Las Vegas Noir

by Jarret Keene

  “Now go get some sneakers on and go find your dad. We’re going shooting.”

  He jumped up and ran toward the garage.

  I picked up the shiny gun lying on the table. It was heavy like a brick. I loaded the bullets into the chamber with soft clinks. Today we would kick up rocks and look for snake holes. We’d eat salami sandwiches while sitting on boulders. Then I’d lean against the car and fire the gun, even though it might blow my arm out of joint. Casey would be able to shoot it on his own. James would have to wait. I couldn’t support him the way my dad supported me. He’d be able to do it himself one day.

  I walked out to the porch to check the sky. Blue. No clouds. Birds flapped between the trees. Just like in the commercials advertising the new housing developments. I held the gun behind me. Kids shouted up and down the street so I was careful not to let the shiny metal catch their attention. I leaned against the wall, the gun still at my back, my finger dusting the trigger. A boy playing in the street scooted in front of our house. He was throwing a football to some friends I couldn’t see, but I could hear their shouts. He was a big kid with a hell of an arm.

  “Motherfucker,” I mumbled. It was Kevin.

  I watched him move, swagger. Not a care. I pulled the gun in front of me. I held it in my palms, adjusting it to catch the light of the sun. I bounced a few rays into Kevin’s eyes. He glanced over, involuntarily. But the glance became a stare. I watched the recognition change his face, ebb his pride. He turned away and threw the football again. I shot another beam of light into his eyes. He struggled to catch the football. He looked nervously toward me. I held the gun up, so my message was clear. I nodded my head. I pointed my finger at the gun, then back to him. He swallowed. His friends shouted for him to throw the ball. He looked away and tossed it. If he looked back again, I was already gone.

  MURDER IS ACADEMIC

  BY FELICIA CAMPBELL

  Mount Charleston

  Millicent Margrave, known affectionately to her students as M, an Associate Professor of Political Science, is sitting in Bagel Nosh on Maryland Parkway, a half-block from the university, reading the paper and licking the cream cheese off her pumpernickel bagel. It’s 1984 and a serial killer stalks Las Vegas. So far, six women, ranging from their mid-thirties to late their late-forties, all writers and teachers, have been targeted. All have been smothered in black plastic bags. Each has had the thumb and first two fingers of her writing hand severed. The middle finger is placed in the victim’s mouth, which is sewn shut around it, while the thumb and index finger are thrust up the vagina. They are otherwise not sexually molested. The last detail has not been made public. The little city of some 600,000 persons is in an uproar.

  She is chilled by the account of the most recent murder, fully aware that she fits the profile of the victims, as she is well known for her high-profile, ultra-liberal writing. While her colleagues who want to pretend they are in the Ivy rather than the Cactus League look askance at her work as not traditional enough, her student following is as varied as the city’s population, including, among others, mobster’s kids, a couple of very savvy hookers looking more like Midwestern college girls than the campus’s traditional coeds who delight in looking like hookers, and an assortment of ex-cons, with a sprinkling of current con men.

  She acquired the ex-cons when the university in its infinite wisdom briefly decided that all ex-cons should report to a specific advisor who would keep tabs on them, and she had volunteered, angry that they should be singled out after they had paid their debt to society and fearful that some asshole who would make their lives miserable would be appointed. She is particularly fond of a couple of them who know her troubles with her dean, and pleaded to be allowed to teach him a lesson in the parking lot. “We won’t hurt him. We’ll just teach him to respect you.” She refused, of course, but finds it neat that someone wants to look out for her. She’s pleased when she looks up to see them approaching her table. Somehow they always seem to know where she is. The two Es, Ed and Earl, sit down in the empty chairs across from her and proceed to lecture her on her personal safety, particularly insistent that Moose, her giant mastiff, is not enough protection, and that she needs to buy a gun, a street sweeper preferably, which has so much fire power she can’t miss and will turn whatever marauder is foolish enough to invade her space into hamburger. As ex-felons, they can’t buy it for her, but they can help her pick it out. She promises to think about it.

