"Where are you taking him?" Patty cried out.
The detective turned to address her. "Clark County Detention. Downtown." A minute later, Ethan and the three squad cars were gone. He hadn't looked back at us before they pulled out.
Patty's makeup was smeared with tears. "That's my baby," she whispered.
"I'm sorry—this is terrible." I really didn't know what else to say. Awkwardness always came naturally to me, and I wasn't up for a round of hugs and soft murmurings to console a complete stranger who, for some reason, hated me. I couldn't just stand there watching her cry, though, so I took a stab at uttering something reassuring. "We both know he didn't do it. I know you don't exactly approve of me, but we're both on the same team here. We've got to help prove Ethan's innocent."
She looked up at me with watery eyes. "I suppose we do." Then she scowled and looked away from me. "It's all that bastard's fault," she muttered.
"Sorry?"
"Mayfield. Have you heard that man's cursing? His mouth doesn't know how to complete a sentence unless it includes a certain word beginning with F. And people pay to see it! That's what boggles my mind. My son has the purest voice you could ever hear, and he worked so hard to get to this point. He was supposed to get a big contract after American Idol, but that never happened. Then he gets here and works himself to the bone. They promised that slot to him! And out of nowhere comes this so-called comedian who's less funny than my little pinkie."
I was relieved that I wasn't the only one in Mrs. Stark's doghouse. "It's amazing he had any fans at all," I said. "Nobody seems to have liked him."
Mrs. Stark was in her own little world. She mumbled a few things to herself and then looked up to face me. "And now they're going to take Ethan. He's my only child, you know."
"No, I didn't know that."
"My husband left us when he was three. We became a team, just Ethan and me all these years. But I shouldn't be boring you with all this. You're right—we've got to get him out of jail."
Oh, so now it's we, I thought. I liked Ethan, though, and more importantly I believed in him. And there was also the little matter of the twenty thousand bucks he'd given me. I felt like I kind of owed him my best efforts, especially considering that I'd only spent a few hours working for him so far. If that meant I had to play nice with his opinionated and overprotective mother, so be it.
"First thing, we've got to find him a lawyer."
She nodded. "I don't know anyone. Do you?"
"Not personally. But I have a friend who's a lawyer. I'll call him up and ask for a recommendation. If there's anything I know, it's that you shouldn't necessarily hire the guy with the biggest ad in the phone book." I whipped out my phone and found my friend Jeff's name in the directory. He was an estate planner and sometimes did civil litigation, but he might be able to recommend somebody from the criminal law world. Seven rings and then voice mail. I left him a message telling him to call me back.
"No luck?"
I shook my head. Then it hit me. "Wait a minute. Forgive me for being so blunt, but Ethan's got to have a ton of money saved up, right? I mean, this is a nice house and all, but…"
"But he could do better?"
"I'm just saying I've heard he does pretty well for himself. Has he stashed some of it away?"
She looked apprehensive. "I think so…"
"The point is, I'm friends with Cody Masterson. When he was on trial, he used a lawyer named Charlie Frank to defend him in his murder trial, and you know how that went. Everyone assumed he was guilty, but he walked. Anyway, I'm sure the guy's not cheap. I have no idea what he'd charge, but it might be six figures. That's why I'm asking about money."
"Well, it's not like I have access to his bank account or anything. But yes, he could probably afford Charlie Frank."
"You have a phone book?"
She nodded and disappeared into the kitchen. While she was away, it occurred to me that it was a Sunday afternoon and therefore unlikely that a big-shot criminal lawyer would be sitting around his office waiting for a phone call.
Mrs. Stark returned with the yellow pages. The attorney listings took up an entire half-inch of specially marked blue pages, but Frank didn't even have an ad. A single line listing Frank & Associates gave the address and number.
"You think anyone's going to answer on a Sunday?" she asked.
"No. They might have an emergency number, though. People need lawyers on the weekends, too. Especially criminal lawyers."
I dialed the number but got a recording. There was no mention of any emergency number. "No luck there either. I suppose he'll have to wait until the morning," I said.
