Easy Prey

say.”
    “I know,” Lucas said. “All right. I’ll go ask him my question, and then maybe later we’ll figure out something to slow him down a little.”
    “The hotel won’t fire him,” she said. “He’s very good at what he does.”
    “Which is?”
    “He fixes things. He gets tickets for shows and basketball games. If somebody gets sick, he gets a doctor.”
    “Anybody could do that,” Lucas said.
    “I mean, if a rock star gets sick . . .”
    “Because he put something up his nose?”
    “Or whatever. Or if there’s a little lover’s quarrel, and somebody gets beat up or cut up . . .”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. “We could still have a talk with him about the maids.”
     
 
LUCAS WAITED UNTIL the receptionist was well back toward her desk before he quietly opened Deal’s office door. The office was a collection of six shoulder-high fabric cubicles; the clacking sound of a computer keyboard came from the far corner.
    Deal was a balding man with a long nose and heavy, petulant lips that he thrust in and out as he peered at his computer screen. He was wearing a dark sport coat, and sprinkles of dandruff decorated the shoulders and lapels. He was intent. He never saw Lucas coming.
    Lucas picked up a visitor’s chair from a neighboring cubicle and sat it in the aisle just outside Deal’s. He sat down heavily, and now Deal, for the first time, realized he wasn’t alone. He jerked around, pulled back, startled.
    “’Lo, Derrick,” Lucas said, smiling. “Thought you were in California.”
    Deal pulled himself together. “Goddamnit, Davenport, you scared the shit outa me. What do you want?”
    “You heard about the murder? Sandy Lansing?”
    “Nothing to do with us,” Deal muttered. He picked a piece of paper up from the desktop, squinted at it, and slipped it into a desk drawer, out of sight.
    Lucas shrugged. “You know how it is, Derrick. We gotta nail everything down. And this Lansing chick, she sorta puzzles us. She’s got no money—she’s pulling down twenty-five from this place. But she’s driving a Porsche, she’s dressing outa those Edina boutiques . . .”
    “We give her five grand a year for clothes,” Deal said.
    “Party dresses?”
    “No. Not party dresses,” Deal said. He turned casually to his computer screen, which showed a spreadsheet, pushed a couple of keys, and the screen blanked out. “The kind of dresses you see on the other women here. Upper-middle-class conservative matron clothes.”
    “We thought maybe she was getting the extra money from taking the clothes off. You know, the matron dresses.”
    Deal shook his head. “No.”
    “Come on, man,” Lucas said. He waved his hand, meaning, Look at this place. “You got all kinds of jocks and movie stars and singers and theater people and rich guys. . . . I mean, what does a fixer guy like you do when one of them wants a blow job?”
    “I tell him to go blow himself,” Deal said.
    “Derrick--”
    Deal put up his hands. “Listen, man. She was not fucking anybody for money. Not here, anyway. I knew about the car, I even asked her about it. She said something like, ‘I got my own money.’ I figured it came from Daddy and she was working until she got married.”
    “She was not a rich kid,” Lucas said.
    Deal shook his head. “So maybe you should do some real investigation, so you can stop hassling innocent people.”
    “Derrick, goddamnit, I’m trying to like you, but you make it so hard,” Lucas said. He put his hands on the arms of the visitor’s chair, ready to stand up. “We know she’s getting some extra cash, and sex is the only thing we can think of. I’d hate to think that Brown’s is some kind of high-class bordello, but we’re gonna have to send some people around to look at the records. Can we use your name as a recommendation?”
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Deal said. He picked up a telephone, punched in four numbers, listened to it ring once, then again, and then said, “Jean, could you come down here for a second?”
    He hung up and said, “You oughta look into dope.”
    “Why?”
    “Because half the time, when Sandy came in, which was usually late in the afternoon, she was hungover. From partying. She was a party girl, and she had a real bad coke habit.”
    “You think she was selling?” Lucas asked.
    Deal opened his mouth, as if with a reflexive response, but his eyes flickered and he changed direction. “I don’t know about selling. But she was using. And she