by Chris Ewan
‘Because Josh told me.’
‘So you say.’ The twin jabbed a finger at me. ‘Hey, where are your cuffs?’
I looked down at my hands, suddenly conscious that I’d been rubbing at my wrists.
‘They were starting to chafe.’
‘They do that. How’d you get ’em off?’
It didn’t strike me as the most opportune moment to draw attention to my ingenuity with locks and bindings.
‘I rubbed them on the table leg.’
The twin frowned at me. His brother frowned at the table.
‘Is that so?’
‘I’m afraid it is.’
The twin on the right checked the time on his watch. He turned and made as if to leave the room. I spoke up before he’d got too far, saying, ‘What about Josh’s body?’
‘What about it?’ he asked the wall.
‘Why don’t you have someone on your security team examine him – maybe take a look at the stab wounds more closely. It might give you a link to his killer.’
The twin flexed his hands. ‘You think this is CSI?’
‘I’m not suggesting an autopsy. But surely it’s worth a try?’
He looked back over his shoulder and summoned a flinty glare. ‘Maybe we should leave it to the cops.’
‘If you were planning to leave any of this to the cops, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.’
He glanced towards the mirrored partition and found his brother’s eyes in the glass. ‘Man has a point.’
The twins nodded at one another and moved towards the door.
‘Can I use the bathroom?’ I asked.
Three security guards accompanied me as far as the door to the bathroom, and one of them followed me inside. There was no door to close for my privacy and no window to prise open to make my escape. I unzipped my fly and peed. The guard watched me do it. He didn’t comment on my technique and I didn’t ask him for any assistance. I took my time washing my hands, smoothing the soapy water over the sore spots on my wrists. Then I was transported back to my room.
Just before I was locked inside again, a fourth security guard came along the corridor and handed me coffee in a Styrofoam cup. I turned to the security guard who’d watched me pee.
‘Loan me a cigarette, Mac?’
It seemed like a Mac moment, on account of his period cop uniform.
‘I don’t smoke.’
‘How about your buddies?’
‘They don’t smoke, either.’
He locked the door behind me and left me alone in the room, drinking my lukewarm coffee and thinking about the cigarette I wasn’t smoking. Two hours went by. I counted them off on my digital watch, since Josh’s watch had quit working again. I tore the Styrofoam cup into pieces. I became so hungry that I started to wonder if I should eat some of it. I’d got as far as tasting a piece by the time Ricks walked in.
THIRTY-NINE
Ricks entered the room holding an ice pack against his forehead. The ice pack was pale blue in colour, complementing his navy blazer and crisp white shirt. He grunted a greeting, then stepped forward and sat down in the plastic chair across the table from me. He lifted the ice pack away from his face and revealed a dark, swollen lump just above his left eye. It looked as if a crazed plastic surgeon had implanted a golf ball beneath his skin.
‘I hope you’re not expecting an apology,’ I told him, and spat a mulched piece of Styrofoam onto the remains of my cup.
‘Doc tells me I have a concussion,’ he said. ‘That accounts for the nausea. And the dizzy spells.’
‘And the compulsive lying?’
Ricks barely smiled as he covered the lump with the ice pack once more. He used his spare hand to reach inside his blazer.
‘Guess you figured you were mighty smart.’
‘You’ll have to be more specific than that, I’m afraid.’
He removed his hand and I saw that he had a playing card pinched between his forefinger and thumb. The reverse of the playing card was pointed towards me.
‘Aren’t you supposed to shuffle the deck and invite me to select my own?’
A smirk flirted with his lips and the greying bristles of his goatee beard stiffened and stretched, like the fronds of a sea anemone. He held the card in front of his nose and turned it slowly. Two of Hearts.
‘You want me to memorise it?’ I asked.
‘Like it’s the first time you’ve seen this playing card.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
Ricks exhaled audibly. My response obviously didn’t please him. I don’t suppose the playing card had pleased him a great deal either. There was blood on the waxed surface, and I was confident that a forensic test would demonstrate that it belonged to Josh Masters. There was also a single word scrawled across the face of the card in a faint blue ink. RICKS.
