“Probably a good idea,” he said. “Same expectation, though. You’re probably not going to find anything. But this way, we rule out any accounting snafus in advance.”
“Another preemptive strike,” I said.
“Bingo,” he said, laughing. “I’ll email you what I have, and you can ship it over to your friend. Thanks for the help, Raven.”
I checked my watch. We’d been talking for about five minutes, but it wasn’t worth the effort to mark it down and bill him for the time. I wasn’t a lawyer, after all. It was probably too early in the morning to call Carlos, my quasi-accountant friend. He worked as a bouncer at Cougar’s, but on the side, he was working towards his masters in business, and he owned a number of apartment buildings as well. If there was anything funny going on with the books, he’d be able to sniff it out.
Dan’s email arrived soon after. He flattered me by thinking I’d have Microsoft Excel on my computer, which I didn’t, but I was able to pull up the spreadsheets using free Google software. To me, it was all gobbledygook, a bunch of inputs, expenses, overhead, costs, and the like.
Although Carlos and I were friends, I had never emailed Carlos, so I’d have to wait until he woke up to call him. I gave him until noon and then called. Predictably, I woke him up, but he pretended not to mind.
“I had to get up soon anyway. It was rough last night. We had a fight. Carmine got his arm broken,” he said.
“Wow, on a Monday night? Glad I missed it,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “two dudes wanted a dance from the same girl. You know how that goes.”
“Huh,” I muttered. “No one ever got in a fight over me.”
Carlos sniffed. “I can’t believe you’re jealous. Anyway, what’s going on?”
I filled him in. Carlos had worked with me as a freelancer a number of times, usually in the capacity of a muscle-bound intimidator or protector. This was the first time I was asking him to use his brain.
“Yeah, just send them over, and I’ll take a look,” he said. “It still sounds weird, though. A bunch of hyper-religious card counters?” He chuckled.
“Only in Vegas,” I said.
He promised to get back to me by tomorrow. That afternoon he was busy taking his girlfriend’s daughter to the movies and then out to dinner, but he said he’d be able to get to it eventually. Carlos had been dating the same woman for years, on and off, but he’d never hidden his interest in me. He had a great body, had commitment potential, and was great with kids. And he even made me laugh sometimes. But he was only about twenty-five, and I was, well, a little longer in the tooth than that.
Tuesdays were my Sundays, the lazy days when I futzed around with old records or CDs and sat out on my balcony getting a no-lines tan to the cool jazz stylings of Dizzy Gillespie or the warm tenor voice of José Carreras, the most underrated of the famed Three Tenors. It was also the day when I missed family life the most. I was still on reasonable terms with my sister, a veterinarian assistant in Illinois, but my parents had essentially written me off once they found out how I was paying my bills. I can’t say I blamed them. It was only partly because I was a stripperâthe rest of it was the web of lies I had told them over the years to cover it up. “I was a model,” I said, “a high-roller hostess,” and, “I worked at trade shows and publicity events.” Some of which was true. My worst gig ever, even worse than any work I did with my clothes off, was working an international auto show. I was “the girl” standing on a rotating platform next to a Saab hatchback. I had to stand there and smile nonstop for stretches of up to two hours. Not being a naturally joyous and bubbly person, my facial muscles began to spasm, forcing me to massage my cheeks while dozens of passersby looked up at me and thought, what’s the deal with her??? My face hurt for weeks, and even now, I cringe any time I see a Saab on the road.
But by and large, my money had come from good old-fashioned nudity. That was where the money was, but it had several costs I hadn’t considered at the outset. It cost me most of my close relationships and had prevented me from developing many new ones, with both men and women alike. Men only wanted one thing, and women looked at me as a sellout. Despite the fact that sex was everywhere in modern society, people still looked down upon people who made a living off it. Which was probably a good thing.
