Nobody Dies in a Casino (11 page)

Even to Charlie, she looked dead.

*   *   *

“Vulnerable, not dead,” Evan Black insisted after everyone had left. His eyes burned with triumph. He must be on something. This whole screening did not make sense and certainly wasn't a triumph. He hadn't proved he could make a successful project from what he'd shown. He'd proved that he could break the law and fly over restricted government property and that he could rob the Hilton. Why would he reveal the burning Mooney if he'd burned it to get rid of evidence?

“The footage of you is to further entice Mitch Hilsten.”

“When's he getting here?”

“Saturday, I hope. His plane from Nairobi was delayed due to nascent rebellion among the downtrodden with access to explosives.”

“Mitch is in Nairobi?”

“You didn't even know where he was? He knew you were here.” Evan was down to his purple shirt now, sitting on the floor, where servers and barmen picked up plates and glasses while pretending he and Charlie weren't there. He and Charlie pretended the same back.

“I got an E-mail yesterday. Guess I didn't check all the address and routing crap ahead and after it.” Damn stuff took up more room on the screen than the message.

Her client's barely contained elation had to mean he was under the mistaken impression his had been a successful screening. Talent is hard to fathom. The more successful, the more deluded they can become, denying the haunting fear they can't do it again. This time, someone will figure out they're faking. They're not sure how they accomplished the success they've become addicted to and fear losing it.

Personally, Charlie was convinced success in the entertainment business had mostly to do with being at the right place at the right time with the right idea. Plus business acumen. Plus a lot of sheer dumb luck. Talent is not that uncommon and few are chosen. When it happens, though, you really need a damn good agent.

This agent thought Congdon and Morse's hot new client was losing it. Or was it just that she was too tired, hadn't really gotten a start on her vacation yet?

“Some of the footage came from satellite, some we swiped off the Net, and a lot of it we'd taken on previous trips. You haven't even seen most of it—the ground stuff. You haven't seen the best yet.”

“Why wouldn't you show the best to backers?”

“Backers … oh, yeah.” He slipped out of his shoes and socks, reached for his toes and lifted them and what followed toward the ceiling, and held the balancing act on his tailbone. “You know the best part about this backing, Charlie? No interest, no taxes, no payback.”

“There's no such thing as free money.”

“Charlie love, trust me.”

“Trust you? This screening involved you, and me by association, in a casino robbery and an illegal flight over Groom Lake. Evan, I have a kid, I don't appreciate your exposing me that way. The mob may not run Vegas anymore, but the corporate-military complex is an incredibly lethal instrument.”

“‘Corporate-military complex.' You are such a living, breathing example of my conspiracy theme, you're wonderful.” He lowered his legs to pretzel them into a lotus position and did some more deep breathing.

Charlie'd tried that lotus thing once and gotten a cramp in her leg. Her daughter and best friend, Maggie, practically had to sedate her to straighten her out. They were almost crippled themselves with laughter.

By the time he was standing on his head, she bent over almost to the floor to assure Evan Black, “I'm not leaving until you tell me about Mr. Thug. And I don't want to hear any magic shit either.”

*   *   *

Charlie rode back to the Hilton with Toby, the second-unit gofer, fuming about Evan's denial of any knowledge of the curly-haired goon. “We didn't check names at the door,” he'd said. “Anybody could have come in. People brought friends, you know. It was a party.”

When she'd insisted the man was one of the two who had walked his pilot, Pat, to the curb and shoved him under traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard, her client insisted that since he hadn't seen any of it happen, he wouldn't have recognized him tonight.

They were on the Maryland Parkway and Charlie looked up at the lighted billboard with Barry and Terry through that orange smear again. This was the time of night you decide such manifestations mean you've got a brain tumor—she'd probably picked it up by being irradiated over Area 51. Barry's face had been repaired and the restored side looked more like one too many lifts than the other side even. The orange sheen overlay made Terry's bright red Realtor's jacket look anemic.

“So, I suppose you were in on the great Hilton heist,” Charlie fished.