  The veteran of three marriages, one to a fellow political scientist, one to a casino pit boss, and one to a black activist, she is the mother of three grown children, one by each husband. Although her body has begun to thicken and she is no longer beautiful in the traditional sense, she is still striking and has lost none of her charisma.

  “We’re serious, Dr. M. We worry about you. You trust too many people,” says Ed as he leaves. “We’ll do our best to keep checking on you.” She assures them that she will be careful and smiles as she waves for the waitress, thinking how sweet they are and how much more she likes them than her administrators.

  Millicent Margrave thinks of herself as M and prefers to be called such. “Just call me M,” she will say with a toss of her head. “That’s the letter M, not Em as in Emily.” She takes a certain delicious pleasure in identifying herself with James Bond’s runner M. She loves the Bond novels, but thinks him something of a fuck-up.

  She is an avid reader, too intelligent to ever subscribe to dialectic of any sort. She is in fact far too intellectually curious to do well in an insecure provincial university. That she is there at all is the result of circumstance. Chet, her first husband, finished his degree while she was pregnant and hadn’t yet finished hers, and he managed to get hired at what was then semi-affectionately called Tumbleweed Tech.

  The young campus was legendary for its faculty suicides. The acting dean who hired her ex in the ’60s after a telephone interview had driven around and around the campus, then five buildings in the middle of the desert, for weeks, psychologically unable to get out of the car, eventually shooting himself in it in front of Grant Hall the week before their arrival. Chet’s contract rather bizarrely noted that he was a replacement for Mary Ledger. Mary had finished herself off with sleeping pills and booze the previous semester. A new hire, a Shakespeare scholar, killed himself before arriving on campus, which she and Chet giggled was very efficient of him.

  Before the first year was out, Chet had fled academe for the neon lights and run off with a change girl from the Silver Slipper, leaving M behind to cope. Desperate, the Political Science department offered to let her fill out his contract. Equally desperate, she agreed. Marco, named after Marco Polo, was born and she settled into a routine of classes, diapers, and finishing her dissertation. As soon as she finished her doctorate, the department offered her a contract at eighty percent of what Chet had been making. She took it, and she’s been there ever since.

  Marco was two when M met Les Margrave, the pit boss. He seemed rather Humphrey Bogarty—she’d always liked Bogart, who always seemed to know what he was doing, Casablanca and all that—and two months later married him. Much to the surprise of what she called the M watchers, the marriage, both years of it, was a success. That she retained his name is a mark of that. Little Humphrey was born two months prematurely out of shock when Les was the innocent victim of a shooting in a convenience store robbery.

  Grover, the black activist, was her next husband. Their marriage might have worked, she often thought, if he hadn’t attempted to step into Les’s shoes. They tried to make a go of it for three years. Lena was born, a beauty from her first breath, and M and Grover decided to call it quits before their fights ruined the children.

  This succession of marriages served to alienate the self-righteous among her colleagues, who certainly outnumbered her friends. “They’re afraid you are having a good time,” Galen used to tell her.

  An angular Canadian with a sharp wit and a vast store of knowledge, Galen had been her mainstay after she and Gro
ver split. Her colleagues had been horrified when she married someone from the gaming profession. “She might as well have married a black,” they whispered, the ’50s not far behind them. But she was socially finished when she married Grover, their professed liberalism not extending to their peers. She’d have been finished at the university, too, if she hadn’t pushed for tenure when Les was killed. Galen had shamed them into it. It cost him the chair when the vultures gathered after she married Grover, but he had never reproached her.

  Galen was gay and, of necessity, in the closet, so the two of them entered happily into a conspiracy in which they pretended to be lovers, a conspiracy which protected both. Her kids liked him and the affair gave the vultures something to be liberal about. Truth be told, it would have been difficult for anyone observing their intimate laughter to tell that they were friends not lovers.

  Leaving Bagel Nosh, M heads for her detested office. On the ground floor facing the quad, its huge windows make her feel vulnerable. Outside her door lurks Danny, the new kid in the department. She doesn’t much like him. He moves oddly, halfway between a slither and a skulk, head tilted to one side. He seems to exist in black-and-white rather than in color. His students bitch about his classes and she thinks he probably isn’t very bright.

