Sleepless in Las Vegas

by Colleen Collins

  “I’m Tony Cordova, arson investigator for this district.”

  Drake guessed his raspy voice was from years of smoking, inhaling smoke or both.

  “Like to ask you some questions,” Tony said.

  “Later.” He carefully closed the passenger door, which shut with a solid click. “Need to take my dog to the vet hospital.”

  “Saw the firefighters bring him around. Glad the tyke’s okay.” He followed Drake as he walked to the driver’s door. “You’re a private investigator, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you understand the importance of my asking questions right now.”

  “I understand.” He yanked open the door. With any crime, the faster you gathered data, the faster you were on the trail. “But as I said, I’m on my way to the hospital.”

  “Was anyone else in your house when you left tonight?”

  “I already told dispatch there was no one.”

  “Did you accidentally leave the stove on? Any faulty electrical apparatus that you were aware of?”

  Drake climbed in, slammed the door and glared at him through the open window. “Tony—that’s your name, right?—I promise to cooperate with your investigation, but now is not the time.” He held out his hand. “Give me your card, I’ll call you.”

  Tony handed over a card. “Are you aware of anyone who might wish to harm you?”

  “No.”

  After checking Hearsay one more time, he shoved the key into the ignition. As Drake drove off, he heard Tony yell something about calling tomorrow.

  Heading down the road, he called the vet hospital and made arrangements for Hearsay’s emergency care. Afterward, one hand resting on his dog, reassured by the steady rise and fall of his pet’s chest, he thought about the lie he had told to the arson investigator. No, he didn’t know anyone who wished to harm him.

  It wasn’t so much that Yuri wanted to harm him—more like he wanted to leave his calling card, a violent, fiery one meant to intimidate. Which told him the Russian knew Drake had been tailing him.

  How? He had taken extra care to park his pickup in secluded areas, always used covert and long-range cameras. In the nearly six years he’d been a P.I., only once had he been caught surveilling someone, but not because he got sloppy. In that case, his client, during a phone call yelling match with his almost ex-wife, had informed her he’d hired a P.I. to surveil her that very day. After that, Drake had never shared his investigation schedule with clients.

  No, Yuri must have heard from one of the employees at Topaz that Drake was sniffing around the club, asking too many questions. If Yuri had nothing to hide, he wouldn’t have cared.

  But his savage reaction showed the depth of his paranoia. He was afraid Drake might have documented something incriminating. Something the police would find of interest.

  Drake had a good idea what had happened tonight. Before setting the fire, Yuri, and probably one or two of his boys, had ransacked the office, snatching cameras, the laptop, recorders. Hearsay, hackles bristling, had barked at the intruders. But it hadn’t taken long for the dog’s street smarts to kick in, sense that retreat meant survival, so he’d withdrawn to his spot under the kitchen table.

  The men hadn’t bothered with the dog after that—they had work to do.

  Yuri and his stupid cretins. No concept that images could be saved in places other than physical devices. Idiots probably thought “the cloud” was something in the sky, not a remote storage option.

  After gathering equipment, they’d drenched his office in gasoline. Considering how rapidly the fire spread through that part of the house, they must have also splashed gasoline down the hall and into the bedroom, too. Then torched the place.

  With the dog still inside.

  His fingers dug into the steering wheel. That son of a bitch would pay dearly for what he did tonight. And Drake would do it personally, not hand over the meting of justice to some arson investigator.

  Sure, he could have leaked Yuri’s name to Tony Cordova, who would have tracked the bastard down tonight for an interview. The Russian would have had an alibi, of course, along with a string of witnesses who’d back up his story. Plus, with Drake siccing government dogs on him, Yuri would go into hiding, and Drake’s personal investigation would grind to a halt. Any hopes of digging for more dirt, or ever getting back the ring, would be crushed.

  Then there was Brax.

  His brother felt above the law, but arson? He wasn’t that dirty. But if Drake offered up Yuri to arson investigators, trails could lead to his brother. And if they didn’t, Yuri would ensure sure they did.

