Nobody Dies in a Casino

  But then she couldn’t sleep. It had been one hell of an unvacation day. And the room was stuffy without the ventilation fan blowing canned air into it.

  Finally, Charlie took her frustration to the wall of window and, kneeling on the couch to face it, reassured herself that life was indeed still normal, fully aware of the irony in that. She had no idea which direction Yucca Mountain and Area 51 and the smoldering ruins of a claustrophobic little airplane might be—but she was alive, warm, fed, and well. And she decided she must have imagined the orange light, a vestigial smear of which she imagined still lurked somewhere at the back of her eyeballs. Which didn’t mean the United States government was collecting her DNA from a portion of the plane that hadn’t burned.

  The electricity might be out in her room and parts of the hotel, but the lights of the Strip drowned out the star show that played over Area 51. Closer in, the immense Hilton sign still had juice. It flashed alternate messages across the night—WELCOME AMA and MOST CASH BACK and TWENTY-FOURTH CENTURY IS NOW.

  Across the street, BOYZ R US. A block up the street, the spindle of the Stratosphere’s Tower was lighted from below and above, the restaurant on top looking like a spaceship with the crazy roller-coaster lights crawling around its top. Below, a string of Metro Police cars, lights flashing, sirens ominously stilled, pulled into the winding drive of the Hilton. You rarely heard emergency sirens here, peculiar for a city this large and busy. Maybe warning sirens would nullify the party ambience. Had they come for Charlie already?

  She waited as long as she could and then crawled back into bed and slept through to noon, like someone on vacation should, the ventilation fan and all the lights on when she woke. And no authority at the door to arrest her. She dressed in front of the TV and Barry and Terry on Live at Noon.

  Nothing new on the hit-and-run murder of Officer Graden. The man guilty of trying to jaywalk Las Vegas Boulevard had been identified as Patrick Thompson, a local pilot employed by a small “undisclosed local airline.” No apology for their having blamed his rash decision to cross a gridlocked street during volcano rush hour on his status as a stupid tourist.

  And a mysterious power outage at the Las Vegas Hilton.

  “So far, Nevada Power has not identified the cause,” Barry told Charlie. “But it affected only certain areas in the hotel and casino—not the entire building.”

  “Yes, Barry, but people were trapped in elevators, some up to ten minutes. Bets on the casino floor had to be put on hold until emergency generators kicked in, and the probable cause was an apparently successful robbery.

  “With the lights out and surveillance cameras temporarily out of commission, clever robbers either took advantage of the outage or planned it to rob the cage at the Las Vegas Hilton’s casino. The Hilton has not disclosed how much was taken, but the thieves were gone by the time police arrived. Hotel security is still checking for possible clues, but all guests are assured the building is safe and the casino remains open.

  “Sources hint that this was unlike the recent rash of casinocage robberies by Los Angeles gang members. It appears to have been a far more sophisticated bunch of thieves. Only slight injuries were reported.

  “Never fear though—Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock were not affected by the outage.”

  “Right, they don’t operate on electricity. They operate on warp drive or something.”

  Charlie decided against room service. She wanted to get downstairs, where there would be people. She was in the bathroom doing her face and hair when the TV couple went on to the next story.

  This one about a downed aircraft located on the perimeters of the undisclosed Area 51.

  “There were no survivors,” Terry announced sadly, as well she might.

  “Yes, Terry, the plane was incinerated in the crash. Officials are searching local and area-wide airports for clues to the aircraft’s point of origin, and they ask anyone missing relatives or friends who might have been flying a Mooney 201 aircraft yesterday to contact local police or the Clark or Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “The air force has no comment,” Terry added unnecessarily. “And for you UFO buffs, the word from Rachel is that there were no disturbing incidents in the night sky out that way last night.”

  “Terry, this only goes to reinforce the warnings this station, editorials in the Las Vegas Sun, and law-enforcement officials in Lincoln and Clark counties have been repeating for some months now—the ridiculous interest in the vast restricted areas and wastelands in this state can be dangerous, unfruitful, and deadly.”

