Royal Flush by Stephanie Caffrey Page B

and take her back to England. Tonight her page was quiet, though. No selfies at clubs, and no gushy or phony-friendly notes from others. Of course, it wasn't even nine o'clock, so the night was young.
    Some idiot pulled the club's fire alarm around two-thirty, but other than that the evening was uneventful and profitable. Saturday morning found me scratching my head. I had called Melanie a few days earlier, but she hadn't gotten back to me. I eventually brushed it off on the grounds that I was old. Even though she was only a decade or so younger than I was, her generation looked at things like phone calls the way I would look at a Betamax tape. Everyone was into texts and emails, not phone calls. Asking Melanie to call me back was kind of like asking her to return my carrier pigeon or to respond by Western Union telegram. Plus, she was an heiress and probably had a million more interesting things to do than talk to a wannabe ex-stripper.
    The worst news of the day was that my bathroom scale was not, in fact, broken. The number it read could not be right, I reasoned, and so I tested it by placing other heavy objects on it. I even replaced the batteries, but the same incomprehensible number kept staring back at me, almost taunting me. Now that I wasn't dancing five or six nights a week, the calories were really starting to catch up with me. There were a number of options for progress on that front. I could cut out some empty calories, like wine and champagne, but that wasn't going to happen in this lifetime. That meant either dancing more often, which I didn't want to do, eating less, which was equally bad, or spending more time in the gym. The gym was the least worst option.
    Saturday night had me back at Cougar's, and Sunday morning meant dragging my tired behind over to the noon mass at St. Christopher's, where spandex and yoga gear were more common than slacks and collared shirts. The homily was about the need to keep things in perspective. Our middle-class American troubles paled in comparison to those of people in third world countries and even Americans just a few generations before, many of whom worked in grueling conditions (if they had a job at all) just to put bread on the table. Suddenly the fact that I had no boyfriend and a demeaning, but very well-paying, job didn't seem so bad.
    I was debating whether to go back to Cougar's that night when Mike called. When I saw the number, I got a little excited, but his voice was a letdown from the get-go.
    "Did you see the news?" he asked.
    "Nope, what is it?"
    "Melanie, your client. Dead of a drug overdose. It was on our local news, but the LA Times website has the whole story. Such as it is."
    I struggled with a response. "She didn't seem the drug type."
    "Maybe not, but all it takes is one time," Mike said. It wasn't very reassuring.
    "I guess that explains why she wasn't returning my call. I guess it doesn't matter anymore whether Kent is royalty or not."
    "Well, we tried," Mike said.
    "Did they say what kind of drugs? Or how it happened?"
    "No, the tox report won't be done for a week or more. They're using phrases like apparent overdose to describe what happened."
    I frowned. "So it might be foul play?"
    "There's no reason to think so," Mike said. "It's just a matter of waiting for the results before they can say for sure what happened."
    "Okay, thanks for the info. I've never had a client die on me before."
    Mike chuckled. "How many clients have you had, like five?"
    I got defensive, but only for a moment. "Seven, if you want to be accurate about it."
    "Those aren't good odds. I wouldn't put that on your website."
    I rolled my eyes. "It's nice that you can joke about someone's death." It was a little melodramatic of me to scold him, I admit. "Anyway, how do I return the money? She paid me ten grand, but I only burned through half that."
    He thought for a minute. "Figure out if she had a will—then pay the executor, and it will become part of the estate."
    "How do I do