Death On the Flop (17 page)

I gasped. He ran to the table and put his hands on my shoulders. “Cop lingo. I don’t mean really dead and buried, Honey Bee. I mean where he’s being kept in hiding. I’m sorry.”

I wasn’t used to a man saying he was sorry and meaning it. Ben said it and didn’t mean it. Neither Toby nor any man I’d ever dated seriously had ever even said it, referring to himself anyway. Huh. I tried to voice what I was feeling. “I just am trying not to think too hard about Ben. I’m taking it one step at a time in trying to reach him. But every now and then I get an image of him in a room, with a blaring TV, trying to get me a message through Mom, without worrying her, and his kidnapper comes in, finds him on the phone and kills him.”

Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. I blinked them away. “But I can’t think that way, can I? Or I’ll have no motivation to go through with this damned tournament.”

Frank’s phone rang. He held one finger up to me to hold my thought. He answered and listened, then said, “Don’t you guys have to log in your extra jobs? Can you check if Conner ever did consult work for the Galaxy casino? Sure, I’ve got all night.”

It would be a break we’d been waiting for. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until I started to get light-headed. Finally Frank spoke again, and I blew out my breath. “He didn’t. Thanks anyway. Listen, do you know anything about any snuff film industry south of the border?”

He stalked across the room as he listened. A minute later, he hung up. “The snuff industry is supposed to be an evil fantasy. Most law enforcement officers don’t believe it exists. But Abel says he’s only heard that the Texas Rangers suspect the unusually high number of girls disappearing in the desert on the other side of the border over the last couple of years might be proof that there is such a thing as a snuff film industry. One that’s run by Americans and starring Mexicans.”

I shook my head. “It’s tragic but I don’t see what it has to do with Ben or Texas Hold ’Em.”

“Neither do I,” Frank said, frowning like he’d been expecting something different. Very different.

“So what’s our next step?”

Frank, obviously expecting company, went to the door. In drifted two women and six men who all shook Frank’s hand and handed him a twenty dollar bill. I recognized one of the women as Spring from the bar at Caesars, she nodded to me. Frank introduced me. “Thanks for coming to give Bee here a crash course in Hold ’Em tournament play. She knows the basics. Have a seat and don’t treat her any differently than you would a stranger sitting next to you at a table on the floor downstairs. She’s gotta learn the hard way. So go get after it.”

Everyone introduced themselves. Frank let each pick a seat number out of one of his baseball caps. I got the empty chair next to Spring. “I see Frank is sober,” she said as we peeked at our pocket cards. Ace/clubs, ten/diamonds.

“I’ve kept him so busy, he hasn’t had time to drink,” I said, not realizing how it sounded, and unable to clarify for fear of giving away more than I should about the investigation.

Spring winked. “Good for you. He’s a good man and has just been looking for a good reason to quit.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I doubted I was his good reason, just like I doubted he’d quit for good. But after The Flop of Jack/diamonds, four/spades and eight/diamonds, I didn’t have time to doubt anything but my skill, or lack thereof, at Texas Hold ’Em.

 
Frank disappeared sometime in the first hour but I
didn’t even see or hear him leave. I found that playing with real people instead of empty chairs honed my focus and interest in the cards. Perhaps there was a bit of type A in this type B girl after all.

I won a hand or two, enough to still be in our single table tournament two hours later. Spring hung in there with me, along with another man who said he’d been playing poker on the Internet for ten years. He was predictable, though, one of those Rocks who’d just happened to get enough good cards to win little bits of money after scaring everyone at the table off the bet from the beginning. I think he’d only stayed in seven hands all night. He was one of those people who wouldn’t be able to hang in with the blinds if he had a bad run of hands.

Spring played like the antifish I was supposed to emulate. She was good. Completely unpredictable, and she won some big pots because the men didn’t believe she knew what she had.

I took mental notes and tried to keep up.

Finally the Rock used his last chips for a blind and lost the hand. “Time to play heads up,” called the man who’d assumed the job as the dealer to speed things along for us.

I was dealt pocket aces, both black, and was the big blind, so I raised. Spring raised her eyebrows, but raised with me. I went all in on The Flop, which was ace/heart, ten/heart and Jack/heart. All I could see were the aces. Spring had a few more chips than I did, so she called. The Turn was a King/heart and The River was a blank—three/club.

