Vegas Stripped (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 2)

by Stephanie Caffrey

  "Exactly. If he was going to take out Mayfield, that would have been the time to do it. Middle of the desert, no witnesses. But still, admitting to wanting to murder a guy who ended up being murdered—not a plus."

  He shook his head. "No, you're right. Do we have anything else? Any other people to accuse of being murderers?"

  I thought for a minute. "Not exactly. But when he first hired me, Ethan was pretty convinced that there was something funny going on at the Copa. Maybe it was just ego, but he couldn't get over them passing him up for this loser comedian who nobody seems to like."

  "So he thought Mayfield paid to play?"

  I nodded. "If that's what you want to call it. Anyway, I'm not sure how it fits in, but it's possible whoever got paid off took the money and then decided to get rid of Mayfield. Maybe he was even worse than they expected— I don't know."

  "Or maybe the deal had strings," LaGarde said absentmindedly. He looked behind him and patted his lap a few times. The dachshund, who had been lounging on the floor, struggled mightily to climb up LaGarde's thigh. After a little boost from the old man, the dog finally made itself comfortable and fixed one bored eye on me while half closing the other. "This is Goliath, by the way."

  Goliath looked like he was a regular at the Caesars Palace buffet. "Did you know he was going to be that big when you named him?"

  LaGarde smiled. "I had a hunch. I have a history of spoiling my dogs. Something my last wife and I always fought about."

  I wasn't exactly a dog person. It wasn't that I didn't like them—they didn't like me. Most dogs had always seemed to have an ability to see right through me and generally found me not worth sniffing, much less befriending. Goliath seemed to be no different, as he'd already dismissed me and shut his other eye to take a siesta. "So what do you think?" I asked. "Maybe someone on the inside took a payoff, or maybe there was some other kind of dispute. There was lots of money involved."

  LaGarde grunted. "Could be. It's kind of vague though, and that sounds like a lot of work. I'm thinking about the money. Mayfield was a big gambler. No matter how much money they might make, big gamblers get into money trouble. The odds just aren't in their favor, especially over the long term."

  "You thinking loan shark? Something like that?"

  "Could be," he said. He was stroking Goliath's back so hard that the dog's skin pulled tight against his face with every stroke. The dog seemed to take it in stride. "We'll need to dig into his finances. If he owed somebody a lot of money and refused to pay up, it's a possibility. Just something else to dangle in front of the jury."

  "Sounds like we've got some low-hanging fruit to nibble on for a while. Anything else we should be looking at?"

  LaGarde shook his head. "We're in good shape. There's always the personal, though. Ex-girlfriends, boyfriends, family, that kind of thing. We can get into that if we run into dead ends on the other stuff."

  I was beginning to wonder how all of this was going to work. "So should we just split up, or…"

  He smiled and looked me over for the first time. I thought it was a wistful look, but he was a hard man to read. He motioned downward to his wheelchair, almost apologetically. "These days I mostly sit in here and watch video screens. Couple years ago we bought a van with wheelchair access, but I hate getting in the way. So why don't you get a head start, and I'll have someone get in touch with you. Probably Andrew, my son. He's good, although…" He trailed off.

  "Although—?"

  "He's kind of hard to pin down lately. He's been doing some work on the side, on his own."

  I nodded. "I think I'll start by looking into Mayfield's finances. In this town, everything's always about the money." As I got up to leave, LaGarde shot a furtive glance at my glass of cognac, which I had barely touched. I bent over to pick up the glass and walked it over to him. "As my grandma would have said, it's three o'clock somewhere."

  He winked at me. "Your grandma sounds like a lightweight."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I left LaGarde to his cognac and headed home to do a little electronic sleuthing. Mayfield's obituary had listed a few surviving relatives, but only one of them lived in the area. A coincidence, I supposed, since the obit said Mayfield's family was from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  It turned out that Mayfield's aunt, Susan Krainek, had a Las Vegas address a few miles east of me, near the freeway. I had no idea if the two had been close, but it was worth a shot. If my Internet search was right, Susan was sixty-seven years old, so I figured there was a decent chance she'd be at home rather than working. I grabbed myself a snack and headed back downstairs to get my car.

