Chapter Thirty-Five
‘What have you got for me?’ he asked, with intrigue, down the phone. There hadn’t been a manila envelope waiting on his desk, as he’d expected. In fact, Rico had been unusually slow in getting back to him on this. It had been nearly two weeks.
‘That’s the thing, boss. She’s clean as a whistle.’
‘Really?’ Lysander rubbed his smooth chin and looked at the family photo of him with his wife and son on the desk.
Megan was clean as a whistle. She wore white dresses to the polo and had an all-American-girl smile.
Blake was tanned with dirty-blond hair and a toothy grin.
The three of them looked like they’d popped out of a Ralph Lauren ad. But Kiki?
‘I spoke to her former boss at the resort in Vegas. Accurate, professional, she had outstanding guest services … An exceptional employee, they said.’
Lysander remembered a comment his father made, when he got back from Vegas, Kiki now his wife: when his children protested at the shock news of their nuptials, he’d said his new wife was highly respected in Vegas, as well as Monte Carlo, and they would extend that respect to her in Kristalldorf too.
‘Shit,’ Lysander said. ‘What about Atlantic City?’
‘They couldn’t remember her that well, so I did a historical dig into HR: never late. Never sick. A highly reliable croupier by all accounts. I spoke to a roommate from around that time. No dirt.’
‘And before then? She must have started earning before she was twenty-one …’ Lysander said, suspicious. Surely a woman that seductive knew her currency from a young age.
‘Good at school. Decent grades. Favourable yearbook reports, if nothing spectacular. She worked at a farm shop in Cherry Hill out of school. She was Miss Hoboken 2007. Honestly, boss, I can’t find nuthin’.
Dad is a mechanic, mom is French – it’s how she works in Europe – and she works the cash register in a pharmacy …
I mean obviously she married up, but there ain’t no dirt on her. ’
‘Dammit.’
Lysander clicked his Cartier pen frantically and frowned. Surely there had to be something?
‘I mean, I’ll keep lookin’, boss, but I can’t find something if it ain’t there.’
‘OK thanks, Rico, appreciate it.’
Lysander hung up and looked out of the window. He was too good an attorney and too honest a man to fabricate anything. Maybe his dad would just have to pay off another wife.