Charlie Opera

Chapter 3

Early the next morning, Charlie woke up in a ditch behind a construction site. A big man wearing a construction helmet was holding a towel spotted with blood.

“You all right?” the big man asked.

Charlie had trouble sitting up. His body was sore. His hands felt bruised.

“Where am I?”

“The Palermo,” the big man said. He was waving somebody over to them. “Bring it over here!”

Charlie strained to see through the glare of the sun. Flashing lights made him dizzy.

“You’re cut pretty bad there, mister,” another man said. “Looks like you were mugged.”

Charlie immediately checked for his wallet. The fingers of his right hand hurt from trying to jam them inside his front pants pocket.

“I think one of those fingers is broke,” the big man said. “Maybe another one. Looks like you still have your wallet, though.”

At Valley Hospital, Charlie learned the damage. He had a slight concussion. Two of the fingers on his left hand were severely bruised. His nose was fractured. Eight stitches were required to sew a cut along his hairline behind his right ear. He had a severely bruised rib on his right side and bruises to his chest, shoulders, and back. When he saw himself in the small mirror on the back of a door, Charlie saw that both his eyes had turned black and his upper lip was swollen. A small gauze bandage covered the stitches behind his right ear. The knuckles on both his hands also were bruised.

An emergency room doctor was asking him questions.

“Do you want to fill out a police report?”

Charlie shook his head. “No.”

“Do you know who did this to you?”

“No.”

“Is there someone here with you I should contact?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. There’s no one.”

“What about back home? Is there someone we should contact back in New York?”

Charlie shook his head again. “No,” he said. “Thank you.”

He was still trying to piece together what had happened the night before. He had spent a lot of time at one of the casino bars playing dollar slot poker while he drank gin and tonics. He remembered that he was pretty drunk. He had won a small jackpot.

Four aces, he remembered. He had hit a four-aces bonus polka machine for five hundred dollars.

He remembered making friends and singing with people at the bar. He remembered some guy and his girlfriend. They wore cowboy hats. They sang something country-western.

Charlie also had made friends with the barmaid, Samantha Nicole, or something like Nicole. She was a pretty redhead with freckles and a bright smile. He couldn’t remember where the barmaid had said she was originally from, but she also had spoken with an accent.

He wasn’t sure what time he had left the bar, but he knew it was pretty late. He had wanted to get some air before heading back upstairs to his room. He knew Lisa was still pissed at him for being drunk. He also remembered never going back to the room. He remembered drinking again instead.

When he finally asino bar, Charlie had walked across Las Vegas Boulevard to watch the Pirate Show up close at the Treasure Island Hotel. He was standing in the middle of a huge crowd of spectators. A man had befriended him there, a short, bald man.

The two of them had stood there watching the show, making small talk. The short man was from Chicago, out to Las Vegas on business, he had said. He was with the construction company building the new hotel, the Palermo. Charlie told the short man how he had watched some of the cranes working through the night from his room at Harrah’s.

“We have them working twenty-four hours a day out here,” the short man had said. “Or they’d never be built in time. The money they spend on these things, it’s important they can open their doors to pay for themselves.”

Charlie had become fascinated with what the short man knew about the casino construction business. How many people it took to build one, how many dollars it cost for the electric, plumbing, carpets, glass, neon. Then Charlie told the short man about the window cleaning business he had recently sold. He was curious about how much money window cleaners were making in Las Vegas. He had asked how much a window cleaning contract for a place as big as the Palermo was worth.

The short man said he would find out and took Charlie to the Palermo model. It was closed, but the short man had keys with him. They did a walk-through together, the short man quoting facts about the costs of the room as he pointed at light fixtures and furniture. Charlie remembered shaking his head in amazement.

Then the short man walked Charlie out back behind the model. It was dark there. The last thing Charlie remembered was another man standing in front of him with a pipe. The man had said something Charlie couldn’t remember. Then Charlie felt the air being knocked from his solar plexus. He felt kicks and punches. Everything went black.

It was nearly ten-thirty in the morning before he was released from the hospital. He took a taxi back to Harrah’s, but Charlie didn’t go straight up to his room. He walked again instead. He took the route past the construction site where he was assaulted the night before. Two uniformed guards stood watch at the front gates as construction trucks lined up to enter the site. The guards checked each driver for identification.

Charlie stopped at the Palermo model to look for the short man who had befriended him the night before. It bothered him that he was mugged but not robbed. It didn’t make sense. He considered describing the short man to the people working at the Palermo model but decided against it.

He was getting too many looks from passersby to interrogate anyone. When he saw himself in the reflection of a mirror hanging outside the model bathroom, Charlie was reminded that his head and hands were bandaged.

When he finally returned to his hotel room, it was a little after one o’clock in the afternoon. Lisa was gone. He remembered denying there was anyone with him to the doctors at the hospital when he was asked if there was someone they should contact. He remembered denying there was anyone at all.

He wondered then if it had been wishful thinking on his part that there was no one to contact. He looked around the room and noticed something was strange. He crossed the room to the windows then turned around to look the room over again. The room had been tidied up by the housecleaning service, but something seemed out of order.

He lit a cigarette from a pack on the small table and immediately realized what was different. His wife wasn’t just out someplace getting sun or shopping or working out. His wife was gone.

It was then that he spotted the note she had left him on his nightstand.