Missing Persons

28

Diane’s husband was wealthy. She didn’t work the long hours I did. She didn’t have to.

On a typical weekday before eight in the morning my car would’ve been the first to slide into the parking spaces beside our office building. That Tuesday should have been no different. On a typical Tuesday morning, Diane would show up at around 9:00, or 9:30. That Tuesday should have been no different.

She’d told me on the phone the evening before that she’d already canceled her appointments until Thursday. Still, given the events at the Venetian, the driveway felt empty without her Saab, the waiting room felt empty without her patients, and the offices felt empty without her laugh.

Raoul had called me near midnight the night before from the room he’d checked into at the Venetian after flying to Vegas from San Francisco. He had a suite fit for the doges overlooking the Rialto Bridge, but he didn’t have any good news to report. Diane hadn’t phoned him. The fact that she hadn’t at least left a message on Raoul’s cell was unprecedented between them. When one of them was traveling they always talked at the end of the day-always. When they were traveling separately they always talked at the end of the day.

After a lot of cajoling, and a five-hundred-dollar incentive, Raoul had finally persuaded a housekeeping manager to agree to check Diane’s room for him. The manager wouldn’t give Raoul the location of her room, but reported back that there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary, nor was there any indication that she’d been there since late that afternoon. No phone calls had been placed on the hotel room phone since midafternoon. The minibar was untouched after it had been replenished midday. The housekeeper who cleaned the room reported that she’d finished the evening turndown service around 6:30. From all appearances, no one had disturbed the bed or bath linens since that time.

The casino attendant who’d been given Diane’s cell phone by the drunk woman who played nickel slots and inhaled Harvey Wallbangers had promptly turned it in to the casino’s lost-and-found department.

Diane had not inquired about it.

Raoul had also begun what he anticipated would be a long, difficult process of badgering the hotel security officers to review the casino security videotapes for the time that Diane was walking across the gaming floor talking with me on her cell phone. He assumed that hotel security cameras videotaped every square inch of the casino twenty-four hours a day. Security was resisting his pleas to review that section of the tapes.

Their argument? What his wife did when she was in Las Vegas was her business, right? Not her husband’s, right?

He was European, he understood. Right? They can’t very well start showing videotapes of what one spouse does in their casino to another spouse, can they? Would that be fair? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?

Raoul knew that it was hard to disagree, unless you knew her.

Raoul knew her. I knew her.

Venetian security didn’t know her. The identity of the person she’d run into as she walked across the casino floor? Venetian security thought that was her business.

How had she lost her cell phone? Venetian security thought that was her business.

Had she left the casino at all? Her business.

What else had Raoul accomplished by midnight Colorado time?

He’d called all the hospitals in a ten-mile radius of the Strip, searching for even the barest hint that his wife might have been treated or admitted that evening. He’d learned nothing that helped.

He’d called the Las Vegas police, seeking any indication that the local authorities had crossed paths with someone who even vaguely resembled his description of Diane. He’d learned nothing. He’d called American Express to see if he could get a list of charges she’d put on her card in the previous twenty-four hours. A supervisor would speak with him in the morning.

He’d tipped the concierge at the Venetian a hundred bucks to find a twenty-four-hour copy shop that could blow up and print a hundred copies of the photograph of Diane that he kept in his wallet.

She promised him that the prints would be waiting for him before breakfast.

“I eat early,” he’d told her, suspicious of her promise.

“I stay up late,” she’d replied with a smile.

“It’s the suite,” he explained to me. “They must have run my credit report. I think she’s hoping I’m a newly calved whale.”

The midnight call from Raoul had awakened Lauren. I didn’t see any advantage to be gained by alarming her into having a fitful night’s sleep, so I’d explained, benignly, that Diane was in Vegas and that Raoul hadn’t heard from her, that he was worried, and he’d called to see if I’d talked to her since early that evening.

Had I? My wife wanted to know. I had not, I told her, not since early evening. I kissed her, and murmured that she should go back to sleep.

Over coffee in the morning, I explained the rest of the mess to Lauren, obliquely highlighting the slippery ice of the confidentiality hazards that were out in front of me, and specifically including the fact that before we’d hung up the night before, Raoul had reminded me that he wanted to know which patient’s mother Diane had spoken with the previous day. Lauren, of course, knew nothing about my patient Bob and his odd connection to the Millers’ neighbor, Doyle. And she certainly didn’t know that the patient’s mother that Diane wanted to see in Vegas was Mallory’s mother, Rachel.

“What do you think about Diane not calling?” Lauren asked me as I was kissing her and Grace good-bye before leaving for my office.

“I’m worried. It’s not like her.”

“There’s probably an explanation,” she offered.

“I hope you’re right. But I can’t think of what it might be. Diane’s a stay-in-touch kind of person.”

“She’s always been unpredictable.”

“About some things, yeah. Not about staying in touch. About that she’s as reliable as sunrise.”

She kissed me again. “If Raoul doesn’t hear from her by midday, let me know, and I’ll see if there’s anything I can do. Maybe somebody knows somebody in the DA’s office in Las Vegas. Okay?”

“Thanks.”

“Sam might be able to reach out, too,” she added. “He might have cop contacts out there.”

And what, I thought, was I going to tell Sam about the Millers and Bob and Doyle and Hannah Grant that might entice him to reach out to cop colleagues in Las Vegas? “Maybe she’ll call,” I said, not quite believing that she would.

I unlocked the front door of the building, flicked on the lights in the waiting room, and started a small pot of coffee in the tiny kitchen. At 7:43 the red light that indicated that my first patient had arrived for her 7:45 appointment flashed on in my office.

It was time to go to work.