Mrs. Stark's eyes got big. "No way he's waiting until the morning. My son is a celebrity! He has means. They're going to grill him all night long. He needs a lawyer now. What about your friend?"
"Not going to work. My friend's mostly into estate planning and civil litigation. I don't think you want someone who doesn't know his way around the criminal courts."
"No," she said, "I mean your friend Cody. The criminal."
"What about him?"
"Doesn't he know Charlie Frank? Maybe he has his home number."
I thought about it for a second. "Worth a try, I guess. And, for the record, he's not a criminal."
Mrs. Stark rolled her eyes at the ceiling. "Oh, please."
"Just trust me." I didn't feel like it was worth getting into the details. We were in a hurry, and she probably wouldn't have believed me anyway. I punched up Cody's number on my cell phone and dialed. He picked up on the second ring.
I explained what I wanted and politely indicated that time was of the essence.
"Umm, yeah, just let me check," he said. "I have his card around here somewhere. I think he wrote his cell number on the back." Cody left me hanging for what felt like ten minutes. I listened to him opening drawers and banging around his house looking for Frank's business card while Mrs. Stark shot me increasingly impatient looks. "Got it," he announced finally. As I wrote down the number, I noticed his voice had a slight hitch to it, a kind of spaced-out, Valley girl quality I'd picked up in his voice on other occasions.
"Having some fun this afternoon, are we?" I asked. Cody was a recreational pot smoker, and getting canned from the casino he used to run had given him more time in which to indulge his hobby.
"What? You can tell?"
"Never mind. Just read the number back to me one more time."
It matched up with what I'd written down, so I said good-bye and dialed Charlie Frank's cell number. A wary male voice answered after about seven rings. I explained the situation as succinctly as I could, but it was clear Frank was trying to get rid of me. That is, until I mentioned the name of the potential client.
"The singer?" he asked.
"The singer. He didn't do it, by the way, if that makes a difference to you. Either way, if you want a chance to get in on this, you better get down to the police station before they beat a confession out of him."
He sighed. "I probably would've hit it in the lake on the eighteenth anyways. Plus, it's starting to get dark out here. I can get there in a half hour. You going to be there?"
"Definitely."
"How will I recognize you?"
"I've been told I look a little like Sandra Bullock." Of course, that was about six years ago, and the guy who said it had been completely hammered at the time.
I filled Mrs. Stark in on our conversation, and she suggested we drive to the police station together. We headed out, climbed into my Audi, and drove downtown. We sped down mostly empty streets in silence until we hit our first stoplight.
"Nice car," Mrs. Stark said. I sensed a slight thawing of the ice.
"Thanks. It's great to have the top down on a day like this. We spend ninety-nine percent of our time in air-conditioning, so I figured a little splurge like this was in order."
She spoke again when the light changed to green. "Thanks for your help. By the way, my first name's Patty, with a Y. I'm sorry about before
. I was just a little nervous about Ethan hiring a private detective. I can be a little bit protective of him sometimes. And I didn't know if you two were, you know…"
My attention was focused on navigating the downtown streets, so I wasn't quite following her train of thought. "If we were what?"
"You know, dating or something."
I laughed out loud. "No, nothing like that. He made that pretty clear from the get-go." Suddenly it all made perfect sense. She'd been worried that Ethan might be falling for a stripper and putting at risk everything the two of them had worked to build together. I can't say I blamed her for being a little bit hostile.
"Well, you are his type," she said. "And you're very pretty, but of course you know that."
She was really laying it on thick now, so I decided to grant her implicit request to bury the hatchet. "Don't worry about before," I said. "If I had a son, I probably wouldn't roll out the welcome mat if a stripper ever came over to visit."
