Royal Flush (24 page)

It turned out that removing something is easier than replacing something. I tried to align the new phone in three or four different ways, but each time I tried to push it into his pocket, it would start to jam into his thigh. But then the idea struck me: I didn't need to replace the phone. I could simply leave it underneath his chair, and then point it out to him, as though he'd dropped it during the dance. Dropping the phone would come as no surprise, given that a leggy blonde had been wriggling around on top of him for the last ten minutes. I placed the phone under his seat and crawled back out of there. Both Alexandra and the other dancer studiously ignored me.

I met up with Carlos at the door to the back room, where we'd been standing only a few minutes earlier.

"What did you tell her?" I asked.

"I said Kent had stiffed another dancer out of a big tip, so you were getting a little bit of payback." He smiled, seeming proud of his little lie.

"You're learning," I said.

"No, I'm just spending too much time around
you
."

I chuckled. "Yeah, as if that's a real burden on you."

"I have other interests," he said, haughtily. I wasn't buying it.

"Such as?"

"My girlfriend, for one," he said. It was clear he wanted to drop the subject.

This time I guffawed. "Oh, you mean the one you leave at a moment's notice every time I call you?"

He grimaced. "That's because you pay in cash."

"Yeah, right."

We stood in silence for the rest of the dance. Alexandra shot me a subtle glance, and I nodded to her, indicating that our mission had been accomplished. When she climbed off of Kent, he didn't seem ready for the dance to be over. But Alexandra was used to that, so she kissed him on top of the head and pulled his face into her chest. When he stood up he fumbled with his wallet to give her a tip, but she brushed him off and told him it was covered.

"Okay, Carlos, get lost," I said. "He's done."

Carlos receded back into the club, and I moved into the lap dance room.

"I thought you were going to be in here forever," I said. "I had to come see for myself!"

Kent smiled awkwardly and pulled at his shorts, which had bunched up around his obvious and persistent excitement.

"She's
good,
" he said.

I smiled and grabbed his arm, and then I pretended to notice something on the floor for the first time.

"Is that yours?" I asked. "Looks like a phone."

He felt his pockets and came up empty. "Must have fallen out. Thanks for spotting it."

He picked it up and, out of habit, tried to turn it on.

"Crap," he said. With his accent, the curse word sounded so
polished
. "The bloody thing has died on me."

"Maybe it hit the ground too hard," I suggested.

"Could be. Maybe it's just the battery. Anyway, you up for another drink? Or…"

"Or what?" I asked, knowing the answer. He'd gotten all worked up by Alexandra, and I imagined he had a very specific agenda in mind.

"Well, you see, er, I have a place nearby here, and we could, you know, have a little bit of fun between us, right?" He'd gotten all shy and awkward on me all of a sudden. It was charming in a way, but the answer was still going to be no. After all, he'd only been a widower about a week. Not to mention the fact that he was a creep.

"Um, I don't think so. But I'm sure if you tip the bouncers, they could point you in the right direction." Around a club like this, there were always some dancers willing to make some extra money on the side. Contrary to popular belief, prostitution wasn't legal in Vegas, but that didn't mean it didn't exist.

Kent seemed confused for a moment, but then his face showed a spark of understanding. "Aha," he said, a bit embarrassed. "Yes, well, we'll see about that."

We returned to our table and made some awkward small talk for a few minutes, but it was clear that Kent's agenda had turned in an entirely different direction. Alexandra had really done a number on him, because now he couldn't concentrate on anything except the dancers off to his right and the skimpily dressed waitresses prancing by.

"I'm going to head out," I said, and he didn't seem too upset. I figured he'd hit up the bouncers as soon as I left, and they'd hand him a few phone numbers of girls who'd help him accomplish his pressing mission.

Carlos met up with me on my way out.

"He got all hot and horny on me," I explained, "so it was easy to leave him here. He'll probably end up with Lena or Briana tonight."

Carlos nodded, knowing what I meant. "So what now?" he asked.

"Now, we go check out his phone. Plus, I'm hungry again," I pouted.

"I'm in," Carlos said.