  “I hope you’re being careful, you know, because of the murders,” he half whispers confidentially.

  “Don’t tell me you think I’m in danger.”

  “Well, you do fit the pattern. I mean, you are a middle-aged woman and you are pretty well-known for your writing,” he throws out, sidling to the door. She wonders if he’s trying to freak her out or if maybe he’s the murderer. After he leaves, she heads toward the mailroom.

  “M, my dear.” It’s Raph, the drunken poet and one of her favorite cohorts on campus, calling from the depths of his cluttered office. He looks like the corrupt cherub that he is, dark curls falling around a baby face just beginning to blur from his excesses.

  “What brings you this bright morning to this pustule on the ass of academe? This carbuncle on the posterior of education?” In rare form this morning, his voice rises, “This hor-ripulation on the butt of phrontistery. This ingrown hair in the fanny of the athenaeum. This excoriation in the seat of learning,” he ends with a flourish.

  She drops a kiss on his curls. “You’re cute. What’s phron-tistry?”

  “A disparaging synonym for the educational establishment,” he responds, the laughter leaving his face.

  “What’s wrong, Raph?”

  “The Little Colonel has stabbed me with his julep stick, hoisted me with his own petard, a chicken bone I believe. In other words, my darling M, he has put me on notice that my performance is unsatisfactory, that I should have published at least another chapbook by now, and I am on my way out.” Raph, née Raphael Waters, looks ready to cry.

  “Why that miserable little fucker!”

  The Little Colonel is their nickname for their mutual dean, Ned Chauven. Ferret-faced, stubby, arrogant, ignorant, and bigoted, he got his job through Vegas juice, the liquid that greases this city and elevates those who have it to positions for which they are unfit. He married the sister of a regent, and, to no one’s surprise, was lifted from relative obscurity to the deanship after the death of good old Dean Longacre. He has been a worse tyrant than anyone could have imagined, applying a brutal form of publish-or-perish to those he dislikes. Truth be told, while Raph is a popular teacher, he has written very little in the past few years, maintaining that grading freshmen essays depleted his creativity and he shouldn’t be required to publish.

  “It’s okay, Raph, We’ll fight. He can’t get away with it.” For a moment, her fighting spirit emerges. “Why did he do it?”

  “Do you want the real reason or the good one?”

  “Both.”

  “Darla Port.”

  “Darla Port! The blond twit who used to be the Colonel’s bimbo? No!” she gasped.

  “Believe it, my dear M. She’s finished an MFA in creative writing somewhere and had a book of poems published in some obscure place. It’s called ImPort, would you believe, with all the revolting connotations that conjures up; ergo, he’s letting me go for affirmative-action reasons. I’m being replaced by an ugly blonde! She’s the only ugly bimbo I ever knew.”

  M grits her teeth over his sexism, but simply says, “Ah, good old affirmative action, the process by which the administration insures that there will be no equity for anyone. Remember how we fought to get an Affirmative Action Officer, then they hired that poor semi-literate ex–football player who sat around and looked terrified while they told him what to do?”

  Realizing that she’s late, she bids Raph goodbye and rushes to class.

  Later that evening, she is sleeping fitfully, dreaming that she is negotiating her way down a narrow several-hundred-foot-high stairway with no handrails, leading to what looks like a food court on a beach, when she’s blasted into heart-pounding wakefulness by the telephone. She’d fed Raph dinner earlier and they’d both drunk too much wine. Raph was reeling when he left, but she was too far gone to take his keys, so she let him go. She is losing her capacity to handle alcohol and she feels rotten.

  “It’s me,” Raph is saying. “I’m in jail. You have to get me out right now!”

  She fumbles for the light. “What’s up—drunk driving?” A cascade of books from the nightstand hits the floor and her toe while she scrabbles for a pen.

  “No, old traffic warrants, but there might be more,” he wails. “Get me out of here!”

  “Are you in City or County?” Awake now, her faculties working, she tells him to hang loose while she arranges bail.

