Diva Las Vegas (Book 1 in Raven McShane Series) (11 page)

“So are we watching Cody for business or pleasure?” Carlos asked.

I smiled.  “No reason it can’t be both.”

“You’re not paying me enough for this,” Carlos complained.

“That’s crap.  You leave a pool of drool on the floor every time a pretty girl walks by.  I’m allowed to look at a good-looking guy every once in awhile.”

I hadn’t planned on seeing Cody, but I couldn’t resist the chance to learn what he’d be up to over a long weekend with his wife out of town.  Maybe he’d be looking for a horny brunette with a convertible and fake boobs.  I had to remind myself more than once that he was probably a murderer.

Carlos sighed and opened up his book.  I guessed he figured himself for the alpha dog and didn’t like the competition.  The dusk was turning into evening, and after a half-hour of waiting Carlos was getting antsy.

“I should have brought another book,” he said.

“Light’s fading anyways.  Give him a half-hour.  There’s no way that guy is staying in and watching PBS tonight.  Feel like clubbing?”

“I’m an awesome dancer,” he said.

I immediately put that image out of my mind and began daydreaming about dancing with Cody at a nightclub.  That helped pass the time quickly.  My hunch that Cody would not stay put proved true.  The light went on in the foyer and Cody’s figure began moving about.  He emerged from the front door just before 8:15.  The light was much dimmer now, but I could see he had changed his clothes and rearranged or washed his hair.  Now he wore a tight fitting white polo shirt with short sleeves that revealed a pair of tanned, muscled arms.  His khaki pants looked like linen and fit loosely, in contrast to the shirt, and his bare feet were clad in brown sandals.  He carried a medium-sized brown leather bag with him and threw it casually into the passenger’s seat of the convertible before getting in.

Cody fired up the engine and cranked up the radio as he backed out of the driveway.

“That’s a Bentley,” Carlos said.

I rolled my eyes.  “No shit.”

As Cody drove past I crouched one last time in the driver’s seat.  I grimaced as a painful twinge ran down my cramped spine.  I shook it off and checked the rearview mirror.  When Cody was a block away I turned my car around and began following him.

“That won’t be a hard car to tail,” I said.

“No shit.”  Carlos flashed a wide, toothy smile.

Cody left the subdivision the same way we had come in, and I guessed that was about the only way out of this tangled web of millionaires’ alleys.  I managed to keep us a good hundred yards behind the Bentley as Cody wound his way east on Vegas Drive, picking up speed as he went.

“Looks like he’s headed towards the Strip,” Carlos said.

“Probably one of the clubs.  Pure or Rain or one of those places all the cool kids hang out in.”

I worried that Cody would be harder to track if that’s where he ended up.  But as we reached the far north end of Las Vegas Boulevard, Cody surprised me by staying in the center lane and crossing through the Strip.  We followed him as he turned south onto Eastern Avenue, closing in on the north end of the Strip resort area.  But he tacked east again and headed onto the Boulder Highway in the direction of Boulder City and the Hoover Dam.

“Where the hell is he going?” Carlos asked.

“Good question.”

I kept pace with him for another couple of miles and followed him through the darkening suburban streets after he veered off the highway in the suburb of Henderson.  He slowed, finally, and ended up turning into a small subdivision.  An illuminated sign at the subdivision’s entrance read “Westhill Meadows.”  According to the sign, the development consisted of a single long street with a cul-de-sac at the far end.  After Cody turned in, I idled the car near the sign at the entrance.  From there we could see that the development still had a few vacant lots with For Sale signs in front.  Just like every other development in Vegas.  The few houses we could see appeared vacant and unfinished.  A couple of bulldozers were parked face-to-face about a hundred feet down the road.

“What the hell is he up to?” I asked rhetorically.  “You hungry?”

“I could eat,” Carlos said.  “Don’t you want to follow him?”

“Not now.  According to that sign, there’s no other way out of that subdivision, and it looks kind of deserted.  I’m afraid he’d notice us if we followed him in.”

