Chapter 69
MO-BOT WAS DOING her best for Hal Archer. He was obnoxious, but he was also a client who was under arrest for murdering his wife. Archer claimed he’d killed his wife in self-defense, but when the jury saw the pictures of the innumerable knife wounds on Tule’s small body, Hal wouldn’t stand a chance.
Mo-bot offered her chair and I sat down, clicked through the files she had set up, and scanned Barbie Summers’s bio.
She’d grown up in central Florida, dropped out of college, moved to Las Vegas, and had had assorted hand-to-mouth jobs. Her arrest record was a star field of infractions: assault, prostitution, obstruction. And then there was a charge for insurance fraud that hadn’t stuck.
Somehow she cleaned up her act enough to waitress at the Black Diamond Hotel and Casino. She learned to dance with a pole and moved up to the Madagascar Salon as a VIP cocktail waitress. I put her age at about twenty-three.
Mo said, “She’s a piece of work. All kinds of high jinks out in Vegas. But she married well, same sort of deal Tule got.”
Mo clicked on another set of documents, and I scanned them quickly as they opened in a luminous array of virtual pages that followed the movements of my eyes.
I read that a year ago, Barbie Summers had married a very prominent businessman: Bryce Cooper of Aspen. Cooper was eighty years old, a fifty-million-dollar-a-year executive in the corporate-jet manufacturing business. Another wealthy dude marrying a Vegas dolly.
Mo had annotated the document to say that Cooper paid off his four kids so that they wouldn’t complain about his new bride and try to ruin his happy marriage.
Then Mo brought up the photos of Mr. Cooper. The first batch were corporate shots: Cooper shaking hands with Dick Cheney and various industrialists and movie stars. Mo showed me candid shots of Bryce Cooper competing in a statewide motorbike race, playing football with grandkids on the lawn of his enormous beam-and-glass-construction home. Then, in the past year and a half, there were a lot of pictures of Cooper on the ski slopes with a busty pink-and-platinum-haired former hoofer I recognized as Barbie Summers.
Cooper had a boyish quality—flyaway eyebrows and a wide smile. I thought I would like him.
“What do you think about all this?” I asked Mo.
“Two dolly girls, two rich old men, two marriages with the much older, very rich men within weeks of each other. I see a pattern. Don’t you?”
I saw it.
If Hal Archer’s story that Tule had threatened to kill him was true, her motive had to be money. If so, it wasn’t a stretch to think that Tule’s former roommate Barbie Summers Cooper might have the same idea.
I stood up, gave Mo a hug, and said, “You. Are. Fantastic.”
“I know,” she said, grinning up at me. “Here’s Mr. Cooper’s phone number.”
I said, “There’s going to be a little extra dough in your paycheck, you know.”
“Yeah?”
She cupped her hands together, went into a crouch, blew on imaginary dice, and rolled them out onto an invisible craps table. “Baby needs new shoes.”
“Baby can get as many shoes as she wants.”
“Awww,” she said. “Thanks, Jack.”
I punched in Cooper’s phone number, listened to the line connecting with his lodge on Red Ridge in Aspen. When Cooper answered the phone, I said my name and told him that I was the owner of a private investigation firm in LA.
“Do you have a couple of moments, Mr. Cooper? There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.”