Diva Las Vegas (Book 1 in Raven McShane Series) (2 page)

 The next day I slept in until one and made myself a tuna melt, which was about the most complicated meal I ever allowed myself to prepare.  My magazines were always prattling on about the need to add more fish to my diet, and I tried hard to ignore a nagging doubt that the combination of mayonnaise and cheddar cheese would counteract any health benefits coming from the tuna.  I decided I didn’t care.  

With the morning officially shot, I decided to spend the afternoon enjoying the cool recirculated air in my condo and diving into the details of how the Cody Masterson murder case had played out in court.  Apart from what Rachel and Jeff had told me, which was almost nothing, I remembered exactly two things about the case: Masterson was guilty as hell, and he was better looking than any man should be allowed to be.  I had recently discovered that for twenty dollars a year, the Las Vegas
Review-Journal
lets you search and browse through old stories on its website, and I figured that would provide a good start.  Too good, it turned out – my initial search for the name Cody Masterson turned up 189 hits, which was too much for me to read in this lifetime.  I
scrolled
past several pre-murder society page stories and focused in on reports about the murder, Cody’s indictment and the lead-up to trial. 

There wasn’t a lot to it.  Three summers ago, George Hannity had been shot through the head at close range in what appeared to be a botched carjacking near a posh suburb ten miles east of downtown Las Vegas.  All signs suggested that Hannity had been driving his convertible Mercedes SL-55 to his home when, at a deserted stoplight, someone pulled up, either in a car or on foot, and tried to wrest control of his car.  Hannity was shot and killed, but the police speculated that something had spooked the carjacker and caused him to flee the scene without taking the Mercedes.  No immediate suspects emerged, and the case looked destined to remain unsolved.

The murder of a young casino owner like George Hannity generated a slew of news stories, most of them under the byline of a writer named Leslie Trondheim.  Her early reports focused on the increase in violent crime that had accompanied the area’s rampant population growth in recent years.  Other stories focused on the family tragedy: Hannity was only in his mid-thirties; had been married to Rachel (who was artfully described by the reporter as a “former entertainer”) for three years; and he controlled thirty percent of an old, yet profitable, casino.  All signs pointed to a long career as a wealthy businessman and community leader.  One article mentioned him as part of a syndicate that was trying to bring a Major League Baseball franchise to town. 

As I was scrolling through the stories, my computer flashed a warning that the website would log me out in another five minutes.  I hadn’t realized it, but I had been online for almost two hours.  I was getting antsy, anyway.  I was quickly learning that I wasn’t cut out for this part of the job.  I wanted to be on my feet and talking to people, not staring at a bunch of electrons on a screen in a lonely apartment.  I logged out and pulled up the newspaper’s public homepage, where I clicked on the contacts link.

I dialed the city desk number and the receptionist put me right through to Leslie Trondheim herself.  She sounded polite but impatient.  I introduced myself as a private investigator and asked whether she remembered working on the Masterson murder case.        

“Of course,” she said shortly.  Stupid question.  It was like asking Dan Rather if he remembered covering the Kennedy assassination.

“I wonder if you’d have a half hour sometime to talk about the case with me,” I asked.

“Um hmm,” she murmured.  “Well, I’m on my way out the door right now, but maybe some time next week I could give you that half hour.”  Next week was not going to do me any good.  I thought for a moment.

“Could I buy you a drink tonight?” I asked.  “Or dinner?”  I’d read or heard somewhere that journalists are notorious cheapskates, and I hoped the offer of free food might do the trick.

She paused.  I didn’t know if she was really thinking about my offer, or if she just wanted me to think she was thinking about it.  “That might work,” she said coyly.  “Your treat, you said?”

I smiled.  “Naturally.  You pick the place.”

She thought for about four nanoseconds and said we’d meet up at Hugo’s, a spot downtown near the newspaper’s main offices.  We agreed to meet there in an hour.  On the way over, I wondered whether talking to a member of the media was such a great idea, but I decided I could probably learn more from her in an hour than I could from an entire week of reading through her old stories.  Money and time well spent.

Hugo’s Cellar is a joint famous with locals but all but unknown to the millions of visitors who pour into Las Vegas and never leave the area between the Strip and the airport.  Hugo’s caters to the kind of people who don’t have any use for dancing fountains, wine stewards or martinis that have anything in them besides gin and vermouth. 