‘Seems you recommended the Fisher Twins had somebody take a look at Josh’s body. Seems you suggested they might find something to identify the killer.’
‘Just trying to be helpful. I thought the slash wounds might give them a lead.’
‘Kind of clever, I guess. Laying the plant.’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah. You.’
He was right, of course – I had done it. The moment everything had fallen into place for me, when the twins had pushed me clear of the boot of the Lexus and I’d first noticed that Ricks was nowhere to be seen, I’d used the biro Victoria had palmed me to write his name onto one of the playing cards from the deck in my pocket. Then, when the twins had backed off and I’d stepped up to look down over Josh the second time around, I’d slipped the card into his hand before tugging the black cape up to cover his face.
I have to confess that I liked the symmetry of the move. When I’d first met Josh, I’d wanted to show him a trick that involved writing a name on a playing card. And once it had occurred to me that Ricks was the killer, I couldn’t see the harm in doing something similar to give justice a nudge in the right direction – especially if it would take the heat off me.
‘Odd, ain’t it,’ Ricks said, turning the playing card in his hand and showing me the reverse. The words CIRCUS CIRCUS had been printed over and over on the flipside, in a slanted brown font. ‘I seem to recall you had a pack of cards just like this when I searched you upstairs.’
‘Coincidence is a funny thing.’
‘Huh. And how would you rate the coincidence if I asked you to count out that same deck of cards onto this table and show me the Two of Hearts you’re carrying?’
I didn’t say anything to that. There wasn’t anything to be said.
‘Or maybe we should arrange for a specialist to compare the name on this playing card with a sample of your handwriting?’
‘Sounds complicated,’ I told him. ‘And more than a little unnecessary.’
‘Oh, it’s unnecessary, all right. But not for the reasons you have in mind.’
Ricks spread his right hand on the table, fingers arched, like he was about to play piano. He drummed his fingers and I watched him at it. The tune didn’t strike me as anything Liberace would have rated.
‘You have a screwy notion,’ he said. ‘Figuring me for the guy who killed Josh.’
‘Makes sense to me.’
‘Is that so?’ His fingers tickled the missing ivories some more. ‘Then I don’t guess I’ll be buying one of your mystery novels anytime soon.’
‘Not to worry. I hear they have excellent lending libraries in the prisons over here.’
Ricks curled his lip and pushed up from the table, wincing as his balance shifted and the pain flared in his forehead. He gripped the table edge to steady himself, then paced stiffly behind me. I waited for him to lean in close to my ear and treat me to a dose of halitosis. Instead, I heard him punch the power button on the television fixed to the wall.
‘Turn around, why don’t you?’
Why didn’t I, I thought, and so I turned in my seat and leaned an elbow on the backrest of my chair. Ricks motioned towards the t
elevision screen with the remote.
‘This here is your killer.’
The picture on the television was of a hunched figure sitting in a room much like the one I was sitting in, behind a table much like the one I’d just turned my back upon. He had lank, tangled hair and a smudged tattoo of a pair of dice on his neck. He wore a Yankees baseball shirt, his right hand was heavily bandaged and he was nibbling at the fabric of the dressing with his teeth. If Jared Hall had really planned on leaving Vegas, he was taking one hell of a circuitous route.
‘Casino security picked him up a couple hours ago,’ Ricks told me. ‘Fool sent some kid in to cash a stack of ten k markers at the high-stakes cage. Dumb move. Security red-flagged the kid and hauled him inside for questioning. Gave our friend up right away. Guy was parked in a breakdown truck outside of a Fat Burger two blocks from here.’
‘The fact he had some silver chips doesn’t make him a murderer,’ I told Ricks. ‘He might have lied to the twins yesterday. He could have had the chips all along. He could have been willing to risk his health to hold onto them.’
