Royal Flush (9 page)

For once, no one was looking at me, so I found Carlos and tried to stay within about twenty feet of him. It would be easy to lose track of each other in a place like this. From what I could tell, he was slowly sidling himself up to the group around Jojia, who was beginning to gyrate like just about everyone else in the room. Her friends, mostly girls and a couple guys, had gotten even more into it, losing themselves to the rhythm and grinding against each other with no apparent pattern. I watched them all dancing, if that's what you called it, in the detached but fascinated way a zoologist might study a rare species of baboon in the wild. All I needed were a Jeep and some field glasses. And maybe some kind of stun gun.

A strong two-finger tap on my shoulder snapped me out of it.

"Raven, I thought we'd lost you." It was Charles.

He'd startled me, and I was a little embarrassed to be busted as the wallflower I was. "Hi, Charles," was the best I could blurt out.

He smiled then wordlessly led me out to the dance floor. I let him.

I was used to gyrating to loud music, but apparently my garb was a little racy even for a nightclub full of drunk twenty-somethings. More than a few people—guys and women alike—were looking at me with big eyes. One guy pointed. Charles seemed to be enjoying it, but within a few minutes he moved himself closer so that we were touching.

"I have to tell you something," he said in a loud whisper.

"Ok."

He leaned in to my ear and whispered as loudly as a man can whisper. "Your breast is showing."

I pulled back and looked down. I figured maybe the V on my dress had gone a little too far south, but that wasn't the problem at all. Instead, my entire left breast had fallen out and had been gyrating to the music, on full display to anyone in the vicinity. I grimaced and pulled my dress up.

"How long has it been like that?" I asked, mortified.

"Couple minutes," he said.

I felt like slapping him. Here I was, uncomfortable enough already, and now I'd made a complete fool of myself. All while trying to stay in the background. And instead of telling me right away, he just sat back and enjoyed the show.

"No offense, Charles, but I'm going to go stand over there now."

He shrugged, still grinning stupidly. I stormed away, more mad at myself than anything else. I should probably have gone home earlier to get something decent to wear rather than relying on a dress that was probably
designed
to fall off. I got myself a twenty-six-dollar gin martini while I pouted on the sidelines.

Carlos found me about twenty minutes later. He was smiling, which automatically made me nervous.

"What?" I asked.

"She's
nice
. Real nice."

"Ok. Spare me the details now. I just want to get out of here."

Carlos spread his hands apart and bowed his head slightly. "You're the boss. Let's go."

I was still red in the face while we waited to pick up Carlos's car from the valet.

"What's with you?" he asked.

"Never mind. Tell me about Jojia." There was no reason to give Carlos another reason to poke fun at me, so I kept mum about the fact that I'd given half the crowd a free peep show.

He shrugged. "Well, for starters, all her friends are high."

"Not surprising. Do you know what they were taking?"

"No. She wasn't really excited to talk about it," he said.

"So what makes you think she's so nice?"

Carlos' car pulled up, and we climbed in. Carlos gave the engine an unnecessary rev before we pulled out.

"She's just a good dancer, that's all," he said.

I coughed at his silliness. "So she let you dance close to her, is that it?"

He smiled. We nosed the car through a bunch of tourists in front of the MGM and turned north onto the Strip.

I hated to admit it, but Carlos looked damned good even in the goofy golf shirt we'd bought him. If he said Jojia took a liking to him, I had no reason to doubt it.

"Was Jojia high herself?" I asked.

"Couldn't tell. Possibly. But not as bad as her friends. They were completely gone, as if they were in another world."

"Anything else?"

He thought for a second as we pulled up to a red light. "She looks good in black."

I sighed. "Sounds like you guys had a really deep conversation."

"It's impossible to say much in there. It's too loud."

I granted him the point. "You can let me out here," I said. We were stopped at a light in front of Bally's. I could walk home from there.

"That was two hours, by the way," Carlos said. With Carlos, the meter was always running.

