Murder in Vegas Read online

  “Looks like it,” Pansy said.

  “What about the hatchling?”

  “He’s okay but he has to be hungry.” With reverent sadness, Pansy stroked the mother falcon’s smooth head. “Another week or two and the baby will be ready to fend for himself. But in the meantime, someone needs to get food to him. Or he needs to be brought in to a shelter.”

  Lyle sighed heavily. He was obviously deeply moved by this tragedy, a quality that Pansy found to be highly attractive.

  “What are you going to do, Lyle?”

  “I’ll ask for a wildlife team to come out,” he said. “Someone will get up there tomorrow to rescue the hatchling. Too bad, though. We’ve lost a chance to reestablish a nesting pattern.”

  “Tomorrow?” There was a flash of indignation in her tone.

  “He’ll be okay overnight.”

  “What if the poachers come back tonight?”

  Again he sighed, looked around at the cluttered lab and the stacks of unfinished paperwork. Then he turned and looked directly into Pansy’s big brown eyes.

  “Pansy, I need help,” he said. “Will you watch the nest tonight?”

  “Me?” She touched her breastbone demurely, her freshly scrubbed hand small and delicate looking. “Alone? Lyle, there are people with guns out there.”

  “You’re right,” he said, chagrined. “Sorry. Of course you shouldn’t be alone. You shouldn’t have been alone last night and this morning, either. It’s just, I got jammed up here in the office with a possible plague case in a ground squirrel, Chamber of Commerce all in a lather that word would get out. I couldn’t break away.”

  “Ground squirrels aren’t in danger of extinction,” she said.

  “I am sorry, very sorry,” Lyle said, truly sounding sorry. “Look, Pansy, I really need you. If I join you, will you be willing to go back to the nest tonight?”

  She took a long breath before responding, not wanting to sound eager. After a full ten count, during which he watched her with apparent interest, she nodded.

  “The two of us should be able to handle just about anything that comes up,” she said. “I’ll meet you out front in five minutes.”

  “In five,” he said as he peeled off his lab coat. “In five.”

  THE KIDNAPPING OF XIANG FEI

  MICHAEL COLLINS

  As we walked along the strip hunched in jackets to keep warm—Vegas can be damned cold in November—Kay said, “There’s a dark blue Lincoln following us.”

  We were on our way back to the Mirage from one of those cheap all-you-can-eat dinners where gimlet-eyes watch for people who try to stash extra prime rib or cheesecake under their shirts or bras.

  “I know.” I didn’t look back. “Don’t worry, but listen. That car’s going to pass us and stop at the curb up ahead. A man is going to tell me to get in. I’ll get in. If I haven’t called by midnight—”

  “I’ll call the police. Dan, what—”

  “Not the police. Call a lawyer named John Jeffries in L.A. His number’s in my Rolodex.” I slipped one of my business cards into her hand. “Tell him to call the numbers I’ve written on the card.”

  I squeezed her hand, and we walked briskly on toward the hotel, but my mind was racing. It had taken me the better part of three days to smoke them out. Now they were here.

  The call had come into my office in the back of the old hacienda where Kay and I live at 4:53 p.m. the previous Monday.

  “Dan? Marty Gebhard. I need a favor.” Professor Martin Gebhard was once the pride of the UCSB political science department, and one of my Tuesday night poker game regulars. A year ago he’d taken the Tardash Chair of International Political Studies at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. I don’t know if UCSB misses him, but the poker regulars sure do.

  “There’s a grad student here, Donald Lewis, who wants to hire a private detective.” I heard the hesitation. “It’s sort of a difficult and, ah, delicate matter.”

  “You want me to drive to Vegas?”

  “He’d prefer a flying carpet, but do it your way. He’ll pay whatever you ask.”

  I. was alone in the office, but I think I cocked an eyebrow. “Whatever I ask?”

  “Money isn’t his problem.”

  “Will he pay for Kay too?”

  “He’ll pay for the cat. Just come as soon as possible.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  Marty always smiled when he lost big at poker, which was most of the time, and “difficult and delicate” always gets my interest. Besides, he hadn’t laughed when I pushed Kay into the deal, and he sounded worried.