  A form materialized in Drake’s mind. That woman. Who Dat. Had she been a player in this arson? Paid to keep Drake busy, give Yuri and his goons time to do their job? His gut said yes. Just like the Mississippi River that ran through her city of New Orleans, she was twisting, swift and treacherous.

  She had never been to Dino’s, a dive bar in a lousy neighborhood, yet she showed up tonight, out of the blue. Made a straight line for him, too, and even after he’d shunned her, she didn’t budge. Stayed perched on that stool like some kind of tufted bird of prey, waiting for an opportunity to sink in her talons.

  He’d walked out of that bar knowing she was trouble, but had given in to the night, the heat.

  He clenched his teeth. And for those few hot, heady minutes, his home had been destroyed. Hearsay nearly killed.

  Just as Yuri would pay for what he had done tonight, so would she.

  By morning, he would know her name, age, address, where she hung out, where she worked. And he would pay her a visit.

  The kind of visit a person remembered for the rest of her life.

  * * *

  AT TEN-FORTY, Val walked through the door of her second cousins’ Char and Del Jackson’s home, carrying a paper bag from Aloha Kitchen.

  Their home was a hodgepodge of secondhand furniture, along with some everyday objects Char, with Del’s handyman help, had remade into furnishings. Stacked crates had become a bookcase in the living room, and a polished wooden wire spool now served as a small table on the patio. Val’s favorite was an old trunk they had recycled into a wine rack. “It’s not about what God took away,” Char liked to say, “but what we do with what’s left.”

  To Val, that said everything about their being survivors of Katrina. Char and Del had visited her and Nanny, Del’s cousin, several times when Val was a child, but they had lost touch over the years. Right before Katrina, they had moved to Gulfport, Mississippi, an area also ravaged during the storm, during which they’d lost their home along with Del’s job as a truck driver.

  Six years and a relocation later, they owned the Gumbo Stop, which they’d grown from a concession trailer to a store that offered creole cuisine in boil-in-a-bag portions. After locating Val, they’d asked her to come to Las Vegas to live with them and their daughter, twenty-one-year-old Jasmyn.

  Who was curled up on the couch in her pink capri pajamas, patterned with the word Paris in a flowery script along with miniature Eiffel Towers. She called them her Je reve—French for “I dream”—jammies because her overriding desire was to live in Paris. Her parents accepted their daughter’s dream to live in the romantic city, but weren’t so thrilled about her wanting to work there as a burlesque dancer.

  Jasmyn had years of training as a dancer. At ten she’d won a regional tap competition, followed by several summers working in the chorus for regional musicals. The past few years, she had been teaching tap and ballet to kids at the Dance-a-Rama Studio.

  As a counteroffer to the burlesque-dancer-in-Paris dream, Char and Del offered Jasmyn full tuition to Le Cordon Bleu, which they called “a virtual Parisian experience,” which just happened to have a college in Las Vegas. Instead of struggling as a dancer, they argued, a prestigious culinary arts degree opened doors to a lifetime career as a chef.

  Jasmyn’s interest in the idea was about as peaked as a collapsed souffle.

  “Hey, baby,” Jasmyn
called out in her soft, lazy drawl. She twittered her fingers in greeting, her eyes glued to the black-and-white movie on the TV screen.

  “Weren’t you watching that show last night?”

  “I bought the DVD because this movie, Double Indemnity, defined film noir. Those old-time movie stars Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck are hawt, cuz.”

  Sometimes they called each other cuz, although in the two years since Val had moved in here, she’d come to feel more like a sister to Jasmyn. Or what she assumed a sister would be like. They sometimes argued, sometimes irritated each other, but they were also each other’s sounding board and confidante.

  Jasmyn played with a curl of her long raven hair. “Cuz, I’m thinkin’ of dyeing my hair platinum, the brassy but trashy color of Barbara Stanwyck’s pageboy wig.”

  Val glanced at the screen. “Looks better than my brassy but trashy wig.”

  Jasmyn’s gaze landed on Val’s hair, where it paused for a moment before darting down Val’s outfit, then quickly up. “Whoa, sugar, laissez les bons temps rouler!”

  It was French for “let the good times roll,” a popular saying heard all the time in New Orleans.