"It's all on file up here," I said, pointing to my head. "You'll get your money."

"Plus drinks. Fifty bucks."

I shook my head, exasperated.

Carlos flashed me a toothy smile, and I unbuckled myself and climbed out. After my ten-minute walk home, it became quite apparent that I was starving, and that a quick snack would not suffice. I threw a couple of frozen beef patties in a pan and fixed myself a double cheeseburger with some bacon on the side. It didn't take me long to discover that a strip of bacon was an outstanding way to mop up the melted cheese left over in the frying pan, which led to some fantasizing about all the different ways I could combine bacon and melted cheese into a smorgasbord of little appetizers, something that might prove useful if I ever hosted a cocktail party. That, of course, would require cocktail party kinds of friends, which I lacked in spades.

I wasn't normally exhausted at two in the morning, but tonight was the exception, and the heavy dinner combined with a splash of boxed white wine was enough to finish me off for the evening. I awoke at dawn in a tangled mess of blankets on my couch, the TV still tuned to Animal Planet, and then I shuffled off to bed, where I lingered, in and out of sleep, until almost eleven.

Fridays for me were like most people's Tuesdays. Kind of mid-week, but kind of not. The big conventions were letting out, which dried up one line of customers, but the tourists and frequent visitors from LA would begin pouring into McCarran Airport around noon, providing a whole new source of revenues for casino moguls and lowly strippers alike. I didn't have much to do anymore for Melanie. I'd followed her friend Kent long enough, and I knew enough to know he probably wasn't royalty and that he had at least one other girlfriend. He also sucked at poker. Unfortunately, that wasn't the information Melanie wanted, but I sensed she already had a hunch.

During the day I filled out some long-overdue financial paperwork and called my agent to yell at him for booking me at yet another boring cocktail party next week. Even in this sensitive, politically correct, and harassment-happy age we lived in, there were still businesses dominated by men who were only a few generations removed from apes, or worse. Auto parts and the building trades were big, but even the less manly professions like video games and web programming had a decidedly testosterone-driven approach to entertainment, and they were not shy about hiring models to "entertain" their customers and fellow tradesmen. If they would pay me to walk around in a bikini and smile, posing for the occasional selfie, I would gladly do it, assuming the price was right. But these events usually required some semblance of conversation, which was more terrifying than it sounded. There was no amount of money that would compensate me for trying to fake interest in the business of a bunch of men who talked like teenagers. I had told my agent this before, but he apparently couldn't turn anything down when it meant a ten percent cut for himself.

The rest of the day was quiet, and I actually got bored enough that I went in to work early, which in stripperese means seven o'clock. During a break I checked Jojia's Facebook page again, satisfying a weird kind of fascination I had with her and her clubby lifestyle. I doubted that partying all the time and being a walking ATM was very satisfying, which might explain why she wanted a prince to rescue her and take her back to England. Tonight her page was quiet, though. No selfies at clubs, and no gushy or phony-friendly notes from others. Of course, it wasn't even nine o'clock, so the night was young.

Some idiot pulled the club's fire alarm around two-thirty, but other than that the evening was uneventful and profitable. Saturday morning found me scratching my head. I had called Melanie a few days earlier, but she hadn't gotten back to me. I eventually brushed it off on the grounds that I was old. Even though she was only a decade or so younger than I was, her generation looked at things like phone calls the way I would look at a Betamax tape. Everyone was into texts and emails, not phone calls. Asking Melanie to call me back was kind of like asking her to return my carrier pigeon or to respond by Western Union telegram. Plus, she was an heiress and probably had a million more interesting things to do than talk to a wannabe ex-stripper.

The worst news of the day was that my bathroom scale was not, in fact, broken. The number it read could
not
be right, I reasoned, and so I tested it by placing other heavy objects on it. I even replaced the batteries, but the same incomprehensible number kept staring back at me, almost taunting me. Now that I wasn't dancing five or six nights a week, the calories were really starting to catch up with me. There were a number of options for progress on that front. I could cut out some empty calories, like wine and champagne, but that wasn't going to happen in this lifetime. That meant either dancing more often, which I didn't want to do, eating less, which was equally bad, or spending more time in the gym. The gym was the least worst option.

