“Look, I’m going to run your chart tonight.” She steamed all over when she stood and reached for a towel. She didn’t look real. “I’ll pick you up at your door, call you first, think of a place we could go.”
“Bradone, talk to me.”
Bradone stood on the tub deck with the towel wrapped around her, head cocked to one side, the edges of her hairdo dripping, honest-to-God shooting stars zipping above her. It was creepy. “You’re really very perceptive, aren’t you, Charlie Greene?”
“No, I’m really very scared.” And I don’t even believe in astrology. The gambling blimp’s tacky advertising board flashed PLAY KENO! over the stargazer’s left shoulder. “Are the murders over with for what’s left of the ruins of my vacation or not?”
For the first time since they’d met, Charlie heard uncertainty in the woman’s tone. “Somehow, I don’t think so.”
CHAPTER 18
THE NEXT MORNING, a limo drove Charlie and Bradone to a secluded restaurant on the edge of a golf course, far from the glitz of the Strip and Fremont. They sat at an outside table in the sun, grape-arbor decor separating the tables from one another but opening onto the view of bright green greens and distant golfers.
Bradone pulled a cell phone and a paper notebook like Matt Tooney’s from her purse. Dressed to kill in a wide-brimmed straw hat and country-club dress, Bradone looked great in black too. But that choice in color didn’t make Charlie feel any easier.
“What did the charts and planets and stuff have to say?”
“May I suggest the creamed eggs on croissant?”
“You said if I came here, we’d talk. You’re not talking.”
“Let’s do talk. But not about dead bodies until we’ve had some coffee and food.” Sun drilled through the holes in the straw brim of her hat to pinprick her face and throat. “Have you heard from your mother since last we talked?”
“Well, no, but that’s not the problem right now, is it?” And Jesus, why are you in black and hardly any makeup?
Was the shading on her lids charcoal color instead of blue because she’d been up all night running charts about Charlie’s future and didn’t like what the stars were saying?
Don’t forget you don’t believe in astrology.
“Charlie, remember when I told you I had a secret about Richard? At the big pool on the recreation deck?”
“Not really, but what were you doing down there anyway when you had your own pool at the penthouse?”
“It was important to Richard. Men need to feel less vulnerable now and then. You know that.”
The arrival of coffee and orange juice helped settle Charlie’s nervousness. Bradone McKinley’s voice was not so soothing and melodic this morning.
“What I found funny about your mention of wild-yam cream and your mother’s menopausal problems was this.” Bradone drew a small white jar out of her black straw purse. It looked a lot like the one Ben Hanley’s sister-in-law, Betty, had shown Charlie at dinner at the Baronshire. “Read the label.”
WATER-DEIONIZED, WILD YAM EXTRACT, GLYCERYL STEARATE, PEG-100 STEARATE, ALOE VERA GEL, GLYCERINE, STEARIC ACID, SAFFLOWER OIL, PROGESTERONE, JOJOBA OIL, CHAMOMILE EXTRACT, BURDOCK ROOT EXTRACT, SIBERIAN GINSENG, PROPYLPARABEN.
“Bradone, people are dying like flies all around me. I could be next.”
“I swiped this from Richard’s shaving kit. Read the directions.”
Apply to soft skin regions such as neck, chest, buttocks, inner thighs, inner arms after showering for symptoms of advancing maturity such as incontinence, impotence, memory lapse, stiff joints, and insomnia.
Despite her growing anxiety, Charlie couldn’t stop the smile spreading across her face. “You mean my boss rubs sweet potatoes on himself? How come he made so much fun of my mom?”
“Because he’d never read the ingredients on his snake oil. Just the name.”
The stuff was called Bubba’s Youth Enhancer for Men.
“Tell me about Mitch Hilsten,” Bradone demanded when a muffin and fruit plate arrived for her, creamed hard-boiled eggs over a croissant with pineapple hunks for Charlie.
“He’s divorced with two grown daughters—”
“Everybody knows that. I mean, what’s he like in bed?”
