He nodded.
“You did?”
He nodded again and pointed up Regatta Drive.
Bay thanked him and yelled, “Here, Rambo!” He held up the screen of his phone with the real estate details. The house was owned by Clive Chesser, the treasurer of the Desert Shores Homeowners’ Association.
I WAS EARLY for my late lunch rendezvous with Elwood at Mladinic’s. I sat alone at the bar with a pint of Kaj beer, watching the local news on TV. I’d been trying to reach Helen Lozoraitis at the Crisis Center, but she was not returning my calls or texts. On TV, men and boys, some of them very young, all wearing camo outfits with rifles or shotguns slung over their shoulders, walked out into the desert. The NRA had sponsored an early morning Wild Dog Roundup as a public service and a thank-you to its host city. And by “roundup” they meant slaughter, if the mass grave we were shown was any indication. A spokesman for the NRA told Fox 5’s Lyle Candeleria that the roundup was a rousing success: forty-five dangerous and possibly rabid and diseased dogs were neutralized and no longer posed a threat to the citizens of Clark County. And only two hunters and one oblivious hiker were injured.
A man with a hooded gray sweatshirt obscuring his profile sat down beside me in what I had come to think of as Ren Steinke’s barstool, ordered a Campari and soda, and stared straight ahead. On TV, a local vet in a blaze-orange vest said that there was now convincing evidence that the feral dogs were mating with the indigenous coyotes, a word he pronounced in two syllables. “What we never want to see is a pack of Rhodesian ridgeback coyotes prowling our streets.” Lyle then crouched down to interview a seven- or eight-year-old boy who knelt, proudly, beside his kill, a Tuxedo Boston terrier. “Back to you in the studio, Ted.”
The cowled gentleman beside me, who must, I thought, suffer from very poor circulation, said, “Everyone who matters knows what happened. And you don’t matter.” On the news, a judge ordered a nearly catatonic woman, who had been stalking a professional golfer, back to jail for violation of her restraining order. The man beside me continued staring straight ahead. He hadn’t touched his drink. He folded his hands and cleared his phlegmy throat. He said, “Do you read me?” His raspy voice evidenced years of whiskey and smoke. I cast a discreet glance at him. He did not seem to be speaking on a mobile device. His flawless and preternaturally white complexion suggested youth, confidence, vitality, and plastic surgery. I said, “Are you talking to me?”
He said, “Everyone who matters has moved on. And so should you. We all have so much left to accomplish.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“She’s dead. That’s life. It is what it is.”
“I hate that phrase.”
“Whatever.”
“And that word.”
“And that’s my problem?”
“Are you talking about Layla Davis?”
“Am I?”
“Who are you?”
“A friend.”
“No, you’re not.”
“A friend is a man who tries to keep you from getting hurt. I qualify.”
“Is this a threat?”
He looked at me. “A warning.”
Tatjana returned from the kitchen with a rack of cleaned cocktail glasses.
I said, “You’re wearing a mask.”
“I’m wearing a face.”
“But it’s not your face.”
With that, this man with a prosthetic face stood. He said, “Thank you for the drink, Mr. Melville,” without moving his latex lips, and he left.
I asked Tatjana if she knew him.
She said, “He looks like Frank Sinatra.”
“Only younger.”
“Ronan Farrow.”
“Who?”
“Guy on the news. Little Blue Eyes.”
Elwood texted that he was five, maybe ten, minutes away. I settled up with Tatjana and asked her to say hello to Ren and Ellis when she saw them. I told her that Ren was looking fine the last time I saw him with Ellis.
She said, “Ellis is in hospice.”
“Is in what?”
“The cancer. When they found it, it was everywhere. Like God. Morphine drip. Not much longer to go.”
I carried my drink to a table out on the patio and found myself angry with Ellis and his fucking cigarettes. The happy little dung beetle had come to a long, steep hill. Not wanting to continue on this freighted train of thought only to find myself at Terminal Station, contemplating my own mortality without my therapist Thalassa Xenakis sitting across the patio table from me, I Googled an image of Ronan Farrow, and he did, indeed, resemble my dissembling messenger. And then I called Helen Lozoraitis, and this time she answered.
She said she would prefer, and then she changed prefer to insist, I not come back to the Crisis Center. The center did not need the distraction of adverse and avoidable attention, nor the damaging negative publicity my presence would provoke. I asked her if she was kidding. She said the perception of impropriety was as toxic as the impropriety itself.
I said, “In what world?”
She said, “People won’t remember that you were innocent. All they’ll remember is the grainy video of you and that child on the Strip, she looking like a little girl at her first state fair and you looking, for all the world, like a skeezy pedophile.”
So I hung up on her. And then I called right back, got her voice mail, and apologized for my rude, impetuous, and immature reaction, said I’d like to talk, hoped she would pick up, said I completely understood her wanting to protect the Crisis Center and all, but just the same, I said, I’m good at what I do, and there are lots of folks out there in distress, and our not doing everything we can to address their critical needs was simply irresponsible, and what, by the way, was going on over at Refuge House that a client can just walk away? Do you think you ought to be referring runaways to a place so lacking in basic supervision, and then I came to a realization as I spoke. I said, “You think I’m guilty, don’t you?” And then I told her to fuck herself and hung up.
