A.R. Winters - Tiffany Black 02 - Green Eyes in Las Vegas

by A. R. Winters

  Stone smiled. “I knew you’d say that.”

  I scowled and grabbed my bag, feeling as though I’d lost in some childish game. “Why can’t you act like an adult?” I grumbled as we approached the elevator.

  “Why can’t you?”

  Trouble is, I was acting like an adult. That’s why I wanted him to compliment me, and that’s why I thought he looked like James Bond but couldn’t say anything about it. Sure, James Bond drives an Aston Martin, and Stone drives a silver Porsche convertible, but I’m pretty sure the similarities end there.

  I stepped into his car and placed my tiny, beaded purse on my lap. The engine purred into life, and just before he pulled away from the curb, Stone reached over and grabbed my hand in his.

  My skin seemed to burn where he touched me, and I felt a jolt of electricity run up my arm and spread through my body. I looked at him in surprise. His eyes had softened and he said gently, “You look beautiful.”

  The air seemed to have left my body and I wondered if he’d lean forward to kiss me. I was beginning to think it might have been a bad idea to invite Stone to the party, when he released my hand and began to drive away.

  We didn’t say anything on the short drive up to The MontePatria Casino. With anyone else, that might have been awkward, but I was used to being in silence next to Stone. Still, I wondered if I’d misread something in our conversation there.

  ***

  Outside the Forum Ballroom, where the party was being held, there were two men with square bodies stuffed into dark suits, checking everyone’s invitation cards.

  Stone and I slid past them effortlessly, and once we were inside, I took a moment to imbibe the atmosphere. Like most places in Vegas, the room was large and ostentatious. Massive chandeliers hung from the ceiling, Romanesque art hung from the walls, and the floor was varicolored marble. The lighting was diffused and classy, and I thought I heard the subtle notes of classical music above the low hum of polite conversation.

  The women were all dressed in slinky outfits like mine, and the men were in suits or tuxedos. Everyone was sipping drinks and nibbling hors d’oeuvres elegantly. There was an air of chummy belongingness inside the room – everyone here was wealthy, powerful, or important, or all three. Except for Stone and myself, of course. And I’m not really sure about Stone – for all I knew, he was wealthy and successful, and a powerful behind-the-scenes advisor to some bigshots.

  I glanced around the room, trying to find a man who matched the photos of Jeremy, the owner of the stolen Van Gogh, that Stacey had shown me. There were only a hundred or so people, and I spotted Jeremy right away – he was holding a glass of whisky in his hand and chatting with two women in their late sixties.

  I nudged Stone. “That’s him.”

  We began to walk over to Jeremy when Stone ran into someone he knew.

  “You son-of-a-bitch!” the chubby, grey-haired man said. “Good to see you again!”

  “Harry.”

  They did some back-slappingly manly hugging, and then Stone introduced me. “This is Harry,” he told me. “I did some work for him.”

  “Are you kidding?” the man said. “Guy practically saved my business. And me.”

  Stone asked how Noel and Sharon were doing, and they chatted about these mysterious people for a few minutes before we moved on. Jeremy was alone now, glancing vaguely at the guests and probably looking for someone he knew.

  We were about to make a beeline for him, when Detective Elwood stepped in front of me, blocking our path.

  “Tiffany Black,” he said slowly, “How nice to see you here.”

  Elwood’s voice was low, and I seemed to detect a slightly menacing edge. He looked incongruous in his shiny, slightly-too-tight suit, and in his left hand he held a glass of transparent liquid with a slice of lime in it. To the casual observer, it looked like a vodka tonic, but as an experienced dealer, I know a decoy drink when I see one – it was definitely a club soda, and he was definitely not drinking.

  He nodded at Stone and said, “I wish I could say it’s a pleasure meeting you.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” Stone replied.

  A waitress passed by with a tray of smoked salmon topped with crème fraiche and chives on thin crackers, and Elwood grabbed one for himself. “What’re you doing here?” he asked Stone.

