Cold, Dead Case

It was nearly 3am and I was digging a hole in the middle of the Nevada desert on some hideous blue planet. I hadn't eaten or slept in almost two days. Not a drop of alcohol for eight hours. I was running on empty after that two-day standoff with Rin Chen, another Chinese mafia goon. He had barricaded himself in the bathroom of the Chinese restaurant his recently deceased uncle owned and he had my wallet in there with him.

So anyway, he was dead and I was in the process of digging his grave when I happened upon another deserted body. It had obviously been there at least ten years based on my sober analysis of the bones. I dug a foot east to find some identification and found the answer to an eighteen-year-old question: Where was Timothy Anderson?

It was my first case. I was just a kid, a teenager with no P.I. license and no business sticking my nose in a missing persons case. Timothy was the son of Vegas developer John Anderson. He disappeared after a night of clubbing with a showgirl. The cops found half a kilo of coke in his car. Sex, drugs and money... it was too much for an aspiring P.I. to pass up.

It was also the first time I met Tommy the Tooth. This was before he had his tour guide business set up. Like me, he was young, crazy and never knew his mom. Tommy and I were both regulars at MacPhearson's pub. It had whisky, slot machines and a basement with a wide variety of classy hookers, plus they didn't bother with  ID. Timothy Anderson, whom I'd never met personally, also frequented the pub.

The night before he disappeared, I was at the pub, as usual, but Timothy had been at the Rio with a hot date. Per the police reports, her name was Jemma Browning. She told the cops Timothy had a few too many, got handzy with her and she made him drop her off at home. She said he drove off angrily and she hadn't seen him since. If memory serves me, she was working a show at the Stardust.

A couple of nights after the disappearance I started asking questions around the pub. That’s when I met Tommy. He’d been asking questions too, because he was aspiring to be the guy with all the intel. I didn’t know people aspired to that sort of thing. It takes all kinds. We took it upon ourselves to break into Browning’s dressing room at the Stardust.

We figured the dressing rooms would be mostly empty during the day, so we went around eleven in the morning. We met up at Stardust buffett to discuss our plans. We didn’t have any money to bribe security, so we’d have to be clever.

Getting backstage was easy, but the door to the dressing rooms was guarded by a lone, monstrous bouncer. I turned from one corner and asked him for directions and Tommy turned the other corner and tried sneaking in behind him. Fucking Tommy's foot bumped into the door as he opened it. The hideous bouncer turned to catch him and I shot him in the back with a taser. This was back when I carried a taser. It seems stupid now because women are usually the ones who carry tasers around and shoot me with them. I've never been shot with a taser by another man. I'd rather be shot dead than poop my pants at someone else's will again.

We found Jemma's dressing room and sleuthed around a bit. Jemma had a picture of herself and a wealthy older man who also happened to be on the board of directors of one of John Anderson's leading competitors. For eight months, I focused all my attention on this guy, but it turned out to be a dead end. His name was Albert Silverman. I tailed him all around town whenever I could borrow my mom’s car, I even tried to sneak onto his compound once disguised as a pizza delivery boy.

“Everyone knows Jews don’t eat pizza!” Tommy said when I told him of my failure.

“I thought it was Asians who didn’t eat pizza.”

“Yeah, Asians and Jews.”

Eventually, it was announced that Anderson and Silverman had been secretly working on a joint development deal for over a year. Apparently they’d ended their rivalry and become partners, just like Siskel and Ebert. I had to turn my attention elsewhere. Unfortunately for Timothy, elsewhere never led me down the road to solving this case.

I searched for clues around old Tim’s bones for a while and came up with nothing. All he had in his wallet was a drivers license, a picture of him with some cute blonde and an obscene amount of dirt for some reason. Dumbass. I threw Rin Chen into Timothy’s expanded home-in-the-ground and went back to my office for two beers, two shots, a steak and a nice, long nap.

I woke up at 2pm. I made myself a coffee cocktail and I walked two blocks east and waited for Tommy to roll by on his daily tour. He picked me up and we toured up and down the strip and over by old Vegas. I must confess I learned a lot of things about Vegas from Tommy during that tour. He also seems a little obsessed with Siegfried & Roy. He knew family history, dates, where and how they got the tigers. He knew things about their mansion, their fashion preferences, their relaxation techniques. He knew where they went to school and what they studied and why. He could name every car ever owned by both Siegfried and Roy. He knew where they shopped, which bedroom was theirs, what the sink in the bathroom in the master bedroom looked like. In all the years I’ve known him he’s never let it slip out.

