LITMIR.BIZ

      Copyright © 2017 by Megan Edwards. All Rights Reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the express written permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. For further information, please contact the Publisher, Imbrifex Books, 8275 S. Eastern Avenue, Suite 200, Las Vegas, NV 89123.

      This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

      IMBRIFEX is a registered trademark of Flattop Productions, Inc.

      Printed in the United States of America.

      Set in Adobe Caslon, Designed by Jennifer Heuer

      www.MeganEdwards.com

      www.Imbrifex.com

      ISBN 978–0-9972369-0-3 (trade paper)

      ISBN 978–0-9972369-2-7 (e-book)

      ISBN 978–0-9972369-1-0 (audiobook)

      First Edition: March 2017

      Chapter 1

      My life in Las Vegas improved dramatically when I started getting off on Frank Sinatra. That’s what I tell people. Then, while they’re still trying to figure out how to react, I continue.

      “I’d like to get off on Dean Martin, too, but I just can’t. And in case you’re interested, Mel Tormé is too short, Hugh Hefner’s a dead end, and I can never remember whether Jerry Lewis goes both ways.”

      The truth is, I can never even remember where Jerry Lewis is exactly, but I know there’s a street named after him somewhere on the west side. Hugh Hefner is really just a driveway next to the Palms casino, and Mel Tormé can claim only one block near the Fashion Show Mall. Frank Sinatra, on the other hand, really takes a girl places. When I-15 is jammed, I leave the red lights to the tourists and slip off to join the taxis and locals zipping unimpeded up the back side of the Strip. Dean Martin serves almost the same purpose on the other side of the freeway, but he didn’t rate an exit. So Ol’ Blue Eyes is my man. When life in the fast lane slows to a crawl, I know I can count on Frank for relief.

      In fact, getting off on Frank Sinatra saved my life the time a crazed maniac in a jacked-up Ram pickup tried to push me off the freeway. If Frank hadn’t been right there offering a quick getaway, bits of my DNA might still be clinging to the embankment just north of Russell Road.

      Now that I think of it, Frank Sinatra also helped me out the day I found my first dead body. It was the hottest day of the millennium, and I had not only discovered the bloody corpse of a local philanthropist, but I’d spent more than three highly stressful hours with a homicide detective who was trying to decide whether I was capable of mutilating a woman’s face and strangling her with a drapery cord. A traffic jam on the way home might well have turned me into a genuine psycho killer, but there was good ol’ Frank waiting to fly me to the moon. Or at least get me up to Flamingo without committing a felony.

      I should never have found that body, let alone recognize that it belonged to Marilyn Weaver. Yes, that Marilyn Weaver, the founder of the most prestigious school in Las Vegas and the city’s best-loved altruist. I had met her only the day before, and I had met her son just that afternoon. How I ended up snooping in her bedroom, looking inside her closet, and entangling myself in a high-profile murder investigation is a perfect example of that plentiful Las Vegas commodity: bad luck. I’m going to call it bad luck, at least. Because if I don’t call it bad luck, I’ll be stuck agreeing with what I know my family and friends think: It was David’s fault.

      Before my rendezvous with murder, David Nussbaum and I were as perfect a pair as Barbie and Ken. Like them, we were designed to complement each other. I’m blonde, and he’s dark. He’s Jewish, and I’m a WASP. We do have some things in common, of course. We both come from commuter towns north of Manhattan, and we both went to Princeton. I still think it’s ironic that we met in Las Vegas instead of on the East Coast, and until everything flipped upside down, it was my favorite coincidence. The day I hooked up with David was the day I smelled the roses, saw the birds, and heard the music. The morning he turned twenty-eight, I still lived in paradise. By midnight, I’d moved to hell.

      David’s birthday evening started out happily enough. We hooked up after work and went to a concert at Mandalay Bay.

      “Really, I thought she’d be good,” David said as we walked out to the parking garage afterward.

      “She was practically over the hill when you were still in diapers. Why are you such a fan?”

      “Copper, don’t be such an age snob. Youth isn’t everything.”

      “She didn’t suck because she’s old. She just sucked. I thought you had higher standards.”

      I looked at David. He does have higher standards. I was shocked that a concert he had carefully selected to celebrate his twenty-eighth birthday had turned out to be such a dud. If the tickets hadn’t set him back over three hundred bucks, I would’ve suggested we duck out at the break.

      “Well, Chris Farr said he’d get me comp tickets for Tori Beaulieu at Caesars Palace next week,” I said. “Maybe she’ll make up for it.”

      That’s one of the benefits of working for the arts and entertainment editor at The Las Vegas Light. So many free tickets come my way that I could pass them out to the entire population of my hometown in Connecticut and still have enough left over to treat my whole family. I haven’t even worked at The Light for a whole year yet, but I’ve seen every production show on the Strip, most of the “just passing through” ones, and a whole slew at venues scattered all over the rest of town. If the word didn’t already mean something else, I’d call myself a showgirl.

      David usually came along. As a staff reporter, he was higher ranking than me, but free tickets came his way only occasionally. Since “Copper Black, Assistant Editor” found them stuffed in her mailbox daily, our dating ritual revolved around what shows looked the most appealing.

      Unfortunately, I didn’t score any tickets for Jamie Hixson, the slightly passé, surgically remodeled diva in platform boots whose voice gave David goose bumps. He also likes old Clint Eastwood movies, so maybe he just came of age a couple of decades too late. On the other hand, I’ve become a rabid Rat Pack fan since I’ve lived in Las Vegas, and I’m four years younger than he is. Age snob, my ass.

      “So where do you want to eat?” David asked.

      “We have reservations at Ciliano,” I said.

      “Wow!”

      “Your birthday deserves it. Surprise!”

      Ciliano is my favorite Las Vegas restaurant. It’s at the top of the Monaco, and it has an eagle’s-eye view of the whole valley. With luck, we’d even rank a table next to the windows overlooking the Strip. I don’t have a lot of “juice” in this town yet, but I’ve learned how to drop my connection with the newspaper where it makes the loudest clang. I don’t really like doing it, but David’s birthday was an occasion that deserved a bit of chutzpah. He always has plenty, and I never seem to have enough. It is a quality, I reminded myself before reciting my résumé to the maître d’, that I need to cultivate. Updating

Скачать книгу