Fatal Flaw

22

AH, LAS VEGAS. Neon, flash, the crush of crowds opening for long-legged women in boots and short skirts. Artificial light, artificial air, proud entrances, meek exits, announcements, lines, doors hissing open and shut, chrome, chrome. The bells and whistles of the slot machines, the silver clatter of coins, the snarl of old ladies with cigarettes dangling feeding in quarter after quarter. Giant video screens advertising the latest shows, the fattest buffets, the newest hotels. Wheels spinning, luggage flying, money passing in every handshake, limos lined up like black lemmings at the doors. The infinite sense of promise in those arriving, the weary defeat in those departing. Signs, shops, restaurants, uniforms, joyous laughter cackling over the grand cacophony as a jackpot hits and the lights start flashing. Ah, Las Vegas.

And that was only the airport.

“Could you wait here a minute?” said Beth after we had departed our plane and were headed to the tramway into the main terminal. “I could use a pit stop.”

I stood in the gray concourse and looked around. The usual mall-like stores and fast-food joints intermixed with slot machines. Nothing of too much interest, until something in the window of a kiosk with a great neon Mardi Gras head on top captured my attention and knocked it cold. While Beth was taking care of business, I went to check it out.

It was a sports jacket, hanging on a rack just beside the snow globes with the Vegas skyline doused in glitter. I found one in my size and felt its material, the lapels a satiny black, the body a rough and sparkly gold lamé. Gold lamé, how apropos. It wasn’t well made – it had no lining, threads were fraying already from the shoulder seams – but it had pockets big enough to hold five jackpots and it glistened so brightly it should have had a switch. I slipped it on and did a spin in front of the narrow mirror and had to shield my eyes. It was money, baby.

“You sell many of these?” I asked the cute salesgirl with the green hair and the ring though her eyebrow.

She curled her lip. “Hardly.”

“It’s a little bright, hey?”

“A-yaah.”

“Could you think of anything tackier?”

“Not really.”

“Perfect. I’ll take it.”

Seventy-eight bucks, and worth every dime.

“By the way,” I said to the salesgirl as I left the store, the jacket packed safely away in my briefcase, “I like your hair,” and I meant it, and she blushed, which was like hitting three sevens on the slots.

While Beth waited for our luggage, I took the shuttle bus to pick up our rental car. A convertible, red, as cheaply made as the jacket, but still topless and red. Before I drove it back to the airport, I dropped the roof. I shucked on my new jacket despite the oppressive heat. I slipped on my sunglasses despite the fact that it was long past dark.

When I pulled in front of Beth at the loading curb, I was smiling like an idiot.

“Welcome to Vegas,” I said.

“You look like you’re about to do a very bad version of ‘Feelings.’”

“This city brings out the best in me.”

“I’d hate to be with you in any city that brings out your worst.”

“Boca Raton, where I break out my Sansabelt slacks and white shoes?”

“Victor, Sansabelt slacks and white shoes would be six steps up from that jacket.”

“Hop in, sweetheart, the night is young and my stake is burning a hole in my pocket.”

She dropped our bags into the back seat and opened the door. “I didn’t know a buck sixty-four could get so hot?”

“Let’s go shoot craps.”

“Do you know how to shoot craps?”

“No,” I said, “but I understand they teach you how to play right on the television in your room. How nice is that?”

“It’s going to be an expensive night, isn’t it?”

I squealed my tires on the blacktop and tore out of the airport, into the desert night.

Vegas was not in my normal route between the office, the diner, and my apartment, but I had been there before. After college, on the obligatory cross-country road trip, I had stopped in Vegas on the way to L.A. and stayed longer than I ever expected. I remembered the $1.99 breakfast buffet at Circus Circus, great troughs of eggs, mountains of bacon. I remembered the shabby old pool at the Dunes where I could sneak in without anyone caring enough to do a thing about it. I saw Wayne Newton at the Hilton, I saw an Elvis impersonator sing “Viva Las Vegas” at the Imperial Inn. I lost thirty bucks on a queen-high straight playing poker at Binion’s. I spent a Sunday afternoon in the Caesar’s sports book, sitting in a helmet, watching nine NFL games at once. I bought the little yellow card that detailed perfect blackjack strategy and still lost more than I could afford and then won half of it back on a royal straight flush at a video poker machine. It was a great tacky carnival and I loved it, and that was why I was in high spirits despite the grim nature of our errand.

Yes, we might be there to break open the safe-deposit box of my murdered lover, but, hell, I was going to have myself a time. It was, after all, still Vegas.

Or was it?

It had changed. It was no longer dominated by the hopelessly tacky, now it was all flash and pomposity. The Dunes had disappeared, spectacularly razed to make way for the Bellagio, with its great sign in front advertising the Picassos and Manets held in the hotel’s private museum. Just on the other side of Caesar’s was the Mirage, with its high-toned lobby and volcano out front. We could have stayed at Paris with its Eiffel Tower, at the Venetian with its Grand Canal, at the Monte Carlo or Mandalay Bay or the Rio or New York, New York. There was the MGM Grand, there was the sinister Pyramid of Luxor with its message beam of pyramid power soaring out to the heavens, there was the Excaliber. As we drove down the glory of the Strip, the city was different from how I remembered it to be, a place that now aspired to be something grander than the tacky heart of the American wasteland. It didn’t look like it was succeeding, but even the attempt was disappointing. My God, I wondered if it still had whores.

“This is amazing,” said Beth as I drove her down the Strip. She had never before been to Vegas and her head wagged as we passed all the shiny new hotels.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why do they have to ruin everything?”

“I’ve never seen so many lights in my life. It’s like the whole city is a parade. What is that?”

“The Pyramid of Luxor,” I said. “But they have a better one in Egypt.”

“And look, look, the Statue of Liberty.”

“The one in New York Harbor is cooler.”

“And what’s that? Oh, my God, the Eiffel Tower.”

“Yeah, but the one in France is bigger.”

“Look at the sign. ‘Now appearing, Picasso’?”

“That’s where the Dunes was. Now, that was a Vegas hotel. You want to talk seedy, that was seedy. There were rats nibbling the food trays left outside the rooms at night, and they had this thing shaped like a spaceship with rows and rows of nickel slots. That was my Vegas.”

“But look how bright it is.”

“It used to be brighter.”

“Why do I suddenly have the urge, Victor, to rub lemons on my breasts?”

I had booked us rooms at the Flamingo, which was decidedly old school, the first casino ever built on the Strip. But it had one of the biggest neon displays, which I liked, and it was also three hundred and fifty dollars a night cheaper than the Bellagio, which I liked a lot. The hotel was very Miami Beach, old-time Miami Beach, crowded with an aged clientele drawn to the same bargains as was I. We ate dinner in their restaurant, the Flamingo Room, since Beth refused to wait in a long line for a buffet, and took a stroll down the Strip to the Venetian, where we saw the gondoliers, and then it was time. I went back up to my room, put on my new lucky jacket, checked my wallet, cracked my knuckles, picked up Beth at her room, and together we took the elevator down to the casino. It was nine-thirty in the evening, Las Vegas time, and I was ready to play.

By ten-fifteen I had busted through my bankroll and was mournfully hanging, like a disconsolate teenager, around the nickel slots.

The only thing more pitiful than stories of great gambling winnings are stories of great gambling losses, so I’ll spare you the details of the debacle, but let me just ask one question: Why is it that whenever you jump-raise your blackjack bet to a level higher than you should, you end up with a pair begging to be split, and then, after you’ve doubled the already stupidly high bet, why does the dealer always seem to pull that six she needs to turn a dead fifteen into a killer twenty-one? Why is that? Why? Answer me that. Does that seem fair to you? Or does it seem fair that Beth, who as far as I knew had never played before, who was merely following the rules of the little yellow strategy card instead of well-honed instinct, was doing spectacularly well, her stack of chips rising and turning colors while mine dwindled and disappeared? It was almost enough to make me lose faith in my lucky jacket. Almost.

So I was mournfully hanging around the nickel slots, feeling like I was living dangerously if I punched the “bet max” button and put a quarter on the line, when I saw it.

A flash of sparkly color. Gold lamé. My jacket.

Just the sight of it on someone else cheered me. It was like finding a grade school soul mate in the glittery wasteland of the new Vegas. Only someone who appreciated the Vegas I had first known could appreciate that kind of jacket. I wondered if my friend was having any better luck with his jacket than I was with mine. Maybe I had taken the wrong jacket off the rack, maybe the lucky one was the one he took. Good for him. Maybe I should pat him on the back, just for laughs. Without anything much else to do, I followed the flash of gold through the pink sheen of the Flamingo’s casino. I glimpsed it snaking in and out among the craps tables, and I kept after it. I could only catch sight of it here or there, losing it among the crowds or in the aisles. Who was he? I wondered. A hard-core gambler or a tourist like me? His hair was black, I could tell, there was a cigar, but I never got a clear glimpse of him. And strangely, as I hurried to catch up, the jacket seemed to hurry away from me.

I sped up my pace. Past the craps tables, the blackjack, the Let-It-Ride, the big wheel. I could only now catch glimpses of the jacket rushing out of this crowd, around this row of tables, catch a glance of its reflection in the shiny side of a slot machine.

Who was in the jacket? Did he know me? Who did I know whose taste was as tacky as mine, and why was he avoiding me?

I had a final glimpse of gold slinking out the corner doors to the Strip, but when I stepped out into the thick night air with its crazed electricity, he was gone.

“IS THAT him?” asked Beth.

“No, I told you, he was a smarmy-looking man.”

“He looks smarmy.”

“That’s not smarmy, that’s just old.”

“He has a mustache.”

“So did Stalin,” I said. “But he wasn’t smarmy.”

“Maybe we have a different definition of the word.”

“But only one of us is right,” I said, “and that guy is not smarmy. He looks like Art Carney.”

“I always thought Art Carney looked a little smarmy. When was Hopkins leaving for lunch?”

“They said he leaves about twelve-thirty. We have time yet.”

“Is that him?”

“What are you, kidding?”

“Maybe you’re right. It’s hard to be smarmy shaped like a fire-plug.”

“So how much did you win?”

“A few hundred, nothing much. Maybe ten.”

“A thousand? You won a thousand? And you’ve really never played before?”

“Well, maybe a little in Atlantic City.”

“Ah, so now we get the truth.”

“A few jaunts now and then with an old boyfriend.”

