“Yeah, I’m sure he’s a talkative guy. If you can, find out about that fight the night of the murder. And that kid Mickey. That bothers me.”
“Right.”
He turned to Serena. “Can you or Cordy run down a lead for us? Tierney used a security agency in town. Premium Security. I don’t know if Karyn Westermark used them, but she told us she had a bodyguard with her during the afternoon, before she met MJ. It’s worth taking a sketch of the perp down there. Maybe this guy had access to inside information about the schedules of the victims.”
“Sure, you got it.” Serena grabbed a handful of the sketches and was about to walk out of the office. Then, with a smile at Amanda, she bent down and gave Stride a long kiss.
“That help?” she asked him.
“That helps.”
She winked again as she left.
“If I were you, I’d sue for harassment,” Amanda teased him.
“Not a chance.”
The phone on his desk rang, and Stride snatched it up. He was still a little breathless from the kiss. “Stride.”
“It’s Walker Lane, Detective. I understand you want to talk to me.”
Stride recognized the wheezing voice. He leaned back in his chair and gathered his thoughts. “Yes, I do, Mr. Lane. Do you have a few minutes?”
There was a long pause on the line, as he had come to expect from Walker. “I had something else in mind. I thought we could meet personally.”
“Are you coming to Las Vegas?” Stride asked, surprised.
“No, no. You know how I feel about that city. I’m sending my private jet for you, Detective. You can meet it at McCarran at two o’clock, and it will take you to Vancouver. Will that be acceptable?”
TWENTY-FOUR
The secretary at Leo Rucci’s Henderson office told Amanda that Rucci always spent Wednesdays on the golf course. Amanda hung around long enough to find out that Rucci owned a successful chain of fast oil-change shops throughout Nevada and southern California. He was a multimillionaire, divorced, with one son whose primary occupation, like MJ’s, seemed to be spending Daddy’s money.
It wasn’t hard to tell who had set Rucci up in business. There was a large photograph in the office lobby of Leo Rucci and Boni Fisso together at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for his first quick-lube station.
Rucci wasn’t welcome in Boni’s casinos anymore. Or any casinos. He was in the Black Book-the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s list of persons whose ties to organized crime and other illegal activities got them banned from so much as using the bathroom in a casino within the state. According to Nick Humphrey, Rucci had taken the fall for Boni in the 1970s, when the feds raided the Sheherezade on the hunt for evidence of tax evasion. Boni walked away in the clear, but the feds needed a trophy, and Leo was it. He spent five years in prison on tax fraud charges but never sang a note about his boss.
When he got out in the early 1980s, Boni set him up in a legitimate business. Loyalty pays, Amanda thought.
Along the way from Henderson to 1-15, she made her usual stop for coffee and a cigarette in the parking lot near McCarran. She watched the planes and thought more seriously about chucking her job and escaping the city. Funny how her thoughts could change in a day, when just yesterday she assumed she would never leave. She and Bobby had had a long talk overnight, when she got home from the crime scene in Lake Las Vegas. He always stayed up to greet her-it was sweet-but when he saw the slur scraped into the door of the Spyder, he threw a fit and wanted to storm down to city hall. He was tired of the harassment, and she was, too. She knew it would never change. As long as she stayed in Las Vegas, she would be a freak, hated and unwanted.
The trouble was, she loved her job. She didn’t like the idea of being bullied out of town.
She stubbed out her cigarette and drove to the Badlands golf course in the northwest corner of the city to find Leo Rucci. The clerk at the pro shop told her that Rucci’s foursome would be somewhere on the Diablo nine, and he let her take a golf cart to find him. As she followed the cart paths, she fell in love with the city again, as she always did. The fairways were lush emerald green, dropped in narrow strips amid the giant estates and golden brush of the desert and dotted with pure white sand traps. The razor peaks of the red rock mountains loomed overhead a mile to the west. The temperature was in the mideighties, but the rushing wind on her face kept her cool.
She found Rucci and his three partners on the green of one of the later holes. Their rough laughter carried on the wind. She waited until they had putted out and were on their way back to their own golf carts, then drove up and parked behind them. She got out with the police sketch flapping in her hand.
“Leo Rucci?” she called.
All four of them stopped and studied her suspiciously. One of the younger men slipped a hand inside his wind-breaker, and Amanda wondered if he was armed. Rucci waved the others off and approached her, twirling his putter in his hand. He was obviously the alpha male, the tallest and biggest of the group. He was in his late sixties, but he was physically imposing, with a shaved head and a neck that looked like a tree trunk. He wore sunglasses, a charcoal-and-black Tehama windshirt, and khaki shorts. She could easily imagine him as a younger man, busting heads for Boni as the casino manager of the Sheherezade.
“Yeah, I’m Rucci. So what? Who are you?”
“I’m Amanda Gillen, from the homicide division at Metro.”
Rucci’s face didn’t move. “Cop, huh? So what do you want with me?”
Amanda handed him the sketch. “I’d like to know if you recognize this man.”
Rucci took the sketch without looking at it and wadded it up, then tossed it into the air and let the wind blow it away. “No, don’t know him.”
“Thanks for studying it so carefully,” Amanda said.
“I don’t like cops. That means I don’t like you. You want to put someone away, you do it without me.”
“This man may be trying to kill you,” Amanda said. “Or your son.”
Rucci reached into his pocket and took out a golf ball. He put it between his two huge hands and laced his fingers together. With his elbows up, he squeezed. His fingers turned red, but the muscles in his face didn’t contract, as if he were making no effort at all. Amanda heard a crack as the casing of the golf ball split. He opened his hand and peeled the cover off the ball, then tossed the remnants away along with the core.
“No one messes with Leo, sweetheart. If somebody wants to come after me, I don’t need your help.”
“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.”