Deadman's Bluff - James Swain [52]
“I kneed one of them in the face. He may have bled on me. That’s not evidence to hold me for suspicion of murder, and you know it.”
“No one’s arguing that an altercation occurred in your suite,” Longo said. “But the fact is, you and Rufus Steele are still walking around, and those two guys are growing cold in the morgue. I have to treat this as evidence.”
“How long will it take your forensic people to examine the shirt?
“A day or two.”
Valentine tried to raise his hand to his face, and heard the handcuff’s chain rattle. The tournament would be over by then. Had someone set him up, just to take him out of the picture? There was a cold cup of coffee on the desk. He raised it to his lips with his free hand and took a slurp. Longo glanced up from his paperwork.
“Someone from the hotel called you and told you about the shirt, didn’t they?” Valentine asked.
“That’s right,” Longo said.
“They also told you I was in Celebrity’s poker room.”
“Right again.”
The cup was empty, and Valentine stared at grains. Before he’d taken the job, the hotel’s general manager, a stuffed suit named Mark Perrier, had threatened him with a lawsuit if Celebrity’s reputation was smeared by Jack Donovan’s murder investigation.
“Was it Mark Perrier, the general manager?”
Longo put his pencil down, trying not to act surprised. “Who told you that?”
“Believe it or not, I figured it out by myself,” Valentine said.
“You have a history with this guy?”
“He threatened me a week ago. Didn’t want me investigating his tournament. This was before Bill Higgins hired me.”
Longo gave him a thoughtful look. “You’re saying Perrier set you up.”
“I’m investigating a cheating scandal inside his hotel. Of course he set me up. Last night, I had you paraffin me for gunshot residue. I may have changed my shirt, but I hadn’t showered. Do you think I would have told you to give me the test if I’d shot those guys?”
Most cops didn’t like the kind of backward logic he was throwing at Longo. It made them go outside their comfort zones. Longo looked at the bagged shirt.
“I need to wait for the blood test,” he said.
“You mean you’re going to hold me,” Valentine said, exasperated.
“Afraid so.”
A woman’s voice came out of the black squawk box on the desk. Longo pressed a button on the box. “Hey Lydia, what’s up?”
“Bill Higgins, director of the Nevada Gaming—”
“I know who Higgins is,” he snapped. “Is he on the line? Tell him I’m busy and will call him back.”
“He’s standing next to my desk,” she said.
Longo clenched his teeth. “Send him in,” he said, and took his finger off the button.
Like most people who worked in law enforcement, Bill had a tough side. When he got angry, he tended to throw his considerable weight around. He was doing that now, and Longo was shrinking in his chair.
“How dare you arrest Tony without first calling me,” Bill said, leaning on Longo’s desk like he was going to do a push-up. “I got authorization from the goddamn governor to keep Tony on this job. You’re screwing with my investigation. If you don’t let Tony go right now, I’ll burn your ass so badly you won’t be able to sit down.”
The lowlifes and miscreants in the other detectives’ offices had stopped talking, the only sound coming from the overhead air-conditioning. Longo pointed at the bagged shirt lying on the desk. “What about this?”
“So what?” Bill said, mimicking Valentine perfectly.
“It’s evidence,” Longo protested.
“It corroborates Tony’s story, but it doesn’t corrobo rate your story,” Bill said. “Why don’t you ask the hotel to show you the surveillance tapes from the stairwell, if you want to know who shot those two scumbags? There’s your evidence, Pete.”
“I already asked the hotel,” Longo said.
“And?”
“They said there isn’t a surveillance camera in the stairwell,” Longo said. “It’s optional under state law to have cameras in stairwells, and they didn’t do it.”
“Who told you that?” Bill asked.
Longo swallowed a rising lump in his throat. “Mark Perrier.”
“Perrier fed you that line of bullshit?”
“How do you know it