I looked around and found what I needed—a gas station on the next corner.  I pulled into the parking lot and angled my car so that I could keep a clear view of the street leading into Westhill Meadows.  I hurried into the gas station to use the bathroom and grabbed a big bag of pretzels.  I hoped the manager wouldn’t mind if we enjoyed the pretzels while we sat in my car in the station’s parking lot.

“This is food?” Carlos asked, eyeing the pretzels skeptically.

 “What do you expect,
foie
gras
and truffles?  Any activity?”

He shook his head.  “That street is dead, dude.”

“Don’t call me dude.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

We finished off the pretzels in short order, but that made us both thirsty and I had to run back into the station to grab a six-pack of Diet Coke.  Ten or fifteen minutes had gone by when another car pulled into the subdivision.  Another soon followed, and by 9:15 we’d counted three more cars turning in.  I couldn’t see where they were headed, but it was obvious the deserted subdivision was coming to life.

“
Somethin’s
going on,” Carlos said.

“I guess it’s safe to go in now.  We won’t stick out like a sore thumb with all those other cars in there.”

We pulled out of the gas station and into Westhill Meadows, and I crept my car past a series of new homes in various stages of construction.  The homes looked naked without any landscaping or trees around.

“Nice houses,” Carlos said admiringly.

By most standards the houses were large and luxurious, but they seemed kind of blah after our visit to the Masterson chateau in Summerlin.  We crept along the road until we found a clump of cars parked at the end of the street.  Some were parked on the road and two were in the driveway of a big ranch house that looked like it was the only completely finished house on the street.  The red Bentley was nowhere to be seen.

“Where the hell did he go?” Carlos asked.

“Well, either we lost him somehow, or he pulled into that garage.”

As we rolled slowly by the house, it became obvious from the loud music that some kind of party was going on.  I circled around the cul-de-sac and parked in the crushed stone driveway of a half-built house across the way.  I turned off the car and killed the lights just as a tan Volvo pulled up to the party house.  The driver parked on the street and got out of the car, a bottle of wine in his left hand.  His movements seemed tentative, as though he wasn’t sure he was in the right place.  There was still enough light to see that he was tall and lean, and when he reached the well-lit front door I could tell that he was somewhat younger, probably mid-twenties, and appeared very well-built.  The door opened as soon as he rang the bell, but the visitor blocked our view of whoever had let him in.

Within minutes, two other cars pulled up more or less simultaneously.  They parked in front of the house next door, an unfinished colonial with a Dumpster outside, and when the drivers got out they greeted each other like old friends.  I couldn’t see their faces, but both men were fashionably dressed and abnormally fit.

Carlos chuckled softly.  “It looks like an Abercrombie & Fitch employee party.”

We waited another twenty minutes, but no more cars showed up.

“What now?” Carlos asked.

“I think Cody’s car is in the garage across the street, which means he’s hosting a party of some kind.”

“Only one way to find out.”  Carlos found the button on the side of the passenger seat and reclined his chair backwards.  He tilted his White Sox cap down over his eyes and began fake-snoring loudly, like in the cartoons.  I could almost picture the ZZZZZZZ’s emanating from his head.

“What exactly am I paying you for?”

“Hey, this was your idea.”

I couldn’t think of a better option, so I decided to get out of the car and check out the party myself.  Carlos handed me my camera as I got out.

“You’re so helpful,” I muttered.

Like a lot of Nevada homes, the house’s “lawn” was a bed of small crushed rocks rather than grass.  Luckily I was wearing comfortable sandals.  I moved quickly towards the back of the house, where the action seemed to be, but the loud music abruptly shut off before I got there.  I froze.  I worried that in the silence people would hear the small rocks crunching loudly underneath my feet.  Soft voices began murmuring in the back yard.  I eased myself behind a wispy shrub against the house’s
stuccoed
wall and listened for any sign that I’d been seen or heard.  All clear.  After a minute I began slowly crunching my way to the back of the house.