Elwood said, “You seem angry. Would you like to talk about it?” He smiled and sat. We ordered light. Octopus salad and cuttlefish risotto appetizers. Two beers. He told me he’d been fired, and he felt liberated.
“Why?”
“I posted the story about Layla’s murder on the station’s site.”
“No, you didn’t!”
“They took it down before anyone could read it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m better off. TV news is pretty people reading press releases.”
“Maybe you can write for the Sun.”
“No future in print journalism.” Elwood flipped up the shaded lenses on his glasses. “News is now. The dailies are all about then. They’re in the wire service reprint business. And the city weeklies are all about pain clinic, massage parlor, and escort service ads.”
“So what will you do?”
“I’ll blog and I’ll freelance. I’ll write articles for Parade magazine for cash. ‘The Miracle of My Mother’s Pudding’; ‘Can Bugs Be Cute?’ Write them in my sleep. ‘Four Uses for Honey That Will Blow Your Mind.’”
Our waiter, Tobias, arrived with our beers, said the food would be out in a jiffy, and introduced us to his shadow, Dunstan, waiter-in-training. Dunstan bowed slightly from the waist.
“I’ll have the blog site up by tomorrow morning latest. I’m calling it the Wingo Star.”
“Ouch.”
“And I’m going live with the Layla story and naming names.”
“Do you have a lawyer?”
“Uncle Shelly.”
Our lunch arrived. We took a look at the gorgeous food, found its quantity wanting, and ordered two bowls of chicken broth with Dalmatian grits dumplings. How could we not? “And those fries,” I said, “with the sriracha sour cream.”
“Excellent choice,” Tobias said.
Elwood’s phone chimed an alert. He checked the message. “Holy shit!”
“What?”
“Wayne LaPierre’s been shot dead.”
“At the convention?”
“In the middle of his welcoming speech.”
I said, “‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ Not judging, just quoting the terrorist-enabling deceased CEO.”
“I should get down there.”
“And leave me here with all this food?”
“It does smell good.”
“He’ll still be dead in the morning when you launch your blog.”
“I wonder who did it.”
“Did he think the avenging angels of irony were never going to swoop down and carry him away?”
“He’s Catholic, and so lived without the burden of irony.”
Another chimed alert. Elwood read me the news. “They caught the guy.”
“Alive?”
“Whisked him away.”
We ate. We waited for more news. Elwood called a few of his sources and colleagues, but no one knew anything more than we did. We wondered how K-Dirt and Bleak would react when Elwood’s story went public. We ordered crumb cake with walnuts for dessert. I suggested to Elwood that he move, at least temporarily. He thought he was in no danger, that the Doublemint twins might even savor the publicity, since no one was about to arrest anyone anyhow.
Another chime. Elwood said that eyewitnesses described the shooter as a burly balding guy in his thirties wearing a T-shirt that read HB1840. “That was a Washington State bill requiring domestic abusers to turn in their firearms. The NRA did not vigorously oppose the bill this time around.”
“So then Wayne loaded the rifle that fired the shot that did him in.”
Elwood raised his glass, said, “Let us, as a nation, never forget that the Second Amendment is the bedrock of our liberties and our freedom.”
WE ALL SAT at the kitchen table. Bay was dressed for his poker game later at the Bellagio—black synthetic slide sandals, brown socks, creased jeans, and a green T-shirt that read I’M BLUFFING. He was drinking a club soda. Mike and I were enjoying our preprandial martinis and snacking on pickled bologna rings and chipotle beef jerky slabs. Health food. I held Django in my arms while we watched Bay demonstrate the five different grips he used to throw playing cards, in ascending order of potential damage: the Flick, the Butterfly Swirl, the Sea Urchin Spin, the Dolphin Dart, and the masterful Four-Finger Fist, where he tossed all four aces at once, and when he was finished there were eight playing cards solidly embedded in the watermelon on the kitchen counter. I released the excitable Django, and he leaped to the counter and warily sniffed the cards. When the doorbell rang, he jumped straight up in the air and then bolted for the bathroom and shut himself inside. Bay invited the two cops into the house, and I let Django out of his prison. We all stood in the living room with Officers T. Virgin and M. Hettich. Mike said, “What can we do you for, Officers?”
Virgin said, “We’re looking for Charlotte Edge, and we understand she might be here.”
“No Charlotte here,” Mike said.
“Or we would have invited her to our party,” Bay said.
Hettich said, “Are you Melville?”
“Nat Hawthorne.”
“And you can prove it?”
“Of course.”
Virgin said, “Hawthorne and Melville?”
I said, “You an English major?”
Hettich looked at Mike. “Melville?”
“Becker.”
I said, “The last time I heard from Charlotte, she was in Florida.”
Virgin and Hettich looked at each other. Virgin puffed his cheeks and exhaled. Hettich raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, and I knew I was busted, but I also could see from the neck-rubbing and the feet-shifting, they didn’t want to be here. So whose errand were they running?
Django did a figure-eight dance around and between Hettich’s legs.
