Within an hour, I’d gone home and packed, sticking a pair of black leather pants, dressy shoes, and a sleeveless top in my bag, in case I needed to pass myself off as a regular guest at the Titans Hotel. Then I hit the road, stopping only to fill the tank.
Babe and Pete were just closing up as I sped by the Paradise. For the briefest of moments I considered pulling in to get a reality check, but I left my foot on the gas and kept on going.
I was feeling half tired and half wired. There was no way I’d have gotten any sleep after Lucy’s message-especially in a house recently pillaged by someone who was likely a thief, a psycho, or at best, a garden-variety creep. Two weird things I could pass off as coincidence, but three was pushing it. I wouldn’t have connected Nick’s death with the break-in at my house if O’Malley hadn’t planted the seed. And now, Lucy’s obscure message. What the hell was it that people seemed to think I knew?
When you’re consciously looking for links you can find them anywhere, like Nostradamus theories. That side of my brain was now connecting so many dots it wouldn’t be long before I convinced myself that this trail would lead me to the remains of Amelia Earhart.
I slid onto the on-ramp and entered the sparse highway traffic with a full tank of gas and a four-pack of diet Red Bull to help me stay awake on the drive to Titans.
My phone was on my lap, plugged into the cigarette lighter and turned to speakerphone on the outside chance that Lucy would call or text-message again. The part about the duct tape was worrying me, but Lucy had a more adventurous sex life than I did. If she was partying, I was going to give her hell. But if she wasn’t…
Classical music would have put me to sleep so I settled on a college radio station in the middle of its weekly Irish hour. That, the Red Bull, and four open windows were the only things keeping me from pulling over into a deserted weigh station, curling up into a fetal position, and having a snooze. I’m a good sleeper. That’s been the consensus with everyone from my mother to my last sweetheart. I know it’s supposed to be a compliment, but it’s hard to take it as praise when someone tells you they love it when you’re unconscious.
Twenty minutes into the drive, I was buzzing on the caffeine and Riverdancing with my shoulders, affecting that haughty head toss that always makes the female dancers look like prancing ponies. The prancing stopped when I passed the gas station/ minimarket where I’d had my encounter with the Michelin Man. A cold wave rippled through my body. Was that incident connected, too, or was I just reaching a new level of paranoia? I checked the rearview mirror as if the MM had been camped out on the highway for the past twenty-four hours waiting for me to reappear. I raised the windows and told myself it was just the early spring weather that had given me the chills.
I was chuckling to myself about what an idiot I was being when the phone rang. I jumped a little in my seat, just enough to knock the phone to the floor of the car and make me have to stretch and feel around blindly through old Mapquest directions, loose change, and empty Red Bull cans until I found it.
I wedged the phone between the gearbox and the driver’s seat, squinting until I could make out the sender’s name. Jon Chappell. I hit answer.
“Hey, what are you doing up at this hour?” I asked.
“I’m no kid, I made it all the way to midnight once.”
After all I’d been through, it felt as if it should have been 4:00 A.M., but it was only 11:30.
“Where’s my story?” he asked.
“What story?”
“That’s what I get for hiring friends. You’re fired. The corpse flower story. The one you harangued me to let you cover? The feature that no one is waiting for? I bumped the Hawley family quilt story for you and Hawley Real Estate is a big advertiser.”
I’d completely forgotten.
“I may have a bigger story for you,” I said, trying to tempt him with something more journalistically challenging than either a plant or the Hawleys’ moldy old blanket.
“I heard; we get alerts on that stuff. Sorry for your loss but break-ins are strictly page-fourteen stuff. At the risk of sounding callous, only home invasions make the front page. You gotta be there or it’s no story.”
“There’s a slim chance that the break-in at my place was connected to the murder I told you about at Titans.” I dangled a few details of O’Malley’s visit and just enough of Lucy’s message to pique his interest, but not so much that he’d freak out and get the local cops, the state troopers, and the FBI out looking for her.
“It’s also possible Lucy made it up to Titans after all. I’m going back to see.”
“Why don’t you just call her?” he said.
Because she might be duct-taped to a chair courtesy of Connecticut’s answer to the Krays? “I think she’s having signal problems.” That was one excuse every cell phone user in the state would buy. “I’m driving now, I can’t talk anymore.”
