I liked the “y’all.” He was speaking to the Stetson.
“Don’t know,” I said. I leaned closer to my baby doll. “Want to settle down here tonight, Sugar Plum? Get us a suite?”
She didn’t even look at me. “It’s gotta face east, Daddy. You know that.” She pushed six chips onto red, kept thirty thousand in front of her. “Red, red, red . . .”
“Forgot,” I told the guy in the suit. “Room’s gotta face east. Got anything like that?”
“Not a problem. East it is.”
“And—any upgrades come with that suite? Little lady purely hates all that nickel and dime stuff, drives her nuts.”
“We got something that looks like a credit card, but isn’t. Good for show tickets, in-room massage, room service or any bar or restaurant in the place, some other stuff, too, no charge.”
I pondered that for a moment. The ball clattered, “Eleven, black,” the girl called out. “Well, shuckins,” Sugar tittered. I looked at the guy at my side. “Sounds good. We’ll take ’er.”
He slapped me on the shoulder. “Stay right there. I’ll send a girl around with keys and a card, get you settled in.”
That took six minutes, during which time Lucy won back the six grand she’d lost. I got us checked in under the name Stephen T. Brewer. T for Thomas. Last October, hunting Julia Fairchild, Maude Clary—Ma—had fake passports, driver’s licenses, credit cards, and a bunch of other paper made up for us by a slippery old boy in New Mexico, Ernie “Doc” Saladin. Something of a rush job that ended up costing $12,000 a person. I wasn’t inclined to give up the fake ID since the credit cards and all the rest of it was “legit.” Now it came in handy. I didn’t want Lucy officially tangled up in this and, now that I was once again a household name all across the land of the free, I couldn’t run around calling myself Mortimer Angel, the PI who finds bodies and body parts of famous missing people. But the pretty thirty-something gal in a dark green pantsuit who took my information didn’t bat an eye at Stephen Brewer, although she raised a discreet eyebrow at the sultry girl at the roulette table who said “shuckins” when her red, red, red came up black, and a small stack of chips was swept away.
“Give it a rest for a while, Sugar Plum?” I asked her when the girl left. “Go have a look at the room?”
“Just one more, Daddy,” she said. The ball was spinning. She plopped a chip down on a corner, covering numbers eight, nine, eleven, and twelve. Several more on black.
The ball stopped. “Nine, red,” the girl called out, sounding weary. “Corner wins.” She put eight more chips on Lucy’s one.
“I like this place, Daddy,” Sugar Plum chirped.
I did, too. Once the dust finally settled, we were up thirty-six thousand dollars, and I still had my original eight. Seven, after buying Sugar a wardrobe. I stashed our winnings in an account with the casino and got a receipt.
In the suite on the fifteenth floor, alone with Lucy, I looked at her through one eye. “Sugar needs another hit, Daddy?”
“It’s all about theater. You’re a rich guy being led around by the nose by a dumb sexy little bimbo who has attached herself to his wallet. Bet they’ve seen that around here before.”
Okay, now I believed she was thirty-one. A girl that age can sound seventeen, but a girl of seventeen can’t sound thirty-one.
She flopped down on the bed and hugged herself, smiling. “This is great. I’ve had more fun today than all last year.”
“And I’ve come closer to having a heart attack today than all last year, Sugar Plum. And it was a pretty bad year, all in all.”
She sat up. “Have a little faith, Daddy.”
“Had enough ‘Daddy’ and ‘Sugar Plum’ yet?”
“For now. Just don’t forget who we are.” She got up and looked out a window. “Hey, this is nice. Just wait’ll the sun goes down and the lights really come on.”
We’d given the bellhop a hundred dollars for bringing up our luggage, such as it was, and sent him on his way. Once we were alone in the room, the wig, moustache, and cowboy hat were on a bed where I’d flung them. The place was huge, impressive, and free. Bedroom with two king beds, furniture in glossy golden oak, indirect lighting, windows that sloped inward due to the building’s pyramid shape. Big sitting room with a purple couch, overstuffed chairs, floor lamps. A kitchen with a stainless-steel refrigerator, microwave, blender, coffeemaker, juicer, good-sized toaster oven. Sixty-inch televisions in the bedroom and sitting room, forty-inch in the bathroom. I stood at the entrance to the bathroom, checking out a Jacuzzi the size of a small swimming pool. Vegas was in a state of perpetual drought; now I knew why.
Lucy walked over. “I like this dress. It’s a hot little number, but real tight on top—which of course it’s supposed to be.” She turned her back to me, looked over her shoulder. “Unzip me?”
Right away I had a choice—unzip or don’t unzip. But in truth I didn’t have a choice. I was the only unzipper in the room. And I’d finally accepted the fact that she wasn’t seventeen or even twenty-five, so I ran the zipper down, exposing a very nice bare back and a tiny waist; a taut, slender flare of hips.
She turned and stepped out of the dress.
“No bra?” I said, trying unsuccessfully not to stare.
She gave me a look like I was from Mars. “In this dress? You kidding? Anyway, it lifts like a bra. Which, of course, is the whole point. Makes the boobies pop out the top a little.”
She rubbed said boobies, then put on her tank top, no shorts. She had on black lace bikini panties. And long legs.
“I’m starving,” she
