The Case of the Sin City Sister (22 page)

“He doesn’t remember the motorcycle coming in or going
out?” Eve was still bothered by the familiar mustached man she had seen earlier and wondered if he had anything to do with what had happened.

“He claims there are a couple of tenants who ride bikes. Both Harleys, he says. Didn’t recall hearing one before the police arrived, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have thought anything about it because he’s used to hearing one leave every day after lunch. Guy goes to work about the time we were there.”

“And would he give you the names of these Harley owners?”

Daniel turned again to Eve.

“What?” she wanted to know.

He shook his head. “You,” he answered.

“What about me?”

“You just have the instinct for this kind of thing,” he replied.

Eve couldn’t help herself, she smiled. It pleased her to hear her father’s former partner giving her such praise.

“And no, Mr. Whitehorse didn’t care to share the names of his tenants. He’s pretty protective of the place.”

“A little too protective, if you ask me,” Eve commented, remembering how he didn’t want to let them into Dorisanne’s apartment, how he questioned who they were and why they wanted to get in there. “He seems a bit hypervigilant for an apartment manager.”

“Yeah, well, maybe he loves his work.” Daniel made the turn into the hotel parking lot. “You want to get something to eat?” he asked.

Eve glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was well after seven. She was pretty hungry. “Let’s go back to that diner,” she suggested.

“You hoping to find that Caesar’s waitress again?” Daniel asked. “Talk to her, see if she knows anything?”

Eve glanced over at her friend. She shook her head and grinned. “No, it’s not anything like that. I just enjoyed the meat loaf.”

THIRTY-SIX

After supper it was too late to go back to the hospital. Eve called the Intensive Care Unit, and after being unable to attain any information because she was not family, Daniel called, gave his title as Detective, his rank and badge number, and claimed he needed to know the victim’s condition for the ongoing investigation, never mentioning, of course, that he wasn’t actually involved in the ongoing investigation, that he wasn’t even an officer in Las Vegas.

He was told that Pauline was stable, that though she remained in critical condition, they planned to upgrade that status to satisfactory if her vital signs continued to stay normal. She was still sedated, but there had not proved to be any neurological damage from the head injury that she had sustained. She was not, however, the nurse reported, awake and talking.

He closed his phone and told Eve everything he had just heard as they sat in the parking lot. “Are you going up to your room?”

Eve studied him. “You keeping tabs on me?”

Daniel smiled. “Well, you have been known to take off in the middle of the night.”

She nodded in agreement. “That is true.”

They got out of the car and Daniel glanced behind him, seeming to study the cars around them. Eve looked at the SUVs and sedans and didn’t think anything appeared suspicious or familiar. He turned toward her, and they walked into the hotel lobby and started toward the elevators.

“You want to stop in the bar before we go up?” Eve asked.

He glanced in the direction of the hotel lounge ahead of them. “I don’t think there’s any American Idols in there.” He grinned, nudging Eve in the side.

“I think I can manage to sit in a lounge without entertainment,” she replied.

They walked into the bar, found an empty table in the corner, and took a seat. There were only a few other customers in the establishment—a man and a woman at the bar and two men at a table near the front. They all seemed to be watching a ball game that was being shown on a large screen over the bar.

“Baseball and a beer,” Daniel said. “My favorite way to spend a weekend evening.”

“Wow, it’s already Saturday night, isn’t it?” Eve had lost track of the hours. She turned to Daniel. “Don’t you need to get back by tomorrow?” She realized that they hadn’t actually discussed how long they were going to stay in Vegas. Originally, she thought they would be heading back by Sunday, but since they had made no discoveries concerning the whereabouts of Dorisanne, she had less of a feel for their plans.

“I got PTO,” he answered.

Eve didn’t know what he meant and he read her expression.

“Paid time off,” he explained, glancing around, stopping at the table with the two men.

She nodded.

“Don’t you have to request that in advance?” The Captain and her mother would make yearly plans of the dates they wanted him to take off. They would decide at the beginning of every year the times and places of the family vacations based on his approved requisitions.

He shrugged. “I can call tomorrow. It’s not a problem.” He went back to watching the game.

The waitress, a young woman with long black hair pulled back into a braid and a butterfly tattoo on her bare right shoulder, came over and took their orders. Eve requested a cup of coffee while Daniel chose a draft beer. She thought about the Captain and wondered if he was watching the same game. He liked baseball, and she often heard the games on Saturday nights through her bedroom door while she read or enjoyed a bit of solitude. He would usually choose any sport over Saturday evening Mass.

Eve turned her attention to the waitress, noticing her braided hair swishing as she talked to the other customers, watching her as she rang up the sale and then brought over the drinks. Eve agreed to let Daniel pay and noticed how the server took his credit card and headed back to the bar. In a few minutes she had returned with the drinks and the question about running a tab. He agreed and she left without giving him a receipt or returning his card.

“How do you run a tab?” Eve asked, thinking about the process of purchasing drinks and meals using a credit card. She was
used to dealing primarily with cash at restaurants. The sisters and monks at the monestery used a credit card only for large items.