I didn’t hear from Carlos that day or the next, but I knew he’d be working at the club with me on Wednesday night, so I didn’t bug him about the little project I’d given him. After the first set at Cougar’s, which ended around 10:15, he tapped me on the shoulder just as I was entering the employee lounge.
“You’ve got yourself into a pretty profitable group,” he said. “At least, they used to be.”
“I know. That’s kind of the point,” I said. “Anything jump out at you?”
“Little things here and there,” he said. “For one, that lady keeps track of everything. I mean, if someone orders a Diet Coke during a meeting, it’s recorded there. I wonder if they’re trying to deduct it for tax purposes.”
I nodded. “They said they were even deducting the pizza they ordered at meetings.”
He shrugged. “They have to report the income, of course. But maybe they can deduct their expenses off the top. I don’t know. I’m not a tax guy,” he said.
“Okay, anything else?” I asked.
“They also have charitable contributions. Ten percent of their winnings goes straight to the church. Or, it did. When they had winnings.”
“Got it,” I said. “That doesn’t surprise me since they’re a pretty religious bunch. But I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a deeper connection, though. You knowâare these guys involved in church management somehow, or are they just regular members?”
“Something to look at, I guess,” he said. “So,” he said and then paused. A small grin crept across his face. I knew what was coming.
I put my hands on my hips. “How much?” I asked.
“Well, it was an hour and a half, and I charge more when I use my hard-earned business acumen, soâ”
I guffawed, causing half the girls in the lounge to turn in our direction. “Your business acumen?”
He shrugged. “I bust my ass in all those accounting classes. And that wasn’t really my thing, either. I’m more into the finance side of things.”
Here we go, I thought. Carlos had a Donald Trump side to him, a penchant for waxing at length about his investing prowess and how smart he was. I wasn’t in the mood.
“Okay, I’ll give you a little extra this time,” I said. “But the next time you utter the phrase ‘business acumen,’ I’m going to cut you off for good.”
He pouted, but I knew he was pleased with himself. Carlos went back to work, and I got myself a Red Bull in preparation for a long night. Many of the top draws had skipped work that night which was common enough on Wednesdays, so that meant lots of lap dances for me, the customers apparently undeterred by my extra pounds.
CHAPTER NINE
Thursday morning.
Mike Madsen was frowning at me.
“We’d split it fifty-fifty, of course,” I said.
“And how much does this stuff cost?” he asked, his muscled forearms folded across his chest. Standing six foot one, he was a tower of skepticism.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to shop for it and everything. But let’s say fifteen hundred bucks.”
“Each?” he asked.
“Each,” I said.
The good folks at the registration bureau in Carson City had randomly assigned Mike to supervise me during my first year as a PI. Recently, we also began sharing an office suite. To call the office an eyesore would be a disgrace to eyesores everywhere. It was a museum of dilapidated metal desks, 1970s furniture, and carpeting stained with Sanka and other fluids of unknown provenance. If I was going to make a go of this private eye thing, I had to do it my way. And that meant new furniture.
Mike was still hemming and hawing, oblivious of how impossibly cute he looked when he furr
owed his brow. He was about my age, with blue-gray eyes, an athletic build, and the sandy-haired, clean-cut look of an NFL quarterback. We had hit it off, which is why we’d started sharing office space, but sometimes his Mormon sensibilities got in the way, clouding his mind with sound judgment and common sense. Every time we started to connect, I could sense danger signals going off somewhere in his subconscious. And he didn’t even know about my night job.
I knew from Mike’s continued silence that I’d won the battle, just as God intended.
“So?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said, sighing dramatically. “But I don’t want to do any shopping. You do everything, and just send me the bill.”
“No problem there,” I said, relieved. The notion of shopping for furniture with a man was mildly horrifying.
“But nothing, you know, weird,” Mike said. “This is an office.”
I smiled. “What were you expecting, zebra prints and purple velvet?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It just makes me a little nervous. Especially for fifteen hundred bucks.”
