Murder in Vegas: New Crime Tales of Gambling and Desperation Page 9

  “That’s Jonn Brooks. My employer, you know?” He spoke softly, with a faint Irish brogue. We all mumbled nothing in particular. “Hold on, you’re Senator Smythe, aren’t you?” he added.

  “That’s right, son.”

  “You, the one with the gun. You mentioned something about a new show?”

  “Er, yeah.” Who says my mind freezes up in a crisis?

  “I can sing. Very well too, though I say so myself. Name’s Craig Anthony.”

  We all kinda mumbled hello.

  “Over by the door, that’s James Quinn Marshall. He’s one killer dancer. You may have heard of him, he moonlights in several chorus lines. Goes by the name of El Gato.”

  We turned about for further mumbled greetings and a serious case of the nodding heads. El Gato? A bell of recognition jangled slightly.

  “We’re not sorry he’s dead,” James/El Gato declared, in an accent that could’ve hailed a New York taxi at half a mile. “In fact, if you hadn’t killed him, our own plan was well on the way to fruition. And I don’t believe that ours was the only plot.”

  “I’m Lilah,” I announced. “This here is Georgia. Before we get roles in the new production assigned to each of you, Georgia and the senator could use a little help with disposing of the body.” They mucked in like true backstage troopers.

  On my way to Calico, I vowed to never force the showgirls in my revue to get implants. With pecs like theirs, Craig and El Gato certainly didn’t need them. Hmmm, I considered stretching Georgia’s cheerleader idea to include a tribute to Jocks.

  So, my gamble had paid off. In Vegas, the gamble always does, when you have the guts to make your own luck.

  IGGY’S STUFF

  J. MADISON DAVIS

  A true connoisseur of weed—and Herbert “Exemel” Knapsdale certainly qualified in all respects—knows that a new batch takes some adjusting to. Normally he bought his weed from Chuckster, but Chuckster was lying low in Tijuana, so he bought an ounce of Iggy’s stuff. Soil, light, acid rain, age, mold from a bad drying: all these things can tweak the chemistry of a natural substance. Your brain’s, like, test-driving a used car. The brakes are a little spongy; the steering’s tighter or looser.

  That’s why Exemel didn’t immediately react to what he saw through the patio doors. Listing to the left because of the fifty-pound bucket of chlorine tablets and loops of vacuum hose on his right shoulder, he squinted behind his sunglasses. The wind was gusting, lifting dust off the desert. The light glinting from the pool slashed at his image in the glass.

  But, yes, there, hovering above the reflection of the desert behind him, through himself, within his image, he could see the creamy white of a woman’s buttocks, their perfection narrowing pear-like to her broad shoulders, black hair, and her arms stretched over her head. She was dancing for him. She was stripping off a tee shirt. Her hands stretched above her. And she held—No, she didn’t hold. It was a rope, looped over an iron hook on the pine beam, wound around her wrists six or seven times. She was hanging there like a side of meat, swaying slightly.

  Exemel blinked. He tore off his sunglasses leaned forward into the bright light, bending sideways to see better.

  “Holy—!”

  Exemel dropped the bucket and the hose and charged the door. He clawed at the latch, but it was locked on the inside. He put his face flat against the glass and was certain she was dead, but he banged on the glass. “Lady! Lady!”

  She pushed the marble floor with her toes and twisted slightly. She only got halfway around before her foot slipped and she twisted back. He saw a blood-red rubber ball gagging her. There was frenzied terror in her eyes.

  He clawed at the door again, then reached for the bucket of pool tablets. He swung it twice to build up power, then hurled it. The tempered glass exploded into a million rough diamonds. He skidded and slipped on the pebbly fragments as he rushed to her across the granite tiles.

  “Are you okay, lady? Watch the glass. Who did this—?” He put his arms around her naked waist to hoist her up and get the rope off the hook. The scent of a strawberry oil came down to him from her bare breasts rubbing against his forehead, and the loop wasn’t slipping over the edge. The woman’s body tensed against him, and he looked up. She whined panicky noises out her nose against the gag. He turned and followed her line of sight.

