Missing Persons

25

I didn’t see patients most Fridays. Diane skipped most Mondays. So I wasn’t at all surprised that her Saab wasn’t in its usual spot in front of our wreck of a garage all day Monday while I was at the office.

Anyway, she’d asked me if I would cover her practice in case she and Raoul went away for the weekend, and weekends for Diane almost always included Mondays.

But the phone call she made to me that evening caught me off guard. Dinner was done, the kitchen was clean, Lauren had Grace in the tub for a mother-daughter bubble soak. Their giggles and laughter filled the house and buoyed my spirits like a healthy dose of rock and roll.

I had the dogs at my feet. Life was good.

“Can you hear that?” Diane asked.

I heard noise but it sounded like nothing more than routine mobile-phone clutter crap. I figured Diane was in her Saab, driving behind the spine of a hogback someplace, or in the deep recesses of one of the many canyons that snake west out of Boulder into the heart of the Rockies.

“No, I don’t think so. You’re breaking up.”

Then I heard it-the frenetic calliope melody of a slot-machine jackpot followed by an orgasmic scream of “I won! I won! Yes! Yes! I told you about this machine. Didn’t I?” I could almost hear the cascade of dollar coins tumbling into the stainless-steel tray.

“You up in Blackhawk?”

“Nope.”

“Central City?”

“One more try.”

I could have wasted my third guess on Cripple Creek, the final member of the triad of Colorado pioneer mountain towns that the electorate had burdened with legalized gambling. Instead I went for the jackpot.

“You’re in Vegas. You really went.”

“Told you.”

“How much of Raoul’s money have you lost?”

“I make plenty of my own money.”

“Yeah, but you told me once that you only gamble with his.”

“I forgot I told you that. I can’t believe I told you that. I’m down a grand or so.”

“Or so?”

“Maybe a little more. Single digits.”

“Single digits plus, what, three zeros?”

“My luck will change. I rescheduled my patients until Thursday. That’s a lifetime in craps. Can we talk about something else? How about matrimony? You want to talk about matrimony?”

Part of me didn’t want to know. But I said, “Sure.”

“I found her. Mrs. Miller. She was hanging out at a place called the Love In Las Vegas Wedding Chapel.” Diane made sure that her pronunciation of “love” had two syllables. “Everybody knows her in the Vegas wedding racket; she’s kind of a local legend. I only had to go to three chapels and ask a few questions.”

I had a picture in my mind.

A woman who had once been pretty dressed in an outfit that had once been fashionable topped by a hat that had once been fresh was sitting by herself on the bride’s side of a chapel that had never, ever really been pretty or lovely or fresh, and she was celebrating the nuptials of two people who had known each other for hours or days or months or years.

Elvis was there, too, or he wasn’t.

The woman heard voices in her ears saying cruel, frightening things and one glance at her made clear that she spent many more of her waking hours tormented than she did at peace. Her face was sometimes molded into odd grimaces with tight, scared eyes, a cockeyed mouth, pursed lips, and a protruding tongue. She mumbled replies to the voices at inopportune moments and strangers in all walks of life kept their distance.

Her hygiene was lacking, her makeup was abundant and applied with idiosyncratic whimsy, and she’d resorted to wearing bad wigs to cover a tangle of hair that, during moments that approached sanity, she realized she could no longer manage.

Her teeth had begun to rot and her breath smelled like roadkill.

She lived in a homeless shelter, or worse.

She had a paper bag full of medicines but most days she hated the side effects more than she hated the voices. Although she would occasionally take a pill or two or three to quiet the rageful ranting, or to still the incipient panic, or to dull the despair that urged her closer and closer to the futility of suicide, she lugged the stained brown bag of pharmaceuticals around more as a totem than anything else.

She was a lost life who was ordered by unseen powers to celebrate the marriages of pairs of strange people eager to believe that their own lives were full of nothing but promise. As each newlywed couple walked out the door of some tacky wedding chapel, whatever future the woman saw in them would disappear like a conventioneer’s promise to his wife to behave himself in Vegas.

That was the picture I had in my mind.

“Is this going to make me sad?” I asked Diane. “Is it going to do me any good to know?”

Lauren sometimes asked that exact question of me late in the evening when we were in bed and the late news was on TV. A story would start to air-something about murder or rape or previously unimaginable despair or desperation in a part of the world that seemed always to bring unimaginable despair and desperation. The anchorperson’s eyes would be stern, his voice would be grave, and Lauren would hit the mute button and ask, “Is it going to do me any good to know this?”

The carnival midway refrain of another jackpot, this one at a more distant location in the casino, filled my ear. Almost as if prompted by the loud celebration that followed the slot machine victory, Diane said, “This is Vegas. You can’t stay sad here long.”

