I needed to get over myself. This whole down-in-the-mouth thing was so not me—well, not the old me, anyway. But the new me was definitely a whiner—so much so, even I didn’t like hanging out with me.
So no more pouting. No more pity party of one. Time to get my life back.
Pushing myself from my leaning position, I threw my shoulders back. Chin up. Chest out. For a moment I felt better, stronger. More…me.
Then the crushing weight of bitter disappointment fell on my heart once again. Hope abandoned me as quickly as it had come as I sagged against the wall.
One foot in front of the other, my father always used to say. Clichés on both sides of the family...lucky me. And some days, survival was the best I could do. This apparently was one of those days.
A bell dinged my arrival at the requested floor and the elevator doors slid open. I launched myself through the opening and strode into the lobby.
Even with the bad visual of Sylvie and the shoe, and even though I’d walked through the lobby a gazillion times, it still took my breath away. Gleaming white marble floors and walls inlaid with brightly colored, intricately patterned mosaic, and peaked cloth in rich, multicolored hues conjured a sultan’s vision of ancient Babylon—the Sultan in question being my father. All of this was his creation.
Reception ran along one wall, the brightly tented cloth above it reminiscent of the tents of a Persian oasis. At the far end of Reception, the one closest to the front entrance, a vaulted, brick entranceway invited all passersby to come enjoy the Bazaar that lurked beyond. Our humble marketplace, the Bazaar, offered all the baubles to satisfy any self-respecting royal’s most outrageous desires—from glittering jewels, to Italian sports cars, to French couture, to gourmet hamburgers.
Gourmet French hamburgers.
An insult to every self-respecting French gourmand.
I don’t know why, but there was something so satisfying, so heartwarming, about poking a hole in Gallic culinary snobbery that, even as grumpy as I was, I mustered a thin smile. Perhaps I found it appealing because I had dealt with so many arrogant French chefs….
However, there was one French chef who was not at all distasteful. My French chef. For a moment, my thoughts drifted. Jean-Charles was truly très magnifique. But was he the man for me? In addition to the complication of mixing business and pleasure, which kept me perpetually off balance, there was another…unknown…in the mix: his five-year-old son, Christophe, would be arriving soon. I hadn’t met him yet. Would he like me?
Full of questions and short on answers, I wasn’t going to think about that either. The list of things I wasn’t going to think about was longer than a kid’s list at Christmas.
Opposite the reception desk, a wall of glass carved off one side of the lobby. Behind the glass, which was really very thick Lucite, a mountain of man-made snow beckoned all willing to pay a Sultan’s ransom to ski in the desert. Not exactly consistent with the whole Babylonian theme, but no one appeared too troubled by that. Right now, the hill was barren, closed for grooming in anticipation of the hordes that would descend once the sun actually rose today.
The false light of night on the Vegas Strip held back the darkness outside the front entrance. The valets darted to retrieve cars for the few clusters of guests waiting after what I hoped was a night well spent.
High above the grand lobby, blown-glass creatures arced in flight. A flock of multicolored hummingbirds and butterflies—a huge rainbow of color that always brought smiles. Even I wasn’t immune. I paused, my neck craned. Somehow those friggin’ birds and insects always made life seem better.
The Big Boss was a genius.
I turned left, away from the front doors, and headed toward the entrance to the casino. A placid stream flowed at the far end of the lobby, providing the demarcation between the lobby and the casino beyond. Our own rendition of the Euphrates, it meandered tranquilly. At least a dozen different types of waterfowl floated with their beaks tucked under one wing, a leg curled under them, and the other leg acting as a keel while they slumbered, drifting with the slight current. Flowering plants and shrubs lined the banks with papyrus reeds lending an air of authenticity—which was all you needed to create an illusion in Vegas—although the architects of some of the newer indiscretions seemed to have missed that point. Bridges arced over the stream at discrete intervals providing perfect photo opportunities and a bit of ambience.
The combined effect was warm, soothing, inviting all to pause, spend some time…and some money.
