Stateline (17 page)

“Why, what happened?”

“He tried to convince me that the police have evidence Sven Osterlund killed Sylvester, so there’s nothing left for me to investigate. Have the detectives said anything to you about this?”

“No, nothing.”

“That’s what I figured. Anyway, Raneswich gave me a bunch of shit about staying out of his way. I basically told him I’m going after the case all gas, no brakes, and he had a problem with that.”

“Will that affect your ability to investigate the murder?”

“No. But it might make it interesting at some point.”

“Keep me posted,” he said.

We hung up, and I called the number for Dancing Babes. A male voice answered and put me on hold. I set the phone back in its cradle, looked out the window into the snowy twilight, then headed downstairs.

Highway 50 was plowed, but I had to chain up at Kingsbury Grade. I found the address about a mile up the road in a little strip mall housing a pizza joint, a snowboard shop, and a few business offices. I walked through the glass door into a hallway and found suite B.

A guy in his twenties was on the phone in the small office, and he motioned for me to sit. His foot was up on the edge of the desk, and he was wearing a very hip and funky white satin V-neck shirt. There were two small silver hoops in his right ear, a stud below his lip, and two more hoops in his left eyebrow.

I took a seat and listened to his conversation. He had a cigarette lit, which he tapped constantly in a marble ashtray.

“Yeah, man, these chicks are cool, they got a good attitude. Huh? Yeah, but they basically work for tips, that’s how it works. Yeah, they do the two-girl number, the double-ended dildo show, all that. You’ll be happy with them, they’re the bomb. What do you mean, anything else? They’re dancers, man. Yeah, they do more the more you tip. Huh? Look, like I said, the gig is dancing, the two-girl show, for tips, okay? All right, lemme know.”

“What can I do ya for?” he said, turning toward me. He was a good-looking guy with a square jaw and even features, but he looked like a walking fashion trend magazine. I guessed he was ten years younger than me. I handed him my card, and he glanced at it briefly before flipping it onto his desk.

“I’m investigating a murder that happened last Friday night,” I said. “Three of your girls were in a suite at Caesar’s that night, and I need to talk to them.”

His eyes clicked, and his lips turned downward. I felt a stab of irritation at his expression.

“Harsh, man. Who got killed?” he said.

“Guy named Sylvester Bascom.”

“The ultimate bad trip, huh?” He held his smoke between his thumb and forefinger and took a couple quick puffs.

“Are these your girls?” I pointed toward a large white binder on his desk.

“That’s our talent book,” he said. I thumbed through a couple of pages and looked at the different promotional photos of the strippers.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” I said.

“I didn’t offer it.”

Okay, tough guy
, I thought. I picked up a card from a holder on his desk. It read “Dust—Talent Agent.”

“You’re Dust, huh?”

He nodded blithely.

“Dustin?”

“Nope, just Dust.”

I wondered what his mother really named him. I looked at a couple more of the pictures, then closed the binder and set it neatly on the corner of the desk.

“Maybe you can help me out here. I really don’t feel like chasing down your girls and questioning them.”

He lit another cigarette. “I’m a busy man,” he said.

“I’m sure you are, so I’ll make it quick. I imagine guys are always calling and trying to figure out if your dancers will hook on the side. Like your last call, right?”

“If you say so.”

“Let me tell you first, some guys were trying to solicit your girls at Caesar’s for sex, and they shut them down. Not that it matters to me, Dust, but I imagine you run a clean operation.”

“As clean as they come, man.”

“So suppose a guy is looking for a local hooker. Who does he call?”

“The Mustang Ranch,” he said in a bored voice, referring to the infamous whorehouse outside of Reno that had shut down years ago.

“No, I mean, he wants a woman to come up to his room, and he’s–”

“I heard what you said,” he interrupted. The phone rang and he picked it up. I waited for about five minutes while he talked to another potential customer. When he hung up, he pulled a file from his drawer and started writing something.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Like I said, I’m busy, man. Sorry I can’t help you.” After a moment, he leaned back in his chair and pointed toward the door with his pen. “You still here?” he said. The phone rang again, and I watched him reach for it.

