Murder in Vegas

by Connelly, Michael

  “We don’t. The so-called witness didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a kidnapping. Everything else suggests a spur-of-the-moment decision to go somewhere. Plus there’s no motive.”

  “Except the reason more women are grabbed than money or politics.”

  Yost sighed. “Come on. In a shopping mall, with people all around, rapists grab and run. The victim fights, screams. No one saw anything like that. And any other motive means ransom or hostage, and there would be phone calls.”

  He was right, but I owed Marty at least my best shot. “You have the witness’s name and address?”

  Yost was interested in the ceiling of his cubicle. He hesitated far longer than I thought normal. “Sure. Frank Goss.” He wrote down the address.

  It turned out to be a house buried in vegetation less than half a mile from the mall. When I got there I found an empty garage, and a recessed door with tall plants on both sides that no one opened. I waited in my car, but when Goss still hadn’t come home by 6:00 p.m., I climbed back out and gave the front doorbell one last push. Nothing.

  It was growing dark, and I decided to pack it in for the day. It looked more and more like Xiang Fei was off somewhere having fun, and the bad news for Donald could wait until tomorrow.

  Still, why had Lieutenant Yost hesitated so long before giving me the name and address of a witness he said had been useless?

  In Kay’s new dark blue S-type Jag I’d reached the corner of Frank Goss’s house when a red Mercedes 560SL pulled away from the curb across the street. It had not been there when I arrived, or while I waited, so had to have parked while I was giving the bell that one last ring. Coincidence or a tail?

  I placed my SIG-Sauer 9mm on the seat beside me, and led the 560 on a chase along the rapidly darkening back streets, not too fast and not too slow. I found the mall where Xiang Fei had gone for coffee, parked in front of the Starbucks, and went in. I ordered a decaf latte, and sat at a table near the window.

  The 560SL was parked three cars up from Kay’s Jag. I carried my latte out to the Jag without looking at the car, and opened the passenger side door. I bent in low out of sight of the Mercedes as if placing the latte into a coffee holder on the floor. Leaving the coffee on the floor and door open, I stayed low and circled to the 560.

  Donald Lewis sat in the driver’s seat. When he saw me, he rolled down the window. “Have you found her?”

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I expected a call by now.”

  “Did you?” I went around, opened the passenger door, and sat beside him.

  For the first time he noticed my missing arm. “Does that make it harder to do your work?”

  “It makes everything harder.”

  “How—?”

  “A crocodile bit it off,” I told him. “Now listen closely. I’ll do your job. From what I’ve learned so far you’re not going to like the result, but you let me handle it, or I quit. No hovering, no tailing, no calling every ten minutes.”

  He heard nothing except that he wouldn’t like the result. “You’re the same as all the rest. You don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you think she’s been kidnapped, and I believe you’re worried. The police don’t, and so far neither do I. But I’ll work on it until I’m sure. Now go home. When I have something, I’ll call.”

  He glared at me as I climbed back out, but when I reached my car I heard the Mercedes start and screech off. An impatient young man who liked his own way.

  I drove to the Mirage, and went up to our room. Kay was propped on the bed, shoes off, legs stretched out, a Newcastle Brown in her hand, looking tired.

  “How’d the calls go?” I said, sitting in the armchair facing her.

  “Sold five gowns, six suits—skirts and pants—and accessories.”

  “Good,” I said. “You can play the rest of the time we’re here.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Dinner, a good one on the first night. A show. Back to the room. Not necessarily in that order. Or are you too tired?”

  She drained her Newcastle, and smiled. “Not that tired.”

  Next morning at 8:00 a.m. I stood on Frank Goss’s doorstep.

  “I told the police what I saw. They said it was meaningless.”

  “I’m not the police. Tell me.”

  “Why the hell should I?”

  “Because I’m working for the woman.”