Hettich winced. “I’m more of a dog person.”
“I’m guessing a big old dog who sleeps in your bed. Likes a bear hug before you leave for work.”
“Dan.”
“Retriever?”
“How did you know?”
“The smell on your uniform. You might want to check to see if Dan’s anal sac is impacted.”
Mike said, “You guys should have your names on the backs of your uniforms like the ball players do. Then we wouldn’t have to squint to read your name tags.”
Hettich said, “That’s ridiculous.”
Mike said, “That’s a million-dollar idea right there.”
Bay said, “What’s this all about, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Virgin pulled a business card from his pocket and handed it to Bay. “If you do hear from Miss Edge, ask her to give me a call.”
“I sure will.”
BAY AND MIKE left for the Bellagio once they learned that the Strip was unaffected by the shooting and commotion at the Convention Center. I reached Charlotte on her cell. “Where are you?”
“Well, I took the 210 Lake Mead bus, but now I’m at Summerlin and Rampart.”
“You’ve gone too far.”
“So I’ve been told.”
I told her to wait right where she was, at a Walgreens, and I’d be by to fetch her. And then I told her about the cops and asked if she might have any idea why they wanted to speak with her.
“I may have roused a sleeping dog.”
“Who’s that?”
“Some of the union work I did in Immokalee made the national news. Good for the union, bad for me. You remember Mr. Kurlansky, of course.”
“The man who fell from grace with the cliff.”
“Yes, well, his family learned of my whereabouts on CNN and dispatched Mr. Kurlansky’s younger brother to find me.”
“The death was ruled accidental.”
“No evidence, no trial. The case may be cold, but it’s not on ice, not as far as the Kurkanskys are concerned. They’ve been telling everyone who’ll listen that I murdered their son.”
“And somehow the brother got the local cops involved.”
“Dieter’s a cop in Fort Bragg. A nasty cop.”
“So the visit to the house was a professional courtesy.”
“Dieter showed up in Immokalee snooping around and asking questions, and the Ochoas, the thugs who supervise the workers, were only too happy to show him where I lived. I saw him before he saw me. He’ll kill me if he gets the chance.”
“Do you want to go to the cops?”
“Hell, no.”
“That’s the spirit. But here’s the thing. You can’t stay here. They’ll be back. I’ll pack your suitcase and meet you right where you are in twenty. You’ll stay with Mercedes till we figure out our next move.”
Patience called to say she’d be arriving tomorrow afternoon. Not a minute too soon, I said. I told her about Charlotte’s fix. By the time I’d packed Charlotte’s overnight bag per her instructions and then drove the few miles to Walgreens, she had made some calls to friends in Immokalee. I drove south on Fort Apache to West Flamingo, and Charlotte filled me in. “It’s bad,” she said. “But not Leroy Brown bad.”
This she learned from the union’s lawyer: Her stalker, Dieter Kurlansky, got himself into some trouble, mouthing off at the Club Lumina, got jumped, pulled out his pistol, fired a shot through the ceiling, and took a shot in the jaw from an unknown assailant. The place cleared out pretty quickly. Dieter survived the gunshot but not without the loss of several teeth, some gum, an inch or so of jawbone, and copious blood. Un hombre con suerte, the ER doctor called him. Mucha, mucha suerte. He would be taking his nourishment through a straw for quite some time, and he would require reconstructive surgery. The lawyer told Charlotte that, of course, no one saw a thing because, quite frankly, Dieter couldn’t pick four thousand pounds of tomatoes in a day, but whoever fired the shot surely could.
“This is quite the mess,” I said.
“He found out I was here.”
“By tracing you to us, no doubt.”
“Time to vanish again. Alone this time.”
MERCEDES SET CHARLOTTE UP in her den with a fold-out bed. Charlotte excused herself, saying she was going to take a long, contemplative bath. I sat at the kitchen counter. Mercedes set out a plate of Manchego cheese and Sardinian parchment crackers. She told me her roommate Mindy was at her boyfriend’s friend’s condo. The boyfriend’s married. Mindy gave him an ultimatum. Tonight’s the night. He has a wife and two kids. Mindy’s been seeing the asshole for two years. Found out about the wife at Christmas.
I said, “He’s not likely to leave the wife.”
“I know that and you know that.”
“Of course, he might tell her that he is.”
“So what are we drinking, Wylie?”
“I’m driving.”
Mercedes wasn’t buying the charade. “We all drink and drive in Vegas.”
“But that doesn’t make it right.”
“But it hurts a lot less when you crash if you’re flushed.”
“We’re being irresponsible.”
She held her thumb and finger an inch apart. “A little one.”
“What’s your specialty?”
“A Paralyzer.”
“Well, that sounds harmless.”
“Kahlúa, vodka, and Coke.”
“A little one.”
“The caffeine’ll keep you alert.”
I got a text from Gene asking me to meet him tomorrow: Name the time and the place. A quiet place. And wear your therapist hat. I need to talk.
I replied, Aloha Shores Park at eleven.
I asked Mercedes how her twins story was going.
“I started a new one.”
“What about?”
“A dying man wins the lottery.”
“I wanted to know what happened to the twins.”
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