Vegas Stripped (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 2)

by Stephanie Caffrey

  "Who the fuck is out there?" It was a deep, primeval ogre voice.

  Carlos sprung up and we bolted toward the parking lot. I had guessed that Mayfield was in a state where he couldn't give chase, but I was wrong. When I peeked backward, he was huffing after us with a speed I wouldn't have guessed he possessed. He'd seen me now, and there was nothing to do but run.

  We breezed into the hotel lobby and flew out the front door. Carlos paused for a second and reached into his pocket.

  "Come on!" I yelled.

  "Just wait," he hissed. He pulled out a folding knife and plunged it sharply into the rear left tire of Mayfield's Porsche, which was still parked out front.

  "Nice," I muttered. We hightailed it to our car and started it up. As we pulled out, I saw Mayfield's fat, bloated figure bent halfway over as he gripped his knees and caught his breath. Carlos stepped on it and got us the hell out of there.

  "That was close," Carlos whispered.

  "You think?" I whipped out my phone. "Let's see how the video looks."

  I punched it up and watched the twelve-second video in silence. "It's okay. You can tell it's him, but I don't know about the girls. They look young, but it's pretty dark and grainy."

  "Crap," Carlos muttered. "What a waste. Now we've probably scared him half to death."

  "Not really. It's only a matter of proof. The video is good enough, and we're both witnesses. And if Ethan's up for it, we can get a whole staff of people out here to interview people. Someone will talk about Mayfield's little hobby."

  Carlos nodded, unconvinced.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The drive back from Pahrump was quiet. Neither of us was in the mood to discuss what we'd seen that evening. On top of that, we had the moral dilemma of our failure to call the police or to otherwise find a way to protect the two girls. I rationalized it by telling myself that the cops wouldn't have been able to do anything by the time they got there. Hell, we were right outside the bungalow, and I didn't think we would have been able to do much. Mayfield was just finishing up when we got there. The damage had been done. I still felt uneasy about just standing by and not doing anything, though. Maybe Carlos did too.

  Carlos broke the silence. "When I was fourteen, I always fantasized about the girls in my class, just like all the other guys did. But seeing them like that makes you realize how young they actually are."

  "Feeling old?"

  "Big time."

  We reached the southern Vegas outskirts around five o'clock. Carlos dropped me at my condo, where I made a proper breakfast and vegged out on the couch. I didn't think I'd be able to sleep, but I ended up crashing for most of the day. My phone rang around four. It was Cody.

  "Aren't you checking your e-mail these days?"

  "Oops. I was gone overnight. I never thought to check."

  "Doesn't matter," Cody said. "I e-mailed you to tell you I can get you a meeting with Jerry Conn if you still want."

  "Wow. I thought you were just showing off when you said you knew him."

  Cody laughed. "If I'm going to pretend to know a celebrity, it's not going to be some old washed-up singer."

  "I suppose. But I'm not sure I even need to bother him at this point. I got something for my client last night that might just trump everything."

  "Going to share?"

  "Not yet. I want to see what Ethan wants to do with it. My guess is, you'll read about it in the crime section of the paper tomorrow. Or on the front page." Regardless of what Ethan wanted to do with the information, I was going to call the authorities one way or another. But Ethan had paid a lot of money for the video I had made, so I figured he was due a little advance notice.

  "Well, I told Jerry you're going to see him today. Or tonight. He's leaving town for Cabo or somewhere like that tomorrow morning. I think he's actually looking forward to meeting you."

  "Why would he want to meet me? What did you tell him?"

  "I just told him you're a private investigator who also happens to be the hottest exotic dancer on the Strip."

  I sighed. "Even at seventy-five, men never change."

  Cody gave me Jerry Conn's number, and I promised to arrange to meet him later that day. I didn't have to dance until ten, so I had plenty of time and nothing else on my calendar. And I figured Ethan was tied up with his usual early evening performance at the Copa, so there was no point trying to get in touch with him.

