Missing Persons

38

“Finding reality here is like looking for condoms in a convent. There might be some around, but they’re not going to be easy to locate.”

Raoul was talking to me about Las Vegas, and about how he’d spent his day. His voice was as tired as my toddler’s when she was up past her bedtime. Raoul was an optimist by nature, an entrepreneur by character. Watching him treading water in a sea of despair was so unexpected that it felt surreal.

The Las Vegas cops remained uninterested in Raoul’s missing wife. He had pressed them to try to ascertain at what point Diane would be considered “missing.” One detective told him that, “Given the circumstances, it would certainly take more than a long weekend. And so far, Mr. Estevez, that’s all she’s been gone. One long weekend.” The hospitals continued to have no inpatients matching Diane’s name or description. As a sign of his desperation, Raoul had hired a local private investigator who was apparently chewing up money much faster than he was uncovering clues about Diane’s whereabouts. All he’d learned so far was Rachel’s address. When he checked for her there, no one answered.

Marlina, the woman from Venetian security, enticed Raoul to buy her breakfast at a place near downtown that was filled mostly with locals. They spoke Spanish while they ate. Raoul learned that Marlina’s brother was in INS detention in Arizona, learned how he got there-or at least Marlina’s version of how he got there-and learned in excruciating detail how Marlina felt about the whole affair, but he didn’t learn anything about what the casino surveillance tapes revealed.

After the frustrating breakfast, Raoul moved on to an alternative avenue of investigation: The Love In Las Vegas Wedding Chapel. As he told me about it, my impression was that relating the story of what happened there seemed to relax him.

According to Raoul’s tale, the minister of the Love In Las Vegas Wedding Chapel was the Rev. Howard J. Horton. By training he was an actor who had enjoyed some success as a young man on Broadway, even once landing the role as understudy for the lead of some Tommy Tune extravaganza. After a move to California to find fortune on the Left Coast, Horton had actually defied the odds and made a living in Hollywood until his thirty-seventh birthday doing bit parts on sitcoms and lawyer and cop shows and getting occasional throwaway lines on big-budget features. In successive years in his late twenties he had been filmed making cocktails for Sean Connery, being pistol-whipped by Al Pacino, and flirting shamelessly with Sharon Stone just before being pummeled into submission by her leading man.

Raoul didn’t think he had caught any of those particular movies.

The bit parts hadn’t been enough to provide the foundation for Horton’s hoped-for long-term career as a distinguished character actor, and as his face matured the parts he was being offered didn’t. To pay the bills he’d eventually gravitated to dinner theater and later on made his way to Vegas, where he did some emceeing at shows on the Strip, fell in love with heroin, heroically managed to “divorce the damn bitch,” and eventually ended up winning a thirty-nine percent stake in the Love In Las Vegas Wedding Chapel in a poker game with some locals that had started one cocktail hour on a Wednesday and ended late in the morning or early in the afternoon-Horton didn’t quite remember; it had been that kind of game-the following day.

Horton was forty-seven years old and had been the minister of the moment at the Love In Las Vegas for almost seven years. On bad days he consoled himself that it paid the bills.

The British accent and aristocratic demeanor that Horton employed for the tourists who came to Vegas for matrimony were pure shtick, and the slick Vestimenta suit he wore in the relentless Nevada heat nothing but costume. He’d won the suit from a gay guy from Atlanta in another poker game-that table populated, with the exception of Horton, entirely by out-of-towners-and he told Raoul a hilarious story about them both stripping down to their undies to exchange clothes after the game. Howard had given up his favorite pair of cargo shorts and a well-worn Tommy Bahama silk shirt.

Raoul promised me that he’d get around to telling me the part about the protracted negotiation for the Atlanta man’s thong another time.

“You promise?” I said.

“Absolutely,” Raoul assured me.

In a city where visitors were primed to expect spectacle, Horton’s wedding show at the Love In Las Vegas was a whisper of sophisticated, or faux-sophisticated, understatement. At the Love In Las Vegas, tourists who were so inclined could be married, not by an Elvis impersonator or a cross-dressing reject from Cirque, but by an ex-patriot British lord who seemed intent on bringing his interpretation of a little bit of the best of the Church of England, whatever that was, to the Nevada desert.

While Raoul waited to get a few minutes alone with the Rev. Horton so he could ask some questions about Diane and Rachel Miller, he had to choose between frying outside in the parking lot in the he-was-told unusual-for-January ninety-three-degree heat or sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of the chapel and observing the nuptials of a young couple that had driven all the way from Spraberry, Texas-that’s just outside Midland and not too far from Odessa-to tie the knot in Las Vegas.

The engaged had written their own marriage vows and brought a cassette of the music they wanted played during the ceremony. Her vows ran onto three legal-sized yellow tablet pages.

His didn’t.

The bride wore white-an ill-fitting empire-style dress with a long train that her second cousin had scored at the Filene’s Basement annual everything-for-$299 wedding dress running-of-the-bulls in Boston. The bride was twenty-two, but didn’t look it. She was as innocent as the prairie, and her face was full of the wonder that every woman’s face should have before she weds for the first time.

