Stripped

by Brian Freeman

  “A lifetime ago, Detective.”

  “A lot’s changed since then,” Stride said.

  “Nothing’s changed. Nothing at all. Now, if you have nothing else, let me go back to my job, and you can go back to yours. Finding out who killed my son.”

  “I do have a few more questions,” Stride said.

  Lane’s impatience crackled through the phone line. “What?”

  Stride was running out of ideas for making the man talk and decided to take a wild leap. “MJ seemed to be very interested in that new casino project near his building. The Orient project that Boni Fisso is launching. Do you know why?”

  “I have nothing to say about Boni Fisso,” Lane hissed.

  Stride and Amanda looked at each other. Boni’s name had obviously struck a raw nerve.

  “Was MJ somehow involved with the Orient project?” Stride persisted.

  Lane exhaled in disgust. Stride wished he were there in person to read the man’s body language.

  “MJ didn’t care about the new casino,” Lane retorted. “All he could talk about was the Sheherezade.”

  “Why is that?” Stride asked.

  There was another stretch of silence.

  “The Sheherezade,” Lane said. “When I read it was coming down, I thought finally it would all be over.”

  He paused, but Stride could hear the fissures in the dam grow wider. Lane wanted to tell them. Just like he had wanted to tell MJ.

  “Boni couldn’t just drop it in the dead of night. Let everyone wake up and find a pile of rubble. All its secrets leveled, ready to be carted away. No, no, make it another goddamn tourist attraction. The governor’s going to push the button. Half the congressional delegation will be there applauding. Like it was something noble. Like they were saying goodbye to something sacred.”

  “What happened there?” Stride asked.

  “Las Vegas killed me, that’s what happened,” Lane retorted. “Now it’s killed my son. Both of us. My God, it never ends. Sins live forever in that city. I just never believed it could reach out and destroy me again.”

  Stride waited until he was done. He could hear Lane gasping for breath.

  “You sound like you think you know why MJ was killed,” Stride said. He added, “Does it have something to do with Boni Fisso?”

  “No, Detective, I don’t know why. The past is the past, and I have no reason to think what happened then has any relevance to what happened to MJ. Or any connection to Boni. I don’t see how it could.”

  “Still-” Stride began.

  “Still, you want to know. You’re curious. That’s your lot in life. I’m sorry. I’ve said more than I should have already, and I can’t say anymore.”

  Amanda leaned closer to the phone. “But if it was so long ago, Mr. Lane, why not tell us?”

  “No, I can’t. I’m grieving over MJ. I’m wishing I had been a better father. That’s enough pain without dredging up mistakes I made when I was a young fool.”

  “Mr. Lane,” Stride said, “we know that MJ called you a murderer.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Why?”

  Lane sighed. “You’ll have to ask Rex Terrell about that, Detective.”

  Stride remembered the answering machine message in MJ’s condo. He quickly checked his notes.

  MJ, it’s Rex Terrell I thought we could trade some secrets. I showed you mine, how about you show me yours?

  “Who’s Rex Terrell?” Stride asked.

  “He’s a writer,” Lane replied, his voice curling around the word with contempt. “He’s the one who dragged this trash up about the Sheherezade and put ideas in MJ’s head. Ask him to tell you what I did, and maybe you can find a way to kill me again. I’ve died many times, Detective. What’s once more?”

  TEN

  Serena sped south out of Reno in a rented Malibu, gulping in the sweet mountain air that whipped through the car, and cranking Terri Clark on the stereo until the speakers of the Chevy vibrated.

  “I think the world needs a drink,” Terri sang in her Canadian twang.

  People sometimes told Serena she looked like Terri Clark, without the cowboy hat. Both tall, with silky dark hair. Maybe that was why Serena liked her so much.

  Like the world in the song on the radio, Serena realized, she needed a drink. When she licked her lips, she could still imagine the taste of vodka, although it had been more than a decade since she quit. A drink was a no-no, off-limits, verboten. She imagined it was like Jonny and cigarettes. It didn’t matter if it was one year or twenty, the desire could come back in an instant and take your breath away.