  “Right, if you want to have fun, come to Vegas instead.”

  Charlie had no more than switched off the set than came a pounding at her door.

  Jesus.

  “Housekeeping?” a frightened voice queried from the hall.

  The peephole revealed an Asian woman. Charlie was somehow not surprised when two robust gentlemen in suits entered the room with the housekeeper. Hell, she’d opened that same door to Super Tami, hadn’t she?

  Totally polite and humorless, one, in the interests of the protection of all hotel guests, asked permission and explained the need for a search of her room—possibility of robbers in the hotel. He went on to question her activities the night before. She lied. Instead of fleeing a burning Mooney 201 somewhere near an undisclosed Area 51, she’d been playing blackjack at every casino on the Strip.

  Meanwhile, the other totally polite and humorless suit—public security folks here wore dark blue policelike uniforms—looked for robbers in her drawers, empty luggage, behind the couch, in the shower, in the closet, and had absolutely no trouble with the combination of the small safe where she kept her notebook computer.

  Having determined that neither robbers nor their proceeds lurked in Charlie’s room, they solemnly rechecked her identification and went off to secure other areas. She left the Asian housekeeper to do her job and sought sustenance downstairs.

  The coffee shop, awash in dangerously aging waitresses, fake red flowers on fake vines hanging from fake-wood rafters, fake trees planted in fake stucco Southwestern adobe–theme planters, was uncrowded for this time of day, and Charlie sat facing the room. Having been here often enough to know the food wasn’t even pseudo-Santa Fe, she ordered an omelette and studied those souls on her side of the fake stucco planters who would brave a hotel with electric and robber problems.

  No thugs in sight, no commando types from her government—just Bradone McKinley and Richard Morse across the room, in a booth for two, facing each other over the table, coffee cups to lips and postures suggesting her boss had scored.

  No way. Charlie was imagining again, like the orange light she and apparently the denizens of Rachel, Nevada, hadn’t seen.

  Charlie gulped at her own coffee and tried to blink smears from her contact lenses. She’d have thought Richard would have lost interest after the yak crud, and why would Bradone dine here, with her own cook and butler upstairs?

  You haven’t checked for messages at the desk or E-mail from Libby or the office.

  “Well, I have to eat, you know.”

  “I know, sweetie, and here’s your omelette.” Her server was considerably older than Edwina, Charlie’s mother.

  “Thanks, uh … this looks wonderful.” Charlie determined to open a retirement account the minute she got home, and added sheepishly, “I talk to myself.”

  “Don’t we all, sweetie?” The elderly server walked off on ankles swollen to the knee. Her name badge identified her as Ardith.

  Ardith shouldn’t have to be working now.

  Yeah, she could be starving instead.

  Big tip, right?

  The omelette wasn’t anything you’d order wine with, but it was smooth and bland and comforting.

  “You eat too many eggs, kid.” Richard stood over her, Bradone, with that sort of smile, behind him.

  “I know.” And I had McDonald’s last night. What could this impressive woman see in Charlie’s boss? “Did you hear about the rob
bery?”

  “Yeah, we missed all the excitement, didn’t even notice the lights went out. So how did the lunch with our boy Evan go yesterday?”

  A lot better than a little airplane ride later. So, they had been together last night. Life was becoming one big mystery. “We need to discuss Evan Black, Richard, and his new project. He’s getting himself and me into some trouble.”

  “We’ll be on the pool deck. Check the office messages and come on out when you’re done.”

  * * *

  Charlie’s E-mail had some personal messages as well as news from the office. And the message light on her telephone was blinking. Would there never be time for blackjack on this trip?

  The voice mail was from her mother. Funny, Edwina Greene had a computer, but she never E-mailed Charlie. The last thing Charlie wanted was to answer it, but the last time she’d ignored her mother’s needs, she hadn’t discovered the woman had cancer until Edwina’d gone into the hospital and a neighbor called to inform Charlie of the pending mastectomy.

