The Other Side of Silence

by Bill Pronzini

  “All right. Can you think of anyone Spicer might know in Vegas besides Eddie Sparrow?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever take you to Vegas?”

  “No.”

  “Go there by himself?”

  “The trio he was with had a four-week gig there once.”

  “When was that?”

  “A few years ago.” She paused. “You know, it was right before he came into all that extra money.”

  “So the money may have come from some source in Vegas. Did he go back there after that?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did Ulbrich check with the musicians’ union to find out if Spicer’s working there now?”

  “Yes. Court’s union card is still valid, but they wouldn’t give out any information about him.”

  Fallon said, “Okay. Now tell me about Kevin.”

  “Tell you what? Except for his asthma, he’s just a normal boy.”

  “How bad is the asthma? Does he need to see a specialist?”

  “No. Any doctor can prescribe his medication.”

  “How do you think he reacted to being taken by his father?”

  “Scared and bewildered. How else?”

  “Would he try to run away if he had the chance?”

  “No.”

  “You sound pretty sure of that.”

  “He’s always been cowed by Court. Afraid of him. If he tried to run and Court caught him . . . No, he wouldn’t do that.”

  Fallon asked about the boy’s interests. Sports, outdoor activities?

  “Well, he’s not good at team games. He’s quiet, shy, he doesn’t make friends easily. He’d rather read fantasy books like The Hobbit and play video games than anything else.”

  “Good with computers?”

  “Like all kids these days. But Court knows that. He wouldn’t let Kevin near a computer by himself.”

  Fallon nodded. He let a few seconds pass before he said, “This isn’t going to be easy for you, but now I need to know about Banning.”

  Her eyes slanted away again; he could see her steeling herself.

  “You’re sure you never saw him before that day in the motel?”

  “Positive,” she said.

  “Never heard his voice before?”

  “No. It was deep, growly . . . I’d remember if I had.”

  “What exactly did he say to you on the phone?”

  “He’d heard that I was looking for my son and ex-husband, that he knew Court and knew where they were living and he’d tell me for two thousand dollars. Bring the money to Las Vegas and he’d meet me and when I paid him, he’d tell me where to find them.”

  “Did he say how he knew Spicer?”

  “He said he’d tell me when he saw me.”

  “Did he use Sam Ulbrich’s name?”

  “No. Why should he?”

  “No reason, unless he got your number from Ulbrich.”

  “. . . Are you saying Sam Ulbrich helped set me up?”

  “I don’t know Sam Ulbrich.”

  “Neither did I, before I hired him. I picked his name out of the phone book. His office isn’t far from where I live.”

  “He didn’t have to know you or Spicer to set you up,” Fallon said. “Detectives can be bought off during the course of an investigation.”

  “I don’t believe it. He was very professional, he didn’t try to overcharge me or anything like that. For God’s sake, Court isn’t that powerful. He doesn’t have unlimited funds, he can’t corrupt everybody.”

  “So we’ll assume Ulbrich’s clean. Let’s get back to Banning. You agreed to his terms, and he told you when and where to meet him.”

  “The Rest-a-While Motel, room twenty, at three o’clock Wednesday afternoon.”

  Fallon asked where the motel was located. North Las Vegas, she said, on North Rancho Drive. She didn’t remember the exact address. Small, old, nondescript—the cut-rate type of place.

  “Was the room reserved in your name?”

  “No, Banning said I was to check in and wait for him in number twenty. But I think the clerk may have been expecting me.”

  “Oh?”

  “I didn’t have to ask for room twenty. As soon as he saw my name on the registration card, he gave me the key.”

  He asked if she’d gotten the clerk’s name. She hadn’t. But she remembered the man well enough: midforties, balding, slightly built but with a noticeable paunch.

  “How long were you in the room before Banning showed up?”

  “About ten minutes.”

  So he’d either had surveillance on the motel, so he knew when she arrived, or he’d got a call from the clerk. He’d been somewhere close by, in any case. “Describe him.”