“They just don’t cash out the card,” Daniel explained, taking a sip of his beer. “They swipe your card, but they just keep adding drinks as you order, and they don’t tally up the costs until you’re ready to go.”

Eve nodded. It made sense to her, and as she thought about the transaction just carried out, she recalled their earlier conversation about Dorisanne and the possibility of her involvement in credit card fraud at her place of employment, at the bar at the Rio. She realized, watching the waitress who was serving them, how easy it was to get credit card numbers in that profession. She also realized that cocktail waitresses were generally serving a vulnerable population by the end of a night. Drunks were less likely to pay attention to who had their cards or for how long.

“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked. He had been watching Eve.

She shook her head. “I was just thinking about Dorisanne, hoping she’s okay.”

He reached over and placed his hand on top of Eve’s. “She’s okay,” he said, sounding as reassuring as he possibly could.

“What if this guy on the motorcycle, the one I saw at the casino last night, what if he is after her? What if Pauline knows where she is and told him? What if that’s why she was beaten? And it’s not Steve. It’s that guy and he’s after my sister.”

Daniel squeezed her hand.

“If he knew where she was, he wouldn’t have come back to the apartment. He would have gone right to where she was.” He sat back in his chair. “No, she didn’t tell him anything like that.”

Eve nodded. What Daniel was saying did make sense to her. If Pauline had given him Dorisanne and Robbie’s location, he would have left the scene and not come back. She wanted to believe that was true, but it still bothered her that Pauline was so afraid for Dorisanne, that she was trying so desperately to warn her that “he” knew it was her. She thought again about Pauline’s words that the nurse had relayed: “He knows it’s you.”

“What could she have meant?” she asked, not explaining her thoughts.

Daniel shook his head. “I’m not following you.”

“He knows it’s you,” she repeated. “What does that mean?”

Daniel seemed to think about Eve’s question. He’d been told what Pauline said when she’d gotten so upset and caused the nurse to make Eve leave the room. “That he knows Dorisanne has done something, that she’s the one who committed some act that obviously angered him.” He looked up at Eve. “But we don’t know who she’s talking about. She could be talking about Steve, that it’s Steve who knows that Dorisanne was the one who got Pauline involved in something.”

Eve shook her head. “I don’t think it’s Steve. I want it to be him. I want it to be that simple, and I want them to keep him locked up for good and away from Pauline and away from my sister, but I don’t think he did this. I think the guy from Caesar’s, the one who was at the apartments. I think it was him. And I think he’s after Dorisanne and Robbie. And I think Dorisanne has done something to make him angry enough to beat poor Pauline to get information from her. But what?” Eve wanted to know. “What could she have done?”

The butterfly-tattooed waitress walked up to their table. “Here, I forgot to give you the card,” she said, handing the credit card back to Daniel. She smiled and glanced over to Eve. “More coffee?” she asked, and Eve stared at the credit card placed next to Daniel’s mug of beer.

“She’s involved in the theft ring,” Eve announced.

The waitress stepped back. “What?”

Eve looked at her and shook her head. “No, no, not you. It’s fine. And no, no more coffee, thanks,” she responded, waiting for the young woman to leave.

Daniel had leaned forward. “How do you know?” he asked.

She reached into her back pocket, pulled out the small address book, and took out the small piece of paper that had fallen out earlier. She placed it on the table in front of him. It was a bar receipt. “She kept receipts. She got the numbers,” Eve said. “At the Rio, she kept the cards and copied the numbers.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

“If what you’re saying is true,” Daniel noted, “then her boss could have found out about it. That could be the reason she was fired.”

“And that’s easy enough to confirm,” Eve said. “All we have to do is call him up tonight and ask him.”

Daniel shook his head.

“What?” she wanted to know.

“The manager is gone, right?”

Eve suddenly remembered the conversation they’d had at the Rio. The waitress had told them that the manager was away for a few days. “Well, we could call human resources,” she suggested.

“That will have to wait until Monday.”

Eve tried to think of another way to confirm her suspicions. “We could go back to the Rio and try asking around again.”

Daniel took the receipt still on the table between them and appeared to be studying it.

“This doesn’t really tell us anything.” He laid it back down.
“There’s not a full card number on it, no personal information other than a name. I don’t see that this proves anything. I don’t see that this confirms she was stealing numbers.”

Eve glanced down at the receipt again. Daniel was right, she knew. But she still couldn’t understand why her sister would have kept a bill from a customer. It had to be something important; it had to be a clue, she told herself.

She drank her coffee and noticed that Daniel was once again eyeing the two men sitting at the table near the front of the bar.

“Do you recognize those guys?” she asked.

Daniel turned to her and smiled. “I’m not sure,” he replied. “I’ve seen them somewhere before.”

Eve glanced once again in their direction. One of the men was young, looked to be barely thirty, the other was older, mid-forties, she thought. They were dressed in shirts and ties, no sport coats, and they seemed interested in only the baseball game playing on the television. They were drinking beers, and as far as she knew, they had not looked at or appeared interested in Daniel or Eve since they walked into the bar. She wondered if she and Daniel were both starting to see things that weren’t there.

“Okay, let’s go over what we have,” she said, drinking the last of her coffee.