She broke up then, and the sobbing was more than I could take.
“Marta,” I said, semi-sharply, trying to cut through the tears. “Wait up a second. If I hadn’t gotten in after two a.m., I’d have called you with a report. I figured it could wait until morning, but now . . . Listen, he’s not having an affair. At least, I don’t think so. He’s gambling.”
She broke off in midsob and stunned silence reigned. “Gambling? But he’s way too smart for that.”
“Smart enough, maybe, to feel like he could beat the system or count cards or find some other edge?”
More silence. “Maybe. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have said he’d sneak out on me at all, but now . . . Oh, I know I shouldn’t have insisted on that Sub-Zero refrigerator, especially with our son needing all his crazy orthodontics. Did I tell you they need to reset his whole jaw?”
She hadn’t. We didn’t have that kind of relationship. But however Gareth’s gambling had started, if he’d made it to the invitation-only games, he was in deep. Maybe even to addiction level. Marta was right to worry.
“I’m sure he hasn’t left you,” I said with more assurance than I felt. If he was an addict, he might not leave physically, but his new passion and priorities might amount to the same thing emotionally. I struggled with how much to tell her. “He’s probably just on a roll or . . . something. The club is closed for the night, but I doubt that means anything for the backroom games. I haven’t been able to crack the inner sanctum yet, but I have a plan.”
“Oh, Tori, please, you have to get him out of there. We’ll get him into a twelve-step program. Whatever. Just tell him to come home. I’ll return the fridge.”
I almost smiled at that. At least Marta had her priorities straight. “I’ll tell him. Let me get my plans in motion. I’ll call you as soon as I can, but I’m not sure how quickly I can make things happen.”
“I’ll stay by the phone.”
So that was it. I was going to have to call Apollo. I’d known it since last night, and yet I’d hesitated. I already owed Apollo my life, and I knew just how he wanted to collect. Even if I wasn’t taken by a certain hunky police detective with midnight blue eyes and dark hair that fell half over them when he ruffled it in frustration, as he often did where I was involved, I would have known better than to get involved with Apollo. For one thing, there was his track record. Mythology was chock-full of his tragic loves. For another, I was pretty certain that I had nothing to offer him after his millennia of experience, and I knew that if . . . when . . . he grew tired of me, I’d be left bereft. Why let myself in for an unhappy ending I didn’t need my precognition to predict? (Not that it worked like that. I couldn’t actually see the future, sadly. It was more like I had an early warning system where danger was concerned.)
I looked at the clock. Six eleven a.m. Definitely too early to call Apollo. I debated it anyway and decided that I’d have a better chance of catching him in the mood to humor me if I gave him a few more hours of sleep. I could use more myself.
But those hours of sleep turned out to be more elusive than an invitation to The Parlor’s inner sanctum. After half an hour or so of tossing and turning, I gave it up and rose. My oversized Arctic Monkeys T-shirt was crinkled beyond belief, but there was no one to see or care, since Nick’s and my schedules weren’t syncing up at the moment, so I just pulled my wild mane of hair back into a scrunchie and booted up my computer. Undercover work was all well and good, but there was something to be said for public records searches. The owner of the club would be a matter of public record, and if the place had ever been featured in any kind of press piece, any partners or major players would likely be mentioned, maybe even pictured. A few keystrokes and all would be revealed.
And sure enough, there she was, in an old issue of L.A. Days, a free daily that was more advertisement than actual news. THE PARLOR IS A GAMBLE, the headline read. It went on to talk about how the club had been investigated as the common denominator in the disappearance of a couple of out-of-state businessmen who were seen to enter but never to leave.
“Which is just defamatory,” says club owner Ariana Weaver. “Of course they left. The police have been through The Parlor from top to bottom. If the men had stayed behind, someone would have located them. I don’t see where my mail goes when it’s picked up, but I trust that it’s not still hiding out in my mailbox.”
My heart started to beat faster, as if my body was trying to tell me what my mind was smart enough to figure out for itself—that this was important. There was a picture of Ariana, standing beside her glass-block bar, just as I’d seen her today, in the wraparound aviator shades, but this time in a black satin jacket with a hood lined in red pulled up around her face, making her seem mysterious, as if she had something to hide. Probably that was the impression the photographer had been going for, given the headline and the direction of the story. But the really telling thing was that she didn’t look a day older last night than she’d looked in the picture, and the article was dated fifteen years ago. I wondered what she was hiding behind those aviator shades besides maybe crow’s-feet.