We ended up at El Segundo, a Mexican place on the ground floor of the Fashion Show Mall, which was about halfway between Cougar's strip club and my apartment. They were famous for the massive quantities of fresh, drool-worthy guacamole they served tableside, and Carlos and I split an order of guac and a plate of beef tongue, which he recommended. We were sitting at an outside table underneath a heat lamp that warmed the early autumn night air.

I ordered a double Hornitos tequila on the rocks, and Carlos got himself a Negra Modelo beer, which came with a lime wedge shoved a bit too deep into the bottle.

"How the hell am I supposed to drink this?" he asked.

"You'll manage," I muttered. "Now let's get to work."

As I pulled Kent's iPhone from my bag, a sinking feeling crept into my stomach. What if there was a password? I didn't use one on my own phone, but I knew a lot of people who did.

Luckily, it was open season. "No password," I said, relieved.

"These kids," Carlos said, his face half-full of chips and salsa. "These kids don't have any privacy. Their whole life is online, so why bother protecting your phone?"

I coughed out some of my tequila, drawing looks from concerned tourists at the table next to us. "These
kids
?" I asked. "How old are
you
?"

He shrugged. "That's not the point."

"Whatever. Here, you want to take a crack at this?"

"At what?"

I smiled and batted my eyelashes. "You know, pull up all his old messages, texts, emails, stuff like that. You're the
guy
. You're good at that kind of stuff." I loved being reverse sexist. After being groped and ogled for more than a decade, I had earned that right.

He sighed and held out his hand. "Thanks," I said, handing him the phone. He tried to take a swig of his beer, but nothing was coming out. The lime had wedged itself in the neck, acting as a stopper. In frustration, he shoved his knife into the bottle to hold the lime wedge down beneath the neck, and then he tilted the bottle back toward his mouth. It was a good idea, but a failure of execution: the knife handle was getting in the way of his mouth, causing a stream of beer to pour down his face and neck. It wasn't a pretty sight.

"Shit," he muttered.

I couldn't help giggling, and neither could the couple at the table next to us, who were both enjoying the show.

"You focus on the phone, and I'll work on your beer," I said. I chugged my glass of water and then carefully poured the beer into my water glass, borrowing Carlos's trick of using the knife to keep the lime wedge from clogging the neck. He eyed me skeptically.

"You don't have a cold, do you?" he asked.

I sighed. "The alcohol in the beer will kill any germs, you big pussy."

He shrugged and got to work on the phone. He was quiet for a few minutes, allowing me a moment to decompress and take in the scenery, something I almost never did. We were facing the massive Wynn casino complex and its nine-million-foot wide video display, which was touting an upcoming visit by Barry Manilow, and the Strip traffic was whizzing by in stops and starts. Racing bikes and Ferraris revved their engines at the stoplight on the corner, ferrying an endless cadre of young thrill-seekers up and down the Strip, with no particular destination in mind. The tequila had made me more relaxed, but what had even more of an effect was the fact that I had overestimated the danger posed by Kent. He hadn't lured me out in order to have me kidnapped—he just wanted to swindle me out of some money. And then he wanted to sleep with me.

"Here we go," Carlos said. "Your client's name was Melanie, right? He's got lots of emails in here from her. Lots of really boring shit. How her day was, what flight she's taking, how she misses him, that kind of crap."

"Did she mention having a baby?" I asked.

"Gimme a minute." He scrolled through more messages and then looked up at me. "Nope. Nothing about babies, pregnancy, or anything like that."

"And nothing about Kent being involved with Jojia, or identity theft?"

He shrugged. "Not in the emails. I can check the texts and stuff too." He eyed his half a glass of beer warily and then pushed it away with a disgusted expression.

I shook my head. For someone who worked in a business where naked women writhed around on strangers all day, he was awfully touchy about germs. Carlos flagged down the waitress and ordered another beer,
without
lime, and kept tapping away at Kent's phone.

"Same stuff. Nothing that interesting in here from Melanie," he concluded.