  Her mother’s face flashed in her brain. She tried to will it away by gazing out the window at the crown of Mt. Rose in the distance, but her mother might as well have been standing by the side of the road like a hitchhiker in some old episode of The Twilight Zone. Appearing over and over, following her. Of all the things her mother had done to her that she couldn’t forgive, the worst was passing along her addictive genes. For her mother, the demon was cocaine. For Serena, the demon was alcohol. For two years in her early twenties, she had drunk her way into deadness. She was grateful for AA and for a crowd of strangers who had pulled her back.

  Those were the two years after Deidre died. Funny that she didn’t start drinking when the two of them left Phoenix, when the flashbacks of the drug dealer’s dirty hands on her breasts still visited her every night. Or that she didn’t start when Deidre began having sex with men for money and encouraging Serena to do the same. No, it was years later, when Deidre was out of her life. A week after her funeral. One drink became two, two became ten, and ten bled so easily into hundreds.

  Someone had told her that Deidre weighed sixty-eight pounds when she died. Serena shivered in the car. The girl she had known was so different, so alive. Red, kinky hair. A trashy way of dressing and walking that men loved, like they loved the tattoo above the crack of her ass, a coiled serpent that seemed to wriggle with pleasure whenever her shirt rode up. She had pale skin, not made for the southwestern sun. Her whiteness set her apart in a town of bronzed bodies. When she was naked in the shower, she almost seemed to glow.

  The truth was that Deidre and Serena were never from the same world. Deidre was fast in a fast town, a perfect fit. For the first few years, Serena was grateful that Deidre had plucked her out of the lion’s mouth, but sooner or later, she was bound to split off and go her own way. Eventually, she left Deidre and moved out.

  They never talked again. When Deidre died, the guilt came crashing down on Serena, and she filtered it through bottles of Absolut.

  She remembered how amazing it was to her that she could put bottles in the freezer and let the alcohol get colder and colder and colder, and still it didn’t freeze.

  Sixty-eight pounds, God.

  Following the directions that Jay Walling had given her, she pulled onto the shoulder at the end of a long dirt track off old 395, near the house where the murder had taken place. She got out of the car and enjoyed the silence. The few sounds she did hear were crisp and clear, like the crunch of gravel under her feet and the distant rumble of a plane climbing over the hills out of the Reno airport. A hawk pin-wheeled above her, scanning the fields, but otherwise, she didn’t see another living soul anywhere around her.

  A handful of old ranch houses dotted the overgrown fields. Farm machinery lay rusted and unused nearby, and telephone wires sagged between poles. She saw the tall mountains to the west, with evergreens climbing the sides and patches of snow clinging to the very peaks. Closer by, the foothills were covered with auburn down, which would turn green when the rains came.

  The house she had come to see was modest, a gray twostory with an RV parked on the side. Its closest neighbor was a half mile away. There was a large white-fenced meadow in which she expected to see horses, but it was empty, its bitter-brush bending in the cool breeze. The air was fragrant with wild flowers.

  She had a large cup of coffee. She sipped it while she waited, leaning against
the hood of the car. Fifteen minutes later, she watched a white Ford Taurus pull up behind her. It was glossy, as if it had just been washed. Serena figured that Jay Walling probably took personal offense at any dirt particles that had the audacity to affix themselves to his car. She knew Walling well. They had worked a nasty homicide the year before, in which a body had been found in the Las Vegas desert and its head had turned up in the ball rack of a Reno bowling alley. Who said murderers didn’t have a sense of humor?

  “What say, Jay?” Serena said as Walling got out of the car. “What’s with the bird crap on your coat?”

  He looked down in horror, and Serena laughed. Walling wore a black shearling overcoat that must have cost him two thousand dollars, and he pampered it like a baby. He also wore a black fedora that made him look like a holdover from 1950s Manhattan. He was tall, with a long face and a boxy mustache.

  “I’ve missed your sense of humor, sweetheart,” Walling told her. “I hope my phone call last night didn’t interrupt a little love fest between you and Detective Stride. I was truly figuring I would get your voice mail.”

