Dancing With Danger in Las Vegas: A Humorous Tiffany Black Mystery

by A. R. Winters

  When I was finally convinced that nobody was lying in wait for me, I released a loud sigh of relief. I hadn’t even been aware that I’d been holding my breath. But now I could feel the blood rushing through my veins, and I could hear the loudness of my own breath. I walked back to the front door, locked it, and then I sat on the sofa and stared at the envelope.

  Perhaps it was just a flyer from a nearby restaurant, I told myself. But I knew that wasn’t the case. I knew that someone had chosen to send me a message, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to open it and read it.

  I thought briefly that perhaps I could avoid reading it now. I would have a good sleep, and when I woke up, I would read it. But I knew that if I didn’t read it, I wouldn’t be able to sleep very well. “It’s probably nothing,” I muttered aloud as I forced myself to pick up the envelope and open it carefully.

  There was a piece of paper inside, and when I opened it, it turned out to be a typewritten message: “You should stop looking into other people’s deaths. Ha ha.”

  I placed the piece of paper and the envelope gingerly on the coffee table and stared at them.

  The note was particularly unnerving because of the weird “ha ha” at the end. What kind of crazy person sends a threatening note and ends it with “ha ha”?

  I didn’t like it one bit.

  I stared at the note some more, trying to put myself into the shoes of a deranged killer who laughed about his threats.

  The more I thought about it, the more annoyed I got. At the back of my mind, a little voice told me that Ronan must’ve sent me this note. He probably hadn’t liked my insisting that we meet at our planned time, and now he wanted me to back off the case. I didn’t know what he was hiding, and I didn’t know why he would feel the need to threaten me if he was innocent of Ella’s murder—but it must’ve been Ronan who had sent the note. I couldn’t think of anyone else who would do such a thing.

  Somehow, I forced myself to go change and get into bed. I slept fitfully for a few hours, and then I got up, got dressed, and texted Ian to come over.

  Ian arrived within five minutes, carrying a frozen pizza that I immediately put into the oven. It was almost lunchtime, and I was starving.

  I told Ian about the note, and he peered at it and frowned.

  “Maybe this guy thinks he’s the Joker,” said Ian. “Maybe he thinks that threatening people is all a big joke.”

  I was about to rant and rave about people who sent creepy notes, when there was a knock on the door.

  When I opened it, my heart skipped a beat, and I smiled.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” said Detective Ryan Dmitrou. “It’s been a few days.”

  I felt myself drowning in his piercing gray eyes. He looked as handsome as ever. He was almost too good looking to be a detective, I thought to myself. His brown hair was wavy and tousled, and his square jaw was covered with day-old stubble.

  I wrapped my arms around his broad shoulders, and we exchanged a brief kiss before Ian said, “Hey, Ryan! It’s good to see you—you’re just in time.”

  I pulled away from Ryan reluctantly, and he said to Ian, “What do you mean, just in time?” He sniffed and said, “I guess you two are eating frozen pizza again?”

  “Yeah,” said Ian. “Did you want to join us for lunch?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Ryan. “I don’t have much time. I just dropped by to say hello to Tiffany—I was in the neighborhood, but I’m still working on a case.”

  “Well, we’ve got another case for you,” said Ian. “Tiffany got a really creepy letter under her door last night.”

  Ryan looked at me, his gray eyes full of concern. “What note?” And then his eyes drifted over to the coffee table, and he narrowed his eyes. “Another threatening note under your door? Maybe it’s time you got yourself some security cameras.”

  “Mr. Kaczynski across the hall won’t let us do that,” said Ian. “He says it invades his privacy.”

  “He’s having an affair with someone,” I said. “I can’t risk annoying my neighbors, and having the apartment owners’ association kicking me out of this place.”