Behind the house was a large black rail fence, buttressed by thick juniper shrubs at least ten feet tall.  Their root balls were still exposed from recent planting.  Privacy at any expense, I guessed.  More voices bounced around the backyard.  Soon there was laughter, and the unmistakable sloshing sound of water being splashed.  It was a pool party.  Someone turned the music back on.

I tried to find an opening to peek through the shrubbery.  I had no luck until I reached the far right corner of the pool enclosure, where the right angle of the fence and junipers allowed a narrow but clear view into the pool area.  The pool was lit with several fake
Tiki
torches and lights that shone up from inside the pool itself.  It was larger than I would have guessed.  On my right, all I could see at first was a diving board at the end of the pool nearest to me, and at the shallow end of the pool near the house three men in their early twenties were playing half-heartedly with a beach ball.  Two of them sipped champagne from half-full flutes as they batted the ball around.  When they bobbed up in the water, exposing their bare torsos, I could tell that these guys were serious workout freaks.  Carlos was right—any of them could work as models for Abercrombie or Calvin Klein.  One guy in particular had jet black hair and darker features, and there was something strangely familiar about him.  I figured I’d probably seen him on a billboard or something.  Or maybe he was just a composite sketch from my dreams.

I couldn’t see anything outside of the pool, and Cody was nowhere in sight.  As I watched the three guys with the beach ball, I heard what sounded like a sliding door open and close outside my field of vision.  It was soon followed by five or six quick steps and a Tarzan yell.  At first I couldn’t see what all the commotion was, but the mystery was soon cleared up when a completely naked man cannonballed into the pool right in the middle of the beach ball players.  They managed to scatter at the last second, but the splash from the impact erupted a full twenty feet.  The
cannonballer
emerged from underwater with a triumphant smile on his face and chased down one of the others and jumped on his back.  He didn’t seem to mind either that his bare butt was fully exposed or that his genitals were pressed against the other guy’s back.

Holy shit, I thought.  So it’s
that
kind of party.  I suppose I should have figured it out earlier, but it just wasn’t on my radar screen.

I reached down to grab my camera when a voice in front of me yelled, “HEY!”  My heart skipped a few beats and I froze, certain I’d been caught peeping.

“You’re getting us all wet!” the voice shouted in mock protest.  That was a relief.  I searched for the source of the voice.  I hadn’t noticed it before, but if I looked down at a sharp angle I could see about half of an oversized hot tub in front of me through the junipers.  Inside the tub were three more men, their backs turned to me.  Two bottles of champagne and some plastic cups rested next to the tub amid a pile of wet swimming trunks and robes.

I didn’t have a view of his face, but I was sure the blonde guy in the hot tub was Cody Masterson.  As I crouched there in the bushes, I tried to process what this all meant.  I failed.  I had no idea what it meant.  It was interesting, for sure, but was it anything more than that?

So Cody enjoyed the company of obnoxiously attractive men.  So what?  That didn’t make him a murderer.  Hell, if stereotypes were worth anything, it probably made him less likely to be a violent guy.  A lover, not a fighter, and all that.  But as I crouched there watching the backs of the men in the hot tub, I began wondering.  If Cody preferred the company of men, it seemed a bit of a stretch for him to claim that he and his wife were making passionate love on the night of George Hannity’s murder.  It might be a crack in his alibi, something the jury hadn’t known about.  It wasn’t exactly a smoking gun, but it was something.

I turned on my camera and tried to position the lens through the junipers.  I took a few pictures to test the angle, but it was no good—all I could capture were close-ups of the backs of their heads.  I would either have to wait for them to move or find another opening.

I decided to play it safe and wait, but I soon got bored.  Luckily, after a few minutes the hot tub jets powered on and made a loud racket that gave me some cover to move.  I crept along the back of the lot and managed to find a better angle in the opposite corner of the yard.  The blonde guy was Cody all right, and he seemed happily buzzed.  I snapped four or five pictures of him and the other men in the hot tub, and for good measure I took a few of the naked guys frolicking in the pool.  If nothing else, I could blow them up and paste them on my locker at work.