Page 13 of Femme Fatale
I leaned against the doorframe. “You ever think about getting out of the office?”
She laughed, a rough, husky sound. “And do what? Run the pit? I’d eat three croupiers before noon.”
I tossed the Treasurer patch on the table. It landed between a stack of comp vouchers and a calculator with half its keys missing.
Glitz stared at it, then at me. “That’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking.”
She picked up the patch, turned it over, then tossed it back down. “I have priors, you know.”
“I know you turned state’s on your old boss, too,” I said.
She raised both eyebrows. “That supposed to scare me?”
“No,” I said. “It’s supposed to tell you I’m not naïve.”
Glitz steepled her fingers. “You’re building a club. Zeke’s building an army. Why do you think the IRS won’t just shut you down?”
“Because I’ll have the best financial brains in Vegas working for me,” I said. “Brains like yours.”
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “You’re good, Selene. Almost makes me forget how easy it is to run a Ponzi in this town.”
“I don’t want a Ponzi. I want clean books. Or, at least, books nobody can open without a blowtorch.”
She considered, then nodded to the ledgers. “You know I embezzled a million from the Russians and made them thank me for it?”
“I read the trial transcript,” I said. “You made it look like a clerical error, then paid it back with ‘interest’ before anyone could get wise.”
She snorted. “Most fun I’ve ever had in a skirt.”
We both laughed, and it felt like the first time I’d done that in weeks.
She swept her hand, indicating the mess. “You think you can afford me?”
“If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
Glitz dug through a drawer, fished out a napkin, and produced a black marker from somewhere in her cleavage. She drew three intersecting circles, labeled them “Dirty,” “Clean,” and “Charity.”
“You got cash?” she said.
“A little.”
“You got charity, as in, a place to launder said cash?”
I nodded. “Mary’s brothel. She runs it off the books.”
Glitz smiled, wolfish. “Good. Now, you need a pipeline—some way to convert the first two into the third, without tripping a flag.”
She drew an arrow, then, on the napkin, scribbled a formula so arcane it looked like algebra. “That’s how you hide a hundred grand a month, easy.”
“You ever teach a class?” I said.
She shrugged. “You don’t get tenure for cooking the books.”
I tapped the Treasurer patch again. “You in?”
Glitz looked at her desk, then at me. “Only if I can keep my office.”
