Vegas Vengeance (6 page)

“I think so. I found evidence in his cabin that he did not leave voluntarily.”

“Oh, no,” she whispered. “That's awful. It didn't seem so hard to accept when I was the only one insisting he had been murdered. I guess it was because deep in my heart, I secretly believed I was wrong. But to hear you say it …”

The woman whimpered, and her chest heaved as she fought for control. Hawker reached over and patted her hand. “Maybe we should eat later. Let's go up to my suite. I have a few things I need to show you, and it'll give you time to calm down.”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “That might be best.”

Hawker found their waiter and gave him a twenty to delay their dinner orders, then took Barbara Blaine's hand and led her through the casino to the elevator.

This was a different woman from the one who had entered the dining room with such quiet flair. Now she was soft and vulnerable and very, very damn close to breaking.

The change was so drastic and so touching that Hawker found himself feeling sorry for her.

Like the hard-nosed whorehouse matrons of fiction, this one really did seem to have a tender heart made for breaking.

seven

Back in his suite, Hawker poured gin into a beaker and added the obligatory scent of vermouth. He filled the beaker with ice, shook it and served the martini in a chilled glass with a triple portion of olives.

Barbara Blaine took the drink gratefully.

“Better?”

She nodded. “I don't understand why it hit me so hard all of a sudden.” She looked out the broad veranda window and spoke out loud, as if listening to her own words. “Jason is dead. Jason Stratton is dead.” She shivered and took down half the drink in a gulp. “And it's such a damnable waste.”

Hawker took the manila envelope from the desk. He opened it and handed it to her. “I found this stuff hidden in his cabin. If he had left voluntarily, he would have taken it.”

She looked at the wad of bills for a moment and smiled wryly at some private memory. She put the money on the bed with the insurance policy. Then she turned her attention to the journal: a small book bound in black leather.

She leafed through the pages, then looked at Hawker. “I've seen him carry this. He used to joke about it. Of course, with Jason, it was hard to tell when he was joking and when he wasn't. He used to say this would be his doctoral dissertation, but that no one would understand it. Now I see why.”

Hawker didn't have to ask what she was talking about. He had already looked at the journal. There were about three hundred pages covered in a minute, carefully written code. There were drawings of plants and insects, and a few entries in recognizable English, but most of it was in what seemed to be a random combination of numbers and letters.

“I was hoping he had explained the code to you. You seem to think these people killed Jason as a way to pressure you. I'm not so sure.”

“But why in the hell else would they do it?” she snapped. “He was such a kind …
good
… person. Jason wouldn't hurt anybody. It wasn't in him.”

Hawker shrugged. “Maybe he saw something he shouldn't have. Maybe he knew something they didn't want him to know. I was hoping you or this journal could tell me a little more about him.”

“All I know about the code he used is something he told me about his boyhood. He came from a big family with a drunken, nosy mother. He said he developed the code when he was in his teens, so she couldn't read what he had written. He said he'd been using it so long that it was second nature to write that way.”

“He never hinted at the key to the code?”

Barbara Blaine thought for a moment, then gave a negative shake of her head. She began to riffle through her handbag. “Do you have any cigarettes?”

“No.”

She put down the bag and returned to her drink. “I don't either. I quit two years ago—when I met Jason. But sometimes I still carry them for friends—and to prove I don't need them. He had this way about him, a way of making you not only believe in him but in yourself, too. I mentioned once that I wanted to quit smoking, and then very calmly and very kindly he told me all this scientific stuff about cigarettes. He explained that no one really enjoyed sucking poison into their lungs; that claiming to enjoy it was really just a rationalization for the physical feelings of addiction. He asked me to picture how ridiculous I looked sucking a white stick of burning leaves. He said it was the tobacco industry—a multibillion-dollar industry—that had replaced the honestly absurd image of smoking with a carefully planned image of sophistication and sexuality. He said I was allowing them to use me as a dupe. A slave, really, who earned them several hundred dollars a year in profit—not to mention the grave harm I was doing to my own body. Jason didn't lecture people. He reasoned with them. He got me so mad at my own silliness and at the tobacco industry that I quit that afternoon.”