  “Actually, this wasn’t worn for fun.” She set the bag on the coffee table. “I worked my first investigation tonight.”

  “Investigation?” Jasmyn punched a button on the remote. The room instantly grew quiet, the movie frozen on an image of Fred MacMurray looking at Barbara Stanwyck’s leg. “Isn’t that outfit the one you wore at that casino where you dealt blackjack and lip-synched Christina Aguilera’s songs?”

  Val plopped down on the couch. “Has nothing to do with her, though. I dressed like this to…” Her heart and mind felt all jumbled up with everything that had happened tonight. She wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. “Hungry? I picked up some to-go from Aloha Kitchen.”

  After shooting Val a knowing look, Jasmyn gestured at the bag. “I love them funny little rolls. You get some of them?”

  “Lumpia Shanghai. Got extra just for you.” She handed her a few of the mini egg rolls stuffed with ground pork, carrots and onions on a napkin.

  They ate in silence for a while. The air conditioner chugged quietly in the background. On the TV screen, Fred continued to stare at Barbara’s ankle. The way he looked at her—startled and hungry—reminded Val of the look on Drake’s face when she showed him the fleur-de-lis on her heels.

  Like she cared. It was over. Dead. Gone.

  She gestured to the screen with an egg roll. “What’s Fred looking at?”

  “Her anklet. It’s a big deal in the movie.”

  Chewing, Val made a keep-going gesture.

  “The anklet is a symbol that represents sexual fascination.” Jasmyn grinned. “Read that in some film critic’s review on the internet. In my own words, that little gold anklet sends a signal as big and bright as a lighthouse beacon. It flashes ‘I’m a bad girl looking for trouble.’ Women who wore them were thought to be loose.”

  Val wiped her fingers on a napkin. “This movie was made when?”

  “Nineteen forty-four.”

  “You just turned twenty-one, what, three months ago? And you know all about anklets worn nearly seventy years ago?”

  Jasmyn gave a casual shrug. “It’s my thing, the forties and fifties.”

  “Your noir thing.”

  “More like my neonoir thing. Digging the old styles, but updating them, too.” She waggled a magenta fingernail at the screen. “Like that anklet she’s wearing. I’d wear one with peep-toe pumps, capri pants, a slim cardigan and Dita Von Teese’s bad-red lipstick, Devil.”

  “You love that Dita Von Teese with her skintight dresses and corsets and elbow-length gloves.”

  “She’s an artist, a burlesque queen.”

  “I see you haven’t thought about this much.”

  “I celebrate my life through my style, what can I say? I know you understand ‘cause you go a little retro yourself, cuz.”

  Val had a thing for simple, vintage black dresses. When she was a kid, she’d loathed reach-me-down—secondhand—clothes, and had sworn that when she grew up she’d always buy off-the-rack. But when that day came, she hated how stiff and scratchy new clothes felt against her skin. Missed the softness of reach-me-downs, so she’d started shopping at secondhand and vintage stores.

  “Y’know,” Jasmyn said, “with your black-purple hair, pale skin and those hot-cute little black dresses you wear, you’d make a great noir chick.”

  “I’m still not even sure what noir means.”

  “It refers to the type of movies being made back in the forties and fifties. Dark and bleak with people who had no morality or sense of purpose.”

  “Sounds like a badly lit casino in Vegas.”

  “F’sure!” Jasmyn peeled off a throaty laugh. “That anklet is famous, by the way,” she continued, looking at the screen. “Right about here, Fred says ‘That’s a honey of an anklet you’re wearing’ and that term—honey of an anklet—is now one of the classic lines in film noir.” She paused, frowning. “Val, what’s wrong?”

  “That word. Honey.” She picked up some wadded napkins and put them into the bag. “Tonight I did what in the P.I. trade is called a honey trap. Which is where a P.I. entices some guy to see if he’s unfaithful, which is a bunch of crock because enticing isn’t investigating.” Wouldn’t Jayne be proud to know Val finally understood? And sorely disappointed if she knew how Val reached that understanding.

  “From the looks of you, cuz, you overshot enticing by a city block.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Just sayin’.”

  “Got it.”

