The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(35)
“I love living in the future,” I muttered to myself as I sat down and called up the Clark County property information website. Property records are public information, and thanks to modern technology I just had to type in Artie’s address and let the computer do all the work. When the results came back, I shook my head at the screen.
“Owner: Carmichael-Sterling Nevada”
I’d heard of them. The Carmichael-Sterling Group was an out-of-state concern looking to make a play for some Vegas action. In the last year they’d bought up the old Silverlode Casino and a couple of off-Strip hotels, looking to rehab and reopen them under new management. Their big claim to fame, though, was the Enclave: a sixty-five-story luxury hotel and casino whose unfinished steel skeleton now loomed at the south end of Las Vegas Boulevard. When it finally opened its doors, word had it, the Enclave was going to make Dubai look like a beggar’s slum.
So why the hell were they paying for a porn merchant’s house out in Henderson? Public relations departments have nightmares about this sort of thing. I dialed their contact number and hit buttons until a live person got on the phone.
“Carmichael-Sterling Nevada, how may I direct your call?” chirped a perky voice on the other end of the line.
“Mr. Kaufman, please,” I said, hoping there was only one of them at the company. The receptionist asked me to hold, and after another couple of rings it went to voice mail.
“This is the desk of Sheldon Kaufman, director of finance,” said a deep, sonorous voice. “I’m away from my desk right now, but if you leave your information at the tone I’ll call you back as soon as I return. If this is an emergency, please call Arthur Shaw at extension—”
I hung up. Sheldon Kaufman. Pleased to meet you. Looked like the group’s finance guy was spending company funds on a dream house for his brother. I put on a button-down shirt and a pressed pair of slacks, digging out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from my dresser drawer. They were fakes, nothing but plain glass in the frames, but they made a nice accessory when I was trying to project a certain image.
I wanted a closer look at Sheldon Kaufman’s office, and I knew exactly how I was going to get it.
Eighteen
I made a second call before my drive over, putting on a thick Southern accent just to be safe and asking for the public relations department. They sent me to the voice mail for a woman named Meadow Brand, and again, I hung up without leaving a message. All I needed was a name.
Carmichael-Sterling had bought up a three-story wedge of granite and glass on the outskirts of the city, perfectly modern and perfectly forgettable. With a leather valise in hand, I jogged up a short flight of steps and through a softly whirring automatic door, adjusting my fake glasses as I cased the room.
A row of overstuffed powder-blue chairs curved along the inside of the lobby wall under the watchful eye of a rounded receptionist’s desk. Not many people around, a few coming and going from the elevator banks or wandering down the hallway behind the front desk, but my gaze immediately shot toward the security camera looking down from its steel perch in the corner of the room.
I put on a smile and strolled up to greet the receptionist. I could see the tilt of her computer monitor from where I stood, but not well enough to read her screen without being obvious. Between that and the lack of any kind of building directory on display, this wasn’t going to be the cakewalk I’d hoped for.
“Hi!” I said, “Peter Greyson, Las Vegas Sun. I’d like to speak with Meadow Brand, please.”
“Certainly, sir,” she said, her voice trailing off as she rattled her keyboard. “I’m sorry, I’m not seeing you on the schedule. Did you have an appointment?”
“No, this is regarding an urgent piece of breaking news. We’re running with it in this evening’s edition, and we’d really like to have an official comment from Carmichael-Sterling on the matter.”
She looked at me like she’d just bitten into a lemon. Dealing with this was above her pay grade. “Well, I’m sorry, sir, but she’s booked in meetings all day. I could possibly set up something for you tomorrow?”
I made a show of looking over my shoulder, then leaned toward the desk, pitching my voice low.
“You might want to tell Ms. Brand,” I said, “that our readers are going to be very curious about why the Carmichael-Sterling Group was bankrolling a Satan-worshipping porn director. Said director having been brutally murdered in a home your company paid for.”
Like I said, the real-estate connection was a PR person’s worst nightmare. No sense letting a good catastrophe go to waste. The receptionist paled and reached for her telephone.
“I’ll see what I can do, sir, if you could have a seat please?”
I wandered over by the chairs, watching in my peripheral vision as she cupped a hand over her mouth and whispered into the telephone. The back and forth went on for a couple of minutes before she finally hung up and called me over.
“Sir? Ms. Brand has an opening in her schedule. If you’d like to go up to her office, she’s in room 371 on the third floor. She’ll be free in about ten minutes.”
Probably frantically calling people, trying to figure out what I was about to confront her with and get her ducks in a row. “Great, thanks! Oh, before I go up, do you have a washroom?”
She pointed me to the men’s room down the hall, a short walk past the elevator banks. I ducked in just long enough to unzip my valise and pull out a sheaf of papers, random tax forms I’d picked up at the local library and scribbled numbers on. At a distance, they looked just boring enough to be important. I returned to the hall, walking fast and trying to look harried, and made a beeline to a couple of middle-manager types hanging out by hallway water cooler.