  He stared hard at me, then stepped back. We went into a large living room with a cathedral ceiling and good modern furniture. He pointed to a chrome and fabric couch, sat in a matching arm chair. “I’ll tell you exactly what I told them. I saw this tall woman in a long brown skirt, brown boots, and tan jacket. When she got out of her car, these two guys walked up and talked to her.”

  So they either knew she was going to Starbucks and were waiting, or they had tailed her. “What kind of car? What did the two guys look like?”

  “An old, light blue Dodge Aries. I didn’t get a good look at them. Two white guys like everyone else you see in a mall.”

  “Tall or short? Light or dark hair. Formal clothes or casual?”

  “Sort of tall, maybe six-feet even. Both of them. One dark-haired. The other wore a baseball cap. Mall clothes. You know, windbreakers, chino slacks, jeans.”

  “They didn’t touch the woman? Or argue? She wasn’t alarmed?”

  “Not when I saw them. My attention was caught by something else, and when I looked back they’d all left.”

  “Her car was gone too?”

  “No. It was still there. I remember wondering where she’d gone.”

  That caught my attention. “She didn’t come into Starbucks?”

  “Starbucks? No, of course not. I’d have known if she was Chinese, or Japanese, or possibly Vietnamese if she had.”

  Supposedly, Xiang Fei had gone to the mall for coffee and nothing more. So where had she gone?

  “You told the police all that?”

  “Damn sure did.”

  “Was the Aries gone when you left the mall?”

  “Almost. After Starbucks, I had to buy some books and CDs at Border’s, and when I came out they were towing it.”

  “Towing it?” No one had mentioned towing. “The police were towing it?”

  “I don’t think it was the police. Just a regular tow truck. I suppose the car had broken down or wouldn’t start.”

  “The woman was with it?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t see her.”

  To say Goss had painted a vastly different picture wouldn’t be true. But the picture was different. More detailed, with a woman who did not do what she had gone to the mall to do, and a towed car. I remembered Yost’s hesitation before he gave me Goss’s name. The police were lying. Why?

  In my car I dialed the number of the roommates.

  “Mr. Fortune? Hi, it’s Nancy.”

  “What car does Xiang Fei drive, and what was she wearing?”

  “An ’87 Dodge Aries, pale blue. She had on her nice calf-length brown cord skirt, cordovan boots, dark brown man-tailored blouse, and her beige jacket.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Are any of her clothes missing besides those?”

  “Gosh, we wouldn’t know. The cops took everything.”

  I sat in the car for a time. All right, the police were lying, probably about more than I knew, and I didn’t think they were going to fill me in any time soon. Where did I go next? If Xiang Fei had been kidnapped, why did they have it under wraps? What was special about Xiang Fei? I could only think of one place to ask that.

  I drove to Las Vegas International, and bought a round trip to San Francisco. First class.

  Relations with China had changed dramatically since 1983. What had been a Chinese mission in San Francisco then, was a consulate now, and the man who talked to me was the consul. He wore an impeccably tailored business suit complete with white shirt and conservative tie.

  “What is your interest in Xiang Fei,” he glan
ced at my card, “Mr. Fortune?”

  “Her fiancé hired me to investigate what happened to her.”

  He didn’t ask who her fiancé was. “What has happened to her?”

  Some things never change. He was as inscrutable as his counterpart in 1983. It had nothing to do with being Oriental, only with being a bureaucrat in a foreign country. I enlightened him with what Frank Goss told me, especially the towed car.

  He never changed expression. “It is essentially what I have been informed by your authorities. What seems to be your problem?”

  “If her car was towed, how could she have gone away in it?”

  “Most probably the car was repaired, and she then went on her trip. She could even have taken a bus. Or flown.”

  “She could have levitated,” I said.

  He smiled a thin smile. “Amusing. But I’m told the police have found no motive, and I can think of none. I don’t understand your concern, Mr. Fortune.”

  Someone had filled him in thoroughly about Xiang Fei.

