I cringed. "Well, I have a probationary license. I can do anything any other PI can do, except that I need to check in with a supervising investigator a few hours a month. It's not a big deal."
"Uh huh," he murmured. It was not a ringing vote of confidence. "Well, why don't you see where things lead and keep in touch."
I snorted softly at Charlie's lame attempt to brush me off. As a favor to Ethan, he'd probably make a show of keeping me involved, but I wasn't being asked to get any dirt under my nails. The real heavy lifting would be done by his preferred agency, LaGarde. Its investigators were the big boys in town, famous for their high-tech video surveillance capabilities and their extensive dossiers on casino cheats and high rollers. Big-time cheaters used a million disguises and could strike with a moment's notice. Because serious cheaters could get out the door with hundreds of thousands of dollars, most casinos kept LaGarde on a seven-figure retainer just so they could use its famous twenty-four hour emergency hotline.
"Who are you using at LaGarde?"
Charlie paused. "I haven't called over there just yet. But for this one I'll probably go with Philippe himself."
"Whoa," I said. "He's still alive? I figured he'd at least be living on an island someplace." I'd never met Philippe LaGarde, but he was a local legend in the PI world. The instructor in my night school course thought he walked on water.
Charlie chuckled. "He's not cheap. But he's the original and the best. Come to think of it, why don't you give him a call and coordinate your efforts? I've got to run."
"All right. Good luck getting bail."
"Thanks. Make sure to watch me on the five o'clock news!"
I hung up the phone and kicked my legs up. I wouldn't say my ego was fragile, but it wasn't bulletproof either. It was clear that Charlie Frank had little respect for my abilities and had called me merely as a sop to a well-paying client. On the other hand, I tried to see things from his perspective. Why should he have any respect for me? At best, I was a glorified pole dancer with a Nancy Drew complex. I'd worked on one big case, which happened to end up in the newspapers, but beyond that all I had under my belt were a few cheating husbands, an insurance fraudster or two, and less than a hundred hours of night school training. I tried to shrug it off and stop second-guessing myself. It must be nice to be a man, I thought. No grueling pity parties, and no after-the-fact analyzing of every word of a conversation to try to pick up hidden meanings and slights. And, best of all, no heels.
Speaking of men, I wondered how easy it would be to get in contact with Philippe LaGarde or whether I should even bother trying. Charlie hadn't even told me what their defense strategy was going to be yet, so I could pretty much kick things around on my own and see if I could turn anything up. My natural inclination was to do my own thing. After all, Ethan had hired me, and I didn't come with associates. But I knew that if I was serious about this whole private eye thing, a chance to work with LaGarde was something I shouldn't pass up, even if I was just along for the ride. I'd probably have to swallow my pride, but I might learn something or make some contacts that would prove useful later. Experience had shown me that I had more luck appearing in person than making a cold call on the phone, so I showered and got myself together.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The GPS in my Audi told me that the LaGarde Agency was on Harmon Avenue not too far from the UNLV campus. I could have walked there in a half hour, but that wasn't going to happen in the blistering August heat. The LaGarde office took up the entire first floor of an orange-ish four-story building set back from the road. Whether for actual security purposes or just to impress clients, a hulking video camera was perched over the outside door. The inside entrance required me to get buzzed in. I wondered what they were afraid of.
The receptionist, a middle-aged woman with perfect auburn hair, fixed me with a look so skeptical that I almost turned around and walked myself back out the door. She had me playing defense before I uttered hello, but I explained I worked for a mutual client and asked if Mr. LaGarde might have a minute to talk. The woman sighed and punched a few numbers on her telephone. After a few hushed exchanges, she reluctantly said that he'd agreed to meet with me.
The receptionist unlatched a half door next to the reception desk and let me in. I guessed I was supposed to feel awed and unworthy, but the guy I was meeting was just a private investigator like me. It's not like I'd been granted an audience with the pope. She led me back through a series of narrow corridors and past cubicles and tables set up with expensive-looking computer and video equipment. Our heels clicked in a synchronized staccato march on the hardwoods as we made our way to the boss's office, which was a midsized corner suite in the rear of the building. The receptionist nodded curtly at me and showed me in.