Toby wasn't biting. “Like to get my hands on one of those magic phasers. I do magic sometimes, you know.”

“What's this magic thing Evan keeps promising is going to make everything just fine?”

“If it works, it's going to be awesome. And funny as hell.”

“If it works—”

“Magic's like that.” An unusual young man with black floppy curls and a wiry energy, Toby seemed eternally happy, but then the expression in his wide-set eyes would turn abruptly sharp and serious. Maybe it was the magician in him.

Charlie blinked. “Why did I start seeing orange light again with the Groom Lake shots? I'm still getting fragments of it. And that's just from the film.”

“Evan's always said you got a great imagination for an agent.”

Her only comeback, the soap-opera cliché, “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Hey, nobody else sees this orange.”

“So where was Caryl Thompson tonight?” And her tits.

“Her folks are in town for the funeral. To hear her tell it, the two of them together are worse than a dead brother.”

“Do you know the big man sitting beside my chair tonight?”

They swirled into the palm-lined drive of the Las Vegas Hilton and pulled to a stop under the lights of the huge marquee and he surprised her with an answer for once. “Yeah. Name's Art Sleem.”

“There was money in that room tonight, but Sleem's boss, Loopy Louie, wasn't there?”

“Sleem works for a lot of people.” Toby's expression had gone serious on her. “He the man who shoved Pat under traffic?”

“Yeah. Does that mean Loopy Louie ordered the execution?”

“Means Art Sleem works for too many people.” Toby nodded at some inner thought and stopped grinning. “Only in Vegas.”

“But the party was about money.”

“That's what everything's about. That and magic.”

“So what was Art Sleem doing at the party uninvited?”

“Looked to me like he was trying to put the make on you.”

*   *   *

Too tired for blackjack but too wired to sleep, Charlie stopped at a bank of slots near the Dodge Stealth in the lobby before going upstairs.
Starlight Express
was just letting out and lines of people paraded toward the front entryway or wandered into the casino, drawn by strategically located slots suddenly heaving up heavy metal into their made-to-be-noisy trays.

Unfortunately, Charlie's was not one of them. The squeals of delight, sound effects, and flashing red lights were random, but not on her row. The Hanleys and Betty showed up at a rigged triumph nearby and Charlie called out to them. Illogically happy to see them one more time, she almost wished they weren't getting on a morning plane for Wisconsin.

“Oh Charlie, that was a great show. Can't believe people can dance like that on roller skates.” Betty gave Charlie a hug. “You should be in bed. You're too young to look that tired.”

Martha Hanley snagged a passing cart and bought a round of dollar tokens for everybody. “Hell,
we
should be in bed. But I still have a little change to lose, and I can sleep in Kenosha.”

She plugged a slot two down from Charlie, Ben the one next to Charlie, and Betty sat on the other side of her—ordering Bloody Marys all around from a passing waitress.

God, these people were refreshingly real. Charlie felt so threatened by Art Sleem and even Evan Black, she had half a mind to take a morning plane out tomorrow herself. Leave all the shit to pompous Richard Morse. That way, she could also avoid Mitch Hilsten. What a deal.

Charlie'd never had a slot go off on her. She didn't play them that often, but she'd sat next to a jackpot once. So when the clanking racket began in the tray in front of her and the red light energized on top of her machine, she sat in dumb surprise. This is what's supposed to happen. This is why I came to Vegas. She still didn't believe it.

But Betty was on her feet, screaming, literally lifting Charlie off her stool, when they both went down. Because Ben Hanley's battle with his own body knocked them down.

Everybody but Ben Hanley got up eventually. He couldn't, because he was dead.

CHAPTER
13

T
HEY TRIED TO
tell Charlie that Ben Hanley had had a heart attack. Even she'd dubbed him one waiting to happen.

She had also noticed him drinking her Bloody Mary. He'd downed his and absently picked up hers the next time he reached, his mind more on the arrangement of the fruit lining up in front of him.

