John Miller - Smoke and Mirrors

“It’s late. Let’s get some rest and go after this at first light,” Brad said, holding up White’s card. “By the way, the last number Beals called…”

“Is the cell number on that business card,” Winter said.

“We could go back in and ask him about that,” Brad said.

“He’d just say he didn’t talk to him or that Beals asked his boss a business-related question. He knows Beals called him, and he’ll begin to wonder why you didn’t ask him. Let him do some worrying. Sometimes it’s better just to let things percolate.”

Local current events, much like the time of day, rarely invaded the Roundtable’s upper offices. Gamblers didn’t bring the outside world in with them, and the staff was too busy collecting their money to care. Pierce had learned from his secretary when she’d come in that morning that a young woman had been killed at the Gardner cotton plantation. The news had opened the door to troubling questions.

After Pierce had asked Albert White to find out the particulars, White had called his contact in the sheriff’s office, a deputy with a gambling problem that had gotten her indebted to the casino for approximately her yearly salary. She told White that a babysitter on the Gardner place named Sherry Adams had been killed by an errant rifle shot. Whatever had happened, it was a very troubling complication in an already complex and delicate maneuver. But he had been told that his involvement was not required. How the death of the young girl fit in, or didn’t, was chewing on his guts.

When Tug knocked and opened the door to his office, Pierce Mulvane frowned. He knew by Tug’s demeanor that whatever he was about to tell him wasn’t going to lift his spirits. After Tug closed the door, Pierce locked his hands behind his neck and leaned back in his chair.

“The sheriff was just here,” Tug said. “He met with Albert.”

“Yes?” Pierce felt a pang of anticipation in his chest. “What was it about?”

“It was about Jack Beals.”

“Yes,” Pierce said, closing his eyes. “What about Beals?”

“He got clipped.”

“Clipped.” A white-hot poker in the eye would have hurt less than those words.

“The sheriff told Albert that Beals was drowning that blackjack-cheating kid out at the Gold Key and somebody killed him while he was doing it. Cut his throat. They’re thinking our security tapes might show Beals scoping him out or somebody watching the kid who was working with Beals.”

“You know what this means?” Pierce asked, without waiting for an answer. “Police involvement at the worst possible time.”

“What do you want to do?”

“This requires more careful consideration than I can give it at the moment.” He shifted uneasily in his chair, tapping a pencil on the desk.

“Barnett thinks the guy who killed him was probably working some strong-arm robbery angle with Beals. Albert told the sheriff he’d check but Beals wasn’t here after his shift, which he said was till noon today. He’ll rig Beals’s time sheets.”

“No. Sheriff Barnett is out of his element, but he isn’t stupid or lazy. What happens when he interviews the staff? Who knows how many people saw Beals here after noon? Tell Albert to leave the time sheets as they are and say he only thought Beals was on till noon. Albert’s got too many people to know who’s where and when. I need to know who the cheater’s backup was and we need to get to them before the sheriff does. Tell Albert to get on it and brief me before he tells the sheriff anything. Maybe I should put the attorneys between Albert and the sheriff. No big deal. We have plenty of friends who can smooth ruffled feathers.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“Tug, the time for mistakes is over. From here out let’s take the word ‘fail’ out of our collective vocabularies.”

Pierce sat back and closed his eyes again. The situation with the Gardners had to be resolved before Kurt Klein arrived. Unless it was handled, Pierce Mulvane would lose everything he had worked so hard for.

He had assumed the professional hired to handle things would do so. Pierce told himself that if he had made a mistake, it had been in trusting Kurt Klein’s guy, this mysterious Pablo. Klein had no right to blame Pierce if that Pablo creep had gone crazy and shot some kid. But he knew Klein would never accept the blame for anything that went wrong, even if it was completely his fault. No telling what exorbitant rate this Pablo was getting, and from what Pierce could tell, he was making it up as he went along. Killing babysitters and people on the wrong side, for Christ’s sake.

He hadn’t expected Pablo would bring the authorities charging into the casino. What he’d expected was a tragic and senseless accident, and a trio of freshly dug graves in the Gardner family plot. Maybe that was still Klein’s plan. Maybe the rest was just misdirection.

Pierce made it to the bathroom, knelt at the toilet, and tried to talk himself out of throwing up, like a sick child would. But his reasoning failed.

Jack Beals’s house was two miles from the city limits, a small brick ranch house set in a circle of leafless oaks surrounded by soybean fields. The place had a narrow gravel driveway and a neatly kept yard. Winter and Brad climbed out of the Tundra to a stiff northern wind that caused Winter to button his wool jacket against the chill and pull down the bill of his ball cap. The two men slipped on surgical gloves as they approached the front of the house.

The exterior windows were fitted with formidable burglar bars, and the front door was a steel security model painted stone gray.

“Looks like Beals was paranoid,” Brad said, taking an envelope out of his pocket. Opening it, he poured into his hand the ring of keys they’d found in Beals’s pocket.

Two dead bolts later, Brad pushed open the front door and they stepped into Jack Beals’s living room. Blackout shades made the house as dark as a cave, so using the light from the open front door, Brad found and flipped on the lights.

The living room furniture was spare, but tasteful and expensive. A sleek leather couch and matching side chairs faced each other over a maple coffee table set on a real zebra-skin rug. The light fixture was a sphere crafted of wide ribbons of bird’s-eye veneer shaved so thin they were translucent. Two oversized abstract paintings hung on the walls and a freestanding bar near the door to the kitchen was topped with an ice bucket, a pitcher, and several bottles of liquor.

A plasma TV had been positioned on a sleek credenza, which Winter opened. It contained a video/DVD player and stereo setup that shared a pair of surround-sound speakers with the TV. Winter opened the drawers and thumbed through stacks of movies on DVD.

The master bedroom revealed a bed on a platform of polished wood, a large bamboo rug, two matching chests of drawers, and another abstract painting on the wall over the bed. “Not set up for spend-the-night guests either,” Winter waxed.

The door to the walk-in closet was open, with the clothes neatly ordered on shelves or hung precisely on rods. A camera case sat on the floor. Inside the case Winter found a video camera.

The bathroom was spotless.

A steel security door with a dead bolt indicated that the room down the hall was probably not a guest room. One of the keys opened it, and Winter found the light switch beside the door. A row of fluorescent fixtures illuminated the room like high noon in Miami. The windows were plated in sheet metal, the floor covered with heavy canvas painted battleship gray.

This room was about as different from those in the rest of the house as a pig and a parrot. In a cabinet, behind sliding sheets of Lexan, a dozen pistols hung by their trigger guards on pegs. Some, like a SIG P-210 and a beautifully engraved Colt National Match 1911 with a four-digit serial number, were expensive. Three tactical shotguns fitted with high-intensity flashlights formed a row on one side. There were two AR-15s, one with a scope.