“Bloody hell!” Felix staggered back, holding one hand to his face and the other straight out as if to ward off the psycho barging her way into his hotel room.
I slammed the door shut behind me.
“What the hell was that for?” he asked, his accent as thick as the blood starting to seep through his fingers.
“That,” I said, still advancing on him, “was for making my mother cry.”
He stared at me, uncomprehending. “Lady, you’re nuts.”
“Thanks to your sleaze factory, she may very well disown me now. Stop printing pictures of me!”
He pulled his hand away from his nose. A small trickle of blood still remained on his upper lip. “Sorry, love, I can’t. That’s what I do.”
“No,” I said, advancing on him again until my index finger jutted into his chest. “You print stories about Bigfoot having the Abominable Snow Monster’s love child and Anna Nicole Smith’s affair with a three-headed alien. You write about the government’s secret plot to cover up the Loch Ness monster.”
“Don’t knock it. I think I’m up for a Pulitzer with that Nessie exposé.” He did a slow grin, his eyes crinkling at the corners. On any other day, his brand of self-deprecating humor might have passed as charming. As it was, I fought off the urge to hit him again.
“You work for a tabloid,” I said, enunciating as if I were talking to a two-year-old. “You make crap up. You do not cover real stories about real people.”
His Hugh Grant-blue eyes lit up. “So there is a real story here?”
“No,” I quickly covered. “No story. None at all. I’m…here on vacation.”
“Funny, I thought you were vacationing in Palm Springs.” He broke into a self-satisfied grin, leaning casually against the wall as his arms crossed over his chest.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “How do you know about that?”
“Sweetheart, I know everything about you. I’m a very good reporter, you know.”
“Ha! That’s why you work at the Informer?”
His grin faltered. “Touché. All right, how about this. I know that last week I got a call from a man who’d seen your picture in our humble little…uh, how did you so charmingly refer to it, ‘sleaze factory’? He claimed to be your long-lost father and wanted to know how to get in touch with you. Not being able to resist a schmaltzy sob story, I gave him your number. Then I followed you around, waiting for the big tearful reunion. Instead, I got a dead body at a drag club. Which, by the way, is a very fun angle,” he added with a wink.
My hand balled into a fist again.
“And,” he continued, “I know that the deceased is reported to have jumped off the roof. Only any idiot who’s ever seen a real jumper could tell you the trajectory was all wrong. Put that together with the fact that you’ve been questioning friends of the deceased, and I’ve got a headline that reads: ‘Santa Monica’s Favorite Amateur Sleuth at It Again.’”
I felt sick to my stomach. Though, I noticed hopefully, he hadn’t mentioned Ramirez or the Mob. Apparently he wasn’t that good a reporter. “Leave me alone,” I warned him.
He threw on his charming face again, all boyish smiles. “No need to be hostile. In fact, let’s make things easier on both of us. How about an exclusive, huh, love?”
“Stop calling me ‘love’!”
“Why, are you going to hit me again?”
I was seriously thinking about it.
“Ever heard of slander? Libel? I could easily sue you for that Bigfoot story.”
Felix held a hand to his heart in mock horror. “Heaven forbid.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re mocking me.”
“Indeed, I am.”
“I hate you.”
“Aw. I’m crushed.”
“Listen, pretty boy, if I see one more picture of myself in your little tabloid, I swear to god I will come back here with my best friend who happens to be an Urban Soldierette and knows a hundred and one different ways to make a man sing soprano. And she’s not afraid to use them!”
He just smiled. “Oooh. Sounds kinky.”
I shot him a look that could freeze the devil himself (who was also probably a tabloid reporter). “Quit following me!” I stalked to the door and pulled it open so hard it rattled against the wall.
“Lovely to have met you, Maddie,” he called after me.
I flipped him the bird as the door slammed shut behind me.
I silently seethed as I rode the elevator back down to the casino level. I went straight to the American Restaurant and ordered a plate loaded with pancakes, waffles, French toast, and crepes that was so high I couldn’t see around it. All served with a mound of whipped cream and a river of gooey maple syrup. By the time I was done I felt totally sick to my stomach, but the anger hadn’t really gone away. It had just morphed into slow-burning anxiety. With Tabloid Boy following me around like a lost puppy, things had suddenly become much more urgent.
If Monaldo saw Felix’s story, it wouldn’t take much digging for him to put two and two together and realize I was Larry’s daughter. I wasn’t sure how this fared for Larry’s safety, but I didn’t think it would endear him to Monaldo much more.
Not to mention me.
