Private Vegas (Private 9)

I WAS ON the phone with Justine when Mo-bot danced into my office. I signaled to her to sit down, told Justine that I was sorry, that she and Scotty should come back to the office.

I was shocked by Capshaw’s suicide, rocked by how shit just happened. It didn’t require global events or an evil twin. Just a single, unintended event—in this case, that Capshaw hadn’t first looked to see if someone was passed out in the backseat of a car before he decided to fire up his protest.

It was terrible to imagine what Capshaw had been thinking when he chained himself to his steering wheel so that he couldn’t change his mind at the last minute. His screen name, Zero Sum, referred to a game or an interaction where if one side won, the other lost by an equivalent amount, equaling zero.

So Capshaw took his own life to balance the loss of Maeve Wilkinson’s. And now, two teenagers were dead. Both deaths were regrettable.

I said to Mo-bot, “The car bomber confessed. Then he blew himself up on streaming video.”

> “What? No.”

“It was…horrific.”

I thought about my brother, that he’d had nothing to do with torching my car. But even if I was paranoid, I couldn’t shake the feeling. I would still bet an arm and a leg that Tommy was planning to hurt me.

I asked Mo what brought her into the office on a weekend and she told me that she’d been doing some work for our client Hal Archer, looking into Tule’s history to see if she could find anything that might help with Hal’s defense.

“I uncovered this guy,” she said, showing me a photo on her iPhone of a man in his early twenties with bland, unremarkable features. He could have been a corporate CEO or a serial killer or the driver of a delivery van.

Mo-bot said, “This is Lester Olsen. He graduated from MIT with a four-point-eight GPA. He has a degree in engineering, but instead of going into industry, he went to the land of no clocks and fast money.”

“He counts cards in Vegas?”

Mo-bot grinned, said, “Very good, Jack,” then went on. “He made a few million at poker by the time he was twenty-three, then, one dark night, the LVMPD found him unconscious in an alley with ten broken fingers and the ace of spades in his shirt breast pocket. There was some writing on the card: ‘This is your last hand.’

“So, the reason I’m telling you about this guy is that after his poker career ended, he still showed up in the casinos. Lost money at craps, but he was friendly with the showgirls. And he started a new business. He became a kind of consultant. Teaching girls how to marry a billionaire.”

I said, “And you’re thinking Hal’s a billionaire who married a Vegas showgirl who’d been trained to catch him?”

My assistant, Val Kenney, came in with my Red Bull, said, “You can learn how to marry a billionaire? I have to hear this.”

I asked Val to stay and asked Mo to go on.

Mo said, “Okay, so, Lester Olsen charges ten thousand dollars for the six-week course, classroom version. But he’s got a higher-end course, more exclusive, no rates mentioned. His advertising promises ‘You will marry a wealthy man. Money-back guarantee.’

“So I burrowed into Tule’s phone logs,” Mo said. “I found that Olsen called Tule five times a week for about three months before she married Hal and he kept calling her throughout her marriage, including the day she died. And what do you know? Mr. Olsen had been calling Barbie Summers Cooper too, same time frame and frequency. He’s still calling her.”

Val asked, “Why is he calling these women after the wedding?”

“Maybe he’s on retainer,” I said. “Maybe he gets a percentage of the take?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Val said. “I mean, really, Jack. What were Tule and Olsen doing after the nuptials? What are Barbie Cooper and Olsen up to now?”

“What are you thinking, Val?”

“I should go undercover. I should sign up for Olsen’s high-end course and let him coach me. See what I can find out. I’m single. I’m primed for this. If Mo-bot can give me a fake history, how is this not doable?”

Val was ambitious and she was smart. I had 100 percent confidence in her.

“Okay,” I said. “You and Mo work out the details.”

Chapter 80

GOZAN REMARI HAD fallen hard for Rodeo Drive, but the Grove put Rodeo in the shade. This outdoor mall was delicious and ostentatious in the unique American way that he both loved and abhorred.

Mostly, he loved it: the wide avenue lined with excellent shops and restaurants, the electric trolley that zipped up and down between First Street and the Grove and the Farmers’ Market, taking tourists through this sugarcoated Disneyland of excess.

And then, at the center of everything, there was this.