  I didn't have high hopes, but Ethan had paid me a bundle, so I figured I might as well dial up Jerry Conn to see if he had any hint about why the Copa had hired Mayfield as his replacement instead of Ethan. I figured it was something we could handle over the phone, but Conn insisted on a meeting. I supposed I should have been excited. Cody had been trying to do me a favor by arranging the meeting, but I wasn't that thrilled to meet a horny old dude, even if he was a horny old dude who used to be famous.

  Jerry and I had agreed to meet up at MIX, a bar on the sixty-third floor of the pretentiously named THEhotel, the supposedly chic and more upscale cousin to Mandalay Bay. It was pretty far from my condo, but Jerry said he was a regular there and they'd get us a deal along with an amazing view.

  He was right about the view. Being a local, I tended to stay away from most of the hotel restaurants and bars except for those within stumbling distance of my center-Strip condo. From the far south end of the Strip, the view was spectacular. I was trying to pick out the balcony of my own condo when I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder.

  "You must be Raven," said a husky male voice.

  I stood up and turned to face him. Jerry Conn was much shorter than I had imagined—maybe five-foot-eight, tops. His face had an onion-like appearance, with thin skin pulled back tightly as a result of some serious plastic surgery, and his lips were puffy and shiny, as though he'd just come from a Botox party.

  Jerry pulled up a chair next to me, and in an instant a waitress pranced over and began oozing phony enthusiasm. "Mr. Conn, so nice to have you back!"

  "Nice to be here, Kat! Nice to be alive! Make us two of my usual, would you?" Conn was almost as bubbly as the waitress. She disappeared before I could protest.

  "I'm actually working later, so unfortunately, I won't be joining you," I said.

  "Suit yourself. But at least keep the drink in front of you so it doesn't look like I'm having two all by myself." He flashed me a conspiratorial wink.

  I had decided to lay it on thick: in for a penny, in for a pound. I touched Conn's arm affectionately. "You are naughty, Mr. Conn!"

  He beamed at me. "I know this is all an act, but I'm happy to play along."

  I felt like protesting but didn't have the heart. He had busted me cold, so we might as well drop the charade and get down to business. "I assume Cody told you what I was interested in talking about."

  Jerry shook his head and looked serious for a moment. "Funny business, that thing with Mickey Mayfield. Of all people, they pick him." He sneered. It was almost the identical reaction Ethan had expressed. Him.

  "I was thinking you had to be in the loop on that, right? I mean, they were basically picking your successor after how many years?"

  "Thirty-one. Can you believe that? Thirty-one years working in the same place, singing the same songs."

  "Do you miss it?"

  He leaned back in his chair and gazed out at the Strip. "I do. Honestly, I haven't had any idea what to do with myself these last few weeks. I'm a creature of habit, and when you do something that long, it's hard to break out of the mold."

  "What about a comeback?" I asked. I wasn't laying it on thick anymore. I was serious. He was a spry seventy-five and there was nothing wrong with his voice.

  Jerry smiled. "Not at my age. No one else would hire me. I might do some shows occasionally, but I think the party's over for me." He was putting on a good act, but I could tell it bugged him.

  Our drinks appeared, and I dutifully allowed the pink concoction to sit in front of me. I couldn't let it slide without arching an eyebrow in Conn's direction, however.


  He caught my look and grinned. "I like girly drinks. So sue me. Our little secret, right, kid?"

  I tried to direct the conversation back to Mayfield. "So did management tell you they were picking Mayfield? Did you have a say at all, or was this basically forced down everyone's throat?"

  He seemed amused by the question. "You're in show business yourself, right? You know how it is. The almighty buck. To answer your question, yes. They let me feel like I had a say in things. You know—the whole spiel about how I was a living legend. Hell, the theater is even named after me! They truly valued my input—and all that garbage. It was horse manure, but they did the dance to make me feel good."

  "Smart business," I said. "The last thing they probably want is for you to be out there complaining to the press."

  He nodded. "Anyway, I wanted your guy to get the job, of course. I was in his corner all the way. Ethan's got that great gift for salesmanship, you know what I mean? He makes you think he's living and dying each song. Some guys can pull that off, but it's hard to get emotional about some of those numbers on a Tuesday night in February when you're playing to a bunch of accountants from Dubuque."

