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At the casino, Dela encountered a large crowd for a Tuesday. It was Kenny’s day off and she’d be staying until they closed down the tables at 2 a.m. Natalie wouldn’t come in to work for another two hours.
Dela dealt with paperwork after walking around and checking in with the security staff on duty. By the time she’d finished reading Kenny’s reports from the past two days and working on scheduling, it was almost five. Natalie would be in the Pony by now.
She stepped out of the security office and nearly ran into Bernie Moon, one of the board of directors for the casino. “Sorry, Bernie.” Dela backed up and studied the man’s face. She’d seen him angry and she’d seen him upset, but the paleness of his skin and his red eyes surprised her. “Are you okay?” she asked, leading him by his arm toward the deli since it was the closest place for them to sit down away from the gaming floor.
Once they were seated, she went to the counter and ordered two iced teas. She asked the girl on duty if it was Rosie’s day off.
“Yes. She has been taking three days off and working the four busiest days.” The girl glanced at Bernie and lowered her voice. “I think she’s taking online college classes.”
Dela smiled. “Good for her!” She carried the drinks over to the distraught board member and sat. “What’s wrong Bernie?”
The man looked at her. “You don’t really care.”
“Yes, I do. Even if you haven’t believed in me more times than I like to think about, I do care if something is wrong. Does it have to do with the casino?” She sipped her tea and let the man think.
He stirred two packets of sugar into his tea and replaced the plastic lid on the paper cup. After slurping up two large gulps, he licked his lips and said, “My wife came home and said someone has been asking questions about a person who once lived in Nixyáawii. Her nightmares are coming back. I don’t get much sleep because of it. I don’t know how to make her feel safe. After all, he’s dead and can’t come back.”
Dela studied the man. “What did the person do that gave your wife nightmares?”
“She and several of her friends were coming back from Walla Walla one winter and their car became stuck. This person stopped and offered them a ride. But he didn’t take them home. He took them to a shack on Spring Mountain. There were piles of women’s clothes in a corner of the structure. They became scared and asked to be taken home. They said he didn’t talk once they arrived at the shack. He just sat and stared at them. The four girls huddled together all night listening to the howling wind and what they thought were wolves. It snowed hard that night and when they woke up in the morning, they were snowed in. The man was gone but he’d left what looked like a human arm that had been cooked on the table.”
Dela shivered and could see why the woman would be having nightmares. “They must have been found?”
“Yes, but they all have had nightmares since.” Bernie finally looked her in the eyes. “That wasn’t the first time that man had scared anyone from here. It was as if he enjoyed putting fear into people.” Bernie shook his head. “He could also be very charismatic. As many of the girls who were scared of him, there were just as many who fell in love with him.”
“What was his name?” Dela asked, wondering why she had never heard about this growing up. But Bernie and his wife and her friends would have been the generation of her mom. They probably told these stories to their friends, not to their children.
“It is never spoken. Thank you for listening. It did help to talk to someone.” Bernie stood, holding his drink, and walked out of the deli.
She didn’t think her mom would know about this, but she bet Rosie’s mom would. Now that Bernie had brought up the story, it intrigued her. Dela picked up her unfinished drink and headed across the gaming floor to the Pony. Hopefully, there wasn’t a large crowd in there yet so she could talk to Natalie.
At the door, she stopped and surveyed the room. Only about a dozen people were seated in the room. She spotted Natalie leaning against the bar talking with Dexter.
Dela crossed to the bar and sat on the stool beside the waitress. “Dexter, I need to visit with Natalie for a few minutes.”
The bartender glanced back and forth between them before he said, “Sure,” and headed to the other end of the bar.
“Why do you need to talk to me?” Natalie faced Dela.
“I learned that you and Athena were friends. That you would meet in the deli, talk, and laugh. Why didn’t you tell me you were friends?” Dela sipped the drink she’d brought in with her.
Natalie looked down at the manicured nails on her right hand. “We were kind of friends, but not real friends like I am with other people.”
“What did you talk about when you met up?”
“Where we got our nails done. Our clothes. Nothing much.” Natalie still wasn’t making eye contact.
“Did she ever talk about her husband or her daughter?”
That got a little flick of a glance up at Dela and back down at her nails. “She really didn’t want to be married, but she liked having it as a way to keep men from getting too clingy.”
“She told you that?” Dela asked.
“Not like that. But she said being married kept guys from getting serious.” Natalie finally raised her gaze and peered into Dela’s eyes. “I think she liked the game of seeing who she could get to screw her.” She rolled her eyes. “I mean, some of them were well-off married men and others were complete scuzzballs.”
“Did you ever tell her husband about her game?” Dela asked.
