The Big Dirt Nap

motioned toward the kids so that he would keep an eye on them.

'Well, my friend has eclectic taste. You or I might not think they were good-looking.' That's right, we're women of the world.

'The Laheys are cute, but I think the younger one is gay.'

'I don't think that's her thing.' I played with the dregs of my drink as long as I could before she brought me a second, stronger than the first.

'The Crawfords are good-looking,' she said, setting the drink down. 'Billy and Claude. There was a third one but he died. But they're not allowed in here anymore. Something happened, before I was hired. Oksana told me about it. Security has instructions to keep them out. Maybe they drank too much. You should ask her. Oksana knows more male customers than I do.'

I bet she did. Oksana's vulnerability and pouty good looks probably got her as much attention as she wanted. Maybe more.

Two Asian guys entered the lounge, ignoring the No Smoking sign and feigning ignorance when the security guard told them to put the cigarettes out. The waitress came back with their orders and Helayne got busy mixing their drinks. 'They stare as if they've never seen boobs before, but they're good tippers,' the waitress said.

I toyed with the idea of waiting for Helayne to finish, but the drinks and the hour were conspiring to get me in the sack. Tomorrow I'd face Oksana and ask her about the Crawford brothers.

The phone rang at around 3:30 A.M. I must have just fallen asleep because I woke up with a start, the way you do when you're afraid you've nodded off in an inappropriate place like the theater or a meeting. I looked around trying to remember where I was and where the hell that obnoxious noise was coming from. I knocked over the lamp and a water bottle reaching for the phone and caught it on its sixth ring.

'Hello,' I mumbled into the dead air. 'Lucy, is that you?' I turned on the light and saw the last drops of a two- liter bottle of water trickling into my Nikes.

'Do you know a woman named Lucy?' someone asked, surprised.

'Who is this?' I raised myself up on my elbows, waiting for an answer.

'It's me. Oksana. The bartender?'

'Oksana, it's . . .' The numbers on the digital clock were magnified and distorted by the overturned bottle; I shoved it aside. 'It's three-thirty. What is it?'

'I need you to help me find out what happened to Nick,' she said.

'I have no idea what happened to Nick.' I sat on the edge of the bed and shook the water out of my shoes. 'Do you know a woman named Lucy?' I asked.

She paused, as if she was deciding how much to tell me. 'We can't talk on the hotel phone. Will you meet me at the casino?'

'Now?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'The night Nick was killed, he left the bar to meet a woman named Lucy.'

Seventeen

My sneakers were soaked, so I slipped into the only other shoes I'd packed—the heels I brought to wear with my leather pants. As I dressed, I started to feel like a hooker making a house call, but it was either my nice outfit or cargo pants with heels and that would have been too weird, even for me.

Unlike his counterpart at Titans, the parking attendant at the casino was cheerful and energetic; at that hour of the morning it was downright creepy to be so perky.

'Welcome to happy Hunting Ridge, ma'am.' He said it as if 'happy' was part of the casino's full name. 'Have you been with us before?'

I wanted to tell him that I wasn't with Hunting Ridge and would probably never be and that the last time I was out at 4 A.M. it was with a flashlight and I was looking for slugs, but this time I was meeting a probably delusional woman who thought she knew something about a murder and a kidnapping. But I decided to spare both of us. I forced a toothless smile and fished out a five, hoping for a better reaction than I'd gotten from the attendant at Titans.

'Don't bury it. I won't be long,' I said, handing him the folded bill. 'Know where the Coyote Cafe is?'

'Yes, ma'am.' He beamed, eager to be of service. I couldn't remember the last time five dollars had provoked such a rapturous response. 'Straight in, past the Chilulhy sculpture, then make a left. Have a lucky stay!'

Jeez, what did they put in the water here?

If I was expecting to see glamorous model types and men in tuxedos playing baccarat and passing the shoe, I would have been sorely disappointed. I'd been to Vegas plenty of times when I was in the television business, and although it had changed dramatically in the years since, there was still a frisson of rat-pack glamour if you looked hard enough for it.

Not at Hunting Ridge. The exuberant use of wood, slate, and river stones gave the place the look of an upscale lodge with incongruously placed slot machines and designer boutiques—Chanel and Cavalli sharing space with Squanto and Sacajawea. There were any number of ways to leave your money there.

The Coyote Cafe's sandwich-board menu was bordered with a blanket pattern and offered, among other things, Chippewa chips and Navajo pancakes. I didn't know where the Chippewas came from, but we were a good two thousand miles from any Navajos. Oksana was behind the sign, pacing and chewing her nails. Then she spotted me.

'It's too crowded in there,' she said, walking over to me. 'Come this way.'

'Oksana. I'm running on fumes. What's all this about? What do you know about my friend Lucy?'

She pulled me over to a bench near a diorama of a Native American village. Every few minutes one of the resin natives offered resin corn to a resin settler who looked suspiciously like Brad Pitt.

'Was she your friend?'

A chill crept through me. 'What do you mean, was she?'

Eighteen

Oksana played with a pack of cigarettes but didn't open it. She fiddled with her flat, dirty blond hair, the scarf that was wrapped around her neck three or four times, and the hem of her skirt.

'Hector told me your name and I Googled you. The newspaper article said you helped solve a crime once. Is that why you're here?'

'The police solve crimes. I'm a gardener. I have to be honest with you. I'm not here because of Nick, I'm only here because you mentioned someone named Lucy. She's the person I was waiting for the night I met Nick in the bar.'

Oksana shook her head back and forth like a petulant child.

'What do you mean, no? I know what I was doing there.'

'The other woman met Nick . . . and now he's dead.'

Nick had gotten two phone calls after I left and Oksana had heard him speak to someone he called Lucy. He said he'd meet her.

'He made a joke about older women and then he left. That was the last time I ever saw him.' Older women? Lucy was thirty-five. I guess if you were Oksana's age, that was old.

She looked around again, as if she expected someone to be listening over her shoulder. I dropped my voice just in case.

'Why are you doing that? Who else would care what we're talking about?'

'There are people.'

Now she was weirding me out. 'Do you by any chance know a couple of guys, the Crawford brothers?' I