For a Tuesday night, Hugo’s was surprisingly crowded.  The bar was on the left side of the entrance, and at it a large hunched woman was sitting by herself sipping a glass of pink wine.  She was reading a worn paperback book through reading glasses that were attached to a chain around her neck. 

“Ms. Trondheim?” I asked.

She twisted back to me and frowned—I was obviously not what she was expecting. 

“Who in the world are you?” she asked.

“Raven.  We just spoke on the . . .”

“The PI?” she practically spit out her pink wine.  Her eyes dropped to my heels and made their way up to my chest, where they lingered a moment too long.  “You’re so….”  She let the phrase hang in the air.

“Sorry,” I said stupidly, not knowing what I was apologizing for.  Who did she expect, Nancy Drew?  I self-consciously adjusted my top to cover up some cleavage.  It was mostly a waste of energy.

Leslie scooted the bar stool back a few inches and struggled a bit to get up.  She stuck out her hand.   “Call me Les,” she said, and gave my hand a firm shake.  She was all smiles and neck fat now.  Apparently she had forgiven me. 

“Are we eating or drinking?” I asked. 

“Both,” she said, and winked.  She slurped down what looked like a half-glass of wine.  So that’s how it was.  Les smiled apologetically and whispered something to the bartender.  She stood only about five-two and looked like she ran a good two-hundred pounds, although instead of appearing wide and bulky she somehow carried the narrow, tubular frame of a juvenile walrus.  A prominent quadruple chin gave her face a lumpy appearance, and it was framed by straight hair that used to be dark but was now streaked heavily with white and various shades of gray.  With her reading glasses on, she could have passed for Benjamin Franklin.

I gestured toward the dining room and we made our way to a small table near the door.  For some reason I pulled the chair out for her and helped her into the seat.  She seemed to like that.

“You’re a cute one,” she said, looking me over as I sat down.  I couldn’t tell if she was being flirtatious or grandmotherly. 

“Thanks.”  I hoped I wasn’t blushing.  A compliment was a compliment.

“So why in the world are you looking at that boring old case?” she asked, her eyes fixing on me over the reading glasses she still wore. 

“Just idle curiosity, really.”

She arched her left eyebrow up at me as though I’d just told the whopper of the century.  Another glass of pink wine suddenly appeared in front of her, and I told the waiter to bring me a glass of prosecco, champagne’s budget-friendly cousin. 

“So how can I help?”  She asked.   

“Well, to put it bluntly,” I said, “how the hell was Cody found not guilty?”

She smiled broadly.  “Isn’t it obvious?  You have to remember that the jury had eight women on it, okay?”  Her voice had the kind of rehearsed self-assurance shared by celebrities on talk shows who have answered the same few questions a million times.  I hadn’t known about the jury’s heavily female slant, but I nodded anyway.

“And any woman would find it very difficult to send that man to prison.  His face, his eyes . . .” She sighed dramatically, like a character in an Austen novel.

“Okay, okay,” I laughed, cutting her off. 

 “It’s true,” she insisted.  “No other explanation for it.”

“So you think he was actually guilty?”  My drink arrived.  We had forgotten to study the menu, so we perused it quickly while the waiter stood by.  Les ordered a lobster bisque to start and an entree of prime rib with a side of garlic potatoes.  I got the bone-in rib eye with a house salad. 

Les picked up where we’d left off.  “I didn’t say I thought he was guilty,” she said carefully, “but I think any other man would probably have gone away for a long time.  There was a lot of evidence, of course.  When they find the murder weapon buried in your backyard, it’s not a good thing.  There was the motive to help his wife take over the casino.  And Cody was known to not get along with George Hannity.  And no one believed the alibi,” she added confidently.

“The wife, you mean?”  I vaguely recalled reading that Cody’s wife Amy had backed up Cody’s story that the two of them were in bed together the night of the murder.

 She snorted softly.  “Amy Masterson,” she said, making a face.  “Nice looking girl, but not on par with Cody. Thinks she’s a princess of some sort, I’m convinced.  Let me tell you, though, she played well with the jury.  She’s as sweet as they come.  Anyway, she did a number with that alibi.  Cody took the stand first and said they were together the night of the murder.  In bed.  Then Amy comes on the stand and says, not only were they in bed together, they were making passionate love most of the night.  She explained that her sweet husband was just too polite and gallant to mention those details to the jury.”