  I went into the kitchen. “Vegas tomorrow? Free, with expense account?”

  “I can visit all my stores.” Her business is what pays for Santa Barbara.

  After Barstow, the high desert stretches all the way to Vegas, and 1-15 is so straight it lulls drivers into a trance. Sin-Mecca beckons, feet get heavy on the gas, and people die.

  Then there were the billboards.

  As I drove in the cool late November sunlight, Kay chatting about the buyers she would call on, the billboards came to meet us long before the city or even Nevada was in sight, scars on the austere beauty of the arid land with its tough bushes, thorny cactus, and tougher, thornier animals.

  The early Spaniards, the hungry prospectors, the settlers heading west to California found in a barren desert valley a tiny oasis of springs and green meadows. The Spaniards named it Las Vegas, “the meadows,” and the Yankee drifters and land seekers welcomed the brief respite. But the billboards do the welcoming now, proclaim a different kind of oasis, and the meadows have long since vanished with the cactus and the thorny lizards.

  The first trumpet call of glitter appears at the border with a clutch of casino hotels one inch into Nevada, and soon the whole rhinestone symphony rises up on that distant horizon. Sprawled across the desert like a skin condition, the Strip looms first. Bugsy and the boys did not want the marks from L.A. to drive one extra mile, time was money.

  I dropped Kay at the Mirage where she would shower, change into her own line of high fashion clothes, and call on her buyers, and drove on to the university that is tucked conveniently close behind the Strip on Maryland Avenue, between Flamingo and Tropicana. A large but relatively compact campus of ultramodern buildings, rectangular, round and domed, basically in pale sand colors, but with a lot of bright primaries. Mondrian in sand and stone.

  I parked as near to the political science building as I could, and walked.

  Marty Gebhard is a pleasant man of forty-odd who wears jeans and a sweatshirt, sports a scraggly black mustache, and, today, three-day’s stubble. He knew I had only one arm. Donald Lewis didn’t, and most people have some reaction when they first see me. Lewis had none.

  Tall, pale, bone thin, and so agitated he all but lunged at me. “You’ve got to find Xiang Fei and arrest those men who kidnapped her!”

  “Okay,” I said, and sat down in the only extra chair. “Now tell me who Xiang Fei is, and when she was kidnapped.”

  Lewis wasn’t sitting, and was so intense and distracted he couldn’t seem to comprehend I didn’t know Xiang Fei, or when she had been kidnapped.

  Gebhard rescued him. “She’s a Chinese graduate student on scholarship from her government, Dan. Donald insists she was kidnapped from the shopping mall on Tropicana a week ago.” Marty sounded more than a shade dubious.

  “What do the FBI and the metros think?”

  Donald paced and raged, “The police don’t believe there was a kidnapping! They don’t believe me or the witness. They refuse to even notify the FBI!”

  This time I did arch an eyebrow. “Witness?”

  Marty Gebhard said, “Donald found a man who was drinking coffee in the mall Starbucks.”

  I looked from one of them to the other. “This man says he saw her kidnapped?”

  Donald nodded eagerly. “He saw her talking to two men, and no one’s seen her since.”

  Talking isn’t kidnapping. I could see fro
m Gebhard’s carefully neutral expression that he knew it if Donald Lewis didn’t. “Why don’t the police believe the witness?”

  “I don’t know,” Lewis was nearly wringing his hands.

  “I take it no ransom notes, no contacts, no demands?”

  Lewis said darkly, “Those aren’t the only reasons for kidnapping a woman.”

  “No,” I said, “they’re not. All right, exactly what’s your relationship to Ms. Xiang, Mr. Lewis?”

  “We’re going to be married.” A stubborn tone of defiance joined the distress in his voice.

  That told me Xiang Fei might have a different slant on their relationship, and Gebhard knew it, hence the difficult and delicate part. He’d probably told Donald, as gently as he could, that Xiang Fei had simply gone off somewhere as college girls will, and the police had told him there was no evidence of a kidnapping. Donald refused to be convinced, and Gebhard hoped if a bonafide private detective backed him and the cops, Donald might finally believe and give up the idea.

