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Crissy
Bud McDonald—Brady McDonald at birth—ran security for the BP and took a special interest in looking out for me at the theater. And so when he came by my cabana that afternoon, I felt a spike of anxiety. He’d been a detective in Boston before deciding he preferred the sun of Las Vegas to the snow and sleet of Massachusetts, and he had a cleft on his chin so deep that he joked to strangers it was a dueling scar. You didn’t skim at the BP for all the usual reasons, but the idea that the head of security had helped bust Whitey Bulger certainly kept wayward dealers in line. He sat down in the chaise beside me now, the day after I had met with Artie Morley and Eddie Cantone.
“I have some bad news,” he began. “Bad news for you, bad news for me.”
I had already sat up and put aside my book. I glanced at my phone, half expecting it to ring, Erika Schweiker choosing this moment to call back. “Okay.”
“Artie is dead. I spoke to the police and I expect they’ll want to talk to you, too. Mary Gifford says you were one of the last people to see him alive.”
The poolside soundtrack and the burble of splashing and conversation—people talking to each other in person, a medley of voices, as well as the monologues that marked cell phone colloquies—went quiet, a susurrus-like immersion beneath a wavelike ringing in my ears.
“Crissy?” My name sounded so very far away.
“How?” I asked him. “What happened?”
“Looks like a suicide, but after Richie, no one believes that.”
“Suicide,” I repeated softly, the sibilance of the word snakelike in my mind.
He nodded. “Hanged himself in his office.”
Hanged. I swallowed hard. It wasn’t as if even a co-owner of the BP was likely to have an office with a cathedral ceiling. Artie’s ceiling was maybe ten feet. But that was, it seemed, high enough. He hadn’t needed a barn or rafters or—
“He used a couple of his neckties and that branding iron. The BP light fixture,” Bud was saying.
I recalled it. “I’m sure the police will do an autopsy.”
“Oh, you can bet your ass they will,” said Bud.
“But maybe not,” I said, almost speaking aloud to myself. “Artie told me he didn’t believe Richie had killed himself, and the police were involved in some sort of cover-up.”
Bud gazed out through my cabana at the pool, the heat rising up like vapors from the concrete. “He told me that, too. But I have faith in the LVPD. I mean, there are cops on the take. Some you can buy. For some people, it’s a coin flip: cop or crook? They could go either way. But two brothers killing themselves? That’s too suspicious not to open some eyes.”
“Is it?” I asked, stunned, but nonetheless playing devil’s advocate. “If the casino’s money problems really are that bad…”
“They’re not. The BP may not be doing great. But gambling is pandemic-proof, Putin-proof, and recession-proof.” He waved his hand at the crowd in the water. “There’s your exhibit A.”
“Who found him?”
“Mary,” he said, referring to the Morleys’ secretary. “She came to work this morning, and there he was.”
“God, the poor woman.”
“Yup.”
“Was there a note?”
“If there was, Mary didn’t find it. Maybe the police have one now or Artie left one at home. Maybe he emailed it to someone.”
I thought of Nola Hahn, one of the city’s gambling pioneers, who divided his time between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and who killed himself in the Beverly Hilton in 1957. He left behind the pithiest of suicide notes: “No one to blame.”
“Who’s in charge of the casino?” I asked. “Eddie?”
“Yup.”
“And tonight?”
“As far as I know, the show must go on—assuming you feel up to it. All those people in the water right now or standing pat at sixteen at the blackjack tables? Most of them have no idea who Artie or Richie Morley were.”
