Stripped (15 page)

“How did Karyn feel about that?”

Tierney shrugged. “I don’t suppose she cared. She still slept with MJ whenever she wanted.” There was a hint of bitterness in her voice.

“Karyn says MJ was planning to dump you,” Amanda said.

Tierney was shocked. “She said that? No way. I don’t believe that. MJ wouldn’t do that.”

“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill MJ?”

“No, I don’t,” Tierney said. “I can’t imagine. But not Moose. Definitely not.”

Amanda asked, “Do you know if MJ had anything to do with Boni Fisso? Did they know each other?”

“Boni? Not that I know of. He never mentioned him.”

“How about Moose? Does he know Boni?”

Tierney nodded. “Well, sure. Moose played the Sheherezade all the time in the old days.”

Amanda wasn’t sure it meant anything, but Moose was a volatile man, despite his age and health. If someone like Moose did want to hire a hit man, it was easy to imagine him talking to Boni.

She thanked Tierney and reached for the door to the limousine. Tierney took her arm in a soft grip. Her hand felt small.

“Does this have to become public? Me and MJ?”

“I can’t make any promises,” Amanda said. “And like I said, it’s already an open secret.”

Tierney nodded. Her eyes drifted to the drawer on the other side of the limo, which wasn’t fully closed. She glanced back at Amanda, then looked away. “You took my stuff, huh?”

“Yeah,” Amanda told her. “But I’m not vice. It gets flushed. You know, it’s none of my business, but you don’t seem cut out for the fast lane, Tierney. Maybe you should think about making some changes.”

“Thanks.” Tierney took a jaded look around at the limo and gave her a half-smile. “Believe it or not, there’s a part of me that wishes I was still slinging drinks at the Venetian. Sometimes it’s easier being on the outside, looking in.”

Stride leaned back in the uncomfortable wooden chair and stretched his arms. The knotted muscles in his back tugged and strained. He felt a pain behind his eyes, and he closed them, hoping to tame his headache. He had been staring at the fiche reader for three hours, squinting at fuzzy forty-year-old images, feeling himself transported to 1967. The year Amira Luz was killed. It was odd, looking at headlines from newspapers back in those days, knowing how history turned out. The young girls in the ads were old women now. There was a photograph of Robert Kennedy. Most people had cigarettes hanging off their lips.

Things weren’t so different then. Las Vegas still floated above the times, corrupt and somehow incorruptible. He saw articles about desperate times for blacks in North Las Vegas and, a few pages later, ads for the black entertainers headlining on the Strip. He saw names from the past, in their prime: Red Buttons, Milton Berle, Ann-Margret. Miniskirts were in. The latest Bond movie,
You Only Live Twice, was
in the theaters that summer. Connery was cool.

He tried to imagine what it was like to live back then, to be a part of those days. From a distance, it looked old-fashioned, like the pencil drawings of models and the washed-out color in the photographs. Sophisticated but naive. He felt the pull of nostalgia, the yearning for the good old days. But nostalgia was nothing but sadness over times past. The good old days weren’t so good. He saw headlines about labor strikes and bribery scandals. The death of a Cosa Nostra leader thousands of miles away in New York made the front page in Las Vegas. The rumor of dark things was in the papers along with Frank’s old black magic, like shadows of clouds passing overhead.

He picked up a copy of the first article he had printed. It was dated June 18:

AMIRA MAKES TRIUMPHANT RETURN
Fresh from a six-month stint in the Montmartre district of Paris, Spanish dancer Amira Luz got a roaring welcome home on Saturday night from a packed crowd at the Sheherezade, where she introduced a risqué new show entitled
Flame.
Like other shows now in vogue in casino showrooms,
Flame
features a cadre of lavishly dressed topless showgirls, as well as a riotous comedy performance by Strip veteran Moose Dargon. But Luz is the star. Her showstopper is a flamenco striptease, where the stage is lit by dozens of candles and a single guitarist provides accompaniment as she sheds her fiery red Spanish costume…

Stride retrieved another article from the third week in July. Amira was on the front page:

SHOWGIRL MURDER SHOCKS STRIP
Las Vegas police confirmed today that Amira Luz, star of the hit show
Flame
at the Sheherezade, was murdered on Friday night in a luxury suite in the popular casino. While police offered few details, sources inside the casino say the dancer was found early Saturday morning in a rooftop swimming pool, her skull crushed. Luz was last seen onstage on Friday during the late performance of
Flame.
Detective Nicholas Humphrey declined to speculate on a motive for the crime or on any possible suspects. In a prepared statement, casino owner Boni Fisso declared “profound sadness” over the death of Luz and vowed “complete cooperation with the police in tracking down the deranged individual who defiled our property in order to perpetrate this heinous crime.”

One day after Luz was killed, and already Boni was laying the groundwork to pin the blame on an outsider. Stride wanted to talk to Nick Humphrey.

As he reread the article, Stride felt experienced hands massaging his shoulders. He glanced up as Serena leaned down and put her face next to his.

“This is your idea of a lunch date?” she asked him. “The library?”

“Just don’t stop,” Stride told her. “That feels great.”

Her fingers continued to knead and separate the tissues in his back. She looked at the newspaper articles over his shoulder and at the stack of microfiche boxes.

“Maybe I heard wrong,” she teased him. “Didn’t Sawhill say the case was closed?”

Stride smiled. “Did he? I must have misheard him.”

Serena dragged another chair across the worn gray carpeting and set it down next to him. Stride noticed several of the men in the library watching her. The midday crowd in the library was almost all men, unemployed, in jeans and baseball caps. Some made a show of reading the newspaper. Others simply stared into space.

“Find anything?” Serena asked.

