Royal Flush Read online

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Henry John Kent lived just off of Tropicana Avenue, near the UNLV campus, in a rented space that was nominally a motel but looked more like a flophouse. The sign at the All-Star Motel said rooms were available weekly or monthly, and instructed passers-by to ask about long-term leases. It was a gray, two-story structure built out of thinly disguised concrete blocks, with row after row of decrepit balconies populated by rusting lawn furniture and bikes, a few satellite dishes, and a couple of well-worn gas grills. I double-checked the address Melanie had given me, because it certainly didn't look like royal digs. Hell, I doubted the place even met the standards of today's college students, who (despite being broke) had become used to housing that would have been considered luxury accommodations in my day.

  I lucked out and found the last spot in the parking lot, then made a casual stroll around the place. The inn had about a hundred units, and Kent's was number seventy-nine, on the second floor. The only thing his place had going for it was an absence of junk on the balcony. Circling back to my car, I immediately regretted not having Mike do the surveillance. I'd brought a magazine with me, but even the fall fashion issue of InStyle wasn't going to make the stakeout that much more tolerable. My Audi TT was cramped, and if I wanted a view of Kent's apartment I needed to crane my neck to look in my rearview mirror.

  After twenty minutes of drudgery, punctuated only by a couple of choice fashion tips from my magazine, I gave up on the idea of sitting in my car all day. Melanie had resources, and she could afford to get me a more comfortable setup. Plus, I had to pee. I climbed out of the car and, with a little bit of trepidation, approached the door marked Office and pulled it open. A little bell rang as I walked in, then nothing happened.

  It was almost noon, so I figured the receptionist could be on break. There were no little bells on the desk to ring, so after a minute or two of surveying the disgusting wallpaper and inhaling secondhand smoke that was probably a remnant from the 1980s, I yelped out a little "Hello!"

  It was a pathetic attempt, really, so I didn't bother waiting for a response. "Hello!" I yelled out again. My second effort produced the unmistakable sound of glass smashing on the floor, and then an "Aww, shit" from whoever had just committed the deed.

  "Coming!" the voice said, annoyed.

  I wasn't expecting much, but the guy who shuffled through the door was even more of a mess than I'd expected. He was only in his thirties, but had the puffy and glazed-over appearance of one of the original members of the band KISS. He was fumbling with his cigarette lighter and uttering more choice words under his breath. First things first, I supposed.

  Once he got the cigarette lit and took a deep drag, he finally addressed me. "Sorry, man, you woke me up."

  I wasn't sure how to respond, either to the "man" appellation or to the fact that he seemed a little ticked that I'd had the nerve to come into the office during business hours. I decided to let it slide.

  "Can I get a room?" I asked.

  He seemed a little surprised by the question. "Uhh, yeah. Just let me check a minute. Okay. You want an hour, a day, a week, or what?" He winked his left eye at me.

  "Let's just start with a day," I said. "Cash okay?" I had no intentions of giving this slimeball my credit card information.

  "You bet."

  "You have anything around room sixty-two? Sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four, something like that?" These were the rooms directly across the parking lot from Kent's apartment.

  He shrugged, looked behind him on a board covered by hanging keys, and reached for number sixty-four. I handed over the thirty-nine bucks, which seemed expensive, took the key, and got the hell out of there.

  "Check out's 11 a.m.," he mumbled.

  I hoped to be long gone by eleven. Best-case scenario, I could see Kent leaving his apartment and follow him around for a while, getting a sense for what he was up to. It could be something as boring as going to the Laundromat, or something a lot more telling. There was no way to know in advance.

  I found my room and opened the door, unable to remember the last time I'd used an old-fashioned metal key to open a hotel room. The room itself wasn't as bad as I'd feared. The bed looked old. The pinkish sheets were frayed, and the bathroom had tiled floors straight out of 1964, but all in all it could have been worse. I peeked out the curtain and located Kent's apartment across the parking lot. It was a straight shot across, so I left the curtain open a crack and arranged a chair so I could face it. And then I settled in for what I hoped would not be a long wait.