“Which one?”

“Dieter.”

“Dieter, the German computer scientist. Dieter was smarmy.”

“So that’s what you mean.”

“I didn’t know Dieter liked the cards.”

“He played slots. I suppose your jacket wasn’t lucky after all.”

“Oh, no, the jacket was lucky, but I wasn’t. It did okay for you while you were sitting next to it.”

“Yes, it did.”

“And I won a pot on the nickel slots.”

“They make you sign a W-2 on that one?”

“Wait a second.”

“Is that him?”

“Wait a second.”

“Now, he’s smarmy.”

“There we go. Yes, that’s our boy.”

We were in a strip-mall parking lot off Paradise Road, just west of the Flamingo, watching from the convertible, with its top up, as Gerald Hopkins left the bank. I had stopped at the bank earlier in the morning to scope out what he looked like. Then I made a call from Hailey’s cell phone to say I’d like to meet with Mr. Hopkins after lunch and to ask about his normal lunch hours. The bank people were ever so helpful. Everything was done to ensure that when we walked in with Hailey Prouix’s identification card and safe-deposit key, Gerald Hopkins, who asked me to give his regards to Hailey, would not be in the bank. I was hoping that when he left for lunch he wouldn’t be walking to the Indian restaurant a few doors down for the $5.95 buffet and a quick return. I almost willed him into the parking lot and, thankfully, he obliged. There was a white Cadillac a few rows down and he opened it with his key and ducked inside. A few seconds later he passed right by us on his way out of the lot and onto Paradise Road.

“How do I look?” said Beth, with her hair now back and the glasses on.

“You look great,” I said, “just great. Now let’s hope that no one’s reported yet to her Vegas bank that Hailey Prouix is dead.”

WE SAT at a desk and waited as the service specialist went off to get the card for the safe-deposit box. Beth fingered the key, trying to hide her nervousness. The woman, a Mrs. Selegard, heavy and smiling, talking all the while to her friend at the other desk, hadn’t blinked when Beth gave Hailey’s name and the box number stamped on the key.

“Here it is, Miss Prouix,” said Mrs. Selegard as she came back with the card. “I’ll need to see your identification and then have you sign.”

Beth reached into her bag, pulled out a wallet, unfolded flap after flap as if searching for something long hidden away. I thought she was laying it on a bit thick, but finally she pulled out the driver’s license and Mrs. Selegard started taking down the information.

“Do you have a home here, Miss Prouix?” asked Mrs. Selegard offhandedly.

“No, I live in Philadelphia. But my parents live here and I keep some things for them.”

“I hope they’re in good health.”

“Still,” said Beth, rapping on the wooden desk.

“We have experts in estate planning if they’re looking for someone to talk to.”

“Thank you, but I think they have a lawyer here working on it.”

“Good, that’s smart. No reason for Uncle Sam to get more than he must. I see, Miss Prouix, that your license has expired.”

“Has it?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Selegard looked up at Beth. “A year and a half ago.”

“I gave up my car when I moved to Philadelphia, so I suppose I hadn’t noticed.”

“You should take care of that.” Pause. “It says here your eyes are blue.” She looked at Beth for a moment. “They don’t look blue.”

“In some lights they’re bluish,” said Beth.

Mrs. Selegard examined the ID again and then Beth’s face. “Well, in some lights,” she said, “I’m a size six.”

The ladies laughed at that, sharing a little piece of vanity among themselves. I could tell that Beth wasn’t a natural at playacting. She was giving too much information, seemed to have an answer to everything when answers weren’t required. If it were me with the fake ID, I wouldn’t have been chatty with the account-executive lady, I’d have acted as if none of it was any of her damn business. But I had to admit, the “In some lights they’re bluish,” line was genius.

“If you’ll just sign here, Miss Prouix,” said Mrs. Selegard, handing her the card. There were a series of lines on the card, with some signatures by Hailey, all duly dated. Without hesitation, Beth signed. She had been practicing all morning in the hotel room, writing out the name based on the signature on the license: Hailey Prouix, Hailey Prouix, Hailey Prouix. It wasn’t a perfect match, but the flourishes were the same, and it was close enough, and after their little laugh together Mrs. Selegard barely glanced at the card before standing from her desk.

“Is your friend coming, too?” asked Mrs. Selegard, gesturing in my direction.

“You mean Raoul?” said Beth. “Sure, why not?”

I tossed Beth a “what the hell are you doing?” expression as we followed Mrs. Selegard to the vault, but Beth, feeling good after having passed her test, only smiled.

The door was a foot thick, the vault itself a closet-size opening walled on either side with the fronts of boxes, two locks on each. Mrs. Selegard placed a key in one of the locks of Box 124, and Beth placed her key in the other, and they both turned at the same time. The metal box slid out of its opening. Mrs. Selegard handed the long, narrow box to Beth and led us to a small room beside the vault with two chairs and a narrow shelf. When the door closed behind us, Beth placed the box on the shelf and we both sat in front of it and stared.

“That went well,” said Beth.

“Raoul?”

“It just came to me.”

“I don’t look like a Raoul. I always thought when I turned gigolo my name would be something more like Giorgio.”

“I wasn’t thinking gigolo, I was thinking cabana boy. Aren’t you going to open it?”

“Sure. Soon. But suddenly it feels weird, doesn’t it, looking into a dead woman’s safe-deposit box?”

“You couldn’t have thought of that in Philadelphia?”

“But now we’re in Las Vegas, land of morality.”

“And all of it cheap. But I think maybe we should check it out before the smarmy Gerald Hopkins comes back from lunch.”

She was right, of course, and I stood again, but before I opened the box’s lid, I hesitated. It wasn’t that I thought I was violating Hailey Prouix’s last hiding place. Someone would eventually open this box, some investigator would eventually cotton to the knowledge that it existed and get some court order and scour it for clues, and so I rationalized that the initial scourer might as well be me. Who, after all, was working more in her interests than myself, sworn as I was to see her killer punished? But still I hesitated, and why was not a mystery to me even then, in the middle of the hesitating, when things suddenly seemed so confusing. “Last thing you want,” she had said, “are any surprises.” I used to think I knew what I needed to know about Hailey Prouix, I used to think I knew the basics, that maybe I knew her heart. But I didn’t think that anymore, and that’s what forced my hesitation. Because as that box with its secrets lay before me, I was deathly afraid of what it was I might learn.

“Go ahead, Victor.”

And go ahead I did. I slipped on a pair of rubber gloves. I took hold of the box. Slowly the top slid off, and there it was, Hailey Prouix’s safe deposits. What lay inside were clues to a whole brutal world I would just as soon had stayed closed to me forever, a world that told me more than I ever wanted to know about a woman named Hailey Prouix and the strange murderous past where were born both her sadness and her death.

23

HENDERSON, NEVADA, used to be a little desert town between Las Vegas and the Hoover Dam. I say “used to be” because now it’s a boomtown, in the truest sense of the word, its growth fueled not by a discovered silver mine or a new technological industry but because the Boomer generation is looking for someplace to retire, and tens of thousands have decided that Henderson is it. It’s got sun, it’s got Lake Mead, it’s got the Las Vegas Strip not six miles away. Henderson is now growing so fast they can’t print maps speedily enough to keep up with the newest walled developments. It is growing so fast it is now the second-largest city in Nevada, leaving Reno in the dust. They’ve trucked in palm trees by the thousands to line the boulevards, housing prices are rising like helium, people are moving there at the rate of twelve hundred a month. And it’s not as if the city has discouraged the grand influx. Seattle’s motto might just as well be “Stay the hell in California because we don’t want you here.” Henderson’s motto is “A place to call home.”

I suppose that was the idea behind Desert Winds, a huge, first-class assisted-living facility built on the edge of the vast desert that leads to Lake Mead. Located on a flat spread of desert rubble with wide pathways and small patches of green grass, more intimations of lawn than lawns themselves, Desert Winds consisted of a series of large buildings in the ubiquitous Spanish Colonial style, with red asphalt roofing and barred windows. The campus was Disney-fascist, a relentlessly upbeat place to wither and die. Despite the evident number of rooms, the landscape was deserted. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe the intended clientele hadn’t yet ripened. The Boomers moving to Henderson weren’t ready yet for a nursing home. They wanted developments like Sun City, where the houses were built side by side and the residents could drive their personal golf carts to the clubhouse and the card games and the golf course and the pool. They had come for the active lifestyle promised in the brochure. The Boomers moving to Henderson weren’t ready yet for a nursing home. Not yet. But it was only a matter of time. In that great Nevada tradition, the owners of Desert Winds were betting on the come.

The office was in a separate building in the center of the campus.

“Are you here for a tour?” chirped the cheery receptionist as I signed in.

“No,” I said. “We came to visit one of your residents.”

“How wonderful. Our members so love to have visitors. Are you expected?”

“No, not exactly.”

“If you tell me the name of the member, I’ll see if a visit can be arranged.”

“Lawrence Cutlip.”

“Oh, my, isn’t Mr. Cutlip having a busy day. Sit down, Mr.” – she turned the book around to check my name – “Mr. Carl, and I’ll see what we can arrange.”

“Should we go to his room?”

“That won’t be necessary. Many of our members have private aides to help them during their event-filled days here at Desert Winds. Mr. Cutlip is one of the lucky ones.”

Lawrence Cutlip. It was a name in a file I had taken from Hailey’s safe-deposit box and put into my briefcase. I had taken a lot of things from that box. I had taken old photographs; I had taken letters, love letters not addressed to me; I had taken a maroon folder with the medical file of Juan Gonzalez, surprise, surprise; I had taken cash – not all the cash, and there was quite a bit there, over eighty thousand, but enough to provide a retainer for my defense of Guy. Taking the cash was only fair, I figured, since the money was undoubtedly part of the funds transferred out of Guy and Hailey’s joint account by Hailey’s unilateral act, but I left even more cash than I took to allay suspicion. When the detectives eventually searched the box, they’d have to assume nothing was taken. I mean, what kind of jerk would empty a safe-deposit box and accidentally leave fifty thousand dollars?

