In the tent, Chee saw rows of chairs that had been set up for the meeting and clusters of people standing and talking, but no Robinson. His goal was to deliver the citation, ask the man what he was doing in the hotel, finish the paperwork, and get back to Shiprock and Bernie.
But Melissa had noticed him and walked his way. She looked disheartened.
“Hi there,” he said.
“Did you hear about the cutbacks?”
“BJ told me.”
“It’s my fault.”
Chee remembered that she was the bookkeeper. “BJ said the word came down from Delahart himself. How could it be your fault?”
“I never should have let Samuel—” He heard the anger in her voice. “Can you give me some advice on something? I mean, could we talk privately somewhere?”
Chee wanted to say no, but what difference would a few minutes make? “We could sit in my unit. It’s parked over there.”
He opened the passenger door for her and climbed in behind the steering wheel, lowering the windows to catch the breeze and create an illusion of coolness.
“You know, this is the first time I’ve ever been in a police car.”
“That’s probably a good thing.”
She sat, staring out the windshield for a while. “I made a big mistake in the bookkeeping. It’s complicated, but in a nutshell I gave the company credit for a big sponsorship that hasn’t come in yet. Robinson trusted me and authorized the expenditures without asking enough questions. Delahart is the producer, so the buck stops with him, but I don’t think he even looked at any of the reports. We weren’t in the red yet, but it was just a matter of time.
“When I realized what I’d done, I went to Robinson with my resignation letter. He talked me into staying. He said that he and Delahart weren’t working together very well, and if I left, Delahart would blame Robinson’s management style and fire him. I didn’t want him to lose his job over me. He asked me for a commitment to stick with it, and I gave him my word.
“He said that because I’d created the situation, I should figure out how to fix it. We knew the sponsorship money was coming, it was just a matter of treading water, doing more with less, until then.”
“What does this have to do with Samuel?”
“I’m getting there.” She looked out the window at the sunlight reflecting off the other vehicles. “We trimmed expenses—Delahart was always harping on that anyway, so it didn’t look suspicious. But Robinson felt bad about what would have been the next step, cutting some people’s hours or letting them go. I had another idea. I’m good at blackjack, and I said with some luck, I could make up the deficit.”
Chee felt his jaw tighten. Gambling to pay debts was one of the top ten terrible ideas of all time.
Melissa didn’t notice his reaction. “Because I’m on the management team, I get to claim one of the empty seats on Delahart’s corporate plane. He goes to Vegas every weekend to meet with investors. Sometimes he’d invite Rhonda, our zombie queen, and tell Robinson to go along. I finagled an invitation, went to a casino with my own paycheck, and came back with about double. I showed Robinson how I put the winnings into the line items that were short. I did it three times, traveling with Delahart, Samuel, and some other folks who wanted to get away. I played at a different casino each time, and had more good luck. With a few more successful trips, I could have fixed the deficit without anyone knowing it had even been there.”
Melissa stopped talking. Chee thought about Delahart’s investors, about the cocaine, and Samuel’s spying. He doubted if the money problems were all due to Melissa’s error. “If you had almost fixed the budget problem, and Delahart didn’t know about it anyway, why did he decide to cut people’s hours now?”
“He’s a jerk. He wants more money for himself and his Las Vegas investors.”
“I still don’t see how this ties to Samuel’s murder.”
Melissa swallowed. “Samuel always went to Vegas because he was Delahart’s man. He decided I had a gambling problem, and he threatened to tell Delahart I was embezzling to cover my gambling debts if I didn’t pay to keep him quiet.”
“Were you using company money to gamble?”
“No. Only my own. Robinson and I kept a second set of books, so when the sponsorship came in, I’d get back the money of my own that I’d loaned the company.”
A second set of books was another very bad idea, Chee thought. “So you let Samuel blackmail you?”
“I knew I shouldn’t have paid him. He started tightening the screws. Every time I got on the plane, the price of his silence escalated. That was why I had to return those beautiful earrings. I needed all the money I could find to keep Samuel quiet.”
Chee remembered something. “Robinson said he planned to fire Samuel before the incident with the girls, and that you talked him out of it. Is that right?”
“Another mistake. Samuel knew he was about to get canned because of the same sort of bad behavior you saw—getting too rough with trespassers, especially girls. He came to me and said that if Robinson fired him, he would go to his boss, Delahart, and say Robinson canned him because he knew I was embezzling, and Robinson was covering it up. Somehow Samuel knew about the second set of books. So even though I hated Samuel, I went to Robinson and begged him to give the jerk another chance.”
Chee let the silence sit between them until he figured out how to phrase what he wanted to say. Parts of her story didn’t make sense. “So Samuel was blackmailing and intimidating you and spying for Delahart on the rest of the company. Maybe he was blackmailing other people, too. It sounds like you weren’t the only person out here who would have been happy to see him dead.”
“I could give you a list of names as long as my arm. But they’re actors and technicians and extras and gofers. Not killers—unless it’s make-believe.”
“What about Robinson or you?”
“Sure, I wished him dead, hit by a truck, a heart attack, something that would remove him and the trouble he made. But I figured what goes around comes around, you know? A karma sort of thing. I hoped the havoc and pain Samuel caused would catch up with him in the end. I guess it did. I can’t say I’m sorry.”
Chee had been around people enough to figure she was telling the truth, at least mostly.
“What about Robinson? He asked me how Samuel treated the girls, and when I told him, he said he was going to fire him. Did he?”
“You’ll have to ask him about that. He didn’t mention it to me. I guess he didn’t want to hear me whining to save that weasel’s job again.”
She looked tired, he thought. Older than when he’d first met her on the sandy rise in the moonlight. She sighed and sat up a little straighter. “I’m thinking about how I’m going to explain this all to Delahart. I made a commitment to Robinson to finish the job, and I will if he doesn’t fire me.”