“You do know the show’s made up, right?”
“And what I imagine is I get bonked on the head again, and I wake up in a hospital, and I know who I am, and I ask the nurse for a telephone.” Ellis put down his beer, left his money on the bar, shook my hand, and said he was off to fetch a polyp-free Ren and drive him home.
I noticed that the stocky woman with a gray chignon to my left was solving quadratic equations on her iPad. I smiled and told her I’d flunked algebra twice in high school.
“And yet look at you now!” she said.
She told me her name was Colette and that she’d been a nun—Sisters of St. Joseph—for twelve years, during which time she taught high school math.
I bought us both pints of Wittgen Amber.
She said, “And then I left the convent. I married Mr. Buzzy Schott in Chillicothe, Ohio, and we had two daughters, a house in the ’burbs, and a border collie, and then I realized I was a lesbian, and I moved out on Mr. Schott. The older girl, Clois, is a doctor and a mom. Her younger sister is an idiot just like her father.” Colette sipped the ale. “Now I live two blocks from here with my partner, Mary, who’s an accountant at the MGM Grand.”
I held out my hand. “Wylie.”
“As in cagey?”
“I prefer artful.”
Colette put down her stylus and picked up the iPad. She said that when she looked at a math equation, she saw a world so exquisite it was beyond words. “And every time I look at the equation again, I see something I hadn’t seen before.” She borrowed a pen from Tatjana and drew an equation on a napkin:
eiπ + 1 = 0
She smoothed the napkin and asked me to tell her what I saw.
I said, “Whatever it is on the left, it all adds up to zero.”
She squeezed my arm and said, “Poor baby.” But she wasn’t giving up. “This elegant equation is known as Euler’s identity. Gorgeous, no? Such purity and simplicity.”
I told her that I’d suffered a lifelong aversion to numbers.
She said, “Any in particular?”
“I’m arithmophobic.”
“I see, a concrete thinker. Well, then, let’s think of the equation as a story and the figures as characters.”
“Go on.”
“1 is a constant and it’s where we begin when we count. 0 is our youngest number. It indicates absence, and yet without it, there could be no math. You’ve probably met π before.”
“Pi are square.”
“e is Euler’s constant, and, like π, is irrational and transcendent. i is an imaginary number.” She cocked her head and searched my face for a glimmer of understanding. “Your face is as empty as a null set.”
I said of the equation, “It’s all Greek to me.”
She said, “Euler’s identity is as sublime and beautiful as Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Mozart’s Requiem. And here’s the kicker,” Colette said. “We can’t understand it; we don’t know what it means, but we’ve proven it, and so it’s true.”
We raised our Wittgen steins in a toast. Colette said, “Here’s looking at Euclid!”
I said, “And here’s to Euler’s pi that was infinitely delicious.”
I asked her if she thought there was randomness in the universe, that it had no purpose, no method, no order, and no coherence. She said not random, but unpredictable sometimes. Until we find a theory that explains it all. She asked me what I thought.
“There is no aim or purpose. There’s just what happens.”
“The universe does seem to be on a drive to maximal disorder,” she said.
I said, “The evidence is all around us.”
“Numbers are infinite,” she said. “If you love numbers, there will be no end to your happiness.”
WHEN CHARLOTTE AND I arrived at Mladinic’s, Bay was dazzling Mike with some basic but deft sleight of hand. He did the French drop with a silver dollar, making it vanish and then reappear beneath Mike’s hat. The straw trilby, by the way, was part of what I could only describe as Mike’s unanticipated but snazzy golf ensemble: blue polo shirt, red slacks, white belt, and saddle shoes.
We ordered a pitcher of Karlovko beer. Mike said, no, he didn’t golf, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t look sharp. Bay ordered for the table: sardines in lemon juice to start, squid ink risotto, ground grilled meat, and pork kabobs. When the beer arrived, Charlotte gathered herself and began.
She told us that she had seen migrant labor camps surrounded by cyclone fences, razor wire, and armed guards. In Florida. In the twenty-first century. She’d seen twelve-year-old children working in the fields—child labor laws don’t apply to agricultural work. The Obama White House scrapped the proposed rule changes that would have kept children away from hazardous work.