The file in which I had found Lawrence Cutlip’s name contained two life insurance policies, the very policies Guy had been searching for. One was made out in the name of Guy Forrest, with Leila Forrest as the main beneficiary. Accompanying that policy was a copy of a change-in-beneficiary notice that made Hailey Prouix the new beneficiary to the extent the law allowed, since some funds would still, by law, go to Leila, the wife. The other was a policy made out in the name of Hailey Prouix, with the sole beneficiary being not Guy Forrest, as Guy had expected, but one Lawrence Cutlip. Who was this Lawrence Cutlip, important enough to Hailey Prouix to be the sole beneficiary on her life insurance at the expense of her fiancé? Lawrence Cutlip. I had never heard the name before but I had a guess who he was. And I also had a guess as to exactly where I’d find him, a guess confirmed with a quick phone call. Which was why Beth and I had taken the convertible east on Interstate 215 to Henderson and the Desert Winds retirement home.

We were directed to one of the large buildings off to the side and then led through a hallway with a thick blue rug and no smell of piss or green beans. That was how you could tell for sure it was an upscale old-age joint. It smelled instead like a summer meadow, it smelled of daisies, it smelled like a preview of coming attractions.

“What exactly are we doing here?” asked Beth as we followed our guide.

“Hailey Prouix transferred the money missing from her and Guy’s account to the bank we visited this morning. In addition, she made a number of calls to right here, undoubtedly to this Lawrence Cutlip.”

“How do you know that?”

“I have my sources,” I said. “They’re very flexible as to payments here at Desert Winds. You can either pay your exorbitant monthly bill in advance, or pay an even more exorbitant lump sum up front, which works like an annuity. My guess is that the Gonzalez money went into a lump-sum purchase of Cutlip’s spot at this lovely facility. And he’s the main beneficiary on her life insurance instead of Guy. I want to know why.”

“To what end?”

“To save Guy, we need to find a killer. To do that, we need to learn what we can about the victim, to see if there was something in her life that caused her death.”

“Blame the victim.”

“Or find someone else to blame, anyone but Guy.”

“We already have the mystery man she was sleeping with.”

“When it comes to suspects, it’s like the invitation list to a college keg party: the more the merrier.”

We were led outside the building to a little walled courtyard with a flooring of red brick. It was a sunny day, as relentlessly sunny as the staff was relentlessly cheerful, and Beth had put on her sunglasses, but with a few well-tended trees and bright umbrellas, much of the courtyard was in shade. We sat at a small table beneath the ethereal leaf network of a twisting mesquite tree and waited. It was quiet, remarkably so. No wind in the flora, no calls or hoots from the fauna. All of Henderson was quiet, I had noticed, as if exuberance had been outlawed by the city fathers as nonconducive to further growth. We sat at the table and waited until a swinging door swung open and a tall, snaggletoothed man with long blond hair and bad skin wheeled what was left of Lawrence Cutlip into the courtyard.

You could tell that at one point in his life Lawrence Cutlip had been an imposing man, tall of limb, broad of shoulder, with a heavy jaw and stern dark eyes, but he wasn’t imposing anymore. He slumped in his wheelchair like a sack of bones, his stockinged feet resting on the risers like lumps of clay. A thin plastic line lay just beneath his nose, feeding oxygen into his nostrils from a tank attached to the rear of his chair, and his mouth was perpetually open, as if the effort to close it was too much now to bear. In the ugly open maw could be seen irregular clumps of yellowed teeth. But despite his evident decay, his eyes were still stern and dark and very much alert. Hailey’s uncle, I assumed.

“Leave it here, Bobo,” said Cutlip in a gruff country voice, wheezing all the while, as the attendant placed his chair facing us.

Bobo, remaining behind the chair, began scratching at one of his wrists. Both of Bobo’s arms were covered with scabs from his fingertips to the short sleeves of his white shirt, as if he had a colony of chiggers breeding like crazy beneath his skin.

“You here to see me?” said Cutlip.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“What can I do you for?”

“We came to talk to you about your niece.”

“Which one?”

“Hailey.”

“Yeah, well, she’s dead, ain’t she?” Cutlip fought to catch his breath even as he spoke, and his wheeze grew louder. “What else is there to know?”

“I wondered if you were aware, Mr. Cutlip, that you were named beneficiary on her life insurance policy.”

His eyes widened for a instant and then he smiled. “Course I knowed. I was wondering when one of you clucks from the insurance company was going to show ’round here with the check. Hand it on over.”

“I don’t have your check.”

“What the hell’s keeping it, then? I been waiting days and days.”

“I suppose nothing’s going to happen with the check until they figure out exactly who killed her.”

“They arrested that bastard boyfriend of hers, didn’t they? I told her he was no good, I told her she was making a mistake.” He coughed and fought for a breath and his coughing calmed. “She wasn’t the marrying kind, Hailey. I don’t know what the hell she was thinking. Then again, I never did know with her. But I ain’t surprised that he kilt her. She could drive men crazy, Hailey could, drive ’em straight out of they right minds. I almost feel sorry for what he walked into. Almost. And now I hear he got himself some smart Jew lawyer that’s aiming to give him a walk.”

“That would be me,” I said.

“Son of a bitch.”

“My name’s Victor Carl, and yes I am.”

His face grew red and he struggled for air. “Let’s get out of here, Bobo.”

“I think you’ll want to talk to us, Mr. Cutlip.”

Bobo started to pull back the chair, but Cutlip raised his hand. “Why the hell is that?”

“With me is my partner Beth Derringer. We represent Guy Forrest, and we have some questions.”

“What makes you think I got any answers I’d be willing to share with a peckerhead like you?”

“Because I figure we’re both after the same thing, trying to find out who it was who really killed your niece and make sure he’s punished.”

“They done found him already.”

“No, they didn’t. They’re wrong.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you, a lawyer?”

“A Jew lawyer to be precise, and yes.”

“How the hell?”

“Because I knew her, Mr. Cutlip. I knew her before she was murdered. What happened to her was wrong and needs to be punished.”

I saw something just then, something in those stern, dark eyes, just a flutter come in an out, like a snake’s tongue slashing in the air. I stared at him, and he stared at me, and the thing in those eyes got brighter and glowed until he turned away from me and looked at Beth.

“I thought this was all up and finished already,” he wheezed out. “I thought you was going to take the plea and put the son of a bitch in jail so we can all rest easy?”

“You knew about the offer?” said Beth.

“Of course I knowed about the offer. I ain’t blind out here in the desert. It’s damn generous, that offer, too damn generous. I thought it was a done deal.” So he, too, had been anxious for me to accept Troy Jefferson’s offer. That was more than passing strange. Didn’t it make sense for Hailey’s uncle to want the greatest measure of justice for the murderer of his niece? You would think. And wouldn’t a trial with a punishment of death waiting at the end be more to his liking? You would think. But that’s not how he was acting. Instead he said, “I don’t know why the hell you folks ain’t snapping at it.”

“Because it’s been pulled,” I said.

“Is that a fact?” he said, a smile growing. “I guess now they’re going to go through with a trial and kill that sumbitch.”

“Our client says he didn’t do it,” said Beth.

“I can’t do nothing about the lies he tells you.”

“The story I heard was that you were a gambler, Mr. Cutlip,” I said.

“Is that the story?”

I looked around at the lovely courtyard. “You must have read the odds pretty damn well to be able to afford this place.”

“Oh, I could, yes I could, when I wasn’t drinking, though that wasn’t much time total, was it, Bobo?”

The attendant smiled and nodded stupidly.

“But that’s not how I can afford this. Hailey paid for it. And she paid for Bobo, too. What with her being a lawyer, it wasn’t too much a strain.”

I looked around again at the high-toned surroundings. “I’d expect it would be a strain for anyone. And she called you frequently?”

“Sure she did. We was close, we had a bond. Hailey and me, we had history. It warn’t no picnic raising her and her sister after the father died. Warn’t no picnic at all. We had us some tough times, some times we both of us would rather forget. But we can’t, can we? I mean, the past it just jumps out and bites you in the ass whenever it gets itself real good and hungry, don’t it?”

“What kind of past, Mr. Cutlip?”

“I don’t know, the past. The past. Maybe it’s best it’s just forgot. What about my check, my insurance check? When’s that coming?”

“You’ll have to ask the insurance company, Mr. Cutlip. But I’m glad to see you’re not so overwhelmed with grief that you can’t keep your mind focused on the more important matters, like your check.”

He stared at me. His lips quivered. “Why you son of a…” came out of his throat until it was choked back by an acute breathlessness and a rising flood of anger that filled those dark eyes until they swelled with something else, something else, and then I could see that the something else they swelled with was tears. Whatever salty anger he had been aiming at me disappeared as if dissolved by the tears, and he came apart in front of us, his once huge body shaking with sobs, gasping for breath, the back of his still-large hands trying to wipe his cheeks dry and failing. And out of his trembling lips came one sentence, over and over again.

“My Hailey. My Hailey. My Hailey.”

Bobo leaned over the wheelchair and whispered in Cutlip’s ear and Cutlip nodded before tossing Bobo a withering glance. Bobo jerked back and stood straight. Beth and I glanced at each other and rose from our chairs, about to leave Cutlip with his grief, when he raised a hand in the middle of his sobs to stop us from leaving. Slowly the jag subsided, the tears abated, his breaths slowed and then deepened, the loose flesh of his palms pulled away whatever wetness still lay on his face. He coughed loudly as he slowly gained control.

“I’m sorry,” he said, waving one of those big hands as if to cover his face. “It happens sometimes when I think, when I remember. I’m sorry. Sit down. It’s just it’s… it’s…” It appeared as if he were about to start again.

It seemed genuine, his grief, it seemed deep and painful and more than I ever would have expected, and it caught me off guard. I turned and frowned at Beth as we both sat again. She had taken off her sunglasses and was staring at Uncle Larry with deep interest.

“How were you and Hailey related, Mr. Cutlip?” she asked.

“She was my sister’s daughter,” he said as he wiped again at his eyes. “But I didn’t have nothing much to do with her until her daddy died in the accident.”

“When was that?” asked Beth.

“They was eight, the girls, when it happened. After that, I could see they was having troubles. After that, I could see they was near to starving. Little eight-year-old girls with no one much taking care of them, raggedy dresses falling off their bones.”

“What about the mother?”

“My sister Debra was a sweet, pretty thing, but she didn’t have what it took to do it all by herself, and when her husband died, she sort of broke apart. They needed somebody with them. So I moved myself in. Never had a steady job before, never needed one or wanted one, could always cadge a drink or find a game with a couple of fish that would keep me going for a spell. But I moved myself in with Debra and the girls and found a job and for eight years I didn’t miss so much as a day at the plant carving carcasses, grinding meat, stuffing casings. Stood ankle deep in blood just so I could help those girls be raised.”

