Cash Out

by Marshall Thornton

  And then we were in front of Pot o’ Gold. A giant rainbow arched across the front of the lounge, ending in a pot of gold. It was odd looking at the rainbow. It was the symbol of my community, a symbol of our diversity and our openness toward others. Here, though, it was a symbol of greed. Appropriate I suppose in a casino.

  It was a wig. I hadn’t realized that. Linda Cotton sat at a booth in the back of the bar. When she saw me, she frowned and adjusted her wig. Even close up she looked like Bozo the Clown—a desperately sad Bozo the Clown.

  I sat down with her and waited for Aunt Katie to join us.

  “So,” I said. “You’re trying to stop the wedding?”

  “Of course, I am. I told you that.”

  “Not very clearly.”

  “You can’t really want your mother to marry Preston Cotton?”

  “I want my mother to be happy. If she thinks—”

  “He won’t make her happy.”

  I didn’t have a way to argue with that.

  “If Cotton is so awful, then why do you want him back?” I asked. It seemed a reasonable question.

  “I don’t want him back.”

  “Well then none of this makes any sense.”

  She let out a big sigh, as though I was a complete idiot for not seeing the obvious. “My girls don’t want them to marry. That’s enough for me.”

  “Your girls are adult women. And my mother is hardly the wicked stepmother.”

  “You really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Have you always spoiled them? Have you always stepped in and done too much?”

  “You’re not a parent, you don’t understand.”

  She was right, I wasn’t a parent and I didn’t understand. Neither fact put her in the right. Finally, I said, “Well, they’ve postponed the wedding. It will be in Grand Rapids. You can try to sabotage it there.”

  Although, I knew I would have to let my mother know what she was up to. Linda Cotton sat back and relaxed. Confidently, she said, “The wedding won’t happen.”

  Since I didn’t have a crystal ball, I had no idea if that was true. I asked, “Where were you at eleven o’clock this morning?”

  “When Sonny was killed? Why would you ask something like that?”

  “It got the wedding stopped, didn’t it?”

  “I did not kill Sonny. I was in my room. I’m on the sixteenth floor. My room faces north. I was actually on the phone arranging for a wire transfer,” she glanced angrily at Aunt Katie.

  Aunt Katie reached her hand into the air and flagged down a cocktail waitress. A moment later, she was ordering a Beefeater’s martini with three olives. I asked for a glass of water. When the waitress looked at Linda Cotton, she said, “I won’t be staying much longer.”

  After the waitress walked away, Linda said, “If you don’t believe me we can call my bank. They can verify the time of the transfer. Or you can ask Becky. She was in my room at the time.”

  “Becky? Becky was in your room? So your daughters know you’re here?”

  “Becky does. She asked me to come.”

  That was odd. Everything kept coming back to Becky. She sent her husband to my mother’s suite. She knew her mother was here. Had she planned to get rid of her husband and my mother in one stroke? But how could she have done that if she was in her mother’s room?

  “Reba and Reggie don’t know you’re here?”

  She shook her head. That wouldn’t be a good idea. “Becky is the smart one. Reba is very emotional and Reggie has very little impulse control. It wouldn’t have been a good idea to let them know what we were trying to do.”

  “Did Becky kill Sonny?”

  “I just told you. She was with me.”

  “You could be lying.”

  “Becky loved her husband.”

  “Really? She didn’t seem to mind that he was having, um, relations with other women. Including her sister.”

  Relations? Oh my God! Who did I think I was? Miss Marple?

  Linda hardened her eyes and said, “My children are none of your business.”

  “They are when someone’s trying to frame my mother with murder.”

  “The affair was over. Or at least it would be soon. Sonny was not leaving Becky. So, you see, she had no reason to kill him.”

  “Neither did my mother.”

  “Didn’t she? He went there to stop the wedding,” she said. “If I’m being nice about it, I’d say your mother got angry and gave him a shove. She probably didn’t intend on killing him at all. She certainly has a terrible alibi.”

  “What about your other daughters?”