Spring had a royal flush, beating my three of a kind handily. Frank walked in right then. “Taught her something, didn’t you?”

Spring nodded as she collected her chips. Frank paid her a hundred and twenty dollars for first place, giving me sixty for second. I thanked everyone as they drifted out but Spring paused in the doorway. “Bee, you have an instinct for reading people. Don’t forget that when the cards are screaming at you. I imagine you might have seen me catching the flush at The Turn, but it was too late. If you’d waited to go all in until then you might have chosen not to and we’d still be playing. Be patient. Another thing, I started to trust your reads of people and use them. Be careful that others don’t do that at the tournament. When you can afford to, do something out of character: pretend a wrong read on a player and lose a hand if you catch someone at your table doing what I did.”

I thanked her. Frank looked proud. “Where did you go?” I asked, looking at the clock and surprised to see it was already midnight. I thought I smelled whiskey, then remembered one of the men had been drinking Chivas Regal. I looked at the mess of glasses left at the bar and wondered if it were hard for Frank to be around it. I walked over and began cleaning up.

“Snooping,” he answered finally.

“What did you find out?”

“That you are too damned sexy to leave alone for long.”

Uh-oh. I peered at him. Frank was leaning against the back of the couch. His eyes were more bloodshot than they had been earlier, and he wore a goofy grin.

“Did you have a drink or two, Frank?” I asked carefully.

“One of the guys was getting suspicious when I was sitting at the bar with a Perrier and asking a lot of questions.” He stood and leaned across the bar to tickle the end of my braid. Whoosh. It was him I smelled, not the players’ empty glasses. “I ordered the drink to make it look right. He was a good source.”

“I don’t even want to know what he said right now. You just need to go to bed. I don’t want you to sacrifice yourself just to find out some spare information for me.”

“I’m not doing this for you.” He argued. “I’m doing this for you.”

Okay. I put my arm around his shoulders while he busied himself trying to undo my braid, and guided him to his bedroom. His biceps brushed my left breast. His fingers tangled in my hair. Oh dear. I tried to get some distance between us, which was hard because half of his two hundred pounds was leaning against me. Finally we reached the bed and I snuck out from under his arm as he leaned in for a kiss. He fell onto the mattress with a groan. Even as toxic as he smelled, it was tempting, but I refused to do something at least one of us would regret in the morning.

“Honey Bee?” He mumbled something indecipherable into the pillow. Good thing I didn’t hear it.

“Good night, Frank.” I said, as I shut the door.

 
I slept like the living dead. I guess I wasn’t too afraid
that Frank would sleepwalk his way to my room and fulfill whatever male fantasy he might have entertained last night because I’d left the door to my bedroom open, which let the morning light in on my face to wake me. Of course, it wasn’t
that
early. I shielded my eyes from the sun and saw 9:43 on the clock.

Gripped with sudden panic that I had only nine hours until the tournament started, I leaped out of bed and hotfooted it to the bathroom. I showered in record time, slapped on some makeup and then tackled my daily fashion dilemma. I’d packed my Lucky jeans skirt, which I had been saving. I needed to be lucky today, so I pulled it on. I grabbed a sunflower colored halter top from Bebe and fit some gold hoops in my ears and the same shoes I wore yesterday. That would have to do. I was both shocked and amazed to realize I didn’t much care if I matched or not today. Being vogue seemed to have dropped a few notches on my priority list.

“Ready for your big day?”

Frank sat in front of his laptop, tapping on the keys. He took one hand off the keyboard and pushed a coffee cup toward me then went back to typing. I wondered how long he’d slept. As I reached for my cup, I could see he’d shaved and he smelled like fresh Dove. He wore his requisite Levi’s and a black T-shirt. He didn’t meet my eyes. Guess we were going to ignore last night.

Men.

I sipped my coffee without answering. Frank kept typing. “Nervous?”

I made a noncommittal sound. “What are you doing?”

“Snooping.”

Oh great. We were back there. I bet he didn’t even remember what he’d heard last night. I had to try. “What have you found out since we last reconnoitered?”