I saw the image just then, Lawrence Cutlip as a younger man, tall, dark, broad, hip boots on, wading through a wilderness of blood as he hacked away at the carcasses passing by him on a conveyer belt of hooks, a wild man who had tamed himself so that two little girls who weren’t his own could have a decent start. The man wading through the blood, I knew, was the uncle that Hailey had told me about, the uncle who was the hero of her life and whom she had put up in this luxury nursing home as a way of offering thanks. My opinion of him shifted as fast as the image came and I felt a sudden swell of affection for the old coot. His grief had been real, his sacrifice true, his gruff, hard exterior a way to hide the caramel inside.

“That must have been hard, doing all that for them,” I said.

“It was, sure, but I ain’t never regretted it. It was the rightest thing I ever done in my life.”

“And looking around at this place, Hailey seemed to appreciate it.”

“Them girls, they needed a firm hand in that house. Now, Roylynn, she was a good girl, a little on the quiet side with all her big ideas, but Hailey, she was trouble, more than her mother could ever hope to handle. There was something about her that was catnip. No man could resist her. Those boys couldn’t walk close as five feet without losing control of they bowels and shittin’ themselves. They swarmed around her, like she was some kind of queen bee, and she let ’em. She let ’em. I tried to swat ’em away, but it wasn’t they fault, it was just the way she was.”

“Did she have boyfriends?”

“Course she did. She didn’t tell me things like that, personal things, she wasn’t one to kiss and tell, but sure she did, though they never lasted too damn long. There was Grady Pritchett, who was older and I didn’t like him hanging around the way he was. And there was that Jesse boy, but he was kilt out near the quarry when she was fifteen. She and Jesse knew each other since grade school, and they was more like friends, not boyfriend girlfriend, but still, that was hard on her. After that there was that Bronson boy, the football player, but it was a halfhearted thing at best. Turned out he was more interested in standing over his center than being with Hailey, if you know what I’m saying. And he wasn’t even the quarterback. If you know what I’m saying.”

Old Bobo, standing still behind Cutlip, snickered, his twisted teeth catching bits of yellow light.

“But I can’t rightly say too much about that one. When the girls they was fifteen or so, I figured I was done, that they could make it on they own. Had some opportunity out here and I took it. I had a lot of drinking to catch up on and I did. Didn’t I, Bobo?”

Bobo nodded. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It was party time.”

“Bobo was just a kid when I first met him, a runaway, come to sin city to make good. I showed him around, helped him out. Now I got him this job.”

“Mr. Cutlip’s been good to me.”

“That’s my Bobo. He’s from out your way, some beach town in Delaware, ain’t that right, Bobo?”

Bobo smiled and nodded. “Dewey Beach.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Inland from there.”

“But he ran into trouble and came out here and I sort of adopted him. I take care of him like I took care of them girls.”

“You kept in touch with Hailey, Mr. Cutlip?” I asked.

“I did, yeah. For a while, right after I left, I lost touch, but then she came out and found me. After that, we kept in touch. We was closer than the normal uncle and niece, you know, me and Hailey.”

“You ever visit her in Philadelphia?”

“Nah. I don’t travel much no more. I like it right here in the desert. Nice and hot, nice and dry.”

“Did she tell you about Guy Forrest?”

“Just that she had decided to marry. I told her it was a mistake. The Hailey I knew wasn’t the marrying type. And when she told me they was fighting over the money she spent to put me in this place, I knew it would all go to hell. But Hailey, you could never tell her nothing. I would have told her to stop the fighting, to forget about the money, but I needed someplace. You ever hear of beriberi? It tears you apart from the inside, paralyzes you piece by piece as you swell to twice your size.”

“Beriberi?” said Beth. “Like sailors used to get?”

“That’s it. Strange to catch it in the desert, ain’t it? Nothing I could do, it came and ran through me and destroyed half my insides. I needed this place.”

“There are plenty of places,” said Beth.

“Yeah, I knowed. I was happy just out in that motel I was living at, but she said I deserved a place like this. Couldn’t talk her out of it. She said I deserved it, and said she knew how to get it for me. And she said I deserved having Bobo to push me around, and that I figured was all right, since I had pushed him around long enough.”

“Did she tell you about anyone she was seeing besides Guy?” I asked.

“There was someone else, she said. But she never told me who. Was it you, you Hebrew son of a bitch?”

“No,” I said, stunned and trying not to show it.

“You sure?” The old man stared at me for a moment, and I thought again I saw that snakelike flutter.

“I’m sure.”

“Good.” He smiled and then he turned to Beth. “It could have been him. It could have been anyone. To know Hailey was to want her, and even when she was with someone, they was always someone else. But she didn’t tell me things like that. Never did. From the time she was fifteen or something, she just closed right up and told me nothing.”

“Did she ever mention anyone named Juan Gonzalez?” said Beth.

“Is that the other fella she was sleeping with? Is that the fella, some Mexican? Had she fallen that low?”

“I don’t think that was the other man,” I said, relieved that his suspicions were so wild as to alight on any name tossed out.

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” he said, staring at me again. “Never had no idea what kind of scum riffraff she’d end up with.”

“In your conversations before her death,” said Beth, “did she mention to you that she was scared of anyone?”

“No, Hailey wasn’t scared of no one.”

“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to do her any harm?”

“Nope, none, except she was aiming to marry one man and sleeping with another and that’s a dangerous proposition in our part of country.”

“In our part of the country, too,” I said. I looked at Beth. She put her sunglasses back on. I slapped my thighs and stood. “I think that’s everything. Thank you for your help, Mr. Cutlip.”

He lifted one of those big hands and pointed at me. “You said you was going make the man who did that to my Hailey pay.”

“Yes I did.”

“Don’t be acting like a lawyer. You be true to your word there, boy.”

“Count on it, Mr. Cutlip.”

“I aim to.”

I nodded at Bobo, standing behind the man with a smile fixed dully on his face, and started heading for the door when Beth asked a final question.

“That boy, Hailey’s friend. You said he died out near some quarry?”

“Jesse was his name. Jesse Sterrett. That’s right.”

“How did it happen?”

“It’s a mystery, ain’t it? Don’t nobody knowed what he was doing there. All they knowed is that somehow he cracked his head and fell into the water sittin’ there at the bottom.”

“They ever find out who killed him?”

“Coroner ruled it an accident.”

“But no one believed that, did they?” said Beth.

“Don’t know what no one believed. Coroner said he slipped and cracked his head before he fell off the ledge they all used to hang out on. That’s what the coroner said, and how the hell you all the way over here fifteen years later can think something different is a goddamn mystery to me.”

“Just like that,” she said. “Fell off a ledge just like that.”

“That’s what he said, good old Doc Robinson. Best-loved man in the county. Good doctor, bad cardplayer. Ruled it an accident.”

“What did Hailey think happened?”

“She didn’t much say,” said Cutlip. “We done never talked about it. She wasn’t much interested in legal stuff then.”

“Only after. Thank you, Mr. Cutlip,” said Beth. “You’ve been a big help.”

24

OUR PLANE didn’t leave McCarran International until late that evening, we were red-eyeing our way back to Philly, so I took the scenic route west toward Lake Mead. The narrow two-lane road, with shoulders soft and gravelly, twisted through hills and canyons. The desert here rose on either side in great piles of singed rock. There was a sign, LAST STOP BASS ’N’ GAS, there was a sign warning of the danger in an abandoned mine, and then just the road. In the desert, with the top of our convertible down and the wind rushing over our heads, the world seemed still raw and the Strip far, far away, even though at night its gaudy lights would fill the sky like a hundred thousand beacons.

Beth hadn’t said much during the drive, and that had been fine by me. There was much I had to think about, the young Hailey with tattered dresses hanging from her bones, the uncle exiling himself to the slaughterhouse to keep his nieces and sister fed, the boyfriend dead in the quarry, Hailey’s subsequent tepid relationship with the football player who preferred showering with his teammates to pitching woo with his girl, the long, improbable haul through college and law school, only to end at the wrong end of a gun. It all seemed to amplify the tragedy of Hailey’s story, turning the bare bones of what she had told me into some sad Gothic opera.

Beside me Beth shuddered, as if she were thinking through the same things, and then she chuckled.

“So you’re the mystery man who was sleeping with Hailey Prouix,” she said.

I played it nonchalant. “Except when she was out on the town with Juan Gonzalez.”

“He looked at that moment when he made his wild accusation as if he wanted to strike you dead.”

“Like a protective papa bear.”

Beth didn’t reply.

We were driving slowly on the road, enjoying the scenery. A big black Lincoln, with its windows up and air conditioner undoubtedly blasting, blew by.

“I had this image when he was talking,” I said, “of him in the slaughterhouse, surrounded by carcasses, ankle deep in blood. It was something, what he did, sacrificing almost a decade of his life so his sister and his nieces could live decently. However he wasted his life before or after, and it seems he wasted it badly, at least he did that one noble thing.”

“Was it noble?”

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t think,” said Beth, “I’ve ever met a more vile man.”

I was stunned by what she said. He seemed ornery, sure, small-minded and bigoted, with a foul word for everyone, but nothing worse than expected from a decrepit old goat. “You’re not serious.”

“Something about him, Victor, creeped me to the bone. His fake tears when you pressed him about being more concerned about the check than the death of his niece.”

“I thought they were genuine.”

“Please. And his little protestations of sacrifice, of how hard it was to take care of that family, of how much his firmness was needed.”

“You don’t think it was a sacrifice?”

“Do you remember in David Copperfield when David’s sweet mother marries Murdstone, and Murdstone comes in with his sister and takes over the house, bending everyone to his will until he destroys his new wife and forces David out?”

“Murdstone with the big black sideburns?”

“Yes. What did Uncle Larry say, the girls needed a firm hand in that house? I shivered when I heard that.”

“Your imagination is running amok. This explains her travel to Vegas. She didn’t go with a lover, she went to visit her uncle. And I was curious why Hailey transferred the bulk of her Gonzalez fee, after taxes, to Las Vegas, and now I know. To pay for the uncle’s nursing home.”

“But why?”

“Loyalty.”

“Maybe,” said Beth. “But if you ask me, there’s something else going on. Something that ruined him, too. Do you know what beriberi is?”