  A bulldog of a man had come out of the corridor wearing a leather mask, a spiked leather dog collar, and leather pants he hadn’t finished lacing down the side. He was bare from the waist up, wooly gray hair covering him like the unruly fleece of a neglected ram.

  He looked at the glass on the granite tiles, then at Exemel.

  “What the—?”

  “You don’t move, dude,” said Exemel. “Who are you anyway?”

  “Why, you son of a bitch!” he growled and started for Exemel with his huge fists raised.

  “Hey! Hey!” said Exemel, backing away. “Stop it! I mean it! Don’t make me—! Stop—!”

  Exemel didn’t even see the first punch, as it whizzed by, just clipping his nose. He stumbled backwards down two steps into the pit area around the fireplace, landing hard next to a campaign trunk used as a coffee table. The woman was twitching and swinging, screaming against her gag, trying to get off the hook. “Shut up!” said the man. He grinned with crooked teeth, snatched up the poker.

  Still on his back, Exemel grabbed a tall bronze statue of Shiva off the trunk and held it across his torso to block the blows. The man raised the poker and savored the pleasure of what he was about to do. “You need a lesson, you son of a bitch!”

  Exemel, however, kicked out, somehow tangled his shoe in the loose laces of the man’s leather pants, and with the downswing of the poker, it caused him to lose his balance and fall on Exemel. His bleary eyes stared into Exemel’s, and his whiskey breath beat on Exemel’s lips.

  Exemel turned his face away but was pinned under the man, who hardly moved, as if he’d got the wind knocked out of him. The puffs of his breath, hot and wet, came out at long intervals, and Exemel began to squirm, pushing at him, desperately trying to get out from under him.

  The man howled then, raised himself on all fours, then rolled onto his back. Shiva hung on his chest. The arm of Shiva had gone into him up to the bronze god’s shoulder.

  “Man” whispered Exemel. “Man.” He crawled toward him and gingerly reached out to pull the statuette out of him, but hesitated, not sure how to grip it or even if he should.

  The woman flexed her body and whined a muffled plea against her gag. Exemel left the man where he lay, arms spread by the fireplace, and went to get a chair from the ultramodern dinette table. Pink and blue and black sex toys of many sizes and odd configurations, as well as three bottles of bright lubricants, had been lined up on the table with the cold precision of instruments in an operating room. He dragged a chair across the floors and stood on it to lift her off the hook. She gasped for air, bending at the waist, as he unfastened the strap holding the ball gag. She was Asian, either Filipino or Vietnamese, he thought. Beautiful.

  “Are you okay?” He tried to avoid looking at her nakedness as he picked at the tight knots on her wrist.

  “What the hell took you so long?” she said. “You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”

  He blinked. “Uhh, there was an accident out on 215, traffic was stopped both ways. A big truck—”

  “I didn’t want to go through his crap again. Ever.” She turned toward the man by the fireplace, pulling her bound wrists from Exemel, and spit. “Sick bastard!”

  “It’s a good thing I came along when I did,” said Exemel.

  “Get something to cut these damned ropes!”

  “Uh, yes, ma’am.” He spun toward the kitchen. On the other side of the dinette counter he saw a chef’s knife in a wooden holder. By the time he got back, the woman was standing over the man.

  “He’s still breathing,” she said.

  Exemel looked at him. “I don’t think so.”

  “I tell you
he’s still breathing. Garbage doesn’t die.”

  “Maybe we should call the cops or something.”

  “Oh, like right,” she said drooping her jaw. “Why don’t we just call the Sun? Or how about Fox News?” Her face twisted with anger. She lifted her foot and stomped the man’s lower belly with her heel. The man’s arm flew up, then dropped limp.

  “Whoa!” said Exemel. “He moved.”

  “I told you!” the woman shrieked. She grabbed the arm of Shiva that wasn’t embedded in the man. Her wrists still tied together, she rocked Shiva back and forth like a video game joystick, then tugged the statuette. It made a sucking sound. She raised it high and, with a grunt and an aiee!, threw it down. It bounced off the man’s head and clanked against the hearth. Shiva’s bloody arm was now bent in half.

  “Whoa!” said Exemel, reaching to her, forgetting the twelve-inch knife was still in his hand.

