Royal Flush (2 page)

Melanie pretended to take offense, then smiled. "Well, Kent isn't like that. He's not exactly a fitness freak, but he at least knows where the gym on campus is. And he has
fabulous
teeth!"

I nodded, pretending to be impressed. "Okay, so here's how this works. Up front I get a retainer of ten thousand. I'll deduct my fees and expenses out of that, and then, if I need more, I'll come calling. How's that sound?"

She had already reached into her bag for her checkbook and was now scribbling away on a pink check. She ripped it out and handed it across the desk.

"Oh, and there's this," she said, opening up her purse again. She produced a sheaf of twenty or so pieces of paper and laid them on my desk. "That's what I've found on my own. Family history stuff off of the internet, mostly."

I thumbed through the papers quickly. A lot of charts and family trees mostly, and a few photos of stately country homes.

"Is his estate in here?" I asked.

"No, I couldn't find a picture of it. The internet can only get you so far. But it's supposed to be in the north, somewhere in Yorkshire, wherever that is."

"Okay. This will be helpful. Anything else?"

She crinkled her nose a bit. "Well, just the obvious."

"The obvious?"

"Well, he can't know I'm doing this, of course. It would devastate him to know that I don't completely trust him."

I nodded. "Even though you're not even dating, possibly, and even though he's asking for lots of money?"

She shrugged. "
Men!
"

I smiled. We stood up, and I showed her out. I took another look at the ten-thousand-dollar check, shoved it in my pocket, and got the hell out of there. Fettucine Alfredo was calling.

For more than a decade, my Tuesdays had been like most people's Sundays. Mondays and Tuesdays were slow nights at Cougar's, the club I danced at, so I didn't bother trying to compete with the younger girls for a limited amount of tips. Not that I
couldn't
compete with them, I just didn't want to go to all that trouble just to score a few lap dances with some balding accountants from Akron. Later in the week, things started to heat up. That was when the stuffy business conferences let out, and the people who liked to party tacked an extra night onto their trips just to let their hair down after their bosses had flown home. Thursday nights paid my mortgage, Friday nights covered everything else, and Saturday and Sunday nights went into my self-employed retirement account. That is, until my budding private detective business took off. I was getting to the point where some of the new eighteen-year-old dancers were almost half my age, and for years Fr. Sweeney at St. Christopher's had been on my case about what I did for a living. A few months earlier, I had finished my detective training and now found myself slowly on my way to becoming an
ex
-stripper, which, I had to admit, was not exactly much higher on the social ladder.

The transition was underway. This Tuesday would be a workday, but not at Cougar's. But first, breakfast. An annoyingly healthy friend of mine had been harping on me about her low-carb diet for more than a year, and it was hard to ignore the fact that she looked fantastic and seemed to be able to eat mountains of food without gaining weight. And then one day I read an article online that stated the unthinkable: fat was okay. Despite being brainwashed to think that grease, butter, lard, and cheese were going to send me to an early grave, the opposite seemed to be true. By eating low-fat and avoiding all that stuff, we were all turning into carb fiends and diabetics with an insatiable craving for more bread, chips, and pasta. When I mentioned this at my last checkup, my doctor looked at me as if I was crazy, which told me I was onto something. Dr. Schwartz was a nice man, and he'd cured me of gout a few years earlier, but one look at him told me he didn't know the first thing about nutrition. I wasn't ready to give up my pasta, but change was in the air.

