by Vivien Chien
It had to be my mystery man. If Esther saw him with someone, it had to be the same guy. “Do you know this man’s name?”
She tapped her chin. “I don’t think so. He would never talk and he did not say hi to us. Your mommy would get very mad about this. Young people do not have manners anymore.”
I laughed. My mom was a stickler about proper manners more than anything else. You could be a total jerk, but as long as you said please and thank you while doing it, you were just fine in her book.
“I have to open my store now.” She started to walk away but then turned around. “Don’t forget to lock the door until Peter comes to work.”
“Believe me, I won’t.”
After I let myself in and promptly locked the door behind me, I went straight to my mother’s office and took off my coat. Digging my cell phone out of my purse, I sent Megan a text asking her to stop by the restaurant around lunchtime to go on a little adventure with me.
It was time to make a trip to the casino.
* * *
It was close to noon and I hid in my mother’s office waiting for Megan to show up. My cover was that we were going to the bank together to drop off a bank deposit and then grab lunch while we were out.
I didn’t want to explain to Peter or Nancy what we were actually doing. I was sure neither of them would approve, and if it got back to my sister, I would never hear the end of it.
With some time to kill, I checked my Facebook messages to see if Jay had responded. There was nothing. I told myself not to be disappointed and busied myself with organizing a stack of sales slips from the previous day. I was behind in my work and they needed to be entered into my mother’s tracking system.
While I was sorting through the slips, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number on the screen. I had been getting too many unwanted calls lately, and there was no telling what fresh disaster this could bring. “Hello?” I asked with caution.
“Lana?” a soft voice asked. “This is Rina … Isabelle’s sister.”
“Oh hi.” I set the sales slips down on the desk. “How are you?”
“I’m okay. It’s been a rough couple of days, but we’re surviving.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Hey, I was wondering if maybe you’d like to meet for coffee this afternoon?”
“Oh, today?”
“Are you not free?” she asked. “We can always meet a different day … if you’re busy.”
“How about tomorrow?” I suggested. “I could meet you around noon?”
“Great, I was thinking we could meet at a Starbucks somewhere? I don’t think I’m ready to go to the plaza just yet.”
“Believe me, I totally understand. There’s one over on Lorain Road. Would that work for you?”
“That would be great. I’ll look it up on my GPS and meet you there. See you then.”
After we hung up, I went back to organizing the sales slips and typed everything into the system. I had just finished as Megan was walking into the office.
“You ready?” she asked, plopping down in the guest chair.
“Yup, just need my coat and purse.” I grabbed my things from the coat tree. “Let me ask you something before we go.”
“What’s up?”
“Do you think I look like a trustworthy person?”
She cocked her head at me. “Are you asking me if your new hair makes you look like a deviant?”
“Huh? No, I mean my face … do I look like a person you’d trust?” I smiled at her, showing all my teeth.
“More like a crazy woman.” She laughed. “What’s all this about?”
I told her about the encounters I’d had the day before. When I finished, I said, “I just don’t get it. I mean, why me? All three people asked me to help solve their problems on the same day. Don’t you find that a little strange?”
“It’s just a coincidence, Lana,” Megan answered. She stood from the chair, smoothing out her top. “I wouldn’t think too much about it.”
“And then my parents, asking me to manage the restaurant.” I pointed at the desk. “I’m clearly the irresponsible one in the family … why would they entrust me with the family business?”
I gasped.
“What?” Megan jumped, eyes darting around. “Spider?”
“No, it just dawned on me—I’m getting responsible looking in my old age. That has to be what it is.”
Megan snorted. “Oh please, you still get carded at the bar. I wouldn’t sign up for your Buckeye card just yet. I don’t know why you’re freaking out about this. This can’t all be from what happened yesterday.”
“Well, Vanessa did ask me if I was going through a midlife crisis the other day,” I told her. “Because of my hair.”
“Ha! That little twit.” Megan turned to leave. “If anything, you’re going through a quarter-life crisis … and if that’s the case, join the club.”
CHAPTER
17
After we made it through Jack Casino security, we were welcomed into a sea of slot machines. They rang and played cheerful sounds of promising wins as people pushed buttons and pulled levers. Music and happy chatter filled the room as groups of people laughed and tried their luck.
Not being much of a gambler, I had only been to the casino a handful of times and didn’t know my way around. I stood in awe as I watched people move around from game to game.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered where Brandon was getting the money for these casino outings to begin with. From the things Isabelle had told me, I knew their finances were not the best, and with him being cut off from his parents, I couldn’t imagine where he found the cash for his gambling habit. Clearly, he had been winning, but where had his start-up money been coming from? Someone couldn’t possibly win all the time … was he losing all his winnings?
Megan tugged on my sleeve. “Blackjack is over there.” She pointed to the other end of the room.
Working our way through the crowd, we headed for the blackjack tables. The area was congested and people hovered near the tables, watching their friends and significant others as they contemplated card strategies.