I laughed.  “Nice touch.”

She continued.  “And it helped that she was the victim’s brother—no one would stick up for her own brother’s killer, right?  But I think she lied about the alibi business.  Overall, Cody seemed pretty believable to me, but since I want to snuggle his brains out I might be a little biased,” she admitted with a devilish smile.

I grinned.  Leslie was not a shy woman to begin with, I figured, and the wine had her pretty well lubricated.  I decided to let her take the conversation in whatever direction she wanted.  “So what else?” I asked.

She paused to consider the question.  “I’ve covered hundreds of trials, okay?  And it’s almost always an obvious case of guilt—a slam dunk or whatever man-invented metaphor you want to use.”  She slurped down a healthy glug of wine.  “But this wasn’t like that.  There was a ton of evidence—the murder weapon being found in his backyard, for example—but it was like, why is this here, you know?  Why kill a guy and clean the weapon of prints, but then bury the gun in your own backyard?”

“Hmm,” I murmured.  She had a point.  “I’d at least drive it out to the desert or something.”

“Right.  Not exactly original, but it works.  But I’ve seen so many of these cases that I’m always a little skeptical.  And when you see these prosecutors and cops on a daily basis, you know they’re not always the brightest bulbs.”

“But Masterson wasn’t really an Einstein himself, right?”

“Yeah.  Look, I’m not saying he was innocent, just that it looked a little too neat to me.”

That was the first time I’d heard anyone say that.  It was pretty much common knowledge that Masterson was guilty, and the not-guilty verdict was always pointed to as a cautionary example of how high-priced lawyers could game the system to secure “justice” for the well-heeled.   

The food came and we ordered another round of drinks.  I decided I liked Leslie—she had grown wise and cautious through years of experience, I guessed, but rather than being bitter and jaded she seemed to process and dispense information with a sense of humor and a shrug.  I was not surprised when she ordered dessert.  By the time we parted ways, the wine had made Leslie more than a bit giddy.  She thanked me profusely and joked I was the best date she’d had in years.  Unfortunately for me, that sentiment was mutual. 

 I had forgotten to close the shades the night before, and by 6:30 my bedroom was bathed in piercing sunlight.  I knew it was too early to get up, but I couldn’t get back to sleep.  My mind was racing with thoughts of breakfast.

I needed to work off the pound of beef I’d eaten the night before, but I always felt uncomfortable using the building gym at this time of day.  Okay, I hated using the gym at
any
time of day.  It was full of motivated people who were burning carbs or toning thighs before heading off to their normal jobs as bankers or casino execs.  I got most of my exercise dancing twenty hours per week, but that wasn’t quite enough to keep my abs trim, and my thirty-something butt needed a little help if I wanted to compete for tips with eighteen-year-old girls who didn’t know a porterhouse from a pancake.  I knew if I thought about it another second, I’d find some way to rationalize being lazy, so I grudgingly put on my running clothes and headed out to the Strip. 

At this hour the street itself was busy with morning traffic, but the wide sidewalks on either side of Las Vegas Boulevard were a ghost town.  I ran past the scattered physical remains of the previous night’s revelries: random call girl slips intermixed with assorted beer bottles, cigarette butts, and torn scraps of free newspapers advertising helicopter rides and Lake Mead cruises and Ferraris for rent.  I encountered a few underage teens staggering about, sporting guilty grins and bleary eyes as they made a last brave stand before crashing.  One kid gave me a double-take and then made a two-handed gesture and yelled something in Russian (I think) at me.  A Catholic priest stood a lonely post collecting for charity, and a few casino workers emerged from buses and shuffled off to work.  I reached the south end of the Strip at Mandalay Bay and headed back.       

I returned to my condo feeling refreshed, and after watching a full hour of The View I figured I had procrastinated enough.  It was time to do more homework: I needed to look at the court’s file on the Masterson case.  Although the court system made some filings available online, I knew their criminal cases were still only accessible in person at the clerk’s dungeon of massive file cabinets.  The kind of work I hated.  Handling paper would probably give me paper cuts, I theorized, and my nighttime customers don’t like it when their dancers are covered in band-aids.