“Some exotic South Seas disease, it sounds like. How do you think he caught it in the desert?”

“Beriberi is not a virus. It’s a vitamin deficiency that sailors used to get because of unbalanced diets. You can also get it from drinking, but not just a little light tippling. They see it in drunks who drink so much that nothing matters but the drinking and the forgetting, who drink so much they forget to eat.”

A flight of warplanes flew low overhead, banking to the left, blowing away the soft rush of the wind with the roar of their engines, leaving thin trails through the pale blue as if the fabric of the sky itself had been ripped.

“Remember when I kept asking about the death of that boy?” she said. “What was his name?”

“Jesse Sterrett.”

“That’s right. You know what we should do? We should go back to Hailey’s old hometown and find out what really happened to him.”

“He said it was ruled an accident.”

“Maybe it was, if you can trust old Doc Robinson to know the difference between an accident and a murder.”

Behind us a white muscle car, its windows darkened, came up on us at a high rate of speed and shifted into the passing lane.

“If you ask me,” said Beth, “I’d guess there was a link between Hailey Prouix’s murder and the death of that boy. If you ask me, there’s something malignant that was alive back then that still exists, just as strong, today.”

“You’re creeping me out, Beth.”

“He creeped me out, Victor.”

“I don’t understand why.”

“Neither do I. But you know what? It gets me to wondering. It gets me to wondering if maybe we don’t have it all wrong. It gets me to wondering if maybe-”

Just then the white muscle car roared alongside us. It was a Camaro, the noise of its engine exploding without the restraint of a muffler. I expected it to zoom on past, but it didn’t, it stayed even with us, like a shadow.

I pulled my foot off the accelerator and slowed down to let it go on by, and it slowed down with me.

I sped up, and it kept pace.

I tried to peer inside but the windows were tinted so dark it was impossible to see who was driving.

I glanced at the road in front and saw a huge red pickup truck, hauling a motorboat, coming our way in the muscle car’s lane.

The truck blared its horn.

I sped up.

The muscle car veered away to the left and then, as if it were a yoyo on a string, came back and slammed us hard in the side.

The crash of metal, the crack of glass, the horn of the red pickup, and then a strange sound like the flap of a huge wing, followed by silence.

The straight road twisted sharply to the left, the soft shoulder tossed us, the great singed desert opened its arms to us, and, like children of the earth, we fell into them, spinning into the arms of the earth as the pale blue of the sky and the rocky surface of the desert revolved one around the other and became for us as one.

25

MY FIRST words when I came to were for Beth. I called her name, I called her name and heard nothing. The sun was brutal in my eyes, three dark things circling about it in the sky. My back ached so badly I thought it was broken, but I realized that as long as it hurt like hell it was still together, still together, and I called out for Beth.

From behind I heard voices. I twisted my head and saw the car, our car, the convertible, on its side, twisted grotesquely, the windshield shattered, fingers of flame lapping out the side of the hood. The red pickup truck was parked off a ways in the distance, the huge boat still hitched behind it. A man in jeans and a tee shirt stood in front of it, talking into a cellular phone.

“Beth,” I called out as loud as I could. “Where’s Beth?”

And then a face appeared over me, blurry and in shadow against the harsh sun. A man’s face, round, with its ears sticking out.

“She’s all right,” came a soft, scarred voice, strangely familiar, though badly out of place. “I think something in her arm, it snapped, but other than that she’s doing fine. You, too, mate. You was both wearing seat belts, good thing, or you’d be vulture bait.”

“The car…”

“I hope you took out insurance on your rental, is all I can say.”

“Beth’s all right?”

“Yeah, Vic, she’s fine. Just fine. I took her out of the car first, you second. Didn’t want to move you but I had to with the engine burning like it was. What’s that?” he called out to the man on the phone.

He turned to hear what the truck driver had to say and the sun lit up his face and I recognized him, I recognized him. That bastard.

“The ambulance will be along any minute. Don’t worry, Vic. Don’t you worry. I’m here to help. I’ll take care of everything.”

And he would, I was sure. I recognized him all right, no doubt about it, and I knew he would take care of everything, that bastard, just like he promised.

Phil Frigging Skink.

26

IN A curtained alcove of the emergency room of the St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson, Nevada, a uniformed police officer took my statement as I waited for the results of the X-rays. They had strapped me to the stretcher in the ambulance to ensure I wouldn’t further injure my back, and the doctor had urged me to lie still on the table until he could review the film.

“Any sudden movement could cause irreparable injury,” he had said.

So I was lying as motionless as I could manage while the cop asked her questions. She was slight and cute, and I would have flirted her up in any other circumstance, but just then she was not at all what I wanted to see in the way of law enforcement. Just then what I wanted to see in the way of law enforcement was a burly bruiser who would take Skink by the scruff of his neck and toss him straight into the slammola. I told the cute police officer what happened with the white Camaro, about the way it smashed me in the side and sent me spinning off the road and how I was ready to sign a complaint for attempted murder as soon as she had it prepared.

“The truck driver said you did a full turn in the air before hitting the ground and spinning onto your side,” she said.

“Degree of difficulty six-point-nine.” Well, maybe I couldn’t help doing a little flirting, and she did have a pretty smile, and I always admired a woman in a uniform with a gun strapped to her hip.

“You were damn lucky, Mr. Carl. If you had dropped upside down, you likely both would have been crushed.”

“That’s just how I feel, lucky lucky lucky. It’s because my lucky jacket was in the trunk.”

“Is it bright?”

“Blinding,” I said.

“Lovely. Did you happen to see the license-plate number of the Camaro?”

“No, I’m sorry, I was busily spinning in the air as it drove away.”

“Did you see the driver?”

“I couldn’t see inside,” I said. “The windows were a dark blue, but it was Skink driving.”

She flipped through her notepad. “You mean the Mr. Skink who gave the statement?”

“That’s right, Phil Frigging Skink.”

“Calm yourself down, sir.”

“Sorry. But it had to be him. He obviously followed me here to Vegas. There’s something he’s desperate to hide, desperate enough for him to try to kill me. My guess is he was in on a murder that happened in Philadelphia and he knows I’m hot on his trail.”

“A murder?”

“That’s right.”

“In Philadelphia.”

“Yes.”

“You’re talking about the Mr. Skink who ignored the smoke pouring from the front of your hood and dragged you and Miss Derringer out of the vehicle and maybe saved your lives?”

“Exactly.”

“And you think he’s a murderer?”

“Doesn’t what he did prove it?”

“Why would he try to kill you, Mr. Carl, and then save your lives?”

“I don’t know. Ask him.”

“I will. But I have to tell you, the truck driver who saw the whole thing said Mr. Skink drove up in a blue Taurus about three minutes after it happened, moving in the same direction as the Camaro, so he couldn’t have been involved in the accident.”

“Accident? It was no accident. The damn Camaro slammed into me.”

“The truck driver said the Camaro was trying to pass and it looked like you sped up and blocked it in.”

“I was speeding up to get away from him.”

“And the truck driver said the Camaro tried to get out of the truck’s lane but you stayed in its path and that’s why it tapped you.”

“It wasn’t a tap.”

“No, sir, going as fast as you were, it must not have seemed like a tap at all. Do you know how fast you were going?”

“No. I don’t.”

“The speed limit on that road is fifty-five.”

“Is that so?”

“The truck driver said you were flying.”

“I was trying to get away.”

“From whom, Mr. Carl?”

“From the Camaro.”

“I see. We are of course looking for the Camaro, leaving the scene of an accident is a very serious charge, but often we find in these types of incidents that both parties are somewhat at fault.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Maybe not, sir, but I’m going to have to ticket you for speeding nonetheless.”

I bolted up off of the examination table and ignored the scream of pain in my back. “You’re going to ticket me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I get run off the road and you ticket me?”

Just then the doctor came back into the room. When he entered and saw me sitting straight up, he stopped short and gave me a stare. “Good to see you up and about, Mr. Carl.”

My head grew suddenly woozy and I lay back down on the table. “I don’t feel so well,” I said.

“Is that so?” The doctor gave the officer a knowing look, and I thought, Hey, no flirting with my cop. “Everything looks fine,” said the doctor. “Nothing broken, just bruising. I see no reason to keep you in the hospital, so we’re releasing you.”

I struggled slowly to sit up again. “What about my friend?”

“We’re going to keep Miss Derringer overnight for observation. In addition to her broken wrist she’s having headaches and might have a concussion. We’d like to be sure of her situation before we let her go.”

“We took your luggage from the car, Mr. Carl,” said the cop.

“And my briefcase?”

“Yes, that, too. You can pick it up as soon as you sign all the paperwork here. Is there anyone in Philadelphia you want me to call in reference to this murder you were talking about?”

She had a benign expression on her face, as if I were a lunatic she was trying to mollify. I thought of the discussion she would have with Stone and Breger, the three of them laughing together at my expense, and I involuntarily winced.

“No. No one.”

“Good,” she said. “I always strive to be thorough. This is for you.”

She handed me a slip of paper and I knew without looking what it was.

“What happens if I just rip up the ticket and refuse to pay?” I said.

She gave a smile, a charming, heart-stopping smile, aimed at the doctor. “Then we hunt you down and kill you.”

BETH HAD already been admitted as a patient. I took an elevator to the third floor and limped down the hallway to pay her a visit. It wasn’t a big hospital, a white circular building on the eastern edge of Henderson, and it wasn’t at all crowded. Beth’s eyes were closed when I entered the room, her left arm with its shiny white cast rising and falling atop her stomach. I didn’t want to wake her, so instead I stepped over and brushed away a lock of hair from her forehead. I don’t know why I did that, it never does any good, the lock always falls back, but I did it, and it made me feel better, and maybe that’s the reason right there. Whatever the cause of what happened, whether a simple accident or a brutal attempt on our lives, I still had been driving. She had been my charge, and I had failed her.

I sat down beside her and waited. After a while I took out Hailey’s phone and made some calls, pushing to the next afternoon our flight back to Philadelphia, reserving another night at the Flamingo, informing the rental-car agency of the little mishap and the total destruction of their automobile. When my calls were over, I sat and waited by Beth’s bedside.

