress to serve her, wondering if they served only at the tables or in the private rooms, how she might find out if Pauline was around.

She figured if the woman had not yet gone to work when she and Daniel were at the apartments, and if she worked an eight-hour shift, she was probably still on the job. Eve just didn’t know where that job took her. She shifted on the stool and faced the machine. A bell rang and sirens blared at a machine a few rows over. She stood up and tried to see what was happening, but the machines were too tall. She sat back down, assuming that someone had apparently won a big prize.

“It doesn’t work unless you put money in, love.”

Eve spun around at the sound of the low, scratchy voice. An older woman had taken a seat at a machine right behind her. There was a tank of oxygen at her feet and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, a deadly combination. Fortunately, the cigarette was unlit.

“Oh, I wasn’t going to play,” Eve responded.

“Then you ain’t going to win,” the old woman pointed out.

Eve smiled. “I suppose that’s right.”

The woman barked a deep and ragged cough.

Eve watched as the woman slipped a card into a slot, pulled out a small wad of bills from a pocket in the front of her dress, and fed a five-dollar bill into the machine. A few whistles and bells announced that she was ready to play. She pushed a button and the images on the screen whizzed around. When they stopped, she pushed the button again.

“What do you look for?” Eve asked.

The woman wheezed a bit before answering. “You want the sevens to sit side by side right on that line, or if not the sevens, then the stars or the gold bars.” She pointed to a narrow horizontal line situated in the middle of the moving images. She pushed the button and three different images came to a stop in front of her. There was one bar, one blue number seven, and one stem of cherries. “That’s what you don’t want,” she explained.

Eve smiled.

“You waiting on your husband?” the woman asked.

“What? Oh, no,” Eve answered.

“A lot of women sit here waiting on their husbands or boyfriends to finish their game of poker or jack. They look about as bored and useless as you do.”

Eve had to laugh. She had never been told she looked useless before. “Do I appear that way?”

“Honey, you look about as comfortable sitting here as a nun in a whorehouse.”

This really made Eve laugh. The woman turned around to see what had caused the big response, but Eve didn’t explain. The woman turned back to the machine, pushed the button again. Still nothing.

“It’s no use waiting on him,” she continued. “He ain’t coming for hours. You’d do better just to go on to bed without him.”

“I’m not actually waiting on anybody,” Eve said.

The woman coughed, pushed the button. “You looking for a party?”

Eve didn’t answer. She didn’t understand the question.

The woman turned around. “A party? You trying to make some money?”

Eve still didn’t understand.

“Nah, never mind. If you was a hooker you wouldn’t be dressed like that.”

Eve glanced down at her clothes and finally understood what the woman was suggesting. “You think I’m a prostitute?”

“Not since I got a good look at you,” she replied, turning back around.

“So, the women who sit here at two o’clock are either waiting on the men at the tables or are prostitutes?”

There was a pause. The images spun once more.

“Pretty much,” came the answer.

“What about you then?” Eve wanted to know. “You’re a woman sitting here at two o’clock, and you aren’t waiting on a man at the tables, and I doubt you’re a prostitute.”

“Nah, I’m an old-timer. There’s a few of us here too,” she explained. She pushed the button again and nothing. She reached into her pocket and took out another five-dollar bill, stuck it in the machine, and waited.