Like I said, the Big Boss was a genius. I only hoped it was hereditary.
Along with this hotel, my responsibilities extended to our new property, Cielo. A renovation of an aging Vegas property formerly known as the Athena, Cielo was to be my concept of an environmentally friendly hotel with a European emphasis on quality and customer service—something usually reserved for the high rollers in Vegas.
A daunting project that could suck every second out of every day.
Yes, I am my own worst enemy. If I’m good at anything it’s burying myself.
Bury myself in my job; ignore life. It used to work.
One thing that was impossible to ignore no matter how deep I dug myself in—my office was a hardhat area. After receiving my own promotion to vice president, I bestowed my former job as Vice President of Customer Relations for the Babylon on Miss Patterson, formerly my most able and loyal assistant. Her assistant, Brandy, moved into Miss P’s former position. Cleverly, I had seen to it that we all moved one step up the food chain. Unfortunately, I had clevered myself right out of an office.
Miss P had taken my old one—it went with the job. So, we carved out some space in a storage area adjacent to our old offices and two guys with one hammer spent their days trying to give me a headache. At the rate they were going I’d have to have wheelchair ramps installed by the time they were done. My first lesson in the vagaries of construction: take the architect’s time estimate, double it, then pray. My second lesson? The more you complain, the slower the work goes.
My life clearly was running me.
After a punishing dash up one flight of stairs that left me at the point of apoplexy, I found the office door was open, as I knew it would be. With a gaping hole cut in the wall where my future office door was to be, what was the point of locking up? A single bare bulb dangled on a wire from the fixture in the ceiling providing a weak circle of light. Every time I flipped the switch I thought fifty thousand volts would sizzle through my body, which, come to think of it, was sounding sort of appealing at the moment.
Stepping around buckets of drywall paste, trying not to trip on the puckers in the tarp, I headed toward a lump in the corner. Carefully I lifted the plastic the painters had tossed over my beautiful burled black walnut desk and peered under it. As I feared, the piles of paper had propagated. Whoever thought being a hotel executive was glamorous had better think twice. Signing my name was so ingrained by now I should be a rock star or at least a minor celebrity. But alas, I was just a corporate grunt…who apparently wallowed in pity parties of one.
Add a phone complete with texting, e-mail, and a push-to-talk walkie-talkie thing and I was tethered to my job no matter how far I ran. Teddie had been convinced the thing was also a blood pressure monitor—it had a habit of ringing at the most unfortunate moments. The memory of his hands working through the buttons on my shirt, the pounding of my pulse, the heat in his skin where it brushed mine, the look in his eyes when the ring of the phone interrupted us, assaulted me, crushing my heart and stealing my breath.
Instant access had its downside.
I don’t know why I even bothered going home. Come to think of it, now that I had moved into the hotel, I didn’t—go home that is. Life and work had merged until one was indistinguishable from the other.
And I had disappeared.
***
The pile of papers on my desk was diminished by over half when I heard noises in the outer office. Scuffling sounds then, “You fuckin’ bitch!�
�� Newton, our multicolored macaw had a serious potty mouth. Miss P usually uncovered his cage in the morning and was rewarded for her efforts with a string of epithets. Newton had apparently had a rough-and-tumble upbringing before he adopted me. When I moved out of my apartment, the bird had to take up temporary quarters in the office. A fact that probably entitled my staff to hazardous duty pay—if they didn’t mutiny.
“Friggin’ bird,” Miss Patterson muttered. “I swear I’m going to have you stuffed.”
“Asshole!” Newton sang out. It was his best word and he said it with feeling.
I couldn’t help smiling. Leaning back in my chair, I closed my eyes and listened to the noises in the outer office. A drawer opening—Miss P stashing her purse. The squeak of wheels on the floor, then the creak as she settled into her desk chair. A beep—she was checking the messages.
“This is for Lucky…” Teddie’s voice. A dagger to my heart.
“Turn that damned speaker off,” I shouted, perhaps louder than I needed to.