My family had disintegrated like an atom split, my old high school and college chums had drifted like driftwood, my law school classmates had gone on to promising careers and gladly left me behind, all but Guy, and we know how well that had turned out. I didn’t have many people in this world with whom I had a mutual caring relationship. My father, maybe, though you could never tell by the tense words we passed back and forth. My sometime private investigator Morris Kapustin, whom I was keeping far away from this case because he knew me too well and could see right through me, when right now I didn’t want anyone seeing right through me. And there was Beth. Beth, my partner and best friend, the woman who shared my adventures, both financial and legal. There had been a time when we had contemplated something romantic happening between us, but it wasn’t there, at least for me, the primal spark, and so we never tried it, and I am so glad. I am the Wile E. Coyote of romance, I keep chasing, keep chasing, only to end up, always, standing still in midair, the edge of the cliff behind me, the bomb in my hand, fuse burning low. But whatever tragedy befalls me, there has always been Beth to crack a joke and rub my neck and keep me from plunging into total despair. What would I do without her? The mere contemplation left me fighting tears.

“Hey, cowboy,” she said. “Why so sad?”

Her eyes were open and she was smiling.

“I was imagining the worst and trying to calculate the price of new letterhead. How’s the wrist?”

“I can’t feel a thing with all the Novocain they pumped into it.”

“How about your head?”

“It hurts so much I can’t tell. Too bad they can’t inject Novocain into the brain.”

“You want the nurse?”

“Nah, not yet. They’ll only give me more drugs, and you know how I am about drugs.”

“Yes, I know. I’ll go get her.”

The nurse came in and checked the chart, took Beth’s temp, and told her it wasn’t time yet for her medication. Beth flirted, the nurse shook his head, Beth pouted, the nurse remained resolute, Beth pled, shedding all dignity, and finally the nurse said he’d ask the doctor. When the nurse came back with the little paper cup of pills, Beth gave me a triumphant smile.

“I should be ashamed of myself,” she said. “When am I supposed to get out of here?”

“Tomorrow, if everything goes right. I changed our flight.”

“I wonder if my head will explode at high altitude.”

“Just in case, I booked a seat ten rows behind yours. That way I can see it happen without it ruining my jacket.”

“Your lucky jacket. Is that why we survived?”

“Absolutely. Did you see what happened?”

“I suppose I did, but I don’t remember.” She closed her eyes and slowly opened them again. “I don’t remember anything. Last thing I recall, we were driving into Henderson to talk to the name on the insurance document. And next thing, I was looking up at some really ugly man who was being very sweet and my arm really, really hurt.”

“I think someone tried to kill us.”

“Really? Who?”

“I don’t know. Some guy in a white Camaro slammed me off the road. The cops think I was speeding and it was simply an accident.”

“Were you?”

“Only after I spotted the Camaro coming after me.”

“Do you think you only imagined it?”

“Maybe, but imagined or not, I’m through driving in this town, I’ll tell you that. Last I saw, the car was slowly burning.”

“I hope we still have the briefcase. I’d hate to have wasted the trip.”

“The cop said the briefcase and the luggage are waiting for me in the hospital office.”

“Did we meet the guy in Henderson?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting?”

“Not really. Hailey’s uncle. Do you need anything?”

“A toothbrush would be nice,” she said. “I’d like to brush my teeth before I fall asleep again.”

“Consider it done.”

I stood, leaned over to kiss her on the forehead, and went off to find our luggage.

It was stacked behind the desk of an admittance clerk in one of the small cubicles they had off the lobby. An older woman smiled at me when I demanded my luggage and sweetly asked for my identification and insurance information. Very clever. They were holding our luggage hostage to our Blue Cross number. I thought of complaining, just for the sport of it, but the old lady with the sweet smile had the eyes of an IRS agent, and so, meekly, I took out my insurance card.

Ransom paid, I lugged our two suitcases and my briefcase into the lobby. I looked around furtively and then checked the briefcase to make sure everything was there. At first glance it all appeared to be in order. The photographs, the letters, the insurance file, the maroon medical file, the envelope in which I had stashed the cash, all there, all seemingly undisturbed. I let out a sigh of relief as I checked the details, one by one, the insurance file first. Guy’s policy was still there, but… but Hailey’s now was missing. Damn it. Damn damn it. Quickly I pulled out the maroon folder. Where there should have been a medical file detailing the treatment of Juan Gonzalez, there was nothing, nothing. And then I noticed that the money envelope was sickeningly thin. Thirty thousand dollars, where was my damn thirty thousand dollars? I ripped open the envelope and found not the sweet hundred-dollar bills but instead a single scrap of paper with a note scrawled in a rough, barely legible hand.

Feeling like a little lamb?

They braise a nice shank at the Bellagio.

Nine o’clock reservation in your name.

Jacket required. Bring your wallet.

It wasn’t signed, but it didn’t need to be. I knew who had written it, the same man who’d set up the accident, I now was certain, the same man who had in all likelihood killed Hailey Prouix.

Phil Frigging Skink.

27

“WHERE THE fuck is my money, you scabrous piece of shit?”

Skink was already sitting at a table, beside a thick gray curtain, beneath a painting of a naked woman with her hand demurely covering her crotch. The joint was papered with maroon velvet, the corners were graced with great metal urns filled with ivy and denuded branches in arresting arrays. The chairs, upholstered also in velvet, had large brass rings hanging from their backs. It felt, the Prime Steakhouse on the lower level of the Bellagio, Roman and gangsterish at the same time, a place where Tiberius Caesar and Sam Giancana could dine together on great chunks of charred oxen and laugh about conquered provinces and rigged elections. A place where grasping lieutenants who had skimmed the empire’s profits could be taken care of with a single blow from a pepper mill the size of a baseball bat.

Sitting before Skink on the peach-colored tablecloth was a huge crystal shell filled with ice, covered with an array of plump fresh oysters. Skink eyed me calmly as he sucked out the insides of a nacreous shell. The maître d’ had brought me through the fabulously decadent dining room to the table and was standing aside as I ignored the proffered seat and confronted the slurping Skink to no great effect. It was disconcerting that Skink seemed to be enjoying himself immensely despite my rage. It was doubly disconcerting that he was wearing the same gold lamé lucky jacket as I was.

“You’re a bit late, Vic, so I hope you don’t mind I started without you.”

“I want my money and my documents, and I want them now.”

“We look like a backup singing group here, don’t we, Vic? You and I in the same jacket, like a couple of Pips. Or maybe like two homosexual types with the same taste in clothes. I wonder if everyone here thinks we’re a couple of poofs having ourselves a lover’s spat.”

“Hand it over.”

“Calm down,” he said. “Sit. Eat first, talk later. That’s a plan, innit? Let’s keep things all clean and private.”

He glanced to the side and I did, too, glanced at the maître d’, still holding my chair. I felt a stern French disapproval of my table manners, which was interesting, because the maître d’ was neither stern nor French. She instead was a lovely American with long, straight hair who calmly waited for my diatribe to conclude. There was no shock in her face – her restaurant served meat in the bowels of a casino, there wasn’t much I expect she hadn’t seen – still, her presence there settled me enough that I finally dropped down into the chair and accepted the great burgundy menu.

“You like shrimp, Vic?” asked Skink. “Who don’t, right? Bring him an order of the grilled prawns to start with while he reads the bill of fare, will you, sweetheart?”

The maître d’ smiled, nodded, swayed away.

“Lovely girl, that. Wouldn’t mind ordering her right off the menu.”

“There’s enough to buy in this town, if that’s what you need to do.”

“I don’t need to do a thing,” he said. “Just like I don’t need to pick up my skim milk in the 7-Eleven. It’s the convenience, is all.”

“I want my money and I want my documents.”

He picked up another oyster and slurped. “There’s the root of the problem, innit? None of thems is yours. You pocketed it all from a dead girl’s bank deposit box, didn’t you?”

“Jonah Peale promised you’d leave me alone?”

“He told me to go on vacation, and here I am. But even so, I’m nobody’s boy. I’m what they call an independent contractor. Key word being ‘independent.’ I do whatever I want, work for whoever I damn please.”

“For whom exactly do you work? Lawrence Cutlip? Is that why you took the insurance policy? The receptionist at Desert Winds said Cutlip was having a busy day. I’d bet you were the other visitor. I’d bet you showed up there before I did. I’d bet you were squatting there behind the mesquite tree, eavesdropping on our meeting.”

Skink smiled as he sucked down another oyster.

“And Guy’s father-in-law, Jonah Peale? That’s who you took the Juan Gonzalez file for, isn’t it?”

“It would be a violation of my ethical duties to be disclosing the names of my clients.”

“It’s so nice to see you concerned about your ethical duties.”

“At least one of us is.” He peered at me over the great crystal shell.

“What about the money? Who was that for?”

“A man’s got to eat, don’t he? You want an oyster? I could order more.”

I shook my head no. He lifted one of the shells, elbow pointing high, and slurped. He chewed and swallowed and let out a soft sigh.

“There’s nature’s goodness, right there,” he said. “It’s like taking in a swallow of the sea.”

“You almost killed me. You almost killed Beth, which is even worse.”

“Is that where all this hostility comes from? You think it was me what ran you off the highway?” He seemed surprised, even hurt. “I had nothing to do with it. I was as shocked as anyone to see the carcass of your car tilting there on the side of the road. In fact, I was thinking it was I who saved your life. And what thanks does I get? Nothing but this diatribe of accusation.”

“If it wasn’t you who tried to kill me, who was it?”

“That’s a question, innit? Though that cute little copper thought it was just an accident. Said you was speeding, driving reckless.”

“But neither of us believes that, do we? You threatened me if I didn’t take the plea, said something awful would happen.”

“Come now, Vic, that’s right there in the private detection handbook, technique number nineteen: the idle threat. It gets the juices flowing, gets the pot stirred. Make the threat, stir the pot, follow the mark until he leads you to something worth your while.”

“And that’s why you’re in Vegas, following me.”

“I even gave you a hint of what I wanted you to look for.”

“The key.”

“I knew it was missing, and I suspected where it might be. By the way, you done terrific work in finding the box. My compliments. But all the time, the threat was idle. It’s one thing to put a scare in a person, quite another to actually back it up with murder.”

“And you’re not capable of that?”

I stared at his eyes, beady, ugly things, stared at his eyes to see whether there might be murder there. He stared back for a moment as if he understood where lay my deepest suspicions and then shrugged.