I didn't know exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn't this. Philippe LaGarde put his cigarette down and motored his wheelchair from behind his desk to greet me. A tiny brown dachshund waddled along behind. From his face alone LaGarde looked to be about seventy, with maybe a few touch-ups along the way. But his full head of dyed black hair and eyebrows were trying to sell fifty, or even forty. I looked down into his small black eyes as I shook his hand.
"Raven McShane! The famous detective. Please sit down. Coffee? Tea?" His voice had a suggestion of French behind it, but I couldn't tell if it was genuine or just a quirky affectation.
"No thanks," I said. I found a seat in a stiff leather chair.
"Forgive me for prying, but…your name is Irish, but you look, I don't know… Spanish? French?"
I smiled. "I'm partly Black Irish, yes. But my folks came to this country more than a hundred years ago, so I'm pretty much American."
"Black Irish? I am confused."
It was a weird way to start a relationship. Most of my generation found it awkward to talk about ethnicity, especially with a stranger. But I played along. "If you notice, some of the Irish are a little darker in our complexions and have black hair rather than red hair, light features, and freckles. The story is that some of our female ancestors got a little too friendly with the pirates who were raiding the coast. They were Turks, Arabs, you name it."
He shook his head passionately. "No, no. That's not it. You don't look Middle Eastern at all."
I smiled. "Okay, well, the other story is that some of the folks who didn't do so well in that whole Spanish Armada thing washed up on the beaches of Ireland. At least that's what my grandma used to say. You should have seen her. She looked like Catherine Zeta-Jones."
"Yes! That's it. But she is Welsh, no?"
"Same difference. The Welsh are Celtic too, just like the Irish."
Philippe's eyes danced as he rubbed his hands together. I wondered why he was so interested in my heritage, but it occurred to me that LaGarde had just managed to learn a world of information about me in less than a minute, and he'd done so under the guise of a seemingly unrelated and innocent topic. Brilliant. And now I'd learned something from him.
"What about you, Mr. LaGarde. You are French, I assume?"
He scoffed. "I was raised in Montreal, but I've been a citizen here since 1967. Are you sure I can't get you something to drink?"
"I'm really okay, thanks." He seemed to be taking a shine to me, but I was wary that it might just be another ruse to get me to let my guard down. "Has Charlie Frank called you yet?"
"Not a half hour ago. Amazing case. He didn't tell me you were so…fetching, or I would have called you over here myself. I'm glad you're here."
I smiled. He was working me over pretty good, but I wasn't sure what his angle was. Maybe charming people was just his modus operandi. "I suppose we should coordinate on a plan of attack."
"Exactly," he said. "Charlie's job is to try to prove Ethan didn't do it. Our job is to prove, or at least suggest, that someone else did. Shouldn't be too difficult, really."
"Why's that?"
He smiled. "Luckily for Ethan, Mickey Mayfield was not a very well-liked person."
"Any ideas?"
> "No, not yet. But he was in show business. Had to have enemies. And I've heard rumors about his personal life."
"They're not rumors," I blurted out. "They're true."
LaGarde's left eyebrow rose dramatically. "Are we talking about the same thing?"
"You tell me."
He smiled. "Okay. The book on him was girls. Young girls."
"The book?"
"Here, take a look." He swiveled his wheelchair around and grabbed a thin black binder off of his desk.
I paged through the binder quickly. There wasn't much to it. The first few pages were filled with bullet points about Mickey Mayfield's preferences and habits. According to the book, Mayfield was a scotch man who preferred Johnny Walker Red Label to more expensive single malts. He played craps at high-limit tables, where he had a temper and a history as a poor tipper. His diet was heavy on double cheeseburgers. He chewed Orbit gum (spearmint) and liked large cigars with maduro wrappers. He was single, no family.
"What is all this?" I asked.