  I must have beaten the end of the second shift because traffic was light, and I made great time. Susan's house was a tight side-by-side beige townhouse with a shared pool in front. I parked my car across the street next to Chaparral High School and made my way up the steps to the front door. Before I had a chance to ring the bell, a voice yelped out a loud Hellooo! from behind me.

  I turned around and found a red-faced, white-haired woman waving at me from a lounge chair next to the pool. Her wave was not exactly a friendly one, so I gave a tentative half wave back and went down to join her. "Don't get up," I said, although she hadn't moved a muscle. "Are you Susan Krainek?"

  "I sure am. You people don't quit, do you?" She shifted upward in her chair. "You can tell your boss the check is in the mail." If I were being generous, I'd say Susan was a not-so-solid 250 pounds, although the pastel-blue men's Hawaiian shirt wasn't doing her figure any favors. A pair of oversized red plastic sunglasses were perched on her nose, and she had her finger stuck as a bookmark in a thick tome called Pick and Win! The Insider's Guide to Picking Winning Lottery Numbers.

  I smiled and handed her a business card, which she studiously ignored. "I'm not looking for any checks, Ms. Krainek. I'm a private detective. Raven McShane is my name."

  Susan put her book on the ground and lurched upward in her recliner. She crinkled her nose at me like a gerbil sniffing an unfamiliar pellet of food. "This about Mickey?"

  I nodded somberly. "I'm sorry for your loss," I lied. "Were you close?"

  "Off and on. He had what you'd call an addictive personality. When he needed something, like money, we were real close. Otherwise, not so much." All in all, she didn't seem too broken up by the whole thing.

  I was beginning to melt under the August sun. "This heat doesn't bother you?"

  She chuckled. "I'm from Michigan, so I've got to make up for all those long winters. I sit out here in the afternoons and soak it up pretty good, I guess." That would explain why her face looked like a roast pig's.

  "So have you been in town long, or is this a retirement kind of thing?"

  Susan shifted again to get a better look up at me. "Who did you say you were with?"

  "I work solo. Just trying to figure out the details about your nephew's murder."

  "Ah, okay. Just so you're not a cop. Not a fan of cops. The kids at the high school over there come running through my yard, leaving all sorts of things, unspeakable things, in my yard, and the cops don't give a damn about it. Here, sit down." She nodded her head at the chair next to her. "What were we talking about?"

  I parked myself on the upright chair next to her lounge chair. She still had to look up at me, but at least she wouldn't hurt her neck in the process. "We were talking about your nephew. Did you move out here with him?"

  She laughed. "It was a dumb idea, probably. But my husband had just run off with a waitress from the truck stop, and Mickey had landed this job downtown. He started out at the Four Queens doing ten shows a week, and then he moved over to the Strip. I thought it sounded glamorous, so I packed up and moved out here. That was about ten years ago."

  "So why do you say it was a dumb idea?"

  "Well, he's not exactly a family man, you know. I pictured cooking meals for two every week and things like that, but he only ever called me when he needed some money. My big mistake was telling him about the jackpot. You see, I won a prog
ressive machine over at Palace Station just about a week after I got here. Two point three million, if you can believe that. I nearly died on the spot. But it's paid out over twenty years, and after the tax man gets his hands on it, it's really only about seventy thousand a year. Enough to live on, of course, but I don't go telling people because they'll all think I'm sitting on the two point three."

  I pretended to look impressed. The jackpot story cleared up the mystery about how she had any money to be lending Mickey, but I was more interested in why Mayfield might have needed to get his hands on it. He was pretty well-paid, by all accounts. Before I could open my mouth, Susan anticipated the question.