  “Business,” Stone said.

  Elwood snorted. “I’ll bet. As long as it’s nothing we have to look into later.”

  Before Stone could reply, Elwood turned to me and said, “Why am I not surprised to see you two together?”

  I looked at him in disbelief. “How do you mean?” He just snorted again, and I said, “What’re you doing here?”

  He inhaled the cracker in one bite and narrowed his eyes. “I’ve got a hunch that whoever stole the Van Gogh is gonna turn up here. Lots of art lovers. You can’t sell it on the black market or through a dealer, now that we’re investigating, but you can sell one on one. This party is just an excuse for introductions.” He glanced at Stone and then back at me again. “Let me know if you meet anyone interesting.”

  Elwood walked away, trying to chase down a waitress carrying a tray of exotic-looking mini-sandwiches, and Stone and I looked at each other.

  “Man’s a nutcase,” I said.

  Stone nodded. “Amazing how a woman can screw you up like that.”

  He gave me a long look and I said, “Hey! It’s not like women collude together to screw up men. Men do it to themselves.”

  “Hmm.”

  We looked around, trying to find Jeremy, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “Oh crap!” I said. “Don’t tell me he’s left already?”

  “Impossible. Everyone stays for the speeches.”

  I frowned. What would I tell Stacey, that I’d lost the man in the middle of a crowded room? I looked back at Elwood, who’d managed to chase down the waitress, and was now stuffing his face with whatever she had on her tray, and cursed him silently.

  There were three tall, roundish men in their early sixties standing in front of us, all wearing boots and cowboy hats. They were laughing about something and I pegged them as Texans.

  “Well, nice meeting you,” one of them said, “I’m gonna find me another drink. How ’bout you, fellas?”

  The other two aging cowboys agreed that they, too, wanted drinks. All three of them spotted a waitress carrying a tray of champagne glasses at the same time, and they all wandered off after her.

  That’s when I saw Jeremy. The three Texans had been talking to him, shielding him from our view with their wide hats and even wider bodies. I felt a wave of relief wash through me, and Stone and I sauntered up to him.

  “Hi,” Stone said, “We haven’t met. I’m Jonathon Stone, and this is Tiffany.”

  “Jeremy.”

  We shook hands and Stone asked some polite questions – what brought him here? Did he know Oscar Goodman personally? Weren’t the tourists being awful this year?

  I’d always thought of Stone as being a silent, stoic person, so seeing him turn on the charm was a bit of a surprise. In contrast, I felt like an awkward, frizzy-haired teenager, not quite knowing what to say.

  After a while, Jeremy asked Stone what he did, and he used this opportunity to pull out his card and hand it over. “Security services, mainly,” Stone said. “Plus some investing, some funding new companies.”

  “Sounds interesting,” Jeremy said. “I’m involved with clothing imports.”

  I racked my brains to come up with some way of talking about the theft, but I couldn’t. Stone said, “Oh, that’s a guy I have to say hello to over there. I’ll catch you guys later.”

  He disappeared, and I shifted my weight uncomfortably. “So,” I said. “Do you travel much?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “Just a bit for business.”

  He clearly wasn’t about to bring up the theft on his own so I said, “Yeah. I’ve got a friend working insurance, says thefts really go up when people leave town.”


  “Oh?” Jeremy began looking around, clearly trying to escape, and I cursed my conversational skills. Usually they’re quite good – except when it really matters.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “She’s working on this one theft now, guy lived in Ascend Towers and his Van Gogh was stolen.”

  Jeremy’s attention switched back to me with laser-precision. “Really? What else did she say?”

  “Uh… She just said to travel safe.”

  I was mentally slapping my forehead. How had I gotten so stuck? I would’ve been better off even if I’d just asked him straight up, “Hey, I heard you got your painting stolen. Any idea who did it?”

  Instead, here I was, being pumped for information by Jeremy.

  He said, “What about this Van Gogh theft? Are they working on it?”

  I frowned, trying to think fast. “I guess I shouldn’t talk about. It could be anyone here.”