Downtown Vegas was deserted, so we were able to score a parking space on the street less than a block from the detention center, which was a few blocks south of the downtown casinos. We made our way to the elevators and found central booking. There was a small waiting area with a few dozen folding chairs. I didn't think the Constitution said anything about a right to have a stripper-slash-private eye present during police questioning, so I told Patty we'd wait until Charlie Frank showed up. It was going to be his show.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Patty Stark was pacing around central booking like a caged lioness. A stream of lowlifes came and went: cousins, uncles, girlfriends, and co-conspirators of bad guys who'd been picked up overnight. Every few minutes the low hum of the waiting room ambience was punctuated by an obnoxious cell phone ringtone, usually of the hard-core rap variety. One guy had the balls (or stupidity) to conduct what was obviously a drug deal in plain earshot of about two dozen people. I checked my own phone to see when I'd called Charlie Frank. It had been almost an hour ago, meaning that he was late. Very late.
Charlie Frank finally breezed into the room as though he hadn't a care in the world. I recognized him immediately from photos I'd seen while working on the Cody Masterson case. He was about seventy, wiry and tall, with thinning white hair and a pink face. He was still wearing the blue Titleist golf shirt and khaki slacks I assumed he'd been wearing when I phoned him on the golf course. I stood up and waved to him as he was scanning the room.
"A dead ringer," he said, shaking my hand and giving me the once-over. Bushy white eyebrows perched on top of his crisp blue eyes. He had a kindly smile, which made me think that with a full beard and another fifty pounds, he'd have made a passable Santa Claus.
"I'm sorry?"
"You said you looked like Sandra Bullock."
I chuckled. "Actually, I said that other people said I looked like her." I was happy to repeat the compliment, but I wasn't quite desperate enough to go around making the claim myself. Patty joined us, and I made the introductions.
"Let's sit down in the corner over there," Frank said. "We can chat for a bit."
After waiting so long, Patty's impatience showed. "Shouldn't we get in to see Ethan right away?"
Frank smiled reassuringly. "Don't worry, Patty. It's all taken care of. The DA is a member of my club. I saw him at the bar when I got back to the clubhouse, so I bought him a drink. That's why I'm late. He phoned down here and called off their dogs. They put Ethan in the nicest cell they have. Solitary. No thugs or gangbangers in there to make trouble for him. They're waiting until I get there to ask him anything."
Patty and I looked at each other, impressed. We sat down and Frank got some basic information from Patty. He was troubled by the threats Ethan had made to Mayfield, but he didn't think it was an insurmountable problem. Frank was a little puzzled by my own involvement, but I told him we could sort that out later. He told us he might be with Ethan until the wee hours, so we should head home and get some sleep.
"He has to spend the night in here?" Patty asked.
"Afraid so. No bail hearings on Sundays, unfortunately. Speaking of which, if he's granted bail, it'll probably be a pretty stiff amount. Couple hundred thousand, minimum. Is that feasible?"
Patty nodded. "Ethan's very good with money. Tight, you might say. You know he makes almost six hundred thousand dollars a year?" She beamed proudly.
Charlie seemed relieved, although I couldn't tell whether his relief was due to the fact that Ethan could make bail or that he could afford his legal fees. "That's impressive, Mrs. Stark. Good to know. You should be very proud. I'll call you when I know something. Go home. Get some rest. They're understaffed here tonight, so there's no way they'll bring him out for a visit."
Charlie turned and headed for the intake window, where he flashed some kind of ID. After a brief conversation with the desk officer, she buzzed him in, and he disappeared behind an ominous gray door.
I looked at Patty. "Now what?"
She shrugged. "No sense hanging around here. It's not like he's getting out of here tonight."
I nodded. "I'll drive you home." We headed out and made our way back to her home in Henderson. I felt bad for her, having to return to an empty house while her son was in jail, accused of murder. But I wasn't her friend, and I was still planning to dance that night, so I wasn't about to offer to play nursemaid.
I pulled into the driveway and put the car in park. "I don't know if he told you, but Ethan paid me twenty thousand to help him. I've barely put a dent in that so far, so I'm planning on trying to help him out in any way I can. Unless you have any objections. Just say the word, and I'll butt out."
"No," she whispered. "I'm sure Ethan would want your help."
"All right. I'll keep in touch with Charlie. Why don't you see if you can get some money together for bail?"