  “Watch it!” she barked. “You could cut me with that thing!”

  “You shouldn’ta done that!”

  “Will you please shut up and cut these damned ropes off!”

  “Okay. I’m sorry.” He concentrated and carefully sawed the thick rope in the space between her wrists. “You’re gonna be okay now.”

  “Just don’t cut me. How did you get in this business anyhow?”

  Exemel shrugged. “I didn’t have any other possibilities. I hate not having possibilities. I was a games programmer. The business tanked. You ever play Galaxy B72?”

  She laughed. “That’s what people used to ask me. How I got in the business.”

  Exemel had sawed through the first strand, but the rest of them did not fall away. She struggled with them, staring at the dead man. “Then I thought I got out of the business. The American dream! Right. Marriage is the same thing, only worse. Worse and boring. The time never runs out.”

  Finally the ropes fell away. She rubbed the raw, red bands on her skin.

  Her nakedness had distracted him and what she had said slipped through his grasp like a handful of sand. “I’ll get you something to cover up,” he said.

  “Never mind that,” she said. “What are you going to do with him?”

  “With him?”

  “You’re supposed to clean it up.”

  The pool?

  “Well, what do you do? Bury him in the desert?”

  What?

  Her eyes narrowed and she took the chef’s knife out of his hand. “Do you need to cut him up? I want to help. I know exactly where I’ll start. You think he could still feel that? Maybe he’s looking down on us from somewhere. I’ll cut it off and leave it somewhere the coyotes could eat it.” She laughed. “It might make them sick.”

  He grabbed her upper arm as she turned toward the body. “Whoa, Jesus, lady. We’re not going to chop him up. Man! Look, I understand you don’t like the dude. He hurt you. I’m with you on that, but he’s dead now. What if, like, coyotes dig him up and somebody finds him? How are you gonna explain that? They can find teeny-weeny drops of blood and hair and DNA and, uh, stuff.” He could see she was thinking. “You get me. You’re just going to, like, tell the truth, see?”

  She suddenly tossed her head and laughed. “You’re right.”

  “You’ve got to tell it like it happened. Exactly.”

  “Then everything matches the clues. Ha! I love it.”

  “There’ll be publicity, you can’t help that. It’ll be embarrassing, but people forget stuff and you’ll get over it.”

  She smiled. “Sure. Perfect. You don’t look like you know what you’re doing, but you do.”

  “Uh, thanks.” Exemel stuck his thumbs in his belt loops.

  She rubbed her hands across her hard stomach, smearing two drops of blood towards her navel. She pursed her lips. “I ought to give you a bonus. I’d like that. How about it?”

  This kind of thing had happened to Exemel before in the boredom of the upper class suburbs like Red Rock and Spanish Trail. Old man’s out golfing, the wife is sunning by the pool getting ideas from reading Cosmo or some book about men in riding boots. But the woman was usually so old or so fat or so ugly that turning them down wasn’t easy. They’d get offended after he left and call for a different pool boy. He said he was gay a couple of times, thought that would work, but one woman offered to cure him and another offered her husband, provided she could watch. He said he had an infection one time. She freaked and wouldn’t let him clean the pool. So sometimes, if he could stand it, it was easier to go ahead with it until she kept calling up over tiny spots of algae and he couldn’t stand it anymore and decided that cleaning that particular pool was more work than, well, really cleaning a pool. This time the woman looked a lot more like pleasure than work, but there was a guy who was, like, dead, ten feet in front of the huge leather sofa that she was lying back on.

  “It would be, ahh, unprofessional,” he said. He waited for her anger, but she merely wiggled her hips.

  “Oooh, a professional!,” she purred. “Now I know I would really enjoy it.”

  “We got a code. Well, it’s not a code, but it’s sort of a code.”

  She sat up and shrugged. “That’s amazing! Even more study.”

  “Don’t, like, be offended or nothing.”

  “I’m not. I’m impressed. I didn’t think you handled it well at all, being late and everything—”

  “There was a big pile-up on 215—”

  “—but the proof’s right there. My life’s about to get a whole lot better.” She flipped a finger at the dead man. “Sick bastard!”

  “You want me to dial the cops for you?”

