Private Vegas (Private 9)

“Don’t move your feet,” I said.

There was an opening in front of me and I stepped hard on the gas, cut out of the lot, and headed to the office. I was livid. My brother saying that Private was rightfully his was the crock-of-shit delusion that drove him.

Tommy was Dad’s favorite, sure. But Dad had given Private to me and I’d built it up from an empty wreck of a company to a profitable and respected global operation—despite my father’s conviction and then, some time later, his death by shiv in the showers at Corcoran.

I wondered if Tommy was even sane.

The Mercedes seemed to drive itself downtown to Figueroa. I turned into the lot under our building and took the lower-level entrance through the lab.

I passed Mo-bot’s incense-perfumed cave of an office on my way to see Sci. All of Mo’s computer monitors were glowing, and she was doing a funky-chicken dance with her back to the door. Acting like a little kid.

“What are we celebrating?” I said.

She screamed, startled. Then she said, “Oh, Jack. I’ve got something you’ll want to see. This is Barbie Summers. She’s Tule Archer’s former roommate.”

A photo filled the screen: a leggy blond showgirl wearing a feathered corset, a pair of ten-inch stilettos, and not much else.

“Show me everything,” I said.

“I knew you’d say that,” said Mo-bot.

Chapter 69

MO-BOT WAS DOING her best for Hal Archer. He was obnoxious, but he was also a client who was under arrest for murdering his wife. Archer claimed he’d killed his wife in self-defense, but when the jury saw the pictures of the innumerable knife wounds on Tule’s small body, Hal wouldn’t stand a chance.

Mo-bot offered her chair and I sat down, clicked through the files she had set up, and scanned Barbie Summers’s bio.

She’d grown up in central Florida, dropped out of college, moved to Las Vegas, and had had assorted hand-to-mouth jobs. Her arrest record was a star field of infractions: assault, prostitution, obstruction. And then there was a charge for insurance fraud that hadn’t stuck.

Somehow she cleaned up her act enough to waitress at the Black Diamond Hotel and Casino. She learned to dance with a pole and moved up to the Madagascar Salon as a VIP cocktail waitress. I put her age at about twenty-three.

Mo said, “She’s a pi

ece of work. All kinds of high jinks out in Vegas. But she married well, same sort of deal Tule got.”

Mo clicked on another set of documents, and I scanned them quickly as they opened in a luminous array of virtual pages that followed the movements of my eyes.

I read that a year ago, Barbie Summers had married a very prominent businessman: Bryce Cooper of Aspen. Cooper was eighty years old, a fifty-million-dollar-a-year executive in the corporate-jet manufacturing business. Another wealthy dude marrying a Vegas dolly.

Mo had annotated the document to say that Cooper paid off his four kids so that they wouldn’t complain about his new bride and try to ruin his happy marriage.

Then Mo brought up the photos of Mr. Cooper. The first batch were corporate shots: Cooper shaking hands with Dick Cheney and various industrialists and movie stars. Mo showed me candid shots of Bryce Cooper competing in a statewide motorbike race, playing football with grandkids on the lawn of his enormous beam-and-glass-construction home. Then, in the past year and a half, there were a lot of pictures of Cooper on the ski slopes with a busty pink-and-platinum-haired former hoofer I recognized as Barbie Summers.

Cooper had a boyish quality—flyaway eyebrows and a wide smile. I thought I would like him.

“What do you think about all this?” I asked Mo.

“Two dolly girls, two rich old men, two marriages with the much older, very rich men within weeks of each other. I see a pattern. Don’t you?”

I saw it.

If Hal Archer’s story that Tule had threatened to kill him was true, her motive had to be money. If so, it wasn’t a stretch to think that Tule’s former roommate Barbie Summers Cooper might have the same idea.

I stood up, gave Mo a hug, and said, “You. Are. Fantastic.”

“I know,” she said, grinning up at me. “Here’s Mr. Cooper’s phone number.”

I said, “There’s going to be a little extra dough in your paycheck, you know.”