  "Yeah," she sighed, "that man went through money like you wouldn't believe. The gambling was a big problem, or issue as people like to say, and I think he got into some drugs. I guess I kind of helped him along with all that. You know how it is. I was trying to be nice, so when he'd ask, I'd give him a thousand, sometimes more. I should have just said no."

  "Some people weren't meant to gamble," I said. It wasn't quite adding up so far. From what I'd seen of Mayfield's gambling, a thousand bucks would last about as long as a droplet of water in the July desert. He could blow that in one roll of the dice. I was sure Aunt Susan wasn't his primary source of funding.

  "He made a lot of money," she said, "but it was never enough."

  "Was he getting money from anywhere else? Did he ever talk about loan sharks or anything like that?"

  Susan blinked at the question. "When I saw you about to ring my doorbell, I thought that's who you were."

  "A loan shark?"

  "Well, not exactly. They don't call it that—they call it distressed debt or something like that. It's all on the up-and-up, although it probably shouldn't be. Mickey used them, and then he got me to guarantee a couple of his loans for him. I've been slow on a few payments, so they've been getting after me. Damn annoying, if you want to know the truth."

  "Who are they?"

  She reached down to fetch her purse, which appeared to be little more than a leather bag stuffed full of empty Snickers bar wrappers. She flipped through her wallet and fished out a business card. It read: Creative Lending Concepts, LLC. Janelle Anderson, Vice-President.

  "Creative?" I asked.

  Susan snorted. "They're creative, all right. If you have good credit, they don't want you. You have to be really up against a wall for them to lend you money. That's how they get creative. You know what they get? Twenty-six percent!"

  "Ouch. Can I ask how much you're in for?" I was doing my best to appear sympathetic, although she was already being very forthcoming with me.

  "Luckily, I drew the line at ten thousand. I've been on kind of a bad run myself lately, so I'm paying it off pretty slowly. It's hard enough to keep up at twenty-six percent, and then you have a bad week at the slots, and you're looking at hot dogs and white bread for dinner."

  No kidding, I thought. "Nevada doesn't have any usury laws to speak of. It's basically the Wild West out here."

  "You've got that right. But at least there's a silver lining in Mickey's death," she said, a glint in her eye.

  "What's that?"

  "He left them holding the bag for a lot of money. My guess, it was probably a half a million or something on that order. Those bloodsuckers had it coming, as far as I'm concerned."

  That was some interesting news. I fingered the business card she'd handed me. "Can I keep this card?"

  "Sure. They're not too shy about finding me. And I've got no reason to call them."

  I figured I'd wasted enough of her time and that she'd better get back to studying her lottery number book if she had any hope of paying off the ten grand. It always amazed me that people thought there was a way to beat a system based on random numbers, but people like her were the lifeblood of this town, a town that ran on hope and a deliberate indifference to mathematics. It wasn't the kind of thing a person commented on. "Thanks for your help, Susan," I said, standing up.

  "Well, it sounds like the police got a suspect already, so I'm not sure how much help I was."

  I smiled back at her. "I'm leaving with more information than I had before I got here. Can't ask for much more than that." I turned and climbed back into my Audi to head home.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  My cell phone started ringing just as I got off the elevator. I didn't recognize the number, but I answered anyway.

  "Raven, this is Andrew LaGarde. I'm working with my father on the Ethan Longoria case, and he suggested I give you a call. I'm wondering if you're free to take a drive tonight."

  I slumped against the outside of my apartment door, cringing at the prospect of going out again. Even though the oven wasn't on yet, I could almost smell the frozen pizza I'd been looking forward to for the last hour. I had even decided to go with pepperoni and black olives rather than sausage and mushrooms. "Um, I am kind of free. Nothing specific, anyways. What are we talking about?"

  "We ran a records search on Mickey Mayfield. A couple years ago he got a restraining order against a guy with a Henderson address. Also, there's a sealed civil lawsuit against Mayfield from just last year. It was settled and dismissed. I was planning to go see if any of these folks are at home tonight."

  "Let me just think for a minute," I muttered. The urge to eat large quantities of hot cheese and meat was almost insurmountable, but a little voice told me to buck it up and go for the ride.

