The short brunette hair, the size, shape, and youth of the body … even minus the cigarette tray I feel sure I know who this is.
But I must confirm it.
Telling myself that detective work does not allow for squeamishness, I move toward the head of the massage table, bend down, and peer up at the face peering down in the face cradle. Indeed it is Cassidy, her eyes wide open and surprised-looking, a trickle of blood running from her mouth. In my heart I knew it was Cassidy but now I know it for sure.
I reel backwards and slam into the credenza across the room. I didn’t see this coming. How lousy an investigator am I? I regarded Cassidy only as a suspect but it turns out she’s a victim.
Now here she is dead.
In the spa of the Cosmos Hotel.
Where Frank Richter is employed. As a masseur, as a matter of fact.
I take a few deep breaths to steady myself and decide what to do next. It’s past the point where I can help Cassidy—not that I ever tried that hard to—but I can make sure my mother is okay. And I can ascertain whether Frank is present and accounted for.
I have a moment of panic when I can’t find my mom but soon locate her in the reception area, where all the spa clients have been assembled until the cops show up. I tell my mother in hushed tones what I saw.
“I’ve had enough of this murder business!” she hisses. “When is it gonna stop? And where is that swindler Sally Anne was supposed to marry? Isn’t it his job to give massages here?”
“Don’t jump to any conclusions,” I say, even though my brain has made exactly the same leaps my mother’s has.
I do gather from the reception-area chatter that it wasn’t Frank but a masseuse named Ginger who was to give Cassidy her massage. Apparently Ginger led Cassidy to the treatment room and then left her in private to get ready. When she returned, Ginger saw exactly what I did: a woman who no longer had any use for a soothing earthly ministration.
I approach the reception desk. “Is Frank Richter here?”
“I’m here.” Frank enters the reception area through the door I peered through earlier and points a finger at my face. “Don’t give me that look. I’m sick of people thinking the worst of me.”
I try to change my expression, which I hadn’t realized was condemnatory. “Do you know anything about what happened?”
“Nothing. Not a damn thing.”
“It’s so hard to fathom Cassidy getting a massage here. She can’t afford these prices.”
“I comped her. You seen how stressed she is lately?”
I guess my expression reverts to what it was before because again Frank jabs a finger in my face. “You’ll stay out of this mess if you know what’s good for you.” He stomps away.
Detective Perelli arrives moments later at the head of a phalanx of cops and sets about her interviews. My mother is released after a perfunctory back and forth. I suspect the moment she’s back in our room, she’ll buckle down to some restorative couponing.
When Detective Perelli gets around to me, I divulge what I know about Cassidy’s trick roll career and that Hans Finkelmeister was one of her victims.
For even if we now know that Hans couldn’t have killed Danny Richter, we don’t know that he didn’t just stab Cassidy Flanagan.
“There is something I can’t get out of my head.” I watch Detective Perelli jot notes on her electronic tablet. “What Hans said when we were talking about Cassidy trick rolling him.” I can’t believe I reminded him of that mere hours ago and now Cassidy is stone cold dead. “He said, and I quote, she’ll learn soon enough that what goes around comes around.” I get a chill even repeating it.
“I’ll tell you again what I told you before,” Detective Perelli says. “You got no gun and you got no badge. This is a dangerous situation. I don’t want to be conducting a third homicide investigation, if you get my meaning.”
I’m glad my mother isn’t around to hear this. “I understand.”
“Anybody snooping around, and that includes you, can get in trouble fast.”
“Can I tell you one more thing?”
She sets her hand on her hip. “What now?”
I relay the details of my meeting with Samantha’s son and his crowbar and reiterate Samantha’s admission that she gave Danny access to her financial accounts.
“Duly noted,” Detective Perelli says, and moves on. Soon a cop leads Frank away. He’s not in handcuffs but I’m pretty sure he’s on his way to the police station. It’s not a good sign when the cops want to interview you there.
Back upstairs, I order hot tea and cookies from room service and summon Trixie and Shanelle to a confab in my room. My mother is lying on her bed with a damp towel over her eyes.
Naturally Shanelle and Trixie are aghast to hear of this new development. “Did the cops take anybody but Frank away?” Shanelle wants to know.
“Not that I saw. But how could Frank be so stupid as to murder Cassidy in his own place of employment? He would know the cops would home in on him.”
“Maybe he’s not thinking clearly,” Trixie suggests.
“I hope for Sally Anne’s sake it’s not true,” Shanelle says, “but maybe Cassidy figured out he murdered Danny and so he murdered Cassidy to shut her up.”
