Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

And what did I do about it? I sat staring at the pattern the sun filtering through the leaves coming in the window made on the blood-spattered papers.

Absently, I spread the papers out, like a hand of poker. If it had been suicide, why didn’t she leave a note? After all, she’d apparently been sitting here in the nude on a hot summer night shortly before her death, doodling, figuring. “Arithmetic,” Brennan had called it that night. A few columns of addition; some multiplication.

A worm crawled into my brain and started wriggling.

I sat up; studied the papers more closely, tried to make some sense of the figures, of the “arithmetic.”

What seemed to be a final figure was blacked out, lead rubbed across it, the side of a pencil. I held it up to the sunlight, to see if the figure, made with the sharp lead of a pencil, could be made out under the softer lead rubbed over it.

And it could.

$1,000,000, it said.

I felt myself starting to shake. Something cold was coming up my spine, and it wasn’t the air conditioning.

I began going through the desk drawers; among various bills and a few personal papers — including a drawing of this farmhouse in crayon signed “Mal” (which I did not draw, incidentally) — was a white form from the Port City Travel Agency.

It was a confirmation notice on a round-trip plane reservation for one, two weeks ago.

To Las Vegas.

“I don’t believe this,” Jill Forest said, stepping out of the cab into the neon noon that was Las Vegas at midnight.

I handed the driver a ten-dollar bill and climbed out after Jill, saying, “Neither do I.”

We were on Fremont Street, and above us a gigantic garish sign said 4 KINGS above neon versions of its playing card namesakes. The Four Kings was a hotel and casino, taking up a block of the casino center, a.k.a. Glitter Gulch, in downtown Las Vegas. Just across the way, and down the street, were the Horseshoe and the Golden Nugget and the rest, mammoth glowing tributes to Mammon. It was overwhelming, this carnival of craps got out-of-hand, this Disneyland of dollars. And here I was basking in it. Here we were.

“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” Jill said. She had a large purse on a strap slung over her shoulder — it was serving as an overnight bag for both of us, actually — and her short red dress with wide patent-leather belt gave her a pop culture look that made her fit right in with the pulsating landscape. I was wearing a short-sleeve dark blue shirt that was sticking to me, and black slacks, and had a sportsjacket slung over my arm. Jane at Port City Travel had suggested I bring one along, despite the hundred-degrees-plus heat (and even at midnight, it was easily that); that way I’d look more presentable in the fancier casinos on the Strip, should we end up there. But it was also for comfort; as she (Jane) had pointed out, the casino air conditioning was on the chilly side; she knew people who’d fainted from going in and out of the Vegas cold and heat.

The conversation with Jane, incidentally, had been a hurried one this very afternoon. I had stopped in at Port City Travel, located in the Port City Hotel on Mississippi Drive, a little after three, having just got back from Ginnie’s farmhouse where I’d run across that confirmation slip on her final Vegas trip. Jane, a pleasant-looking, cheerful brunette about my age — yet another old friend from high school, but a class behind us — told me she’d booked that trip; that she’d booked many such trips for Ginnie over the past ten years. Their high school connection had prompted Ginnie’s doing business with Port City Travel, rather than an Iowa City agency, or so I supposed.

Anyway, Jane told me that Ginnie always stayed at the Four Kings, that she was friendly with the casino manager there, a man named Charlie Stone.

“What’s really odd about this trip,” Jane said, sitting at her desk by a little computer screen, “is it was for overnight.”

“I noticed that,” I said, “on the confirmation slip. And you find that odd?”

“Yes — for Ginnie, at least. Actually, sometimes we fly groups in for twenty-four-hour whirlwind junkets... businessmen sometimes, college students especially get a real kick out of that sort of thing. But never Ginnie, not before this.”

“How long would she usually stay in Vegas?”

“She’d go out for a week or ten days.”

“What if I wanted to fly out there today?”

“Today? Las Vegas? Are you kidding?”

“No. I’d leave from Moline, right? When would that be, and when would I get there, and how much would it cost me?”

She started punching info up on her computer; I had several options. I had several departure times to choose from, ranging between four and seven o’clock, but any way you sliced it the bite would be in the six-hundred-buck range.

“Ouch,” I said.

“If you had booked in advance, or as part of a group or junket or something... wait a minute. I may have something for you...”

Twenty minutes later I was at Cablevision, where I found Jill in her office, talking to somebody on the phone. She looked at me with a curious smile, covering the mouthpiece, and I said, “Want to go to Las Vegas?”

“Sure,” she said, perky. “When?”

I looked at my watch. “Ten minutes.”

That knocked the perk out of her. She completed her phone conversation in thirty seconds or so, all the while looking at me with wide eyes. She hung up, and I said, “We should have time for you to stop at your apartment and pick up a toothbrush, change of underwear and a bathing suit. Maybe we have time for me to do that, too.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Flight leaves at five fifty-five, but we ought to be there half an hour early, and it’s three now, and it’s forty-five minutes to the airport, so what do you say?”

“Well... I... yes.”

Later, on the plane, she said, “I don’t know if I understand how it is, or why it is, that I’m saving you money by coming along.”

“You aren’t saving me anything by coming along. I told you. It was just cheaper to buy two seats than one. A couple canceled out on this group deal just today, and we stepped in their shoes for four-hundred something. It was over six, otherwise.”

“So I could just as easily have been an empty seat beside you?”

“Sure. But you look better in that red dress than the seat would.”

She smiled a little. “You’re crazy. It’s a good thing I’m the boss where I work, or I could get fired for this.”

“You’ll only miss a day. We’re coming back tomorrow afternoon.”

A mechanical delay turned our hour layover in Chicago into a two-hour one, and it was almost midnight when we landed at McCarran International, where we passed through avenues of slot machines, lined up like shiny tombstones, on our way past the baggage area, where taxis waited.

Now here we were, standing before a twenty-some-story building that took up a city block, with an overhang all around, a neon-framed marquee promising the expected games of chance as well as twenty-four-hour restaurants and free souvenirs, with big plastic glowing neon playing cards interspersed occasionally — specifically, kings of hearts, clubs, spades, diamonds.

“Have you ever been to Vegas before?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “You?”

“Long, long time ago. I lost a hundred dollars here.”

“You make it sound tragic,” she said, with a little smile. “That’s not so much, is it?”

“It was at the time; I was still in the service. And it only took me about an hour to do it.”

“Somehow I don’t think you were the first serviceman to lose a hundred dollars in this town.”