Stripped

by Brian Freeman

  “Who’s running the investigation now?” Stride asked.

  “What investigation?”

  “Into Blake’s death.”

  “Oh, we wrapped that up last night,” Sawhill replied. His smile grew wider, as if it were his nose growing longer.

  “Wrapped it up?” Stride asked. “Who killed him?”

  “The head of Boni’s security agency. David Kamen. He’s a sharpshooter, as you’ll recall. Fortunately, Boni thought to take precautions when Blake called him, and he had Kamen take position in the Charlcombe Towers opposite the Sheherezade.”

  Stride nodded. He had figured that. “Is Boni under arrest?”

  Sawhill looked shocked. “Whatever for?”

  “He had Blake killed. This was an assassination. Blake was secure, sir. Boni gave a green flag for Kamen to kill him, because he didn’t want dirt coming out at Blake’s trial about Amira’s death.”

  “You’re mistaken, Detective. I talked to Kamen personally last night. He had Blake under his scope the entire time, and he shot him when Blake began reaching for a backup gun he had in an ankle holster.”

  “Blake never moved,” Stride said.

  “Are you absolutely sure about that? I understand you were focused on Boni and Claire at the time. Good thing Kamen was there, Detective. This could have been another mistake on your part. A fatal one. Blake could have had his gun out and taken you both out in less than a second.”

  Stride frowned. He couldn’t swear in court that his attention hadn’t wavered, at least for a second, during the confrontation between Boni and Claire. A tiny space of time was all Blake would have needed.

  Except it was a lie. They all knew it.

  “We found a gun on the ground near the body,” Sawhill continued. “A Walther. Small but deadly. Blake still had the holster strapped to his ankle.”

  Isn’t that convenient? Stride thought. “So that’s it?” he asked.

  “That’s it.”

  “Who’s Mickey?” Stride asked. He watched Sawhill’s eyes but couldn’t read anything in the man’s level stare.

  “Mickey? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What about Amira?” Stride persisted.

  Sawhill smiled. “Like I told you at the very beginning, Detective, Amira Luz was killed by a deranged fan.”

  Stride lit a cigarette. Serena looked at him, frowning. They sat in a park a few blocks from the station. It was late afternoon. The heat wave had finally broken, and the October sunshine felt like another day in paradise. Midseventies, endless blue sky. The smog was taking a day off, leaving the mountains sharp and crisp on the horizon.

  He was half hooked again, and he knew it. The smoke in his lungs felt like an old friend he had missed. He didn’t look back at Serena. “I wouldn’t say anything if you had a drink,” he said.

  “Like hell. You’d rip it out of my hand and pour the bottle down the sink.”

  “Okay, yeah, I would,” he admitted.

  Serena reached over and grabbed the cigarette from his lips. She flicked it to the ground and crushed it under her foot. A few embers fizzled in the dirt. Stride felt an immediate longing and wondered if he could win the war twice.

  “You haven’t asked anything about me and Claire,” Serena said. She squinted into the sun, and Stride saw her tongue flick over her dry lips.

  “That’s true,” Stride replied flatly. It had been in and out of his thoughts all day. The sweet aroma of Claire in their bed. But he wasn’t going to say anything. He waited, needing a cigarette.

  “I get it,” Serena said. “It’s up to me. Tell you or not tell you. A lot of guys couldn’t live without knowing.”

  “I’m not saying I can,” Stride said.

  She stuthed her fingernails and looked incredibly nervous.

  “We had sex,” Serena told him.

  The words hung there between them, and Stride tried to read Serena’s face. She was embarrassed. Guilty. Scared. Proud.

  “I mean, we were going to have sex,” she rushed on. “Blake interrupted before anything could really happen. But that doesn’t matter. We had started. I was going to let her make love to me. I was going to make love to her. That’s the truth.”

  She wanted him to tell her everything was all right. He hoped the blankness on his own face didn’t register as disapproval.

  “Are you going to say something?” Serena asked.

  Stride said the first thing that occurred to him. “I have a raging hard-on.”

