Brian Freeman - Stripped

Stride saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Harvey Washington from next door stood in the doorway of the living room, his dog in his arms, his eyes sad. The dog squirmed to be put down.

“Nick, why don’t you tell them the truth? We’re old men. No one gives a rat’s ass about us anymore.”

Humphrey didn’t show any surprise. “Shit, Harvey, I could still get in trouble. We both could.”

Harvey shook his head and put down the dog. It immediately scampered across the room, jumped into Humphrey’s lap, and curled up for a nap.

Serena blinked. “She’s your dog?”

“Do you guys want to tell us what the hell is going on?” Stride asked.

Harvey folded his arms and waited. Humphrey scratched the dog’s head and refused to look up. He gave a petulant shrug. “You do what you got to do,” he told Harvey.

“Oh, don’t be a child,” Harvey said. He pulled a rickety wooden chair out from the wall and sat down. ‘There was pressure,” he told Stride and Serena, “but it’s not what you think. Nicky never took a dime. He went soft on those guys because of me.”

Stride didn’t understand. “You?”

“We’ve been partners for almost fifty years.”

In the recliner, Humphrey took a deep breath. If there had been a closet in the room, he would have crawled back into it. “Leo Rucci knew. I don’t know how. Those guys back then, they knew everything about everybody. He made it clear that if I pushed in the wrong direction, the department would find out I was gay. That would have cost me my job.”

“And the wrong direction was Walker Lane?” Stride asked.

Humphrey spread his arms wide. “What do you think? I knew it smelled, but I was fucked.”

“It was more than that,” Harvey added. “Nick was protecting me. He would have lost his job, and I would have wound up in jail. Me and the law, we haven’t always seen eye to eye about things.”

Stride saw Marilyn Monroe smiling at him from the wall. “You’re a forger,” he guessed.

“He’s an artist is what he is,” Humphrey insisted.

Harvey ducked his head modestly. “I imitate things. When I was younger, sometimes I wasn’t all that fussy about people knowing what was real and what wasn’t”

“But not anymore?” Stride asked, picking up the Willie Mays baseball.

Harvey grinned. “I give Nicky presents from time to time. It’s a game for us. These days, I can sell my imitations on eBay and still make pretty good dough. Mind you, I advertise them as imitations, not the real thing.”

“And I’m sure your buyers are always equally honest when they resell them,” Serena said.

“That ain’t my problem,” Harvey replied pleasantly.

Stride couldn’t believe it. A gay cop and a lover who happened to be a con artist. The result was that someone- Walker Lane?-got away with murder, and some poor chump in L.A. got killed to close the case. And forty years later, another round of murders had begun.

“Is Leo Rucci still alive?” Stride asked. “We need to talk to him.”

“He’s alive,” Humphrey said, “but Rucci was just the arms and legs. Boni was always the brains. He’s the only one who really knows what went on that night.”

“Except Boni’s not likely to talk to us without a warrant and seven lawyers vetting every question,” Stride said.

“See if Sawhill can get his dad to make a call,” Humphrey said. “The old man has done money deals for Boni and a lot of the other casino owners for years.”

“Sawhill has connections to Boni?” Stride asked.

“It’s a small town,” Humphrey replied.

“You could talk to Boni’s daughter, too,” Harvey suggested.

Serena looked up, surprised. “I didn’t know Boni had a daughter.”

Humphrey nodded. “Claire Belfort. She took her mother’s name. Claire and Boni had a big falling-out years ago. She’s a folk singer at one of the joints on the Boulder Strip.”

“Why would she help us?” Stride asked.

Humphrey shrugged. “She might not. Probably won’t. But if anyone can get you to Boni with a single phone call, it’s Claire.”

He parked the Lexus on the lake road in front of an estate where the windows were dark. Whoever owned the mansion was away in the city for the evening, or maybe cruising through the calm waters of the Greek islands. That was what the people in Lake Las Vegas did. They could afford to go anywhere and do anything.

It didn’t really matter if someone was inside. If they looked out and saw a Lexus parked in front of their house, it wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. Just one of the neighbors taking a nighttime stroll by the water. After all, strangers couldn’t come here. You couldn’t get in without passing through the security gate on the south shore.

The old woman had played her part well. Smiling at the guard, laughing as if nothing was wrong, as if no one was behind her in the backseat, with a gun. Rolling up the window and driving through the gate, as she did most days. The only telltale sign, which he could see from behind her, was the frantic quivering of her fingers on the steering wheel. Not from Parkinson’s, as anyone might expect from an old woman. This was terror.

He had spent the late afternoon with her in her house, watching her fear grow, watching the sun set. She was tied to a chair and gagged, eyes wide, following his movements as he went back and forth to the window. When it was night, he was finally ready. He knew she was waiting for him to kill her, and he wondered if her heart finally stopped racing when he simply left the house, took her car, and drove away.

He didn’t drive far. Just a few blocks down to the lake, where the largest of the estates hugged the water. He had a commanding view from here of the big house dominating the street.

Waiting.

He wanted a cigarette but didn’t dare open the smoked windows of the car. Better to let it look deserted, if anyone drove by. He sat, almost motionless, watching the large estate, observing the lights that went on and off from room to room, seeing occasional silhouettes moving behind the curtains. He used a miniature pair of binoculars to see inside and confirm that both of them were still home. Just the two of them.

Every now and then, his eyes flicked across to the lake. The lights of the resorts twinkled like a fairyland. That was what they peddled here. Illusion,

He cleared his mind. He had done this many times, and he wasn’t nervous, but the mental lapse with the boy still worried him. He had allowed himself to get angry, to let his emotions spill over. It hadn’t been a problem with the others. He didn’t want it to be a problem again. Not tonight. Not with the rest in the days to come.

He saw motion in the rearview mirror of the car. Headlights. A long black limousine glided by the Lexus, continuing down the lakeside street and pulling into the driveway of the estate he was watching. The driver didn’t turn the engine off, or switch off the headlights, or toot his horn-it was simply the time for him to be there, and with celebrity assignments, you were always there at the right time.

The door of the estate opened.

He raised his binoculars and watched the big man leave the big house and proceed to the rear door of the big limousine. Everything about the man was larger than life. The driver had jumped out and was waiting there, tipping his hat, smiling.

The car door closed. The front door closed. He watched the limo back out of the driveway and reverse course along the lake road, passing the Lexus as it went.

He gave it another ten minutes, sitting in silence and darkness. The street remained deserted. Finally, he turned on the car, leaving the headlights off, and rolled the Lexus quietly down the remaining stretch of pavement until he was in front of the large estate. He put the car in park and set the brake but left the engine running. This wouldn’t take long. He was always surprised to hear about the mistakes that other professionals sometimes made, such as turning the car off and finding, when they got back from the scene, that the car wouldn’t start again. A little thing like that could mean twenty-five years to life.