Hawker waited patiently, knowing the woman had to work into it in her own way.

She swirled the gin in the glass, staring deeply into the clarity of it. “I met him just over two years ago. I had just built the Doll House, had just built on property I'd bought from the Five-Cs syndicate. Outwardly I was feeling very proud of myself. Very tough and in control. The house was tastefully done, and I had built it all myself. No partners. And I knew that I would soon be rich, have all the money I had ever dreamed of.

“But inwardly I felt … I felt just as cheap and dirty as a person can feel.” She looked up at Hawker suddenly. “Do you want to know how I became the matron of a whorehouse? Take the most obvious guess, and you'll be right. I worked on my own, free-lance, for three years. A thousand dollars a night—and I did my best to make damn sure I was worth it. I read all the literature, learned all the tricks and then improved on them. If a man paid me once, I did anything I had to do to make sure he would be back. I got the occasional sicko. I was beaten badly twice. But I went right back to work when I got out of the hospital. For an attractive woman from a poor background, there are only two ways to get rich, Hawk. One way is to marry a rich man.” She laughed sardonically. “That's the most common form of prostitution, isn't it? But I didn't want a bad husband and a bad marriage. I had watched a bad marriage turn my mother into an old and broken woman. But I did want to be rich. Money was power, and I wanted power. So I chose the other form of prostitution.

“I told myself I was just being a tough businesswoman. I had a product that men were willing to pay dearly for. So I exploited it. In those three years, I grossed $463,500. I didn't make the common mistake of not declaring my earnings to the IRS. I reported every cent, paid the taxes, saved every remaining dollar. I told myself I could quit when I had a quarter of a million. After three years as a whore, after paying taxes and living expenses and making some wise investments, I had saved $305,000. It was all the money I needed to start my own business. I had seen the ruin of too many fellow prostitutes, and, like I said, I'd spent some time in the hospital myself. So I decided to start my own house. A classy place that was safe and carefully monitored. A whorehouse run like a first-rate business firm. The girls in my house have a damn good retirement plan. I strongly encourage them to take a sizable portion of their earnings and pool it in money market accounts or CDs or bonds. If they want to continue their education, the house pays seventy-five percent of the tab. Drugs kill more prostitutes than sickos, so the first thing I did was set up a drug rehab program. Every one of my girls is clean. So you see, Hawk, I was a whore before I became a rich businesswoman.” Her tight smile was like a challenge. “Are you shocked?”

Hawker shook his head. “Like you said, there are many forms of prostitution. I imagine most junior executives in major firms compromise themselves more often than an average prostitute. Why should I be shocked?”

The woman looked at him carefully. “For just a moment there, I thought I was hearing Jason again.”

“Which is exactly what I need you to talk about.”

Barbara Blaine finished her drink, laughing. “God, I got carried away, didn't I?” She found the martini pitcher and poured herself another drink. “But it all has to do with the way I met Jason and why I was attracted to him.”

“He wasn't a … he didn't come to your house—”

“Jason visit a whorehouse? You would have had to know him to know just how funny that question is. Jason is … was a pure spirit. An intellectual who loved the clarity of science. The absent-minded-professor type. He was very bright and very naive, and I grew to love him dearly. The way I met him, the Doll House was just nearing completion. It's about a mile from here and, like the casinos, there's nothing else around it. Just the neatly landscaped lawn out front, and sagebrush behind. I was in the house one afternoon, and I saw this stranger lurking around out back. On my property! With all the pomp and severity of a new landowner, I charged right out and asked him just what in the hell he was doing on my property. He had this shoddy canvas knapsack he always carried, and he had one of those funny-shaped hammers that rock collectors carry. I bawled him out good, lecturing him about trespassing and snooping and God knows what else. Like all whores, I guess, I had come to hate men, and I didn't want to miss the opportunity to put this man in his place. But he just stood there, smiling kind of shyly, and when I was done, he held out this pasty-colored rock. He asked me to look at it. I came very close to slapping it out of his hand and calling the police. But instead I took it and looked. I spent the next two years secretly thanking myself for looking at that rock.

