DeMarco heard a series of rapid clicks in his earpiece. Play had resumed, the dealer sailing the cards around the table. The clicks were in Morse code, the dots and dashes telling him what cards his opponents held. He listened intently. His opponents had ace–king, a pair of deuces, 2–9, a pair of fours, 7–8 of clubs, and a k–9, also known as a Canine. He didn’t like missing the hand, but wanted to hear the woman out.
“You didn’t work for my uncle?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then who are you?”
The woman grabbed his wrist and tried to stuff something into his hand. It was stiff, and felt like a photograph. When he wouldn’t take it, she shoved it into the breast pocket of his shirt.
“What did you just give me?” he asked.
“A gift. I saw you on the television, and flew here from Philadelphia to see you.”
“Please let go of my wrist,” he said.
She released him and he stepped back. He wanted to tell this woman to stuff her head in a toilet. The only person in his life before Uncle George was his mother, and she was lying dead in a cemetery in New Jersey. Uncle George had taken him to her grave.
“I tried to contact you many times,” she said, “but your uncle wouldn’t let me near you. I even once tried to visit you at school. Do you remember that?”
“No,” he said.
“You were in the third grade. I came to the school, and the teacher pulled you from the class.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. I need to go.”
“Your uncle sent his bodyguard to my house in Philadelphia,” she said. “He threatened me. Said he’d hurt my family if I tried to contact you. So I stayed away.”
“Good,” he said.
“You don’t care?” she said.
“Not in the least.”
She stifled a tiny sob. He’d wounded her, and heard her hurry away.
DeMarco let the noise of the poker room guide him back to the table. Before he reached his chair, his uncle was by his side, holding his arm and breathing on his neck. “Skipper, where the hell you been?” his uncle asked.
“Some woman grabbed me, started chewing my ear off,” DeMarco said.
“I don’t want you talking to strangers,” his uncle said.
“So tell the strangers that.”
DeMarco returned to his seat. The hand was still going on, with two players playing for a huge pot. It pissed him off to know he’d missed out, and in anger removed the photograph the woman had given him from his pocket, ready to tear it up. Ballas, who’d dropped out of the hand, spoke up.
“Man, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“What do you mean?” DeMarco said.
“The photograph.”
“What about it?”
“You haven’t changed since you were a kid. It looks just like you.”
DeMarco stiffened, then raised the photograph to his face, and stared at the little boy dressed in shorts and bright red suspenders staring back at him.
24
“So what?” Valentine asked. “What do you mean, ‘so what?’” Longo said.
“A chambermaid found my bloody shirt in the trash in my bathroom. So what?”
They sat in Longo’s cluttered office at Metro Las Vegas Police Department headquarters, a few blocks from Glitter Gulch. The door was open, and in the other detectives’ offices they could hear suspects lying their fool heads off.
“It’s a solid piece of evidence—” Longo said.
“That I had a bloody nose.”
“—to you murdering those two guys.”
“You’re making a big leap, Pete.”
“I’m too old for that,” Longo said.
“What are you, fifty? That’s not old.”
Longo pushed himself back from his desk. He’d dropped a lot of weight in the past six months, and his face looked like a refugee’s. “Tell me what happened again.”
“Two guys barged into our room and attacked us,” Valentine said. “My nose got busted during the scuffle, and I bled all over myself.”
“Are you saying our forensics team won’t find any of those guys’ blood on this shirt?”
“I kneed one of them in the face. He may have bled on me. That’s not evidence to hold me for suspicion of murder, and you know it.”
“No one’s arguing that an altercation occurred in your suite,” Longo said. “But the fact is, you and Rufus Steele are still walking around, and those two guys are growing cold in the morgue. I have to treat this as evidence.”
“How long will it take your forensic people to examine the shirt?
“A day or two.”
Valentine tried to raise his hand to his face, and heard the handcuff’s chain rattle. The tournament would be over by then. Had someone set him up, just to take him out of the picture? There was a cold cup of coffee on the desk. He raised it to his lips with his free hand and took a slurp. Longo glanced up from his paperwork.
“Someone from the hotel called you and told you about the shirt, didn’t they?” Valentine asked.
“That’s right,” Longo said.
“They also told you I was in Celebrity’s poker room.”
“Right again.”
The cup was empty, and Valentine stared at grains. Before he’d taken the job, the hotel’s general manager, a stuffed suit named Mark Perrier, had threatened him with a lawsuit if Celebrity’s reputation was smeared by Jack Donovan’s murder investigation.
“Was it Mark Perrier, the general manager?”
Longo put his pencil down, trying not to act surprised. “Who told you that?”
“Believe it or not, I figured it out by myself,” Valentine said.
“You have a history with this guy?”
“He threatened me a week ago. Didn’t want me investigating his tournament. This was before Bill Higgins hired me.”
Longo gave him a thoughtful look. “You’re saying Perrier set you up.”
“I’m investigating a cheating scandal inside
Most cops didn’t like the kind of backward logic he was throwing at Longo. It made them go outside their comfort zones. Longo looked at the bagged shirt.
“I need to wait for the blood test,” he said.
“You mean you’re going to hold me,” Valentine said, exasperated.
“Afraid so.”
A woman’s voice came out of the black squawk box on the desk. Longo pressed a button on the box. “Hey Lydia, what’s up?”
“Bill Higgins, director of the Nevada Gaming—”
“I know who Higgins is,” he snapped. “Is he on the line? Tell him I’m busy and will call him back.”