  Ryan looked at the note and shook his head. “I’ll take it to the station with me for fingerprinting,” he said. “But you know how these things go. Even if I asked for a rush job, it’ll take at least a couple of days.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. “I think I know who sent the note, and I don’t think he really means business. He probably just wants me to stop looking into everything, but of course I’m not going to.”

  “Who do you think sent it?” said Ryan.

  “Ronan,” I said, and I filled him and Ian in on my text conversation with Ronan last night.

  “This doesn’t sound like Ronan’s style,” said Ian. “I still don’t think he had anything to do with Ella’s death.”

  I smiled cynically. “You’re just a Ronan fan. Who else would bother to send me this? The timing’s a little too perfect.”

  “Well, I’ll take this with me anyway,” said Ryan. He leaned forward to give me a quick kiss on the cheek. “I need to rush back to work now.”

  “You are coming to dinner tonight, aren’t you?” I said. “My mom still insists on setting me up with these horrible people.”

  Ryan grinned. “I’ll be there. Although I don’t think my presence will stop your mother.”

  “I’m going to be optimistic about that one,” I said. “At least once she meets you, my mother is finally going to believe I have a boyfriend.”

  Ian and I had planned to meet Ella’s best friend, Felicity, this evening, but just as we’d finished our lunch, Felicity texted us to say that she could chat with us during her lunch break. So Ian and I dashed out the door and drove over to the salad bar where Felicity had asked us to meet her.

  The salad bar was housed in a squat terracotta building, wedged in between an insurance office and a hair salon. There were a couple of small law firms nearby, and I assumed that Felicity worked at one of them.

  Inside the salad bar, it was all modern and bright and Scandinavian style—pale wooden floors, white-topped tables, and low-backed wooden chairs.

  Felicity was already waiting for us at one of the tables, and she waved us over. She had a massive Greek salad in front of her, and once introductions were made all around, she dug into her food with a fork, chomping on feta cheese and olives as we chatted about Ella’s death.

  Felicity looked a lot more relaxed than the lawyers we’d met at Ella’s firm. She wore a dark gray skirt suit and a white blouse. Her curly brown hair was chopped into a stylish short haircut, and her brown eyes were tinged with sadness when she spoke about Ella.

  “I was her closest friend,” she said. “We’d catch up every week or two, and we knew pretty much all about each other’s lives.”

  “You must’ve been shocked by the news,” I said.

  Felicity nodded. “I was. I never expected anything like that to happen to someone I know.”

  There was no one else sitting down and eating inside the salad bar, but there was a dark-suited man placing an order at the register. I assumed that on weekdays this place did a brisk carryout trade, with workers from nearby offices grabbing a healthy lunch to eat at their desks.

  There was a short pause as Felicity gazed off into space for a few seconds, and then she shook her head. “It’s hard to make friends in Vegas,” she said. “Most people are just passing through, and they’re only here for a few days. And when you work as hard as most lawyers do, you don’t really have time to go out and meet people or make new friends.”

  “That’s true,” said Ian. “I never really made any friends here until I met Tiffany.”

  I grimaced. Most of my own friends were from back in my high school days, and many of them had moved away. But it was a common refrain—that people moved to a different city for work, and then they didn’t have time to make new friends.

  “People who move out here for work,” said Felicity, �
��plan to move away after a few years. Vegas is a fun place for tourists, but it’s not so much fun when you live here permanently.”

  “Most of the lawyers at Ella’s firm told us that they didn’t even have time for relationships,” said Ian.

  “That’s true,” said Felicity.

  “Are you seeing anyone?” I asked.

  Felicity shook her head quickly. “What the other lawyers told you is true. It’s so hard to meet new people—you can’t even make friends, and a relationship is just…”

  “What about Ella?” I said. “Was she seeing anyone?”

  “Not that I knew about. Of course, she might have been seeing someone in secret and decided not to tell me.”

  “How about any ex-boyfriends?”

  Felicity shook her head again. “I don’t think Ella dated anyone while she was in Vegas.”