  “I can handle it,” she said. “I’ll just concentrate on those five million reasons to say the right thing. Cha-ching. It’s my jackpot. The jackpot every tourist dreams about.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll get your money,” she said, walking along the far wall and avoiding the glass.

  “But I haven’t—” she was already in the corridor to the back “—done the pool yet.”

  Exemel stared at the dead man. He knew he was missing something. This was like one of those games where you have to travel through some cyberspace world gathering objects like keys and talismans and sometimes you know where the last door is, but you can’t figure out what opens it. Of course you can always cheat and go to the chat board at Gamester.com and somebody will tell you, but only junior high kids who don’t appreciate the tao of gaming would ask or answer a question like that, though he’d have to admit that once or twice when he was really stuck … .

  He didn’t notice her return until she said, “Catch!” A sealed envelope hit his chest and before he could disengage his thumbs from his belt loop, it had fallen to the floor. He picked it up. It was almost an inch thick. Most people wrote a check, he thought. What was this? All ones?

  “You want to count it?” she asked.

  “Uh, if you’re trusting me, I’m trusting you. That’s what I say.” With a roll of his head, he smiled and stuffed the envelope in his back pocket. “I’d better get to work.”

  “On what?”

  “The pool,” he said.

  “Very funny,” she said. “You get out of here, a long way out of here. I don’t know you and you don’t know me. Have a good life. I’ve got things to do. You’ll read it in the papers. The guy who broke in was black, about six feet, with a shaved head, a Mexican accent, and an earring.”

  He squinted, still unable to decipher the lock on that last door, but nodded and picked up the bucket of chlorine tablets that still lay in the lake of broken glass. The handle was hot from lying in the open doorway and seemed a lot heavier than usual. The vacuum hose had unrolled all over the patio. As he wound it, he barely noticed the telephone ringing inside.

  “Marty?” she said. “It’s just great! Just perfect! I’m going to call the cops and—”

  Exemel straightened up and squinted into the house. Just great? Just perfect?

  “You had to slip out to a pay phone? Why? No records, I unde
rstand, but—?” Suddenly she looked up at Exemel. “What?” she said. “That can’t be. He’s right here. Talk to him yourself. He’s about six foot two.” She listened carefully. “No,” she said slowly. “This guy could fall down a drinking straw.” Her eyes widened. She walked toward Exemel. “Marty sent you, right?”

  “Marty? No, it was Lester. Marty don’t work there no more.”

  She shuddered her head trying to clear it. “Where? Where does Marty work—? Used to work?”

  “Desert City Pool Services. My real name’s Herbert, but everybody calls me Exemel. Like in XML, you know, ‘Extensible Mark-up Language.’ It was kind of a joke.”

  Her mouth fell open and she did not move. The phone was squawking in her hand. “Shut up, Marty,” she finally said. “Just a minute, damn it!” She blinked, thought, then smiled like a mother holding a newborn. “Uh, umm, Hex-abel, or whatever, could you come back inside for a minute?”

  “Exemel. But really, ma’am, I’m flattered and all, but the code, you know … I got three more pools this afternoon and we don’t get overtime.”

  “Just—” she said, barely controlling herself, “just come in for a minute. Please. My nerves are shot. Just a few seconds.”

  Exemel crunched in across the glass. “You don’t look so good. I mean, you look good, but, you know, you don’t look good. I can wait for the cops with you. I got no problem with that.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “Maybe a toke or two would help. I’ll just step out to the truck. It’s new stuff so it shouldn’t smell too much like chlorine yet.”

  “Just—damnit—stay there. Don’t move. I—I want to get a robe. Promise?”

  “Sure.”

  Exemel gazed at the dead man sprawled in front of the fireplace. With the leather pants and mask, his skin pale and unreal, he looked like a really big action figure. An X-Man or something. Deathmaster. Sado-Man. Sick Bastard Dude.

  He heard the padding of the woman’s feet on the granite floor. She was still naked, but she was holding an enormous nickel-plated pistol in front of her.

  “Whoa,” said Exemel.

  She stiffened her arms. The heavy gun wobbled in front of her. “Look, I’m really grateful for all you’ve done, but Marty knows about things like this and he says you’ve got to die.”