I wanted a babysitter, so I picked up the phone.  “Mike, I need to go downtown to the courthouse.  Can you show me around?”  Mike Caffrey was a private investigator who had the misfortune of being assigned as my supervising detective during my first year with a license.  It meant he was supposed to supervise my work ten hours a month and certify to the licensing board that I wasn’t a complete nut job.  I don’t think Mike liked me.  Mike is a Mormon who seemed like a fish out of water in this town.  I harbored a natural suspicion of people who didn’t drink coffee or alcohol, but Mike had the tall, muscled body of an Iowa farmhand and his eyes were big and sapphire blue.  Not my type of guy for the long haul, probably, but I had to respect the fact that he was a different breed from the male clientele I dealt with most of the week.

He didn’t sound enthusiastic about accompanying me downtown.  “Haven’t you been down there a lot already?”

“No,” I lied.  “I need someone to show me the ropes.”  I wasn’t above using my helpless-woman voice.

“All right.  But I have to testify at eleven-thirty.”

“Fine.  You at your office?  I’ll swing by and pick you up.”

That was a relief.  The prospect of facing piles of papers by myself gave me unpleasant flashbacks to college, not to mention the aforementioned danger of paper cuts.  Mike would protect me. 

I dialed downstairs, and they said my car would be waiting for me out front in five minutes.  I sometimes felt guilty about spoiling myself with things like valet service, but I’d worked hard for a decade at a job most people found demeaning, and I figured I was due a little pampering.  When I got down to the lobby, Tommy the valet (I didn’t know his last name) was leaning on my car with a shy smile on his face.  Vegas was full of beautiful people in the most unlikely places, and Tommy was one of them.  He was probably twenty-two, but he looked sixteen.  He didn’t just have boyish good looks—he had jailbait good looks, especially in that tight gray valet uniform.  We had been flirting outrageously for the better part of a year—well,
I
had been flirting—but he’d never taken the next step.  Come to think of it, I don’t think he’d ever said a single word to me.  The story of my life.  I spent my nights fending off the grabby hands of drooling, sex-crazed Neanderthals, but the guys I actually liked never made a move.  Was that why I liked them in the first place?

Tommy opened the door on my silver Audi TT.  I tried to give him an eyeful when I crouched into the driver’s seat, but he was polite enough not to gawk.  Damn him.  He blushed and smiled widely at me like a trained chimp and shut the door without so much as a word.  Oh well.  At least I’d made him blush.  I waved and headed out.

Mike’s office was about ten blocks from the county courthouse.  Downtown Las Vegas was experiencing something of a renaissance, but it was still a museum of 1960’s architecture and buildings built primarily for function rather than form.  That is the polite way of saying that Mike’s office was dumpy.  He met me at the street. 

“This is your car?”  He sounded a little offended.

I hadn’t told Mike about my side job, and I didn’t plan to.  I figured it would be uncomfortable for the guy supervising me to learn that I probably earned five times what he did in a year, not to mention
how
I earned the money. 

“Just a little splurge,” I said.  “I got it to celebrate getting my PI’s license.”

“
Probationary
license,” he corrected as he climbed in.  Mike’s idea of dressing for court meant a short-sleeved white shirt and a red tie, like a Bible salesman.  The shirt looked cheap, but it showed off Mike’s tanned, muscled arms.  He was about the sexiest dork I’d ever met.   

The Regional Justice Center is an imposing, all-business building completed early in this century at a time when the county actually had money.  It’s about twenty stories tall, brick and glass, and is made up of a number of rectangular boxes that make it look like a big city hospital.  Mike led the way to the clerk’s office on the third floor.  When we arrived, the lobby was empty, and I approached a woman behind the glassed-in counter and requested the
State v. Masterson
file.  The clerk, a middle-aged woman whose bold glasses made her look fashionable but not any younger, barely raised an eyebrow.  She asked if I knew the case number, but then disappeared before I could answer.  Apparently she knew exactly where the file was.

The file was not as mountainous as I feared.  Mike pointed to a small table in the office lobby and we brought over the two file folders the clerk had given me.  I knew they must have backup copies somewhere, but the clerk watched us surreptitiously to make sure we didn’t run off with the file.

