When the girl and her mother left, Jerry came up to her. “You doing anything special tonight?” he asked.
“Look, I told you before, I’m not interested in going out with you.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Jerry said.
Rosa shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t want to offend Jerry any more than necessary, but she had to tell him something to get him off her case. She said, “I already got a boyfriend.”
“Oh, yeah?”
She should have let it go at that, but she suddenly felt the need to elaborate. “Yeah, Charlie, the guy who works at the entrance to the buffet and brings the people to their tables.”
She had never actually dated Charlie. But she wouldn’t mind if he asked her out. He reminded her of Frank Sinatra.
“Him. He’s skinny, like Sinatra. I don’t see what you see in him.” Jerry flexed his arm showing overdeveloped muscles.
“Sorry,” Rosa said, and then added, just to be safe, “We’re engaged.”
It took fifteen minutes for Jeff to lose Julie’s entire two dollars and seventy cents.
Brenda and Jeff were quite relieved.
“Tomorrow we’ll go to Hoover Dam,” Jeff said when they got to their room. He needed to get away from the slot machines for a while.
They rested for an hour and then Jeff, Brenda, and Laura put on their bathing suits.
“I have a belly ache,” Julie said. “I don’t want to go swimming.”
“You can just sit at the pool,” Brenda said.
“I want to take a nap,” Julie said. Brenda felt Julie’s head. It felt warm. “I’ll stay in the room with you then. I’m not leaving you alone,” Brenda said. “You might have a slight fever.”
She had looked feverish at lunch, Brenda thought.
“You can go swimming,” Julie said. “I’m just going to sleep.”
“Poor Julie,” Brenda said. “You’re upset that you lost all that money.”
“I’m all right,” Julie said. “I just have a belly ache. That’s why I didn’t eat my lunch.”
Brenda picked up her book and lay down on her bed and started to read.
Julie lay down also. A while later she got up. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said.
Brenda didn’t respond. The book lay open on her chest. She snored lightly.
On the way to the bathroom, Julie grabbed a handful of change that Jeff had left on his dresser. Six nickels, three dimes and two quarters. She went into the bathroom. She wrapped the money in her handkerchief, the one that had violets embroidered on the corner, so that the coins wouldn’t jangle. She flushed the toilet. When she came out of the bathroom, Brenda was still fast asleep. Julie tiptoed to the door of the room. She opened it quietly and slipped out into the hall, closing the door softly behind her. Then she ran to the line that was waiting for the buffet.
Two weeks earlier, a child had been kidnapped and murdered. She had been a guest at the Dollars Dreaming Hotel. She was asmall thing, not quite six years old, and she had roamed away while she and her three brothers were horsing around at the pool. The brothers were supposed to be keeping an eye on her, but you know how teenage boys can be.
Anyway, they didn’t find her body at the hotel, but partially buried in the sand in an undeveloped area, a few blocks off the Strip. The parents had gotten a ransom note to put the jackpot money they had won in the casino, the night before, in a paper bag and leave it at a certain place downtown and not to notify the police.
The parents hadn’t told the police about the ransom note until it was too late. They didn’t want to anger the kidnapper.
Somehow they got confused. It was their first time in Las Vegas and they didn’t know the city. They couldn’t manage to find the spot that the kidnappers had specified. A day later, the police found Amy’s strangled body.
Charlie had seen her just before she was kidnapped. She wasn’t very pretty, from what he recalled. Skinny, with stringy yellow hair and sharp features. Charlie worked at the buffet, seating the customers. He hated working there and hoped one day to wait tables at one of the dinner restaurants. There at least you got tips. And the food was a lot more expensive to begin with.
Ironic, wasn’t it? Here he came to Vegas from New Jersey, hoping to be a singer, the next Frank Sinatra, maybe, and now he was aspiring to be what every failed performer hated to be, a waiter.
He had seen the little girl-Amy, he found out her name was, after they discovered her body-hanging around the slot machines where you waited to be seated for the buffet. She was in a bathing suit, one piece, blue with pictures of colored fish. It looked like it was still damp from the pool. She didn’t seem to be with any adults. Charlie thought he should have gone up to her and brought her to one of the security guards, right then and there. But then Rosa came up to talk to him and he stopped noticing the little girl.,
Charlie felt guilty as Hell. If he had done something sooner, maybe she’d still be alive today. But he hadn’t told anyone that he had seen her and now he couldn’t. They’d probably fire him, if they knew, or worse, suspect him of the crime.
Today there was another little girl hanging around the machines.At least she wasn’t wearing a bathing suit, but navy blue shorts and a pink polo shirt. She was small and cute, with bright red curls. She was feeding nickels into one of the slot machines. Which was illegal.
Charlie stepped away from the buffet table. This time he was going to report the child to security before anything happened.
And then Rosa came over again and informed him that she had told Jerry that she and Charlie were engaged.
Charlie wouldn’t have minded if it were true. He was attracted to Rosa and would have liked to ask her out, but he was afraid that he’d be rejected. And, frankly, he was more than a little intimidated by Jerry.
After Rosa left, Charlie noticed that the little girl was gone.
The good-looking lifeguard was not on duty that day so Laura was not upset when Brenda rushed out to the pool and told her that she and Jeff had to go back to the room right away. Laura wondered why Brenda had left Julie alone in the room by herself. She would have been in big trouble if she had done something like that. She was always getting into trouble for things that Julie had done, or not done.
But when they got back to the room, Julie wasn’t there.
“I fell asleep and when I woke up she was gone,” Brenda said.
Brenda wanted to call the police right away, but Jeff thought they should contact hotel security first.
“I bet she went back to the slot machines,” Laura said.
“She had no money,” Brenda said.
But then Jeff noticed that all of his change was missing from the top of the dresser.
They rushed out to the slot machines outside of the buffet. Jeff and Brenda ran up to the security guard.
Laura walked over to the skinny man who had seated them at the table. The one with the name Charlie on his shirt.
“Maybe you’ve seen my sister,” she said. “She has curly red hair and was wearing blue shorts and a pink shirt. I know pink doesn’t go with red hair, but she insisted, and she’s a very stubborn little girl.”
At first Charlie thought he would say he hadn’t seen her. Butthen he remembered what had happened to Amy and he just couldn’t keep it to himself. “She was here,” he said. “She was playing the nickel slot machines. I was just about to report her to Jerry, that’s the security guard, when I had to take a customer to his table. When I came back, she was gone.”
“She must have lost all of her money and left,” Laura said. She hoped that was what had happened.
“Maybe she went back to your room,” Charlie said.
“I don’t think so,” Laura said. “We would have passed her in the hall.”