  "How do you learn to do that?"

  "You don't learn it, it's—what's the word—innate. Damn shame. Ethan had gone through the ring of fire, just like me."

  "The ring of fire?"

  "When you decide you're gonna try to make it big, it's like a ring of fire, just like that old Johnny Cash song. Not only the people who won't hire you, but your own family and friends. They think you're nuts. Get a real job, they say. Earn your diploma. Become a welder. Go work at a bank, that kind of bullshit. Either that, or they're jealous. When you get big, then you have fans. Too many fans. Until then, you have to be your own best friend and believe in yourself, even after a hundred rejections. Ethan walked through that ring. So did I. Mayfield? He's a hack."

  "So the whole Mickey Mayfield thing was pretty much news to you?"

  Jerry slurped at his drink. "It was news to everyone. But I actually did a tiny bit of snooping on my own, if you can believe that."

  "Somehow, I can."

  "You see, I really was in Ethan's corner on this. I'm not just being show-biz phony here. I like that kid. So I asked the guy who's technically my boss what was up. He said he'd get back to me. Never did. So I asked his boss." Jerry paused to take a sip and then looked me in the eye. "Now you're probably too young to appreciate this, but you have to understand that when Jerry Conn calls you up, you pay attention. In thirty-one years, I played almost ten thousand sold-out theaters. Eight million tickets sold. Get it?"

  This was the part where I was supposed to be impressed, so I forced out a hushed "wow" and let him keep talking.

  "It doesn't mean much to you because it's all in the past, but my name still commands some respect around here. Anyway, the guy's name is Bob Weber. He's a big-shot VP at the Copa. Runs the whole entertainment side of things. Everything from me and Ethan to the guy who plays the piano in the Cabana bar on Thursday nights. I never really liked the guy, but he kept his distance from me, and we made out fine."

  "Until he fired you," I chimed in.

  Jerry grimaced. "Yeah. Until he fired me. You're brutal, kid. So anyways, I ask him what's up with the Mayfield thing, and he gets all testy on me. Doesn't want to talk. Tells me it's none of my business. I'm meddling. You get the idea."

  "And you thought that was strange?"

  "Kind of. I mean, he's right. It was none of my business, not really. It's their friggin' hotel. They want to waste money on that clown, go right ahead. But he got so prickly just by my asking. I didn't do it in a nosey way at all."

  "Ethan thinks Mayfield had some kind of angle working."

  Jerry smiled. "We all have something working, hon. You think I got where I am by my voice alone?"

  I took the bait. "What's your secret?"

  Jerry took another healthy gulp and leaned across the table toward me. "When I started out, and I'm talking like fifty years ago in Reno, I started dating the boss's daughter. She had a horse face, rotten breath. Kissing her was like doing mouth-to-mouth on a diseased mule. But guess what? It got me onstage three nights a week, and that's how I got noticed by the papers. Pretty soon I got an agent, and I was playing Vegas twice a month. And you know the rest of the story. I've been to Paris twenty-five times. Hong Kong. Rio. Beijing. Helsinki. Finland, for God's sake! I'm huge in Helsinki."

  "But Mayfield was pretty well-established already. He was doing shows all over the country."

  "Maybe. He was at some of the rinky-dinky places, I think. Not that the Copa is a big deal anymore, but it's got a big theater, and they get a good price for seats. Getting that gig was a major upgrade for him, trust me."

  "So you think he was dating the boss's daughter?"

  Conn shrugged. "Something like that. But so what if he was? Why is Ethan so eager to find out?"

  "He says he wants to learn from the experience."

  He leaned over the table again and surreptitiously switched our glasses, leaving me with an empty one. "Well, if I were you, I'd start by talking to Weber. He might be a little nicer to you than he was to me."