  I obliged. “I’ll be honest, Donald. The police take even a whiff of kidnapping seriously. They’re obviously not taking this kidnapping at all seriously. It looks to me like your girlfriend has simply gone on a trip, and she’ll call when she’s ready. Marriage jitters, second thoughts, last fling, research, who knows? I get five hundred a day plus expenses and extras. This is going to cost you a large nut, and I don’t think you’ll get your money’s worth.”

  Donald Lewis’s eyes flashed anger. “You’re wrong! I want her found! I want whoever kidnapped her caught! Money doesn’t matter.”

  From the way he said it, there was a lot of money behind Donald. A privileged rich boy. It was there in the quick anger, the stubborn refusal to believe Xiang Fei could possibly have gone anywhere without him, the requests that were more like commands. The Metro cops must have loved him.

  “She’s never been gone for a week before?”

  “Not without telling me when and where and how long. We had a dinner and movie date for the day after she vanished. She’d never break it without letting me know why.”

  Even if their relationship were nothing more than a college romance for a girl heady with the discovery of a different world, most college girls would have at least told him before they vanished for a week.

  I asked Gebhard. “Is she missing classes?”

  “She isn’t taking classes this quarter. She’s finishing her dissertation.”

  “Does she need to do more research?”

  “No, not really,” Gebhard admitted grudgingly.

  So she should be at her computer. “You have a photo, Mr. Lewis?”

  He dug into his wallet and handed me a small snapshot of the two of them in front of some building. Donald was easily six-three, and the top of the girl’s long, thick black hair came inches above his shoulder. Xiang Fei was tall by Chinese standards, probably five-ten. The oriental fold that gives Asian eyes the appearance of being slanted was barely there. She was lean, but not thin. Sturdy. Donald grinned in the picture like a schoolboy with a prized possession. Xiang Fei looked at the camera with a half-mocking smile.

  That smile, and the photo, told me a great deal. Xiang Fei wasn’t a beautiful girl, she was a handsome woman. A woman who didn’t look the type to break a date or walk out on a man without explaining. It wasn’t much, but factor in the witness, and Donald Lewis’s anguish, and it rated a look.

  I’ve learned to pay attention to emotions.

  “Write a check for two days in advance. The bill comes later.”

  Donald quickly wrote out a check for two thousand, more than I’d asked, gave me Xiang Fei’s address, and had to leave for a class. Marty Gebhard watched the closed door to his office as if he thought Lewis might still be standing outside with his ear pressed against it.

  I asked, “How old is Xiang Fei?”

  He nodded. He’d been waiting for the question. “She’s twenty-nine, has a master’s from Cambridge, and knows who she is. Donald’s twenty-four, has too much money, and no idea what he is or wants to be. She’s a strong woman. That’s powerfully attractive to some men, and Donald’s one of them. I don’t think—”

  “Would you,” I interrupted, “be another, Marty?”

  He thought about it. “I find her fascinating. The determined way she goes about everything. But I’m your standard quiet professor. A very nice wife, peace, and a routine low-stakes poker game suits me fine.”

  “But not Donald?”

  “Donald’s father is a self-made billionaire, and a powerful personality. His mother’s a gentle woman. I think Xiang Fei is the surrogate mother Donald always wanted to stand up against his dad for him.” He shrugged. “Sorry. Pop psychology. A simplified guess at a far more complex situation.”

  “But you think their ‘marriage’ is mostly in Donald’s mind?”

  “Oh, Xiang Fei seems to like him a lot. Why, I have no idea. But I don’t think he’s anywhere in her intended future, Dan.”

  “You know what she intends her future to be?”

  “I know it won’t include marriage to a spoiled American boy.”

  “Not even for money?”

  “That would be the last reason for Xiang Fei to do anything.”

  “You’ve thought a lot about her,” I said.

  He nodded. “She has that effect on people. She either fascinates them, or they’re afraid of her.”

