12
Valentine got his rental car from the Acropolis’s valet. The vehicle was a real piece of junk. Roll-down windows, a sputtering heater, and a front seat with enough legroom for a circus midget, all for thirty-nine bucks a day.
Leaving the Acropolis, he followed the signs for Las Vegas Boulevard and soon was driving south into the desert. As the towering casinos grew small in his mirror, he felt himself relax. He’d been offered several lucrative full-time jobs in Las Vegas over the years and always turned them down. He needed to be rooted in reality, and this town was anything but that.
After five miles he hung a left on Cactus Boulevard, and a mile later a right on Hibiscus. It was a newer suburb, with roads seeing blacktop for the first time. Although he didn’t remember Bill’s address on Hibiscus, he was certain he’d recognize Bill’s place when he saw it.
He powered up his cell phone. He considered cell phones one of life’s great intrusions and rarely left his on. He had a message in voice mail and retrieved it.
“Tony, please call me,” Mabel said. “It’s an emergency.”
He punched in his work number. His neighbor answered on the second ring.
“What’s going on?”
“You must start leaving your cell phone on,” she scolded him. “It’s Gerry.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“Yolanda did earlier. Gerry is involved with something very bad.”
“Yolanda got a call from American Express,” Mabel went on. “They saw a lot of activity on Gerry’s credit card. He bought a gun in Las Vegas.”
“A three fifty-seven Smith and Wesson. Yolanda is worried, and so am I.”
He saw Bill’s place up ahead, a single-story ranch house with a terra-cotta tile roof and all-natural landscaping. The colors were earthy and seemed to bleed beneath the bright sunlight. Slowing down, he said, “I need you to do something for me. Contact every casino boss in Nevada we do business with, and see if you can get the address of Bart Calhoun’s school.”
“Certainly. May I ask what you’re going to do when you find Gerry?”
“Can I tell Yolanda that?”
“You can tell her whatever you want.”
Mabel was silent as he pulled into Bill’s driveway. Venting his frustrations on her was juvenile, and he said, “Am I starting to sound like a cranky old man?”
“Yes. I think you need to pack your bags and come home.”
“Once my bags get here and I find Gerry, I will.”
“Wonderful. Just remember one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Start leaving your cell phone on!”
As he got out of the rental, Bill emerged from the house, walking with a metal cane. Bill was a Navajo Indian, a shade under six feet, with a stony face offset by piercing eyes and a full head of hair. The gunshot wound he’d endured in Miami two months ago had been slow to heal, and he was still working from home.
They shook hands on the lawn. Valentine asked him how his leg was holding up. Bill said okay, then asked him about his ear. The same guy who’d shot Bill had blown off Valentine’s left ear. Valentine showed him the replacement.
“Is that real skin?” his friend asked.
“Yeah. Don’t ask where they grafted it from.”
They went inside. Bill’s house was U-shaped, the rooms facing a courtyard with a meticulously landscaped Japanese garden complete with a running waterfall and a pond filled with exotic goldfish. The back of the property was walled off, hiding everything from view. Bill and his partner, Alex, liked it that way. On a coffee table in the living room sat a pitcher with lemon water, and a tray of glasses. Bill filled two, handed him one. They toasted each other’s health.
“What brings you to Las Vegas?” Bill asked.
Valentine stared at the waterfall in the garden. Telling Bill he was looking for Gerry was not a good idea. If Gerry was breaking the law, Bill would have to do something about it. He didn’t want to put his friend in that position, so instead he said, “I’m doing a consulting job. That’s not why I came to see you, though.”
Bill sipped his water, waiting for him to continue.
“A guy wearing a stocking paid me a visit earlier. Swore I’d killed his girlfriend, a stripper at the Pink Pony. We mixed it up, and he ran.”
“You call the cops?”
“That’s the bad part. I think he was a cop.”
Bill raised an eyebrow.
“I had lunch with Nick Nicocropolis,” Valentine said. “Nick told me about a call he got from the FBI regarding this same stripper. The FBI thinks she was laundering casino chips.”
“Any idea how your name got tied up in this?”
“No. Have you heard about the case?”
“Yeah,” Bill said. “But I can’t talk about it.”
“Not even to an old friend?”
It was a Navajo custom not to make eye contact during conversation. Only Bill was staring right at him. He said, “Not even to you. When the FBI contacts you—and trust me, they will—you need to play ball with them. Whatever they want to know, tell them. Otherwise, they’ll make your life a living hell.”
“But I don’t know anything.”
“Let them be the judge of that, okay?”
Valentine went back to sipping his water. Bill rarely lectured him. The FBI had him scared, just like they had Nick scared. The bureau had invaded Las Vegas right after 9/11 and, along with setting up an extensive surveillance operation, was watching the casinos’ cash flows. They were Big Brother, and making everyone’s life miserable.
Bill was still staring at him like a hawk.
“Whatever you say,” Valentine said.
“Believe it or not, I was just about to call you,” Bill said after they’d both emptied their glasses.
“You missed my cheery voice?”
“I’m reviewing a case, and I’m stumped.”
They went to Bill’s study in the back of the house. The walls were decorated with Native American artifacts and paintings from New Mexico where Bill’s parents lived on a ranch. He was a teenager when his parents learned he was gay, and they sent him away to school. Somehow they had managed to reconcile, and their pictures were scattered around the room.
Bill picked up a remote and the TV on his desk came to life. “This is a tape of a robbery that happened last week. It went down so fast, the casino is convinced it’s an inside job. They had their employees submit to polygraphs. Everyone came out clean.”
The tape showed a woman in her fifties with a Dolly Parton hairdo standing inside the cage. Her job was to change chips into money when players wanted to cash out. A bearded man appeared at the cage’s window and shoved a gun through the bars. The woman put her hands on her head as if to scream. The bearded man motioned with the gun, silencing her.
The woman opened a cash drawer and started pulling out bundles of bills, which she slipped through the bars. The man shoved the money into the pockets of his windbreaker, then sprinted away. The woman again put her hands on her head. Then she tripped an alarm, and all hell broke loose inside the casino.
Bill shut the tape off. “What do you think?”