Stride shrugged. “You have to read between the lines. It’s mostly rumor and innuendo. There was a gossip column back then that dropped some broad hints. I think that’s where Rex Terrell picked up a lot of the details for his story in the magazine.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Jonny,” Serena told him. “I trust your instincts, but I’m not sure I see the connection. I don’t know how you take a 1967 murder that was supposedly solved and draw a line to MJ’s death today.”

“Maybe you don’t,” Stride admitted. “There may be nothing in this. But I’m like you. I don’t like coincidences.”

“Such as?”

Stride leaned back in the chair. “Here’s what I have. MJ starts nosing into the murder of Amira Luz, because he reads allegations in
LV
magazine that his father was the one who killed her. Shortly thereafter, MJ winds up murdered himself. The murder of Amira took place at a casino owned by Boni Fisso, who may or may not have ties to organized crime and who is set to break ground this year on a new two-billion-dollar development project. How’m I doing?”

“You have my attention,” Serena said. “First question: Who was Amira Luz, and why was she killed?”

Stride nodded. “Amira was a nude dancer, and
very
good at it, according to the papers. They called her Spanish, but I found a bio that said she was actually half Spanish. Her father was a Spanish diplomat, and her mother was the blond bombshell daughter of a Texas congressman. When Boni Fisso opened the Sheherezade in late 1965, Amira was eye candy, twenty-one years old, in a show built around a comedian. Guess who?”

“Moose Dargon,” Serena guessed.

“Exactly. Another interesting coincidence. Anyway, Amira is a big hit. By May of 1966, she has her own show, Lido-style, backed up by a chorus line of wannabes. Toward the end of the year, Amira went off to dance in Paris for six months. Or maybe she was over there planning her next act. Regardless, by June of‘67, Amira is back in Las Vegas at the Sheherezade in a whole new show called
Flame
, and she’s bigger than ever.”

“Until someone kills her,” Serena said.

“Right. A few weeks after the show opens, Amira winds up murdered in a penthouse suite at the Sheherezade. By the way, Moose wound up as a supporting act in Amira’s new show and lost his solo gig. I don’t imagine he was too happy about it.”

“Go on,” Serena said.

“Now let’s look at Walker Lane. He filmed one of his movies in Vegas during the spring and got hooked on the city. Soon he was a regular, flying here every weekend from L.A. His favorite watering hole was the Sheherezade. Walker was tight with Boni Fisso. And Rex had it right, too: The gossip columns in June suggested that Walker had his eye on ‘a Latin beauty regularly seen on the Vegas stage.’ Amira.”

“So what’s the theory?” Serena asked. “What happened to Amira?”

“Try this. Walker gets carried away in his suite when Amira rejects him. Or maybe rough sex gets out of hand. She winds up dead. Then Boni helps Walker get away clean and finds a patsy in L.A. to take the fall.”

“Why’d Walker stay away after the police closed the case?” Serena asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe Boni had a secret deal with the cops back then that Walker wouldn’t set foot in Vegas again. Anyway, it’s ancient history until Rex Terrell drags the story into
LV
and brings up all the old rumors about Amira, Walker, and Boni. Then MJ gets hold of it and starts asking questions.”

“And gets killed.”

Stride nodded. “I keep coming back to Boni’s plan to implode the Sheherezade and launch the Orient project. The last thing you want to deal with when you’ve got that kind of money on the line is a skeleton in the closet from forty years ago. Like Amira’s murder.”

“I hate to point this out, but Sawhill doesn’t want you asking questions about this. What are you going to do?”

“Ask questions about this,” Stride said.

Serena laughed. “You could wind up the fastest-hired, fastest-fired detective in Metro history. Come on, let’s get out of here, and you can buy me lunch.”

“Deal.”

Stride gathered up his copies and shoved them inside his blazer pocket. He stacked the boxes of microfiche together and balanced them unsteadily. “Can you grab that copy of LV? That’s the one with Rex Terrell’s article.”

Serena picked up the magazine. One of the pages had a Post-it note, and Serena opened it to look inside.

“That’s Amira,” Stride told her.

There was a large black-and-white photograph in the magazine from the 1960s, with Amira in a sexy Spanish black dress, her black hair spilling across her sweaty face, her hand pulling up her skirt to reveal her bare, muscular leg. Behind her, in white, another showgirl struck a similar pose.

Stride dropped off the boxes with the librarian. He looked back and realized Serena hadn’t moved. She was holding the magazine in her hands, staring at it.

“What is it?”

Serena didn’t seem to hear him. Then she folded the magazine back and pointed at the photo.

“This girl in white behind Amira. That’s Peter Hale’s grandmother. The boy who was killed in the hit-and-run.”

Breaking into the car was child’s play.

He waited in the backseat of the Lexus, parked in the shadows of the underground ramp at the Fashion Show Mall. His gun, a SIG-Sauer .357, was on the seat beside him.

The Lexus was near the entrance to Nieman’s. Of course. She was a fashionable lady. Seventy-five years old, widowed. Thin as a bird. She parked in a handicapped spot, because she had arthritis in her legs. The windows of the car were smoked, and no one could see inside. But he could see out and see her when she came.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. He found himself staring back at his own dark features: thick black hair, heavy beard line, and his eyes, so deep brown they appeared to have no color at all. He scared people with his eyes. He always had. It was as if, when they looked into his eyes, they were inside a closet, black, without light, with the walls closing in.

He was like his eyes. Without emotion. Focused only on his goal.

Except he knew that wasn’t true when it came to the boy. Peter Hale. He had felt something then, despite all his training, despite the soldiers who had showed him how to view pain and death through the lens of a microscope. Study it. Learn from it. But feel nothing.

He did feel something about the boy, so much that he changed his plan in the middle, which he
never
did. He changed targets.

His plan had been the mother. He took the boy instead.