Royal Flush (6 page)

Mike flashed a furtive glance at my chest. "I can imagine," he said, surprising me. I was used to being ogled by men, groped, grabbed, wolf-whistled, proposed to and propositioned—you name it. But in the months since I'd been working with Mike, he'd never even uttered a word, causing me to wonder whether I was losing my looks faster than I thought, or whether he was just completely uninterested in me. The two of us had gotten hot and heavy in a hot tub during a work trip to San Diego, but that seemed to be the result of my getting him drunk more than anything else. Since then, he'd returned to his Mormon sensibilities and had treated me primarily as a semi-annoying curiosity.

I looked up at Mike's face and smiled. When he smiled back, I began blushing like a fourteen-year-old. Our eyes locked for a split second, just before the cocktail waitress approached and saved me from the awkward moment.

"Drinks? Cocktails?"

"
Yes
," I blurted out. "Gin martini, please. Up, with a single olive. Mike?"

He shook his head, predictably, and waved the waitress off.

"You gonna stick around?" he asked. "I don't think we
both
need to be here."

I nodded. "I have an idea. I can run over to the gift shop and grab some big sunglasses and a baseball cap. In poker, that's pretty common, so I won't stand out. That way I can play at his table and see if I can get to know him a little bit."

Mike pondered it for a second. "Up to you. It could be dangerous, you know. That girl won't like it if you're too friendly."

"I'll wear a thick, baggy shirt."

Mike smiled. "Probably safer that way. I'll walk you out."

I waited for my drink to arrive, and then we left them at the poker room and wound our way back through the casino. I got in the valet line and Mike found himself a cab.

When I returned to the Bellagio poker room, I looked nothing like my glamorous, dashing self. I had scored a pair of Ray-Bans in the gift shop, which I wondered if I could deduct on my taxes, and a tan Bellagio baseball cap. With my hair pulled up and tucked into my cap, about the only thing someone could tell about my appearance was that I was probably of the female persuasion and definitely had awful taste in clothes.

I hadn't initially realized it, but Kent had sat down at an Omaha table. I had played Omaha, but not in half a dozen years, the simple reason being that I sucked at it. My normal game was Texas Hold 'Em, a version of poker where you could go "all in" and either scare your opponent away or get him to call and play for a giant pot. In Omaha, the bets you could make were limited, which cramps my style. And instead of getting only two cards, you start out with four, a nuance that makes the calculations about your hand strength much harder, and to me it made guessing what the other players had almost impossible. The hardest part was figuring out which cards to play at the end of a hand, because you needed to play a high hand and a low hand, and you had to use certain cards from your own hand while using certain other cards that the dealer had dealt to everyone.

But I wasn't there to win money, I was there to spy on Henry James Kent and, by extension, the girl who appeared to be his girlfriend. I handed six hundred bucks to the poker boss, and he counted out some chips and pointed me in the direction of the Omaha table, which had two seats free. Poker is a game of coolness, of projecting a stern,
don't-mess-with-me
image. First impressions count. These thoughts were floating through my mind as I made my way over to the table, weaving my way between the closely packed poker tables.
Look strong, be cool,
I told myself.

But just before I arrived at the table, a player at the table next to me pulled his seat back to get up, and the chair's leg managed to hook itself right around my left foot, causing me to trip and fall forward right onto the Omaha table. I had to reach out in front of me to protect myself from the fall, and in the process all of my chips went spewing around the room in seventeen different directions.

Completely mortified, flustered, and red-faced, my first instinct was to get the hell out of there, leaving my chips behind. A previous version of me would no doubt have done just that. But this was work, and I was disguised, so I would suck it up and sit down. Most of the table had gotten up and begun crawling around on their hands and knees looking for my chips. I bent down to help.

The other players were careful to reveal any chips they found, not wanting to be seen as opportunists or thieves, especially with all the cameras watching. They placed my red fives and green twenty-five dollar chips on the table, and after a few minutes we had accounted for all but one of them. After I made countless apologies, we all settled into our seats, and the dealer began shuffling the cards.