  “I don’t understand your lack of concern. In my experience, Chinese officials raise holy hell when there’s even a hint of danger to one of your citizens abroad.”

  This produced a faint narrowing of his eyes. “I am confident Xiang Fei is in no danger. I have full trust in your fine police.”

  “Even though they’ve lied to me?”

  “Possibly the police do not feel obliged to tell you everything. Do your job for you, as it were.”

  “You’re taking our State Department’s word for all of it?”

  A furrow appeared between his narrowed eyes. “Since their word fits all the facts, I am. Might I suggest you do the same, Mr. Fortune?”

  “Is that what you’d advise if we were in China?”

  “In China your profession does not exist.”

  I stood. “Now that you’re going capitalist, it will.”

  “China is not going capitalist. That is a mistake many in the West make. We are a socialist nation adapting to the free market world beyond our borders, which, at the moment, we cannot change.” He almost smiled. “Have a good day, Mr. Fortune.”

  I drove south back to San Francisco International, thinking hard. A Chinese consul should be howling his head off to have Xiang Fei located, wherever she was. The police were lying. Or, at least, not telling me everything they knew. Something was wrong. A piece was missing. I mulled it over all the way to the airport, and by the time I arrived by the bay a possible explanation had dawned in my mind.

  I looked hard at her photo again.

  Then I switched flights to Santa Barbara. It was Donald’s money.

  Jan Brouwer came out of his darkroom with the enlarged negative of the snapshot Donald Lewis had given me. Or part of the snapshot. The part I hoped would confirm the bells ringing in my mind.

  “The guy used a damned expensive 35mm SLR. A Leica M6 TTL or better. It took a hell of a blowup before it grained out. Now let’s print the sucker.”

  Minutes later he dropped an eight by ten glossy on his desk in front of me. A head shot of Xiang Fei and her sardonic smile. I studied it. The thick black hair was coarse. The aquiline nose, prominent cheekbones, and pale brown skin color of the long face leaped out at me. A lean face already slightly weathered at twenty-nine. Her large dark eyes were round, and had the squint creases of a land of strong sun and stronger winds. It was a face that dropped into place like the final move in a chess match.

  I called Donald Lewis on my cell phone. “How much will your father back you with money to get Xiang Fei back?”

  He could barely speak with excitement. “They’ve asked for a ransom? Who are they?”

  “Answer my question.”

  “As much as I ask him to when he knows what it’s for. Who—”

  “I’ll get back to you.” I rang off. Fortunately, he didn’t have my cell phone number, or our room number in Vegas.

  The next call went to Los Angeles and the law offices of John Jeffries.

  “Dan Fortune,” I told the receptionist. “I need to speak to him.”

  It wasn’t long before the voice that made prosecutors and judges grind their teeth came on the line. “Dan, my boy. It’s been a long time.”

  I explained the bare facts of what I suspected. “How’s your time frame?”

  “How’s your money frame?”

  “Promising.”

  “Then I have time. Details?”

  “For now, this is a heads up.”

  My final call was to The Los Angeles Times. Larry Norris was a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist. I told him more of what I suspected than I had Jeffries.

  Then I headed for the airport again.

  At the reception desk of the Metro police when I asked for Lieutenant Yost, I got Captain Bruccoli. His office had two windows and a real door. “Don’t sit down, Fortune. What I have to say won’t take that long.”

  “What I have to say might.”

  “You don’t get to talk. You listen. You’re interfering with an ongoing police investigation. You’re meddling in matters that don’t concern you, and that could land you in serious trouble. I’m telling you stop whatever you think you’re doing. Now.”

  I smiled. That annoys petty tyrants more than anything else. “You finished?”

  “Yes, and so are you. Get out of here.”

  I opened my manila envelope, and dropped the enlarged face of Xiang Fei on his desk in front of him. “I suggest you look at this because it tells the whole story. Maybe you don’t know enough, but believe me, this photo at the top of an L.A. Times feature story is going to make a lot of people unhappy.”