He’d left. How could his voice still make me feel so…happy, sad, angry, thrilled, and all at the same time. My pulse quickened as I flushed with anger. I hated him for leaving, for breaking my heart. Yet I had loved him so…
Love and loathing. Two such powerful emotions separated by such a thin line.
“Christ! Lucky is that you?” Miss P sounded less than pleased at being startled yet glad I was there, both at the same time—like a rebuke with a hug. It was one of her best things. I had no idea how she did it.
I didn’t think she expected me to answer, so I didn’t.
Her chair banged into the wall, then she filled my doorway. Trim yet curvy in all the right places, Miss P sported a brown sweater with gold flecks that was just tight enough to get the right kind of attention. Her slacks of white winter wool looked pricey. Bronze Loubous with a semi-sensible heel and closed toe graced her feet. Cascades of David Yurman silver and gold filled her décolletage, and matching earrings sparkled in the light of the single bulb. Her spiky blond hair and subtle makeup completed the picture. The angry eyes and frown were new additions and I wondered what had gotten her knickers in such a twist.
Hands on her hips, she glared at me. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“Sneak up? On you?” I raised my head and opened my eyes wide. “For your information, I’ve been here for the better part of two hours. Here, take care of these.” I stuffed the pile of signed papers into her hand. “And get the Beautiful Jeremy on the phone. I need his help.”
Mention of The Beautiful Jeremy Whitlock, Vegas’s premier investigator and Miss P’s live-in boy toy brought a brief smile to her face as she tucked the papers under her arm, pen poised to take notes.
“And Brandy? She knows American Sign Language, doesn’t she? Her parents were hearing impaired, right?”
“I believe they still are,” Miss P said with a slight air of superiority.
Teddie’s voice droned on in the background. The machine beeped through several messages, all from him. All saying the same thing: he missed me, he’d made a mistake, please call him any time, day or night.
Too much water under that bridge. And his recent recognition of something that had been so obvious, so vital to me for a long time, did little to improve my mood.
“Fine. Brandy’s job today is to find a pro poker player we’ve got wandering around here. He’s young, handsome, and deaf.”
“And what should Brandy do with him when she finds him?” Miss P looked at me over her cheaters, her face a blank slate.
“Bring him to me. Whatever she does, once she finds him, I want her to stick to him like glue.”
Miss P scribbled. Teddie’s voice finally stopped.
“I’ve been busy,” I said, apropos of nothing.
“And you deserve a gold star,” Miss P noted with a sardonic lift to one eyebrow.
It was way too early for attitude. I opened my mouth to give her a…readjustment, but she cut me off. “I was just going to stash my stuff then come looking for you. The pilots caught me on my cell on the way in. We have a problem.”
“And this is news?”
She gave me a look of exaggerated patience. “Don’t you ever take anything seriously?”
“If I did, I would explode.” That statement had a ring of truth to it that I hoped Miss P didn’t hear. Avoiding her penetrating stare, I pretended to be interested in a Lucite paperweight, one that contained a golden cockroach—a gift from the employees after dealing with a guest and his pests. Finally I hazarded a glance at my assistant. “So, where’s the fire?”
“The airport. They got a dead guy stuck in the lavatory on one of our G550s.”
***
The Executive Terminal at McCarran International Airport was no more than ten minutes from my office door—on a good day. With Paolo driving our limo, we made it in less than five—and we didn’t even taken out any tourists or bend any metal. After narrowly missing a post holding a section of chain-link fence topped by several rows of barbed wire, Paolo skinned the big car through a tight opening onto the tarmac and then screeched to a halt.
With no momentum to fight, I loosened my white-knuckled grip on the armrests and settled back into the comforting embrace of the deep leather seats. Behind tinted windows, shadowed by the darkness of morning that brightened the eastern sky but had yet to reach the ground, I savored a few moments of peace.
My mother always said death came in threes.