  Boy, was I wrong. One-thirty came and went, and with it the last vestiges of my ability to ignore the ravenous hunger that was roiling inside me. Murphy's Law said that if I left to pick up lunch, that would be the time Kent would appear, so I decided to order Chinese food, or at least what we Americans called Chinese food. A Chinese friend of mine, who danced under the name Princess Asia, always laughed at our ideas of their cuisine, most of which was cooked by Koreans, not Chinese, and had little relation to the food the Chinese people actually ate. I didn't care, though. Crab Rangoon and egg rolls were exactly what I needed to fill the pit in my stomach.

  By four o'clock I was bored silly, so I came up with the bright idea of moving the TV to the little table near the window. That way I could keep one eye on Kent's place and one on the tube. What I hadn't planned on was the incredibly bad quality of afternoon broadcast television. I powered through an hour of people blabbing about celebrities and then settled in for the local and national news. Still no sign of Kent. It was then that I began to experience some mild panic at the thought that I might have to stay here for the night if I wanted to spot him. The lock on the door seemed fairly secure, but when it got dark out I was not going to feel very comfortable in this dive. More than that, I began to wonder about my new career path. Was sitting around in dingy hotel rooms really that much better than stripping? It certainly didn't make me any more money. There was only one discernible upside: the continued need to order junk food.

  Pizza for dinner—thin crust, pepperoni and black olives from Octavio's, a favorite joint from my college days. I eagerly consumed a half-dozen slices, but not without a pang of guilt. I had been in denial, but the truth was that my new career as a PI was not being very friendly to my waistline. For one, it had me out and about more, which left me at the mercy of restaurants and stripped me of the control I used to have over my diet. And, by reducing the number of nights I danced, I was eliminating a thousand-calorie workout every time I stayed home. Dancing five or six nights a week had spoiled me by allowing me to eat whatever I wanted, but now I found myself needing the two things I dreaded most: exercise and self-control. I decided, right there on the spot, that I would take more control of my diet and start exercising more. Right after I had one last slice of pizza.

  By eight, there was still no sign of Kent. As far as I knew, he didn't have a job or any other obligations apart from school, so it was a mystery why he hadn't shown his face at his apartment in more than eight hours. It was possible he was holed up inside all day, but, given how depressing my own room was, I found that unlikely. And now that it was getting darker out, I noticed there was no sign of illumination from within his room.

  Necessity is the mother of invention, it is said, but so is boredom. In a rare fit of competence, I had brought my digital camera with me, zoom lens and all. I was far from an expert on how to use it, but I knew that it had a feature perfect for surveillance. After pressing about a hundred buttons, and clicking through countless digital menus, I finagled it so it would take a photo every ten seconds, setting up a constant still-frame view of Kent's apartment. Another dozen buttons turned off the fake "click" sound. I didn't have a tripod, but I rested the camera on a pillow I placed on the table near the window, and voila, I had built myself a nice little spying unit that wouldn't require me to keep one eye on the place. Better yet, it allowed me to get the hell out of there. Pleased with my little contraption, I celebrated with a final slice of pizza. Afte
r all, it was thin crust.

  I waited a couple of minutes until I was comfortable that my surveillance system worked. After adjusting the photo quality downward, to preserve storage space, I got my other stuff and left the room, making doubly sure the door was locked. I would come back the next morning to retrieve my camera.

  Spending a few hours in that sleazebag motel made me appreciate my thirty-third-floor condo more than ever. After some champagne, a handful of cheese curds, and a few chapters on my Kindle, I was beat.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I didn't have the heart to try making eggs benedict again, so I settled for scrambled, with extra cheese. After a quick shower, I hit the road again to retrieve my camera and see if it had caught any sign of young Mr. Kent. In the middle of the night, I'd woken up afraid that the ten-second delay between shots would allow him enough time to enter without being picked up by the camera. I decided that although it was possible, it would be very unlikely.