“Didn’t say that, only said it was quite a thing. You should gander the menu, Vic. They’ve got nine different types of potato. Unfortunately, with my cholesterol problem, I can’t order a one of them. Nothing for me but the oysters and a single filet mignon, well done. A lean cut of beef that is, and after they burn it, not a scrap of fat left. But you, you should help yourself there, since it’s you who’s treating.”

“Why me? You have the money.”

“True, true, but it’s mostly earmarked already, expenses and such. How about some creamed spinach, Vic, some rack of lamb? A bargain, too, the whole thing costing less than a proper craps spread at a ten-dollar table. You play craps?”

“No.”

“Well, then, maybe you should learn. I gots myself a system.”

“You’ve got a system?”

“Oh, yes. Yes I do. Yes, yes. With a few quick lessons maybe you could earn it all back and more. You know what the good book says: Give a man thirty thou, he’s rich for a day, but teach a man to play craps, well, then, he’s got something for the rest of his life, don’t he?”

Just then a waiter laid a plate in front of me. It held four large crustaceans, split and grilled, a wild assortment of antennae and legs sticking helter-skelter from the shells, the whole thing looking like some bizarre Klingon meal served to interstellar diplomats on the USS Enterprise.

“How do I eat this?” I said.

“With the saffron mayonnaise, I would suppose,” said Skink.

I reached my fork into one of the shells, pulled out the meat, dipped it into the yellow sauce.

“Oh, my.”

“I hear they’re quiet good,” said Skink. “Although on my diet, I’m afraid…”

I didn’t wait to hear what he had to say, and I didn’t offer him one either. I pulled out another, dipped it in the sauce, snapped it clean between my teeth – marvelous. All day I’d been running around like a crazy man, stealing into a safe-deposit box, interrogating Cutlip, getting sideswiped in the desert, being examined at the hospital, sitting by Beth’s bedside, taking a cab back to the hotel, checking back in, performing a quick run-through of what had been left me in the briefcase. With all that running, I hadn’t eaten since the morning and wasn’t aware how hungry I was until I bit into that first prawn. Then the second, then the third. I was ravenous, starved. I stopped only long enough to scan the menu and choose what else I wanted to stuff inside my gullet. Skink was wrong about the potatoes, there weren’t nine choices, there were ten: shoestring and gaufrettes, ginger sweet and mashed, roasted fingerlings, french fries, truffle mashed, grati dauphinion, St. Florentine, and the simple, classic baked. With the waiter hovering, I ordered the lamb, the spinach, both the shoestrings and the ginger sweets. Then I attacked the final prawn.

“You want mint jelly with that lamb, Vic? My mamma, she always served mint jelly with her lamb.”

I nodded.

“And how about some wine? Something red, good for the heart. A little merlot? How does that sound? This is a business meeting, it’s all tax deductible. Let’s have some wine.”

I nodded again. Skink ordered. The waiter took away the menu and bowed.

“You surprise me, Vic. I had taken you for the tightest of arses, but you’re more fun than I expected. I’m beginning to see what it was she saw.”

I had come into the restaurant homicidally angry at Phil Frigging Skink, angry at him for trying to kill us, angry at him for stealing my files, strongly suspecting that he had been the one to shoot Hailey Prouix. Hatred is a soft word for what I felt toward him, but while I was sitting at that table, eating prawns and then lamb, the spinach and potatoes, drinking the Merlot, which was excellent by the way, smooth and dark, while I was sitting at that table, my emotions softened. He was a creep, clearly, but a pleasant little creep, pleasanter still as we started into the second bottle of wine. And I had to admit, I admired his taste in jackets. It would be a shame if I were right about him.

“Tell me something, Phil.” He was no longer Phil Frigging Skink, he now was just Phil. “Did you ever in your life sell cars for a living?”

“Never.” He laughed, and I laughed with him. “That would be a honest day’s work.”

“And who the hell needs that?”

“There you go.”

“Well, you’d be good at it nonetheless. Most of sales is bullshit and you’re a master. But something confuses me. How many people are you representing, and how do you stop from getting all their differing agendas confused?”

He paused, took a sip of Merlot. “It’s all a matter of lines and angles, of anticipation.”

“Like billiards.”

“Now you’re getting it, yes you are. You like stories?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Well, fill your glass, Vic, sit back, and listen up. I got me a story you might want to hear. Yes, you might at that.”

28

“A MAN sets up a meeting, wants me to spy on his wife. Oldest story in the world, but with a twist. He’s a fancy-dressing man, you know what I mean, handkerchief sticking out his suit jacket, his fingernails manicured and glossy. I hate him at sight. And here’s the thing, not a whit of nervousness or upset about him. Generally a Joe thinks some other Joe is doing his wife, he’s all flippy, but this Joe he’s an absolute cuke, an arrogant cuke, if you catch my drift. It doesn’t feel right. But like Sam says, never believe the client, believe the money. So’s I take the retainer, write the information in my little book, and sets about tailing the wife.

“She was once a pretty thing, I can tell, but she’d gotten no younger over the years and the things what happen to women as they get older, the thickening thing, happened to her just as you would expect. But, see, with her I can tell she knows it, with her you can see the vulnerability. She shops, plays tennis, lunches at the club with the other ladies, la-di-da. Don’t know why that’s the life all the birds want, it’d be enough to bore my pants right off, I was them, and I figure maybe that’s the trouble. So Thursday is lawn day, the boys in their cutoffs, whipping the mowers over the client’s three football fields, and there’s one boy wearing no shirt, who I tell you is frigging gorgeous. Dark complexion, thick curled lips, straight narrow nose, a perfect nose, with a ballplayer’s arse and a swimmer’s body, thin but with muscles chiseled and abs, oh, my, the abs.

“Now, I ain’t that way, I want you to know, don’t be getting no ideas, me in this jacket and all, but I can still appreciate the male figure and I can tell you he’s a frigging rock star. And next thing you know, he’s talking to the missus. She brings him a lemonade. Sweat’s dripping from his tits as he takes the glass. He lifts his chin to drain the drink, his Adam’s apple bobs, one of his pecs twitches. She reaches out and almost touches his shoulder but pulls back. Obvious, innit? The attraction between ’em is so thick you could lubricate your dick with it. So they all leave, all the lawn boys, but at three he comes back in a ratty old car and starts searching around like he lost something. She comes out to help him, they search around together, side by side. And when he happens to find it, the shirt he planted there that morning, he doesn’t put it on as you would expect, but tosses it over his shoulder and waits there, like waiting for an invitation in, and she gives it, how could she not? Next thing you know I got myself a roll of film, job done, fee earned.

“But something’s not right, and I don’t like it. So I gives off following the lady and start to following the lawn boy. I meet up with him in a bar on Twelfth Street, a funny bar, you know, where we with our jackets would fit right in. I buy him a beer, buy him another, he thinks I’m an old poof interested in that swimmer’s bod, and I can tell that he’s willing to be interested, too, as long as I’m paying. So I go out back with him, into the alley behind the bar. It’s dark, damp, rubber johnnies littering the asphalt, a place where if it could talk, you’d cover your ears and run out screaming. Lawn boy puts his hand on my hip and smiles his charming smile. I lift my elbow and break his nose. Sounded like someone snacking on a taco. So much for perfect. Now he’s on the ground, hands covering his face, blood leaking through his fingers. I leans down and I tell him what I want to know, and he spills. Everything. It was the husband what put him up to it, the husband what paid off this trick to do his wife while I was there whole time with my camera.

“I figure the bastard, he wants a divorce on his terms, wants the pictures either as bargaining leverage, hoping to unsettle her so she’ll agree to poverty, or to show the judge in a custody fight when he grabs for the kids. Either way a nasty piece of business. So of course I goes back to the missus and shows her the pictures, and she breaks down, begging me not to give them to her husband. I tell her how I got no choice, I was paid for them in advance, I got my ethics to consider, but then I tell her about lawn boy and about how her husband paid him off and how she ought to get herself checked, because there’s no telling what kind of vile organisms lawn boy passed on to her. She’s collapsed into a heap, sniveling, crying, moaning out, ‘What am I going to do? What am I going to do?’ Beautiful, right? So’s I go and tell her what it is she is going to do, and she spots me another retainer.

“I’m back on the road, following husband this time. Is this a great job or what? It turns out husband, he’s a lawyer, surprise, surprise, driving a Jaguar, lunching at the Palm with political heavies, and spending stray afternoons in the Bellevue with some little chippy from his law firm. It’s harder getting pictures from a hotel like that as compared to a private home, but with the right equipment, including a pinch of cash for the staff, you can get yourself anything, and it ain’t long before I can a roll of that son of a bitch with his arse hanging out and his socks on giving that chippy his prima facie best.

“Now the two parties, husband and wife, they’re back on level turf, and I’m feeling pretty good about things, but why stop there, why stop with two? It’s a triangle, innit? So I decide on following the bird from the husband’s law firm, a good-looking thing, I must say. I was just curious, mind you, not knowing what I’d find, but just trying to figure out what pitch to make and where to make it. I read her as a typical spoiled brat, never wanting for nothing, fancy college, ambition driving her into the law, setting up her yuppie lifestyle, not minding grabbing another woman’s husband if it helps her climb a peg or two. A little pressure and she’d be willing to pay anything to make it go away. It all seems so obvious, except this girl, she ain’t obvious.

“One night I follow her to a dive of a bar in South Philly, where she meets up with some shady sailor type. Next night I follow her into some church, where she stays an hour before rushing off to meet the husband. Night after she has dinner in some ragged seafood joint alongside some scumbucket from Kensington with but three teeth to his name, and after that she ends up again in the church. I go in behind her this time. She slips a buck or two into the box, buys herself a candle, then it’s off to a pew by herself. She doesn’t hit her knees, she’s no papist, I can tell, but I look around, seeing who she’s meeting, and there’s no one. Might as well have been praying, for all I know. And then I trail her until she disappears into some lesbo bar in Old City. That’s a switch, huh? But I can’t go in there without getting marked, so I wait outside in my car. An hour later she’s on the street with some bull dyke in a black leather vest, and while they’re clinching and kissing, and not like cousins neither, while they’re chewing each other’s tongues, she opens her eyes and gives me the stare from across the street. Then she’s off, alone, heading away from me. I gets out of my car and follow.