We’re interrupted by the arrival of room service. Once we all have a cup of tea and a cookie, we resume.
“Poor Cassidy. What a way to go.” I can picture it all too clearly. “Can you imagine how terrifying it would be? You get undressed, you lie down on the massage table and put your face in the little cradle, you listen to the new-age music and smell the soothing scents, you anticipate just how wonderful the massage is going to feel—”
“—then you hear the door to the treatment room open and of course you think it’s the masseuse about to send you to seventh heaven—” Trixie says.
“But instead,” Shanelle finishes, “you get a knife in the back.”
“Enough already!” My mother bolts upright and casts her eye towel aside. “It’s murder, shmurder all the time! I’ve had enough.” She points an accusing finger in my direction. “Tomorrow’s Friday and you still haven’t taken me to a show. You said you’d take me to a show.”
“That’s true, I did.” I am a lousy daughter if I have my mother in Vegas for an entire week and never once escort her to a show. “How about we go to Ziana’s matinee tomorrow?” I looked up her schedule and saw she does two shows a day on the weekends. Plus I have those backstage passes. “We can squeeze it in between rehearsal and our Sparklettes performance.”
“I don’t care who we see or when we see them. I just want to see a show. I’m going to go sit on the balcony if all of you are going to keep talking about this murder business. Hand me some cookies,” she adds, and rises to her feet.
I set her up on the outside lounge chair with a cup of tea as well. “I can’t get out of my mind how jittery Cassidy was,” I say when I return. “She was petrified when Shanelle and I were at her apartment, like she thought somebody was going to shoot her through her front window. And she kept saying she had a bad feeling.”
Trixie’s expression is solemn. “Maybe she had a sixth sense what was going to happen to her.”
“Maybe she did. And I did nothing to help her.”
“I don’t know what you could’ve done,” Shanelle says.
I’m not sure I do, either. We’re all quiet until I make a confession. “I keep trying to prove how smart I am by solving these crimes when I’m such a moron it didn’t even occur to me there might be a second murder.”
“You can’t anticipate everything,” Shanelle says. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“The police seem to think the most likely suspect is Frank, anyhow,” Trixie says. “Maybe they’re the ones who made the boo boo by not arresting him before today.”
“We don’t know that he’s been arrested. He might just be in for questioning.” With a sigh, I set down my tea. “I just thought of something else. Who’s going to take care of Cassidy’s cat?”
“Cassidy has a cat?” Trixie asks.
“A rescue,” Shanelle answers, and promptly gets us back on track. “Remember how when we first met Cassidy at the casino she kept saying that Danny never told her anything about anything?”
“I thought at the time she was protesting too much. I really think that now. I bet she did know the nasty business Danny was into but kept trying to convince everybody otherwise because she thought claiming ignorance might save her.”
“But it didn’t,” Trixie breathes. “I’m worried about her cat.”
We have another round of tea and cookies as we ponder the bereaved feline’s future. “There is another possibility,” I say after a while. “That Cassidy did kill Danny and somebody else killed her.”
“Two murderers?” Trixie looks stunned that I so casually doubled the number of homicidal perps in our midst.
“It’s possible. Detective Perelli told me that the guy who tried to pass Danny counterfeit bills fled the state. So he couldn’t have murdered Cassidy. But he might have been the one who murdered Danny.”
My head is spinning. Despite how much time and effort I’ve put into investigating, I do not know who shot Danny. And while I was trying to figure it out, Cassidy got stabbed. This is one of those dark moments when I worry that my crime-solving prowess on Oahu was a fluke, only a fluke, and nothing but a fluke.
Then again, Detective Perelli hasn’t solved Danny’s murder yet, either.
“Oh, gosh, I forgot something else.” I kneel down and grope under my bed until my fingers light upon Hans’s Mac. “I have to give this to Detective Perelli.”
“Not so fast,” Shanelle says. “That belongs to that Austrian whatshisname, right?”
“Cassidy gave it to me after rehearsal.” When Hans’s dastardly deadline was uppermost in my mind. Cassidy’s murder changed all that.
“Hand it over,” Shanelle says. “Perelli can wait an hour to get it. Let’s see if I can find anything on it first.”
“Then I really have to give it to her.”
I hand Shanelle the laptop and collapse atop my bed with a sigh, exhausted and fired up at the same time. Cassidy didn’t always make the right choices but she sure as heck did not deserve this. Now she’s at the pearly gates awaiting judgment from the highest power.
There’s only one thing left for me to do: try to win her justice here on earth.