I took a deep breath, but suddenly my mind felt like a cassette tape switched to fast forward, and I shot out of the chair like a piston under full load. I grabbed Dust’s wrist just as his fingers touched the phone, his mouth in mid-syllable. I snatched the phone with my other hand and flung it against the wall, the plastic and metal crashing and busting apart. Then I jumped over the desk.

His eyes were wide in disbelief as he tried to push me away. I slapped his arms aside, grabbed him by the throat, and shook him like a rag doll. He put one arm over my wrists and tried to pop me in the nose with his other fist, but I threw him against the wall before he could hit me, and when he bounced off I punched him with two short rights across the head, my fist ripping out his eyebrow rings and leaving watery trails of blood running down his face. His foot kicked out at my crotch, but I turned sideways, undercut him in the gut with enough power to make his feet come off the ground, then I grabbed him by the shoulders and slammed him down on the desktop.

“Answer my fucking questions,” I yelled, holding him down by the neck. “A man’s son is dead, you piece of shit!” I could feel my eyes rolling around like a lunatic’s, but the adrenaline rush felt wonderful, as the tension of the last couple days exploded to the surface. I bounced his head off the desk and swore at him for another minute until I regained control. Dust was white as a sheet and hadn’t yet caught his breath from the gut shot. I finally backed off and paced around a little.

“Whew, that felt good,” I said, a crazed grin on my face. “Now, where were we?”

“I think I’m gonna puke,” Dust moaned. He rolled off the desk and vomited in his trashcan. I went over, patted him on the back and helped him into his chair.

“Two places,” he said in a small voice. “Try Dana’s Escorts or Erotic Striptease. They’re both in Reno.”

“They run call girls?”

He nodded. “The cops seem to lay off them. Erotic has been busted once, but I don’t think Dana’s ever has. Dana’s is owned by the same people who run Pistol Pete’s.”

“I need their addresses.”

“Here,” he said, pushing his Rolodex to me with shaky fingers.

I
left Dust to clean his office and tend to his wounds as I drove back down the grade. The snow had let up, and I took my chains off at 50, then headed east over Spooner Summit. The roads were icy, the visibility obscured behind a heavy mist that had settled over the pass.

I kept my speed at about thirty-five, climbing the pass toward the high desert and Carson City. Reno lay thirty miles north of Carson City, and in clear weather the drive from South Lake Tahoe to Reno could be done in an hour. Given the night’s conditions, it would take close to two. I had plenty of time to think as I drove through the swirling snowfall, up into the shrouded desolation of the Sierra’s eastern ridge.

Toward the end of our marriage, Julia had once called me a no-good, drunken, brawling son of a bitch. I laughed out loud when she said it—I
was
drunk at the time—but her words stuck in the back of my mind like a bent nail buried in a fencepost. After I sobered up, and during my three dry years, I tried to develop a more cerebral approach to my job. My goal was to convince people to cooperate through the leverage and persuasiveness of my words. Sometimes that worked, but often it didn’t. In the event of the latter, I returned to the old tried-and-true methods: when in doubt, put your hands on someone.

In a business where information is a vital commodity, it often can only be bought with threats or violence. The ability to gain real intelligence is the difference between success and failure in an investigation. Problem is, people have endless reasons to not cooperate. Most criminals share one thing in common—they are habitual liars out of necessity, as a practical means of sustaining.

But what about supposedly law-abiding citizens like Mandy, or Desiree, or even borderline crooks like Dust? I asked Mandy to talk to me about Osterlund, and she blew me off. Desiree didn’t want to talk about her sex life because she was embarrassed, which was understandable. Dust made the mistake of blatantly not cooperating, probably just the result of a philosophical resentment of authority. If he had been a little more responsive or polite, I might have let it go. But the punk had picked a bad time to be disrespectful.

What about Edward Cutlip? I was a little wary of him, although nothing in his behavior indicated he was hiding anything. Still, I had to consider him a possible suspect, maybe as an envious aide working some sort of scam on his boss’s spoiled son. I hoped this wasn’t the case; I’d not held back in my communication with him.