Frank looked up with a raised right eyebrow. Wrong choice of words considering what he wanted to do last night, but I held his gaze coolly. He closed down his computer. “There’s plenty of time to compare notes. Let’s go to the Galaxy and see if any of the staff over there remembers when Stan was a working man.”

The Galaxy was on the northern side of The Strip. We rode down the elevator in silence, a chasm between us. I wondered if it was because he was embarrassed about drinking or whether he’d found something out he didn’t want to tell me. Either way, we had to clear the air—I just didn’t know how to start. Frank was as intense in his stony silence as he was in his unflagging interrogations.

We stopped at the bakery for another coffee and croissant that we ate under one of the coconut palms outside the casino. I think Frank chose the table adjacent to the waterfall so its roar would preclude any opportunity for conversation.

I tried to let the incident go, as he most certainly preferred, but my resolve lasted only ninety seconds before I couldn’t stand it any longer. I would never be able to live with myself if my dilemma was to blame for pushing Frank back to booze. I leaned forward and raised my voice over the cascading water. “Frank, I’m worried about what happened last night.”

He looked up sharply, a hint of surprise showing in his eyes before he hid it. “Don’t worry, it won’t happen again.”

Uh-oh. What wouldn’t happen again? He wouldn’t make a pass at me again or he wouldn’t drink again? I didn’t want to close the door on the attraction building between us, so I figured I should clarify. But, what if he meant the drinking and didn’t remember making a pass at me? I tried some careful semantics. “I just don’t want you to sacrifice yourself to help me.”

“It wouldn’t be any sacrifice to make love to you, Bee.”

Oh dear.
My face flushed as tingles spread through my torso, igniting small fires that I tried to put out by squirming in my seat. That only made them worse. His dark eyes danced as he sipped his coffee poker faced. He was better at this game than I was. I finally looked down at the bottom of my coffee cup and mumbled, “I didn’t mean that.”

“Good,” he answered succinctly.

I didn’t have the guts to pursue the conversation further, so we finished our croissants in silence.

We’d started back toward the Galaxy before Frank spoke again. “They ruled Felix Quinn’s death a homicide.”

I stopped in my tracks and nearly took out an octogenarian couple behind me. Frank caught the old gal before she careened into the street. The old man grabbed my right boob and righted himself with a grin so wide, I didn’t feel guilty. I apologized, and they tottered off. “What killed him?” I stage whispered.

Frank’s mouth was tight. His eyes smoldered. “Smothered to death. They are looking for the call girl he was last seen with who goes by the initial B.”

That was what I got for being nice. Damn that note. And guess I should burn the eggplant suede. I swallowed hard and tried to stay cool. “How did you find out?”

“I called our buddy, Dr. Vassey, who was more than happy to tell me. And then I listened to the morning news.”

“Are they saying who last saw him with a call girl?”

“Not exactly. They are saying an anonymous witness. I think it’s a smoke bomb, designed to flush you out so Conner can find you.” Frank paused. “How do they know your first initial? Is Conner guessing, or have they forced it out of Ben?”

“I, uh, left a note to Felix.”

Groaning, Frank hit his head with the heel of his hand. “Why?”

“I felt sorry for the old guy. He was so lonely.”

Frank just shook his head. “You’ve got to stop thinking about everyone else and worry about yourself.”

“I’m not as worried about them knowing my name as what I look like. They could look at the security cameras and see me flying down the hallway and into his room,” I mused, wondering how this would compromise my ability to nose around.

“And then they would see Conner coming out of the same stairwell and stopping at Felix’s room. I think it’s safe to say that he dispensed with said security tape, or reviewed it prior to reporting it ‘anonymously,’ to make sure no one could be identified with any accuracy. Still, this is a bold move on his part. He is getting desperate.”

“Good, then maybe he’ll get sloppy and give us a chance to catch up with whatever he is cooking up.”

Frank stopped, turned and looked hard at me. For an instant, I expected him to accuse me of really being a call girl and killing Felix. After all, he’d never met Ben. I could have fabricated the whole disappearing brother scenario. I withstood his scrutiny. “You’re tougher than you look,” he said, finally.