Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 2 - Stellium in Scorpio (8 page)

"I'm
so happy about sweet Elmo," she called out.

"Me
too," I said, and surprised her by stepping into the shower with her.
"These hotel rooms have more surprises in the bathrooms than you ever
thought possible, don't they? We have Elmo to thank for this opportune moment.
You don't want to sleep with someone who's slept with Elmo, unless she's
showered." I wrapped my left arm around her soapy, slick waist and held
her steadily as I slid my hand down her tight little buttocks, letting the warm
water pound her breasts as I gently massaged between her legs and sighed over
the softness.

"That
feels so good," she moaned.

Suddenly
the TV in the bathroom turned on, apparently the result of a preset timer,
startling us and giving us an unasked-for late-night recap of the local evening
news. The news anchor's voice was blaring over an aerial shot of a sheriff's
helicopter flying low over the stark desert terrain outside the city and
landing at a remote, rocky site. On the ground, several medical personnel were
loading a body into an ambulance as the news anchor said, "The body of Bruce
Singleton was found tonight at this remote desert location northeast of Las
Vegas. Mr. Singleton apparently died of drowning some eight hours before his
body was discovered."

"Died
of drowning in the desert? Now that's a trick," I said as the camera moved
in on the dead man, his arms folded across his chest. I reached with one arm
out of the shower to turn off the TV, not wanting more dead men interfering in
my love life.

"Wait!
That's the man who was in our bathtub!" Callie squealed. I jerked the
shower curtain back as if getting a better view of the screen would make the
video frames slow down, but the photographer was already rolling on something
else.

"How
can it be the same guy?" I tried to calm Callie, telling her we were both just
tired and nervous. It couldn't be the dead guy.

"I
mean that it's his clothes, his hands, his body...I don't know. Singleton was
murdered, that's what I'm getting," she said and hopped out of the shower,
grabbing a towel.

"Getting
from whom?" I asked, knowing full well from whom. Callie was inexplicably
plugged into the cosmos, and apparently her lines were up and running.

We
dried off and climbed into bed, Callie disturbed and preoccupied. I was
disturbed and preoccupied too. I couldn't believe we were about to go to sleep
without making love.

"I'm
sorry," she said, hugging me close. "I'm just exhausted and a little
freaked by this."

"No
problem," I lied, thinking Barrett and Mary Beth and probably two or three
other women would love to be lying here in front of me, but I wanted the woman
with her back to me.

Callie
rolled over, wrapped her arms around me, and held me tightly, in one tender
touch erasing my doubts and increasing my desire.

At
dawn, Callie burst into the room having gotten up, dressed, and hit the lobby
without my ever stirring. She plopped down on the edge of the bed, jarring all
of my synapses into firing at once while I tried to remember where I was.
Callie had the morning paper so close to my face I could smell the type. I rose
up on one elbow.

"Check
the photo!" she said excitedly. I tried to focus. There was Bruce
Singleton's tanned body on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance.

"Look,
he's wearing a tuxedo!" Callie said.

"Like
half the dealers in Las Vegas," I replied. I wasn't sure why Callie was so
excited over Bruce Singleton, since we didn't know the man. The photo of him
didn't really show his face but merely gave us a side view of his belt, right
shoulder, and arm.

"His
finger. Look at his little finger. It's white, not tan. That's where he wore a
ring, but the ring's not there!" When I was slow on the uptake Callie
finished her thought. "He's the guy from the tub. He was wearing the bird
ring. Now he's dead in the desert without the ring."

"It
was probably nibbled off him by prairie dogs," I said. She punched me
playfully for not giving his mysterious death my full attention. "Is there
coffee?" I asked.

She
produced some black liquid in a ceramic mug that she'd brought upstairs especially
for me since she never touched the stuff. "You drink it too strong—"
she began, but I cut her off by pulling her down on top of me and kissing her.
She sighed and seemed to relax for a moment.

"You
have the most luxurious lips!" I sighed in return. Elmo sighed too, making
us giggle. "He thinks they're luxurious and he's ten feet away. So what am
I supposed to do with this startling information you've brought me?" I
asked, gratefully sucking down the coffee and pulling Callie in closer.

"Bruce
Singleton was dating Karla Black, wife of Mo Black, the now defunct owner of
this hotel." She smiled smugly. "The waitresses in the restaurant
downstairs were buzzing about it. I guess Karla and Bruce Singleton were quite
an item, because he was fifteen years younger than she is." Callie could
see I wasn't enthused. She bounced the bed as if kinetic energy would jar my
enthusiasm level. "You love great stories. You write great stories. You
sell great stories. This is a great story...and it will help my client. Come
on, get excited! Word is that Bruce Singleton was set to come over here and run
the
Boy Review,
become its executive producer, but he died before he got
to do it."

"Significance
being... ?"

"I
don't know, but Karla's at home this morning. I rang," she said. Callie
pulled a slip of paper bearing an address out of the pocket of her tiny jeans,
and just the way she moved her hip to get her hand into her pocket looked sexy.

"You
got the phone number and address from the waitress?"

"Nope.
My client knows her. And I called her and she's invited us over."

I
complained about having to leave the room. In other circumstances I, too, would
have been curious about Karla Black, a woman who had managed to trap a big-time
gangster into marrying her, and then outlived him to enjoy a hot young guy like
Bruce Singleton. "If I'd been Mo, I would have at least inserted a prenup
that specified, in case of my death, she couldn't screw her new lover in my
hotel," I said.

"You
would do that," she said flatly.

"Damn
straight. Let the next Bozo take her to Motel 6. How did you get Karla to agree
to see us?"

"Told
her we're thinking about writing an article on astrological architecture and we
want to feature the hotel lobby."