A girl with blond hair and glasses wearing a casino uniform walked by with a tray of drinks. I stepped in front of her. “Excuse me, have you worked here long?”
She appeared taken aback and hesitated before she answered. “Yeah, why?”
I pulled out my phone and opened my photo album, showing her a picture of Brandon I had taken from a social media page. “Have you ever seen this man before?”
She inspected the photo and then gave me a sideways glance. “Is he a famous person or something?”
“No,” I laughed. “He’s just a regular guy. I was wondering if you’ve ever seen him in here before.”
She shook her head. “Nope, sorry.” And she walked away without giving me time to thank her.
“Time is money around here,” Megan said with a shrug.
“Everything is money around here.”
She smirked. “Okay, well, what do we do? Try someone else?”
“I don’t know how else to find someone who knew him. But someone had to, if he came here as much as Esther said he did.” The blackjack dealers started to look our way. “Come on, let’s move around. We look suspicious.”
After we walked around aimlessly for a few more minutes, a petite woman with caramel-brown hair walked by, an empty tray in her hand. I had to do a double take, because when I saw her something triggered in my brain. I knew her from somewhere.
She was the reporter from the plaza!
Only not so much. Today she was dressed in a Jack Casino uniform.
Recognition set in on her face as she made eye contact with me. It was followed with a guilty head slump and a poor attempt to turn around and go the other way.
I grabbed her arm. “Um, excuse me, but I think I know you…”
She whipped around, jerking her arm away from me. “I’m pretty sure you have me mixed up with some
body else. I get that a lot.”
Megan had moved on the other side of her, blocking her other exit route.
“No, you’re the woman who claimed to be a reporter the other day,” I said with confidence, taking a step closer. I noticed her name tag read CARMEN. “You were snooping around Asia Village right after my friends were—” I stopped myself. “What were you doing at the plaza? And why you were pretending to be a reporter?”
There was an awkward pause as she seemed to weigh her options: continuing with her lie or ’fessing up.
“All right, fine,” she said, dropping the tray to her side. “You caught me, okay? I’m not a reporter. What are you going to do? Turn me in?”
“No, I’m not interested in getting you in trouble. For the time being, I just want to ask you a few questions about Brandon Yeoh.”
“I can’t tell you much.” She inhaled deeply. “What do you want to know?”
I was in a tricky spot, I realized, thinking on how I should go about this. I didn’t know what type of involvement this woman had with Brandon or what she could be hiding. For all I knew, she could be the killer. “First, why were you snooping around Asia Village the day after … everything happened?”
“Because I wanted to know if it was true,” she replied. “I wanted to see if the whole thing…” She stopped, rubbing the back of her neck and looked around toward the blackjack tables.
I turned around to see what had caught her attention, but I couldn’t pinpoint anything in particular. “What?” I asked, turning back around. “You wanted to see what…?”
“I wanted to see if the whole thing was staged, okay?” Carmen huffed, shifting her weight. “He won a lot of money that night.”
“Staged?” I asked. Was she implying that she knew the murder scene was staged to begin with?
“Yeah, people do that, you know. I had to see for myself. My first thought was that he faked his death so he could take off with the money. I went to the plaza to see if the store was cleaned out. Then I would know that the whole thing was planned.”
Oh, that kind of staged. I told my brain to calm down. “Well, I can tell you, firsthand, he didn’t fake it.”
“I don’t see what any of this has to do with you,” Megan said.
“It has to do with me because I fronted him some of the money he used and he took off with my cut,” she said, sounding a tad bitter.
“This money that he won … how much was it?” I asked.
“Like hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Megan and I gawked at her in disbelief. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars?” I repeated. “How much did he have on him when he left the casino that night?”
“At least a hundred thousand in cash.”
“Actual cash?” I tried to imagine what that kind of money would look like.
“Yes, actual cash.” She pursed her lips. “My cash.”
“Do you remember seeing him with someone else that night? A tall man with Captain Kirk hair?”
“What’s Captain Kirk hair?” Carmen asked.
Megan groaned. “You have got to stop saying that.”
“You know,” I said, gesturing to my head and making a swooping motion with my hand. “Like a flip thing…”
Megan covered her face with her hand. “Please stop.”
I clucked my tongue at her. “Well, you describe him then.”
Carmen glanced between the two of us. “Is he a beefy sort of guy?” She flexed her arm. “Dark hair?”
“Yeah, that could be him,” I confirmed.
“I’ve seen him around. But I don’t think he was here that night. Before I lost track of Brandon, every time I saw him, he was alone.”
“Do you know anything about this other man?”
Carmen shook her head. “Nope.”
Megan looked confused. “So, wait … if he came with that guy, but no one saw them together … then where did he go? Does that mean Brandon left alone?”
Carmen turned to her and shrugged. “If he was running off with my cut of the money, he coulda ditched that guy, too … if they were even together.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But there’s an even more important question here.”