  Serena burst out laughing. Stride did, too. When the laughter died away, she kissed him hard and then whispered, “What about the rest of you?”

  “It doesn’t change anything for me. The real question is you.”

  “I feel like I purged a demon. But I was afraid I’d lose you because of it.”

  “That wasn’t going to happen.”

  “I’m sorry,” she told him.

  “You don’t need to be, not for this.”

  “I need to tell Claire the truth. Let her down gently.”

  “Have you talked to her?” Stride asked.

  Serena shook her head. “I’m worried. I tried her home, her cell phone, the club. Nothing. I don’t know where she is.”

  “Boni has her under wraps.”

  “That’s what scares me.”

  “I don’t think he’d actually harm her” Stride said.

  “No? He killed his own son. I don’t want her winding up as a so-called suicide. ‘My daughter was upset, couldn’t handle the stress,’ that kind of shit.”

  “You really care about her.”

  Serena hesitated. “Yes, I do. I could love her. But I don’t.”

  Stride was surprised at the depth of relief he felt, hearing her say those words. “She wanted the truth to come out. Now it’s probably not going to. Can Claire live with that?”

  “Boni won’t give her a choice.”

  “How about us? Can we live with the whitewash?”

  Serena shrugged. “It’s not thefirsttime, is it?”

  Stride heard and understood the message. They had resolved the murder of Rachel Deese, the case that had brought them together, in a way that left part of the truth hidden. At Stride’s request. It was their secret.

  “Sometimes politics and money win out, Jonny,” she added.

  “In Vegas?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “The bigger question is whether he’ll let us live,” Stride said. “We heard things we weren’t supposed to hear.”

  “Mickey.”

  “Exactly. Whoever he is, he’s at the heart of Boni’s power.”

  “But he must have been a kid back then,” Serena said.

  “Helen Truax said he was a pool boy. A lifeguard, looking to get lucky with gamblers’ wives. Maybe he tried to seduce Amira, and things got out of hand.”

  Serena shook her head. “No way. He was with Amira because Boni wanted him there. He called Rucci when the job was done. The fight story was just a ruse.”

  “And from that day forward, Boni owned his soul,” Stride said. He took out his cell phone and began dialing. “Let’s find out who the bastard is.”

  “Helen didn’t know.”

  “Maybe Moose will.”

  Stride heard the big comedian’s voice on the phone, and he reintroduced himself. Moose began to fall all over himself, congratulating Stride on catching Tierney’s killer. Stride let the man gush. He could imagine his eyebrows dancing with joy.

  “I have a question for you,” Stride said when Moose finally took a breath.

  “Anything.”

  “Do you remember a lifeguard at the Sheherezade back in 1967 named Mickey?”

  There was a long pause on the phone, and Moose began to backtrack. “There were a lot of college kids around back then.”

  “That’s not an answer, Moose. Did you know him?”

  “Why? What’s this about?”

  “It’s just a loose end we’re trying to clear up.”

  He could
hear Moose breathing. “Well, I don’t think he makes a big secret of it. He put himself through law school working at the Sheherezade. A lot of the big shots did.”

  Stride began to feel uneasy. He wondered if he had made a mistake that would get him and Serena killed. “So you’ve stayed in touch with him?”

  “Of course. Mickey Durand is the best damn friend the entertainment industry has ever had in this state. God and the voters willing, he’ll be reelected as governor next month.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  Beatrice Erdspring punched the volume button on the television remote control repeatedly, but it didn’t make any difference in the sound. The newscasters kept whispering, and she couldn’t hear a thing.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she grumbled, pulling the cream-colored blanket up over her nightgown.

  She tried several channels, but it was all the same, so she went back to the local CBS station, where that nice Hispanic man with the black hair read the news. Raul was his name. He looked strong and trustworthy, and he had an attractive mustache. Her husband, Emmett, had always worn a mustache.

  It wasn’t like Raul to whisper, but even when Beatrice craned her neck and cupped a hand behind her ear, she could barely make out a word.