This is all by way of explaining why I was making hollandaise sauce at eight-thirty on a Tuesday morning. Egg yolk, butter, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and a little cayenne to wake up my taste buds. I had already learned the hard way that making an edible version of eggs benedict required a certain amount of orchestration, and I was no Leonard Bernstein. The bacon has to be ready at the same time as the sauce, not to mention the poached egg. I was going without the English muffin, so that would make things easier. In theory. What the theory didn't take into account was the fact that I was an idiot. I'm a zombie without my morning coffee, and also not very bright to begin with, so I had somehow gotten mesmerized watching the bubbling fat as the bacon fried in the pan, a symphony of sizzling pork bellies. As I stared at it, entranced, I managed to completely forget about the three eggs I was trying to poach. By the time I snapped out of it, they had turned into three hard, white globs in the boiling water. After I threw them out, I spun around to get more eggs, but in the process my elbow knocked over my bowl of hollandaise sauce, spilling the deliciousness all over my tiled floor. At that moment, a word beginning with "F" escaped my mouth, I am sorry to admit.

I surveyed the mess and sighed. Before cleaning it up and starting over, I decided the best course of action was to take a deep breath and brew myself a pot of strong coffee. At least I couldn't mess that up too badly, I figured. As I sat on my stool watching the coffee drip into the carafe, I realized I was simply procrastinating, avoiding the inevitable. Snapping out of it, I reluctantly wet a cloth and got down on my hands and knees to mop up the hollandaise, and I don't mind admitting I stuck my finger in and tasted some right off the floor. Naturally, it was delicious, which made the whole thing that much more frustrating.

With my attempt at a low-carb breakfast an unmitigated debacle, I regressed to my old ways and poured myself a big ol' bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and skim milk, which I scarfed down in front of my laptop. After futzing around on the internet for a few minutes, I finally decided to get to work. Melanie had done her own internet research, as anyone in her position would do, but I had my own ways and methods. A good chunk of my training at investigator school had involved sneaky ways to get information about people without lifting more than a few fingers.

Before checking out Kent, I ran an internet search for Melanie Weston. In my brief tour of duty as a PI, I'd learned that sometimes the client who hired me turned out to be more interesting than the subject of the investigation, and I didn't want any surprises. Melanie's was a common enough name that I didn't have high hopes of finding her, but sure enough she popped up in a few headlines. At the ripe old age of twenty, she'd been arrested for drug possession and wound up making the
Los Angeles
Times
as a result of her family's prominent name. And, a year later, she was pictured with her dad at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a medical clinic in a downtrodden area of Los Angeles. Since then, nothing. Pretty boring stuff, which was fine with me.

Henry John Kent was another matter. There were a million Henry Johns and John Kents, and a much smaller number of Henry John Kents. But remarkably the one I was looking for did not appear to have any presence on social media, at least under that name. I realized I should have asked Melanie for that kind of information. I had his Las Vegas address, but little else. I'd have to take a different tack.

Apart from William and Harry, and the obvious folks like Prince Charles and the Queen herself, I really didn't know much about the British Royal Family. I didn't much care about them, either, but I was going to have to fake it if I wanted to earn my fee with Melanie. One of the papers she'd given me was an extended royal family tree, which started at the top with Queen Victoria (1819-1901). I had heard of old Vicky, of course, but I hadn't known she had nine children, all of whom became either dukes or princesses of some kind. The line of succession ran through her oldest son, Albert Edward, who became Edward VII. His oldest surviving son then became George V, and when he died his son Edward VIII took over. But Edward (I seemed to recall) had a thing for a divorced American, and so gave up the throne in favor of his younger brother, who became George VI. George died in 1952, leaving the throne to his daughter Elizabeth, whose children are Charles, Anne, Andrew and (you guessed it) Edward. And that was as far as the family tree went.

I shook my head in frustration. With all those kids in the family, there would be hundreds of cousins to sort through. This was not going to be easy. I went back to the computer and tried to find a universal guide to the royal family, the kind of tome that might have all the third-cousins and great-grandnephews and all that kind of thing. But no such thing seemed to exist.

I sighed and reached for my cell phone.

"Mike, you at the office?"