After the tour, I told Tommy what I’d found. “You have to show me!” he said. “I need to see the body for myself.”

“It’s in an unmarked grave in the middle of the Nevada desert. That I dug while I was tired, anemic and sober. We’d never find it again.”

“Shit.” He paused. “You should have brought it home with you.”

“You think I was gonna drive all the way out to the desert with a body in my trunk, dig a hole, and bury the body just so I can drive home with a different body in the trunk?” I shook my head. “ Anyway, I got this,” I showed him the picture of the cute blonde.

“That’s Jennifer Winters. She was an intern at Channel 5 Vegas back then. Got a job doing the weather in Provo, I think. Man I had a crush on her.”

The next morning we loaded up the Buick with beer and jerky and headed to Provo. Jennifer was now working as an executive at the tv station. Tommy had gone on the computer and got all sorts of Intel on her on the way there. We parked in the station lot by her car and waited. When she came out, Tommy distracted her and I snuck up and knocked her unconscious from behind. We took her to a secluded area and made her spill the beans.

Jennifer said she loved him, but I could tell right away she was lying. We kept her alone with us for 30 hours. Finally, the truth came out: Timothy had stolen a considerable amount of cocaine from her tv station boss in Vegas, Paul Delaterre. She said he planned on using it to frame Albert Silverman so that the deal with his dad would fall through. I'm still not sure what the story is there, but she was plenty clear about who killed poor Timothy Anderson. So Tommy and I went home and made plans to blackmail Paul Delaterre. Revenge is awesome, but blackmailing someone is the greatest feeling in the world.

PRESSURING THE PROP COMIC

I woke up tied to a chair in a dark room. I was pretty sure my nose was busted, again, it was never good for much else. No broken arms, legs or ribs though, so what kind of trouble was I in? I figured if I kept quiet I stood a chance of getting free and escaping, but then I sneezed. A door opened and light flooded in, temporarily blinding me. The husky silhouette of a man stood in the doorway. "Jim Belushi?" I asked. The chuckle that answered was strangely high-pitched. And then I remembered the case I was working on involved a high-profile, powerful celebrity, the likes of which I'd never dealt with before.

"Carrot Top wants you brought to his office." I remember tangling with this body guard before, that's probably what got me here, I couldn't be sure. But I was sure of one thing, whiskey and burritos is a bad mix if you plan on being tied up all night, and nowhere near a bathroom. Squeaky grabbed me, chair and all, and dragged me out into the hall. Posters from Carrot Top's Vegas shows lined the walls, as well as movie posters with Top's face superimposed over the leading men.

Top's office was equally absurd. It was like a child's bedroom; ridiculous, colorful props littered the floor. Fast food wrappers, dirty underwear, semen stains all over the walls. "You mad man! Why!? Why would you wear that see-through shirt and those tight pants?" I asked.

"You think you're funny?" he asked. "This is funny." He pulled out a gun with a mirror on it. "So you can see yourself get shot!" he laughed. And then he shot me.

It all started a week ago, when these two beautiful showgirls walked into my office. One of them had a bad case of herpes, but that's another story. According to them, Carrot Top broke into their dressing room in the wee hours of the morning and stole all their thongs. He then went on to hit every thong in town. "Is he wearing them or making soup?" I asked. I knew what I'd be doing with those panties.

This was bad news, Vegas without thongs is like a hooker with no vagina. I went down to the wholesale clothing district to talk to Sal Silvio, the Vegas clothes king. Sal was as queer as a mega-church preacher, but he's a good guy. "I need the story on all the thongs, Sal."

"And I need a good stiff Zima to wrap my lips around. Care for a drink, Genie?"

"Scotch and ice, preferably non-stiff, just in case it means something different than what I think it means."

"It does!" he shouted at maximum gay. He told me the story of Carrot Top's newest project: a sports car covered in thongs for picking up sluts in.

"I fucking hate Carrot Top!" I said.

"Me too," Sal said. "He's got a gorgeous body, but he's total butter face."

I figured I'd go by the Carrot Top compound and see what's what. That's when I met Squeaky. Now here I am tied up and shot. I'd been hoping this was some kind of Vegas prank show fucking with me, but no such luck.

After a good ten minutes of struggling I finally wriggled my hands free and discovered they'd not found the .22 I had taped to my back. I stood up and plugged Squeaky and pistol-whipped Carrot Top two good times. He's too high profile to kill, at least for now. Then I took a cab to the hospital. I hope a get a sucker.