“Yes, yes, I believe I will. Cindy, you said her name was?”
“That’s right. Cindy Johnson.”
“I’ll have to let Robby know.”
An hour later Milton had received a vigorous massage by a very enthusiastic woman named Helen. However, when he casually raised the issue of Cindy’s death, Helen became somber.
“It was awful. Here today, gone tomorrow sort of thing.”
“Accident I heard,” Milton said as he sat in the lounge wrapped in a robe and sipping a cup of spring water.
Helen snorted. “Accident?”
“You don’t think it was?”
“I’m not saying one way or another. None of my business really. But her poor mom’s busted up over it, I can tell you that.”
“Her mother? Poor woman? Did she have to come to town to ID the body?”
“What? No, Dolores lives right here. Works a craps table at the Pompeii.”
“Well, goodness gracious, I was just there.”
“Small world,” Helen said.
“Poor Mrs. Johnson,” Milton said. “To lose one’s daughter like that.”
“I know. And it’s Mrs. Radnor now, she remarried. Cin liked her stepdad all right, so she said.”
Milton finished his water. “Well, thank you for a great massage. I feel like a new man.”
“Anytime, sir, anytime.”
CHAPTER 33
ONCE BACK AT THE POMPEII, Milton filled Reuben in on what he’d discovered.
His friend looked impressed. “Damn, Milton, Susan
A few well-placed twenties later, the two men were directed to Dolores Radnor’s craps table. Milton bet on a hot shooter while he sized up the woman. She was thin and wrinkle-faced with a perpetually sad air about her. An hour later she took a break and Milton followed her to a table outside the bar area where she sipped on a cup of coffee, an unlit cigarette dangling in her free hand.
Milton said, “Mrs. Radnor?”
Startled, the woman looked at him warily. “How do you know my name? Is there a problem?”
“This is very awkward,” Milton began as Dolores looked at him expectantly. “I was in town a few months ago and your daughter gave me the best massage I ever had.”
The woman’s lips began to quiver. “My Cindy was damn good at giving massages. She went to school for it, had a certificate and everything.”
“I know, I know. She was great. And I promised her the next time I was in town I’d look her up. I was just over there and they told me what happened. And they were kind enough to give me your name and where you worked.”
“Why did you want to know that?” she asked, though her look was now more sad than suspicious.
“She was so nice to me that I told Cindy that the next time I was in town I was going to place a bet for her on the craps table.”
Dolores looked at him more closely. “Hey, aren’t you the shooter who burned up Table No. 7? I popped over there on a break because people were all talking about it.”
“I am the very one.” He took out his wallet. “And I wanted to deliver Cindy’s share to you.”
“Sir, you don’t have to do that.”
“A promise is a promise.” Milton handed her twenty one-hundred-dollar bills.
“Oh my God,” Dolores said. She tried to give it back but Milton insisted until she put it away in her pocket.
“You coming over and giving me this money is the only good thing that’s happened to me in a long time.” She suddenly broke down in tears.
Milton handed her some napkins from the holder on the table. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Thank you,” she said.
“Is there anything I can do to help, Mrs. Radnor?”
“You can just call me Dolores. And you just did something wonderful.”
“Helen over at the spa told me she died in an accident. Was it a car accident?”
The woman’s face hardened. “
“So why did they think that’s what killed her?”
“Stuff in her body. And a container of stuff by her bed, and bam, she’s a crackhead. But I know my Cindy. She saw what the stuff did to me. I finally got myself straightened out, got a good job, and now this. Now my baby’s gone.” She started snuffling again.
“Again, I’m very sorry.” Milton left and rejoined Reuben.
Milton said, “Okay, Cindy gives Tony Wallace a.k.a. Robby Thomas a massage. Wallace gets nearly beaten to death by Bagger. And Cindy dies of an accidental drug overdose even though it appears she didn’t use drugs.”
“Can’t be a coincidence,” Reuben said.
“The probabilities are Bagger had her killed. I can do some poking around on the Pompeii Web site. There might be a back door there I can exploit.”
They walked off without noticing the man in the suit who’d been watching Milton talk to Dolores. He spoke into a walkie-talkie. “We might have a big problem. Get hold of Mr. Bagger.”
CHAPTER 34
IT WAS A LATE-STAGE PROBE and penetration mission, which was the only reason Harry Finn was standing in a queue early in the morning after having flown in the night before from visiting his mother. While he listened to the man in the front of the group drone on, Finn’s thoughts kept going back to his frail mother with the resolute spirit. The story she had told him, as she had hundreds of times before, concerned Rayfield Solomon, who was Harry Finn’s father. Solomon had been a man of inexhaustible intellectual curiosity and possessed an unassailable integrity. He had labored on behalf of his country for decades, building a reputation as not only a true patriot but a man who could fix things with his ideas, who could see the answer when no one else could. Then, later in life, he’d fallen in love with Harry Finn’s mother and married her. Finn was born and then things began to change, or, more accurately, implode.
And then his father was dead, by his own hand it was claimed, in a fit of guilt. Yet Finn’s mother knew better.
“It was all lies,” she had told him over and over. “None of it was true. Not about me or him. They killed him for their own reasons.”
Finn knew what these reasons were because his mother had drilled them into him. Rayfield Solomon’s career as a servant of his country had been forgotten, his good name besmirched. It wasn’t the unjust shame that hurt Finn’s mother so much. It was the fact that she had lost the man she loved far sooner than she should have.
“He deserved none of this,” she had told Finn. “And now there must be retribution.”
Finn remembered hearing this story for the first time when he was just seven years old, soon after his father’s death. It had astounded him then, assaulting his still developing sense of justice. Today it still stunned him, how one man could be destroyed so unfairly, so completely.
He broke free from these thoughts and concentrated on the task ahead. In the crowd with him were three other members of his team. Two were college students pulled out of his office for a little adventure in the field. The third was a woman who was nearly as accomplished at her work as him.