They both looked at me as if to say, What?
“Where’s the money now?”
* * *
We left the casino more puzzled than when we’d come in. Why hadn’t I thought about the money before? When Esther had first mentioned that he’d won at the casino that night, I hadn’t given it another thought. Maybe because I hadn’t known exactly how much. If Adam had found a large sum of money with the bodies, wouldn’t he have mentioned that?
And despite her original unwillingness to help, Carmen had proved to be more useful than I’d thought she’d be. She’d even given me her cell phone number in case I wanted to ask her any more questions. I think part of her was holding out hope that I would somehow miraculously find her money.
Fat chance of that happening.
When we were alone in the car, Megan asked, “What do you think this means?”
I maneuvered the car out of the parking space and headed for the parking garage exit. “I don’t know. But now we have this missing money to consider. Esther did say that he told her it was enough to pay rent on the store for two years. It never dawned on me how much that would actually be. It couldn’t just disappear into thin air, right?”
“Do you think he was robbed? Maybe someone knew he won the money and followed him to the store. Like, this unknown man, for example. It would certainly explain why the police didn’t mention finding any money at the scene.”
I shrugged. “The thought had crossed my mind. But I just have a hunch that it’s personal, you know? Why stage something so elaborate if it was just about the money? Something is nagging at me, and I can’t put my finger on it.”
“So what do we do now?”
We drove through the parking garage exit and pulled out onto Ontario. “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. Maybe look for someone who Brandon knew that was hard up for money? Maybe Mar—”
“Hey!” Megan yelled.
I slammed on the brakes. “What?” I looked left and right, but I was clear to pull onto the street.
“What if they’re all working together?”
“Oh my God, don’t do that!” I put a hand to my chest. “I thought I was going to hit someone!”
“Sorry,” Megan replied sheepishly. “But seriously, what if this mystery guy and Carmen and her boyfriend are all working together. She could be covering for him?”
“It’s a possibility.” I contemplated the likelihood of this scenario.
“Now the only thing we have to figure out is how to find this guy.”
“No one seems to know who he is, and even though Esther has seen him around, she doesn’t know, either.”
“Maybe we should question our new friend Carmen further. We should convince her to come clean before anyone beats her to it. That always works on those murder mystery shows.”
I snorted. “Come on, get real, Megan.”
“It’s true, though. Who’s going to rat out who first?”
“Let’s try to find out a little more on our own before we contact her again,” I suggested. “If we come at her with too much too soon, she’ll probably clam up and refuse to talk to us anymore.”
Megan turned to me. “But you definitely agree that she wasn’t telling the whole story, right?”
“Oh absolutely. She’s holding out on us for sure.”
* * *
When we got home that night, Kikko and I plopped in front of my laptop with cold pizza and a notepad. Excitement followed: I had three responses from the people I had reached out to. I was a little disappointed that none of them were from Jay Coleman, but at this point, I would take what I could get. In truth, I hadn’t expected to get any at all.
The first reply was from a guy named Steve who lived in Brooklyn asking if I was single. He mentioned that he’d never dated an Asian gi
rl before. And if he kept running with that line, he never would. I clicked DELETE.
The second message was one of Brandon’s friends from Cleveland, who told me he didn’t know that much about him but would be willing to answer whatever questions I had. I put a checkmark next to his name on the notepad. And the last message was from a guy named Todd in New York.
I decided to give the New York friend a call. He answered on the first ring.
“Hi, this is Lana Lee,” I said, using my professional phone voice. “I was the one who emailed you about Brandon.”
“Oh yeah,” he replied. “I was real sorry to hear about his … situation. I tried to make it out to Ohio for the funeral, but I couldn’t get off work. The beginning of the year is a busy time for us.”
“It was a nice service,” I told him. “Very sad, though.”
“The whole thing is a shame. He finally seemed to be getting his life together.”
“What can you tell me about him?” I asked. “I’d really like to capture who he was for … the article I’m writing. I didn’t know him that well; I was more Isabelle’s friend than his.”
“Well, let’s see. He was super easygoing about everything, even when things weren’t really going his way. He didn’t seem to mind when everything around him was chaos. I think he preferred it, actually. He breezed through school while the rest of us almost went bald stressing over exams. I envied that about him.”
“What did he go to school for?” I asked.
“He was a business major. A group of us were all in the same classes and we’d hang out at the bars and stuff after school. You know, a little happy-hour study session.”
“And he met his first wife, Constance, when he was in college, right?” I asked, pretending I didn’t know.
He chuckled. “Yeah, she was a real piece of work, that girl. So uptight. I can see why he had a thing for her sister, Victoria.” There was a long pause on the other end, and it made me wonder if he was daydreaming of the good ol’ days. “Man, that Vic, she was something else. Fun girl, beautiful … no, sexy. You wouldn’t even know the two were related.”
“I met her briefly at the funeral,” I told him, leaving out the details. “He liked Victoria before he even married her sister?”