She’d seen men locked overnight in unventilated box trucks so they couldn’t escape. She’d seen contractors confiscate workers’ passports for “safekeeping.” She’d seen twelve men living in a dilapidated single-wide with faulty plumbing, rotted floors, leaky ceiling, and without AC, for which they were charged $2,000 a month rent. Pregnant women worked in tomato fields that were soaked in terotogenic toxins. “I’m not a troublemaker,” Charlotte said. “I’ve never had much nerve. I’ve never been one to stand up and scream. But I couldn’t stand by.”
She’d seen heartbreaking photographs of children born without limbs, with fused limbs, with extra digits, one baby with a parasitic head attached at the neck, another with a single eye in the middle of her forehead. The congenital abnormalities were not a coincidence. Those fields were sprayed with methyl bromide, a Category 1 autotoxin that kills everything it touches. And all the while, Charlotte said, the growers themselves, the corporate farmers with their ag and business degrees from the University of Florida and their bespoke suits and their vigorous children, enjoy their afternoons at the country club, their weekends in Vail, and their philanthropic fund-raising galas, and feign horror when they learn of the injustices inflicted on the workers by their trusted subcontractors and note that they, too, are victims, betrayed by heartless supervisors.
Bay said, “So what happened when you rattled their cages?”
“Someone trashed my motel room. My tires were slashed. My windshield shattered. And then someone killed Henry. Hacked him open with a machete and left his body at my motel room door.”
Bay said, “I’m so sorry, Charlotte.”
“I’m very, very pissed off right now,” Mike said.
ELWOOD HAD LEARNED from a reliable-ish source that Messrs. K-Dirt and Bleak were lounging poolside at the Grand Dragon Hotel. Elwood suggested we pay them a visit. He picked me up at the Barnes & Noble in Summerlin, where I’d bought a book on traveling the back roads of Nevada. I learned that there were floral sculptures in Hawthorne made out of old bomb casings. I hopped into the back of the Fiat mobile office, moved sacks of stale pastry off the seat, and settled in. We went nowhere fast.
“The convention’s got everything tied up,” Elwood said. “The NRA’s in town.”
I told him that Walker Lake used to have an annual Loon Festival, was home to schools of cutthroat trout, but now nothing can live in the saline water. And did he know that the old Tonopah Cemetery was across the street from the Clown Motel? That there were over thirteen thousand abandoned mines in the state?
• • •
WE TOOK A SHADED poolside table at the Jade Mountain Bar and ordered two Maogaritas. (Just what you’d think, but with lychee liqueur added.) Elwood told me that the station wouldn’t let him post the story about Layla’s murder mentioning the names of the alleged killers. He couldn’t run it, not on the air and not on the blog.
I said, “The station’s worried about lawsuits.”
“The cops won’t talk; maybe the killers will.”
“Alleged killers, and I doubt it.”
“Won’t know till we ask.”
I asked Elwood how he’d recognize our dangerous friends. He said he’d seen their high school yearbook photos. Kaiden was treasurer of the
Camera Club. “And there they are,” he said, nodding to a pair of fair-haired gents lounging by the pool on foam mats.
I thought they’d be burly, neckless skinheads with droopy mustaches and lugubrious tattoos, like a couple of Motörhead fans on the way to WrestleMania. These two inconspicuous fellows seemed harmless, angelic even, every-mother’s-son material, and looked like they might be on the way to a hootenanny. Their slim bodies were tanned and hairless. They were as sleek as harbor seals. They wore identical Oakley sunglasses and black sports watches on their left wrists. One of them rubbed oil onto the other’s back and shoulders.
I said, “Does that move seem a little peculiar to you, Elwood?”
He said, “The sun’s a bitch.”
“Would you let me rub tanning oil on your back?”
Our waitress, Elizabella, returned with our drinks and overheard me say that being a Jack Mormon must be like being a lapsed Catholic. She said, “Jack or lapsed?”
I said, “Lapsed.”
She looked at Elwood. He said, “My people don’t get that choice.”
