Cash Out

by Marshall Thornton

  And then on the tape, Cotton came back to the table. “How long did that take?” Louis asked.

  “He was gone maybe fifteen minutes,” Marc said.

  “See, that’s not enough time,” my mother said. And she was right, it probably wasn’t.

  Something bothered me though, something I’d seen but had not really registered. “Could you go back, Marc?”

  “Um sure. It’s still gonna be fifteen minutes, though.”

  “That’s okay.”

  He sped the tape back, after twenty seconds, I said, “Stop there. Play it at regular speed.”

  Becky was saying, “I know Daddy’s kind of a Neanderthal when it comes to politics, but he means well, he really does. I mean, we’re all trying to get to the same place, we just disagree on the path to get—”

  “There,” I said. “Over her shoulder.”

  On the other side of the restaurant, Cotton had come out of the men’s room and been accosted by the same red-haired woman who’d approached me in the casino.

  “Who’s that he’s talking to?” my mother asked.

  “She looks like a crazy woman,” Aunt Katie said. “That hair! It makes her look like Bozo the Clown.”

  Then I said, “She grabbed me in the casino this morning. She said, ‘Don’t let it happen.’ Or something like that. It was really weird.”

  “Well, it’s Las Vegas,” Aunt Katie said. “It’s not surprising there are disturbed people wandering around.”

  “I’m sure Cotton’s just being kind,” my mother said. We watched, expecting him to pull out some money for the poor woman. Instead, she tried to touch him and he pulled away violently.

  “Oh my,” my mother said. “I wonder what she said.”

  “She smelled like alcohol when she came up to me,” I said. I didn’t really want to defend Cotton, but my mother looked so distressed. “Obviously, he didn’t have time to go up to the room and swap out the suitcases.”

  We scanned through the rest of the meal and did a mental countdown every time someone left the table. As it turned out, no one really had enough time to go to the twentieth floor and change out the suitcases.

  “Maybe someone bribed the manager,” Aunt Katie suggested.

  “‘Here’s fifty bucks, go steal back my million dollars and don’t take any?’” Louis asked. “Does that sound like a good idea?”

  “Maybe not, but neither is putting that kind of money into a suitcase identical to everyone else’s,” Aunt Katie said, a little put out.

  “Well, I need to go,” my mother said. “I promised Cotton we could, um, have some champagne.”

  I would have worried about her drinking too much, but it was so obvious she was lying. Cotton was in the bridal suite. They had things in there like heart-shaped beds and mirrors on the ceiling. That was what she was trying not to say in front of me. And to be honest, I was grateful. I didn’t want to think of my mother—oh my God, I was thinking about it.

  La-la-la-la-la—quick, think about something else. Pie. No, pi. Why did pi even exist? What was the point? And who thought of it? Someone Greek, I think. I seemed to remember a teacher telling the class that pi was an irrational number, which was ridiculous. Numbers are the most rational things in the world. So—

  “Um, have fun,” I said, doing my best.

  She grabbed a few things and left, leaving us alone with Aunt Katie. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her if my mother was staying there at all, when Louis said, “It’s Sonny. It has to be. He’s a lawyer with the mob, he wouldn’t have had any trouble getting the manager to open the suite… or give him a pass key.”

  “That’s true,” Marc said. “If he already had a pass key, he could easily have swapped the suitcases before coming down to join us.”

  “Are you sure?” Aunt Katie asked. “What about the restaurant? How did he find us so quickly then?”

  “Noah was probably right. Cotton told him. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Cotton knows everything.”

  “Unless it was just a guess,” Marc said. “I mean, he knows the casino. He’d have known we weren’t going to the buffet again. So really there’s just the steak place, the Chinese place and pasta place. He knows Cotton. He knew what Cotton would choose.”

  I took a deep breath and managed not to cough. “Well, now that Sonny has his money again everything should be fine. We can relax and enjoy the rest of the weekend.”

  Even though I’d just said that, I had to wonder, could we? Could we just pretend we hadn’t seen all that money? All that potentially illegal money?

  Just then, there was knock on the door. Aunt Katie went over and opened it. A moment later Tina walked in, “I thought you guys might be over here.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been with Reba by the pool,” she said, as though that should be apparent. Of course, she was covered head to toe in filmy black fabric. She looked more like she’d just come from a séance. “Boy did I get an earful.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Well—she spent a lot of time denying she’s having an affair with Sonny.”

  “Did you accuse her of that?” I asked.

  “Of course not. She just came out with, ‘Despite what Becky might think, I’m not having an affair with Sonny.’”

  “What do you think?”

  “Oh my God, she’s totally having an affair with Sonny. Her sister’s husband. That’s tacky.”

  “Very,” said Aunt Katie.

  “And, she’s not the only one Sonny’s having an affair with. Apparently, he’s got some actress type on the side. Typical.”

  “Did you find out anything about the money?” Louis asked.

  “I tried to. I asked a lot of questions about Sonny’s work. I even asked if they ever asked him to carry money for them.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “She said a mob attorney was too obvious. They liked inconspicuous mules. Like Angie.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “She accused my mother of being a mule?”