So far I’d racked up two. What if, for once, Mona was right? Who would be next? A cool breath of a breeze tickled my cheek. I didn’t know where it came from, which creeped me out. Feeling the specter of death at my elbow, I bolted upright and threw open the door, surprising Paolo who had stepped around the car to help me out. He jumped aside in the nick of time.
“Ms. O’Toole! Let Paolo help you.” With one arm tucked regally behind his back, his chauffer’s hat clutched between his elbow and his side, he bent at the waist and extended a hand to me. Not wanting to offend, I accepted, even though it was like letting a pony pull a freight train.
A small, dapper man, with jet-black hair brushed straight back, dancing black eyes, and a thousand-candlepower smile, Paolo took his job seriously. His uniform was spotless. Even at the end of a long shift, his pants still held a sharp crease. A twenty-five-year service pin, his only jewelry, sparkled in his lapel. Grasping my hand he helped lever me from the bowels of the limo—and he did so without a grimace. I’d have to remember that at Christmas.
Taking a deep breath, I stretched to my full height and filled my lungs with fresh air. Even though it was tinged with jet exhaust, it was a far cry better than the recirculated stuff wafting through the hotel. We did our best, but there were limits to just how much sin could be filtered from the Vegas atmosphere.
The airport was just awakening. Like lumbering giants moving quietly in the half day, planes taxied to the runways. The in-bound red-eyes hung in the sky, a glittering string of landing lights above the ever-brightening eastern horizon. Personal jets of varying sizes already dotted the parking area behind the private terminal. Our G550 was the largest of the bunch.
If God had money, she would have a G550.
The Babylon had two.
Bathed in phosphorescent glow from the arc lights, its directional lights still illuminated, the plane waited like a living, breathing beast. Sleek and elegant, reeking of adventure, it looked ready to leap into the wild blue yonder at a moment’s notice—which was not too much of an exaggeration.
This one was the oldest and had already been sold to one of our investors in the Macau operation, pending the delivery of a G650. Stairs had been lowered from the doorway just aft of the cockpit on the left side of the plane. It looked like we’d beaten the police, which was an unusual stroke of luck. But I didn’t have much time, of that I was sure. Soon, the place would be crawling with cops. I hoped, for once, they could be discreet but I wasn’t holding my breath.
Men in jumpsuits
clustered at the bottom of the stairs, wringing their hands, looking lost and worried. Please! It was just a dead guy in the bathroom. I could handle that with my eyes shut. Come to think of it, that was probably not a bad idea. Although sometimes welcomed, death is rarely pretty.
The men parted as I approached and said nothing as I started up, taking two steps at a time. At the top I paused, collecting myself, then ducked through the doorway into the plush interior. Even though I’d been one of the privileged passengers a few times—a particularly vivid memory of a trip to Macau to check on our property when it was under construction sprang to mind—I’d never quite adjusted to the whole Architectural Digest thing going on inside. Gulfstream made beautiful machines—efficient, luxury condos that could deposit you anywhere in the world you desired. The ultimate extravagance.
The aft portion of the plane housed a stateroom with a double bed and private lav, which included a massaging shower and other high-end appointments. Club seating for ten or twelve of your closest friends, depending on the exact configuration, filled the forward section of the main compartment. A galley and small lavatory for the three-person flight crew separated the passenger compartment from the flight deck.
Stepping farther into the plush interior, I found myself between the passenger seating on my right and the galley on my left. The door to the lav was open, but I couldn’t see inside. I let my eyes adjust to the soft lighting as I took stock of my surroundings. All the comforts of home—assuming you lived in a Four Seasons. With soft Italian leather upholstery, 1,400-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, thick Turkish terry cloth towels, burled black walnut accents, the plane was beyond the reach of most of us mere mortals.
With flat-screen televisions streaming live satellite feeds, communication capabilities to anywhere in the world, food service in the finest five-star tradition, wines from the best houses, top-drawer spirits, all served by a beautiful young man or woman depending on the passenger’s preferences, the G550 was reserved for only the best customers of the hotel, certain executives, or, on occasion, personal family friends.
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