“So what kind of case are you working on?”  Mike asked.

I pointed to the name on the file folder.

“State versus Masterson,” he mouthed. Mike thought about it for a second and then pulled open the file.  He dug out the criminal complaint and read the caption.  “State of Nevada versus Cody A. Masterson.  What exactly are you planning to do with this file?”

“I’m friends with Rachel Hannity, George Hannity’s widow.  She’s asked me to take another look.”

He folded his arms and bobbed his head seriously.  “Uh huh.  To do what?”

“Civil case,” I said nonchalantly.  “Her lawyer thinks they can get a judgment if I can get a little more evidence.”

“Wow.”  He sounded genuinely impressed.  “That’s kind of a big deal.”

No shit
it’s a big deal, I thought.  I was beginning to wonder whether Mike wasn’t just a few clicks short of genius-level intelligence.  “So what am I looking for in the file, teacher?”

He ignored my jibe.  “Um, nothing specific.  I assume you’d want to read most of Cody’s testimony.  There weren’t any witnesses, right?”

I nodded.

“So maybe Cody’s wife’s testimony too.  And the widow’s—your friend’s.”

“Okay.”  It was still weird to think of Rachel as a widow, even after three years.   “Thanks for coming with me.  I just have an irrational fear of paper.  You can head up to court if you need to go.”

Our eyes met for a second.  “I can stay,” he said.  “I’ve got a half-hour.  You take this folder and I’ll go through this one.”

We sat in silence, like two teenagers on a study date.  I wasn’t looking for anything specific in the court’s file, but my conversation with Les Trondheim had convinced me that I didn’t know half of what I needed to know about the case.  My half of the file contained pretty standard stuff, much of it in the form of pre-trial motions.  In college I had spent most of a semester shadowing a criminal defense lawyer, and that was enough for me to forget law school forever.  Despite what you see on TV, most legal work involves pushing papers around.  The Masterson case didn’t seem any different.  There had been some motions about juror sequestration and suppressing evidence.  Nothing major, though. 

The transcripts of the trial were more helpful.  One officer described the gruesome crime scene, a stoplight intersection halfway between the city and George and Rachel’s home in the suburbs.  It was after midnight, and George’s car was stopped at the red light.  No witnesses had come forward.  The first officer on the scene testified briefly about the blood, the victim’s partially blown-off face, and the brain matter splashed across the tan leather seats of the Mercedes.  Fun stuff.  The passenger’s side window was found open, but the driver’s window was closed and intact.  An expert testified that, based on the open passenger window, the directional spatter of the blood and the damage to George’s face, it was clear that the gunman had come from the direction of the curb and approached the car from the passenger’s side.  Either the murderer was on foot or he had driven up next to George’s car.  Either way, it didn’t seem all that relevant to me.  I just hoped Rachel wasn’t forced to listen to that line of gory testimony.

Mike cleared his throat.  “The DA called your friend Rachel to the stand about half way through the trial, and Cody’s lawyer made about a million objections along the way.”

“Who was his lawyer?”

“Charlie Frank.  He’s …”

“I know who he is.  He was the mob’s lawyer, wasn’t he?”

“One of the best,” Mike said.  He had me read a section of the transcript that looked pretty damning for Masterson.  Rachel was on the stand testifying that her husband, like most people, would not pause at an intersection and roll down the window for a complete stranger in the middle of the night.  The assailant had to be someone he knew, or at least recognized.

“Well,” I said, “that kind of blows up the whole car-jacking theory.  George was not the sort of man who would stop to chat with a stranger in the middle of the night.”

“Nobody is.”

Mike sat back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.  “Add to that the gun found at his house, and the fact that killer had to be someone, like Cody, who Hannity knew.  And there wasn’t really another plausible theory to sell to the jury, either.”

“Maybe I can quit right now,” I said, only half-joking.

“I wouldn’t.  You only get one chance at a civil trial, and you don’t want to go in unless you’ve got something rock solid.”

Maybe Mike wasn’t as dumb as he seemed.

I had read enough of the transcript, and I knew I would have voted to convict Cody Masterson.  It was 11:15, and Mike got up to leave for court.  I thanked him and flashed a big smile.  He didn’t blush.