The Big Gamble (23 page)

“Not tonight,” Clayton said with a shake of his head.

“You can’t keep running away from the fact that Kerney is your father,” Grace said.

“I’m not. Tell him I wanted to call but couldn’t.”

“Do you mean that?” Grace asked.

“Half and half,” Clayton replied with a weak smile. “He’s not an easy man to talk to.”

“Neither are you,” Grace said, squeezing his hand. “I’ll call him.”

Clayton kissed his wife and left to the sounds of tittering children. He fired up the engine of his unit, thinking his best move, given what he’d learned at Rojas’s mountain retreat and from Tredwell, would be to get a handle on the girlfriend and then start looking for Staggs in El Paso.

 

Ramona Piño got the lowdown on The Players Green Club & Restaurant from Jeff Vialpando. It wasn’t an ordinary sports bar. High-class and expensive, it had opened less than a year ago in a new building in the Northeast Heights, and catered to young, affluent singles who lived in the town homes and condominiums close by.

The grand opening had been attended by the mayor, several city councillors, a couple of state legislators, and some important local business leaders.

Within several months narcotics agents were hearing street talk about drug dealing at the club, and vice cops were getting rumors of illegal Las Vegas-style betting on televised athletic events. Weeks of outside surveillance had identified only two known drug dealers who frequented the club on a regular basis. Undercover cops posing as customers saw no evidence of dealing or illegal wagering. About the only incidents of note involved a duo of college-type hookers, just barely of legal age, who worked the bar on the weekends.

Everything pretty much looked on the up-and-up, but rumors and talk persisted, mostly passed on by two reliable white-collar snitches, who’d fingered an ecstasy drug ring of graduate students at the university.

Surreptitious attempts to get an officer hired as an employee failed. Staff turnover was minimal, and the owner, a man named Adam Tully, always seemed able to bring a new waitress on board quickly without advertising or interviewing applicants.

Tails were placed on staff members, and background checks were run as identities were ascertained. All had clean sheets, but interestingly, all were recent arrivals from out of state, particularly Colorado and West Texas.

Tully, a New Mexico native recently returned from Colorado, was listed as the sole owner of Five Players, Incorporated, doing business as The Players Green Club & Restaurant. If he had partners, they were silent.

Tully had no criminal record, and owned another club in Denver operated under the same name, which had been given a clean bill of health by the Denver PD. All his business licenses, corporate reports, and state and local tax filings were current and in order.

Vialpando had described the club’s layout. The bar and dining area were separate from a large room where big-screen televisions were set up in six different viewing areas consisting of comfortable couches, overstuffed chairs, and coffee tables. Only the bar menu and drinks were available to customers in the screening room. Six adjacent rooms with televisions were available for fans who wanted to dine and watch a specific televised event. Those rooms were already booked months in advance. On the weekends, a jazz trio played dance music in the main dining room.

As she drove to the club, Ramona pushed pleasant thoughts about Jeff Vialpando out of her mind and ran over the cover story she’d laid on Cassie Bedlow. Whatever she told Adam Tully had to match what Cassie Bedlow “knew” about her.

Good undercover cops always built fictional personas based on reality. Ramona’s previous assignments had taught her the importance of character development. Blending fact with fiction made the role more natural and authentic, easier to pull off. But there couldn’t be any gaps or lapses that might give you away.

In fact, Ramona had been both a waitress and a sales clerk in Durango during the year she’d attended college there as a transfer student. She’d returned to the city several times since then, so dredging up recollections and recalling places and streets wasn’t much of a stretch. She did it anyway, because you never knew what could trip you up.

She stepped inside the club and let her eyes adjust to the dim lights. The man standing at the end of the bar talking to the hostess matched Vialpando’s description of Adam Tully. Five eight, narrow shoulders, a thin frame, with an arched, slightly turned-up nose. Tully smiled as she approached, and Ramona smiled back.

Adam Tully liked what he saw. She was all that Cassie had told him in her phone call and more: great Hispanic features with dark, liquid eyes, a tight, shapely body with a tiny waist, and creamy skin with a golden hue.

“You must be Ramona,” Tully said.

“Yes, I am.”

Her baby-doll voice ran through him, right down to his cock. If everything panned out, he could work this bitch every night for five, maybe eight years, and make a hell of a lot of money. He knew a Major League baseball player who’d pop fifteen or twenty grand for a week with her, easy, as soon as she started tricking. Plus, a former Colorado congressman who favored the thin, schoolgirl type with nice knockers. Put her in thigh-high stockings, lacy panties, a push-up bra, some candy-apple-red platform mules, and braid her hair, and the guy would get a hard-on just looking at her picture.

“Let’s talk,” Tully said, leading her to his office, where he eased back in his thousand-dollar ergonomic chair and inspected the woman more closely. Thick dark hair, small bones, comfortable with her body, five three, one-ten at the most, perfect teeth. She took his gaze without flinching. She was used to getting attention from men, wasn’t put off by it. That was good.

“Tell me about yourself,” Tully said.

Ramona licked her lips and ran out her cover story:

Durango and her failed marriage, the need to make a change, dreams of becoming a model, looking to have some fun and excitement. Tully nodded all the way through it.

“Have you waitressed before?”

Ramona named the restaurant in Durango where she’d worked.

“Isn’t that in the old downtown Victorian hotel?”

“No, it’s by the railroad station. When were you in Durango?”

“Some time ago. I rode my Harley from Denver for the annual motorcycle rally.”