  He pulled the photo to him. As I expected, it meant nothing. But I had his attention. “What feature story?”

  “The one that will explain who those two men who talked to Xiang Fei were, and who towed Xiang Fei’s car. Or whatever her other name is.”

  “Other name? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Just tell the sheriff I want to meet with those guys before I put the story in motion and hire the best lawyer Donald Lewis’s father’s money can buy.”

  Bruccoli wasn’t exactly sputtering when I left, but I hadn’t made a friend.

  If I were right, I didn’t give a damn.

  Now, as Kay and I walked home along cold and windy Las Vegas Boulevard, the midnight blue sedan pulled to the side of the road in front of us. The rear door opened. “He’ll talk to you. Get in.”

  I gave Kay a kiss, and climbed into the sedan. The man closed the door, the driver squealed away.

  The John Lawrence Bailey Federal Building in Las Vegas is at 700 East Charleston Boulevard. The man I faced this time across his desk was tall and wore the mandatory dark suit. Except his suit was a custom-made charcoal gray, and his office was a large corner one. He pushed my business card around his desk with one finger as if playing with a small animal.

  “What do you think you want, Mr. Fortune?”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  “Why?”

  “To hear what she has to say before I go to a lawyer and the L.A. Times.”

  “You can’t see her, and neither can your lawyer or the L.A. Times.”

  I sat watching his finger toy with my card. “Exactly who is she terrorizing?”

  “That’s classified.” The Mister was gone. He gave me a cold stare Captain Bruccoli couldn’t begin to match.

  “You like what you’re doing?”

  “What am I doing?”

  “Throwing a woman into a cell alone and incommunicado, when she’s done nothing in this country, or against this country. No lawyer, no judge, no visitors, no charges, no telephone call, no civil or human rights. No admission you’re even holding her. She disappears. Exactly like Chile or Argentina.”

  “Chile and Argentina were political civil wars. Our war against terrorism is international. We’ve been attacked. We’re defending ourselves.”

  I took an interest in the darkness outside his windows. We were
high enough, and facing in the right direction, to see the dark even in Las Vegas. “Don’t you get a sense of déjà vu? That we’ve all been here before?”

  “If you’re talking about the McCarthy era, there’s no resemblance.”

  “Actually, I was thinking of the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Congress and President John Adams in 1798.”

  “Never heard of them, but I expect Adams knew what he was doing.”

  No one knows history anymore, not even our own.

  “Ben Franklin didn’t think so: ‘They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ Tom Jefferson rescinded those laws as soon as he became president.”

  “Ben Franklin and Tom Jefferson lived in different times, without terrorists who target civilians and strike without warning, nuclear bombs in satchels, and biological weapons that can be carried in a pocket.”

  “They lived in times of Indians who targeted civilians and struck without warning on a thousand mile frontier. A time of two superpowers who encouraged and armed the Indians against us, and were ready to attack us at any time. And a far more dangerous and vulnerable homeland.”

  “Then President Adams knew what he was doing after all.” It was his turn to look out at the dark. “You’re wasting your time and mine. The woman isn’t a citizen. She’s Chinese.”

  “I don’t think she is.”

  His eyes were suddenly cautious. “You don’t think she’s what?”

  “Chinese. And legal resident aliens who have done nothing are supposed to have rights here. That’s what America is about.”

  He sat there staring down at my card as if trying to understand something. He either gave up, or decided he didn’t care. “We’re in a war against terrorism. She belongs to a terrorist organization on our list. It’s national security. Period.”

  I said, “Whose national security? Ours or China’s?”

  This time he only stared at me. “Go home, let us do our job.”

  I shook my head. “For twenty years we’ve been pressuring Beijing to improve their human and civil rights record. Three years ago we would have been loudly demanding Xiang Fei’s rights and freedoms. Shouting for democracy. Now, she’s done nothing against us, but we arrest her without charge and throw her into a cell without trial.”