  “Speak up, Raul,” she said to the television.

  Beatrice was frustrated, because she recognized the attractive woman in the old photograph on the screen, and she wanted to hear what they were saying about her.

  “Can you hear that, Rowena?” Beatrice called to her roommate. “I think the television is broken again. Or maybe the remote control needs batteries.”

  Rowena was in the other bed in the one-room studio they shared in the assisted living facility in Boulder City. Beatrice looked over and saw that Rowena was sleeping again. She slept most of the time. Beatrice had gone through three roommates in the past year, and she was afraid that Rowena would be gone soon, too. It was too bad, because when she was awake, Rowena was a stitch. She had raised six children on a dairy farm in Iowa, and the stories she told could keep you laughing for hours.

  Like the one about her eight-year-old daughter trying to “milk” a bull. Well, wasn’t that a surprise for both of them!

  Beatrice stared at the television again and sighed. Raul had moved on to another story.

  She looked out the window at the main street of Boulder City. Cars whizzed by, heading off to Lake Mead or Hoover Dam. Flora had taken the residents on an outing to Lake Mead the previous month, and although the wind had mussed her hair, it had been lovely to see the water again. Not that Lake Mead was as pretty as Lake Tahoe, where she had lived for so many years, but it was good to be outside again. She enjoyed the heat, although she did miss the chill of those winter nights long ago, when she and Emmett would snuggle under the quilt together. She couldn’t handle the cold anymore, though. That was why she had retired in the southern part of the state.

  Flora came running into the room, her hands over her ears. She made a beeline for the television, clicked it off at the switch, and then put a hand over her heart, breathing heavily. She wagged a finger and said something that Beatrice couldn’t hear.

  “You’re mumbling again, Flora,” Beatrice told her. “Speak up, will you?”

  Flora came up to the side of the bed and looked like she was shouting, but the words were far away. “Bea, honey, you forgot to put in your hearing aids.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  Flora rustled in the nightstand drawer by Beatrice’s bed and came out triumphantly with two beige plugs that Beatricefitted in her ears each morning. She helped Beatrice insert them and then stood back, laughing. Flora was a three-hundred-pound Filipino woman, and her body jiggled all over when she laughed.

  “Is that better, honey?”

  “You don’t need to shout, Flora,” Beatrice said, which made Flora laugh again.

  “Do you want the television back on?” Flora asked.

  Beatrice shook her head. “No, I missed the story I wanted to see.”

  “Wha t story was that?”

  “Well, I missed it, so I don’t know! But they were showing a photograph of a lovely girl I knew back when I was a nurse.”

  “That’s nice,” Flora said. She was bustling around the room, straightening up, and had stopped paying attention. “Did you see they caught that terrible man? The one who killed all those people? Shot him off the top of a building. Bang, bang.”

  Flora fussed at the bedside. She nudged Beatrice forward, then grabbed and fluffed her two pillows with a meaty brown fist. “It’s romantic, though. He killed all those people to get revenge for his mother. His mother! My boys, it’s hard enoiigh getting them to show up for my birthday party.”

  “Who was his mother?” Beatrice asked.

  “What? Oh, one of those showgirls from the 1960s. She had to give up her baby. Isn’t that tragic? Can you imagine? I would go crazy giving up one of my babies. I’d be happy if they were living here when they were fifty. Of course, the way my boys are going, they might well be!”

  Beatrice frowned. “Are you talking about Amira Luz?”

  But Flora was already on her way out of the room and didn’t look back. Beatrice was alone again, except for Rowena, who was snoring. She remembered now-that was why she had taken her hearing aids out. Rowena snored like a 727 on takeoff.

  Beatrice thought about Amira Luz and smiled. It was so funny to see this beautiful, pregnant woman on the balcony of the suite, trying to do these strange, erotic dance moves while her bulging stomach got in the way.

  Flora must have been talking about Amira. Why else would her picture be on television after all these years?

  It didn’t make sense, though. Flora must have got it wrong.

