Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 2 - Stellium in Scorpio (6 page)

"So
who are you really?" I asked playfully.

"Today,
I'm your guide to the greenroom. Who knows tomorrow what I'll be for you,"
he said with a twinkle.

"What
happened to your name tag?" I asked him, by now hooked on the ridiculous
hotel titles and missing an opportunity to grin over something like Camel Boy
Kevin.

"Forgot
it this morning. My name is Rob," he said, depositing us on a couch in the
clubby setting, opening a fridge and offering us wine. The tables were already
laden with fresh cheese and crackers, and on the wall, a flat screen TV was
muted. "I'll get Ms. Ross for you."

"Nice
manners," I said to Callie.

Moments
later, a long-legged, redheaded twenty-three-year-old showgirl strode into the
room.

"Are
you Ms. Rivers?" she asked, extending her hand to Callie.

"I'm
Callie Rivers, and this is Teague Richfield," Callie said.

"I'm
so silly! I freaked out that night at the party. I realize worrying my father,
and now you, was a mistake." Her stance, and her movements, and everything
about her communicated that she felt her own importance.

"It's
wonderful to meet you. You look a lot like your handsome father," Callie
said.

I
didn't particularly like the fact that Callie thought meeting this young girl
was wonderful, or that her father was handsome, or that she was handsome by
proxy. I wanted all Callie's admiration reserved for me.
Childish of me,
I
thought.

Rose
Ross didn't duck her head in shyness, as most young girls would with a
compliment. Instead she jutted her jaw forward in a striking pose and said with
a big smile, "Thank you!"

A
tall, glamorous, brunette drag queen swept into the greenroom and kissed Rose
on the cheek. "Hello, darling," she said, "Excusez-moi! I didn't
realize you had guests."

"Joanie
Burr, this is—"

"Callie
and Teague," Callie interrupted.

"I'm
Joanie Burr, Rose's best and only friend because, of course, she's from
Oklahoma and no one in Las Vegas even speaks to anyone from Oklahoma," she
teased. "Where are you from?"

"Oklahoma,"
Callie enjoyed saying.

"Oops."
She put her long slender fingers to her electric-red lips in mock embarrassment
and slid gracefully onto the couch next to Rose. She took Rose's hand, and the
light bounced off the huge amethyst on Joanie's ring finger and off the gold
piping of her white silk lounging pajamas. While no one in her right mind could
deny that a young woman like Rose was attractive, she paled in comparison to
the exceptionally well-made-up Joanie, whose facial features and body parts
were sheer elegance on a grand scale—femininity embellished and enhanced. Her
moves were practiced and fluid, with a casual sensuality. She was a fascinating
experiment in gender bending, her every waking hour obviously occupied with the
way she looked, and dressed, and moved. She was the glamorous woman who was not
woman—a genetic mirage in the desert, and I could not take my eyes off her,
despite knowing that she wasn't really there.

Rose
spoke openly in front of her, telling Callie that she'd become frightened when
she'd made the ghost's ghoul pool list.

"Because
she's a baby girl, aren't you, precious? And she didn't know that it's an honor
to make the list," Joanie said, and with one long, slender, manicured
hand, she tossed her short hair back out of her eyes where it remained for only
a second and then slid seductively back where it originally hung, half
concealing the long lashes of one perfectly mascara-lined eye.

"What's
the ghoul pool list about?" I asked.

"Just
a spook night for every spook in town...at midnight they draw names and
everybody on the list freaks," Joanie said with even more dramatic flair.

"It's
a list of people you think will die in Las Vegas in the next twelve
months," Rose managed to say and glanced sideways at her friend to make
sure it was okay to say it.

"I'd
rather make worst dressed," I quipped. "So does the ghost actually
show up?"

"Giovanni
Gratini does," Joanie said, gesturing with her hands and whispering to
Rose. "He loves wearing that toga. If his skirt gets any shorter, the
entire front row can gobble his baubles, instead of just Marlena."

"Anyone
on the list ever die?" I asked.

"Just
their hair, honey," Joanie said raucously.

"Do
you have the list?" I asked.

"Every
queen in the city has been on the damned thing at one time or another. I think
Rose is the only one who ever remembered she was on the list! Everybody else
was too freaking drunk!"

"Your
father asked that we check on you and make sure that you're okay." Callie
gave Rose a meaningful look that seemed to say this was her chance to tell us
if she needed help.

"Perfectly
okay. Really." She shrugged and smiled, but an underlying nervousness
belied her cavalier attitude.

"We
had a weird thing happen to us, actually a couple of weird things," I
said, deciding as I spoke to skip the one about the dead body in our tub.
"When we checked in, someone had put an astrological chart in my
luggage." I watched them both for even a twitch of a reaction.

"Did
it say you would meet someone exciting?" Joanie gave me a knowing smile,
and I wondered if my feelings for Callie were flashing across my forehead like
images on the Times Square JumboTron.

Callie
quickly changed the subject. "We're headed over to the buffet. Would you
like to join us?"

Rose
looked as if she were about to accept our invitation.

"Gotta
run through that scene we blew tonight, honey," Joanie reminded her with
just the appropriate note of regret in her tone.

"Thanks
for coming to my rescue. Sorry it was a false alarm. It was nice meeting you
both," Rose said.

We
said our goodbyes and they departed, leaving my mind bouncing around in my
head performing its own lie detector test—and Rose was failing.
Was Joanie
hanging around to report our conversation to someone, or to protect her friend
Rose, or was she trying to derail our interest in the ghoul pool by
trivializing the game?

We
exited the theater and walked back to the lobby. I slung my arm around Callie's
waist, walking slowly beside her, enjoying the feeling of her body against
mine, our hips moving in sync as we walked.