LaGarde chuckled. "We've got hundreds of these. I can show you if you want. Most people think the casinos hire us to catch cheats, and that's partly true. But a lot of our business is trying to understand the habits and tastes of gamblers. Big gamblers. It wasn't uncommon for Mayfield to drop twenty, thirty grand in one sitting, so some of the casinos paid us to help them figure out how to lure him to their places. Here, look at this," he said, grabbing the TV remote.
LaGarde flicked on the wall-mounted TV, and an image of what looked like a parking lot appeared on the screen.
"What am I looking at?" I asked.
"That's McCarran airport." He wheeled over to the TV and pointed. "This is the tarmac leading to the private terminal, where all the private jets park. We've got a room booked permanently at the Sleepy Inn Motel, which is right next to the tarmac. Our camera is set up with a motion detector. Sometimes it catches birds flying around, but usually it only starts up if a jet pulls in. From there, we run our facial recognition software, which tells us who's getting off that plane. We have a database of two thousand or so known high rollers who fly in from everywhere from New York to New Delhi. We had an oil baron from Irkutsk fly in yesterday. You know where that is?"
"Russia," I said blithely. Most of my knowledge of geography came from playing the Risk board game as a girl.
He beamed. "Smart girl. Anyway, if we can't get a visual, we can run the ID on the plane's tail number to try to figure out who it is. My clients pay me dearly to get that information. If a high roller is staying at the Wynn, believe me, the boys at Bellagio want to know about it. And they want to know if he's with his wife, alone, or with someone else. And for kickers, I tell them what brand of cigarettes he smokes and what color bathrobe he might like. Those are the kinds of details that can make them millions. It's a cutthroat business."
"It's all men?"
LaGarde nodded. "Yes. It seems no woman is foolish enough to blow the kind of money it takes to get the casinos to drool over you the way they do for these guys. It's all about ego and respect. The typical whale is not some famous computer mogul or movie star. Those guys already have respect and fame. It's the guy who owns a waste disposal company in Syracuse or a line of funeral parlors in Oregon. The guy might be worth twenty, fifty, a hundred million. But no one has any idea how much, because it's not polite to talk about money, and you can only be so flashy in some places without alienating your friends and family. But they come here, throw a bunch of money around, and the casino hosts treat them like oil sheikhs or rock stars. They lap that up. A roofing contractor from Boise can live like Mick Jagger for a weekend."
"So where does our friend Mayfield fit in?"
"He's not a blue whale, that's for sure. But he's a good enough mark that we have a little book on him." LaGarde took the book back from me and flipped to page two. "All we have here is a little notation a few years ago that Mayfield had a thing for young girls. It's not much, but it's something."
"You think it's even relevant?"
"No, not technically. But what we're doing here is called oppo. Opposition research. In politics, it's obvious who your opponent is. In a murder case, your opponent is often the victim himself."
My body language must have tipped him off that I wasn't following.
"If you're running a political campaign against Joe Smith, you try to find out all kinds of bad things about Joe that the public won't like, right?"
"Right," I said hesitantly.
"Here, we try to paint the victim in a bad light. If we make him seem like a creep, two things happen. A, the jury has less sympathy for him. B, creeps deal with all sorts of lowlifes, and lowlifes have enemies. It's not hard to make a jump to think the guy might have had it coming from somebody else—somebody other than Ethan."
I wasn't really buying it. I figured I might as well tell LaGarde what I'd seen Mayfield doing in Pahrump. It wouldn't change much, but it would confirm the rumor.
"Well if you think it's relevant, I've got some video of Mayfield with a couple of young girls. I happened to follow him out to Pahrump last week."
LaGarde's unnaturally black left eyebrow shot up. "And why did you have occasion to do that? Maybe I should be looking at you for the murder." A thin smile stretched across his face.