Whatever Larry had gotten himself into I needed to get him out. And fast.
By the time I got back up to the room, Marco was strategically fitting a collection of souvenirs into his leopard-print luggage while Dana got in one last poker lesson from the casino channel.
Dana took one look at my low-cut tank, liberally dotted with maple syrup, and started clucking her tongue.
“Oh, Maddie. Pancakes? Do you know how many carbs are in those things? Not to mention the refined sugars.”
“I only had three.” I didn’t tell her about the waffles and crepes.
“All that white flour goes right to your midsection. I bet you just ate two hundred sit-ups worth of simple carbohydrates.”
I shuddered at the mere mention of the “S” word. “I couldn’t help it. I needed comfort food.”
“Why, what happened?” Marco asked, tucking a “Vegas Vic” coffee mug between a pair of loafers.
I flopped down on the one functioning bed and told them about my morning’s series of disasters. How one person’s life could disintegrate so quickly, I still wasn’t sure. And it wasn’t even noon yet!
When I was finished, Marco had stuffed the last of his commemorative postcards into the one square inch of space left in his bags and Dana was doing a series of “ohmigods.”
“Ohmigod! That creep! He almost ran us off the road for a freaking picture?”
“Well, he didn’t exactly run us off the road,” I conceded. In fact, now that I knew my “stalker” was nothing more than a tabloid hound, the whole thing seemed almost petty.
“What a putz,” Dana said. “I ought to go kick his ass right now.”
While I appreciated the sentiment, I had a terrifying vision of that scene splayed across tomorrow’s front page.
Instead, I turned to Marco, who was sitting on his carry-on, trying to force the zipper closed. “Any luck with Madonna last night?” I asked.
Marco got a wicked look in his eyes, dimples creasing both his cheeks. “Tsk, tsk, Maddie. You know I never kiss and tell.”
I rolled my eyes. At least someone around here was getting some. “I meant about Bobbi.”
“Oh that! Yeah, sure.” He reached into his new “I heart Vegas” tote bag and pulled out a slip of paper. “Madonna said he lives near the airport. Above this little bar called FlyBoyz. I’ve got the address right here.” Marco handed me the paper.
“I take it there’s still no sign of him at the club?”
Marco shook his head. “Nope. Madonna said the last anyone had seen of him was a week ago. He actually left in the middle of a shift. Asked one of the other girls to cover for him and just took off.”
“Had he ever done that sort of thing before?”
Marco shook his head. “Never. Bobbi’s got two exwives and five kids. From what Madonna said, it sounded like he was always behind on child support. He never missed a shift.”
I didn’t have a very good feeling about this. Hank’s funeral wasn’t until two, which left us a good three hours to go check out Bobbi’s place.
After we’d thoroughly cleaned the room out of hotel stationery and complimentary mini-toiletries, the three of us hauled our luggage down to the Mustang and piled in. Only somehow Marco’s luggage had multiplied and there was just one teeny tiny space left in the backseat for me, wedged between his makeup bag and a lifesize cardboard cutout of Elvis he’d picked up at the Neon Museum. I tried not to think about riding with The King for the next four hours as Marco pulled out onto the Strip and followed the snail’s pace traffic toward the airport.
FlyBoyz took up the lower half of a faded stucco building located directly across the causeway from McCarran International Airport. A neon sign, dimmed now in the daylight, hovered over a dark wooden door. Two windows faced the street, though they were both covered in peeling black paint. A dozen Harley Davidsons lined the far side of the lot, sporting bumper stickers that read “Desert Demons.” The upper floors of the building held a series of apartments that would have been great for watching planes take off from the tarmac. Not so great for a peaceful night’s sleep. Even as we parked the car in the makeshift gravel lot, the sky above us filled with the underbelly of a 747 and the ground shook with a magnitude 6.4, rattling the blackened windows of the bar.
“Nice place,” Dana said, laying the sarcasm on double-stuffed.
Marco just scrunched his nose into an “ick” face.
Gravel crunching beneath our feet, we made our way around to the back of the building where a set of metal stairs, minus the railing, led to the upper level apartments. There were four mailboxes affixed to the wall at the bottom. Rusted letters on their faces read A, B, C, and D. D was bulging with mail. I gingerly pulled out an envelope. A bill from the water company addressed to Bob Hostetler. A.k.a. Bobbi.
“It looks like he hasn’t been here in a while,” Dana noted.
“Maybe he’s just on vacation?” I asked hopefully.
Dana gave me a “get real” look. “Who leaves for vacation in the middle of a shift?”