"So
what do you make of that?" Callie asked.

"Lying.
What do you make of it?"

"Same."

"You
see? I could have been the psychic and you could have been the cop; we both got
the same vibe. So what are you going to do next?" I asked.

"Eat,"
she said, already heading toward the buffet line in the open-air restaurant.
She filled two plates with food that she first examined as if it were loaded
with explosives, carefully lifting the edge of a pastry, tilting a slice of ham
toward the light to see its true color, asking the chef behind the chafing
dishes if he knew how long the sausage had been sitting out under the lights.
After tedious selection techniques had been applied, she Saran-Wrapped the
plates and handed them to me to carry so that she could juggle our drinks,
asking the waiter where the water for the ice had come from. I was starting to
fidget, patience not being my particular virtue. I wondered if this was her
ongoing modus operandi.

Perhaps,
at the end of the river of love, there's silt: that which is left to wade
through after the waves of ecstasy have washed over us. I was on the lookout
for silt. Would Callie turn out to be too good to be true: a sexually
passionate, exciting woman of insane beliefs and annoying little habits?

Callie
unwrapped the plate to have one more look at the condition of the ham, just to
make my point. Fairly certain we would not be poisoned during this particular
meal, she smiled at me. "My mom and dad are flying in."

"Really,
when?" I was caught off guard, still focused on the ham pat-down.

"In
a couple of days, I think. They'll let me know. You'll love them. I've told
them all about you. I want them to meet you. We'll all go out."

We're
visiting your client’s kid on our time together, we have barely had a moment to
ourselves, and now you're flying in your parents. What in the hell are you
doing?

"They're
not staying in our room, are they?" I asked, my inner child turning
nuclear.

"Adjoining,"
she said, unintentionally rubbing it in.

"Adjoining.
Not across the hall or on another floor?"

"That
way we can be..."

"...together!"
I finished her sentence with an upbeat sarcasm. "Is there going to be any
personal time for you and me, or is it just going to be dead folks and old
folks?"

Callie
gave me a look that said she might want to reevaluate having a relationship
with someone as callous as me, and then gave me a rather lengthy dissertation
on the meaning of family. Callie's family were her friends: her father, Palmer,
and her mother, Paige. She'd apparently told Paige and Palmer about us, much in
the way one would talk to a girlfriend.

"I
told them that you and I are having a relationship and that I wanted them to
meet you. That's perfectly reasonable, since we are lovers."

"You
told them we're sleeping together?" I asked, slightly alarmed.

"What
does a relationship mean between two women over forty?" Callie leaned in
and kissed me somewhere between the sausage patties and the fruit bowl.
"I'm going to set you free, Teague. You're way too uptight."

Callie
picked up a tiny piece of steak, held it between her fingers, and fed me as if
I were no more than an exceedingly loud baby bird. My mouth wrapped around her
fingertips and gently pulled the meat from them, caressing her fingers with my
tongue. "There are even better things to eat in our room," she said
and I swooned, completely forgetting the issue about her family. They could all
show up as far as I was concerned. Then she wrapped a few small steak bites and
some boiled potatoes in a large napkin and rolled it up.

"Elmo
has to eat too," she reminded me. "He's getting anxious to see us, I
can feel it."

"Oh,
my gosh, I forgot," I said, taking the food from her and thinking she
might just be a better mom to Elmo than I was.

Callie
furrowed her brow and shook her head as if to shake out loose thoughts and keep
only those that were tightly anchored. "The paper left in your suitcase
with the Stellium in Scorpio keeps flashing through my head, and the whole
ghoul pool thing, everything's connected, you know," Callie said.

I,
of course, couldn't see the connection. I
could
see, however, as we got
on the elevator, that there was something about 29 critical degrees in the
Eighth House that seemed to lock up her mental hard drive. She repeated again
and again that in Scorpio, those 29 degrees meant something was imminent,
perhaps something sexual or secretive.

"Something
that's already happened, or is about to happen, in or to this hotel; that's
what I feel, but that should only apply to the past when this chart was
created, so I don't know..." Callie mused.

I
assured her that the imminent sexual event involved the two of us. I slid the
electronic card into its metal slot, and our hotel room door clicked open. I
immediately dumped the plates onto the dining room table and turned to greet
Elmo. His cage door was open, his toys were scattered around the room, but Elmo
was nowhere to be seen.

"He's
gone! Oh, God, he's gone!" I wailed.

Callie
was on her knees looking under the bed and into cramped spaces where we both
knew Elmo was far too big to hide, and furthermore, would never think of
hiding. I ran into the bathroom and looked around. No Elmo. Callie grabbed the
phone and rang the front desk, telling the clerk on duty that our dog had been
stolen. In other circumstances, I would have taken time to savor her having
called him "our dog," but right now, he was my missing puppy, the guy
who took road trips with me, listened to me, even slept with me, and someone
had taken him.

The
desk clerk told Callie she'd check with the front office, and maid service, and
security, and see what she could find out, reminding us that no dogs were
allowed in the hotel. Callie hung up and hurried out into the hallway and
banged on the adjacent hotel room doors. I heard a door open and Callie
interrogating someone in a slightly elevated voice.

A
man said loudly, "Never saw him. Didn't know dogs were allowed."

The
thought crossed my mind that since dogs weren't allowed maybe they'd discovered
him and confiscated him, hauling him off to the pound.

After
talking to half a dozen people in the hallway, Callie returned to the room,
plopped down on the bed, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes, rubbing her
forehead with her small, pale hands. My heart was pounding, and I felt like I
might burst out crying.