  “M,” he whines, “they were really nasty, making noises like now that they had me, they might even look at me for the murders. I think they hate poets. Get me out of here!”

  “Listen, Raph. They always hassle people. They’re just messing with you. Don’t answer any questions. This is crazy! I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “M, I have to hang up. A bunch of guys are pushing me. They want the phone. You’ve got to help me!”

  For a moment, she looks stupidly at the phone, now buzzing a dial tone, then drops it into its cradle. Cursing under her breath, not bothering to comb her hair, she drags on a pair of soiled khakis from the laundry basket, adds a Greenpeace T-shirt and sandals, checks in her purse for credit cards, and heads out the door for Main Street and Fast Freddie’s Bail Bonds. She is really sick of taking care of people who can’t seem to take care of themselves.

  Fast Freddie, who she met in the days of her activism, is in the nature of an old friend and likes to deal with the pahfes-sor, as he calls her. He’ll be able to find out what’s going on and recommend a good lawyer. He’s a Vegas character of the type mentioned before who always seems to be there when she needs one. From convicts to con men, they all love M and love to take care of her, all the while lecturing that she should never trust anyone like them, especially them, and should get rid of the losers who seem to surround her and want her to take care of them.

  Like a Hopper painting, Main Street is deserted, a few neon signs illuminating the dark street. At first she thinks that she’s missed Fast Freddie’s, then realizes that an alien name is on the doorway. Jennie Ledbetter, Bail Bonds. Jennie is every inch a bondswoman.

  About forty-five and heavily made up, clouds of metallic frosted big hair surround her suspicious face. She sports a pair of handcuffs painted on one fake thumbnail and a key on the other. She peers at M over her bejeweled half-glasses. “What can I do for you?” she sneers.

  “I’m looking for Fast Freddie,” M answers, and realizes that she must look like a bag lady in her unkempt clothes.

  “Fast Freddie ain’t here anymore. Maybe I can help.”

  “I used to know him. I liked him. I have a friend in trouble. I need his help.”

  Deciding M isn’t worth her time, Jennie tells her that Freddie got in some trouble and sold her this place, but that he has a ne
w one, Jack Be Nimble, further down on Main.

  “There’s a neon sign with a guy jumping over a candlestick out front. I don’t get it, but you can’t miss it. Tell the guy at the desk you’re looking for Freddie. He’ll know where he is.”

  Moments later, M drives past the Jack Be Nimble sign and has to make a U-turn to get back. Entering, she sees a heavy, bald black man sitting at the desk. He looks up. “Hey, it’s Professor M,” he says, smiling and rising.

  It takes her a moment to rake Tommy’s name from the bottom of her memory and adjust it from the elegant young man who used to escort her to get her spouse out of jail where he’d landed for civil rights protesting to this middle-aged stranger. Suddenly, the world comes into focus and she’s grinning.

  “It’s great to see you, Tommy. A friend of mine is in trouble and I came to find Freddie.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “He was picked up for traffic warrants tonight and told me they said something about hassling him for the murders. He’s wimpy, and they were probably just rattling his cage. He’s flipping out.”

  “Whoa, that’s heavy. Any chance he’s the killer?”

  “Come on, Tommy, you know me better than that. What’s up with Freddie?”

  “He started drinking again and screwed up the accounts, so they stood on his hands for a while. He’s okay now, but doesn’t usually come in until about 9.”

  “I can’t wait. This poor guy doesn’t have a macho bone in his body. He’s terrified”

  “Is he a fag?”

  “Not unless it’s happened in the last two hours.”

  Tommy tells her to grab a cup of coffee from the pot in the corner while he checks on things. Staring out the window at the flickering shadows of Jack Be Nimble jumping on the pavement, she can’t hear what he is saying, but his expression seems grim. She contemplates taking up smoking again, the seedy atmosphere seeming to require it, but changes her mind as Tommy says, “You’re in luck, lady.” She turns to hear, “The computer’s down again, which means we may be able to spring him before they know what’s happening, then you can get a lawyer to buy him some time. I don’t know what they’ve got on him, but for some reason they screwed up and took him to City instead of County.”