  After a few seconds she said, “Not handsome, not ugly. About your height, six feet. Heavyset but not fat. Strong. I couldn’t fight him. I couldn’t even scream with his hand on my throat. He—”

  “Don’t dwell on that. How old?”

  “Thirties. Maybe thirty-five.”

  “Hair color?”

  “Black. Short and kinky.”

  “Distinguishing marks? Scars, moles, anything like that.”

  “A tattoo. On the back of his right wrist.”

  “What kind of tattoo?”

  “A dragon. Breathing fire.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Brown leather jacket. Slacks, shirt, cowboy boots . . .” She paused, frowning. “He had something odd in the jacket pocket. It fell out when he took the jacket off and he grabbed it and stuffed it back—quick, as if he didn’t want me to see it.”

  “Did you get a good look at it?”

  “No, but I’m pretty sure it was a garter. Gold, with black ruffles around the edge. I think it had writing on it.”

  “Writing?”

  “A name of some kind.”

  Not a woman’s garter, then. A sleeve garter. Some casino employees— floor bosses, dealers, croupiers, stickmen, bartenders—wore them. The name on it could be that of a casino.

  “Can you remember anything else about him?”

  “He wore a ring, a big gold cat’s-eye ring. One of the times he hit me, it cut my cheek.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Fallon said. “Now, what about his car?”

  “I didn’t see it. I didn’t even hear him drive up.”

  “Okay. What did he say to you when you let him in?”

  “Just . . . ‘I’m Banning.’ He was smiling.”

  “And then?”

  “He asked if I’d brought the money and I said yes and took it out of my purse and gave it to him. He counted it before he put it in his pocket. Then . . . then his smile changed and he said, ‘All right, now you get what’s coming to you,’ and that’s when he grabbed me and threw me down on the bed. It all happened so fast . . .”

  “When did he deliver the warning? While he was attacking you?”

  “No. After he . . . afterwards.”

  “Can you remember his exact words?”

  She’d picked up her coffee cup; the question made her put it down again, hard, so that it rattled the saucer and nearly tipped over. “I’ll never forget it. ‘Message from your ex-husband. Stop looking for him and the kid. If you don’t, he’ll find you and do what I just did to you and then he’ll kill you. And if you go to the police, I’ll find you and fuck you again and then I’ll kill you.’ ”

  “That all?”

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  She had begun to rock slightly, back and forth. There were goose bumps, he saw, rising on her bare arms. The conversation, the chilly air in the room, physiological reaction to the sunburns.

  He said, “That’s enough for now. You’d better lie down for a while, get some rest.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “No, you’re not. Not yet.”

  He got up to turn the air-conditioning unit down to medium cool. She wouldn’t let him help her to the bed. When she was lying down with a sheet over her lower body, she sa
id, “What are you going to do now?”

  “Go see about your car. It should’ve been towed in by this time and if it’s not too badly damaged, the mechanics ought to have it ready to drive by to- morrow. You won’t be ready to travel before then anyway. Probably not until Monday.”

  “I can’t just sit around in this cabin for two more days . . .”

  “You will if you want my help.” He went to the writing desk, found a piece of cheap motel stationery and a pen. “What’s your cell phone number?”

  She gave it to him and he wrote it down. Then he tore the paper across the middle, pocketed the top half, and on the clean bottom portion wrote his cell number. He put that piece on the nightstand.

  “Call me if you need to at any time. Otherwise I’ll call you.”

  “From where? Where are you going?”

  Fallon smiled wryly. “The other side of silence.”

  “What?”

  “Vegas,” he said, “where else?”

  PART II

  LAS VEGAS

  ONE

  FALLON HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT of Vegas as a massive, amoeba-like creature slowly inching its way across the flat desert landscape, absorbing more and more of it in little nibbling bites. No head or tail, no intelligence, its only purpose to grow larger, fatter, like the others of its kind that had covered the Los Angeles basin and the Phoenix area and were now swallowing parts of the Mojave Desert. Its veins and arteries pulsed and glowed, new cells made up of housing developments and strip malls and big-box stores expanded in every direction as it grew. Heat radiated from it, but it wasn’t the dry, natural heat of Death Valley. It was sweaty, oily, carbonized. Body heat. Engine heat.