  “Maybe she was seeing someone in secret, like you said,” I said. “Maybe she was dating someone from her work.”

  Felicity laughed. “That doesn’t sound likely. Ella had a strict policy about never dating anyone from work. When she got her first job, she dated one of her coworkers, and it ended badly. She told me she’d never make that same mistake again.”

  I frowned and tapped my fingers on the table. “Did she mention anyone from her work to you? Maybe someone she disliked?”

  Felicity munched on a tomato thoughtfully. “She did mention she was having a tough time at work,” she said finally. “She said it was really busy, and that she was looking into something that she’d learned recently.”

  “In the Ronan Hastings case,” I said excitedly.

  Felicity shook her head. “Ella didn’t tell me what it was about. Just that she’d learned something new, and that work was really busy, that she had all these projects on her plate. She was working with one of the partners in the firm, and she kept being put on very important projects. Of course, she’d also say that she was very grateful for those projects, because that meant she was likely to get a promotion soon. Oh—and now that I think back, she said she was competing against one other guy for the promotion—Cary or someone.”

  “Keith,” Ian and I said in unison.

  “Yes, that’s it. She said this Keith guy didn’t like her, and that he was trying to sabotage her chances.”

  I chewed my lower lip thoughtfully. “Did she say anything else about Keith?”

  Felicity shook her head. “No. Just that he wasn’t very nice.”

  I nodded. “And what about Eric? Did she say anything about a guy named Eric?”

  For a split second, something like recognition glimmered in Felicity’s eyes. But then she shook her head. “I thought the name sounded familiar, but I can’t really remember Ella saying anything about Eric.”

  “Oh,” I said, unable to keep the disappointment out of my voice. “We were told by the other associates that Eric had been acting strangely around Ella.”

  Felicity frowned. “How do you mean?”

  “People told us he was avoiding Ella,” said Ian. “It sounds like an odd thing for a grown man to do.”

  Felicity shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t really avoiding her. Maybe it just seemed that way to some people.”

  I shook my head, unconvinced. “You were at home when Ella died, weren’t you?” I said.

  Felicity’s eyes flashed with anger. “That’s true. I was home. And you know what? For a long time the cops acted like I might’ve had something to do with Ella’s death. It was really annoying—she was my closest friend.”

  “Why did the cops think you might have had something to do with her death?” I said, surprised. Felicity’s affection for Ella had seemed pretty genuine to me.

  “Oh, you know,” Felicity said, lifting one shoulder in a half-shrug. “They thought maybe I was jealous of her professional success, or that we’d had some kind of argument. Just because they didn’t have any other real suspects, that doesn’t mean her closest friend would have anything to do with her death.”

  I agreed with Felicity. I couldn’t see any reason to think that Felicity might have had something to do with Ella’s death. And the lack of an alibi doesn’t necessarily make somebody a killer.

  “Do you think Ella would have gotten the promotion?” I said.

  Felicity stabbed a piece of cucumber with a fork and held it up in front of her. “I’m not sure. I really hoped she would get it—she’d been working so hard. But you can’t ever really tell with these kinds of things. One day you’re the boss’s darling, and the next day, they think you need to be demoted, or that a man would do a better job in a senior position.”

  “I guess things aren’t going very well at your firm,” I said sympathetically.

  “No,” said Felicity with a scowl. “It’s not that I work any less hard than the guys—but when it comes time for promotions, it’s always the men who get them. Just because I’m a woman, the Powers That Be think that I’ll take off any day and choose to have babies, or that I won’t be as good at dealing with clients.”

  “It’s tough being a woman,” said Ian. “I had to dress up like a woman once, and nobody took me seriously.”

  Felicity looked at him and smiled. “You must’ve looked like a funny woman.”

  “There was probably that too,” Ian admitted.

