Sin City Homicide

34

Mindi had work to finish up before her shift ended, so Stanton was alone all morning. He performed his usual routine before going down to the buffet for breakfast. He sat at the table near the window and placed his iPhone in front of him. He was expecting a call, and he hoped it would come that day.

Out of the corner of his eye, as he took a bite of waffle with butter and syrup, he saw a young couple fighting. They were arguing about mundane things that they probably wouldn’t remember the next day, as young people did. Stanton suddenly felt a sharp pang of loss as he thought about his ex-wife and the day they had gotten married. She had looked stunning, her exposed shoulders, tan and muscular, contrasting against the white dress. He thought of the day they had found out she was pregnant with their first son. They had gone out for ice cream but were so broke they could only afford one child-sized scoop to share. He thought of the day he received his doctorate from the University of Utah. She had saved all year to take him on a four-day vacation to Hawaii afterward.

He wondered what had happened to those times. They had flown by so quickly, like an arrow shooting away from him. They faded in the distance and were gone before he even knew what he’d truly had.

According to modern personality theory, every individual has a five-tier personality, and one trait dominates the personality matrix: openness to experience, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extroversion. He understood that each individual could be categorized under one dimension only, even though he or she may have traits from others.

Those open to experience were artistic, creative, and full of ideas. They focused on the big picture and paid little attention to details. Neurotics worried and were moody, unable to control their emotions. They were always ruled by emotions like anger, fear, frustration, and negativity. Conscientious personalities were organized and efficient, and got things done immediately, while agreeable personalities empathized with people and tended to be cooperative rather than combative. Extroverts were marked with a tendency to seek out stimulation, particularly stimulation from others. They were always the life of the party and could scarcely handle being alone.

Stanton believed that couples whose dimensions of personality were in line had the perfect relationships. Two neurotics would be mutually self-destructive and should not be together under any circumstance, but an extrovert would perfectly complement someone open to experience. Stanton had determined that he was an agreeable personality, and Melissa was the apex open personality, always willing to jump first and try new things. They helped each other in ways that they hadn’t experienced before. Stanton was able to read her moods and respond accordingly. Melissa helped him to open up and be less preoccupied with the minds of others. Psychologically, they were a perfect fit.

Stanton had learned, however, that psychology didn’t determine everything about what makes human beings who they are. There’s something else that can’t be quantified, deduced, or analyzed: the soul. On a deep level, the deepest possible, he and Melissa simply were not soulmates. It had taken them more than a dozen years to figure it out.

Stanton’s cell phone buzzed, and he stared at it for a moment before answering. “Hello?”

“Yeah,” a male voice said, “is this… is this Jon?”

“This is Jon Stanton.”

“This is, um, Tyler. Tyler from yesterday. You came and-”

“I remember you, Tyler. I’m glad you called.”

“Yeah, yeah. Well, um, hey, do you have… I mean, can we talk?”

“Sure. Do you want me to pick you up?”

“No, no definitely not. I’m coming to Vegas to meet up with some people. Can you meet me in, like, two hours?”

“Sure. Where would you like to meet?”

“There’s a restaurant called, um, Philly’s. Yeah, Philly’s. Wait… yeah, Philly’s.”

Stanton could hear the fatigue in Tyler’s voice. The methamphetamine was wearing off. The binge he had been on for however many days was winding down, and his mind was a bowl of mush. “There’s no deadline, Tyler. If you need to sleep first-”

“I don’t need to sleep. No, I don’t need to sleep. I just wanna get this over with.”

“Okay. I’ll meet you at Philly’s in two hours.”

“Okay, okay, better make it three hours. Okay?”

“Okay. See you there.”

Stanton hung up the phone. He dialed Mindi’s number.

“Hey, I’m meeting Tyler at Philly’s in three hours,” he told her.

“No way! I have a couple things to finish up. I’ll be down to pick you up right after. Can you occupy yourself for a couple of hours?”

“I’ll be fine. Don’t worry. Could you do me a favor, though? I want to look through Marty Scheffield’s file. Just the photos and the forensics reports.”

“Not a problem. See you in a bit.”

Stanton finished his breakfast and left a large tip before heading out to the casino floor. He put his hands behind his back, a position that he found comfortable for thinking, and walked circles around the casino. The ding of the machines and hoots and hollers of the players eventually melted away from his conscious thoughts, leaving only his voice in a slow, comforting monotone, organizing the bits of evidence.

Tyler had something extremely important for him. In neo-Nazi organizations, cooperating with the police was a certain death sentence. He wouldn’t do it lightly, or if he had irrelevant information. But something else was bothering Stanton: Marty Scheffield’s death.

Despite having known him for only a short while, Stanton had liked Marty. He was open and had no deceit in him, which was a rare trait. Stanton hadn’t really dealt with Marty’s death. It was in the back of his mind, processing with the other bits of information he’d gathered during his time in this city. He felt he owed Marty something: convicting the man who had ended his life.