She said, “All Mormon men are premature ejaculators.”
I said, “Really?”
She said, “Trust me. I’ve done extensive field research.” She smiled, folded the drink tray under her arm. “It’s from having to hold it in all those years.”
Elwood said, “Those two are not armed unless those are Glocks in their Speedos, so now might be a good time to ask them some questions. In public and all.”
“I’ll wait here.”
Elwood stood. “Wish me luck.”
I watched him flip down the tinted lenses on his glasses and approach K-Dirt and Bleak. I took out my cell phone and prepared to dial 911. Elwood handed one of the pair his business card and then spoke, asking, I imagined, the sixty-four-dollar question: Why did you murder Layla Davis? Elwood was not one to back and fill. Both men shook their heads. Elwood then may have reminded them who Layla Davis was. One of the men stood and got into Elwood’s face.
Elizabella returned with our check and said, “I see your pal has met Chip and Dale.”
“He has, and I’m worried.”
“Preemies,” she said.
“You know them?”
She nodded. “And quite nearly in a biblical sense.”
“They have unsavory reputations.”
“So I’ve been told.”
I noticed that Elizabella was no longer red and silky. “Did you change your kimono?”
“I didn’t want you to get bored.”
“Well, that was thoughtful.”
“Easy on, easy off.” She flashed her dimples and widened her Egyptian-blue eyes.
Waitresses are my weakness. I wanted to know the story behind the tiny scar above her left eyebrow. I said, “Is Elizabella your real name?”
She said, “Look at you, getting all ontological on me.”
I looked up to see Elwood being frog-marched away from the pool by two uniformed guards. I looked up, and Elizabella was gone. I looked at the Mormon twins and realized that I had seen them before—with Blythe leaving the elevator after Layla’s death. As I ran to rescue Elwood, I switched on my image-generating future receptor, took the pepper spray from my pocket, turned, and fired several bursts into the pursuing preemies’ eyes. I met Elwood outside, where he was taking a selfie with the two mollified guards and checking the spelling of their names.
I said, “Did they deny everything?”
“They said they did it because they wanted to and they could. But they might have been lying.”
“And you can’t prove it anyway.”
“I’ve got it in a file.” He held up his phone. “Every mumbled word.”
“Did you show them Layla’s photo?”
“I did. They started talking Mormon.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“That’s what I said. They told me it was actually reformed Egyptian.”
And then I told Elwood what I had just discovered. They were both at the scene of the crime.
Elwood said, “They may have pulled the proverbial trigger, but Eli did the killing. I’d bet on it.”
I said, “Eli?”
We drove to Elwood’s. He carried two folding chairs into the kitchen from the porch and set them at the table. He explained, “I eat standing up at the sink.” He cleared the table of the piles of unopened mail and newspaper clippings. I sat. Elwood opened the freezer, where he kept iced martini glasses, a cocktail shaker, vermouth, vodka, and twists of lemon. He mixed and poured the drinks while standing there. He set the drinks on the table, shut the freezer, opened the fridge, pulled out a large manila envelope from the vegetable drawer, opened it, and unfolded an organizational chart on the table.
I said, “What is this?”
“This is the chain of command of the anonymous monopoly that operates the very lucrative illegal prostitution business in Nevada. The Invisible Empire, I call it.” Elwood explained that while legal brothels operated in eight rural counties in the state, most of the prostitution happened where it was illegal—in Vegas and Reno. Sixty-six percent more money was spent on illegal prostitution. “We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“How do you know about this Empire?”
“I’ve been investigating prostitution in Nevada for four years, and for six months of that time I had a willing informant within this organization. Called himself Babe Parilli, but I have no idea what his real name was.”
“Why would he talk to you and presumably risk his own life?”
“Vanity, I think. He didn’t like the anonymity. He wanted to feel important and wanted people’s esteem; after all, he rubbed shoulders with very bad men and with movers and shakers. He felt appreciated when he spoke with me. Babe drew this org. chart right here at the table.”
Below the directors’ box and the CEO’s box were four department boxes: Recruitment & Distribution, Operations, Enforcement, and Public Relations.
