A Nevada Highway Patrol Officer who enjoyed a good relationship with the casino called the French Quarter’s office and asked to speak to the executive manager, personally. That request, Briggs knew all too well, was unusual.
This had been just before eleven A.M., and the casino manager had barely hung up when the phone rang again on his direct line, the one that circumvented the hotel switchboard and even his secretary. The call was from their courier at the airport in Tonopah.
“The delivery,” a monotone voice told Briggs over the phone, “is an hour late. Something wrong on your end?”
“Get back to you,” Briggs said and hung up.
Now, forty-five minutes later, he was at the Mushroom Motel, assessing a scene of carnage, and the only thing that pleased him about the situation was the lack of any police or deputies. The Highway Patrol officer had kept the lid on nicely.
Nothing identified Briggs as an employee of the French Quarter, much less its executive manager. He wore a dark brown polo (no logo) and lighter brown chinos and hush puppies; he might have been a tourist. With him from casino security was Leo Willis, an African American who had served in Vietnam before working in Baltimore as a cop. Big, brawny Leo was similarly dressed with only the colors—gold polo and purple slacks—to hint at him being a French Quarter employee; he had a .38 revolver on his hip, however, which meant he wouldn’t be confused for a tourist.
Briggs and Leo took a tour of the corpses and the two rooms that contained them. The room next to the motel office had been set up for watchdog duty, and one of those watchdogs— who Leo identified as a low-level, off-the-books debt collector nicknamed Bud—was dead on the floor near the door. Probably trying to escape. The gun in his hand, a .357 Colt revolver, had apparently done him no good.
Leo, who was wearing latex gloves, knelt and took the gun from limp fingers and sniffed the barrel. “Recently fired,” he said.
Briggs gestured toward an ancient couch where a bullet had clearly struck, stuffing pluming. “This is probably what he hit.”
In the next room the body count climbed—another leg-breaker, a chubby one nicknamed Lou, lay on his back with a bullet in the head; the husband and wife who had run the rundown motel, whose only client was the French Quarter, lay dead, the woman on her back with a big hole in the top of her skull and her feet toward the door, no weapon, the man sprawled between the bed and the bathroom, a shotgun beside him—unfired, Leo said.
“It smells like an outhouse in here,” Briggs commented, wincing.
“At least one of ’em,” Leo said, “evacuated.”
“Somebody left?”
“No. Evacuated as in shit themselves when they died. Happens a lot.”
Briggs shuddered, just a little. “Remind me to eat light before I’m murdered.”
Leo, who had no discernible sense of humor, just flashed him a mildly confused look, then asked, “What the hell you think happened here, Mr. Briggs?”
“Not sure. Robbery maybe.”
“No skim in that Taurus. So robbery for sure, I’d say.”
“Right. But who perpetrated it? Is the question.”
The Highway Patrol officer stuck his head in the door. He was about thirty-five, tan and handsome, his silver-lensed sunglasses and gray-blue uniform with silver buttons as sharp as he was corrupt.
“Something you should see out here, Mr. Briggs,” the officer said.
Briggs went out with Leo trailing, and followed the officer to the edge of the swimming pool at the far end of the low-slung, paint-peeling building, past the parking lot.
“Don’t know how I missed this,” the officer said.
The three men looked down at the two corpses, one face up, the other face down on a bed of scrubby leaves and garbage and sand.
“That’s Vin,” Leo said, pointing at the face-up victim, not terribly regretfully though he’d often worked with the man.
“Don’t have to turn the other one over,” Briggs said, nodding at the big head and small feet on the whale of a body, “to know that’s Harry Bellows.”
“I can go down there and check,” Leo said, “if you like, sir.”
“No.” He turned to the officer. “Are we good?”
“Nothing here to attract attention, Mr. Briggs. Nothing suspicious visible from the highway.”
“We’ll get a clean-up crew out here straight away,” Briggs said. He turned to his security man. “Use the phone in the car.”
“Yes, sir.”
Leo trotted off.
The officer said, “My chief says tourists used to come stay here and get up early to watch the atomic tests. Gawk and grin at the mushroom clouds, chief says.”
“I heard that.”
“Some crazy shit.”
It was ambiguous as to whether the officer meant watching mushroom clouds or the nearby rooms full of slaughter.
“Very,” Briggs said. “The two running this place may have got off easy.”
“How so?”
“Think of the chemo bills they were spared.”
The officer had nothing to say to that.
Leo came back and said, “On their way.”
Briggs walked Leo over to the car, a light blue BMW, also minus a French Quarter logo. He said to his security man, “Stay out here and supervise. Call my office for a ride back.”
“Yes, sir.”
Briggs nodded and was getting into the car when Leo came over and said, “Sir?”
“Yes?”
“Something odd in there.”
“Oh, really?”
“Well, we’re supposed to think this was a straight-up heist. Like maybe Bellows and Vin got forced off the highway into this little parking lot and killed for the skim. And then some people inside, that the crew didn’t expect, got mixed up in it and guns started going off.”
Briggs grunted. “And then, what? The action was out here and, after, the bodies got moved inside? To keep this from getting noticed immediately?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s not what the crime scene says.”
