December 5th, 2016
Las Vegas, Nevada
Pickett really liked Cinda and was enjoying their talk. Finally, Pickett got around to the main question they had been wondering about.
“Did Heather have any enemies that you knew about?”
“Oh, yeah,” Cinda said, laughing. “A bunch.”
“What did she do to cause that?” Sarge asked while Pickett regrouped from the surprise.
Cinda looked at both Pickett and Sarge, a serious look on her face. “You really don’t know, do you? I thought that was the real reason you were here.”
“Not a clue,” Pickett said. “We really are just investigating the disappearance. Trying to figure out why it happened.”
“Anyone close to Heather knew why it happened,” Cinda said. “She covered too many bets that lost and got in over her head. Way over, more than likely refused to pay off on a couple of bets, made some pretty powerful people around the university real mad.”
“Covered bets?” Sarge asked.
Cinda nodded. “I’m convinced she was taking bets like a bookie on some weird shit. Not the normal sports stuff the casinos all cover in their sports books, but mostly celebrity stuff. Who would be divorced, who was sleeping with whom, range of gross on movies on opening weekends, and so on. Amazing what people will bet on when given the chance. Especially in this town.”
Pickett was shocked. She had never heard of anything like this.
Cinda went on. “Heather spent a lot of time out and about in the clubs and hotel bars. She also wrote a nasty celebrity gossip column for a small newspaper that was starting to get major attention.”
“Column?” Sarge asked.
Cinda nodded. “Heather dished crap on numbers of bigger name stars that were playing here in the casinos. Her favorite targets though were the lounge bands, the small groups, the lower-level magic and comic acts and the Elvis impersonators. She could be one nasty bitch in print to them. But after she vanished for that week, she stopped doing all that, including writing, and became a nasty bitch in person instead. Her columns kept going for a few months, but then stopped.”
Pickett tried to wrap her mind around what she had just heard. Sarge was busy taking notes and shaking his head.
“Let me get this straight,” Pickett said, “the week Heather disappeared, she planned to meet some handsome guy from California and also owed a bunch of people money and had a bunch of celebrities and musicians hating her.”
“You got it,” Cinda said. “And since you didn’t know any of that, you wouldn’t know that Heather back in those days kept amazingly accurate notes in dark blue journals on everything, including the money and her sources on the gossip. I saw her writing in the damn things all the time. You might ask her what happened to those journals. Last time I saw them they were in her pretend office in a storage unit down off of Sahara.”
Pickett knew exactly which storage area she was talking about. The place had been there for thirty years and was looking pretty worn these days.
“So do you know if she wrote those columns under her own name?” Sarge asked.
Cinda laughed. “Heaven’s no. She wrote all that under the name Darling Black.”
And that made Pickett glance at Sarge who was just writing that down. Pickett remembered clearly the name Darling Black and how many threats were sent to the small newspaper against her. Pickett and Robin, in their first year as detectives, had been forced to investigate some of those threats. They had gotten nowhere and then Darling Black stopped writing and it all went away.
Cinda was right. Darling Black had been a real nasty bitch. Stunning that the world didn’t know she was nothing more than a college student.
But someone clearly must have known.
Someone angry enough to lock Heather, aka Darling Black, in an abandoned hotel to die.