“Hey, you can deduct it,” I said. “That means it’s like it’s on sale!”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like,” he said, rolling his eyes. He turned to go back into his office.
“Anyway,” I said, halting his escape. “I’ve got this thing I’m working. You ever hear of The Meadows Worship Center?”
He turned back to me and stared blankly. “No. Is it a church?”
“Yeah. It’s a nondenominational Christian church about two miles from here. The weird part is, there’s a group of card counters running a team out of there.”
Mike cocked his head. “Only in Vegas,” he said, chuckling.
I nodded. “Their angle is that they’re morally opposed to gambling, so they try to stick it to the casinos by winning lots of their money. Then they turn around and give some of the winnings back to the church.”
“That actually makes a little bit of sense,” he said. “Maybe I should join them.”
“Since when are you against gambling?”
He smiled. “Since I never win. So what’s the job?”
“The head of the group thinks someone’s stealing from them,” I said. “Actually, he thinks it’s his wife. She keeps the books.” I filled him in on the rest. He was impressed that I could count cards without making a mess of things.
“I actually tried that a few times myself,” he admitted. “Read a few books on it, even. But I couldn’t quite keep up.”
“It’s like riding a bike,” I said. “Once you get it, it just comes naturally.”
Mike mumbled something unintelligible.
“What was that?” I asked.
He sighed. “I can’t ride a bike, either.” He folded his arms defensively and grimaced.
I felt my eyes getting big. “You never learned to ride a bike?”
“Yeah, yeah, long story. So how are you going to catch the wife?” He was suddenly eager to talk about something other than cycling.
I gave him a pass, but I filed that little tidbit away for safekeeping. “I don’t know,” I said. “My friend looked at the books, and there’s nothing too unusual going on. The spreadsheets wouldn’t tell us if she was taking something off the top, though, so that’s not surprising. I’m just trying to see if there’s some kind of deeper connection between the card-counting group and the church itself.”
“And why is that?” Mike asked, leaning against his office door.
“Well, the books showed that they donated ten percent of their winnings to the church. Which I suppose isn’t that unusual since they use the building for their meetings.”
“Like a tithe,” Mike said. “Ten percent is pretty standard. So why not join the church? That’s the best way to get on the inside.”
I cringed. “I’m already pretending to be a real member of the card-counting team. But it’s something else to join a church under false pretenses.”
Mike smiled. “You think God would mind?”
I shrugged. “I suppose he has better things to worry about. Like that awful shirt you’re wearing, for example.”
Mike pretended to be offended, but he knew that his short-sleeved khaki shirt was indefensible.
I decided to press the point. “Is that from Goodwill or the Salvation Army? I can’t tell.”
“I don’t really do much shopping, so I have no idea,” he said lamely.
I shook my head. It was a losing battle, like trying to convince Donald Trump to get a haircut. I took my leave of Mike, happy to get his agreement, or at least acquiescence, in the need to buy new office furniture.
My next step was to figure out if Laura Hartman was stealing from the group. I was stumped as to how to go about proving it since it was such a private crime. After all, she collected all the money and then reported how much was there. Apart from catching her in the act, which seemed unlikely, there was no way to actually witness the deed.
But gradually, as I paced around my little office, a plan began coming together. Even if I couldn’t prove the how of the theft, I might be able to prove the why. Every thief had a reason for stealing, whether it was drugs or just plain greed, and if I could uncover Laura’s reason, it might unravel the whole mystery.
I didn’t know her very well yet, but she didn’t give the impression of being overly interested in material goods, and so I had little hope of uncovering a hidden cache of Prada handbags and Jimmy Choo shoes or a secret garage stuffed with Ferraris. In short, apart from the missing money, there were no red flags.