"Huh," I muttered, not sure whether I was disappointed or pleased with the news. I had been hoping that something incriminating might link Kent to Melanie's death. Maybe she had complained about Kent's extracurricular activities, or maybe they'd had a fight. But apparently the phone wasn't worth stealing after all. Even so, a macabre sense of curiosity made me want to read the emails. "Can I take a look? Pull up his emails again."

Carlos touched the screen a few more times and then handed the phone over to me. He had done a search for "Melanie," which showed all the emails from her in chronological order. Carlos was right. If they had some kind of steamy romance, it didn't show through in their emails, which were businesslike and perfunctory. I clicked the phone off and listened to Carlos brag about one of his investment properties until our food arrived. For a muscular guy, he was a lightweight, and the beer had loosened his tongue. He seemed to be suggesting that if I invested with him, I'd make a small fortune. I guessed that he was probably a little embarrassed that most people only knew him as a strip club security guy, when in fact he owned a string of properties around town and was close to getting his MBA. He wanted to sound like a big shot, but I wasn't in the mood.

"You're the second guy to pitch an investment to me in the last hour," I whined. "Let's change the subject."

He apologized and began talking about golf, which was almost worse than real estate. I listened politely and allowed my double shot of tequila to sink in, the familiar soothing feeling spreading throughout my body. But tequila wasn't enough to render interesting Carlos' views on Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, so eventually the urge to poke around some more on Kent's phone proved irresistible. While Carlos prattled on, I touched an "X" on the screen and found my way back to Kent's regular inbox. Half of the emails seemed to be spam, but a name jumped out at me, a name that made my eyes get big and killed my buzz at the same time.

"Caroline Weston?" I asked, to no one in particular. "Why is she emailing Kent?"

"Who's that?" Carlos asked, perturbed at the fact that I had been ignoring him for several minutes.

"Melanie's younger sister."

"Is that important?" Carlos asked. "I mean, she was his sister-in-law. Why not email him?"

I ignored him and started reading the email. It was about an upcoming plan to visit Kent in Las Vegas.
Tomorrow
. Reading between the lines, the visit would not be Caroline's first trip to see him. I started scrolling back, where I found more emails from her. Many of them preceded Melanie's death.

"What the hell?" I whispered to myself.

Carlos scooped about five hundred calories worth of guacamole onto a single chip, and then shoved the whole thing into his mouth in a single bite. When he finished, he asked what the big deal was.

"The big deal? A dead woman's husband was cheating on her with her own sister. Don't you think that's a big deal?"

He nodded, taking another chip on a long excursion deep into Guacamole Mountain. His capacity for guac seemed unlimited. "I guess you're right," he said. "So you think he liked her more?"

"Could be," I murmured. I was still taken aback by the revelation that Caroline and Kent were a
thing
, and I began wondering if it was enough to get the LAPD off their butts and start investigating. And then, despite the tequila, another revelation jumped out at me.

"Carlos, did I tell you about the fake Kent?"

He furrowed his brow. "No."

"At Melanie's funeral, there was a guy there pretending to be Melanie's husband. No one had ever met Kent before, so he was able to pull it off," I explained.

"Okay…" Carlos wasn't exactly following.

"But the big question was
why
Kent felt the need to have a stand-in. Why not just go to the funeral himself?"

Carlos perked up. "Because he's a killer and he was racked with guilt? Hell, if I offed somebody, I wouldn't go to their funeral. It would be creepy."

"Yes," I said. "Maybe. But maybe it was because he didn't want someone there to see him, someone he already
knew. Someone who didn't know he was married to Melanie."

"Such as Melanie's own sister," Carlos said. He flagged the waitress down for another beer.

"Wouldn't that be a little awkward? We know, based on these emails, that Kent and Caroline were tight, but I assume Caroline wouldn't have been dating him if she knew he was the same guy who had married her own sister."

Carlos didn't seem convinced. "But she's emailing him. She knows his name. How many Henry John Kents are floating around in Las Vegas?"

I nodded. "Right, but look at his email. It says his email address is [email protected]. He could have told her his name was Kent Jones or Kent Smith, or whatever, and she'd have no idea what his full name was. Once he met Caroline and decided he liked her, it makes sense that he would have given her a fake name, right?"