Saturday night had me back at Cougar's, and Sunday morning meant dragging my tired behind over to the noon mass at St. Christopher's, where spandex and yoga gear were more common than slacks and collared shirts. The homily was about the need to keep things in perspective. Our middle-class American troubles paled in comparison to those of people in third world countries and even Americans just a few generations before, many of whom worked in grueling conditions (if they had a job at all) just to put bread on the table. Suddenly the fact that I had no boyfriend and a demeaning, but very well-paying, job didn't seem so bad.

I was debating whether to go back to Cougar's that night when Mike called. When I saw the number, I got a little excited, but his voice was a letdown from the get-go.

"Did you see the news?" he asked.

"Nope, what is it?"

"Melanie, your client. Dead of a drug overdose. It was on our local news, but the LA Times website has the whole story. Such as it is."

I struggled with a response. "She didn't seem the drug type."

"Maybe not, but all it takes is one time," Mike said. It wasn't very reassuring.

"I guess that explains why she wasn't returning my call. I guess it doesn't matter anymore whether Kent is royalty or not."

"Well, we tried," Mike said.

"Did they say what kind of drugs? Or how it happened?"

"No, the tox report won't be done for a week or more. They're using phrases like
apparent
overdose
to describe what happened."

I frowned. "So it might be foul play?"

"There's no reason to think so," Mike said. "It's just a matter of waiting for the results before they can say for sure what happened."

"Okay, thanks for the info. I've never had a client die on me before."

Mike chuckled. "How many clients have you had, like five?"

I got defensive, but only for a moment. "Seven, if you want to be accurate about it."

"Those aren't good odds. I wouldn't put that on your website."

I rolled my eyes. "It's nice that you can joke about someone's death." It was a little melodramatic of me to scold him, I admit. "Anyway, how do I return the money? She paid me ten grand, but I only burned through half that."

He thought for a minute. "Figure out if she had a will—then pay the executor, and it will become part of the estate."

"How do I do that?"

"Um, I would just ask."

"But I can't just butt in and ask her family," I said. "They're rich, and they probably have bodyguards."

"Well, I doubt she had a will anyway," Mike said. "She's only twenty-whatever."

"Okay, I'll figure it out," I said. "Thanks for calling."

After I hung up I kicked myself for not inviting Mike over for dinner. It wasn't as if I had anything good to serve, but we could order food. And I wondered if maybe he had been secretly fishing for an invite himself. The fact that my client had died was important, but it wasn't the kind of urgent news that would require calling me on a Sunday night. It could have waited until the morning. With Mike, who was part-sphinx, one would never know.

I pulled out my iPad and found the news story online. It didn't have any more details than Mike's cribbed version, which was frustrating. A pretty young heiress dies with her entire life in front of her, and it barely merits more than a paragraph.

As my frozen pizza cooked in the oven, an idea began germinating in my mind. It was going to be difficult to return Melanie's unearned fee, and for that family five grand would never even be noticed. But I didn't want to just pocket the money either. I hadn't earned it, and I knew I'd feel creepy for the rest of my life if I kept a dead girl's money. But, I theorized, if I
earned
the money somehow, it would be reasonable to keep it. Her death was unusual, and it didn't sit right with me. Melanie would have wanted me to get to the bottom of things. It was probably just an overdose, but her family might appreciate knowing the full story. Was she alone? Where did she get the drugs? Was it a freak thing or was she a regular user? There were so many questions, and waiting a week or more for a toxicology report wasn't something I was interested in. Before I had even decided what to do, I unconsciously began to pack a suitcase.

And before I'd even thought it through, I pulled out my phone and dialed Mike.

"Want to go to Califonia? Again?"

He sighed. I thought it was a little overdone. "I was worried you'd do that," he said.