Ricks lowered the ice pack from his forehead and weighed it in his hand along with my words. The weighing took a few moments and it led him to suck on his lips in contemplation. Once he was through sucking and thinking, he dropped back into his chair and slapped the television remote and the ice pack onto the table before me. I willed myself not to fixate on the colourful swelling above his temple as he delved inside the front, left-hand pocket on his blazer.
‘They didn’t only find your playing card when they checked on Josh’s body. They found the man’s cellphone too.’
He pulled a clear, Ziploc bag from his pocket. Inside the bag was an expensive-looking mobile phone – the kind with a touch-sensitive screen. He frowned as he prodded at it with his thumbs. After some considerable time, his face relaxed and he showed me the lit screen.
‘Text message. Sent at one-seventeen this afternoon.’
I took the phone from him and stretched the plastic bag so that I could read the message clearly.
Am stuck in trunk of Lexus in staff parking lot. Have your roulette cut. Can you come free me?
I offered Ricks a puzzled look. ‘How does this connect Josh to Jared? Did you trace the number this message was sent to?’
‘Better than that.’ Ricks slipped a hand into the pocket on the right of his blazer. He removed another plastic bag and another mobile telephone. This time, Ricks negotiated the operating system with relative ease before passing me the bagged phone.
‘Found this on the croup,’ he explained.
I compared the two messages and confirmed that they were identical. Then I scrolled down and found that Jared’s telephone had received the message at 13.17. That was around the time I’d been in his apartment, and it seemed reasonable to believe that this was the text that had prompted him to leave me by myself.
‘I can see that the messages match,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t prove that Jared is responsible for Josh’s death.’
‘The dressing on the man’s hand has blood all over it.’
I shrugged. ‘Unless you can demonstrate that the blood belongs to Josh, that doesn’t mean anything. His fingers were mashed with a metal bar only yesterday. I’d say a little bleeding is to be expected.’
‘The blood is on the outside.’
I shrugged some more. ‘Even if what you say is true, it looked to me as if Josh had been stabbed to death. Your man there couldn’t lift a pen right now.’
‘So he used his left hand. That would explain why the wounds were spread around so much. The blood on the bandage would rate as splatter.’
I supposed that was possible. And I couldn’t deny that Jared had a plausible motive. Josh had screwed him out of his cut from the roulette scam, sure. But factor in the damage to his hand and his banishment from Vegas, and who knew what he was capable of. Hell, I knew only too well that he had a tendency to lash out.
I slid the phones back across the table to Ricks.
‘It would help if you had the knife he used,’ I told him. ‘Or better still, a confession.’
‘Oh, we’ll get a confession.’
‘Without breaking his hand this time?’
‘Relax. I have enough evidence to work the guy. The text message is good, but one of my team searched the dumpsters out back of the parking lot. We found a crowbar he used to force open the trunk – it has paint fragments that match with the finish on the Lexus. We also found the weapon. It has a lot of blood on it. Prints too, I’m guessing.’
‘You have the knife?’
Ricks shook his head. ‘No knife. Whack job used a barbecue fork.’
I exhaled hard and turned to look up at the television screen. Jared was still gnawing on a thread from his bandage, as if it was a stubborn hangnail.
‘Then I guess you do have your killer,’ I said. ‘But that still leaves one matter unresolved.’
I fixed on Jared, chewing hard, and I allowed my mind to do the same thing on the knotted logic I was struggling to untangle.
‘I didn’t like Josh Masters a great deal,’ I told Ricks, ‘but he didn’t strike me as completely stupid. So I don’t see him climbing inside the boot of his Lexus and waiting more than half a day to send Jared the text message you found. Then there’s the fact that somebody erased the footage from the cameras in the parking lot. I don’t imagine Jared was capable of it, and you haven’t suggested as much. Which means someone else was involved.’
‘You think so, huh?’
‘Absolutely. And when you put all that together, you’re really only left with one question that matters.’
‘Oh yeah? And what’s that?’
‘Who shut Josh in the trunk of his car?’