Someone on the run from the Mob, that’s who. I forced that thought down as a picture of Larry sprung to mind, and replaced the envelope in the mailbox.
“Let’s check upstairs.” Holding on to the wall for support, I gingerly took the first step. The staircase seemed to hold me, so I slowly worked my way up, gesturing for Marco and Dana to follow. Marco shimmied up the stairs sideways in something that was part James Bond and part audition for Cats.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
He shrugged, palms up. “What?” he whispered back.
“That shimmy thing?”
“I was being sneaky.”
“You were being conspicuous,” Dana whispered. “Everyone knows the way to be the least suspicious is to act like you belong here.”
“Then why are we whispering?”
He had us there.
“Just come on,” I said, reverting to my normal voice.
I led the way up to the top of the stairs (as Marco continued his Broadway Bond routine behind me), where a little landing carpeted in fake plastic lawn opened up to four doors. A and B were on the right, C and D on the left. C had lost its letter; only a dark outline in contrast to the faded door remained. D’s letter had lost its top nail and was hanging upside down. Though, I noticed with a little lift, there didn’t seem to be any visible signs of a struggle or break-in.
I looked from Dana to Marco, then took a deep breath and knocked, hoping like anything a big hairy lady answered the door.
I waited two beats, then knocked again, shifting from foot to foot on the small landing. I could smell Indian food being prepared behind apartment A’s door, and from apartment C I could hear the faint base rhythms of a Black Eyed Peas song. But nothing from apartment D.
I knocked once more for good measure, though I knew deep down it was a lost cause. Either Bobbi was on the run or…Well, I didn’t want to think about the “or.” At least not while Larry was still out there in that “or” limbo land too. Instead, I said a silent prayer to the saint of men on the run that Bobbi and Larry where holed up somewhere together. Somewhere far, far away from Monaldo and his tweezers-challenged goon.
“I don’t think anyone’s home,” Marco whispered, voicing my thoughts.
“You want me to pick the lock?” Dana asked.
I turned on her. “You know how to do that?”
She shrugged. “How hard could it be? I watch Veronica Mars. All you need’s a credit card.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I muttered under my breath. But considering our combined experience in breaking and entering consisted of five episodes of a teenage detective and one mangled Visa, I persuaded Dana to leave the lock be.
“Well, maybe we could check his mail? Rico says you can tell a lot about a suspect by going through his mail.”
I shrugged. Might as well. Though I was pretty sure the Mob didn’t send death threats via US postal service.
We clanked back down the stairs and converged on box D again. With a quick look over our shoulders to make sure the local postmaster hadn’t suddenly appeared at our backs, we each took a stack of mail and began sorting through it.
Mine was mostly bills and a couple of envelopes from Clark County Child Services, no doubt wondering where little Bobbi junior’s monthly mac and cheese money was. Electric bill, credit card bills-two of them stamped past due. And a handful of catalogs for “hefty” women’s fashions. I took it Bobbi was not a slight man.
“Check out this dress,” Marco said, holding up a Big Lovely Ladies catalog featuring a pink-and-black polka dot off-the-shoulder number in size 3XL. “This ought to be outlawed.”
“Oh yeah, I’ll one up you,” Dana countered. She held out a catalog page featuring a teal green poncho with bright yellow daisies on it. “Why not just walk around in a shower curtain?”
I was quiet. As I was pretty sure my mom owned that same poncho.
Bobbi’s bad taste in clothes aside, there wasn’t anything terribly telling in his mail. No subscription to Mobsters Monthly, no indication of where he might be now. Though Marco pointed out that the earliest postmark was the middle of last week. Bobbi hadn’t been back to pick up his mail since then.
“You want to check out the bar?” Dana suggested.
Marco and I eyed the blackened windows and row of Harleys.
“Nuh uh,” Marco said, shaking his head violently. “Do you know what they do to guys like me in places like that?”
“Don’t worry, princess. I’ll protect you,” Dana said, taking Marco’s arm and steering him toward the door.
The interior of FlyBoyz was just about as appealing as the outside, and I immediately wished I had Dana’s stun gun. The painted windows gave the place a cavelike feeling, not mitigated by the shadowy crowd gathered around scarred tables and an ancient jukebox playing a George Thorogood song. The men (and a couple of beefier ladies) were dressed in various versions of the leather chaps and biker vest look, some going with the grubby bandanna over the shaved head while others opted for the I-combed-it-last-week mullet look. All of them looked way overdue for their monthly bath, and smelled even worse. The air held the distinct odors of beer, sweat, and a cloyingly sweet scent that I wasn’t about to try to identify. Clearly this was not the Vegas advertised in flashy posters at your neighborhood travel agent.