She said it, I was sure, for her own benefit as much as for mine.

“Something tells me that she’s managed to stay sad.”

“Mallory’s mom? Yeah,” Diane admitted. “I think she has.”

I was thinking Reese’s mom, too, but I didn’t throw his name into the mix. The refrain from the previous week’s morning run with Sam was still part of the soundtrack spinning in my head.

“She’s still crazy?” I asked. My question was irreverent and my choice of descriptors pejorative, but Diane knew that I was asking with a heart laden with pathos.

“You know,” she said.

I did know. It was because I knew that I was so certain that it was going to make me sad. “Did you learn anything?” I said, but I was thinking: What could she have learned? What could Mrs. Miller know? I didn’t think that Mallory had gone to Vegas to see her mom. I didn’t think that Mrs. Miller would know anything that would help Diane understand the connection between Mallory and Hannah.

“It’s not what you think, not what I thought. Coming here to see her? It’s like poking at a hornet’s nest, for some reason it gets a lot of people stirred up. It’s… just a sec. I can’t talk here-I’m going to go outside, or at least to a quieter part of the… It’s such a trek to get out of the casino from here; if the call gets dropped I’ll phone you right back. You really need to hear this.” Her next words were a simple, pleasant version of “Yes, I’m out.” I suspected the message was intended for the croupier or whatever you call the person who handles the dice and the chips at a craps table.

Diane dropped the phone on the floor-at least that’s the way it sounded-cursed, kicked it, picked it up again, and asked, “You still there?” She laughed. “The phone slipped out of my hand while I was trying to pick up all my chips.”

“I’m still here.”

“Good. I won five hundred or so. That’s pretty good. This place is so huge.” A moment of silence. Then, “Hi. Do you know which way’s the door?”

Hi? Was she talking to me?

“Which means you’re only down… what?” I asked.

Thud. I thought the phone must have fallen out of her hand again.

“Diane? You there?”

That’s when the call died.

Diane didn’t call right back.

I gave her five minutes before I tried to reach her. Her cell phone rang and rang and rang before it clicked into voice mail.

I waited half an hour, hitting redial again every ten minutes or so with the same result. I was chewing on the possibility that technology had failed somewhere, that her phone had died or that the network had burped.

Soon I started thinking that she’d simply changed her mind about talking to me right then. Maybe she’d passed an open seat at a twenty-dollar blackjack table that she was sure had her name on it in raised gilded letters, or she’d eyed a spot at a new table and thought she’d seen steam rising from those dice.

I also considered the possibility that she’d run into someone she knew-Diane knew more people than anyone I’d ever met-while making her way out of the cavernous casino, and that they had headed somewhere for a drink or a meal or… what?

Diane, I guessed, was staying at the Venetian, the mid-Strip gambling palace that was decked out to look like Venice, Italy; that’s the hotel where she’d booked us to stay the weekend after Hannah’s death. I’d never been, but she’d told me that the canals in the hotel were lined with shops and I knew from long experience with Diane that a garish SALE sign in a store window could have distracted her. Easily.

All were reasonable explanations. But none, I thought, were likely.

Had her plans changed, Diane would have called me back and told me she’d talk to me later. She certainly would have picked up my call to her cell. Were her cell not working properly she would have gone to a pay phone and called me the old-fashioned way. After tracking down the mother of a missing girl-a girl who was the patient of Diane’s dead friend-and after telling me she had news I needed to hear, Diane would have done something to reach me. She wouldn’t have left me hanging, waiting, wondering.

She wouldn’t.

I called Raoul at home to see if he’d heard from her. He wasn’t there.

I followed happy voices down the hall and found Lauren and Grace on the bed in the master bedroom, where I interrupted Lauren’s dramatic rendition of Alice in Wonderland. She told me she thought she had Raoul’s mobile number in her Palm. With monumental inefficiency, and only after pecking enough tiny faux buttons to book an entire round-trip flight to Kathmandu-including arranging for Sherpas-I tracked down Raoul’s mobile number and dialed the ten digits.

“Raoul,” he answered almost immediately.

He sounded tired. The usual gorgeous timbre of his voice was disguised by the wireless ether.

“Hey, Raoul. It’s Alan. Where are you?”

“San Francisco, consulting at a clueless incubator. How these people expect to make any money is beyond me. What’s wrong?”

His question made perfect sense. I don’t think I’d ever before called Raoul on his mobile phone. Instinctively, he knew I wasn’t calling him in San Francisco to recommend a restaurant.

“It’s probably nothing,” I said.

He replied, “Mierda.”