“The room’s gotta face east? Where’d that come from?”
She laughed. “Got any idea how much casinos like flakes?”
“I do now.”
“So . . . food? Bein’ that lucky is hard work.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LUCY HAD A tabbouleh lettuce wrap—garbanzo beans, roasted tomato, and walnuts with a pomegranate vinaigrette dipping sauce. I had the Australian lobster tail and a small steak. Good stuff. Mine, anyway.
She ate cross-legged on one of the beds in her panties and tank top, flipping through a menu on the TV that advertised the various attractions offered by the Luxor. I sat on a chair, eating off a folding walnut tray worth a hundred bucks.
“We could go see Fantasy,” Lucy said, pointing with her wrap at the screen where a video clip of the Luxor’s “best-on-the-Strip” Showgirl Review was playing. “Topless women, Mort.”
“Got that covered already.”
She laughed merrily. “It’s got guys dancing around in like little jock straps, too. I don’t have that.”
“Nor will you.”
“Maybe not dancing, but—”
“Don’t think so, kiddo.”
Lucy worked the remote a while longer. “There’s Aurora. Nice quiet-lookin’ bar downstairs. We could go on down, get ourselves loose, maybe a little bit sozzled.”
“Sozzled, huh?”
“Hey, I went to college, picked up a few things. Got that good nineteen-forties vocabulary. Anyway, you might want to unwind after a hard day gambling and riding around with a gabby topless chick seventeen years old.”
I gave her a look. “You sure as hell better not be.”
“What? Gabby?”
“Seventeen. Gabby is now a given.”
“So how ’bout it? Aurora? We’re not gettin’ anywhere with this Jo-X investigation, and I don’t think we’re going to find out anything more about him here tonight if we wanted to.”
True enough. I wasn’t sure we were going to learn anything about Jo-X if we kicked around Vegas for a month.
“You’ve got that red dress. Got anything else to wear in a place like that?” I asked, nodding at the television.
She smiled. “Turns out, maybe I do.”
She did, sort of. Of course, this was Vegas, so it didn’t much matter what she wore as long as it covered the critical parts, or at least pretended to. We rode the elevator down, Lucy in clothes she’d bought in the first shop she’d gone into that afternoon—tight white hip-hugger pants that ended four inches above her ankles, waistline a few inches below her navel, and the absolute pièce de résistance, a white crochet cotton halter top with a bit of kite string around her neck, another around her back. The thing was peek-a-boo mesh with eighth-inch holes throughout. It gave no support, but none was needed. It looked airy and cool, and might have weighed a fifth of an ounce. A two-inch fringe on the bottom swayed as she walked. She wore her silver heels and the ankle chain. The outfit left eight inches of flat belly exposed. It might’ve been legal on the streets in Vegas, but not something I would’ve wanted to push in Muscogee.
I, of course, was in the white idiot wig and all the rest of it.
We found an empty booth and she ordered a strawberry daiquiri that came in a glass the size of a birdbath. I had a Mojito made with Pyrat rum, best the place had to offer, even better since it was on the house. A bottle of that stuff would cost nearly three hundred dollars.
Lucy looked terrific across the table from me in lighting that shaded from hot pink to deep blues and purples. She looked good sipping from a little red straw with pursed lips, too.
Was this a “date”?
I didn’t know what it was. I’d started off that morning with no expectations about anything, including Jo-X’s murder, but ever since Tonopah, the day had been over the top. Not even my recent year of gumshoe training had prepared me for someone like Lucy.
“Tell me what happened in that basement,” she said, looking at me as she took another sip of daiquiri.
“What basement?”
“Where those two women kept you last year. You were tied up. What was that like?”
“We could talk about something else.”
“We could, but why?”
“It wasn’t a good time for me.”
She looked at me from the tops of her eyes as she took another sip. “They said you were naked the entire time.”
“That’s excellence in journalism for you. Report all the facts. Don’t leave out anything that might sell Jeeps or beer.”
“That mean it was true?”
“Yes.”
“Well, hell. Now I feel deprived.” Her eyes smiled at me.
“We could talk about something else.”
“Déjà vu.”
“So . . . why art history if you weren’t that much into art?”
“I thought mathematics or physics would be a lot of work. Especially since I barely got Ds in algebra in high school. I’m smart, but not like that.”
“You could’ve been an English major.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t ever want to have to read James Joyce’s Ulysses, or, God forbid, anything by Montaigne. And I don’t like writing essays, which I ended up getting plenty of in art history. Didn’t know that would happen. I should’ve majored in Phys. Ed.”
“Did you look for a job? After graduating?”
“I tried. Museums want PhDs, and then there’s a waiting list six miles long, or would be if there were six miles of people dumb enough to get doctorates in art history. Bachelor degree in art history and a subway token will get you a ride uptown and then you have to walk back. The first job I got was arranging and decorating mannequins in a store window, if you can believe that. Like in that place in the casino here where I bought the dress. That was at Macy’s in Frisco. Lasted all of a week. Then I was a receptionist for a dentist for a year and a half in Reno. Then I was in Seattle for two years, working for a florist, arranging flowers. Best job I ever had. Finally I got tired of rain so I went down to Phoenix, got a job answering the phone and taking orders for a fat guy who rented out party equipment, amplifiers