  “Ten minutes earlier, and you might have heard some heavy breathing.”

  “Ah, good” Walling looked a little uncomfortable with the details. “So is it serious?”

  “I think so,” Serena admitted. “He seems to think so, too. I’m trying not to screw it up.”

  Walling, who knew some of Serena’s history, nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I appreciate your coming up here. Can you tell me more about this receipt you found?”

  Serena gave Walling a quick summary of the hit-and-run in which Peter Hale had been killed and told him about their discovery of Lawrence Busby’s car in the parking lot of the Meadows Mall. “The receipt was under die driver’s seat,” she said.

  “No line yet on who stole the car?”

  Serena shook her head.

  “Shame. This could all mean nothing, but it smells funny. That receipt of yours was from a little convenience store less than five miles away. About two hours after those half-dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts got sold, a woman was murdered at this ranch. Then the receipt shows up in a stolen car used in a hit-and-run in Las Vegas.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “No, neither do I.”

  “So what happened here?” Serena asked, inclining her head toward the ranch house.

  Walling tugged at his mustache and then removed the fedora. He smoothed his carefully trimmed gray hair.

  “Brutal killing. We don’t get cases like this very often. Albert Ford came home from a golf game and found the front door open and his wife lying in the foyer. Clean cut across the carotid. Near as we can tell, she opened the door, and the perp dropped her right there. Bloody mess.”

  “Motive?”

  “We don’t have one,” Walling said. “Nothing was taken from the house. It doesn’t look like he even went inside.”

  “And no witnesses?”

  Walling shrugged and gestured at the empty landscape. “Out here? Not many neighbors. The road dead-ends to the east. We haven’t found anybody who saw a thing.”

  “What do we know about the woman who was killed?”

  “Salt of the earth,” Walling said. “Both of them. The Fords are multi-generation Reno residents. Both retired. Albert Ford bred horses for decades and sold out a few years ago. His wife Alice was a schoolteacher-third grade. She put in thirty-five years and retired around the same time that Al unloaded the horses.”

  Serena shook her head. “A third-grade schoolteacher?”

  “Exactly. It makes no sense.”

  “And Al is in the clear?”

  Walling nodded. “His golfing buddies gave him an alibi. Alice had been dead for several hours when he found her.”

  “They have kids?”

  “Four. All grown. The youngest is in her early thirties.”

  “Any of them in Las Vegas?” Serena asked.

  “No, two in Los Angeles, one in Boise, one in Anchorage. All clean. Alice has a brother in Reno, but that’s it within the state. Al’s the only one left in his family.”

  “I don’t suppose the brother is mobbed up,” Serena said.

  Walling laughed. “Retired director of an adoption agency. He’s in a retirement home now.”

  “So we have a twelve-year-old boy run down by a car and a retired schoolteacher with her throat cut,” Serena said. “Nothing similar about the MO, nothing similar about the location. The only thing we have to tie the cases together is a few doughnuts. Maybe we’re just blowing smoke here, Jay.”

  “Except both vies do have something in common,” Walling said.

  “Oh?”

  “We can’t find a reason why anyone would want to kill them.”

  ELEVEN

  Rex Terrell was thirty minutes late.

  It was fiveo’clock, and Stride and Amanda had a booth in the corner at Battista’s, underneath a wall of vintage celebrity photos that spanned the decades. They had already shooed away the accordionist, who was ready to serenade them, and turned down the house wine that came with dinner, but they had finally agreed to accept two bowls of penne with meat sauce, on the house.

  Terrell had picked the place, which was on a side street behind the Barbary Coast. “Real Vegas,” he said. “A landmark.”

  Stride had Terrell’s number from MJ’s answering machine, and he had finally reached him in the middle of the afternoon. It turned out that Rex Terrell was a freelance writer who did gossipy features for entertainment magazines, including LV. Stride wanted to know what Terrell had told MJ Lane about his father and the Sheherezade.

  They waited impatiently. Amanda stabbed a few noodles with her fork.