  I’d only seen a photo of Xiang Fei, but she was intriguing the hell out of me.

  “Okay, she’s Chinese, smart, strong, and twenty-nine. What else? What did she do in China? Who are her parents?”

  “She doesn’t talk about herself or her past. Or China, for that matter. Her records give only her parent’s names and occupations, and her academic transcript. Her father is Zhao Zhongwu, a minor civil servant, and her mother is Zhao Sooling. Xiang did her secondary school in Chongqing, her undergraduate in Beijing, and her M.Phil. at Cambridge.”

  “Why isn’t her family name the same as her father’s?”

  “I have no idea.”

  After agreeing to get together with him and Carol at least for drinks, I left Marty staring into space as if seeing Xiang Fei, wherever she was.

  Xiang Fei lived in a low-rise apartment building on a shaded back street near the university. The apartment she shared with two other girls was on the second floor facing the street. Her roommates were home, drinking beer and watching television. The police had talked to them. They weren’t too worried about Xiang Fei, but they were a little worried.

  Sally Fanelli said, “Like, she still had laundry in the dryer. I mean, she was doing her laundry, and needed a coffee fix, you know?”

  Nancy Devlin added. “We were out of coffee, so she went to the mall Starbucks. She was supposed to bring us back double lattes.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “She never came back.”

  “What about Donald? Did she have a date with him the next day?”

  Sally nodded. “He took her expensive places. She liked that, but, there was, like, you know, no spark.”

  “It’s ‘cause she’s older,” Devlin explained with the wisdom of nineteen.

  “Can I see her bedroom?”

  “Sure,” Devlin said.

  “You won’t find much,” Sally said. “The cops took most of her things.”

  “Really?” If the Metro police didn’t believe in the kidnapping, why take her possessions?

  Las Vegas Metropolitan Police have various geographical commands, sort of like super New York precincts. I drove to the downtown command where I knew one detective lieutenant. I’d only been to Vegas on the job twice before, both missing girls cases. (Girls tend to run to Vegas or Hollywood. Boys head for Mexico or Malibu. Both escape to New York. They’re the biggest dreamers.) I’d found one girl, and had worked with Chris Yost both times.

  He grinned when I walked in, and waved me to a chair in his cluttered cubicle. “What’s her name this time, Fortune?”

  “Xiang Fe
i. She’s a Chinese student—”

  The grinned vanished abruptly. “I know who the hell she is. What’s your interest in her?”

  “Hired by her fiancé.”

  “Lewis?” Yost leaned back in his chair, shook his head. “Hell, I don’t believe for a damned second he’s anyone’s fiancé except in his dreams.”

  “You also don’t believe the woman’s been kidnapped.”

  He gave me a pitying look. “Don’t tell me you believe his fairy tale? No ransom note, no political demands, no damn contact at all? Come on, Fortune. The kid’s been dumped and doesn’t want to believe it.”

  “The witness?”

  Yost snorted in derision. “Some guy having a cappuccino inside Starbucks sees a woman who might have been Xiang Fei talking to a couple of guys. Talking, that’s all. No grabbing and shoving into a car, no struggle, not even an argument. He turns his attention to something else, and when he looks back all three are gone. How long he looked away, who knows? Damn it, Fortune, he didn’t know if the woman was Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, or Russian! He can’t even say what the two guys looked like except they were both white.”

  “Then why pick up all her stuff?”

  “You know damn well we have to act on any report of kidnapping. We talked to the Lewis kid, her roommates, and her professors. We hauled in her things looking for a motive. We talked to the alleged witness. We canvassed the scene. We came up empty. It never happened. She’s off somewhere on her own.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Lieutenant. She’s twenty-nine, a woman, not a girl. Everyone says she’s steady, responsible, serious. She stands up a guy she’s at least dating regularly. She leaves laundry she’s doing in the dryer. She’s supposed to bring coffee back to her roommates, and doesn’t. She’s been gone a week without telling anyone where or why. She talks to two guys, and hasn’t been seen since. I have questions.”