My face was still a deep shade of scarlet.

"That was quite an entrance!" the dealer said, winking at me. "Don't worry about it, honey, I've seen a
lot
worse." She was a redhead of about sixty, with a kindly face and oversized glasses.

An older guy next to me chuckled. "Usually it's the
exits
that are worse. Last week a guy was tipping back vodka lemonades as if they were sweet tea, and after a couple hours he bolted up from the table and then spewed all over the no-limit table on his way out the door. They were cleaning puke off of chips for the next hour and a half!"

The table let out a collective cringe, but that didn't stop the rest of them from sharing their embarrassing poker stories. There was one about a guy who desperately had to go to the bathroom but had such a good hand that he couldn't leave. You can imagine how that one ended. There was another one about a guy who slipped some Viagra into the drink of the player next to him, and it turned out the guy had a blood pressure condition that amplified the effect of the drug, which led to amusing consequences. You expect to get stiffed when you go to a casino, but not like
that
.

All in all, the stories deflected the attention from my gaffe and got me to calm down and focus on the game and on Kent, who had remained mum during all of the excitement. I wondered whether the other players were telling stories because they wanted to make me feel more at ease, or whether they just needed an excuse to blab. My first several hands were the typical dreck that I was used to, so I didn't get into any trouble. Bad hands were easy to play because you just folded. The dangerous hands were the marginal ones that drew you in, got you to bet, and then gave you an ulcer while you tried to guess whether you were beat or not.

The crap hands kept coming my way, but for once I didn't mind. It allowed me to focus on Kent rather than the action, although I couldn't help trying to read the hands he was playing. Of course some of the hands went all the way to the "river"—the final card overturned by the dealer—in which case he had to show his hand if it was a winner. Some of these hands were less than stellar. For example, he ended up winning one hand on a stone-cold bluff holding nothing but an ace and a six. The hand ended up being a winner when the last two cards the dealer dealt were both sixes, giving him a miracle three of a kind. It was not the kind of hand a good player would have played, as evidenced by the groan from the losing player and the bewildered looks from the others at the table when Kent turned his hand over.

Eventually Kent's lack of skill caught up to him. It wasn't his playing style so much as it was the simple fact that he was playing way too many hands. Poker is a game of patience, and some would even say boredom. You have to wait for the right hand to get your money in, and the right hand only comes around every ten or fifteen hands. But Kent didn't seem to want to wait. During the course of an hour I saw him play starting hands of Ace-Queen-Seven-Three, King-Queen-Ten-Seven, and all kinds of other hands that might look strong to a novice but were actually quite weak. The general theme was that he was trying to catch magic in a bottle by hitting a miracle inside straight or a long-shot flush, and that was a recipe for losing money. Which he did, in spades. And clubs.

I wasn't sure how much Kent had started with, but at a table like that it would be several hundred dollars, or even around a thousand. He was taking it well, and so was the girl on the other side of the rail, who had been texting feverishly for most of the time and only half paying attention to the action. I assumed it was her money that he was losing, which meant she must have had some deep pockets. Anything for a prince, I figured.

Kent smiled at her and put his hand out, and she didn't flinch as she reached into her cream-colored Louis Vuitton handbag. At the same time that she leaned over the rail and handed him another wad of hundreds, a cocktail waitress arrived to deliver her another drink. I figured the drinks helped with the boredom of having to stand there next to the poker room. I hadn't been keeping an exact count, but the drink had to be at least her fourth one of the afternoon. While she was occupied with the cocktail waitress, I noticed Kent palm a few chips and shove them in his pocket.

Having participated in very few pots, I was doing okay financially but still struggling with the complexity of the game. After another half hour of folding my hands and watching Kent play bad ones, I figured I'd learned enough about him for one day. He wasn't very chatty, and his seat across the table from me made it hard to engage him. But observing his play and his interactions with his Asian money honey spoke volumes. When I cashed my chips in, I found I was only down twenty-eight bucks, which I counted as a kind of win.