  “Reggie was gambling. As I’m sure you’re aware, she has a little problem. Reba, well, she was waiting for Sonny to meet her.”

  “In the suite right next to her sister?” That seemed a little too sophisticated.

  “No, they have a room on another floor for their assignations. I gather Sonny was to meet her after he spoke to your mother.”

  “After he convinced my mother not to marry Cotton?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to pack.”

  After I left Aunt Katie, I walked back toward Fortune’s Forum to wait for the show to end. I sat at a slot machine nearby but didn’t pump any money into it. Which didn’t prevent it from flashing and making the occasional ding. It wouldn’t have surprised me to win a jackpot by osmosis.

  I tried to decide if what I’d learned from Linda Cotton told me anything about Sonny’s death. It seemed unlikely. Despite her mother’s alibi, Becky still seemed the most likely suspect. Something about the whole thing was off.

  I didn’t think it would be that hard to convince her mother to lie for her. But Becky had told us she sent Sonny to my mother’s room, and then her mother said the same thing. Why tell us? I mean, if she had followed him down to my mother’s suite and pushed him off the balcony—wait, how exactly would that work?

  ‘Honey, now that we’re in someone else’s room come out to the balcony.’ Seriously, how did she get him out there? Did she drug him? No, that would just make things harder. She’d have had to drag him down the hallway, get him into the suite and lift him over—no, that wouldn’t have worked.

  Wait a minute. My mother wasn’t there. Aunt Katie wasn’t there. So, if Becky sent Sonny down to talk to my mother, who let him into the suite? Was I wrong? Did Becky have nothing to do with it?

  Maybe Linda was telling the truth. Maybe Becky was with her. Which meant it might be one of the other girls. Maybe it was Reba. She certainly didn’t seem happy. Sonny might be the reason—

  The show emptied out, which wasn’t surprising. Robert had said it wasn’t a long show. It took a few minutes for Marc and Louis and Leon to come out. They had been in the front row, after all.

  “How was it?” I asked.

  “Well,” Marc said. “After a rocky start—”

  “She screamed for at least two minutes after you ran out of the theater,” Louis said.

  “Did she?” Leon said. “I thought that was part of the song.”

  “Oh, you did not,” Marc said. To me he said, “They brought the lights down and she started over. Right from the beginning. Then, she did the whole show as though nothing had happened. To be honest, she was flawless.”

  “She was lip-synching,” Leon said.

  “You think that because she looks like a drag queen,” Louis said.

  “She wasn’t lip-synching,” Marc said. He leaned close to me and quietly said, “To be honest, she was a little flat toward the end. But she’s a trouper and sold it anyway.”

  Not agreeing, Leon rolled his eyes at them and then turned to me. “So, what happened with you?”

  Then I told them all about chasing down Aunt Katie, tackling her, and making her take me to Linda Cotton. When I was finished, Louis asked, “She really took money to ruin your mother’s wedding?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s low,” Marc said.

  “What do you thin
k Angie’s going to have to say about that?” Leon asked. “She thought Katie was her friend.”

  “I don’t know. I’m thinking I might not tell her until she gets back to Grand Rapids.” Louis raised an eyebrow at me. “What?” I asked, “Does this trip need to get any worse?”

  “Do you think Katie really killed her husbands?” Marc asked. “She seems too nice.”

  “Ted Bundy was nice,” Louis said. He and Marc had taken to reading true crime novels. I swear, I had nothing to do with that. “John Wayne Gacy was a clown.”

  Then, unexpectedly, Leon said, “You know, we’ve never really considered whether it might be Cotton.”

  I was hit with a wall of nausea and began coughing all at once. Louis began slapping me on the back. As soon as I could talk again, I asked, “Do you think Cotton and Becky are in on it together?” I mean, we still had the problem of her being the one to send Sonny to my mother’s suite. I just didn’t see how she could not be involved.

  “I think it’s possible,” Leon said.

  “Yeah, I think it is too,” Louis said.

  “Okay, how do we prove or disprove it?” I asked.