  Worst of all was the noise it generated. Growls, snarls, howls, roars, siren shrieks, and all the other sounds that came from its writhing bowels in a throbbing, never-ending din. There were louder assaults on the eardrums— NASA rocket launches, supersonic jets on takeoffs and flyovers—but they didn’t go on and on and on. Only two places were worse than the city beasts. One was a military training base during ongoing preparations for war. The other was war itself, the deadly thunder of bombs and rockets, grenades and small-arms fire—hellsounds that by pure chance he had never had to endure himself.

  This creature, the Vegas creature, seemed to be spreading even faster than he recalled. Only five years since he’d been there last, on a concessional weekend with Geena, but it might’ve been decades. Accelerated metabolism, increased hunger: proportionately less desert. One of the fastest-growing cities in America. One of the fastest-dying open spaces in the West.

  Geena loved it, of course. Not so much Vegas itself as its pulsing, pounding heart—the Strip. The skyscraping, weirdly shaped casinos like New York, New York, Bellagio, Bally’s, Luxor, the Venetian; the lounge acts and musical extravaganzas; the eye-stabbing neon colors that obscured the night sky—all the gaudy, tawdry, money-driven glitz the City Where Anything Goes could supply. To her it was the epitome of excitement. Worked on her like an aphrodisiac, he remembered. Their sex life had never been as lush and experimental as it had been on their few short stays in Vegas.

  He couldn’t help wondering briefly, as he reached the northern outskirts, if she’d been here yet with the new man in her life. His name was Macklin—a gynecologist, of all things. Good practice, plenty of money to give her the material possessions she craved. That was all Fallon knew or cared about Macklin or Geena’s affair with him or their future prospects together. You love someone, you live together and suffer and grieve together, and then you fall out of love and drift apart and move on. Happens all the time. Doesn’t have to be bitter or adversarial. All it really has to be is final.

  He didn’t need a map to find the Rest-a-While Motel. The Jeep’s GPS navigator took care of that. North Rancho Drive was off Highway 93 in North Las Vegas, a few miles from the old downtown. It took him longer to get there crosstown from Highway 95 than the GPS estimate because of heavy Saturday afternoon traffic, like bunched-together platelets clogging the creature’s arteries.

  Casey had described the motel as nondescript and cut-rate. Right. It took up most of a block between a Denny’s and a strip mall, in a section of small businesses and fast-food joints and discount wedding chapels. Low parallel wings stretched vertically from the street, ten units in each, facing one another across an area of dried-out grass that contained a swimming pool and lanai area. The desert sun had baked a brownish tinge into its offwhite paint job. A sign jutting skyward in front claimed that it had Las Vegas’s most inexpensive rates, free HBO. A small sign said VACANCY.

  Either the Denny’s parking lot or the strip mall would have been a good place to watch and wait for an expected arrival; easy, then, to walk or drive over to the motel. Number twenty would be one of the rear units, farthest from the street, probably in the wing that backed up against the fenced side yard of an auto-body shop. If the rooms closest to it had been vacant, the sounds of a woman being beaten and raped, even in broad daylight, wouldn’t have carried far or alerted anybody. And Banning, the son of a bitch, had been careful, methodical in his assault: hand around Casey’s throat, panting threats in her ear to stifle her cries.

  Fallon went inside the office. Small, but not too small to hold a bank of slot machines and a TV turned on to a sports channel. A chattery air conditioner vied with the voices from a row of talking heads. Behind the short counter, a man wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt had been perched on a stool staring at the talking heads; he stood up when Fallon came in. Middleaged, slightly built with a noticeable paunch and an advanced case of male-pattern baldness. He pasted on a smile as Fallon stepped up to the counter.