“Keep me in the loop,” he said. “I want the exclusive if this really is a story. And worst case, you better come back with pictures of that damn flower.” Just as I hung up, I heard him say that the paper was only going to pay for my mileage once. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was glad Jon had called. In the back of my mind, I wanted someone to know where I was going. Just in case.
When I arrived at Titans, the parking attendant was propped up on a plastic storage crate, leaning against a flaking pillar. His legs were stretched out in front of him and he was snoring loudly. One other car, an electric-blue Isuzu festooned with dream catchers and bumper stickers, was parked diagonally in the fifteen-minute registration parking area.
I yanked my bag out of the backseat and the straps caught on the tines of one of the pitchforks I’d bought only that morning. It seemed like days ago. In plain sight with a truckload of other garden tools, a pitchfork is a perfectly reasonable item. On its own, it’s faintly creepy, like something from a date-night horror flick. I untangled the straps and tossed one of the small tarps I carried for plant material over the pitchfork.
The parking attendant made no attempt to move, so I tapped him on the shoulder, and handed over my keys and a couple of dollars. The kid said nothing, and I guessed that meant the tip was too small to warrant a thank-you or even an acknowledgment.
You’re welcome. Next time I park it myself.
The weight of the revolving door reminded me just how tired I was. I promised myself a solid six hours of sleep before embarking on what I hoped was a foolish wild-goose chase. I imagined Lucy and me laughing about this over drinks on my deck.
If the outside of the hotel was dead, the inside wasn’t much livelier-Titans at two A.M. was not exactly filled with the sound of champagne corks popping, fingers snapping, and high rollers squealing with delight. A few stragglers were holding up the end of the bar I could see from the entrance, and a couple who couldn’t keep their hands off each other stumbled over to the elevators.
Bernie Mishkin was also there, head down, locked in a serious conversation with a pretty woman in a puffy fur-trimmed vest. She had sunglasses on top of her head despite the fact that it was nighttime and she was indoors. A deep tan and smoker’s lines probably added ten years to someone who probably wasn’t that much older than me, but she had a nice, wide smile, and Mishkin seemed charmed.
If Mishkin noticed me, he didn’t show it, but it would have been hard for him to let his attention drift from his companion, who had her hand on his knee and was leaning in to either make a point or show him her cleavage. A widower for just a few months, Mishkin looked like he’d already found a replacement for his beloved Fran. Something told me she wasn’t the marketing genius that Fran had been, but I had a feeling she was pretty good at something else. The woman flicked a key ring with a blue rubber pompom on it, and periodically pointed with it for effect.
There was one waitress on the floor and a plump brunette with thick, shiny hair and Buddy Holly glasses was manning the bar; I didn’t see Oksana. Since bartenders generally knew the locals, and two brothers might have stuck in someone’s memory, I decided to summon up enough energy to ask the bartender a few questions before crashing in my room.
I took the long way to the lounge, avoiding Mishkin and circling the corpse flower, which hadn’t changed much since my last visit. From the corner of my eye I saw Mishkin’s female companion storm out of the lounge area, nearly knocking over three frat boys who’d just come in. Mishkin mopped his brow and straightened his tie, emitting a fake laugh to suggest that nothing major had happened, but the look on his face said otherwise. Mishkin scoped out the room for witnesses to the embarrassing scene, but the few people who’d seen anything were involved in their own dramas and it barely registered. I hid behind the corpse flower, thinking, Ain’t love grand?
After he left, I settled in at the bar, ordering a drink and a bowl of Goldfish and engaging the bartender in a round of girl talk. Despite what Detective Stacy Winters thought, I hadn’t interviewed anyone in a long time. What I remembered about it was that a successful interviewer made the subject feel comfortable, as if you were having a conversation, not grilling him or her under a spotlight. So that’s what I did. I nursed a white ginger cosmo and gently complained about my (nonexistent) boss, my (nonexistent) boyfriend, and the paucity of good-looking men at the bar at Titans. By the time she’d topped off her last few customers, it was as if she and I were old friends.
She told me it was Oksana’s night off, and Hector Ruiz, the only other person I knew to ask about, had left about an hour earlier.
