“How about your son?” Amanda asked. “Do you watch his back, too?”
“My boy Gino can take care of himself,” Rucci said.
“Well, you better warn him that somebody might be painting a target on his back. Three people are dead, including a little boy. They all had family connections to the Sheherezade and Amira Luz. Like you, Leo. So you or your boy Gino could be next.”
“Thanks for the advice, Detective.” Rucci turned on his heel and headed back to his three stone-faced colleagues.
“Hey, Leo,” Amanda called after him. “Who killed Amira?”
Rucci stopped. He turned back and leaned on his putter. “It was some nutcase in L.A. Why don’t you ask Nick Humphrey about that? He was the cop on the case.”
“Some people think Walker Lane killed Amira.”
“Some people think Castro killed Kennedy. That don’t make it true.”
“I guess it would have taken balls for Walker to kill Amira. I mean, she was Boni’s mistress, wasn’t she? Did Walker know that?”
Rucci came toward her with an ugly snarl, brandishing the putter as if he might take a swing at her. Amanda involuntarily stepped backward. “Boni Fisso has done more for this city than all the cops and politicians put together. Got that? He’s one of the guys that made this town great. So don’t you go fucking around about him with me, okay? Boni’s farts are worth more to Las Vegas than anything you’ll ever do.”
Amanda recovered and stepped inside Rucci’s shadow. She was half a foot shorter than he was, and she knew damn well he could snap her in two with little effort, but she shoved her face close to his anyway. “Where were you when Amira got killed?”
“You know where I was,” Rucci retorted, grinning for the first time. “And you know what I was doing. I was balling one of the dancers. She could hardly walk straight when I was done with her. Maybe you’d like to know what that feels like, Detective.”
“Or maybe I’d just cut it off and use it as a paperweight, Leo,” Amanda said, smiling back. “Tell me about the fight that night.”
“What fight?”
“The dancer you were sleeping with, Helen, says you got a call from one of the lifeguards. Kid named Mickey. There was a drunken fight outside, and you went to break it up.”
Rucci shook his head. “Helen’s wrong. She should be keeping her mouth shut and not talking to cops, if she knows what’s good for her.”
“You threaten a witness, Leo, and you’re going to regret it.”
“I don’t need to make threats. There was no fight. There was no phone call. Helen’s memory is fucked up. That happens. She’s an old woman now, underneath all the Botox and plastic. We had drunks get rowdy all the time, and I used to break their noses and send them back where they came from. But not that night.”
“You think Mickey would tell the same story?” Amanda asked.
“You find him, you ask him,” Rucci said.
“Any idea where I can find him?”
“Sure. I stay in touch with every fucking kid who spent a summer at the casino helping girls out of their bikinis.”
“What was his last name?”
Rucci grinned. “Mouse.”
He lumbered back to his cart and slammed his putter back into his bag. The foursome drove off in their two carts, and as they left, one of them looked back and extended his middle finger at Amanda.
She waved back at them.
TWENTY-FIVE
Serena let Cordy drive his PT Cruiser to the offices of Premium Security. She sat in the passenger seat and stared out the window, trying to figure out which emotion would get the upper hand. She was angry at herself for dwelling on the past, confused about her feelings for Claire, madly in love with Jonny, and horny as hell. Take your pick.
Cordy had a Spanish-language radio station on, and he was pounding his fingers against the steering wheel to the annoying, thumping beat of a song she didn’t understand. When Serena couldn’t take it anymore, she reached down and clicked the radio off.
“What’s eating you, mama?” Cordy asked.
“Nothing. I’m just not in a mood to do ‘ La Bamba ’ now, okay?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
They pulled up to a stoplight, and Cordy kept humming the song without: the radio.
“Tell me something,” Serena said. “You had a good thing going with Lavender. Why’d you screw it up?”
Cordy pointed out the window. A leggy brunette was on the corner, jogging in place as she waited for the light to change. “You see that? That’s a sexy muchacha. I see her, and the first thing I do, I peel off her clothes in my head. What color are her nipples? How big are they? You know, quarter, half-dollar, bigger? What kind of panties is she wearing? Bikini, thong, maybe nothing at all? Then I wonder what she likes in bed, okay? Her, I’m thinking-”
“That’s enough,” Serena said, interrupting him.
Cordy Shrugged. “You asked.”
Serena hoped he would drop it, and he did. She didn’t need a man’s advice anyway. What was going on in her head wasn’t about lust. Or not only about lust.
She wondered if she was bisexual. She hadn’t thought that in years. Even when she was with Deidre, she had never thought of them as girl on girl, just as two friends who used sex to comfort each other. She had never dated any other women. Her experiences with men, until Jonny, had been rocky at best, but she chalked that up to her aggressive defenses, born of the hell she went through in Phoenix.
Nothing happened with Claire, she told herself. But she couldn’t take much comfort in her willpower. When Claire tried to seduce her, she was on the verge of giving in, and only Jonny’s call had broken the mood and given her an excuse to leave.
“Here we are,” Cordy said, turning into a grungy strip mall on Spring Mountain Road that looked like it would blow down in a stiff breeze. They were about two miles west of Las Vegas Boulevard.
Serena looked up and frowned. “This is Premium Security?”
Cordy pointed at a sign on the glass door in front of them, which advertised the name of the agency in flaking white paint. The windows were blackened so that no one could see inside. Serena took note of the other occupants in the tiny mall, including a fast-food gyros joint, an auto parts store, and a pawnshop advertising handguns.
“Low overhead,” Serena said.
“Uh-huh.”
They got out of the car and approached the door but found it locked. Serena saw a buzzer and pressed it several times. She peered into the darkened windows, not seeing anything, but she suspected they were both on camera. A few seconds later, she heard a soft click, and she pulled the door open. They entered a claustrophobic vestibule, about four feet by four feet, with another locked door on the other side. She had been right: There was a camera pointed down at them.
She heard a female voice through an overhead speaker. “Please let the outer door close behind you.”
Cordy let it shut, and this time they heard two locks click into place. When he tugged on the door again, it was locked from the inside. They were trapped.
“How can we help you?” the disembodied voice said.
Serena explained who they were and held up her shield in front of the camera. There was another click, and the inner door swung open for them.
They entered a surprisingly plush waiting area, which didn’t fit at all with the surroundings in the rest of the mall. Big band music played gently overhead. There was a cherry-wood welcome desk with a large vase of bright yellow daffodils. A petite blonde sat behind the desk, and Serena caught a waft of her perfume.
“Have a seat,” she said with a big smile. “Mr. Kamen will be with you in just a moment.”
Serena and Cordy sat on an overstuffed sofa that seemed to swallow them up. In front of them, a coffee table sported current issues of the Economist, the New York Times, and Variety. They waited less than a minute before the door to an inner office opened behind the receptionist, and a man emerged to greet them. They both struggled to extricate themselves from the sofa and shake his hand.