“The New York, New York. Larry’s waiting for us in my room.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“He called me about an hour ago, trying to get a hold of you again. Said he needed to see you.”
“Any idea what about?”
Felix shook his head. “No. But he seemed rather shaken up about something. I almost didn’t want to leave the poor fellow alone, but he said there was no way he was going near the Victoria again. Apparently some bad blood there.”
I cringed, thinking of Hank’s swan dive. Felix didn’t know how true that statement was.
Ten minutes later we pulled up to New York, New York. Felix, slowed down at Tropicana and I could see him mentally debating between the valet and the milelong hike in from self-park that would save a whopping two dollars.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “You can afford the Marquis suite, but you’re too cheap to pay for parking?”
Felix shot me another one of those crooked smiles. “What can I say, Maddie? I’m an enigma.”
“Hmmm.” I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Family money,” he confessed, pulling to the right as he opted for the valet after all. “From my father’s side,” he explained. “The
“So you’re a stingy rich guy?” Okay, I admit, I kind of enjoyed making him uncomfortable too.
He let my question go without comment, instead handing his keys over to the valet as we got out of the car. He didn’t wait for me to follow before making quick strides through the casino to the elevator doors. We rode up in silence. Once we got to the fifteenth floor, Felix unlocked his door with a key card and I got my first glimpse of Larry.
He was sitting on the edge of Felix’s bed, fidgeting worse than a heroin addict. He looked like he’d aged fifteen years in the last three days. His eyes were bloodshot, his girdle twisted around his waist to revealing an unflattering pooch (that made me instantly suck in), and his pantyhose were running a marathon all the way down to his scuffed heels. All in all, he looked so pathetic I couldn’t help myself. Despite my earlier vow to let all men rot in Hades, I ran over and gave him a big hug.
Larry hugged me back, his arms wrapping tightly around my middle, and I got a warm, fuzzy, Hallmark moment feeling.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” I said, my voice threatening to crack as I pulled away. Only he didn’t look all that okay. To be honest, he looked terrible. “Larry, what’s going on?”
He did a deep sigh. Then looked from me to Felix.
“I’m in big trouble, Maddie.”
Well, duh. “Tell me,” I said instead, sitting down on the flowered bedspread beside him.
He sighed again and looked down at his hands as he spoke, picking at his flaking ruby red nail polish.
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Start with what you told me,” Felix prompted.
I shot him a hurt look. My dad had confided in Tabloid Boy first?
Larry nodded. He took a deep breath, picked a little more nail polish and finally started in a shaky voice. “I’ve been dancing at the Victoria Club for about five years now. Before that I was on the Strip, but, well, you know how it is when we girls get older. Weight starts climbing, things start to sag, there’s more shaving…”
“Got it, moving on,” I interrupted, fighting the urge to stick my fingers in my ears and chant, “I can’t hear you! I’m doing denial!”
“Right. Anyway, Hank and I both moved to the Victoria. The pay was all right, not Strip good, but all right. It might have been enough but…well, see, I’ve got this little problem.”
Uh oh. Here it was. I was going to find out I was genetically predisposed to alcoholism or a gambling addiction. “What kind of problem?” I asked. “Drugs? Gambling? Booze?”
“Shoes.”
Mental forehead smack.
“Shoes?”
Larry nodded. “I can’t help it, I just love shoes. I see a pair of heels and I can’t stop myself. I need to have them. Pumps, slingbacks, mules-it doesn’t matter. I love them all. And let me tell you, finding heels in a size eleven wide is not cheap. But I can’t stop. You don’t know what it’s like. I buy them and it’s like a rush of happiness just courses through me.”
Sadly enough, I did know what it was like.
“Okay, so you were in debt over shoes. What happened next?”
“Well,” he said, “one day Monaldo said he had a delivery to make and would Hank and I like to do it for a little extra cash. I was about to have my car repossessed over an adorable pair of ballerina-strap wedges in lime green, so I jumped at it. It was simple, really. Monaldo gave us a handbag that we took to one of his warehouses out in the desert. We handed it off to these two Italian guys in business suits, then we came back to the club. Simple.”
Right. Simple. Somehow the Italians in business suits would have tipped me off, but then again, I wasn’t in shoe debt. (Okay, at least not
Though I had to hand it to Monaldo, the plan was brilliant. The last place Ramirez and the Feds would be searching for Monaldo’s payoff to the Marsuccis was in a bunch of drag queens’ handbags.
“What then?” I asked, almost giddy that I’d finally found the proof Ramirez needed to put Monaldo away for good.
“Well, the next week Monaldo had another errand for us. This time he sent me and Bobbi. Pretty soon it became a regular thing. We’d trade off; whichever of the three of us wasn’t on stage that night, we’d go make the run. Worked out great for a couple of months.”
“So what went wrong?”
Larry shook his head and sighed again. “One day the guys in suits were late. It was Bobbi and me out there. We got bored waiting, so we started looking around the warehouse. We opened a couple of boxes and found out they were all filled with shoes. Bobbi and I…” He paused, looking sheepish. “We each took a pair. I know it was wrong, but we honestly figured no one would miss two little pairs. The place was filled with them. I mean, thousands of designer shoes, Maddie. Can you imagine?”
I tried not to salivate, reminding myself they were probably all fakes. “So you took the shoes?”
“Yes. I took a pair of Dior pumps and Bobbi chose some black Prada stilettos. Then when the suits showed up we gave them the bag like always and went home. It was a couple of weeks later that Bobbi decided he could raise some extra money by selling his pair on eBay. Being that they were Prada, he figured he could get a whole month’s child support out of them. Only when he put the auction up, the lady he tried to sell them to said they were knockoffs. I looked more closely at my pair and sure enough, they were fake too. Look, if we had known that Monaldo was dealing in fake designer shoes, we never would have gotten involved.”
Mobster he didn’t blink an eye at. But fake shoes were where he drew the line. I would have rolled my eyes if deep down I didn’t kind of agree with him.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” he said, his eyes filling with tears. “Bobbi disappeared the next day. I didn’t know what to do. I filed a missing persons report, but the officer didn’t seem to think anything had happened to Bobbi. He said these deadbeat dads skipped town all the time. So I told Hank everything we’d found and told him I was going to tell the police about the shoe warehouse. Hank didn’t want me to do it. He…” Larry paused. Then looked down at his hands again. “Well, Hank liked the money too much. He didn’t want it to stop. That’s when I decided to call you for help. I’d seen your picture in his paper.” He gestured toward Felix, who had been silently standing near the door this whole time. “I read how you got that lawyer out of trouble last summer and helped put a murderer behind bars. I thought maybe, well, maybe you could do something here. Only as I was dialing, Hank came into the room waving a gun. He was talking crazy, about how he couldn’t afford to go back to a dancer’s salary. We fought and the gun went off. Blew a hole right through Hank’s favorite chair.”
At least that explained the gunshot I’d heard. “Then what happened?”
“I promised Hank I wouldn’t tell anyone if he’d put the gun away. We went back to work like nothing had happened. Then three days later, Hank got pushed off the roof.” His eyes teared up again.
