Rose arrived about noon, a week and a half later. I looked up from the wheel at the doorway and there she was, fully dressed and smiling.
"I got back. Sorry I was gone so long. It was necessary. I had to wait for him to show up. He was overdue. But he came in last night. This is what I got from it."
She showed me a very small computer thumb drive.
"It was made last night. I haven't had much sleep. I have to show it to you. It's priceless."
"What is it?" I asked, probably foolishly.
"You won't believe it. You have to see it. Come up to the house and see it."
We did that. Rose plugged the thumb drive into my laptop, fiddled with the computer a little bit, and there it was. A naked man was having sex, or trying to, with a naked woman in a hotel room. I watched for a few seconds, then realized what I was seeing, or rather who. "Rose, that's the guy who is trying to grab the Indian's farm, the guy with the phony treatment center, the guy who killed Edward's goat. That's him!"
"He's also the guy who came to the castle and searched the tower."
I watched a few seconds longer, then, quietly. "That isn't you with him, is it?" The shock of the idea hadn't hit yet. Before it did, Rose reassured me.
"It isn't me. It's the very nice sex worker who made the video. She kept her face out of it. Nobody can recognize her in it. She's his regular playmate, so it was easy, she said. He drinks a lot and doesn't notice things by the time the action starts. But you sure can recognize him. His wife will love it. The people on the church donor list will love it."
"Rose, that's blackmail!"
"Yes, isn't it?" she responded joyfully.
We watched it to the end. Then we watched it again. I wanted to make sure that the sex worker couldn't be recognized. She had really stuck her neck out, betraying a client like that. I said that to Rose.
"Yeah, and she has a copy of the video. We'll have to tell Mr. Morris that any contact with her will result in the video appearing in several public places."
"Isn't prostitution illegal in Nevada, except for the legal brothels, I mean?"
"Yeah, technically it is. But I have it on good authority that 90 percent of the prostitution in Nevada is illegal, and that the authorities don't make any effort to stop it. Besides, they wouldn't know who she was either. She isn't using her right name, of course, and can disappear by just walking down the street to the next hotel. And no, I don't know her legal name either. For all I know her day job is secretary to the Mayor."
"He doesn't know you made this, does he?"
"Most certainly not! He doesn't know it exists."
"So how did you do this? Just walk into a hotel and ask for a video of a prostitute doing her thing with a client? There must be a lot more to this."
She looked directly at me and started talking.
"Claire, I've held a lot of jobs in my short life, and almost the latest was night staff in a Vegas hotel. I cleaned rooms, ran errands around the building, and brought stuff up from the kitchen and the bar to late night revelers in their rooms.
"That's how I saw Franklin Morris the first time. I was delivering a bottle of whiskey to his room. I saw that there was a woman in there with him, and I knew, sort of, who she was.
"She came around the hotel a couple times a week, wearing what I think is called in some circles a cocktail dress. She looked sexier in that than we do stark naked. She would walk straight across the lobby and ride the elevator up. Not a word to anybody. We all guessed what she was doing. She was a call girl going to an appointment. A sex worker, I believe is the current title. Of course, we didn't know who she was meeting.
Then one night I was up on one of the floors with the cleaning cart when she came out of a room down the hall. She went right past me, and smiled as she waited for the elevator. As soon as she had left I went down the hall to see what the room number was.
"He didn't see you then, did he?"
"Nope. The door stayed closed and I was quiet as a mouse."
"Back at the counter, I asked who was in the room. Now, you understand that the night staff isn't as professional as the day staff might be. We looked stuff up in the computer that the day manager would have fired us for. But not the night manager. Actual supervision wasn't there in the small hours of the morning.
"So I found out his name, or at least the name on his credit card.
Then last week when I want back to Vegas I checked in with my buddies on the night shift and told them part of what was going on out here. I wanted something on this guy. Something like a video of him with the sex worker. So the next time she came in, we stopped her on her way out.
"You're not going to tell me anything about her, I hope."
"Nope. Just that with very little coercion on our part she agreed to cooperate in the video. After all, she was using our hotel as her place of business without paying any rent, not that almost all of the hotels in Las Vegas aren't doing the same thing. All I wanted was proof of sexual contact with a prostitute, it didn't have to be a porno film. We didn't need anything from her except that she was a sex worker, no identification, no face. Especially no face. For him, we wanted definite identification. We needed his face and obviously what he was doing, what was going on. That's all.
"It turned out to be easier than I thought. While we were waiting for the guy to show up for his next assignation. Is it an assignation? An assignment? Anyway, whatever, we became friends with the sex worker. She would hang around for coffee after a job. She wasn't hurting us and we weren't hurting her, as long as the whole after-hours business stayed more or less discrete. We even checked to see if the credit card he used for the room was the same one he paid her with. It was. Same card, same phoney name. But that way she had some confirmation that the card was good. And so did we, of course. I wrote down the card info in case we need that sometime.
"Good job. If the FBI gets into it, because of the Indian's goat, we can give it to them." There was maybe just the hint of sarcasm in my voice.
"What's the goat to do with the FBI"
"I talked to the lawyer about that. It seems that shooting the goat to intimidate and frighten the Toadlena's by threatening Edward is extortion. Extortion is a federal crime, usually difficult to prove, but possible in our case. We don't have the gun and we didn't see the shooting but we do have the bullet, safely inside the goat. The FBI might not be interested in a dead goat. Franklin Morris might not know that. You never can tell."
Which was all lovely. All I had to do now was figure out what to do with the sex tape.