  “Help you, sir?”

  “I’m looking for a friend of mine.”

  “One of our guests?”

  “Probably not. But maybe you know him. Calls himself Banning.”

  The clerk’s expression was as flat as a concrete wall. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “Big, heavyset, tattoo of a fire-breathing dragon on his right wrist.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “You work every day this week?” Fallon asked.

  “Since Tuesday.”

  “Here on the desk every afternoon about this time?”

  “That’s right. Why?”

  “Then you remember a young blonde woman, Casey Dunbar, who checked in around three o’clock on Wednesday.”

  Flicker of something in the man’s eyes. They slanted away from Fallon’s, to a point above his right ear. “I see a lot of faces every day. Can’t remember them all.”

  “You gave her number twenty. She didn’t stay long, not much more than an hour.”

  “None of my business how long they stay.”

  “Banning showed up right after she did, paid her a visit. He didn’t stay long either.”

  “So? What’re you getting at?”

  “The maid report anything out of the ordinary when she cleaned up afterward?”

  “Such as what?”

  “Such as bloodstains on the sheets.”

  “Bloodstains?” Now there was a little twitch under the clerk’s eye, like a piece of the concrete wall that had worked itself loose. It took him a couple of seconds to smooth it down again. “Listen, Mister—”

  “Did the maid report anything like that?”

  “No. What’s the idea of all these questions? You’re not a cop or you’d have proved it by now.”

  “Let’s just say I’m a friend of Casey Dunbar’s.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know anything about her or this guy Banning or any bloodstains Wednesday afternoon. You satisfied now?”

  “Let me have a room for the night,” Fallon said. “Number twenty.”

  The clerk was going to refuse; his mouth started to shape the words. But the way Fallon was looking at him changed his mind. “I don’t want any trouble here,” he said.

  “Just a room. Twenty’s free, isn’t it?”

  “. . . Yeah, it’s free.”

  “How much
?”

  “Only one night?”

  “That’s what I said. How much?”

  “Like the sign says—forty-nine ninety-five.”

  He took his time producing a registration card, sliding it across the counter. Fallon filled it out, transposing two of the numbers on the Jeep’s license plate. The name he printed on the card was in block letters, easy enough to read upside down.

  The clerk read it aloud: “Court Spicer.” The name didn’t seem to mean anything to him.

  Fallon laid three twenties on the counter, waited for his change and the room key. Still no eye contact. And no more words except for a by-rote, “Check-out time’s eleven A.M.”

  A gamble, playing it this way. If the clerk knew Banning and reported to him, it might flush him out into the open—potentially a quicker way to make contact than trying to track him down on skimpy information. Poten- tially dangerous, too, but what Fallon had told Casey was true: he wasn’t afraid of men who beat up and raped and extorted money from women. The bigger risk was that if Spicer was still in Vegas, Banning would report to him and he’d spook and take Kevin somewhere else.

  A gamble, sure. But this was a gambler’s town, and there was risk no matter what game you played.

  Fallon drove to the rear and parked in the space in front of number 20, the last in the row on the far side as he’d guessed. He took his pack in with him. Not much of a room: bed, nightstand, dresser, one scarred naugahyde chair, TV bolted to an iron swivel, tiny bathroom with a stall shower. Stifling in there, the smell of Lysol disinfectant nearly overpowering; the room likely hadn’t been rented since Wednesday. You’d need a UV fluorescein detector to find the blood traces in here now.

  He put the air conditioner on low, drew the drapes over the single window, made sure the door was locked. Then he sat on the lumpy bed, opened the phone book he found in a nightstand drawer. The Hot Licks Club and Casino was on Flamingo, probably in a section close to the Strip.

  He debated calling Vernon Young in San Diego. Casey didn’t want Fallon to bail her out, but he didn’t see any reason to wait before getting in touch with her boss. The quicker the money issue was resolved, the better it would be for her. And if resolving it meant loaning her the two thousand, all right—another gamble. But he doubted it would come to that.