I said, “PR?”
“They throw hush money around to media outlets.”
“You can keep the media out of it, but how do you keep the cops out of it?”
“Cops are public servants who do what they are told. You don’t have to influence the cops, just the high command.”
Elwood said, “Babe worked in enforcement for a man he called Eli, the head of local and regional enforcement for the company. All the independent brothels in the state, legal and ill-, are a part of this centralized network. Eli’s responsible for policing the network. Anyone who stepped out of line got a visit from Eli and friends. A stand-up guy, according to Babe. MBA from Wharton. Worked his way up the corporate ladder. A team player.”
“And who are these directors?”
“Babe said they were your corporate types, solid citizens, weekend golfers, entrepreneurs, investors, guys with Gucci briefcases and pocket squares, the same sort of trash who run Goldman Sachs and Chase.”
“Slave traders.”
“That’s not how they see it. Prostitution is a victimless crime, they say.”
“You don’t see the bruises when you’re counting the money.”
“Babe never told me their names, and I doubt he knew them.”
“And Babe is . . . ?”
“No longer with us. Vanished. One night he’s at my house getting editing help with his nephew’s college application, and the next day he’s gone.”
“Did Eli have a last name?”
“Belinki. Babe let it slip one gin-drenched afternoon.”
“You have a photo of this Eli Belinki?”
Elwood opened his laptop. “As you might imagine, Eli is camera-shy. He’s the Thomas Pynchon of hit men. But I found him tagged in a Facebook photo at a frat party at Penn.” Elwood turned the screen for me to see. “That’s him with the ukulele.”
“Looks like Abraham Lincoln.”
9
WHEN BAY AND I saw the enormous dog chase down, catch, and then drown the lemur, we w
ere out for a stroll in the neighborhood alongside Lake Jacqueline, talking about Charlotte’s dilemma. Then he said, “The next car that comes down Regatta will be a red Audi R8.” And it was. He’d been doing this all evening, and he hadn’t missed a car yet. Clearly he wasn’t guessing, but I couldn’t figure out how he was doing it, which brought us to speculate on the origins of magic. Bay quoted Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. “Imagine,” Bay said, “the first Homo erectus who discovered fire and how to conjure it with flint. He must have seemed like a god to those nearby clans still cursing the darkness. They would have fallen at his feet.”
That’s when we heard the piercing screams of the loping monkey, which was what we thought the terrified creature was at first, and saw him or her coming toward us down Regatta Drive, followed by a bounding bullmastiff, closing the distance between them. The pair of them veered left, crossed the street, the swale, and the sidewalk, and splashed into the lake, where the dog grabbed his sodden prey and dove under the water.
When the beast emerged from the lake with the limp body of his dispatched prey in his jaws, he shook himself dry, spied the two of us, raised his hackles, and snarled. Bay said, “Silver Ford Focus,” and that’s when I noticed the deceased’s ringed tail in the glow of the approaching car’s headlights. The dog trotted off up Regatta Drive with his trophy; the Focus stopped; the driver rolled down her window and called to us. Kit told us she’d just delivered a half dozen Maui Wowee pizzas to the House of Mirth, she called it, a brothel four doors up Regatta on the left.
“Really?” I said. “A house of ill repute in our proper little subdivision.”
Kit said, “The girls need fuel, and the johns tip well.” She smiled. “Beach Pizza—doing our part to make the world go ’round.” She pointed to a pair of extra-large pizzas on her front seat. “Got to run. Two Vege-terraneans for Charo.”
Bay said, “Fourth house on the left?”
“The one with the taxis idling out front.”
We walked to the House of Mirth. Bay said he didn’t know the neighborhood was zoned for business. “I wonder who’s running the show.” He entered the address into a real estate app on his phone. A cabdriver asked if we were looking for anything special. We weren’t. Anything at all, he said. You name it. A suited gentlemen stood on the porch, legs spread, hands folded over his crotch. I thought of how proud his mother would be to see what Sonny’s made of himself. All that worrying for nothing. Sonny nodded. Bay told him we’d lost our dog. Had he, by any chance, seen a huge dog lumbering by?
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