FORTY
‘You’re honestly saying it was Caitlin?’ Victoria asked me.
‘Cross my heart. And Ricks admitted as much. Eventually.’ I lifted my eyebrows. ‘Mind you, he wouldn’t say a thing until we were outside the hotel and walking up and down the Strip. We must have covered a couple of miles talking it through.’
Victoria shook her head. ‘I did not see that coming. She seemed genuinely upset when we found Josh’s body.’
‘She was genuinely upset. She had no idea that he’d been killed.’
I reached for the bread basket and slipped a chunk of warm ciabatta into my mouth. The Italian restaurant we’d selected was a smart establishment, with well-dressed waiting staff, immaculately laid tables and an appealing menu. It also happened to be situated in a corner of St Mark’s Square – the indoor version at the heart of the Venetian resort-casino.
We were surrounded on all sides by the mock façades of pastel-coloured grand palazzos, and above our heads a domed, Renaissance-style sky was marred only by the visible sprinkler system. From the far side of the square, beyond the gelateria stall, I could hear the warble of a gondolier navigating the chemical-blue canal. Above the canal, on an arched bridge, a bride and groom exchanged vows in the glare of tourist camera flashes.
Sure, it was kitsch, but I can’t deny that I really quite liked it. And I especially liked that I was able to share a meal with Victoria without the threat of imminent death hanging over us.
‘You’re sure that Caitlin wasn’t working in partnership with Jared?’
‘As sure as I can be. I very much doubt that she even knows who Jared is.’
‘But Ricks knew?’
‘He did. In fact, he probably had more information than anybody else. His problem was timing. And I’m afraid I have to shoulder some of the blame for that.’
Victoria frowned, as if she was about to assure me that I was talking nonsense. I wagged my finger. She deserved all the facts before she made that call.
‘By early this afternoon,’ I said, ‘Ricks had got around to reviewing the footage from the surveillance cameras covering the theatre exits. He managed to catch a glimpse of Josh making his getaway. Once he had the timing right, he was able to follow his route out to
the staff parking lot on the connecting cameras.’
Victoria snorted derisively and reached for her glass of Pinot Grigio. ‘And he couldn’t have done that before?’
I felt a tic in my cheek. ‘Don’t forget, to begin with he was faced with questioning Jared about the roulette scam, and then he had you and me to contend with. And since nobody knew about the juice list back then, I’m pretty sure Ricks expected Josh to turn up after a few days with his tail between his legs.’
‘By which point we might have been dead.’
‘Maybe. But don’t you think that’s why Ricks focused on us to begin with? I know he didn’t exactly make things easy on us, but he could have made them an awful lot worse. And I’d say we have your father to thank for that.’
‘Forgive me,’ she said, sipping some wine, ‘but it would have been a lot more helpful if he’d just talked some sense into the Fisher Twins.’
I tossed my head from one shoulder to the other, then popped another piece of ciabatta into my mouth and spoke from behind my hand. ‘Easier said than done.’ I chewed, then swallowed, and pointed a finger at Victoria. ‘But let me get back to the surveillance footage. According to Ricks, Josh spent twenty minutes in the driving seat of his Lexus, talking on his mobile.’
‘Who did he call? Maurice?’
I shook my head. ‘Maurice never heard a thing from the moment Josh disappeared. No, he called Caitlin. The register on his mobile confirms as much.’
Victoria’s face tangled. ‘But why?’
‘To say that her brothers were onto him.’
‘Over the roulette fix?’
I shook my head again. ‘Over the juice list.’
‘Right,’ she said slowly, and set her wine glass down. ‘Because Josh had it on him when he vanished.’
‘Actually, no.’
Her brow furrowed. ‘No?’
‘Caitlin had it.’
‘But wasn’t Caitlin upstairs in the bath?’
‘I’m guessing his call probably roused her. According to Ricks, when she appears on the footage she’s wearing a robe and her hair is wet. And she doesn’t seem terribly happy. They rowed. For eight minutes.’