  Jasmyn was thoughtful for a moment. “I thought your boss wasn’t going to let you do any investigations for four more months.”

  “Jayne doesn’t know I did it.” Val felt ashamed to have repaid her boss’s trust with such insubordination.

  “Dawlin’,” Jasmyn said gently, “what happened?”

  “After she left work early, this new case walked in, and…you know my bullheaded streak.” She gave a halfhearted shrug. “Although that’s hardly an excuse for my misbehavin’. I’m feeling mighty bad that I took a case that I had no right to take because I wanted fast cash.”

  “How much fast cash?”

  “Two grand.”

  Jasmyn emitted a low whistle. “That’s fast, all right. Now you can get your car fixed.”

  “Already in the shop. I’m driving a rental until it’s ready.”

  “You bad, bullheaded girl, you. Mama will be glad to know you got wheels.” She gave Val a knowing look. “Speaking of mamas, now that you’re a private eye in training, have you looked for yours?”

  Val felt a stab of guilt. “No.”

  During Katrina, when she and Nanny had been stuck on the roof of their building, her grandmother confessed she had lied about Val’s parents dying in a car crash when Val was two years old. Nanny’s daughter, Val’s mother, had survived, but left soon after that. “She was born Agnes Monte Hickory LeRoy, after your great-grandmother Agnes Lowell and great-grandfather Elias Monte Hickory, but if she’s remarried, her last name’s prob’ly different. Promise me, dear girl, you’ll try to find her, make my wrong right.”

  Val made that promise.

  But since then, she had not tried to find the mother who had abandoned her. Not once.

  “Truth be told, Jaz, I can’t work up the desire to meet a stranger who gave birth to me, then abandoned me.”

  Jasmyn nodded. “Everythin’ in its own time.”

  Left up to Val, that time would never come. But she felt wretched breaking her word to Nanny.

  “Wow, two thousand!” Jasmyn exclaimed, bringing the conversation back around. “Except for the sneaky part, of course, but who am I to talk? I’m the one sneaking around taking burlesque classes.”

  For the past five months, Jasmyn had been taking private burlesque dancing lessons from Dottie “the Body” Osborne, a former headliner at the Pink Pussycats in Hollyw
ood, a famous burlesque club where the dancers plied their G-string gimmicks in the 1970s. Val, sworn to secrecy about Jasmyn’s clandestine studies, knew if Del and Char ever learned about this, their daughter would be grounded until she was forty.

  “The problem with secrets is that they can blow up in your face,” Val murmured. “I need to tell Jayne.”

  “No, cuz, bad idea! Don’t blow this internship by gettin’ all confessional. Look at the money you made in one night! Plus you tackled your first case and probably learned a lot in the process.”

  “No,” Val said solemnly, gathering the rest of the trash, “I learned investigations are about using the mind to solve puzzles, not playing body games.”

  “Hey,” Jasmyn said, “enough with our heavy noir talk. Let’s dish about something fun. I think I got my burlesque name. Ready? Ruby Stevens!”

  “Definitely sounds like a burlesque name.”

  “It was Barbara Stanwyck’s real name. But they wouldn’t let her use it because—guess what?—it sounded like a burlesque dancer! Y’know how burlesque dancers gotta have a gimmick? I’ll be Ruby Stevens, and I’ll always wear a shiny gold anklet to go with my brassy and phony blond hair. Like your wig, only curlier.”

  After a beat, Val said, “You know I love ya, right Jaz? Word to the wise. One of these days, you’re gonna need to have a sit-down with your mama and be up front about those burlesque lessons. Doing that gives both of you dignity.”

  She wasn’t just talking to her cousin. She was talking to herself, too.

  Because at that moment, Val knew she was going to be up front with Jayne tomorrow morning and tell her what she had done. Nanny used to say that secrets destroyed relationships, and she was right. If Jayne threatened to end her internship, well, Val would give her one hell of a side note on why she should stay.

  After she and Jaz said their good-nights, Val dumped the trash in the kitchen and headed to her room, reflecting on all kinds of things, from blond wigs to honey traps to young women who needed to keep their word.

  Just because a hurricane had wiped out Val’s world didn’t mean it had also taken her self-worth.