"Ethan paid me to." I shifted in my seat. "Actually, I think I'll have that drink now, if you don't mind." I wasn't working that night, and I'd noticed LaGarde had cast more than one longing look at the crystal decanter on the hutch behind his desk.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LaGarde wheeled back behind his desk and poured out about an inch of amber liquid into a pair of crystal glasses. With the cigarette and now the booze, I half expected Mad Men's Don Draper to barge in on us at any moment. I got up from my chair and joined LaGarde so he wouldn't have to wheel over to deliver the drink. He smiled up at me and raised his glass. "To the beginning of a beautiful friendship," he said with a touch of old-timey grandeur.
"Cheers." I sniffed at the drink and took a cautious sip. "Cognac?"
"Of course," he scolded, as though anything else would have been uncivilized. "You know that line? 'A beautiful friendship?'"
"Of course," I snorted. "Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart. But I forget who played Louie, the French guy."
"Claude Rains. But he wasn't French. He was English, but he might as well have been French. Divorced six times!" LaGarde snorted at his own joke and tossed back half his glass.
I sat back down across from LaGarde's desk. My second sip of cognac triggered a mild coughing fit. Without ice, the drink was a little too much to take, especially in the middle of a Monday afternoon. My throat felt like I had just guzzled molten lava. Either that, or I was becoming a lightweight. I set the glass aside sheepishly. "I was about to explain what the hell I was doing out in Pahrump following Mickey Mayfield."
"I'm dying to know," LaGarde said, folding his arms across his chest.
I tried to clear the last stubborn remnants of cognac out of my throat. "Stop me if you know all this. Ethan was up for the big job at the Copa, but Mayfield got the job instead. That, of course, is why the cops focused on Ethan in the first place. When they saw on the surveillance video that Ethan was in the vicinity at the time of the shooting, they figured he was their guy."
LaGarde made a wave of his hand. "I think the whole city knows this by now."
"Well here's the interesting part. Ethan hired me before any of this happened because he wanted to know exactly how Mayfield got that job. He figured he was a lock for it, so it really took him by surprise."
"Smart idea to hire you, I would say."
"Well, only a fellow PI would think it was a good idea to hire a PI under those circumstances. Most people probably think it's a little odd. Anyway, it soon became clear that Ethan wanted some hard-core dirt on Mayfield. Something to bring him down. We'd heard the same rumors you had, namely that Mayfield had a thing for young girls. So one night I found him playing craps at the MGM and then foll
owed him out to Pahrump. One of the brothels out there has a private bungalow in the back, and that's where I managed to get some video. I don't have it on me, but it's clear it's Mayfield."
"Well I'd say that's pretty terrific." He beamed. "We just have to figure out who those girls are. Do they have angry fathers? Brothers? Uncles? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are probably hundreds of girls out there with family members who aren't very happy with that pervert. I've got two girls of my own. Of course they're grown up now, but I can't imagine them being used in that way when they're so young."
I nodded. I had seen dancers get caught up in some bad situations, usually because of drugs, but I'd never known anyone abused at such a young age. I wasn't sure it was the winning approach LaGarde thought it was, however. "How many of those people are going to talk? The guy's already dead. If someone pops in out of the blue to ask them some questions, they'll have to know we're trying to point the finger at them."
LaGarde shrugged. "It's all about reasonable doubt. We just need to prove that Mayfield had a lot of enemies. We don't have to prove someone else did it. Although that would be nice."
I realized I hadn't told him everything. "Getting back to that night in Pahrump. When I was tracking Mayfield, I actually spotted Ethan. He was watching Mayfield too. In fact, he followed him out to the desert but turned around before we got to Pahrump."
LaGarde frowned. "That's bizarre. Did you figure out why?"
"Pretty much. Our friend has a vodka problem. He told me he tied one on that night and worked himself up into a tizzy about how much he hated Mayfield. He followed him and planned to rearrange his face with a baseball bat, but along the way the booze wore off, and he thought better of it."
The room became silent for a long minute. LaGarde finally spoke. "I believe that could work both ways. Yes, Ethan wanted to kill him. That's not good. But, when in a perfect position to do so, he didn't kill him. That is good."
Vegas Stripped (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 2) Page 9