Mike Madsen was the licensed private investigator who was supposed to be supervising me during my probationary first year as a detective. All that meant was that occasionally I had to check in with him to make sure I wasn't blundering around too wildly. In reality, we had started working together as equals because his business was a little on the slow side, and I had made a few headlines, which generated some business. We shared office space, and that resulted in a fair amount of mild sexual harassment with Mike finding himself on the receiving end. He was a good-looking, corn-fed Mormon, a bit on the quiet side, and pretended to have very little romantic interest in me at all. It was all an act on his part, I could swear.

His voice was skeptical. "Yeah I'm at the office. Why?"

"Want to go to the library with me?" I said it as enthusiastically as I could, the way a parent tells a child it's a real treat to try asparagus.

"Uhh, how come?"

I explained the problem to him. He was silent for a minute, turning it over in his head. Whenever I brought work his way I wondered if he was purely grateful for the opportunity, or if it was mixed with a little bit of jealousy that well-paying clients were coming to me, a newbie private eye, instead of someone like him who'd been at it a decade or more.

"Yeah, I could squeeze that in, I suppose. Just finishing up a report for General Casualty. A guy who claims he slipped and fell at Harrah's turns out to have quite a problem with slips and falls. He's sued six different businesses in the last three years."

"He should get a walker," I said. "You sure you can pull yourself away from such a fascinating case?"

"Hey, it pays the bills. Don't knock it."

Our office was right on my way to the downtown library, so I agreed to swing by and pick Mike up. As usual, his attire drew inspiration in equal parts from 1950's TV dads, bug exterminators, and cut-rate funeral directors: a white, short-sleeve dress shirt, black tie, black pants. I didn't mind the shirt, since it showed off his muscular arms, but the rest of it made me cringe. I nagged him about it at least twice a week, but it was clear that he gave my fashion advice about as much weight as anyone would give dieting advice from Rosie O'Donnell.

We made our way through downtown and up to North Las Vegas Boulevard, where the main branch of the Clark County Library System was housed in an imposing tan building. I wasn't ready to confess that in more than a decade living in town I had never set foot within its doors. It wasn't that I didn't read, it's that I was lazy. Most of the trash I read could be picked up for under four bucks on Amazon, so it was hardly worth the trip.

Mike seemed willing to take the lead, so I gladly let him type away on the electronic card catalog computer.

"Upstairs," he said.

We climbed the stone staircase and found the section on British history. There were about a hundred books on Churchill and Henry VIII (and his wives), but nothing much on the present royal family.

"There are some recent biographies out there," Mike said. "You know, Diana, William and Kate, all the celebrity type of stuff. But I doubt those kinds of books would include anything about this obscure cousin you're after."

I nodded. "Well, you went straight for the computer. I always like to ask a live person. This is what they do, after all."

He looked skeptical. "Knock yourself out."

He followed me over to the reference desk, where a smartly dressed woman was staring at her computer screen. She was trying to look as if she was working on something exceedingly important, but I had a hunch she was probably just comparing pumps at Zappos.com or Nordstrom. When she finally looked up, she actually managed a wide and winning smile.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"Probably not, but it's worth a shot. I'm looking for a guide to the British royal family. Not just the queens and princes, but the whole bunch of them."

She pursed her lips. I supposed she was expecting me to ask where the bathroom was, or when the next issue of
Entertainment Weekly
would be arriving.

"Let me just make a call, if you don't mind." She spun around and pulled out a one-page phone directory from a desk behind her.

I nodded and then pretended not to eavesdrop on her call. From what I could tell, she might actually be talking to someone who knew something.

"So, here's the deal," she began. "We don't have anything like that here, or even in the county system. But the university library does. If you want to head up there, just go to reference and they'll help you out. You can't check it out, but they'll let you look at it."

I nodded in approval. "Thanks a lot!"

Mike sighed audibly.

"Told ya," I said. "People aren't all bad, you know. Sometimes they can even be helpful."

"I still prefer machines," Mike said. He said it in a way that made me think he was at least partly making fun of himself.

I shrugged. "Machines don't keep you warm at night, though."

"Electric blankets do," he offered.

I rolled my eyes and kept my mouth shut as we headed to my car.