On the final stretch of Highway 95 into Vegas she’d made a valiant attempt to memorize all the vows that she had penned onto the yellow legal pad on the haul from Spraberry to El Paso on Interstate 10, but during the actual ceremony she’d had to consult her notes every few seconds during her long recital of eternal love.

In his retelling, Raoul generously wrote it off to nerves.

Her betrothed was twenty-six years old and was dressed in a tuxedo jacket he’d borrowed from his sister’s husband, a ruffled-front tux shirt sans tie, and clean-and pressed-Wranglers. His hair, greasy from all the road time, was combed into a mullet that was as sleek and shiny as the skin of an under-refrigerated fish. This was his third marriage and his second wedding in Las Vegas-he was once widowed and once divorced-and by demeanor and practice he was a love-honor-and-obey-till-death-do-us-part kind of groom. By history he apparently wasn’t exactly a love-honor-and-obey-till-death-do-us-part kind of husband, but he’d promised his fiancée repeatedly-including once during the ceremony-that all that rutting was behind him.

The groom’s self-written vows were an obviously plagiarized, parsed version of the popular standard. Raoul’s impression was that the guy would have been better off just allowing Rev. Horton to do his almost-Anglican-cleric thing. But, Raoul noted, the bride didn’t seem to be at all offended by her husband-to-be’s lack of vow-writing prowess.

The wedding music, which was played over and over and over again in a toxic loop, consisted of a single upbeat song by Shania Twain with a lot of uh, uh, oh s in the lyrics. Raoul couldn’t quite figure out the romantic relevance of the tune, but the cumulative weight of the pure repetition of the uh, uh, oh s eventually rendered him willing to accept the silky voiced singer’s implied warning about whatever the hell it was. By the time the ceremony was over and the newlyweds had kissed and kissed again and walked hand-in-hand down the aisle toward the desert inferno that awaited them outside, Raoul knew just about all he wanted to know about the couple from Spraberry whose wedding he had just helped celebrate, and he also knew he never wanted to hear the damn uh, uh, oh song again in his life.

Ever.

“He may have divorced ‘the bitch’ but Reverend Howie still sleeps with her cousin,” Raoul said to me. “He drinks a bit, and then he drinks a bit more. We spent most of the afternoon at the kind of saloon the Vegas Chamber of Commerce doesn’t want tourists to see. That’s when I heard his life story and got all that fascinating background on the happy couple from west Texas. Have to give the guy credit, though-Howie knew I was paying but he got the same crappy well-scotch he drinks in that bar every day. He didn’t ask the bartender to dust off the single malts just because I was running the tab.”

“Did you learn anything?”

It was late in Colorado-almost eleven at night-and I was exhausted. Although it was an hour earlier in Nevada, Raoul’s voice told me that his long day and long story had left him every bit as tired as I was. Maybe more. But something about his day had at least temporarily softened the edge of his despair.

“He wouldn’t talk to me about this Rachel woman. I could tell from his little act that he knew who she was, but he wouldn’t answer any of my questions, wouldn’t even admit that she hung out at his chapel. When I showed him Diane’s photograph he wouldn’t admit that he’d ever seen her before. I knew he was lying; wasn’t sure exactly about what, or why, but I knew he was lying. I was beginning to think I was going to have to just stake out the damn wedding chapel and wait for Rachel to show up again and lead me to Diane.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no. That’s when it hit me. I lowered my voice to a whisper, pulled a little pile of thousand-dollar chips from the Venetian out of my pocket, stacked them up in front of me, and asked Howie exactly how much he was being paid.”

“Paid for what?” I said.

“That’s just what he said to me. All offended and everything. Reverend Howie’s a smart guy. He’s on the edge, but he has some pride. I don’t think he’s too dishonest. At the chapel he makes a living providing a service, as screwy as the service is. He supplements his income by taking people’s money, or whatever else they might want to bet, in high-stakes poker games. But he plays those games fair. His MO? He sets people up by being a better actor than they give him credit for, and then he takes their money by being a better poker player than they give him credit for. This time? I already know he’s a good enough actor, and I wouldn’t think about sitting down to a hand of Texas Hold ’Em with the guy.”

“Yeah?” I had one ear focused on Raoul’s Las Vegas story, the other tuned to Grace’s room. She was making the kinds of nighttime noises that often precede one of those restless nights that end up with one of her parents dozing nearby on the rocker in her room until dawn. I said a silent prayer that my little daughter was merely enduring a troublesome dream.

Raoul said, “Eventually, he told me. I had to make it clear I wasn’t going away, but he finally said, ‘Fifty.’ ”

“I’m sorry, Raoul. I’m too tired. I don’t get it.”

“I didn’t get it at first, either. See, my brainstorm was that I thought that Rachel Miller must be paying him. That that was why he let her attend all the weddings. I figured she might be slipping him five bucks, maybe ten, per ceremony. But he was trying to convince me that she was paying him fifty bucks a pop-fifty-to sit in this tacky chapel while Reverend Howie did his pretentious I-now-declare-you-husband-and-wife song and dance.” Raoul paused. “Do you know how many people get married in Las Vegas on an average day? One hundred and fifty-three. That’s what Reverend Howie told me.”