“Like, does he snore or what?”
“Richard says you’re smitten with your secretary, who’s gay.”
“How’s Richard in bed?”
“Not bad for his age.”
“Must be the sweet potatoes.”
Bradone tried again. “Is Mitch Hilsten as owly and pouty and reclusive as he appears in interviews?”
“Actually, he’s very sensitive and thoughtful and pretty cheerful. He just doesn’t like the press.”
“That’s not smart.”
“Seems to be working for him.” Mitch’s career was sky-rocketing after a scary decline. He’d always been a household word with the public but was too good-looking for Hollywood’s recent infatuation with scuzzy everyman heroes.
“Does he have a lot of moles or anything?”
“Not really. His teeth are capped. Did you know his smile was insured through Lloyd’s of London when Lloyd’s was the place to be insured? One time, I was in the Utah dessert with him and that smile nearly blinded me.”
“Charlie, can’t you throw me a crumb?”
Charlie pretended to consider the request while enjoying her food instead. “Okay,” she relented. “Mitch has the most wonderful—” She caught the waiter’s eye and raised her cup. “The most beautiful—”
“What? The most beautiful what?”
Charlie shook more pepper onto her creamed eggs and picked out a big hunk of hard-boiled egg to savor. “Back.”
“Back of what?”
“Back of his back.”
“You slept with Mitch Hilsten and you looked at his back?”
Once. One night. And I’ll never live it down. “Look, he’s threatening to be here tomorrow. You can see for yourself.”
“His back?”
“It’s very nice.” Charlie wondered how much Bradone was paying for that limo and driver waiting out front.
“Okay, you win round one.” The astrologer put her hands up, palms outward. “How about Georgette Millrose?”
“She fired me and signed on with Jethro Larue. It happens. She got tired of being midlist. I don’t know an author who isn’t tired of it. Maybe Jethro knows something I don’t.”
Bradone’s phone mewled faintly and she opened her notebook as she picked it up. She listened carefully to somebody named Harry, turning pages in her notebook that were scrawled with diagrams and iconlike sketches. She studied one at the very back that had a plastic-coated table of figures and signs and dates.
“Sell Singer and buy Stryker and double the number of shares we discussed yesterday.… Harry, you know I don’t care about your little insider tips. Do what I say, like a good boy.” She punched him off and closed the notebook. “My broker. He’s not very clever, but I never take his advice.”
“You play the stock market too? I thought you just gambled at the tables.”
“Charlie, I have to invest my winnings so they’ll grow. You have to lose big-time to be allowed in the high-stakes games.”
“I’d think just paying to stay in that penthouse would make the Hilton happy enough.”
“Those penthouses are comped to a select few who are expected to lose heavily. Trick is to lose a few million one time, win it back, say, the next two times you visit a resort.”
“A few million?” Charlie searched for words that weren’t there. “I suppose you have DRIPs too.”
“Of course. The secret to the stock market is not playing it, but in compounding.”
Did everybody know about this but Charlie? “Okay, we’re even. You win round two. He whistles.”
“Who whistles?”
“Mitch Hilsten. Instead of snoring.”
* * *
“Were you really flying over Yucca and Area Fifty-one or was
that trick photography?” They were in the limo. The driver had been ordered to drive around for a while. “Tell me, Charlie.”
“Not till you tell me why you’re dressed in black and why you are avoiding talking about the one thing I want to know.”
“Black seemed the proper mood for what I wanted to do with you today.”
“What, bury me?”
“If I’m to help you, we’ll have to do some detecting. But first, I have to know about Area Fifty-one and that robbery at the Hilton’s casino.”
So Charlie, who hated detecting, described her experience with the illegal flyover of undisclosed areas on the vast government reservation of the Nevada desert. “When I got back to the Hilton after that sickening flight with Evan and his motley crew, the lights went out. I didn’t know about the robbery until the next day.”
And why am I trusting you with all this?
“Trust your instincts, Charlie, they’re good ones.”