  “Where was he at eleven this morning?” Leon asked. We looked at one another. None of us knew for sure.

  “He had to have been with your mother.”

  “But she was having a massage at the Flamingo,” I pointed out. “Alone. She said so.”

  “Doesn’t it seem odd that someone like Sonny would be carrying the money?” Louis asked. “I mean, he’s a lawyer not a mule.”

  “You’re right,” Leon said. “It’s illegal to bring the money here to be laundered, isn’t it? And don’t lawyers, even bad ones, try not to break the law?”

  “So, Sonny might have stolen the money?” I said.

  “But if he got caught… he had to know The Outfit would kill him?” Marc said.

  “Do you think they know he has it?” I asked. “And that they killed him because of it?”

  “I think Cotton works for The Outfit, too,” Louis said. “The girls talk about this hotel like they’ve been coming here their whole lives.”

  “Do you think he killed Sonny? With Becky’s help?”

  Louis nodded. “I think that’s possible. Yes.”

  16

  It was the middle of the night and someone was shaking me. My eyes sprang open and I found myself looking up at Leon. He looked frantic and a bit deranged.

  “Get off me,” I told him, trying not to cough.

  “Cameras!”

  “What?”

  “Cameras.”

  I pushed him onto the floor and sat up in bed. “What are you talking about and why is it important enough to wake me up at…” I glanced at the digital clock next to the bed. “…two thirteen?”

  We’d all come back to the suite I shared with Leon and chatted for a bit longer—we really didn’t come up with any new ideas. We split up around eleven. Marc and Louis went back to their suite and Leon to the tables.

  He continued, speaking rapidly, “I was at a blackjack table downstairs and I was sitting next to this guy in a nice business suit. He was doing well. Really well. He was getting blackjack after blackjack. And then, all of a sudden, three goons appeared out of nowhere and threw him out of the casino. I looked at the dealer and asked what happened. He told me the guy had been cheating. Aces up his sleeve. And I’m like, I didn’t see a thing. The dealer says, ‘I didn’t see anything either.’”

  “So how did they know he was cheating?”

  “Cameras! There are cameras in the ceiling.”

  “Big deal.”

  “Then I asked if there were cameras everywhere, if there were cameras in the rooms.”

  “There are cameras in our rooms?”

  “No. But there are cameras in the hallway.”

  “Oh. Okay. So the police will be able—"

  “The casino is making them get a warrant. It’s going to take a few days.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s Easter weekend. Remember?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Meanwhile, Mickey Troccoli is going to get us into the surveillance room.”

  That got my attention. “Really? So, we’ll be able to see who was in the room with Sonny.”

  “Exactly.”

  “We could, we should, wait and let the police deal with this,” I said, reasonably. And, yes, part of me was afraid I’d have to tell my mother her fiancé is a killer.

  “Don’t you want to see the look on the Cotton girls’ faces when they find out Angie didn’t kill Sonny?”

  He was absolutely right about that. I did want to see their faces. I got out of bed, pulled a pair of jeans on over my boxer briefs, grabbed my baseball cap, and was ready to go. We walked down the hall to Marc and Louis’ suite and woke them. Standing in the living room, we could hear Tina snoring. Apparently, she’d watched The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom with a bottle of tequila.

  As we waited for Marc and Louis to dress, Leon and I whispered in the living room.

  “So, why is Mickey doing this?” I asked.

  Leon gave me a look and asked, “Don’t you have the slightest idea how to get something from a man?”

  I stuck my tongue out at him. Who was he kidding? Mickey Troccoli was involved with Gary Glenn, a female impersonator. That was Mickey’s type. If that’s what he liked I didn’t see how Leon’s flirting would have any effect.

  “Plus, I tipped him. A lot.”

  “I thought we didn’t have to tip? We’re VIPs.”

  Leon rolled his eyes. Just then, Louis came out of the bedroom, saying, “What do you think we’re going to see on the tape?” He wore a pair of jeans and a simple black turtleneck.

  “Whoever opened the door for Sonny,” I said, simply.

  “My money is on Cotton,” Leon said.

