“Some woman grabbed me, started chewing my ear off,” DeMarco said.
“I don’t want you talking to strangers,” his uncle said.
“So tell the strangers that.”
DeMarco returned to his seat. The hand was still going on, with two players playing for a huge pot. It pissed him off to know he’d missed out, and in anger removed the photograph the woman had given him from his pocket, ready to tear it up. Ballas, who’d dropped out of the hand, spoke up.
“Man, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“What do you mean?” DeMarco said.
“The photograph.”
“What about it?”
“You haven’t changed since you were a kid. It looks just like you.”
DeMarco stiffened, then raised the photograph to his face, and stared at the little boy dressed in shorts and bright red suspenders staring back at him.
24
“So what?” Valentine asked. “What do you mean, ‘so what?’” Longo said.
“A chambermaid found my bloody shirt in the trash in my bathroom. So what?”
They sat in Longo’s cluttered office at Metro Las Vegas Police Department headquarters, a few blocks from Glitter Gulch. The door was open, and in the other detectives’ offices they could hear suspects lying their fool heads off. Theirconversation felt normal, only Valentine was handcuffed to the arm of a chair. Lying on the messy desk was a tagged evidence bag containing his bloody shirt.
“It’s a solid piece of evidence—” Longo said.
“That I had a bloody nose.”
“—to you murdering those two guys.”
“You’re making a big leap, Pete.”
“I’m too old for that,” Longo said.
“What are you, fifty? That’s not old.”
Longo pushed himself back from his desk. He’d dropped a lot of weight in the past six months, and his face looked like a refugee’s. “Tell me what happened again.”
“Two guys barged into our room and attacked us,” Valentine said. “My nose got busted during the scuffle, and I bled all over myself.”
“Are you saying our forensics team won’t find any of those guys’ blood on this shirt?”
“I kneed one of them in the face. He may have bled on me. That’s not evidence to hold me for suspicion of murder, and you know it.”
“No one’s arguing that an altercation occurred in your suite,” Longo said. “But the fact is, you and Rufus Steele are still walking around, and those two guys are growing cold in the morgue. I have to treat this as evidence.”
“How long will it take your forensic people to examine the shirt?
“A day or two.”
Valentine tried to raise his hand to his face, and heard the handcuff’s chain rattle. The tournament would be over by then. Had someone set him up, just to take him out of the picture? There was a cold cup of coffee on the desk. He raised it to his lips with his free hand and took a slurp. Longo glanced up from his paperwork.
“Someone from the hotel called you and told you about the shirt, didn’t they?” Valentine asked.
“That’s right,” Longo said.
“They also told you I was in Celebrity’s poker room.”
“Right again.”
The cup was empty, and Valentine stared at grains. Before he’d taken the job, the hotel’s general manager, a stuffed suit named Mark Perrier, had threatened him with a lawsuit if Celebrity’s reputation was smeared by Jack Donovan’s murder investigation.
“Was it Mark Perrier, the general manager?”
Longo put his pencil down, trying not to act surprised. “Who told you that?”
“Believe it or not, I figured it out by myself,” Valentine said.
“You have a history with this guy?”
“He threatened me a week ago. Didn’t want me investigating his tournament. This was before Bill Higgins hired me.”
Longo gave him a thoughtful look. “You’re saying Perrier set you up.”
“I’m investigating a cheating scandal inside hishotel. Of course he set me up. Last night, I had you paraffin me for gunshot residue. I may have changed my shirt, but I hadn’t showered. Do you think I would have told you to give me the test if I’d shot those guys?”
Most cops didn’t like the kind of backward logic he was throwing at Longo. It made them go outside their comfort zones. Longo looked at the bagged shirt.
“I need to wait for the blood test,” he said.
“You mean you’re going to hold me,” Valentine said, exasperated.
“Afraid so.”
A woman’s voice came out of the black squawk box on the desk. Longo pressed a button on the box. “Hey Lydia, what’s up?”
“Bill Higgins, director of the Nevada Gaming—”
“I know who Higgins is,” he snapped. “Is he on the line? Tell him I’m busy and will call him back.”
“He’s standing next to my desk,” she said.
Longo clenched his teeth. “Send him in,” he said, and took his finger off the button.
Like most people who worked in law enforcement, Bill had a tough side. When he got angry, he tended to throw his considerable weight around. He was doing that now, and Longo was shrinking in his chair.
“How dare you arrest Tony without first calling me,” Bill said, leaning on Longo’s desk like he was going to do a push-up. “I got authorization from the goddamn governor to keep Tony on this job. You’re screwing with my investigation. If you don’t let Tony go right now, I’ll burn your ass so badly you won’t be able to sit down.”
The lowlifes and miscreants in the other detectives’ offices had stopped talking, the only sound coming from the overhead air-conditioning. Longo pointed at the bagged shirt lying on the desk. “What about this?”
“So what?” Bill said, mimicking Valentine perfectly.
“It’s evidence,” Longo protested.
“It corroborates Tony’s story, but it doesn’t corrobo rate yourstory,” Bill said. “Why don’t you ask the hotel to show you the surveillance tapes from the stairwell, if you want to know who shot those two scumbags? There’s your evidence, Pete.”
“I already asked the hotel,” Longo said.
“And?”
“They said there isn’t a surveillance camera in the stairwell,” Longo said. “It’s optional under state law to have cameras in stairwells, and they didn’t do it.”
“Who told you that?” Bill asked.
Longo swallowed a rising lump in his throat. “Mark Perrier.”
“Perrier fed you that line of bullshit?”
“How do you know it’s bullshit?” Longo asked.
“Because any door leading off the main lobby of a casino, or its hotel, must have a working surveillance camera according to Nevada state law,” Bill said. “The stairwell where those two scumbags got plugged was right off the lobby. Celebrity couldn’t have gotten a license to operate its casino if there wasn’t a camera in there.”
“But why would Perrier lie?” Longo asked.
Bill finally did his push-up. He worked out religiously, and looked like he could do a hundred of them. “I don’t know, Pete, why don’t you ask him?”
Rubbing his wrist, Valentine walked out of Longo’s office and followed Bill past a warren of detective’s offices to the main reception area. In one office, a black pimp was getting processed by the detective who’d arrested him. The pimp wore flashy clothes and enough gold jewelry to open a pawn shop. Seeing Bill, he threw up his arms.
“I need you, man,” the pimp said.
Bill stopped in the open doorway. “What did you say to me?”
“I said I need you. You know, your services.”
Both of the pimp’s wrists were cuffed to his chair, a sure sign he was a threat. On the desk were his personal belongings, which included an enormous wad of cash and a handful of hundred-dollar black casino chips.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Bill asked.
The pimp glanced sideways at the detective who’d busted him, then looked at Bill. “I heard you chewing out that mother down the hall. You sound like you know your stuff. What’s your going rate?”
“You think I’m a lawyer?”
The pimp acted startled. “You’re not?”
Bill marched into the office. Grabbing the chips off the desk, he began peeling back the paper logo on each one. Valentine guessed Bill was looking for the microchip that casinos were required to put in chips over twenty dollars in value. The pimp’s chips didn’t have the microchips, and Bill shoved them into the arresting detective’s face.