  “She did!” Tina said. “Actually, one of the things she said was that the Chicago Outfit had some women pretty high up. Not a glass ceiling I’d like to break.”

  Which was saying something, since Tina seemed to be chomping at the bit to break a glass ceiling somewhere, anywhere.

  “Do you think it’s a good idea for your mother to marry Cotton?” Aunt Katie asked.

  I tried to hesitate but couldn’t. “I don’t.”

  “Then we need to do something.”

  8

  The next morning there was a cart with an untouched continental breakfast and coffee in the living room of our suite. Leon was nowhere to be seen and the message light on my phone was blinking. The message was from Louis. I was to be downstairs in front of the building at 11 a.m. We were going to the Liberace Museum.

  I had a Danish, drank some coffee, and pulled a banana out of the gigantic fruit basket—just to be healthy. As I ate, I worried about what to do. Tina had called me Meg Ryan since I wanted to stop the wedding, but when I thought about it, I couldn’t think of any film in which the actress had done that. In fact, the only movie I could think of where a wedding was interrupted was The Graduate. By rights, Tina should have said I was no Dustin Hoffman.

  Of course, none of that was helpful. All Dustin did to stop the wedding was bang on the church window and Katharine Ross came running. I had no idea if the chapel where my mother would be married even had a window—not to mention if I banged on it, she’d probably just give me a disappointed look.

  No, I needed my mother to voluntarily call the wedding off, well in advance of walking down the aisle. So, how did I get her to do that? I mean, she knew she was marrying into a family of mob lawyers, or at least one mob lawyer. What could I possibly say or do that would get her to cancel the wedding?

  As I showered and dressed, I ran through the various reasons people cancelled weddings: infidelity revealed, a secret criminal past (although we’d alre
ady gotten through that one), unexpected biological relationship. The last held the most promise. Though how I would prove my mother and Cotton were at least first cousins was a challenge, particularly since it was incredibly unlikely that they were. I’d have to ask Louis if there was a way to manufacture familial relationships. If any of us knew, he would.

  It was hot when I walked out of the casino into the valet area. High eighties at least. Marc and Louis stood next to the Infiniti, which had already been pulled around.

  “Any idea where Leon is?” I asked.

  “We called his mobile phone before we left our room. He said he’ll be here,” Louis said.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Marc snarked.

  “Is he still winning?”

  Louis shook his head. “I tried to take five hundred away from him, but he wasn’t having it.”

  “The casino is giving him credit,” I mentioned. “Hopefully he’ll still have kneecaps when we leave. Did you guys go right to bed?”

  It was a logical question. I’d gone to bed, after all.

  “Oh God no,” Marc said. “It was barely ten o’clock. We snuck into “Les Femmes” last night. Gary Glenn does an imitation of Wilma Wanderly that is to die for.”

  “It’s actually a very good show,” Louis agreed.

  “Have you seen my mother this morning?” I asked. I’d called her room an hour earlier and gotten no answer. She could still be with Cotton, but—

  “No, we haven’t,” Louis said. “She probably has a lot to do. She’s getting married—”

  A sudden, loud crack filled the air and the valets around us ran to a buff-colored Mercedes sedan. An automated voice was saying, “You are too close to the vehicle. You are too close to the vehicle.”

  I wondered who the car was talking to.

  It took a moment, but I realized there was something wrong. The car’s roof was crushed, and a man’s arm was flung across the windshield. Blood was spattered all over the hood.

  “In ten seconds, the alarm will go off,” the car said.

  Numbly, we walked out from under the awning and looked up. The only floor with balconies was the twentieth; the floor we were on. None of the windows where open on any of the other floors. I followed the trajectory from the Mercedes up to the twentieth floor. The balcony he must have fallen from was halfway through the floor. On the south side of the building. That would be my mother’s room. But no, it couldn’t be. Why would some random man fall from her balcony?

  The alarm went off. It was very loud and extremely unpleasant.

  “It’s Sonny,” Louis said, raising his voice above the alarm. “I can see his hair.”

  Okay, not a random man. But why would Sonny fall from my mother’s balcony? In fact, what would he even be doing in my mother’s room? Especially when we were fairly certain he’d already been in the room and gotten what he wanted. There was nothing in there for him. Was there?

  “Louis, Sonny is not the only blond in Las Vegas,” Marc said, and I grabbed onto the hope that it might not be Sonny—

  “Oh my God,” Louis said. “That’s the jacket he was wearing yesterday.”

  That’s when I noticed the plaid sleeve. Crap, it was Sonny. Sirens popped on and seconds later two firetrucks were pulling into the parking area: a ladder truck and a smaller, square van. They couldn’t have come far. They quickly turned off their sirens but left the lights flashing. In the distance, I could hear other sirens getting closer. Police? Ambulance? As I thought that, a couple of firemen jumped out of the boxy van, which I realized was actually an ambulance.

  Leon showed up. “What on earth is going on?”

  “Sonny fell off the balcony,” Louis said, quietly.

