Ashes to Dust (Las Vegas Mystery) by Rex Kusler Read Free Book Online Page B

for a year or more.” He looked down at his crumpled beer can, tilting it to examine the dents he’d caused. He sighed and continued. “One more month and my unemployment will stop coming in. Maybe they’ll give me an extension and I’ll get another six months. I don’t know.
    “But that’s not enough to live on anyway.” He looked up at Alice. “April, my wife, works as a cashier at the Boulder Nugget; she doesn’t make much of anything. We’re more than three months behind on the rent. Dead landlady won’t keep us from getting evicted. I heard her old man is a worse asshole than she was.” He spread his hands, the beer can in his right. “So why would I bother to kill the bitch?”
    “So, what’s your plan now?” Snow asked.
    Dole raised his can of beer in front of himself and then lowered it. “Drink myself to death,” he said. “Just like Nicolas Cage in that movie.”
    “ Leaving Las Vegas ,” Snow said.
    Dole nodded. “That’s the one. I’ve studied it many times. That’s the way to go out.”
    “I don’t think you’ll get there drinking beer,” Snow advised. “It doesn’t have enough alcohol in it. You’ll just end up fat and dying of a heart attack at fifty.”
    “Well,” Dole said, “I can’t handle hard stuff; it makes me barf…goddammit!” He lowered his head and shook it.
    “What about your wife and kids?” Alice said. “You don’t care about them?”
    He raised his head slightly, peering at Alice past his eyebrows. It gave him a demented appearance. “They don’t need me. They’re hardly ever here. The kids treat me like a stranger, and my wife is screwing her boss.”
    “What makes you think that?” Snow said.
    “She lost fifty pounds. Wears more makeup than Tammy Faye Bakker. She looks at the guy like those fifteen-year-olds used to look at Elvis.” He shook his head again. “It’s pretty sad, I tell you. Before we had the kids, she used to look at me that way. Used to whisper sexy things in my ear. We’d sit on the couch every night—I’d be rubbing her feet, and she’d be asking me if I still loved her. Now she asks me if I farted.”
    Dole took a swig of beer and continued. “It’s going to be tough on her, having to break it off with the guy. He’s married with kids. We’ll probably have to move back to Sioux Falls and stay with her parents. That’ll suck for a while, and then eventually I’ll be arrested for murder and spend the rest of my life in prison.”
    “Not if you’re innocent,” Snow insisted.
    Dole shot Snow an evil glare. “I’m not talking about the murder of Laura Roberts. I’m talking about my mother-in-law.”
    Snow looked down at his hands for a moment, thinking, then back up at Dole. “Tyson, have the police been here to talk to you?”
    His head tilted a bit, his eyelids beginning to droop. “Oh hell yeah. They showed up the morning after the murder. Grilling me. Searching the place. My car.”
    “They find anything?”
    He scowled. “Hell no! I didn’t do it!” He drained the rest of the beer, crumpled the can in his fist, and hurled it at the wastebasket. It missed and went skidding across the linoleum, stopping in front of the cabinet doors under the kitchen sink.
    “Did they take anything with them?”
    “Pair of work boots.”
    “What size?”
    “Eleven and a half.”
    “Pretty old?”
    “No,” he said. “Practically new. I just bought them two weeks before I got laid off. Haven’t had a need to wear them since then—obviously.”
    “Would you mind telling us where you were last Tuesday night?” Snow said.
    Dole snorted and got up. He went into the kitchen, leaving the empty can on the floor, and dug another beer out of the refrigerator. After popping it open, he took a drink from it. “I’m starting to get the impression you two are homicide detectives, working for the man . Mind showing me your stinking badges?”
    Snow interlocked his fingers and rested his arms on his thighs. “We don’t