  I sat with Jerry another fifteen minutes while he finished his second drink and regaled me with stories about his early career and his three wives, all of whom were still living and (he claimed) on good terms with him. When a middle-aged woman approached and asked for an autograph, Jerry gladly obliged and invited her to join us. I took that opening as a good excuse to get out of there and head home.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I returned home and made myself a light dinner to eat on my balcony. Almost directly in front of me lay the back of the Bellagio hotel and casino and the recent addition of City Center, a miniature city of hotels and casinos built in the thick of the recession. If I craned my neck to the right, I could catch a glimpse of the lounge at the top of Mandalay Bay that I had just shared with Jerry Conn. I had a hunch he might still be there, holding court with the friendly waitstaff and lapping up praise from his appreciative fans, but from this distance there was no way I could tell if my hunch was right.

  I'd pretty much decided that my meeting with Conn was a waste of time. Once Cody had set it up, though, I figured I had to follow through on it. You don't just blow off a guy like Jerry Conn, even if his music wasn't exactly my cup of tea. But I knew my video of Mayfield would probably bring him down and open the door for Ethan to get the job, so Ethan would probably lose interest in finding out whatever Mayfield had done to get the job in the first place.

  I figured I should call Ethan and let him know the good news—if you could call witnessing a man having sex with a minor "good news." His set would be over around nine. I found myself struggling against a lingering uneasiness about the whole thing, however. It bugged me that Ethan had been following Mayfield himself, right after hiring me to do the very same thing. That made no sense. And clearly my esteemed client was a wild card in other respects, especially with his tendency to get sloppy drunk. I was beginning to learn that the kinds of people who hired private investigators weren't always the most upstanding citizens themselves. I shrugged it off and tried the cell number Ethan had given me, but there was no answer. I was heading over to Cougar's to dance from ten to three, so the news would have to wait until tomorrow.

  I wasn't going to wait to call the cops, though. I had witnessed a pretty serious crime, and it was worth reporting it to the authorities so they could get a jump on stopping Mayfield's sick little hobby. After being bounced around from desk to desk, I finally reached Detective Sam Humes, whom I'd spoken with earlier in the week. I briefly related what I'd seen to her, but Detective Humes sounded rushed and distracted. She promised to call me back and then got rid of me in a fashion that bordered on the impolite.

  There weren't any big conventions in town, but it was a Friday, and I expected to pull down at least a grand in tips and lap-dance fees. It proved to be a better night than I expected, as almost all
of my regulars were in the house. These were my long-term customers, guys who behaved themselves and knew that generous tipping habits would garner them some extra and not necessarily legal benefits. I had never slept with a customer or done anything even remotely close to that, but I wasn't exactly a completely by-the-book dancer either. No one was. It was a dark room with a lot of people in it, and there were little things you could do that the men went wild over and, truthfully, weren't all that objectionable.

  Usually, though, good tips just produced a change in my overall attitude and relationship with the customer. For a typical half-drunk and semi-creepy guy I'd never seen before, I would keep my distance and just go through the motions. Forty bucks bought him a five-minute lap dance from a nearly naked girl with the best breasts money could buy, and most guys seemed happy enough with that. Afterward, the guy might slip me a five or, if I was lucky, a ten.

  But for a regular, a guy who I knew might crease me a C-note, I could pour it on and make the customer think he was really special. Men tended to like that, and the smart ones paid handsomely for the privilege. Besides the big tips, I had received hundreds of bouquets of flowers, jewelry, watches, and even a half-dozen marriage proposals, two of which I actually considered. The strangest thing I ever got was a twelve-pound cured Italian ham from Fabrizio Millonetti, one of the local superstar chefs. After eating nothing but ham sandwiches for the better part of that winter, I told him to stick to cash or bling if he wanted to keep me happy.

  Nineteen hundred dollars richer, I returned home exhausted and crashed while watching an early morning rerun of Seinfeld. I woke up around eleven—much too early—and wondered how long I should wait before calling Ethan to tell him the job he pined after would probably be opening up in the near future. From the little I knew of him, he had probably sung at the Copa until about nine and then gone out to party. Either that, or he'd had a little party by himself. Either way, I figured I'd wait until at least three o'clock to give him a call.