  Beatrice turned on the television again and quickly lowered the volume with the remote. She waved at Raul, then began switching channels to see if someone else would have the story. Amira? No. They had made a mistake.

  FIFTY-THREE

  The invitation came, just as Stride expected. The following night at ten o’clock, they found themselves back in the bone white foyer of Boni’s penthouse suite in the Charlcombe Towers. Boni himself let them in through the double doors and guided them into the mammoth cowboy room. The light was low, just a few pale lamps and the glow from the tower outside.

  Boni wore a dark suit again. Stride caught the aroma of cigars and cologne. He still had an easy, charming smile, and Stride wondered if he was like the Cheshire cat, who could disappear and leave only the smile behind to fool people. He used a two-handed grip to shake both their hands.

  “You saved our lives, Detectives. Me and Claire. I felt I owed you a celebratory drink.”

  “That’s why we’re here?” Stride asked, suspicion in his voice.

  “Of course. You will drink with me, won’t you? You’re certainly not on duty now.”

  Message received and understood, Stride thought. This was all off the record.

  “Ms. Dial, I know you’d prefer mineral water or juice, of course. Detective Stride, what about you? Brandy?”

  Stride nodded.

  “I have an excellent brandy I think you’ll like,” Boni told Stride. He retired to the bar to pour a glass, as well as three fingers of whiskey for himself.

  Stride took a sip. It seemed to melt on his tongue.

  “Good, huh?” Boni asked.

  “Outstanding.”

  “Where’s Claire?” Serena asked.

  “I thought she needed a break,” Boni said. “These last few days have been stressful for her. I flew her down to St. Thomas. She’ll be back soon.”

  “I’d like to talk with her,” Serena said.

  “Of course. I’ll give you the number for the resort before you go. I’m sure she’d love to hear from you.”

  Stride took another sip of brandy. He wondered how this game was played. Who would start? How would they dance? What it really came down to was who would say the name first. It was foolish to pretend they didn’t all know what this was about.
>
  As it turned out, Boni moved the first pawn.

  “There’s someone here who would like to meet you,” he told them. “I bet you’d like to meet him, too.”

  Stride heard a swish of movement behind them, and when he turned, he saw the silver-haired governor of Nevada joining them from one of the interior rooms of the suite.

  “Mickey,” Boni called. “Come on in here. Meet those detectives who saved my neck.”

  Mike Durand was tall and imposing. He was heavily suntanned, but his aging skin was tight and unblemished. A face-lift, probably, with laser surgery to burn off the blotches of sixty-five years. Capped teeth, too, that gave him a huge alabaster smile. He was dressed in a black tuxedo that practically glowed, and he already had a whiskey in his hand, twice the size of Boni’s. Stride also noticed something that he hadn’t spotted before when he saw the man on television or in photographs. Durand had the meanest, most cutthroat eyes he had ever seen, worse than any hardened criminal’s. He could smile as he slit your throat. A perfect politician.

  Durand extended his hand. Stride and Serena didn’t smile back or try to shake hands, and Stride could see a barely contained fury in the governor’s face.

  No more pretenses.

  “I don’t think they’re going to keep this quiet,” Durand told Boni, as if they were alone in the room. “I thought you said you had this under control.”

  Stride watched Boni and realized to his surprise that the old man hated Mickey Durand. There was undisguised contempt in his stare, as if Mickey were a parasite that fed off him, but one that had wrapped itself around his entrails until he couldn’t tell anymore where one organism ended and the other began. Kill one, kill them both.

  “They’re police, Mickey,” Boni replied calmly. “Police don’t stop until they know the truth. So you and I, we’re going to tell them the truth. Then we can all put this behind us.”

  “They’ll talk. Hell, they could be wired.”

  Boni shook his head. “Ihave scanners in the foyer. They aren’t wired. As for talking, don’t worry. I think we can come to an arrangement that keeps us all happy.” He took a slug of whiskey and nodded at Stride. “You already know about Mickey. I know you talked to Moose. What else do you want to know?”