“Every September,” Ramona said with a nod. “It’s a lot of fun.”

“Why did you leave the restaurant?”

“My ex-husband didn’t like me working nights.”

“The jealous type?” Tully asked.

Ramona remembered her ex-boyfriend and made a face. “He thought every man I talked to I wanted to take to bed.”

Tully laughed. “Do you smoke dope, get high, use drugs?”

Ramona paused. “Sometimes,” she said in her tiniest voice. “But not a lot.”

“If I hire you, you can’t come to work high.”

“Okay,” she said seriously. Was she playing it too Goody Two-shoes?

“You see how my girls are required to dress at work. They show a lot of skin, a lot of T and A. Is that a problem for you?”

“I bet they get good tips,” Ramona replied with a grin, “and I can use the money. Besides, I don’t mind men looking.”

“Do you like men?”

“Most of them.”

“I have a girl leaving in a week,” Tully said. “See Lisa. She’s the hostess. She’ll give you a tour and an employment application. I’ll work your schedule around Cassie’s classes. You’ll have to take an alcohol beverage server course before you can start. Lisa will set it up.”

“Thank you, Mr. Tully.”

“You’ll do just fine,” Tully said. He watched Ramona leave, wondering how long it would take to get her strung out and in debt big-time to one of his dealers. He figured maybe two or three months, if he played it right.

 

Clouds had thickened outside, but not enough to promise rain. The April sun broke through the cover, casting patches of yellow light on the brick walkway that led to the old adobe house near the state capitol where Mark Shuler ran his research and polling company. Shuler was round, had probably been round all his life, but he wasn’t fat, although if you only looked at his chubby cheeks you might think so. Add a foot to his solid stocky frame and he’d pass for an NFL line-backer. He pressed his lips together when Kerney mentioned Tyler Norvell.

“I understand you went to college with Norvell,” Kerney added.

Shuler closed his office door on the four researchers who worked in office cubicles in a room just behind the reception area. “Why the interest in Norvell?”

“I’m told you don’t like him.”

“Don’t trust him would be a better way to put it.”

“Why is that?” Kerney asked.

“Are you going to tell me why you’re investigating Norvell?”

“No,” Kerney said with an apologetic smile.

“Then it’s probably best for me to keep my thoughts to myself,” Shuler said. “I make my living in the political world, Chief Kerney, and while it’s public knowledge that I’m not a member of Senator Norvell’s fan club, I keep my personal opinions to myself.”

“I’ll do the same with what you tell me,” Kerney said. “You went to college with Norvell. What kind of person was he back then?”

Shuler found his way to his desk chair and settled in. “Are you familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work?”

“I read
The Great Gatsby
in college.”

“Norvell was like Gatsby, always full of subterfuges, superficially charming, good at keeping up appearances, but basically unscrupulous. He was quickwitted, ambitious, and smart enough to align himself with people who would help him socially. By the time he entered law school, he’d transformed himself from just another college student who was scraping along into a big man on campus.”

“How did he do that?” Kerney asked, as he pushed an office chair to the front of Shuler’s desk and sat.

“He joined the right clubs, hung out with the right people, especially the popular jocks, and got involved in campus politics—member of the student senate, student rep on an activities planning committee. That kind of thing.”

“So, he played the angles,” Kerney said. “How was he unscrupulous?”

“Drugs, women, and gambling,” Shuler answered. “While the campus cops and narcs were busting the longhairs and student radicals for using, Norvell and his pals were allegedly selling drugs to frat boys, sorority girls, and students living off campus. He supplied women for bachelor parties, took bets on sporting events, even organized spring vacation gambling jaunts to Denver.”

“You know all this as fact?” Kerney asked.

“I got some information from an anonymous informant while I was editor of the college newspaper, but I couldn’t confirm it. I spent a lot of time trying to corroborate the story through other sources. All I got was second- and third-hand rumors and gossip.”

“What stood in your way?”

“I was the longhair liberal running the college newspaper. The enemy, so to speak. Norvell’s customers were the kids who saw themselves as the elite. They were well-off, clannish, spoiled brats. Socially, they kept to themselves and partied pretty much out of sight. They’d rent a suite of rooms in a nice hotel, gather at private houses away from the campus, or go out of town for their big bashes.”

“How did the anonymous information come to you?” Kerney asked.

“By letter. Two of them.”

“Did you happen to save them?”

“You bet I did,” Shuler replied. “I kept hoping someone would come forward and give me something tangible that I could verify and print.”

“Were they typed or handwritten?” Kerney asked.

“Handwritten.”

“I need to see those letters,” Kerney said.

“They prove nothing.”

“I still need to see them.”

Shuler rummaged around in a file cabinet, pulled out a folder, and handed two sheets of paper to Kerney. They were note size, no dates, with writing on one side only. The first letter read:

The second letter read:

“When did you receive these letters?” Kerney asked.

Shuler checked his file and read off dates that corresponded with Anna Marie’s cousin Belinda Louise Nieto’s time in Albuquerque.

“Whoever the person was,” Shuler added, “I don’t know why they didn’t go to the police.”

Kerney knew the answer to Shuler’s question. There were millions of reasons why people shied away from talking to cops. It didn’t matter if they were friends, family, relatives, or total strangers. He’d seen women protect abusers; parents lie on behalf of felonious teenagers; people confirm false alibis for friends; and witnesses deny they’d seen a crime occur. The rationales for either lying to or avoiding the police were endless.