Within an hour, his eyes were red and watering from the cigarette smoke, and he had to go outside. He walked down the street, absently staring at the massive man-made constructions of Venice, Paris, New York, the Pyramids, and old Hollywood. A giant screen was playing a video of a magician hypnotizing a couple into thinking they were dogs.

He walked past Mandalay Bay, crossed the street, and went down the other side. It was early morning-far earlier than he would have liked to have been up-but the people were still getting drunk at the casino bars. Street peddlers were attempting to hand out pornography. Two women in mini-skirts and fishnet stockings walked out of a hotel in front of him. One commented on how repulsive the man she had just had sex with was.

When he returned to the Mirage, Mindi was there, waiting for him. He climbed into her car, and she handed him a Diet Coke as she pulled away onto Las Vegas Boulevard.

“Got what you wanted.” She reached into her backseat and grabbed a file. She handed it to him and turned down the radio, which was blaring Def Leppard.

Inside the file, a paperclip held over a dozen enlarged, neatly stacked photos. The first was the image of the kicked-in window in Marty’s basement. The next was of the glass that had spread over the carpets. The rest were different angles of Marty’s position and his head wound. The two final photos were of cushions that had been thrown on the ground in the living room and a chest of drawers in the bedroom, all its contents emptied onto the floor.

Stanton flipped through the forensics reports. Three techs had spent a total of fifty-four hours in the house, an amount of time reserved for the loss of one of their own. They had found almost nothing-no dirt, debris transfer, fingerprints, or shoe prints. No fibers, DNA, or even gunpowder residue, except on Marty’s skull.

“Isn’t that weird?” Mindi asked, not taking her eyes off the road. “They didn’t find anything but those drawers and the cushions. You think there was a struggle?”

“All the drawers wouldn’t be pulled out in a struggle. They would’ve just knocked the whole thing over.” Stanton closed the file. “He was looking for something. The fact that the rest of the house wasn’t a mess means I interrupted him.”

“What was he looking for?”

“I don’t know. But if I interrupted him, it means it might still be there.”

Mindi’s phone rang, and she answered. “Hello? Oh, hey.… Yeah, yeah.… Lemme ask.” She turned to Stanton and said, “That’s the lab. They’re wondering when we want to come see what they found on that DVD you got from the Steed’s house.”

“Anytime.”

“We’ll be there at five o’ clock tonight,” she said into her phone. “Really? Can’t you stay later than that? … Okay, well, we’ll be by at two, then.… Okay, bye.”

“Computer guys don’t work long hours.”

“We’re lucky just to see them. Their government contracts are the lowest-paying contracts they have, and we usually have to wait until they’re done with their regular clients’ work to get anything. They did a special favor for us because the CFO or somebody went to business school with Daniel Steed.”

She drove for another ten minutes through areas filled with cookie-cutter homes and strip malls. One strip mall caught Stanton’s attention. It consisted of a tattoo parlor, alternative clothing stores, a secondhand store, and a vinyl record shop. Two girls, no older than eighteen, were standing on a corner near the buildings, wearing shorts and tank tops, smoking while cars honked at them.

Mindi finally came to a stop in front of a house that had been turned into a makeshift restaurant. A worn sign hanging over the front porch read PHILLY’S. The patio was packed tightly with customers. Stanton and Mindi got out and walked up the steps to the interior, which still looked like the living room of an old house, except that it had tables instead of couches. The hostess sat them in a semicircular booth in the corner.

“Well, we’re right on time. I can’t imagine a meth-head’s gonna be punctual.”

“Probably not,” Stanton said.

“Mind if we order an appetizer? I’m starving.”

They ordered potato skins with cheese and sour cream and two apple juices. Philly’s served peanuts for free, and Stanton picked at them slowly and chewed without noticing the taste.

“You still here?” Mindi asked.

“What?”

“You looked like you were a million miles away.”

“I was just thinking. Wondering if Marty would still be alive if I’d never come out here.”

“Hey, you cannot think like that. That bullshit will eat you up. You surprised that guy and stopped whatever he was doing, which means he would’ve done it anyway, with or without you. Don’t beat yourself up over this.” She stuffed half a potato skin into her mouth and wiped her lips with a napkin. “Can I tell you something? I feel like you were pissed at me because I wasn’t always nice to Marty. You don’t know the whole story.”

“What is the whole story?”

“Before the accident… well, he was a fucking asshole. He was always hitting on me and grabbing me. He cornered me once in his office after hours and tried to make out with me. When I was drunk at a New Year’s party… when I was drunk at a New Year’s party, he tried to rape me. He got my pants down, and I screamed so loud that he got off and left, but a few more drinks, and I would’ve been out of it. And he would’ve done it. He was always coming into the women’s showers. I never saw it, but I heard from people that he would bust hookers just to get blowjobs from them and then let them go.

“After the accident, he was a lot different. It was like he got his innocence back or something. But I couldn’t forget what he was like before. I was never able to forgive him.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“We all make mistakes.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you ever think you made the wrong choice? That you should’a just stuck to the academic world?”

