Chapter 5

Finally, Mike managed to get his long-neglected wheels back into working order and now he had transportation that was absolutely essential in a land of no other alternatives for getting from point A to point B.

He was tempted to start asking Toni questions about her naked appearance in one of the dead girl’s rolls of film flirting with the studio big-shots. On second thought, it didn’t seem like the right thing to do because she was working her ass off helping him with the new “Confidential Inquiries” business and cooking his chow and spreading her legs whenever he felt the overwhelming urge to get lucky. It bothered him a little that her young daughter suspected he was banging her mom on the sly, but he didn’t feel it was his place to apologize for the behavior of adults with needs and he would feel uncomfortable touching on the subject of the “birds and the bees” with a girl so young. In only a few more years, she would be a real heartbreaker and running roughshod over guys with a yen for trouble. It wasn’t his job to be explaining why guys only had one thing on their mind when they went out on a date.

He went through the photos in his office and separated the ones with the Asian girl wearing the mask and not much else. It was difficult to judge the young girl’s age because of her petite frame and small breasts, but he was fairly certain she was somewhere between sixteen and twenty. It was easy to imagine the middle-aged balding studio executives slobbering over her innocent flesh. They probably pawed her relentlessly behind closed doors and bragged amongst themselves about “busting her cherry”.

“Mister Mike, why are you looking at pictures of naked ladies?”

He was startled and looked over his shoulder to see Beth, Toni’s precocious daughter twirling her curly hair and gazing with serious intent at the Asian girl in all her naked splendor. He hoped she didn’t see the pictures of her mother in her birthday suit sprawled out on the sofa looking up at the camera with a written invitation on her lust-filled face.

Mike scooped up the evidence and handed the young girl a stack of comic books he had been saving to give her at the first opportunity. These kids nowadays just didn’t get into the swing of reading like when he was a youngster and he had to fight his sister for a book they both wanted to read first. He seldom won any of those showdowns, because she was a real dirty fighter and knew just how to incapacitate him with one swift kick in the right place.

With Beth all engrossed in her hated homework and Toni bent over an ironing board and too distracting to his ogling eyes, he went out to the garage and started to go over each item he had listed in the dead girl’s inventory of possessions remaining in the crime scene apartment like mementos of her ghostly presence.

He had to admit that most of it was just pure junk but he paid special attention to photos and to her cryptic little notes that must have had meaning to her, but were a mystery to anyone else. He discarded the stack of standard playing cards noting that they were distributed to a well-known casino in downtown Las Vegas. He had been there more than once and enjoyed the free buffet and the close contact from the “change” girls that kept his glass refilled and allowed him to roam freely about their sexy costumes with his wandering hands and a smile on his loser’s face. He shuffled the deck a few times and easily discovered it was “marked” with a simple code that identified all the aces and the picture cards to his sensitive fingers. He wondered how the dead girl had gotten this deck of cards out of the casino because the clubs made a fetish of destroying them on the spot before they could be stolen.

In the back of his mind, he made a mental note to schedule a visit to the casino the following weekend and considered asking Toni to come with him for a little weekend vacation away from the hustle and bustle of Tinsel-town. Then, he remembered Beth and decided it would be better to make the trip by his lonesome.

Toni was a bit miffed by the fact he was planning a trip to a garden of temptation like Las Vegas without her but she put on a stiff upper lip and acted like it was the most natural thing in the world and she was not the least bit aggravated. Of course, he knew it was all an act and he hoped she would be in a better mood when he returned. Beth thought it was funny and hummed a little tune like she knew a secret and wasn’t telling anyone.

The ride out to Vegas was without any incident.

Mike pulled off the interstate just as the sun was falling below the horizon and the lights of the strip and all of Sin City was beginning to form a cosmic cloud in every direction. It was too late to do any investigating, so he planned to start early in the morning. He wanted to interview several of the staff at the casino just to get a picture of how the recently departed Amy Lynch fit in at the club. He was surprised that the Hollywood cops had not made any effort to do the same thing right at the beginning of the investigation. His last visit to the detective squad room was less than rewarding with them not even being able to locate the file. A dizzy blonde with terrible teeth told him that it might have been accidently sent to “missing persons” section because that was where they usually found the lost files.

He signed the register in a flea-bag motel off the strip with his left hand and changed his name to William Wilson only because it was one that he could remember with ease. He doubted that a single resident of the trash littered refuge next to a pancake house used their real name when signing, just because they had pretty much all had a skeleton in the closet just like him. The defeated-looking desk clerk looked like death warmed over and had a cough that caused him to stay as far away as possible the entire time.

The room was surprisingly clean and it looked like the shower curtain had been replaced recently. It had a glorious display of stars and a harvest moon on a dark blue background that added a bit of color to the dreary white and black tile.

He had made certain the top was up on the Chevy and he transferred his back-up piece to the trunk right next to the tire iron that would make a good sap in a pinch. The last time he had been in Vegas, he had to ditch his 1911 Colt .45 in a drain pipe behind the pancake house, but they had built an addition and that whole section had disappeared along with his rod. The Clark county cops took a dim view of yahoos with handguns in their territory and he didn’t want to wind up endlessly repairing pot-holes on the paved roads leading into Sin City. Besides, it had been almost seven years since he had walked the streets in Vegas and nobody gave a shit about him anymore. His information was that the mob guys that ruled the strip in those days were long gone and replaced by a new crowd of baddies interested more in pimping south of the border ass and scamming tourists for “timeshares” instead of good old gambling profits.