"Watch your step," the guy next to me muttered as I stood up to leave, drawing a chuckle from the rest of the table. I blew him a big kiss then headed for the bathroom.

Given the overwhelmingly male clientele of the poker room and sports book, the closest ladies' room was all but deserted. I took the opportunity to remove my ridiculous
Guns & Ammo
cap and style my hair a tiny bit before venturing back out into the casino. I knew no one was scrutinizing my appearance very carefully, but a girl had to have some kind of standards, didn't she?

There wasn't much I could do about the horrid plaid shirt, but at least I had made myself look marginally presentable. Just as I was finishing up, the bathroom door opened and Kent's girlfriend stormed in, her face completely white. She ignored me, dropped her bag, and pushed her way into a stall.

For a tiny little woman, she sure made a lot of noise. I had never heard a vomit like hers—a high-pitched
heeeeeeeeeee
followed by a grotesque
unnnnhhhhh
. At first she was dry-heaving, but then all of the drinks and the Ping Pang Pong lunch came up in what sounded like a tsunami of gloppy unpleasantness. I cringed, feeling for her. I knew she would feel a thousand times better in about ten minutes, but that was a long ten minutes.

Her Louis Vuitton bag lay on the floor outside the stall, spared from the indignity and messiness of it all.

"You okay in there?" I asked.

"
Unnnnnnnnhhhhhhhhh,
" came the response. Silly me for asking.

I eyed the handbag again. The girl was going to be in that stall for awhile.

I couldn't resist the urge to find out who she was, so I quietly crouched down and began fishing through the bag. I pulled out a beautiful black leather wallet and was not surprised to find a few thousand dollars in hundreds. But it was her ID that interested me the most. I pulled out her Nevada license and took a quick photo with my iPhone.

Jojia Star Takada. Aged twenty. Lived in Summerlin, an upscale planned community outside town. Rifling quickly through the rest of the purse, I couldn't find any semblance of any student IDs or anything else that would indicate her status, apart from the fact that she was obviously rich. I put everything back as it had been and got out of there before she yakked again.

On my drive home, I ran things through in my mind. The fact that Jojia was only twenty explained the hefty tip she'd left the cocktail waitress. I knew from experience that someone was much less likely to be carded by an employee who saw a consistent flow of dollar signs. At least that made sense. The rest of it, not so much. I granted that it was possible for a young girl to be charmed off her feet by a prince, or an earl, or whatever Kent was claiming to be, but standing around watching a guy playing poker was nobody's idea of a good time. My working assumption was nothing more than the obvious, namely, that this Kent guy was a player who had at least two wealthy girlfriends funding his lifestyle. What I'd seen so far wasn't conclusive evidence, but it all pointed in the direction of telling Melanie Weston that she'd have better luck betting at the roulette tables than funding Kent's supposed royal lawsuit.

The next morning I put in a call to Melanie to update her on what I'd learned, but she wasn't answering, so I left her a voice mail, a move I immediately regretted. It wasn't as if we were discussing national security secrets, but I figured communications between a client and a private investigator should probably be live, rather than recorded. Without much else to do, I decided to start snooping around for information about Kent's other girlfriend, the deep-pocketed girl who couldn't handle her afternoon booze.

Jojia Star Takada had a vibrant and in-your-face online presence. In person, she seemed more quiet and waif-like than anything else, but on Facebook she was a party animal and selfie addict who never seemed to miss a chance to record her debauchery at just about every nightclub in town. In one photo she was posing next to a bottle of Ketel One at Hakkasan, a club at the MGM Grand, and in another, posted just days later, she was making a pouty face at Rain, which was down at the Mandalay Bay. Not being a natural party girl myself, I had only visited the big clubs in the old days when I hired out as an escort for wealthy clients, almost all of whom were expecting to get something "extra" in addition to my escorting duties. Now, I readily admitted to being a party-pooper. I didn't enjoy the thumping noise of the processed music, all the phony kids blowing through wads of borrowed cash they couldn't afford, and I certainly did not approve of eight-hundred-dollar bottles of vodka.