Leo’s eyes tightened; he was the ex-cop, but the boss always knows best. “What does it say, Mr. Briggs?”
“You saw those duct tape strips on the floor? Makeshift gags, maybe? The roping that was chewed up here and there? Someone was being held.”
The African American frowned. “And got rescued?”
Briggs sighed. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”
Leo’s expression grew thoughtful. “Was this that fella from yesterday, you think? That thief that Chicago said we should lay off of ’cause he was a Family ‘friend’?”
“Nolan.” That had occurred to him long ago, but he nodded. “Maybe. Either he was planning this from jump, or he put it together partly out of spite, after we gave him a hard time the other day. But nothing about this really fits together right.”
Leo gestured toward the swimming pool. “Bellows was a friend of this Nolan dude. Went way back with him. Could be they was in it together. Could be Nolan crossed him, and…I don’t know, Mr. Briggs. Only thing I do know is something weird sure as shit went down here.”
“Something did,” Briggs agreed. “But if Nolan had any part of this, I can guarantee you one thing, Leo.”
“Yeah?”
“Our associates in Chicago will be displeased with their ‘friend’ Mr. Nolan.”
Leo having chauffeured him out here, Briggs drove himself back to the casino. On the twentieth floor, he called security and asked them to check on the Nolan party in the Honeymoon Suite in the overflow facility, and to let him know immediately if they were there. If not, the suite was to be staked out to see if Nolan returned.
Finally, the casino manager gave his security chief a description of Nolan and said to report to him, directly, if the man was seen anywhere on the property.
Then Briggs called the Tonopah airport number and had the courier paged.
“There’s been an interruption,” Briggs told him.
The monotone came back: “A serious interruption?”
“A rude one. We’re looking into it.”
“So no delivery today?”
“Possibly not. Send my apologies and my assurance that we’re on it.”
“I would suggest you make another call.”
Fucking disrespectful asshole.
“I will,” Briggs said, “but I need to look into this first. Before I have more to say.”
Briggs hung up.
He glanced at the photos on his desk in his expansive, walnut-and-ebony office. His lovely wife Karen and his two boys, Jason and Brian, beamed at him from various frames. Celebrities posing with him, both show business and political, grinned supportively from his wall of fame. His life of country club, Chamber, Kiwanis, and Guardian Angel Cathedral could not be more respectable. And yet today he’d stood in a shabby ghost of a desert motel in the company of corpses who had shit themselves.
The phone rang and it was his security chief.
“Sir, the suite appears to be vacated.”
An echo of evacuation reverberated in his brain.
Briggs asked, “Has the Nolan party checked out?”
“No, sir. And I will let you know at once if there are any reports of Mr. Nolan on site.”
“Thank you.”
Shit! The bastard was in the wind.
He thumbed his Rolodex for the number. The number. He stared at it. How did you tell someone that the $700,000 they are expecting has disappeared? Has been taken? You can speak of your suspicions about Nolan, who happens to be someone they trust and who they vouched for, meaning you would be seeming to shift the blame to them.…
Fuck.
He reached for the phone and it rang and he jumped a little.
The security chief again.
“Sir, he may actually be on the property.”
“May be?”
“If he is, he’s making no secret of it. He’s in the casino.”
“Gambling?”
“No, uh…having a beignet and a cup of coffee. In the Lagniappe Café.”
Briggs sat up. “I want two of our best muscle boys watching from across the way. If he makes any move that strikes them as suspicious, they are to weigh in. But they’re to be discreet about it—make sure they stay out of sight unless they’re needed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Briggs got up, threw a cream-color sports jacket on and headed out so quickly it startled both his secretary and the outer-office receptionist. He cut like a keen knife blade through the casino, that world of no clocks and no windows, where weather was something abstract, of slots spinning and dinging and donging, as the patter of dealers and croupiers lulled their prey into just one more bet.
The café was in sight.
It was him all right.
Nolan.
Sitting at the little white metal table behind the white wrought-iron railing, sipping coffee. He wore a French Quarter baseball cap and matching t-shirt, black jeans and sneakers. The son of a bitch could not have looked more relaxed.
Next to him on the floor, up against the table legs, was a brown hard-shell briefcase.
Briggs approached the café, nodded to Nolan, who nodded back, got himself a cup of coffee, and settled in at the other of two seats at the round-topped table.
“Mr. Nolan.”
“Would you like to explain yourself?”
The mouth smiled just enough to lift the mustache. “Perhaps you would. I’m hoping you can convince me you had nothing to do with my abduction.”
Briggs almost blurted that last word back at him, but then some pieces slid in place.
The casino man said, quietly, establishing a low-key tone for the conversation, “You were abducted.”
Nolan nodded. “And my wife of two days. By one of your security people. Vin. I didn’t catch his last name, but he was in league with Harry Bellows.”
“I thought Harry was a friend of yours.”
“I thought so, too. You’re never too old to learn. You’ve been out to the Mushroom Motel this morning?”
“I have.”
“Interesting place. Do you suppose Ozzie and Harriet glowed in the dark?”