Tell that to Georgette Millrose and Jethro Larue.
Charlie’s impulse to trust this woman made her skeptical, but she felt drawn to Bradone as she might a female mentor or even a mother. Charlie, who was adopted, wondered fleetingly if her birth mother was more like Bradone than Edwina Greene. And then felt immediately guilty. But she also felt an unconditional acceptance here she never had with her mother or daughter.
Bradone doesn’t know you as well as your mother and daughter.
“This is all so peculiar.” The stargazer who earned her living gambling and compounding removed the oversized sunglasses to chew on an earpiece. Vertical worry lines formed at the corners of her mouth and between her eyebrows. “This plane you and Caryl Thompson, Evan, and his cameraman flew in was the burning plane out by Rachel on the news, wasn’t it? The Mooney.”
“They torched it themselves. I suppose so they couldn’t be traced to it. But then why did Evan show it burning at his little titillating screening? I think he’s gotten us all in a lot of trouble.”
“I’m afraid I do too. He’s acting like a little boy, thumbing his nose at the authorities.”
“He says it’s all going to be fine because of some magic he’s intending to pull off. Somehow I don’t find that reassuring. You’ve got to watch out for these geniuses.”
“This morning’s paper claims all aboard that plane were incinerated.” The astrologer’s worry lines deepened. “The story used it as a warning to people trying to invade that airspace, hinting that it was shot down by keepers of the secrets out there. Evan’s armed response personnel? They must know you all got away.”
“They could sift through the ashes and notice there are no charred bones, and now, after the screening, they have to know who we are.” They’d also be able to tell the Mooney landed instead of crashing. Why was the truth being covered up here? Force of habit? Were military authorities playing along with Evan’s amateurish stage setting for a reason? Maybe they were getting ready to spring a surprise of their own. What if that wand thing, that fancy laser-phaser in the casino-heist clip—wasn’t special effects?
“So the young pilot was murdered because he angered somebody by flying Evan and crew over restricted areas when he himself was a pilot for this airline ferrying workers out to those same areas. And Timothy Graden died because you told him the pilot’s death was murder and not jaywalking, and he may or may not have suggested same to someone or left a note or two around the police station declaring such—that one’s pretty weak, Charlie.”
“What if he did some investigating of his own?”
“And Ben Hanley from Kenosha, Wisconsin, died because he drank a poisoned drink meant for you. A tiny mention of that in this morning’s paper claimed he died of a stroke in his room at the Hilton.”
“They were staying at Circus, Circus.”
“Okay, but that means your life is in danger.”
“Not if Art Sleem poisoned the drink. He’s dead.”
“But you think he was working for someone else. That someone isn’t dead.”
“Art said he freelanced. He was a bouncer for Loopy Louie’s. The government guy investigating the murders at Evan’s said Art worked for the government.”
“Sounds like he was for hire by anyone. We need a motive for three easily documented murders. Sleem, Tooney from the IRS, and the other bouncer from Loopy’s.”
“I thought astrologers read the stars for answers. You sound more like a cop.” Much as Charlie hated detecting, she enjoyed this woman. Must be fun to live life as one big adventure.
“We need the deductive methods of the police and have at our disposal added insight. But who could walk up to three grown men and have time to shoot each squarely in the forehead without at least the last one lunging forward and getting shot less than squarely? They were most likely at Evan Black’s house for nefarious reasons, but what would two bouncers have in common with an IRS man? And how did Tooney get there before you if you’d just left him at the Hilton?”
“Stolen money? And they might not all have been shot at the same time, but in different parts of the house and moved to the great room. And I changed clothes and made a phone call before I left. Maybe Matt Tooney got a faster cab than I did, surprised Sleem and the bald bouncer searching the place. Maybe they shot him.” Or were they looking for the wandphaser?
“Who shot them?”
Charlie leaned toward her friend’s hat brim and whispered, “Can we trust this guy?” She gestured toward the driver and the glass panel between them. There was something about the back of the guy’s head under the improbable cap … or was it the neck? “Do we know it’s really soundproof back here?”