  "I could pick you up in twenty minutes," he said.

  "All right," I said, beating the back of my head against my door. "Let me give you my address."

  "No need. We've already started a file on you."

  "What?"

  He laughed. "Just a little joke."

  "Right…" I wasn't in the mood for jokes. I was in the mood for pepperoni. I gave him my address and told him I'd meet him outside in twenty minutes.

  That gave me enough time to freshen up and fix a grilled cheese sandwich, which I managed to burn in the frying pan. I compounded the mistake by staying in the kitchen to scrape the char off the bread, which only gave the smoke even more opportunity to infuse itself into my hair. On the way down the elevator, I wondered how the scent of burnt grease and bread would mesh with my lilac-blossom conditioner. I think it pretty much smelled like a forest fire.

  Waiting for me downstairs was a full-sized black van that looked like it was on loan from the A-Team. The driver jumped out and bounded around the front. He stretched out a medium-sized, well-manicured hand.

  "Raven?"

  I smiled and shook hands. He was wearing a tight-fitting tan polo shirt tucked into olive cargo shorts, a belt cinched around his narrow waist. He was on the short side, with dark hair and paler skin than his dad. A few tufts of chest hair poked out from under his neck. On first review, I pegged him at about thirty-five and awarded him an eight, or even an eight point five. The chest hair was worth a minor deduction, but he got major points for the biceps that stretched out his shirt sleeves.

  "Andrew, is it?"

  "You got it," he said through unnaturally white teeth. "Let's get moving."

  He opened the passenger door for me and I climbed in.

  Before I found my belt buckle, Andrew stomped on the gas pedal and wheeled us out of my building's circular drive and onto the main street connecting to the Strip. A few throaty honks from the van cleared some bewildered tourists from our path and allowed him to swing to the right into Strip traffic. If he had seen the red light, he didn't let on. I wondered if he always drove so recklessly or if this was some kind of sophomoric macho attempt to impress me. I secretly hoped it was the latter.

  "Where are we headed first?" I asked, urgently fumbling with my seat belt.

  "Henderson. I couldn't tell much from the court records, but getting a restraining order against somebody is a big deal, especially when it's between two grown men. It's not the kind of thing you see every day. If nothing else, it's something we can use to raise another question in the jury's mind."

  I n
odded silently and clutched the door handle with the kind of death grip I usually reserved for hundred dollar bills. I had been on roller coasters that were easier on my blood pressure.

  "That's what this is all about, isn't it?" I asked, though it wasn't really a question. I had still not quite adapted to the idea that we weren't searching for truth—if such a thing existed—but instead were merely looking for various people we could point fingers at to drum up doubt in a jury's mind. In some ways, that was much easier because we didn't have to prove anything. But it wasn't particularly satisfying, especially if it meant suggesting to a jury and the press that some guy who was probably innocent might actually be a murderer.

  Andrew's face took on a serious tone as he swerved into the bus lane and then gunned it through a yellow light. He reluctantly fell in line behind a queue of cars turning left on Tropicana, where the prospects for a left-hand turn this century looked dimmer than the Chicago Cubs' chances of winning a World Series.

  "How's business?" he finally asked after we had lurched forward a few car lengths. I had just met the man, but his tone had a hint of playfulness to it, as though he wanted me to know he knew all about my other "business." I decided to play it straight.

  "Business is great. How could I complain? I've been doing this detective thing less than a year, and I've already got the most famous accused murderer in town as a client. Plus, he paid me up front."

  Andrew smiled. "Smart woman."

  Apparently he had decided to let the matter drop, because we drove to Henderson in a silence punctuated only by the van's horn and my thumping heartbeat and involuntary squeals. It was closing in on seven o'clock and the traffic in Las Vegas's largest suburb was finally beginning to ease. We pulled into a flat subdivision that pushed up against the side of the mountains. Andrew parked the car out front of a faded green ranch house with a weathered Dodge pickup in the driveway.