  I was forced to park in a back alley this time, and unfortunately my arrival coincided with the cigarette break of the freakish receptionist from the day before. He leered at me in a way that didn't give me any warm fuzzies, and I shuddered and quickly made my way up the stairs to my room. Luckily I had arrived just before the maid, who was only a couple of rooms down the row, and the room was untouched. Unfortunately, my camera had died. I guess I should have known that asking a battery-powered device to take a few thousand photos was an exercise in futility. Even so, I knew there was a good chance it had taken enough photos to get me something useful. I grabbed my stuff and dropped off the key in the office before the creepy receptionist returned from his break.

  I drove down to my office to plug the camera into the computer and begin scanning the photos. The first one showed 8:12 p.m. as the time of the shot, and I was able to rifle through each picture with the touch of the keyboard's right-arrow key. Nothing was happening. Occasionally a form would appear to be passing through the shot, but no one stopped at Kent's door or opened it. The lights never went on. I kept pressing the right-arrow key and got all the way to 4:14 a.m., which is when the battery apparently clunked out. It was a complete bust.

  I was slumping my shoulders in defeat when Mike rolled into the office.

  "Ooh," he said, sounding concerned. "That's not your usual winning smile."

  "I was staking out Kent's apartment yesterday. A total dive of a place, by the way. Anyway, he didn't show for the eight hours I was there. And then I had my camera watching his door all night, and still nothing. At least until about four in the morning, when the battery died."

  He nodded. "You sure it didn't miss anything?"

  "Pretty sure. I just had a feeling that something about the place wasn't right. I couldn't imagine many students living there, much less ones with royal blood in their veins. So I'm kind of not surprised that he never showed up."

  "So he's got a different address than the one Melanie gave you, is that what you're thinking?"

  I hadn't been thinking, to be honest, but that was a distinct possibility. "Yeah, he must. He's gotta live somewhere. How are we going to track that down?"

  Mike thought for a second. "Does he have a car? DMV records are easy enough to get."

  "I don't know if he has one. We can check anyway, though. How do we go about doing that?"

  He cocked his head sideways and then shook it back and forth, pretending to be disappointed in my detective skills. I knew that he secretly relished the idea of teaching me something, but I let him ham it up. "Come with me," he said.

  We walked across the lobby to his office, which was about the same size as mine but much cleaner. He sat down and punched a few keys, and soon an official-looking web page popped up. Mike typed in a password and an ID, and he was in.

  "You probably don't have clearance yet," he said coolly. "When you work for the casinos, the state views you kind of as an arm of the Gaming Commission. We're all trying to catch the bad guys, so they let you apply to get certain clearances. This is one of them."

  What he said was ringing distant bells in my memory, but I'd never bothered applying for clearance. Another thing to add to the list.

  "What's the guy's name again?" Mike asked.

  I told him, and he crinkled his nose. "That's what he says, anyways." Mike muttered.

  A few more keystrokes got us there.

  "There it is," I said, more excitedly than I intended. "Henry John Kent. Age 24. Brown hair, blue eyes, 162 pounds, registered as driving a Range Rover. Cute little bugger, too," I added, just to get a rise out of Mike. The driver's license photo revealed a serious guy who, if you used your imagination, looked like a young Hugh Grant.

  "What about the address?" Mike asked.

  I'd completely forgotten the purpose of our search. "Oh yeah. Well, this address is not the place I was staking out. According to this, he lives right on the Strip."

  Mike nodded. "I think that's City Center."

  "Yeah, it has to be," I murmured. City Center was a massive complex consisting of a number of different hotels, casinos, and luxury condos. The developers had the bad luck of trying to finish the complex during the height of the global financial crisis, but they'd managed to get it done, and now it was a rousing success.

  "Those places aren't cheap," Mike said. "I think the one-bedrooms are about a million-five or something like that."

  I nodded, turning over the situation in my mind. My own place was very swanky—swankier than I deserved—but it wasn't on par with the condos at City Center, which were designed as second or third or fourth homes for people with serious means.