A touch of the familiar playfulness returned to Bradone’s expression as she picked up the speaker phone and rapped on the window. “The Janet Terminal, please.”
CHAPTER 19
CHARLIE AND THE stargazer gazed through a chain-link fence at an unmarked building on a far corner of McCarran International Airport. An eight-foot chain link with barbed wire in a Y formation on top, as if intended to keep people in and out at the same time. According to legend, this is where Patrick the hunk and his fellow pilots would have picked up and returned the workers they transported between Groom Lake and Vegas.
Behind them, their smirking driver leaned against the limo, and every time Charlie glanced over her shoulder, he raised thick black eyebrows above small round sunglasses. He wore a dark suit but with a tam-o’-shanter pulled low over his forehead.
Between them and the driver stretched an unnecessarily wide drainage ditch of hardscrabble graded sand/dirt. Charlie had painful pieces of it in her sandals still and dreaded the return trip. It was more like a dry moat that extended around the front of this little corner of the airport, as well.
Across the side road, along which the limo was parked, a concrete block wall formed the back of a row of hangars for the private jets of the elite, according to Bob, the smirking driver. Charlie had an irrational problem believing in men named Bob. The eyebrows alone made him highly suspicious.
“How do we know this is the Janet Terminal?” Bradone asked. “There’s no sign on the building.”
“If there was, it wouldn’t be undisclosed,” Bob said.
“But it could be a warehouse, a repair shop. Anything.”
A small nondescript concrete building in tiered levels and two-tone gray. Its windows either heavily tinted in bright green or covered with inside shades of that color. No markings, no flags, just a plethora of tall light poles among the cars in the lot and surveillance cameras on the corners of the building. The tails of two white airliners with no insignia were poised over the roof, one on each side.
“So now what?” Charlie asked.
“Let’s try another tack”—Bradone lowered her voice and turned away from their driver—“now that we’re not in the car. Let’s start with murder number one. The pilot was connected with Area Fifty-one through this airline, with Evan through flying him over it, and with Art Sleem, a freelance enforcer who could w
ell have had more than one employer.”
“I can’t believe Sleem really worked for the government.”
“Governments hire temporary help just like everybody else, And a lot of it undercover so they can’t be held accountable. No reason why Sleem couldn’t be working for Loopy Louie and one small sliver of the government. Maybe himself too. But what, Charlie, if all this was connected to the robbery at the Hilton casino, as well?” A jet screamed low overhead and a whirly little wind tunnel, which may or may not have been caused by it, lifted Bradone’s hat high in the air, flipped it a couple of times, and dropped it on the other side of the fence.
“Looks like you blew your cover,” Bob said behind them, and guffawed.
* * *
They dumped Bob and the limo back at the Hilton, slipped into their rooms, and, ignoring telephone message lights, donned blue jeans and shirts for the Jane Doe tourist look. Charlie felt pretty silly by the time she met her accomplice outside a corner door by the glass elevator on the outside of the building.
Bradone looked mysterious behind her Jackie Onassis sunglasses. Avoiding all ears, they walked to the Strip. “I have the feeling the police are going to be looking for you with further questions. We’ll just keep moving and thinking and sorting this out. You may be safer away from the hotel.”
Charlie would rather be playing blackjack. “Art Sleem never seemed to have much of a problem finding me.”
“Good thought.” Bradone pulled her into an alley behind the old Debbie Reynolds theater and museum, the pictures of the stars—Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, John Wayne, Judy Garland—still gracing its front. All beautiful then. All dead now.
They watched for passing foot traffic. There wasn’t any. The heat coming off Debbie’s white stucco met that of the white-painted concrete block of the Bank of America, where they stood about midalley.
“See, what you have to understand about astrology, Charlie,” Bradone started off again, “is that it doesn’t give answers. It gives clues. Its study can recommend paths to follow and those not to take. Think of it as more like a road map than a manual.”
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