  “Fell? How could he—”

  “We don’t actually know,” Marc said. “We only saw him land. Over there on that beige car.”

  The firemen had already gotten Sonny off the roof of the car, onto the ground and were attempting to revive him.

  “Isn’t that a little pointless?” Leon commented. “I mean, twenty floors.”

  “I heard about a guy who jumped from a plane, his parachute didn’t open, and he survived,” Marc said. “He broke most of his bones, but—”

  “Did he land on a Mercedes?”

  “I really don’t think it makes much difference if you land on the ground or on a Mercedes,” I said. He was annoying me. “Why are you even here? Did you run out of money again?”

  “If you must know, I’m up. Forty-two hundred dollars. But I wouldn’t miss the Liberace museum for love or money. In fact, when do you think we can go?”

  “That’s so selfish,” I said. Glancing over at the firemen working on Sonny, I saw that they’d stopped. That he was laying there motionless. “Sonny’s dead, after all. I don’t think we can go traipsing off—”

  “True. We should probably hang around and talk to the police,” Louis said. He stepped forward and looked up at the top of the building.

  “Did you see anything?” Leon asked.

  “We saw him land,” I said, repeating what Marc said. Louis was making the same connection I’d made. That Sonny had fallen from my mother’s suite. We exchanged an uneasy look.

  “That doesn’t seem very helpful at all,” Leon pointed out. “I mean, you don’t really have to hang around and waste the time of the police.”

  “Well, we do know him,” I said. “Not well, but… they should probably be told he was a mob lawyer.”

  “And then there’s the money,” Louis said.

  “Can’t your mother just keep it?”

  “Someone brought her bag back and swapped them,” I said. “You were off gambling.”

  “Hmmm, then you don’t have anything to tell them, do you?”

  A black-and-white police car pulled in behind the ladder truck. A uniformed officer got out of the car and began walking toward the EMTs and Sonny’s body.

  ‘There,” Leon said. “The police are here, go over and say hi so we can go.”

  “I think we should wait for a detective,” I said. I actually didn’t want to talk to the police at all. But if I had to, I didn’t want to talk to six of them.

  “Why? So, you can flirt with him?”

  “Leon,” Louis scolded. “That’s not very nice.”

  “Well, if we’re not going to the Liberace museum then I’m going back to the tables. Honestly, I’m thinking I should quit my day job and become a professional gambler.” And with that he huffed and walked back into the casino.

  “I’m going to talk to the officer for a moment. Noah, maybe you should try and find your mother and Cotton.”

  “Oh my God,” Marc said. “This will ruin the wedding.”

  And that was the best thing I’d heard all morning.

  I should be more upset, I kept thinking as I wound through the casino to the elevators. One of my future in-laws was dead. More importantly, he died near me! Well, across a parking lot but close enough. Why did I keep finding myself involved with dead bodies? Really, I’d hoped to get through the entire weekend without a dead body—and now that hope was dashed.

  Okay, now I was upset. I should have known something like this would happen the minute I saw that money in my mother’s room. Wait, that’s silly. A million dollars in cash does not automatically lead to… What? Accidental death? Suicide? Murder? Oh God, murder.

  But, I thought as I hit the button for the twentieth floor, if it is murder it’s very unlikely my mother had anything to do with it. Even if it did happen in her room, there was no way she could toss Sonny off a balcony. She was a senior citizen. Or almost a senior citizen. Even if he did fall, jump or get pushed off her balcony it would definitely not be her fault.

  At the twentieth floor, I got off the elevator and walked down to her suite. I knocked. After a moment, Aunt Katie opened the door wearing a kaftan over a black, one-piece bathing suit.

  “Is my mother here?”

  Shaking her head, she said, “No. She’s off on an adventure. Did you
just hear sirens? Is there something happening?”

  I walked by her into the room. Taking a good look around, the suite seemed exactly as it should. But then I noticed a magazine had been knocked off the coffee table. And there was a puddle of water in the center of its glass top.

  “You were swimming?”

  “Yes. How long have you been back?”

  “I just walked in. What’s going on? You’re being very cagey.”

  “Was that magazine on the floor when you left?”

  “Probably not. When I walked in things were kind of messy. I’ve been putting things back in order.”

  “What about the water?”

  “Oh, I’ll wipe that up. Just give me a sec.”

  “Oh my God!” I nearly shouted. “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “The sirens. Sonny fell off the balcony.”

  “Oh dear. I think his room is two doors down. Just thinking about it—”

  “No. This balcony. This whole suite might be a crime scene. You shouldn’t be cleaning up.”

  She looked around like the floor might jump up and bite her. “What have I done?”

  “Tell me everything you changed.”

  “Well, this lamp was on the floor. I put it back on the table. And the pillows were messed up. I straightened those out.”

  “The balcony doors are open. Were they open when you left?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I thought Angie had opened them at some point.”

  “When was the last time you saw my mother?”

  “At breakfast. Afterward, I went for a swim and your mother said she had a rendezvous. I mean, I assumed it was with Cotton somewhere.”