One thing I knew for sure was that Osterlund knew a lot more than he told the police. Unfortunately, he took the knowledge to his grave.

I dialed Cody Gibbons as I drove over the dark summit, to ask if he’d been able to get copies of the police files I’d requested. The cellular reception was scratchy, but I was able to hear the gist of his message: Sylvester had no criminal record to speak of; his worst offense was open container. Sven Osterlund’s case file was littered with alcohol, drug, and battery charges, but he had never done any real time. Cody was saying something about high-priced defense lawyers when I asked him to run Edward Cutlip, but we were disconnected before he could answer.

The cloud cover broke up as I dropped into Carson Valley. Light patches of snow spotted the desert floor, reflecting the distant glow of stars sparkling like cut diamonds against the black sky. I turned north toward Reno and drove the length of the main drag of Carson City, past old bars in brick buildings that had been doing business since the late 1800s, past second-rate casinos, cheap hotels, fast-food joints, auto dealerships, and discount gas stations. I went by the state capitol building in the center of town and decided to get dinner, but I felt overdosed on greasy chow, and Carson City wasn’t the type of town that would offer much in the way of healthier fare. Eventually I found a small restaurant that was closing up even though it was only eight o’clock. I convinced the cook to make me a garden burger and ate leaning against my car in the parking lot. Then I drove another couple miles until the RV centers and convenience markets faded in my rearview mirror, and the commercial strip gave way to State Highway 395.

The four-lane highway through the desert was straight and flat, and the road seemed to pull the Nissan along, as if the pavement was charged with an energy it drew from the earth below. I cruised along at ninety, making time, my headlights flashing against the sagebrush and scrub that dotted the landscape. A few miles outside of Reno I stopped, filled my tank at a Terrible Herbst gas station, and bought a city map. The address for Erotic Striptease was on Fourth Street.

I took the Virginia Street exit, driving under the archway proclaiming Reno “The Biggest Little City in the World.” The town was lit up by the neon brightness of the casinos. I drove past The Silver Legacy, The El Dorado, The Nugget, and others, but it was a Monday night and the streets were mostly empty. I hung a right on Fourth, couldn’t find the address, and had to double back, driving slowly until I pulled over in front of an old Victorian-style home set back off the road next to an apartment complex. The house was dark, with a “For Rent” sign in the front window. I walked to the front door, jiggled the locked doorknob, then returned to my car and dialed the phone number for Erotic Striptease. It was disconnected. I rubbed my brow and studied the map until I found the street for Dana’s Escorts. It was on Taylor, on the south side of town.

Dana’s Escorts’ address was for a well-lit office building with floor-to-ceiling glass walls facing the street, but the sign on the door said Diamond Talent Agency. Velour shades hung from the top of the windows, and a few of the blinds were partially open. I opened the door and stepped inside.

“Hi,” a quite large woman said to me from behind her desk. She had bright eyes, red lipstick, and a pretty face framed by long curls of blond hair. Her bosom was huge, and her arms were bigger than mine. Despite her girth, she bounced up lightly and stuck out a chubby hand.

“I’m Gloria Damone. May I help you?”

“I’m not sure I’m in the right place,” I said. “This is a talent agency?”

“Yes. We specialize in musical acts, dancers, comedians, and the like.”

“I see. How about magicians?”

“Yes, we place magicians occasionally. Are you a magician?”

“No, but sometimes I wish I were. I’m a private investigator.”

Gloria sat down, and while she still smiled, she looked a little unsettled. I tried to think of something witty to put her at ease.

“Actually, I’m trying to solve a mysterious case, and a little magic might go a long way.” It sounded lame, and I regretted it as I said it.
Christ, how many brain cells did I fry last night?

“I see,” she said. Her voice confirmed my hokey attempt at charm wasn’t working. “And what can I do for you?”

“Do you also manage Dana’s Escorts?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “That is one of our businesses.”

She seemed an unlikely madam, running a call-girl service behind the front of a talent agency. I wondered how tough she was beneath her cheerful demeanor.

“Last Friday night, probably around midnight, I believe one or two of your escorts may have gone to the Crown Ambassador in South Lake Tahoe. Did you send any girls there?”