  We asked Felicity a few more questions about Ella—had she been acting strangely in the weeks leading up to her death, or had she mentioned anything unusual? But the answers were no, Ella had seemed perfectly normal right up till the last time that Felicity had seen her. Felicity couldn’t think of anyone who might have hated Ella enough to hurt her.

  “But there must have been someone,” I mused out loud to Ian as we headed back to my car. “Somebody out there must’ve had a very good reason for wanting Ella dead.”

  13

  On a hunch, Ian and I headed back to the offices of Elman and Associates to talk to Eric.

  When we showed up, Eric was hunched over some paperwork. He didn’t seem too pleased to see us, but he forced a smile onto his face and said with fake friendliness, “Don’t tell me you’ve thought of something else?”

  “Actually, I have,” I said. “Can we talk to you in one of those conference rooms, instead of out here in your cubicle?”

  “Why not?” said Eric with a wan smile.

  We followed him into one of the empty conference rooms and closed the door behind us. After we all settled into comfy chairs, Eric said, “So, what did you guys think of, suddenly?”

  The truth is, we hadn’t really thought of anything new. However, it had occurred to me that if Eric or Keith knew something about Ella, they might be more willing to share that fact if we talked somewhere private—as opposed to somewhere like their cubicles, where ten of their coworkers could overhear them.

  So I said, “I know you said you didn’t have an alibi for the night of Ella’s death, but I was wondering if you remember what you did when you were at home. Did you watch some TV? Perhaps some show that was airing at a particular time?”

  Eric shook his head. “I was reading a book on the history of the Civil War.”

  “Oh.” I scrunched up my mouth and looked slightly dejected.

  I wondered what else I could ask Eric, when Ian said, “We’ve just come from talking to Felicity. Ella’s best friend.”

  Eric raised one eyebrow. “Oh?”

  Ian nodded sagely. “Yes. That’s why we came here afterward. Felicity told us some very interesting things.”

  I didn’t know where Ian was going with his bluff, but Eric’s look of mild amusement tinged with politeness was suddenly replaced with one of wariness.

  “Oh?” he said again, except this time, his voice was guarded and low.

  “She told us everything,” I said, continuing Ian’s bluff. “So you don’t need to keep it a secret from us anymore.”

  Suddenly, relief washed over Eric’s face. “That’s great!” he said. “I kept telling her there was no point keeping it a secret from th
e police, but she said she still didn’t want anyone to know. We agreed that we’d tell people only if we absolutely had to.”

  I still had no idea what Eric was talking about, so I tried to mask my surprise by nodding and saying, “And Ella found out?”

  “No, no, of course not!” said Eric. “She was one of the people we were keeping it a secret from. Felicity thought Ella might feel hurt for some reason if she found out the two of us were dating. I didn’t see why it’d be such a big deal, but Felicity said we needed to be together for much longer before we told anybody else about our relationship.”

  Realization dawned. “That’s why you were avoiding Ella—because you were afraid you’d blurt out something by mistake.”

  Eric nodded. “Exactly. I found the whole ‘secret’ thing quite childish, and I wanted to tell everyone. But I knew Felicity would hate me if I let something slip out by accident, so I had to be extra careful. I was worried that if I talked to Ella and she mentioned Felicity, I’d look very happy or something, and then Ella would guess—and then Felicity would think I’d told people.”

  “Women,” said Ian, in a sympathetic voice, “why do they want to make everything so complicated?”

  “Maybe Felicity had a point,” I said, suddenly feeling the need to defend all of womankind for our complexity. “You know how it is when people learn about your relationship, and then you have to break up, and things become awkward. Felicity probably worried that if you two broke up, Ella would find it hard to work with you.”

  Eric shrugged. “Maybe there was that.”

  We chatted a little more about his relationship with Felicity and how they’d met at an industry networking event and had been keeping it a secret from everyone they knew.

  Now that I understood Eric’s behavior, I needed to focus on Keith.

  As we were saying goodbye to Eric, I said, “Ian and I are going to head over to talk to Keith now.”