The Big Gamble - Michael Mcgarrity [72]
Everything pretty much looked on the up-and-up, but rumors and talk persisted, mostly passed on by two reliable white-collar snitches, who’d fingered an ecstasy drug ring of graduate students at the university.
Surreptitious attempts to get an officer hired as an employee failed. Staff turnover was minimal, and the owner, a man named Adam Tully, always seemed able to bring a new waitress on board quickly without advertising or interviewing applicants.
Tails were placed on staff members, and background checks were run as identities were ascertained. All had clean sheets, but interestingly, all were recent arrivals from out of state, particularly Colorado and West Texas.
Tully, a New Mexico native recently returned from Colorado, was listed as the sole owner of Five Players, Incorporated, doing business as The Players Green Club & Restaurant. If he had partners, they were silent.
Tully had no criminal record, and owned another club in Denver operated under the same name, which had been given a clean bill of health by the Denver PD. All his business licenses, corporate reports, and state and local tax filings were current and in order.
Vialpando had described the club’s layout. The bar and dining area were separate from a large room where big-screen televisions were set up in six different viewing areas consisting of comfortable couches, overstuffed chairs, and coffee tables. Only the bar menu and drinks were available to customers in the screening room. Six adjacent rooms with televisions were available for fans who wanted to dine and watch a specific televised event. Those rooms were already booked months in advance. On the weekends, a jazz trio played dance music in the main dining room.
As she drove to the club, Ramona pushed pleasant thoughts about Jeff Vialpando out of her mind and ran over the cover story she’d laid on Cassie Bedlow. Whatever she told Adam Tully had to match what Cassie Bedlow “knew” about her.
Good undercover cops always built fictional personas based on reality. Ramona’s previous assignments had taught her the importance of character development. Blending fact with fiction made the role more natural and authentic, easier to pull off. But there couldn’t be any gaps or lapses that might give you away.
In fact, Ramona had been both a waitress and a sales clerk in Durango during the year she’d attended college there as a transfer student. She’d returned to the city several times since then, so dredging up recollections and recalling places and streets wasn’t much of a stretch. She did it anyway, because you never knew what could trip you up.
She stepped inside the club and let her eyes adjust to the dim lights. The man standing at the end of the bar talking to the hostess matched Vialpando’s description of Adam Tully. Five eight, narrow shoulders, a thin frame, with an arched, slightly turned-up nose. Tully smiled as she approached, and Ramona smiled back.
Adam Tully liked what he saw. She was all that Cassie had told him in her phone call and more: great Hispanic features with dark, liquid eyes, a tight, shapely body with a tiny waist, and creamy skin with a golden hue.
“You must be Ramona,” Tully said.
“Yes, I am.”
Her baby-doll voice ran through him, right down to his cock. If everything panned out, he could work this bitch every night for five, maybe eight years, and make a hell of a lot of money. He knew a Major League baseball player who’d pop fifteen or twenty grand for a week with her, easy, as soon as she started tricking. Plus, a former Colorado congressman who favored the thin, schoolgirl type with nice knockers. Put her in thigh-high stockings, lacy panties, a push-up bra, some candy-apple-red platform mules, and braid her hair, and the guy would get a hard-on just looking at her picture.
“Let’s talk,” Tully said, leading her to his office, where he eased back in his thousand-dollar ergonomic chair and inspected the woman more closely.