“If it’s people, wouldn’t it have to be a hundred and fifty-two or a hundred and fifty-four?” I asked. “Maybe you mean couples; the number can’t really be odd.”

Raoul sighed. “Alain, your point?”

I did the math. Five weddings a week: two hundred and fifty dollars. Ten weddings a week: five hundred dollars. Five weddings a day, with one day off each week: fifteen hundred dollars. That meant that for Rachel Miller to attend weddings to her heart’s content would cost somewhere between two thousand and six thousand dollars a month, or between twenty-four and seventy-plus thousand dollars a year.

Plus gifts. Holy moly. Where the hell would a schizophrenic woman living on the streets of Las Vegas get that kind of money?

I asked Raoul, “Do you believe him?”

“At first, I thought he might be inflating the numbers to see how the negotiations would go with me, that I might be sitting in that saloon watching him drink scotch so that I could try to outbid Rachel for some crazy reason. You know, offer him more than fifty to turn her away.”

“He’s making pretty good money by allowing her to stick around for weddings.”

“That part seems clear. Tell me, how sick is Rachel? No details-I’m not asking for anything confidential-just rate it for me. Do it in a way I can understand.”

I couldn’t tell him anything specific about Rachel’s mental health mostly because I really didn’t know anything specific about Rachel’s current mental health. “With the kind of disease that someone like Rachel has, with the kind of chronicity she’s endured-she could have very visible symptoms. If you were to measure the disease of a person like that on the figurative ten-scale, say, on a bad day-a day when she’s not taking appropriate medicine-she could be approaching double digits.”

“On that ten-scale?” Raoul asked.

“Yes.”

He emitted a high-pitched whistle. “See, that’s what I thought. That kind of sick is scary to people like me. Which means that Rachel is ill enough to be a serious liability at a place like the Love In Las Vegas. What bride wants somebody that disturbed camped out in the front row of her wedding?

“Reverend Howie’s fee is insurance: He makes Rachel pay to attend the weddings. Who knows, he may even limit the weddings he lets her attend. Maybe he picks them himself. Makes a judgment about which ones are safe for her to be at, which ones she might create a distraction, cost him some business.”

“Raoul, if Rachel were attending all the weddings she wanted and if she were paying that much, it would cost a fortune. Where would she get that kind of money?”

Before the words were out of my mouth, I heard a prolonged whimper from Grace’s room. Damn.

“This town?” he said. “Too many bad ways to answer that question. Way too many.”

I shuddered at the thought of what perverse advantage some people might gain over someone as ill as Rachel Miller. “What did Howie finally admit to you?”

“Just that she gives him money so he’ll allow her to attend the ceremonies. And this is the funny part-she doesn’t pay him herself-the money comes from someone else, someone who makes Reverend Howie very nervous. He wouldn’t give me the person’s name. He said, ‘You can buy me scotch all day and all night and I’m not going to give you a name.’ I even pushed one of the thousand-dollar chips from the Venetian across the table and left it right in front of him. I said, ‘Name and phone number, Howard, and it’s yours.’ He picked it up, flipped it, ran his fingers over the surface, and pushed it back onto my side of the table.

“I added two more and made it a nice little pile. He pushed them all right back to me. I added two more. He did the same thing.”

Howie had turned down five grand. I was thinking, Wow. “So what are you going to do, Raoul?” I asked.

“I took four chips off the pile and slid the one that remained back across the table. I said, ‘Different question. Man or woman?’

“ ‘Yeah?’ Howie asked me. ‘For a grand? That’s all you want to know?’ I said that was the deal and he actually had to think about it. He is so wary of this person that gives him money so Rachel can attend weddings that he actually considered turning down a thousand dollars rather than reveal to me the person’s gender. Eventually, he picked up the chip and slipped it into his shirt pocket like it was a pack of matches. He said, ‘It’s a man. Not a man you want to fuck with.’ ”

“That was it?” I said. “That’s all you got for a thousand dollars?”

“In business you don’t always get value at the front end of a relationship. At the start you form a bond, establish platforms, ensure access. What I got for my thousand dollars is I got Howie on my payroll. And I reduced the possible suspects by half.”

“How do you find the man you’re looking for?”

Raoul sighed. “You remember a guy in Denver named Norm Clarke? Use to write for the Rocky.”

I remembered him. “The gossip columnist with the patch on his eye?”

“Sí. Well, I know him-he did a story on me back in the tech boom times. He lives in Vegas now, knows everybody. I’m meeting him downstairs a little later for a drink. I’m hoping he can help me find the man Howie was talking about.”

Grace’s unsettled whimper suddenly blossomed into a wail that was so powerful I could have sworn her lungs had been temporarily replaced by air compressors.

Raoul didn’t need to be told our conversation was over. I sprinted in Grace’s direction, praying that I could quiet her before Lauren’s sleep was shattered.