  We looked at each other warily. This conversation was going downhill fast, and I needed to do some damage control. “Actually,” I said, “She told me that the guy who owned the painting was called Jeremy. Is that you?”

  We stared at each other in silence, and then he said, “Yeah, it is me, actually.”

  I could see him trying to figure out if I’d known all along that it’d been his painting, so I quickly said, “Wow, what a coincidence! Small world, huh?”

  He smiled a terse, tight-lipped smile, not seeming to have been convinced by my act, but I pressed on. “I’m so sorry about the robbery. It must feel awful.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s pretty awful.”

  “Any idea who did it? Or how it happened?”

  He shrugged. “Just some guy, I guess.”

  “But I heard you’ve got great security at Ascend. How’d he get through?”

  “Umm, I’m not sure really.”

  “Security must’ve been off?”

  “Yeah, I think he turned it off. Anyway…”

  He was trying to run off again, so I said, “Geez, I hope the insurance pays out properly.”

  Jeremy focused his attention on me again and said, “Why, did your friend say anything?”

  I frowned and thought back to what Stacey had said. “I think they’re meant to pay out after three months, right? Unless it turns up again.”

  He nodded. “That’s what they say. Those scum better pay up, this time.”

  He glanced over my shoulder, nodded at someone and said, “I should go say hi to my friend, over there.”

  I followed his glance and almost stopped breathing. His “friend” was Green Eyes.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Of course, I wasn’t completely sure he was the man I’d seen falling from the sky that day, but he was definitely the man I’d seen in The Tremonte that night. The man who’d disappeared into thin air. Our eyes had met and Green Eyes was smiling at me now, and I held his glance and smiled back. There was no way, no way on Earth that he’d disappear on me a third time.

  “It was lovely meeting you,” Jeremy was saying, and I snapped back to reality.

  “Yes, you too,” I heard myself saying automatically. “Is that your friend over there? He looks kind of familiar, I might’ve met him somewhere. Could you introduce me to him, please?”

  Jeremy looked at me, trying to keep the exasperation out of his eyes. I was that person. The leech. The one who meets you at a party and sticks to you like superglue, the one whose sole aim in life seems to be to prevent you from having a good time.

  “Um…” He was clearly trying to think of an excuse to not introduce me.

  “Please?” I said. “The only other person I know here is the guy I came with, and he’s gone off somewhere. I’d love to meet your friend!”

  I didn’t care about dignity or pride or self-respect. All I cared about was sticking to Jeremy and meeting Green Eyes.

  I could see the annoyance start to show through the edges of Jeremy’s carefully composed expression. But it was a hard request to turn down, and Green Eyes was already heading right for us.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I tried not to grin too broadly, and we took a few steps forward.

  “Jack,” said Jeremy, “This is Tiffany Black. Tiffany, Jack Weber.”

  We smiled at each other. His eyes were green, flecked with tiny bits of gold, and his forehead was broad with strands of dark hair falling over the sides. I felt myself start to get lost in his eyes and quickly said, “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “You, too,” he said.

  I wondered if he meant it. But he looked genuinely interested in talking to me, and this time he hadn’t run off. I decided that I wasn’t going to make the same mistake I’d made when talking to Jeremy, and I jumped straight in. “Didn’t I see you at The Tremonte the other night?”

  The corners of his mouth went up a little. “It’s possible. I’m there quite often.”

  “Oh? Why is that?”

  He looked amused, and said, “I own half the place.”

  “Oh.”

  I felt like an idiot and was trying to think of something polite to say. It annoyed me that his mysterious disappearance, and the security guy’s refusal to talk about him, were both explained away so easily.

  Jack said, “Your name sounds familiar. Have we met before?”

  I narrowed my eyes. I wanted to be the one asking if we’d met before.

  “I remember!” Jack said, recognition dawning on his face. “You did some work for Sophia Becker, right?”

  I tried not to look completely stunned. “How do you know Sophia?”