  All in all, Charlie thought she carried her burden of guilt pretty well for the unwed mother of a terrifying teen. She didn’t ever expect to get hardened to it, mind you, but she’d managed to make a place for herself and her daughter in this world. Talking to her mother, however, always diminished any pride she might have built up in her triumphs.

  Stop whining and call your mother.

  Charlie’s mom lived in Boulder, where she worked as a professor of biology—rats and bats—at the University of Colorado. Where Charlie was born and her daughter conceived on the wrong side of a tombstone. Charlie’s greatest nightmare was that Edwina would move to Long Beach and the world would ask three generations of totally incompatible women to live in the same state.

  Charlie loved her mother—she just couldn’t stand her.

  “Well, it took you long enough.” It was as if Edwina had been sitting on top of the phone.

  I’ve been busy, like, you know, dead people, crazy clients, midlist authors on a toot. “So what’s the problem now?”

  “‘So what’s the problem now?’” her mother mimicked, and Charlie took a pillow off the bed to kick. “I’m the problem in this family, right?”

  “Edwina? I’m listening. But only through the next three words.”

  Whoa, is that power talk?

  Charlie couldn’t believe she’d said it either.

  “Three words. Never…” and Charlie’s mother hung up.

  I’m going to kill that woman.

  You are not, she merely followed your orders. You do not order your mother.

  Charlie punched her mother’s number, determined not to begin the conversation with an apology. “I’m sorry. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. How many words do I get?”

  CHAPTER 9

  “LARRY SAYS PITMAN’S has given Reynelda another deadline extension, but this is it, and the book clubs are pissed because their schedules are shot to hell too,” Charlie told Richard Morse, who was splayed contentedly on the lounge chair next to that of the lovely Bradone. Bradone, a tad thick in the thigh, could be hiding some corrective-surgery scars under her one-piece, but the woman was firm and shapely for any age. Her houseboy probably doubled as a personal trainer.

  Richard sagged some about a middle that had been lipoed at least once that Charlie knew, thanks to documented office gossip. But he looked pretty good compared to gray chest hair nearby. Didn’t even bother to hide his hickey.

  Richard roused himself enough to ask Charlie, “What’s your mother say? She knows this Goff woman better than anybody.”

  Charlie’s mother had claimed on the phone to be on the verge of suicide because of hot flashes now that she couldn’t have hormone-replacement therapy. Charlie had told her to sit in front of a fan in her office and to air-condition the house.

  Edwina had hung up again. Charlie dialed again. Apologized again. Jeesh—you’d think hot flashes were fatal.

  “My mother says Reynelda Goff is suffering from menopausal symptoms and has these panic attacks that—”

  “Jesus Christ in a chorus line, is nothing safe from old women in menopause?” Richard sat up and whipped off his sunglasses. “Well, I mean, most broads don’t make such a big deal of all that shit,” he added weakly when he noticed Bradone had whipped off her sunglasses too.

  “‘Broads’? I haven’t heard that anachronism in years. You do mean shit like breast cancer,” Bradone McKinley said, far too politely. “If she can’t take hormones—”

  “No, it’s my mom who had the breast cancer and can’t take hormones,” Charlie said, coming to her boss’s defense. She must love her job. “Reynelda’s a neighbor of Edwina’s who—”

  “Who wrote a book and got menopause,” Richard chimed in, but then he added disastrously, “Why can’t beautiful, young, sane women write books?”

  “I expect they do.” There was something reassuring in Bradone’s smirk and the possibility that the planets had not stood still for her because Richard Morse scored.

  Poor Richard, so insulated by his power status in the positioning of the genders in the Hollywood universe, didn’t hear what he really said. He’d even get torqued when Charlie refused to appreciate insulting jokes. And yet he could be so savvy in other ways. Didn’t add up.

  You’re the one who told her mother to sit in front of a fan.

  “Ruby is about to implode if you or I don’t answer her messages, Richard. And I don’t know how to answer them.”