She hadn't thought much about it and couldn't have touched even a glass of water by this time in her unvacation. Besides, these free drinks weren't called “well drinks” for nothing. They were pretty well watered. You were supposed to get loose, not comatose.

Amazing how quickly and smoothly she and the Hanleys and Betty had ended up behind that forbidden door. That very door the guards had rushed blindly out of with their blazing flashlights on Evan's film.

Ben Hanley wasn't pronounced dead until a good half hour after that door closed Charlie and his family in with him. But Charlie Greene, who had been running into a lot of this lately, knew he was dead before she and Betty managed to get out from under his inert form on the casino floor.

She'd glimpsed banks of TV monitors lining the walls of a room off the hall as they passed to this office. Charlie sat on a couch between Betty and Martha, unable to believe she'd met these people only this afternoon, while a couple of uniformed guards and then a battalion of EMTs tried to resuscitate Ben Hanley.

When they heard the distinct sound of a bone cracking in Ben's chest, the three women grabbed one another's hands in an involuntary motion.

“Why do they keep doing that?” Martha whispered, her glasses steaming over at the top, her hand hot and sweaty. “My Benny's dead.”

“Remember when they resuscitated Pop?” Betty's hand felt cold and sweaty. “Lived—what?—ten, eleven years in a lot of pain from a cracked sternum. Never did heal.”

“Had to put him in a nursing home.” Martha blinked enormous eyes behind enormous glasses. “Betty and me weren't about to quit our jobs, neglect our children and husbands to change diapers on somebody bigger than we were. They had to catheterize him every six hours.”

“Cost thousands of dollars a month. He didn't know who he was, didn't know who we were either.”

“That's when Martha and I made a pact,” Betty confided. The sisters promised each other that the first to go would not be forced to linger. But they hadn't made a pact with Ben Hanley. They also hadn't noticed many resuscitated people over a certain age being successfully rehabilitated.

“Ben carried on like a baby when his sisters wouldn't give up their livelihoods to take his mother in when she got Alzheimer's. And I wouldn't either.”

“You didn't give in then, Martha.”

“I'm not giving in now.” Martha squeezed Charlie's hand and leaned across her to look into Betty's glasses. “Benny went like he'd want to—enjoying himself on vacation.”

“Yeah. In his favorite place, Las Vegas.”

“Favorite place after Kenosha, Wisconsin, you mean.”

“Right. And doing what he loved best … after fishing. Playing the slots.”

“What do you think we should do, Charlie?”

This was so far out of Charlie's league, she could only shrug helplessly, but she stood as both women rose to their feet and, lifting their hands in the air—hers too—called for a stop to the degradation of Ben Hanley's poor carcass.

*   *   *

Charlie didn't linger over breakfast in bed, but grabbed a quick shower, read her E-mail, and hurried down to the coffee shop. She didn't want to be alone in her room this morning either.

People can too die in a casino, and they can be murdered too.

She ordered one egg poached soft, a piece of dry toast, and a cup of hot milk from Ardith, the elderly waitress with the thick ankles who'd served her yesterday.

“You going to do with it what I think you are, sweetie? Because if you are, there's better remedies for hangovers.” When Charlie didn't answer she added, “Not even coffee?”

“I'll eat my breakfast first and then see if my stomach wants coffee, okay?” Everybody's a doctor. “Please hurry it.”

If someone wanted to murder you, they could have gotten in your room while you slept. Maybe Ben Hanley really did die of a heart attack.

Betty and Martha were sure that's what it was. “Doctor's been warning him to stay away from his favorite foods, but he figured life wasn't worth living if he couldn't eat what he wanted. Only time he drank was on vacation or with his cheese balls during a Packers game.”

They wouldn't let her stay with them. “We got each other. And, honey, he was so lucky to go that way and that fast. We'll miss him, but you don't know how awful it can be growing too old. You're exhausted. We'll write to you from Kenosha.”

And that had been it. These people who'd been in her life for one day, one of them dead because of her, the other two already making plans to combine households.

I'm beginning to feel not only threatened but dangerous to others. Three dead in four days. And four more days to go.