The woman’s eyes widened a bit before she glanced down the bar and back at Dela. “I didn’t, but I think Dexter might have said something to Alex one night when he showed up here looking for Athena and she’d slipped out with someone on her break.”
“Did Alex seem upset?” Dela asked.
Natalie pressed her lips together and stared at the ceiling. “He looked disappointed more than angry.”
Dela thought about what Alex had said about his wife keeping her infidelity off the reservation. Would knowing she was doing it here, at the casino on the reservation, have made him angry enough to kill her?
“Can I get back to work?” Natalie asked.
“Yes.” Dela wandered down the bar to where Dexter was chatting with a couple at the bar, playing one of the machines inserted in the bar top. “Can I speak to you?” She nodded her head back the way she’d come.
He said something to the couple, they laughed, and he made his way back to where he’d been when she’d walked in. “What did you need to ask me about?”
Dela studied him. Had he been one of Athena’s conquests? “Natalie knew what Athena was doing while working here. Did you?”
“You mean her quickies with anyone who looked like they had money? Yeah. I asked her about it. She said she just wanted to make sure she got good tips.” He snorted. “I could tell she was on the hustle, but I never quite figured out how.”
“The night her husband came in to talk to her and she was out with a man, how did Alex take it?” Dela kept her gaze on the bartender. She’d dealt with him before and knew his emotions showed no matter how hard he tried to hide them.
“At first, he didn’t believe me. But he hung around and saw her and the man she’d left with walk in all smiley. Her shirt was crooked. I had expected Alex to charge across the room and confront her. But he waited until she came over to pick up her tray and all he said was, ‘I told you to keep your underwear on when you were on the reservation.’ Then he marched out of the Pony and I haven’t seen him since.”
Dela sat there staring into the mirror behind the bar. She scanned the people visiting and ordering drinks. “That’s an odd way to behave having just found your wife messing around with someone else.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too.” Dexter started filling glasses with beer as Natalie returned with empties.
“Did Athena ever say anything about her husband knowing what she did?” Dela asked Natalie.
“No. She only talked about him in that he was a dandy little housekeeper and babysitter.” Natalie loaded her tray back up. “I never understood why they married. She didn’t talk like she really liked him and he never treated her in a way a man in love would treat his spouse.” She walked away and Dela thought about that. Why had they married?
Because she was stuck at the casino working, she couldn’t talk to anyone but the people here. It was Tuesday, she wouldn’t be able to visit with Arthur about Alex. All she could do was her usual. Then she remembered wanting the surveillance of the parking lots.
Dela left the Pony, tossed her empty drink cup in a trash can, and headed to the hidden door to the surveillance room. She tapped her security card on the disguised box and the door opened. Entering a room filled with monitors, she nodded and spoke to each of the four people on duty watching the world as it played out inside the casino and in the parking lot.
“Nice day to be inside where there’s air conditioning,” Marie James said. She was the one watching the parking lot footage. There were cameras around the outside of the building as well as on lights in the main parking lot.
“It just keeps getting warmer each day,” Dela said, wishing she’d had time for her run early this morning. “Is Marty in?”
“It’s Farley today,” Russ said, looking away from the screens on the wall in front of him.
“That works. Thanks.” Dela continued to the door of the surveillance office and knocked. She wanted to let Marty’s assistant know that she was coming in. Not that he would have anything to hide, other than eating over the keyboard, which Marty reprimanded the younger man about often.
“Hey, Dela, figured you were headed in here when you entered our sanctum.” Farley was in his twenties and a genius with computers, or so Marty said. But he reminded Dela of the big purple dinosaur loved by many children back when she was young. She hadn’t cared for the creature’s overexuberance. She understood Farley was just a full-of-energy person, so she tolerated him. And he didn’t sing silly songs.
“I would like you to put all the nighttime parking lot videos on a flash drive for me to pick up tomorrow.” She continued standing since she didn’t plan to stick around.
“By all, you don’t mean from several years?” His energy drained a bit at the thought.
She laughed and said, “No, just the last two months should get what I need. I think just the front parking lot is all I need, but if it’s easy to do, also the back lot.”
“I’ll get on it.” His cheeks darkened. “You going to save me a dance at Marty’s wedding?”
“As long as you don’t hop around.”
“Awesome. I’ll have that ready for you tomorrow.” He started clicking the keyboard.
Dela left the room. She hadn’t thought about having to dance with anyone at the wedding. She hadn’t danced since losing her leg. Could she dance?
Dela walked out of the surveillance room and into the chaos of the casino. Machines chimed and dinged, voices were muffled, and the flute music in the background didn’t lull her as usual. Something wasn’t right. Not with the casino but with the information she’d gathered. But which information? About Athena Kindale or Dory Thunder?