  "Plus," I said, "the guy apparently has a Range Rover. At least he did three months ago, when his registration was updated."

  "Well, something's going on," Mike said, stating the obvious.

  "You busy today?" I asked.

  Mike surprised me by admitting he was free. Normally he would put up a little bit of a stink, but apparently his calendar was so free that he didn't have the energy to fight me.

  "Print that out," Mike said, pointing at the screen. "We might need the photo to ID the guy."

  I nodded. It turned out pretty grainy on the printer, but it would do.

  "How do you propose we watch him?" I asked.

  "Well, security will be a problem. They don't let just anybody get in those condos."

  I nodded. "That's what I was just thinking. Not much security at UNLV, though. Public school and all."

  "Yeah, but that's a big place. Twenty thousand students walking around there."

  I shrugged. "But he's a grad student. I assume he sticks to a pretty small area for his graduate work. They probably have their own building all to themselves."

  Mike agreed to give it a try, mainly because there didn't seem to be any other options.

  We climbed in my car and breezed over to campus in less than ten minutes. Finding a parking spot took just as long, and then we started our wandering. We found a map, which told us that the Harrah School of Hotel Management was located inside the Frank and Estella Beam Hall, which wasn't too far from where we'd parked. The September heat was already kicking in, so I was glad when we arrived and soaked up the central air-conditioning.

  Beam Hall was a modern university building with a surprisingly large and classy courtyard partially open to the air. The building also housed the business school, so that added another thousand or so kids to our search. I wasn't feeling too confident about the whole idea, but it was all we had.

  "Split up?" Mike asked.

  "I suppose we'll cover more ground that way," I said. "I'll head down to those soda machines."

  Mike nodded and wandered off in the other direction. At 10:50 it seemed pretty quiet, so I guessed classes were in session, which meant we'd have little chance of seeing Kent immediately. I sat down and paged through the university newspaper that was jammed into the side of the chair's cushion. Even after four years as a student, I had never grown accustomed to the paper's name. The Rebel Yell sounded li
ke something I might find in South Carolina or Georgia, but apparently the name fit right in with the Runnin' Rebels of UNLV. The lead article was a laudatory piece about a female student who'd invented a new kind of slot machine and sold it to a large gaming company, which caused me to wonder whether the underlying purpose of universities, especially public ones, had gone awry somewhere. Were the taxpayers subsidizing public education so that people could invent slot machines? But then I laughed at myself, a girl who'd spent half her time in college taking her clothes off. I was in no position to be judgmental about what people did with their college degrees.

  Within ten minutes the foot traffic started picking up, with some students milling around while others walked with more purpose in their step. My initial scan of the crowd came up blank, except for the fact that it made me feel old and overdressed. A surprising number of students, mostly girls, were walking around in pajama bottoms, sporting no makeup, with their hair covered up by baseball caps. Was this where the feminist movement had gotten us? That we had earned the right to look just as sloppy as men? I felt like lecturing them until, once again, I realized that a stripper had no standing to lecture anyone about anything.

  I realized I'd see more faces if I milled around in the crowd and moved through the stream of students, so I got off my butt and began walking around, trying mightily to pretend I wasn't almost twice the age of most of these kids. Ascending some stairs in the back of the building, I felt like a salmon swimming upstream, fighting to make progress against a never-ending line of underdressed youth. I had to grasp the handrail to keep myself steady, all the while scanning the faces of those descending the stairs as they rushed past. It was not a very productive use of my time. I walked aimlessly around the second floor, hoping to get lucky, when my phone buzzed.

  "I think I see him," Mike said. "Right where we came into the building. Red T-shirt, black shorts."

  "Got it," I said.

  I flew back down the stairs and then walked quickly over to where Mike was standing. He was trying to be casual and blend in, but his button-down shirt tucked into his gray slacks made him stand out like a chaperone at a kids' dance. I was pretty sure he was the only guy within a hundred feet who was wearing a belt. I sidled up behind him and nudged his arm.