  Richard decided Charlie could tell him what Ruby Dillon wanted and he could give Charlie the answer and she could tell his office manager. All because Charlie knew how to E-mail.

  “I’m not your secretary.” But she jotted down a few notes to pass on to Ruby as he tried to impress his new girlfriend with sage answers to mundane office matters.

  That was another thing. If you didn’t learn the new technology, you’d fall behind at Congdon and Morse. If you did, someone above you in the food chain would use you and these skills to make his more important work easier. Charlie had other serious misgivings with these timesaving electronic devices that ate up all your time to learn and, when you finally did, forced you to upgrade to something new and the “learning” started all over. Libby’d had to help her out more than once. But Libby learned computer-ease at school, far earlier in life than Charlie. Larry, Charlie’s assistant, treated it with contempt and deigned only to use E-mail, the word processor, and a spreadsheet to log Charlie’s schedule, phone calls, and the script submissions that crowded his cubicle.

  No message from Libby today. Libby hadn’t contacted Edwina either. Charlie could only hope and swallow a lot. She hoped Libby would contact their neighbor Maggie Stutzman if anything earthshaking occurred. Both Maggie and Libby had instructed Charlie to take a vacation and not call them. They’d call her.

  “What about our boy in Folsom?” Richard asked importantly and informed Bradone, “Keegan Monroe, screenwriter, inked Phantom of the Alpine Tunnel, Shadowscapes, and Zoo Keepers.”

  Edwina was threatening to go off tamoxifen—a drug prescribed to block natural estrogen production in her body—because the unnatural estrogen prescribed to head off hot flashes, panic attacks, heart disease, osteoporosis, and old age had given her breast cancer.

  Everything Charlie’d read said that synthetic estrogen did not cause breast cancer.

  “Actually, Keegan’s on chapter ten of his novel,” Charlie answered. Which is further than he’d ever gotten before.

  “Christ, with all the time he’s got on his hands, he could of written three Moby Dicks. Tell him to finish the damn book and get back to screenplays that make money.”

  Edwina, who smoked, had said, “Well, tobacco companies used to say cigarettes don’t cause cancer too.” She’d sent Charlie a folded insert that had come in the box containing an old Premarin bottle. It listed, in minuscule print, breast cancer as a possible side effect.

  Now Edwina had found a new wonder drug on her own. So
mething she called “snake oil.”

  “Snakes don’t make oil, right?” Charlie asked, interrupting whatever it was Richard was saying.

  “No, dinosaurs do.” He hated being interrupted. “Snake oil—where the hell did that come from?”

  “Edwina called. She wants to go off the tamoxifen and rub this stuff on her skin instead.”

  “Rub snake oil on—your mother’s always been a few bricks short of a bale, but—”

  “Snake oil is a term used historically to mean a magic elixir, a medicine or concoction that can cure all your ailments at once,” Bradone explained. “Hucksters used to sell it at fairs and outdoor markets. They probably still do, but by mail-order catalog. It often contained a good dose of alcohol or a potent drug like cocaine.”

  “Not even somebody with menopause should rub good hooch on their outsides,” the president of Congdon and Morse said with weary disgust.

  “She mentioned something about yams too.”

  “She’s going to rub herself with sweet potatoes?” Richard was on his feet. “I’m going to the gents.”

  “Where did he learn to speak like that? Old movies?” The astrologer watched Charlie’s boss strut off and almost laughed.

  “Thanks for not jumping on the ‘few bricks short of a bale’ thing. That was a trap. He mixes metaphor, analogy, and worn-out sayings on purpose. But when he wants to, he can be sort of intelligent.”

  The astrologer turned her amused attention to Charlie. “I expect your mother was talking about wild-yam cream. The wild Mexican yam root contains natural progesterone and helps to adjust hormone levels at all ages and for both sexes, but I’ve known women who have been on it for months with no results. It depends on who’s making it and how reliably it’s standardized.”

  Because of the aging of the baby boomers, this was the latest snake oil, according to Bradone, and everybody wanted in on the profits.