“Hector and his wife and baby girl live in a mobile park,” she volunteered without much prodding. “Near the reservation. A lot of Titans workers do. There’s not much affordable housing around here since the casino went up.”
“Is that where you live?” I asked, trying to read her name through her long hair. She brushed it back over one shoulder. “Helayne?”
She shook her head, and the hair fell back against her round face. “I moved back in with my family, but I’m going for my aesthetician’s license, so I may be out again soon.” She made it sound like she’d be crashing out of prison.
“What about Oksana?” I asked.
“She shares with a girl named Nadia. In the same park as Hector. Nadia has a double-wide.” Helayne was impressed.
Nadia worked at the big casino. She’d kicked her boyfriend out of their trailer a few months ago and Oksana had moved in to help out with the monthly payments. It was supposed to be temporary.
“O. thought she’d move in with Nick, but he was a big talker. A terrible flirt. He came on to me once, but I told him I was engaged. ‘You see that ring?’ I said. ‘That means something.’ You heard what happened to him, right?” she said, under her breath.
I nodded, and spared a moment for the late Nick Vigoriti, who might have been a little less successful with the ladies than I’d originally thought. This was mildly interesting but it wasn’t getting me any closer to the two brothers.
“A friend of mine was here last weekend. She said she met some really cute guys. They’re a little young for me,” I said, tilting my head toward the table of college kids who got rowdier with each round of Guinness and were taking turns trying to get the widget out of the can. “A couple of brothers, I think she said.”
Helayne gave it some thought. I couldn’t see her in a ménage, but you never knew about people. For all I knew, there was a trapeze over her bed.
“Some brothers, but not single. And no one I’d call cute.” She made eye contact with the security guard and motioned toward the kids so that he would keep an eye on them.
“Well, my friend has eclectic taste. You or I might not think they were good-looking.” That’s right, we’re women of the world.
“The Laheys are cute, but I think the younger one is gay.”
“I don’t think that’s her thing.” I played with the dregs of my drink as long as I could before she brought me a second, stronger than the first.
“The Crawfords are good-looking,” she said, setting the drink down. “Billy and Claude. There was a third one but he died. But they’re not allowed in here anymore. Something happened, before I was hired. Oksana told me about it. Security has instructions to keep them out. Maybe they drank too much. You should ask her. Oksana knows more male customers than I do.”
I bet she did. Oksana’s vulnerability and pouty good looks probably got her as much attention as she wanted. Maybe more.
Two Asian guys entered the lounge, ignoring the No Smoking sign and feigning ignorance when the security guard told them to put the cigarettes out. The waitress came back with their orders and Helayne got busy mixing their drinks. “They stare as if they’ve never seen boobs before, but they’re good tippers,” the waitress said.
I toyed with the idea of waiting for Helayne to finish, but the drinks and the hour were conspiring to get me in the sack. Tomorrow I’d face Oksana and ask her about the Crawford brothers.
The phone rang at around 3:30 A.M. I must have just fallen asleep because I woke up with a start, the way you do when you’re afraid you’ve nodded off in an inappropriate place like the theater or a meeting. I looked around trying to remember where I was and where the hell that obnoxious noise was coming from. I knocked over the lamp and a water bottle reaching for the phone and caught it on its sixth ring.
“Hello,” I mumbled into the dead air. “Lucy, is that you?” I turned on the light and saw the last drops of a two-liter bottle of water trickling into my Nikes.
“Do you know a woman named Lucy?” someone asked, surprised.
“Who is this?” I raised myself up on my elbows, waiting for an answer.
“It’s me. Oksana. The bartender?”
“Oksana, it’s…” The numbers on the digital clock were magnified and distorted by the overturned bottle; I shoved it aside. “It’s three-thirty. What is it?”
“I need you to help me find out what happened to Nick,” she said.
“I have no idea what happened to Nick.” I sat on the edge of the bed and shook the water out of my shoes. “Do you know a woman named Lucy?” I asked.
She paused, as if she was deciding how much to tell me. “We can’t talk on the hotel phone. Will you meet me at the casino?”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The night Nick was killed, he left the bar to meet a woman named Lucy.”