“On the outside, it was just a plain old rock. But inside was the perfect outline of an animal. Some kind of fish. Very delicate and very pretty. Jason began talking about that fossil. He told me that thousands of years ago, the land the Five-Cs complex was built on had been a riverbed. He said it was a big raging river that flowed to the sea. By that time, I had him marked as some kind of kook. Tall and blond, with glasses. Kind of gangly and boyish-looking, but harmless. I no longer had any interest in men in a physical sense. Even so, he was kind of attractive in a funny way. He made me feel like he needed protecting or something. So I listened to him talk about the fossil, and before I knew it, what he was saying was actually
interesting
. I had gone right from high school to being a Las Vegas showgirl, and then to being a Vegas whore, so I was academically ignorant. He made all that stale stuff come alive. I could actually
see
this river flowing where my business now was. He talked about the geological formation of the mountains, and about the dinosaurs and jungles that once covered Nevada. The things he talked about made me realize for the first time how … insignificant my own problems and accomplishments were. It did something to me. I can't explain it. I guess it was because it made all the guilt I felt at being a whore seem ridiculously unimportant and small. Then all of a sudden I started to cry. I don't know why. I couldn't stop crying. Jason bundled me into his car and drove me up into the mountains to his cabin. He made tea for me and then listened to me talk. I must have talked nonstop for three hours. I told him everything.”

Barbara Blaine looked up at Hawker uncomfortably. “I know it must sound odd, my going off and talking to a complete stranger. But I had no male friends. A whore can't afford male friends, you see. And Jason had this knack for making strangers feel completely and totally at ease. He listened like what you said was the most important thing in the world. Jason had a very real magic about him. Everyone who ever met him felt it. Whenever someone was in trouble or had a problem, they came to Jason to sort it out.”

“And you became lovers?”

She shook her head quickly. “Not at first. I had been a whore, remember? I had already had intercourse with three hundred and seventeen different men by actual count. All kinds of men—fat, thin, white, black, big, little and in between. And I despised every one of them. To me, sex was work, a bit of theater to be performed nude. I took no pleasure in it. Maybe that's why I felt so comfortable with Jason. He never once made a pass at me. Never once said anything suggestive. When I saw him, it was usually to go on collecting trips. He called me his pack mule, because I carried whatever he happened to be collecting at the time. We talked a lot. We talked about everything. He opened my eyes to a lot of things: science, history, religion. I stayed up there in his cabin with him sometimes. I slept in the bed, and he slept outside on the porch because he said he loved sleeping outside. It was all very open and innocent, and very damn good for me. I hate to think what I would have turned into if it hadn't been for Jason Stratton.”

The woman shivered slightly, thinking about it. Then she began to talk once again, with the same faraway look in her eyes, remembering. “When we finally did become lovers, I had to initiate it. I was staying at the cabin. It was very late, and it began to rain. Really pour. Jason was sleeping outside, as usual. I got up to check on him. He was soaking wet. And shivering. It gets very damn cold up there. I helped him get out of his wet clothes, and I began to rub him dry with a blanket. I was wearing one of his T-shirts for a nightgown. While I dried him, I began to feel something. It was that funny feeling, low in the abdomen. It had been so long since I had felt it that it took me a moment to realize I was becoming sexually aroused. Jason, very obviously, was feeling the same way. We became lovers that night, Hawk, and I can honestly say that it was the first time in my life that I enjoyed it. It was wonderful because I
loved
him, you see. I really did. I couldn't get enough of Jason Stratton, and he felt the same way about me. We spent the next two days alone on that mountain, and I consider it one of the most wonderful times in my life. I knew then that I would be with that man always and forever, no matter what happened.”