  Louis nodded, asking, “How do you think he got in? The door would have been locked.”

  “The manager,” I suggested. Taking a page from Leon I added, “If Cotton tipped well enough.”

  “It still could have been Becky,” Marc said, coming into the room. He had on a very colorful sweater—it did get very cold at night, even inside the casino.

  We left the suite and headed downstairs.

  “I’m exhausted,” Marc said.

  “You’ll sleep when we get back to L.A.,” Louis said.

  “No, I won’t. I have to go to work Monday morning.”

  “You’ll sleep there, then.”

  “I do not sleep at my desk,” Marc insisted. “Very often,” he added.

  We met Mickey Troccoli near the tables where he worked. I could see he wasn’t on duty, though, since he wore casual clothes: jeans and a Chicago Cubs jersey.

  “You guys follow me,” he said, rolling forward and leading the way.

  “Aren’t you going to get into a lot of trouble with your bosses for his?” I asked. He seemed nice enough, I didn’t want anything terrible to happen to him.

  “Nah, they know they didn’t get rid of Sonny.”

  “Then why won’t they just give the police the tapes?” Louis asked.

  “Principle. You gotta make the police play by the rules or they won’t, you know?”

  I wasn’t sure that was particularly true. Javier played by the rules. Nobody made him do it. Of course, there were other cops who didn’t even come close to playing by the rules.

  The video surveillance room was just down the hallway from the ‘break’ room where Brace Ryland interviewed me. It was a long, dark room filled with TVs and VCRs. Each TV monitor had a screen split into four views with four VCRs stacked below. The room was aglow with tiny red lights.

  We crowded inside, allowing Mickey to go first. In front of the TVs was a technician, who Mickey introduced as Todd. Todd looked like a surfer with a peeling sunburn and curly sun-bleached hair—though where he might have surfed in Nevada was questionable. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one and, to be hone
st, looked a little stoned.

  “We want to look at yesterday around ten thirty, maybe ten forty in the morning. Penthouse floor,” Mickey said. Then he looked at us and asked, “That okay?”

  We nodded, but I was sure we had no idea what we were agreeing to. Todd pulled three tapes off a shelf where they were wedged in between other tapes. Then he put them into three different VCRs. He had a kind of keyboard in front of him. Clicking a bunch of keys, he managed to sync the tapes so that they showed the full length of the hallway on the twentieth floor in three different views.

  The tapes began at 10:20, forty minutes before Sonny died. The video was black-and-white and the quality poor. A maid in a loose uniform worked her way down the hallway. It looked like she was in room 20105. That wasn’t one of the rooms our party was using, or at least I didn’t think so. It hadn’t seemed like anyone else was on the floor but us and the Cottons. I could have been wrong.

  At around 10:33, Marc and Louis came out of their room. Louis made sure the door was locked. Then they walked down to the elevator. Louis put his hand on Marc’s ass, earning him a gentle slap on the shoulder.

  “Oh, God,” Marc said under his breath.

  “Why did you guys go downstairs so early?” I asked.

  “I wanted to cash in our chips,” Marc said. “I didn’t want certain people gambling them away.”

  “More chips?” I asked, remembering that he’d already cashed a bunch in.

  “Yes, more chips,” Louis said.

  “You did well at the craps table,” Todd said, factually.

  “Um, we did,” Marc said.

  “Say thank you,” Mickey said with a devilish smile. I wouldn’t have believed it, but it seemed they picked the winners and losers. Or at least he was making it sound that way. Silly me, I’d thought it was just the odds that were against us. Marc and Louis mumbled thank you and then blushed. I wondered how much they’d won this time.

  On the screens, the hallway was empty for a few minutes. We fast forwarded to 10:37 when a room service waiter came out of the service room next to the elevators and, carrying a tray of food, walked down the hall to 20104, the room next to my mother’s. He looked tall and had brown hair. Mostly, we saw the top of his head. When he reached 20104, he knocked. A few moments later, the door opened, and he went in. From the way the cameras were positioned we weren’t able to see who let him in.