The air was so thick with cigarette smoke that I could hardly see where I was walking as we made our way to the bar. Which might be a good thing. I didn’t even want to guess at the sticky substance all over the floor.
“Excuse me,” Dana called to the bartender. He was bald, had full tattoo sleeves on each arm and a long goatee that reminded me of a nanny goat.
“Yeah?” he grunted. He gave us a once-over, his eyes squinting at the corners as they rested on Marco.
I think I heard Marco whimper.
“We’re looking for the man who lives above you in apartment D,” Dana continued.
Nanny Goat Guy just gave us a blank look.
“Bob?” I prompted.
A slow grin spread out on Nanny Goat’s face, showing off a row of stained teeth, most of which were still there.
“Big Boy Bob,” he drawled.
“Big Boy?” I asked, remembering the hefty women catalogs.
Nanny chuckled. “Yeah. It’s kind of a pet name. The fruit’s always comin’ in here dressed like a chick.” Nanny paused with a sideways look at Marco’s beret.
Marco gave him a feeble one-finger wave.
“Uh, anyway…” I cleared my throat. “When was the last time you saw Bob around?”
Nanny stroked his goatee. “Not sure. Been a few days though. He missed karaoke night on Friday and Big Boy never misses that.” He did that gap-toothed grin again. “He always does Pretty Woman.”
I tried not to picture the shower curtain poncho to go with that audio track.
“Say, what do you want with Big Boy anyway? Who are you?” Nanny asked, his eyes going from Dana to me…then resting on Marco again.
This time I’m sure I heard him whimper.
“Who are we?” I asked, my voice going about an octave higher as Nanny narrowed his eyes at us. “We’re, um, well…”
I hesitated to tell him. Unibrow had already searched Larry’s place. I didn’t particularly want my name coming up should he make a visit to Bobbi’s as well. I was racking my little brain for a good fake name, when Dana came to the rescue.
“Hey, is that a cobra?” she asked, pointing to a snake tattoo making its way up Nanny Goat’s left forearm.
He nodded. “Yeah. Got it in the Gulf War.”
“No kidding?” Dana leaned in closer. “Because my friend, Rico, has the same one.”
Nanny Goat’s face broke into a smile. “Rico Moreno?”
“Ohmigod, yes!”
“Hell, Rico and me go way back. Used to run around San Bernardino together with this group called the Hellcats when we was kids. After I joined up, we served together in Kuwait. That’s where I got this beauty,” he said, gesturing to his arm again. “Why didn’t you tell me you all was friends of Rico’s?” He reached across the bar and slapped Marco on the back.
Marco lurched forward from the impact, steadying himself on the counter with another whimper.
“What a small world,” Dana mused.
“Hell, in that case I don’t mind tellin’ you, you ain’t the first people come lookin’ for our Big Boy.”
“We’re not?” I asked, visions of Unibrows dancing in my head.
“Nope.” Nanny leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. “About a week ago his ex was in here looking for him. Said he missed his child support payment this month. Nothin’ new though, that guy is always behind.”
“So we gathered. Anyone else stop by?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yep. Couple days before that. Big dude. Built like a tank. Real hairy eyebrows.”
I gulped. “What did he want?”
“He was looking for Bob too. Gave me some line about Bob owing him on a gambling debt. I didn’t buy it though.”
“Why not?”
“Like I said, Big Boy was always behind. Any extra cash he got went to those ex-wives of his. No way would he gamble any of it away. The dude was odd, but he wasn’t stupid.”
“Thanks,” I said, though it wasn’t really the news I wanted to hear. Apparently Monaldo was sending his goons to pick off the drag brothers one by one. It was only a matter of time before they worked their way down to Larry’s name.
I pulled a pen out of my purse and wrote down my cell phone number on a cocktail napkin. “If you see Bob, would you mind giving me a call?”
“No prob,” Nanny said, depositing the napkin in his pocket. “Like I said, any friend of Rico’s is a friend of mine.”
After Dana and Nanny exchanged a few pleasantries about what the old dirty dog Rico was up to lately, we made our way back out into the assaulting sunlight.
Marco, who’d been quiet save for the whimpers, let out a long breath as we reached the car. “That was the scariest place I have ever been,” he said, fanning himself with his beret. “I seriously need a drink. Anyone want to stop for a cranberry-tini?”