“Neither was aglow when I saw them.”
“No. I would guess not.”
“What happened out there, Mr. Nolan?”
“I can tell you what I know.”
Which he did, a harrowing tale of his wife and himself being sapped and stuffed in a panel truck and driven to a motel in the desert and thrown onto a piss-stained mattress, bound and gagged. Of spending hours working free from ropes on wrists by utilizing a rusty spring as a cutting tool, and fighting back in a melee that involved the deaths of the captors, and then of Bellows and Vin who had arranged the captivity.
“Quite a yarn,” Briggs said. “But why were you held?”
Nolan’s shrug was slow and elaborate. “Several scenarios come to mind, but they all involve Bellows and his crony stealing the casino’s seven hundred thousand dollars, and me taking the blame.”
“…You know the amount of the missing funds.”
“I do.”
“Would you mind sharing those scenarios?”
Nolan opened a hand. “Not at all. But would you mind refilling my coffee for me? I’m keeping an eye on those two gents you have watching me, or us. They can do remarkable things with steroids these days, can’t they?”
Briggs had spotted them, too. Stay out of sight, he’d said. But he’d neglected to mention they shouldn’t wear the casino staffer’s standard purple suit and gold shirt.
“You haven’t touched yours,” Nolan said, nodding toward the casino man’s coffee. “Might be cold. Have them warm it up.”
Briggs collected both cups of coffee. He brought back fresh ones and sat. Nolan put some cream in his. Briggs took his black.
“Something you don’t know,” Nolan said, after sipping the coffee, “is that Harry and Vin also snatched a friend of mine. Young fella employed here, actually. Plays keyboards in the Showroom combo.”
Briggs frowned. “Jon’s his name?”
“Jon’s his name, yes. They pistol-whipped him, too, and stuffed him in the trunk of that Taurus. I don’t know precisely what Harry had in mind. But I think he planned to kill me and my wife and my friend Jon, making us seem to be the parties who helped themselves to the monthly skim.”
“You’re guessing.”
“Educated guess. Harry was in a desperate place. He wanted to get his money-grubbing cutie-pie wife back, and he resented that you had him down here playing glorified floorwalker when he was running casinos while you were still playing grab-ass at frat-house toga parties. That’s how I figure Harry saw it, anyway. We both know he was over the hill, and hardly qualified to run an operation of this size.”
Briggs sipped his coffee, which was as hot as this customer was cool. “You believe Harry capable of killing all those people—you, your wife, your friend, the four at the Mushroom…?”
“Not sure. But he was sure as hell capable of having Vin do it. And I would bet…if I were a betting man…that Harry intended to kill Vin, himself, to make the robbery appear more convincing…and to have the whole seven hundred thousand to himself.”
“That number again.”
“That number again. But don’t get attached to it.”
Briggs frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Nolan held up a palm. “I’m getting something under the table. If your bully boys head over here, hold them back, would you?”
Nolan reached under the table. The bully boys started over. Briggs held up his hand. Nolan set the briefcase on the circle of white metal.
“Have a peek,” Nolan said. “It’s unlocked.”
Briggs turned the briefcase toward him and unsnapped the latches and looked in. Green banded bills looked back at him. He shut the case.
“You’re returning this,” Briggs said.
“That’s not how I’d put it.”
“How would you put it?”
Nolan shrugged one shoulder. “I recovered it from the scene of a robbery that I fucked up for some people of yours who betrayed you. That’s how I’d put it.”
Briggs smiled, chuckled. “Are you expecting a reward?”
“I wouldn’t want to put you to that trouble. So I’ve taken care of it myself.” He nodded toward the briefcase. “That’s shy twenty percent. Call it a finder’s fee.”
Briggs felt a flush of irritation, but then he thought about it.
Then the casino manager said, “I will admit that you were inconvenienced…but not by me. And not by the French Quarter. In fact, it’s the casino that was inconvenienced.”
“The casino was inconvenienced,” Nolan admitted, nodding. “But not by me. And if I had not been there to handle these murdering bastards, you would have lost the skim…and, if Harry had gotten away with his scheme, you’d have plenty of explaining to do to our mutual Family friends in Chicago.”
Briggs thought some more. Then: “We’re talking $140,000.”
“Which is a lot less than your end—$560,000.”
“Our end? That money is ours, all of it.”
Nolan shrugged. “Price of doing business. I suggest you keep this embarrassment to yourself, and go ahead and get the monthly skim delivered today.”
“Without the missing twenty percent?”
“Who’s to say it’s missing? I know how the skim works. It’s no set amount. You’re just taking a little off the top.”
“Skim the skim?”
“Skim the skim.”
Briggs thought about it.
Then he began to laugh and laugh and laugh.
Finally he reached across the table and shook Nolan’s hand.
The casino manager rose, gripping the briefcase handle. “You wouldn’t be interested in a job, would you?”
“No thanks. I have my own set-up. But that’s generous.”
They strolled out of the café together.
Briggs said, “You and your wife want to stay a few extra days, just let me know.”
“No, we head home Sunday.” He snugged the baseball cap down and, heading off, said, “I think we’ve done Vegas.”