I sighed and looked out my window down at a homeless man digging into an improbably large takeout lunch. It was beginning to dawn on me that this job would never be easy. If a problem was easy, the client wouldn’t go through all the hassle and expense of hiring a private investigator. They only came to us with the tough ones, the problems whose solutions didn’t immediately jump right out at you. The best I could hope for was to do a better job of staying out of danger.
After lunch, I found Dan and Laura’s address and drove over to their house, a midsized ranch home perched on a wide lot with colorful desert stones blanketing the yard. A small dog, unleashed, was wandering around and sniffing at the trees. Like many Nevada homes, there was a carport instead of a garage. This one was empty.
I was a little unclear what Dan’s expectations were. Obviously, he knew I would be investigating his wife, but I wondered whether or not he wanted me poking around his homestead and digging into her personal life. As I was gazing at their spread, a shadow crossed in front of the left window, and then a form appeared at the door. It appeared to be a teenaged girl, probably their daughter. She opened the door and then whistled at the dog which proceeded to ignore her. She put her hands on her hips, whistled again, and then yelled at the dog whose name was Sparky.
I could see her whole body sigh, as though she was saying “Here we go again,” and then she stormed out and gave poor Sparky the business which involved some sharp scolding and a little chase before she snatched the little pooch up and brought him inside. The girl was tall, long-legged, and anywhere between fifteen and eighteen, pretty despite being garbed only in a tank top and pajama bottoms. Was she skipping school, I wondered? It was around noon on a Thursday in September, which had me curious.
Apart from the girl’s presence, there was nothing unusual about the house which was situated in a quiet neighborhood of similar ranches that predated the more recent housing boom’s love affair with two-story cookie-cutter homes. The visit didn’t tell me very much except to confirm that Laura wasn’t living high on the hog. At least, she didn’t appear to be.
With that bit of almost useless information under my belt, I moved on. I’d have to connect with Dan to find out more about Lauraâwhere she worked, shopped, and that kind of thingâand if there were any boundaries I should not cross. After all, I was investigating his own wife, the mother of his children.
That afternoon I got another call fro
m my bank president friend, who had another job lined up for me. Supposedly, he thought one of his best loan officers was being courted by another regional bank, and he wanted me to confirm that before he committed to promoting the guy. I couldn’t help feeling that he was using my new job as an excuse to see me. Eighty percent of me felt bad for his wife, but the other twenty was flattered. It wasn’t like I was going to sleep with the guy. I was just going to play a small role in whatever little fantasy he was trying to live out. The fact that he always paid well, and in cash, had nothing to do with it. Rationalization 1, Truth 0.
CHAPTER TEN
On Friday morning, I woke to an email from Dan which answered most of my questions. Surprisingly, he said there were no boundaries. Nothing was off-limits. I should follow the money, Woodward and Bernstein style, wherever it led. He also gave me some basic information about his wife. She worked part time at a local gambling software company (another delicious irony), golfed in a ladies’ league on Monday mornings, and belonged to the Desert Athletic Club where she did Pilates and played tennis. That explained why she was in such great shape. Though sparse, the information was enough to get me started. I responded and asked him about their family, something I’d forgotten to mention in the first email. I also thought about asking him if he knew any of her passwords so I could check her email, but I wasn’t quite ready to take that step. Even though Dan had said there were no boundaries, hacking emails was a whole different level of snooping.
Leftover pizza and orange juice made a splendid breakfast on my balcony, which by eleven had warmed up considerably. Pizza for breakfast was one of my most treasured benefits of single life. I couldn’t imagine being able to get away with such a thing with a husband and kids around. First of all, there wouldn’t be any pizza leftovers. And second, even if there were, they’d scarf them down before I ever got my paws on them.
I knew I needed a plan to begin understanding what made Laura tick. Without prompting, Dan had said he’d cut me a new check to cover additional hours on the project, so I viewed that as a green light to start digging. In my brief months working as a private investigator, I had uncovered some of the most unusual things just by watching and paying attention, trying to keep out of sight and stay out of trouble.
Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4) Page 6