She nodded. "That's my plan. I think he keeps a list of his passwords by his computer. He's got a bank account and some online trading account. Nothing's open on a Sunday night, of course, but it can't hurt to get a handle on things."
"Good luck. I'll be in touch."
I dropped her off and sped home, where I touched on a little makeup and changed into some sweats. I headed over to Cougar's around nine, where I found a pretty sleepy crowd. The upside was that I could sneak out of there before two and get a decent night's rest.
* * *
With my quirky job schedule and its heavy emphasis on working weekends, you'd think that Monday mornings wouldn't feel so lousy. After all, I normally took Mondays and Tuesdays off so I could enjoy the city without the full press of tourists bearing down on it. But Monday mornings still brought a nagging sense of dread. Maybe it was ingrained from all those years of school, or maybe it was just hardwired into my American DNA. I tossed and turned for a while in bed and then fixed myself some eggs.
I had missed the morning news, as usual, but I flipped on the local news at eleven to get an update on the Mayfield murder. Not surprisingly, the biggest story was no longer the murder itself but Ethan's arrest. Apparently the news stations didn't have a perp shot of Ethan dressed in orange and holding a prison ID, a fact I attributed to the savvy influence of Charlie Frank. The local station was forced to use one of Ethan's old publicity photos from its stock footage bin. Ethan's smiling, cherubic face was an odd mismatch for the gruesomeness of the story.
It hadn't taken long for the DA and the cops to get their theory of the case together and broadcast it to the public. Trials weren't conducted only within the four walls of the courtroom, so most prosecutors and defense lawyers liked to get their story out to the public as soon as possible. After all, everyone who watched the news was a potential juror. The DA was giving a news conference explaining that a witness had come forward to tell the cops about Ethan's threat to destroy Mayfield, just as Ethan had predicted. And it hadn't taken them long to find the video surveillance showing that Ethan was near the crime scene at the time Mayfield was shot. It didn't look good: motive plus opportunity. Luckily, they didn't see
m to have discovered Ethan's little stalking adventure from only a few nights earlier. That kind of evidence could be downright toxic. If the DA got to tell the jury about how Ethan was stalking Mayfield and had followed him halfway to Pahrump, the jurors could find the kind of premeditation and planning that could get a guy a needle in the arm.
I finished my eggs and puttered around my apartment, trying to come up with a plan of attack. Ethan and his lawyer hadn't exactly retained my services, but I'd taken a lot of money from Ethan and didn't plan on giving it back. In my mind, I felt obligated to do what I could. Which wasn't much, I had to admit.
But a vague uneasiness had begun to unsettle my stomach while I finished up the dishes. The DA had made a fairly convincing case: Ethan was upset that Mickey Mayfield had "stolen" his job (the DA's term), and he had a lot to gain if Mayfield were out of the picture, since Ethan was the most likely candidate to replace Mayfield. It wasn't too complicated, and a lot of the time the most obvious explanation proved the correct one. Although Ethan had made a convincing denial to me, in retrospect I thought I should have pressed him harder. His explanation for why he was at the Copa so late on Saturday night was plausible, but not a slam dunk. And even Ethan couldn't deny that he had a lot to gain from Mayfield's death. Still, I believed him. If Ethan was going to kill Mayfield, he'd have done it a week earlier in the middle of the desert after a half bottle of vodka and a night of whipping up his own sense of outrage. It didn't make sense that he'd get a gun and kill him in a parking lot a few nights later.
My phone rang a little after noon. It was Charlie Frank.
"A few things. First, Ethan's hired me as his lawyer. His mother has helped get access to his finances, so we might have some luck making bail."
"That's good. When's the hearing?"
"About an hour from now. It's fifty-fifty. He's not really a flight risk, but it's a murder. Death penalty's on the table. Anyway, the reason I'm calling is that Ethan's asked that you help work on the case. Normally I use the LaGarde Agency for my investigators. I'm going to do so here, too. But he seems to trust you, so I want to bring you in on this. I assume you're licensed? Sorry, but I have to ask."
Vegas Stripped (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 2) Page 8