  “I bought off her shares of The Riverbelle.”

  “That must’ve made her sister-in-law mad.”

  We smiled at each other, and Jeremy turned to me and said, “What work did you do for Sophia?”

  I felt my mind go blank and I began mumbling, trying to think of something to say.

  “She’s a private investigator,” Jack said to him. “And she’s really good.”

  Jeremy glared at me. “So AAI sent you, huh?”

  “Uh…”

  “I don’t know how you live with yourself,” he hissed.

  His hostility surprised me, but before I could say anything, he turned and huffed away.

  Jack looked amused.

  “What was that about?” I asked him.

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “Lucky I remembered you’re a PI. So, you’re working for AAI, huh?”

  “Um, not really.”

  I glanced around the room, wondering where Stone was. There was a group of about half a dozen men huddled in one corner of the room, talking and laughing, and when one of them moved away, I noticed that the ex-mayor was a part of the group, and Stone was saying something that made him laugh uproariously.

  Jack followed my glance and then turned his attention back to me. “So, what brings you here?”

  I looked back at him. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  He shrugged. “I gave the guy a donation once, so now I’m invited to these things. But how does a PI get an invitation to this, and more specifically, why?”

  His eyes were smirking silently, a mixture of amusement and curiosity, and I tried to think of something to say that would change the topic. His name sounded vaguely familiar – Jack Weber. Where had I heard that before?

  I remembered and looked at him in surprise. “You’re the co-producer of Casino Kings.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Yes.”

  “Your name was on the list Tony gave me,” I explained, but he just looked more puzzled. “I’m investigating Crystal Macombe’s death. She had a role in Casino Kings.”

  “Oh. I think Sam mentioned wanting to hire someone to replace Sally. But I didn’t know her name was Crystal, or that she died.”

  “You’re not a very hands-on producer, are you?”

  He grinned and shook his head.

  “Then why bother?” I asked. “Doesn’t The Tremonte keep you busy enough? And you own part of The Riverbelle, too.”

&nbs
p; He smiled. “Casinos are boring. Business is all about money and profitability and looking at operations.” He shrugged. “I thought the movie world might be a bit more interesting.”

  If I were a multi-million dollar businessman who owned large shares in large casinos, I’d probably be happy with my life and not complain about boredom. But then again, what do I know about being a casino owner? Maybe Jack’s life was one big sob story.

  “And how’d that turn out?” I said. “You don’t even know what’s going on in your own movie.”

  He smiled again. “Yes, but word gets around there’s a guy wanting to throw money at movies, all kinds of people start wanting to be your friend. Very int-eresting people.”

  I tried to keep my face expressionless, but all I could think of was, pig. He was probably doing this to meet beautiful actresses. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining him standing arm in arm with Angelina Jolie, talking and laughing about something. A wave of jealousy hit me like a punch in the stomach. I couldn’t compete with Angelina. Not even if I gave up cupcakes forever and spent half my life at the gym. Pig.

  “Why are you frowning?” Jack said. “What pig?”

  I snapped out of my reverie. “Huh?”

  “You said ‘pig.’ You weren’t calling me a pig, were you?”

  I looked at him blankly. “No, of course not.”

  Jack seemed amused. “You think I’m a pig because I’m financing movies to meet women?”

  It sounded absurd when he said it out loud. “No, of course not,” I repeated. Jack continued to look amused, and I could feel myself blushing. “I, uh, was thinking of that charity where you buy pigs for poor people.”

  “Which charity?”

  “The Pig Foundation.”

  “Right.”

  Jack was smiling broadly, and looked like he was trying not to laugh. I quickly added, “I’m not sure if they exist anymore, but they used to do really good work.” I was babbling, and I needed to change the topic before I made a bigger fool of myself. I tried to push my brain to think faster. Bingo! “What do you think of the other people working on the movie?”

  His smile disappeared immediately, and I patted myself of the back. Sure, my thoughts might inadvertently turn into speech sometimes, but I’m still able to change the topic in time.