“Sometimes. I think everyone second-guesses their career at some point. It definitely would’ve been easier on my marriage. But there was something about it. I don’t know. It was like a cave. People in academia seclude themselves. I think they do it on purpose. They don’t want to know what’s going on in the real world or deal with its problems. They want to work on theories and leave the application out of it. That never settled well with me. I’m not a Marxist by any means, but he had a point when he said that philosophers just want to interpret the world when the point is to change it.”

“My mom always pushed me to become a nurse. She thought that being a cop was only for men. She was really one of those people who thought men do some things, women do others, and that’s the way we’re born. I hated that because she would never come to my baseball games or wrestling matches.”

“You wrestled?”

“Hell yes, I wrestled. I kicked ass at it, too. If they had a women’s wrestling team at UNLV, I would’ve definitely been on it.” She suddenly looked disturbed, as though an unwanted thought had pushed its way into her mind. “You seem like a really nice guy, Jon. I wish-”

“Officer Jon.”

Stanton looked up and saw Tyler walking toward them. He looked worse than he had yesterday, as if he’d already aged. His skin was green and sagging, and he had dark circles under his eyes. He sat down at the booth without being invited to do so and leaned his head back against the cushions.

“Do you want something to eat?” Stanton asked.

“Yeah, man. Definitely. I’ll take a burger, some tacos, and fries.”

Stanton called the waiter over and ordered. After the waiter left, Stanton waited a few moments before speaking again. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Tyler?”

“Freddy. First off, man, you can’t bring my name into this. I’m fuckin’ serious. They will cut off my balls and feed ’em to me.”

“We never met. I promise you.”

“Brody and them, they was the ones that did Freddy.”

“They killed Fredrick Steed?” Mindi chimed in. “Why?”

“They was paid to do it. A lotta money, I guess.”

“Who paid them?” Stanton asked.

“I don’t know. Brody talked to ’em. They didn’t tell me until they was gonna do it ’cause they knew we was tight. When you spend time in a cell, you grow tight like we was. Freddy wasn’t bad. He didn’t deserve to go out like that. Check this out, though-they made me record it.”

“On what?”

“My cell phone.”

“Do you have it here?”

“Yeah.” He pulled out his phone and fiddled with it for a few seconds. He turned it toward Stanton.

The screen was dark at first. An interior light came on, revealing a figure in the driver’s seat of a car. His hands were tied to the steering wheel with a thin rope, and a piece went around his neck and wrapped around the car seat. Even though his eyes were bulging from being choked and his cheeks were puffy and red, Stanton could see the countenance of the little boy from the video he had watched.

Brody came into view. “You see what happens when you fuck with the Brotherhood?”

He poured lighter fluid over Freddie’s face then emptied a gas can over him. Freddie was suffocating from the fumes and coughing violently. Brody threw the can into the passenger seat and pulled out a book of matches. Freddie pleaded through his coughs and wheezing. Brody grinned and threw a lighted match into the car.

The intense light from the flames made the screen go white. Freddie’s muffled screams were audible. Stanton could hear Tyler swearing, yelling, and crying. The video ended.

“You stood by and watched while they did that to your friend?” Mindi asked.

“There was like twenty people there, and everybody’s got guns. What was I supposed to do?”

“You were supposed to stop them. You’re a coward.”

“Mindi,” Stanton said softly. His eyes locked on hers briefly; she exhaled loudly and sat back in her seat, folding her arms. “Tyler,” he said turning toward the young man, “I need your phone.”

“What for?”

“I need to authenticate the video and make copies. I’ll get it back to you as soon as possible.”

“What am I gonna do without a phone? I need my phone.”

Stanton pulled the phone out of his reach. “I’ll pay you for it. Enough to get a new phone, but I need to take this one with me. It’s evidence.”

“Well, I ain’t gonna be in trouble, right? I mean, I came to you guys and brought you the video and everything.”

“I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”

“That don’t sound like I’m not getting in trouble. You promised you’d keep my name out of it.”

“No prosecutor is going to pursue a case against you for-”

“Pursue a case against me!” he shouted. “Fuck you. You fucking said you wouldn’t say my name.”

“I will do everything-we will do everything we can to protect you. If I have to, I’ll find another way. I keep my promises.”

Tyler stood up and pushed his middle finger into Stanton’s face. “Fuck you!” He stormed out of the restaurant just as his food arrived.

“That went pretty well,” Mindi said.

Stanton tucked the phone into his pocket. “He’s going to have to testify in court against Brody. They’ll need him to lay the foundation for the video.”

“He’s not going to like that.”

“If they’re smart, they’ll give the case to the Feds to prosecute under RICO. I’ll bet Tyler knows everything about their drug trafficking and prostitution rings. The Feds’ll give him immunity and a new life somewhere else. He can start over.”

“There’s no starting over for them, Jon. He can be a meth addict in Billings, Montana, as easily as Las Vegas.”

“It’ll at least give him a chance.”

She shrugged and took a bite of Tyler’s burger. “So, what next?”

Stanton took out some cash and left it on the table. “Take it with us. I need to see your captain.”