Brian Freeman - Stripped

Walker Lane hung up the phone. The time stamp on the recording was midnight, right around the time that MJ and Karyn were entering her suite at the Oasis. An hour before someone followed MJ into the street and shot him.

Stride looked around the room again. He saw a few framed photos of MJ with various celebrities, mostly women. There was a photo from years ago of a very young MJ with a woman Stride guessed was his mother, but nothing of his father. Not a sign anywhere that Walker existed, except for the smell of money.

“I wonder if he called MJ’s cell phone. That might explain why Karyn left early and why MJ was upset.”

“That’s not the voice of a man who paid to have his son murdered,” Amanda said.

“No. But I want to know what they were arguing about.”

They continued searching the condo. Stride expected to find more drugs, and he did: a carved wooden box inside a well-stocked liquor cabinet that contained a large bag of marijuana, a glassine envelope with several ounces of cocaine, and two prescription bottles with what appeared to be OxyContin. The labels had been scratched off.

“He looks like a high-end user, but not a seller,” Amanda said.

Stride nodded. He began loading and sealing the drugs in an evidence bag.

“What’s with the Maserati?” Stride asked, catching Amanda’s eye. “You didn’t buy that on a cop’s salary.”

Amanda shrugged. “I had to sue the city last year. Discrimination. Harassment. You wouldn’t believe the shit I put up with.”

“I think I would,” Stride said.

“Anyway, the city settled with me. The court made the brass say the right things, and most of the obvious crap went away. But they don’t want anything to do with me.”

“Cops are all men, Amanda. Even the women.”

“Don’t I know it,” she said. “The settlement was pretty good. Low seven figures. Nobody ever dreamed I’d stick it out. I’m sure they thought I’d take the money and go away, but the hell with that. I bought the Maserati, put the rest of the cash in the bank, and kept on working. It drives them crazy.”

Stride laughed. He liked her in-your-face attitude. It reminded him of Maggie, his longtime partner in Duluth.

“It’s been hard on my boyfriend, though,” Amanda added. “I feel worse for him than for myself. We hooked up about six months after I made the change, and that was four years ago. And no, he didn’t know, not at first. And yes, it was a shock. But he’s come around.”

“I really wasn’t going to ask,” Stride told her.

“Come on, you were curious. Everyone is. That’s okay.”

“Guilty,” he acknowledged.

“You’re lucky, you know,” Amanda said. “With Serena. She’s beautiful.”

“Yes, she is,” Stride said.

Serena’s beauty had knocked him over when he first saw her. Long black hair that his fingers couldn’t help but glide through. Emerald green eyes that danced and teased him. Suntanned skin and just a few dry lines creasing her face that told him she was past thirty and cruising toward forty. A tall, athletic body that she worked like hell to keep trim.

Amanda saw it in his eyes. “You love her, don’t you?”

“I sure do,” he said.

“I love Bobby, too,” Amanda said. “He takes a lot of shit, and he sticks around.”

“That’s worth a lot.” Stride suddenly stopped dead and rolled his eyes. “You picked the name, didn’t you? A-man-da.”

Amanda grinned slyly. “Most people never get the joke.”

“Let’s go in the bedroom,” Stride said. He added quickly, “To search.”

The lush carpet in MJ’s bedroom was black, and so was the furniture, all shining in black lacquer. The left-side wall was built with floor-to-ceiling windows, with double doors in the middle, and Stride could see city lights through the wooden vertical blinds. MJ’s California king was on the opposite wall. A checkerboard comforter, black and red, was half off the bed, and the burgundy sheets were a mess. Stride noticed a condom wrapper on the floor.

“Check the bathroom, okay?” he said.

Amanda disappeared through a doorway next to the bed. Stride turned his attention to the desk on the far side of the room, which was a war zone of unopened mail, bank statements, men’s magazines, and receipts from restaurants and hotels. He sat down and began sifting through the piles.

“More pills,” Amanda announced when she returned. “Lots of Ecstasy. And take your pick-Levitra, Cialis, and Viagra. He could have played tennis with his cock.”

Stride winced.

“Anything there?” Amanda asked.

“I haven’t found a date book or a PalmPilot. He had upwards of ten million in his bank accounts, probably courtesy of Walker. He gambled a lot, all over town and in the Caribbean, too.”

“Stalkers? Hate mail? Lawsuits?”

“Not so far.”

“So what’s our motive?” she asked. “Why would anyone want to kill this guy?”

Stride rubbed his eyes, feeling the lack of sleep catch up with him. “It doesn’t look like he owed money to anybody. We might have a love triangle going on between Karyn and the mystery brunette in the video, but I think everyone cats around on everyone else in this crowd. Doesn’t seem worth killing over, not with a hired gun. He did drugs, but what else is new? He was having an argument with his dad. That’s as much as we’ve got, and it ain’t much.”

“Unless we’ve got a psycho on our hands.”

Stride got up from the desk. He thought about the killer on the videotape, leaving his fingerprint for them. “Yeah, that’s something we have to consider.”

He saw a newspaper folded on the nightstand next to MJ’s unmade bed and picked it up. The pages were already yellowing, and he saw when he checked the date that it was more than three months old. He read the headline:

IMPLOSION TO MAKE WAY FOR “ORIENT”

There were photographs covering most of the front page. Boni Fisso shaking hands with Governor Mike Durand over an architectural model of the lavish new resort. The showroom of the old casino in its heyday, forty years ago, with near-nude dancing girls onstage. A billowing dust cloud from one of the earlier casinos that had been leveled in a few seconds with the efficiency of a bomb.

“Have you ever seen an implosion?” Stride asked Amanda.

“Yeah, I worked security when they brought down the last tower of the Desert Inn,” she said. “It’s awesome. An implosion always means a party around here.”

Stride nodded. He saw a back issue of LV , the city’s monthly magazine, lying under the newspaper. There was a corner photo of the same old casino on its cover and a teaser headline beside it:

ONE CASINO’S DIRTY SECRET

Amanda spied over his shoulder. “He lives upstairs, you know, if you want to say hi.”

“Who?”

“Boni Fisso. He owns this whole complex, like the hotel across the street. I’m pretty sure his penthouse is in this tower.”

Stride knew Boni Fisso’s reputation. He was one of a dying breed of Las Vegas entrepreneurs, a holdover from the mobbed-up days before the city went corporate. Fisso had to be over eighty, but he still looked suave and sharp in the newspaper photos, an old man who hadn’t slowed down. He was short, barely five-foot-six, but built like a fire hydrant that you could kick and kick and never dent.

“What’s your take on Boni?” Stride asked. “Is his money clean?”

“That’s hard to believe, but no one’s ever proved otherwise,” Amanda said. “Gaming Control has had him in their sights for years, but they never had the goods to put him in the Black Book. Either that, or Boni has juice with some politician on the inside. Either way, he’s been able to play the game. Pretend he’s like Steve Wynn, just an honest developer and philanthropist.”