"Her
lover just died and she's up for an interview on astrological architecture? I'd
say the woman isn't too heartbroken."

"People
cope in different ways," Callie said nonjudgmentally.

An
hour later, we crossed the starstruck lobby, where a domed ceiling, painted in nighttime
blue, held hosts of twinkling stars raked by hidden strobes that seemed to make
the heavens come alive. Callie stood in the middle of the celestial display and
stared up in wonder, leaning against me for support. It was a compression of
stars and planets and asteroids, each carefully placed and correctly named. As
if God hovered above the entire array, light filtered down through the stars,
somehow managing to cast their images onto the floor below. Other images
embedded in the floor were backlit, casting their shadowed shapes up into the
sky. So looking up at the ceiling, we were, in fact, partially looking down,
God-like, and looking down at the floor, we were, in fact, looking up. It was a
wonderful, mind-boggling experience. I hadn't really taken time to admire the
ceiling, having spent most of my time admiring Callie.

"I
was so proud to be part of this at the time." Callie's voice was barely
audible as she pondered the astrological implications.

"You
worked on this ceiling?" I asked in awe.

"Mapping
out the design. Mo directed it. He was obsessed with eights, can you tell? Look
at all the eight clusters. He said he always won on eights and that the number
eight had the best odds."

I
stared at her wondering how many things I would learn about her over time that
would surprise me. I couldn't expect at our age that life would only begin from
the moment we met, but there was a piece of me that wistfully wished it could.
How sad that there had been so many wonderful and interesting experiences she had
already had without me—memories I wouldn't share with her, places she would
talk about that I wouldn't have seen. I longed for us to have a history
together, to be able to say, remember when we went to Sedona? Or, remember that
time in New York? I suddenly felt cheated of her presence, as if God had left
me to wander the desert alone for forty years before giving me a mate.
Why
couldn't we have met in our twenties?

As
if reading my mind, Callie took my hand. "Had we known each other twenty
years ago, we wouldn't have hit it off." We exited through the large front
doors on the way to retrieve our car.

"Because
you were busy designing the astrological equivalent of the Sistine
Chapel?" I asked.

"No,
because you were too cocky and arrogant." She jabbed me with her
forefinger for emphasis.

"That
could
be construed as a negative remark," I mused.

We
got into our car, and I tipped valet parker Sheik Skippy and headed north off
the Strip.

"Right,
right, right!" Callie suddenly shouted as we drove up into the hills above
Las Vegas.

"Sorry,"
I said, making the turn at the last possible moment. "Thought you were
just agreeing with me."

"You
have no sense of direction, do you?" she asked kindly, as if inquiring
about a loss of hearing.

I
insisted I did have a sense of direction but merely became preoccupied. Her
silence made me want to argue the point, but she quickly added, "The
address is 888. You passed it!"

I
threw the car into reverse and backed up in front of a two-story Spanish
mission-style home with an arching entryway that led into a huge courtyard.
Not
a bad cottage,
I thought, but the pink and turquoise walls, with inlaid
tiles of half-naked girls, and the garish fountain, featuring three peeing
lads, made me think that Mo Black had more money than taste.

"Hiya,
kids." Karla threw open the door in a grand gesture, as if we'd known her
for years. "Come on in." From what I could tell, she didn't appear to
be in the emotional vicinity of any of the five stages of mourning.

Karla
Black was what gangsters in the twenties called a floozy, a woman of
disreputable character. When she was sober, her walk was a stagger, her massive
head of bleached-blond hair looked as if she'd tried to comb it with an egg
beater, and her makeup was Ringling Brothers. She was forty pounds too heavy,
and her clothes needed another trip through the wash cycle; nonetheless, she
had sadness behind her soft green eyes and a ready smile that made me mentally
slap myself for being judgmental. So she liked sleeping with mobsters. Maybe they
told her she was pretty and bought her nice jewelry. Who was I to judge?

Callie
introduced us and explained we were on a literary mission. Karla didn't seem to
care why we were there, as long as we would sit and chat. She obviously didn't
get much female company.

A
half hour into the conversation, Karla let out a big sigh. "Always
wondered about all that crap on the ceiling. Some little chickie came in and
sold him a bill of goods about the hotel bein' a livin' person and some
jibberish about the planets. He just wanted to get in her pants, was my take on
it." Karla laughed. I furrowed my brow at Callie, who avoided my stare as
Karla rambled on.

"Aaaanywho,
that was pre-me, so I didn't give a shit. Exceptin' he spent a zillion dollars
of what woulda been my dough on the damn thing. People like it, I guess. So
whadaya wanna know about it?"

Callie
explained that the kind of color commentary Karla had just provided was exactly
what she was looking for, and she artfully moved Karla away from the
astrological design of the ceiling and onto her love affair with the builder.
It was a subject near and dear to Karla's heart.

"So,
Mo and me was just, ya know, like in our second childhood and in love, humpin'
all the time, not worryin' about nothin', then a couple of his buddies come
along and they decide to build these kinda gigantic houses out here in the
middle of nowhere! Ya know, for me, the desert was just like, well...deserted!
But Mo, he was like a sand-schlepper, so we pulled some money together and
times was tough, but then, I don't know, he hooked up with the right guys, and
well, here I am in this desert palace, as Mo called it." Saying his name
made her chin tremble, and tears came to her eyes. "I miss Mo. He was my baby."

"I'm
sorry," I offered.

"Yeaaah,
he was hot stuff, Mo was. That's him," she said and picked up a photo off
the mantel of a chunky, Italian-looking stud. She gave the picture a big
lipsticky kiss. "I got life-size cutouts of him stored down in the hotel
basement. Used to have 'em in the lobby, but people said it made 'em sad. God
forbid they should be as sad as me, huh?"