“It’s an old section of the town, narrow streets, lots of turns and twists. It’s raining lightly, there’s a mist, I see her go down one alleyway, I catch a glimpse of her turning down another. I have no idea where she’s going, but I’m curious, right? Who the hell is she, right? This ain’t no yuppie like I ever saw before. Another turn, across a bigger street and into another alley. All the time I’m seeing just bits of her, never the full thing. I catch just the flash of her heel as she turns down a narrow cobbled street. I make the turn, and next thing I know I’m on the ground, a knee in my crotch, a knife at my throat, and the bull dyke staring down at me with a look that lets me know she’d do it, she’d do it, and damn if slicing my throat wouldn’t be the most fun she could ever have with a man. And behind her, calmly leaning against a wall, smoking, stands the girl.

“‘What do you want?’ she says.

“‘A word, is all,’ I says.

“‘Go ahead,’ she says.

“‘Let me up first,’ I says.

“‘No,’ she says, and the dyke presses the knife a little harder at my throat.

“‘Fine,’ I says. ‘At my age I can use a little time off my feets.’

“And then I tell her, I tell her about the husband coming into my office, about the missus and the lawn boy, about the pictures of the two of them in the Bellevue. When you’re in a situation like that, it don’t pay to hold nothing back. You give it all, the whole of it, and hope they get so lost in the details they don’t know what to do. But this bird, she knows what to do. She starts to laughing.

“‘Is that all?’ she says. ‘I hope you caught my good side.’

“‘From what I could tell,’ I says, ‘that’s all you got.’

“And the bull dyke, she stares down at me and says, ‘Don’t make me puke.’

“‘All right, Tiffany,’ says the girl. ‘Let him up.’

“The bull dyke lets me up. I look at her in her leather vest, shoulders bulging, Doc Martens, and all I can say is, ‘Tiffany? You gots to be kidding.’

“The dyke snarls, the girl laughs, and the next thing I know the girl and I, we’re in that lesbo bar, downing vodka martinis, trading cigs, laughing like we was the oldest of old pals. I ask her if she wants to get married to the lawyer. All she says is ‘Please.’ I ask her why and she shows me her pinkie. Then she turns her face away and says in the saddest voice I ever heard, ‘Besides, it would end up bloody.’ I asks her to explain. She shakes her head. Then she writes a name on a napkin and tells me before I meet with either husband or wife I oughts to find out what I can about it. For her. The only requirement is that no one knows it was she what set me on the name. And right there she writes me a check for my retainer. My third retainer.

“You would think it would be a trick with just a name to go on, figuring what there was to learn. You’d think. But I look up the name and then knocks on a door and some old lady, she just invites me in, pours me a cup of herbal, puts out a plate of biscuits, and starts chatting off my ear. Nice old lady she was, old for sure, what with her skin like tissue paper and me being able to see the blue veins pulsing in her neck. Never had no children, she tells me, but she was married for forty years to Morty. I hear a lot about Morty. He fought in the war, occupied Japan, through no fault of his own came down with some tropical disease transmitted by the mosquito that left him sterile. A senseless tragedy, she says, though I’m thinking that if Morty can convince her that the clap is transmitted by the mosquito, then what couldn’t she be convinced of? So I asks about her estate and she tells me it’s all taken care of, handled by a very sweet young man who calls her every day. She’s going to give it all to the nunnery, that’s what she plans, and every day the sweet young lawyer calls and tells her how the market moved that day. It’s going to be a tidy sum, yes, it’s going to raise some eyebrows, oh, yes. There’ll be a building at the nunnery named after Morty, oh, yes, oh, yes. Won’t that be something?

“No, it won’t. Because there’s nothing left in the trust account, is there? Nothing left, the sweet young lawyer has taken it all. Except he’s not so sweet, not so young. All he is is a frigging lawyer. And, of course, he’s the husband.

“So’s I go back to the chippy, though by now I know she’s no chippy, and tell her what I found, and she’s not the least bit shocked. And here’s the tripper, she tells me to give it to the wife, the name and the story, to let the wife do with it whatever she wants. I toss her a look like she’s crazy, like she can do a lot better for herself with the information, but she just tells me to shut up and do what I’m told. Well, that’s what she’s paying me for, and so that’s what I do. I give the pictures of the wife and the lawn boy to the husband. I give the pictures of the husband and the chippy to the wife. And with those pictures I give the name, address, and story of the old lady.

“Now, I can’t say for sure what happened in the meeting with the lawyers once the husband told the missus he wanted the divorce. I wish I was there, it must have been something. But in the end the husband and wife, they stayed married after all. In fact, they went on a European holiday for three months after. The north of Italy, the South of France. They would have gone to the coast of Luxembourg, excepting Luxembourg’s got no coast. It must have been lovely, and it was quite the shopping spree if my sources were right. And funny thing, I ran into the missus a little while after she got back, and she was happy as an oyster, had even lost some pounds and was looking rather svelte. Rather svelte. I’d of done her myself, I would, but now she was happily married.

“And the chippy that wasn’t no chippy? Listen to this. The wife, she insists, insists that the chippy leave the husband’s firm. And the chippy, she balks. No way in hell she’s leaving without a little something to remember him by. The husband, now desperate to keep the wife happy, gives the chippy a slew of cases, some profitable ones, too, I might add, and some money if she’d just leave. And so she does. Starts her own place, turns those cases into cash, begins to make a name for herself. She did quite well, didn’t she? Lost a arsehole and gained a practice all in one swell foop.

“It was my kind of case, it was. Three clients, three retainers, and the outcome, in a rough sense, was just. But the best thing was meeting the chippy. We became partners of a sort. I did her investigations, working on the sly mostly, helped those fees of hers roll in. And she, she was something, she was, special, and far too smart for the likes of me. Wheels within wheels within wheels.”

“Hailey,” I said.

“She was a hell of a girl, and I miss her.”

“So do I.”

“I believe you do.”

“I thought you might have killed her,” I said.

“I knows you did. I could see it in them peepers of yours. And me, I was wondering what kind of man represents the killer of the girl what he’s doing the old Friar Tuck to every chance he gets? I thought you was going to use some insider knowledge to get him off the hook and get your face all over the papers. I didn’t like that idea, wasn’t so happy with that. I figured I owed the girl enough to not let that happen. That’s why I came on so hard over my oatmeal. But after watching you for the last couple days, I gots a different idea.”

“Go ahead.”

“This is what I thinks.” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “I thinks at first you weren’t taking the deal because you thought it too sweet. You thought the bastard did it, and you was standing by your Guy just to be sure he paid the ultimate price. That was what your meeting with Peale was all about, wasn’t it? Setting him up to tell the coppers all about our Mr. Gonzalez. You’re taking our little murder all personal like, playing at being being the Lone Ranger.”

“And you’re not?”

I stared at him, he stared back.

“You’re a piece of work, ain’t you, Vic?” he said. “But you don’t think he did it no more, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Something switched in your head.”

“Like a light turning on.”

“What changed your mind?”

I picked up my wine, stared into the deep crimson before taking a drink. “Hailey changed my mind. I finally learned the whole sad story of her and Guy. She was in control. From the very first, when she met him in that hospital room, to the very last, on the night of her death, when she told him it was over, she was in control. Total control. Guy never had a chance.”

“Not much a one, no.”

“And you helped set him up, didn’t you? Hailey needed to know all about the man defending the Gonzalez case to lay her trap, and you gave her what she needed. And when Guy thought you were threatening her, you were really just giving her little tidbits to help her scheme.”

Skink didn’t answer.

“Well, if she was so much in control, how could she have ever let it happen? How could she have miscalculated so? Unless she didn’t and he didn’t. Tell you what I think, I think he was in thrall to her to the very end. I think he was too whipped to kill her.”

“Or maybe he fooled her like he fooled you. He’s a harder piece of work than he lets on. You should a seen how viciously he cut down the claims of the poor injured wretches what fell in his path. Not an ounce of mercy. He left his wife and kids at the drop of a skirt and stole a million in the process. That bastard is capable of anything. You was right from the first. It was Guy what done it.”

“Nope, it was someone else. And I have a pretty good idea where I need to go to find who.”

“Where’s that?”

“You much interested in history?”

“Julius Caesar?” said Skink. “The bloody fall of the bloody Roman Empire?”

“No, the recent past. Hailey Prouix’s past. I’m taking a trip, and that’s where I’m headed.” I stared at his ugly mug for a moment, thought of his story and the tenderness behind it, and then said softly, “You coming?”

Skink tilted his head.

“I was looking through what you left me in the briefcase,” I said. “Keepsakes from her past. I have some questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“The usual. An idyllic childhood that might not have been so idyllic. An accidental death that might not have been an accident.”

“And you think all that has something to do with what happened to Hailey?”

“Now that you’re no longer a suspect, maybe I do. That’s what I’m taking the trip to find out. You coming?”

“Where to?”

“Pierce, West Virginia.”

“Her girlhood home.”

“You coming?”

“You won’t find nothing.”

“Sure I won’t.”

“It’s been too long.”

“Far too long.”

“Nobody no more knows nothing.”

“You coming?”

Skink sucked his teeth for a moment. “I charge two-fifty a day.”

“A hundred.”

“Two hundred.”

“One-fifty. Plus expenses.”

“I’ll need a retainer.”

“You got thirty thousand already.”

“Did I?”

“I need to settle a few things first. Take care of Beth, do some trial prep. But then it’s West Virginia ho. You coming?”

He paused a moment, reading my face as if reading the newspaper, and then he broke into a gap-toothed smile as wide as the Mississippi and reached out his hand.

I took it and shook it, but before I let go, I turned it over and checked the knuckles. Rough and hairy, each as ugly as a slag heap, but no scrapes, no bruises. Still holding on, I said, “How’d you know the safe-deposit key was missing from her house?”

“Private sources.”

“You weren’t the lug in black who beat the hell out of that police technician?”

“Me? Nah, I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

“You understand if you work for me, your mouth stays shut. Our little secret remains our little secret.”

“Vic, sweetie, if we’re going to be partners, we need to trust each other.”

“I already have a partner,” I said as I finally let go. “And the idea of trusting you is enough to get my stomach roiling.”

“I seem to have that effect on you, don’t I?” said Phil Skink with a laugh. “Don’t worry, Vic, I’ll play it your way, all buttoned up, while you convince yourself that your friend really done it and deserves whatever he gets. Now, take care of the check and we’ll go on up and have ourselves a time. What say I teach you how to play craps?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Not to worry, Vic. We’re sporting our lucky jackets. How can we lose? And better than that, I gots myself a system.”