  “So what’s it like in Minnesota?” she asked.

  Stride smiled. “Are you thinking of moving?”

  “Who knows? I know how this sounds, but I wouldn’t mind living somewhere a little less strange. Bobby and I have talked about getting out.” She added, “It would be nice to be someplace where not everybody knew, too, know what I mean? My little secret, that is.”

  Stride nodded. “Minnesota is cold.”

  “Cold? Is that news? Here’s a hint, Stride, that white stuff that hangs around up there for six months? That’s called snow.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Stride said. “I don’t care about the weather. I used to live right on the shore of Lake Superior. I’d watch the big ore freighters come and go from my porch”

  “So why’d you leave?” Amanda asked.

  He hesitated, wondering how much to say, and then realized he was still doing it. Being a Minnesotan, locking everything away. “I began to realize it was a cold place. Minnesotans are hard to get to know. They don’t let you inside. You won’t find nicer people any where, but you can live with them for decades and never really know them on the inside, where it counts. They don’t open up.”

  “That sounds a lot like Serena,” Amanda said.

  Stride shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m that way, too. And yeah, that’s Serena. But we’ve been able to get to each other in a way that no one else did. I found out I liked it. So to me, that was worth moving for.”

  “But you miss Minnesota,” Amanda said.

  “Sure I do.”

  “What about Vegas? If it’s too strange for me, I can’t imagine what you think of it.”

  Stride let his eyes wander around the restaurant. Terrell was right. This was Vegas in all its kitschy, bitchy glory. He thought about Walker calling the city immoral and about executives like Gerard Plante at the Oasis calmly manipulating his guests. But then there were the mountains and the blue waters of Lake Mead. And Serena. And something irresistible and terrible about all of it together.

  He looked up, and fortunately, he didn’t have to answer.

  Rex Terrell was waving at them as he crossed the restaurant, his other arm draped around the back of the maftre d’. He wore a lime green shirt, untucked, over expensive black silk slacks. His blond hair was gelled,
sticking up in jagged spikes, and he wore narrow black sunglasses. He was about thirty years old, of medium height, and muscular. He carried a lowball glass with a coppery drink that sloshed over the side as he approached.

  “Rex Terrell,” he said, jutting out his hand. “And you’re detectives? What a trip. A real murder investigation. This is so CSI.”

  Stride shook his hand, which was moist, and introduced himself. Amanda did the same.

  “Amanda Gillen?” Rex stripped off his sunglasses and leaned into her face. “Oh my gawd, I know you. What delicious headlines. ‘Metro Sexual: Pre-Op Cop Says Her ‘Equipment’ Is No Big Deal.’” He giggled, spilling more of his drink. “Remember that one?”

  “Fuck off,” Amanda said.

  Terrell sat down and picked up a fork. He plucked a mouthful of pasta from Amanda’s bowl. “Oh, no, no, I loved it! Your lawsuit? I was with you all the way. I cheered when you won. And look at you, you are so hot! Tranny is definitely the new gay.”

  Stride saw the ice in Amanda’s eyes. She was holding a glass of water with such force that he thought the glass would shatter in her hand. “You’re poking the bear, Rex,” he told him.

  Terrell blathered on. “Listen, honey, how about an article in LV? We could do a photo spread with it. I don’t mean chicks with dicks, not that kind of thing, although wouldn’t that drive up our numbers! But very tasteful, very erotic, cleavage, maybe a bulge in the right place. I’m talking artistic here.”

  Amanda grabbed Terrell’s jaw and clenched it until he shut up. She yanked his face toward her. “Focus, Rex. Listen carefully. I am not a freak show. I am not a circus performer. I’m Amanda. I may be a little different from most people, but all I want to do is lead an ordinary life. What I don’t want is people invading my privacy. So leave me alone, or the operation that I chose not to get, I’m going to give to you right now with a butter knife. Got it?”

  She pushed Terrell away, and he rubbed his jaw. “Ow, ow, ow.” He looked at Stride. “She’s a pistol. But I like that, I really do:’

  “Maybe we can get down to business,” Stride said.