Dragonfish: A Novel (26 page)

The elevator doors opened, and the din of slot machines jerked me back to life.

Mai had played at the Stratosphere only two or three times but apparently knew the place well. She started us walking the casino floor and circling the roulette tables, then the blackjack tables, the baccarat and craps tables. The floor was bustling, the evening crowd here trading in their afternoon sweatshirts for crisp collars and glittery dresses, their baseball caps for hair gel, their handbags for clutches and high heels. This was a newer casino, higher ceilings and skinnier waitresses, and the perfumed air pumped in from the vents masked the cigarette smoke that clung to the walls of a place like the Coronado.

Some of the tables were crowded enough that we had to stop and search for the dealer. Again, they were mostly Asian. Twice
we approached a female dealer with glasses, and each time my face went hot with anticipation.

The thought of confronting Happy felt vaguely humiliating, made me regret our chance encounter in Oakland and all my lustful glances at her over the years. I kept imagining Junior and Victor roughing her up, and as ugly as it all was, as much as it proved what she was willing to take for Mai, all I cared about now was whether her bruises had kept her from coming to work.

“Three days are enough for a black eye to fade a bit,” Mai said knowingly. “Little makeup like she had on, and you’re fine. And you can hide a lot with glasses on.”

I followed her into an area with ceilings painted like the sky, past escalators that ascended into clouds toward the entrance of the Stratosphere Tower itself. A sign boasted thrill rides and the Top of the World restaurant. I thought of the suicide Mai had mentioned and wondered if taking this ridiculous route made it easier, gliding past slot machines and fake clouds and zooming up eleven hundred feet to a roller coaster, where to a chorus of laughter and screams you leap off the edge of the world.

Mai had led me on a brisk, circuitous path to the poker room, which was situated far away from the main floor. We arrived at the four-foot wall surrounding the room and started scanning the fifteen packed tables.

Mai slapped the wall irritably and walked to the front desk, which was attended by an impressively tanned guy wearing a double-breasted suit and an oil slick for a haircut. He didn’t look up until she said, “Is Happy dealing tonight?”

“‘Happy dealing’?” he said as if repeating some foreign phrase. He glanced at me.

“Yes, Happy,” Mai repeated. “Is she here tonight?”

“Oh. Wrong poker room. No one here named that. Wouldn’t matter anyway since our dealers rotate every half hour.”

“Okay, then.”

“We have the best, though. They’ll walk you through if you need help.”

Mai had half turned to go but was now giving him the eye as though admiring his ripe tan. “Will they?”

“I can sign you up for the tournament. Starts in half an hour. You’re only risking the sixty-dollar buy-in. A little less pressure.”

“I play cash games.”

“Oh. You do. Well, let’s see . . . there’s an open seat at the one/two game. No-limit hold’em.”

“How about a twenty-five/fifty?”

The guy looked up to measure her seriousness, a little embarrassed but also ready to be annoyed. “I’m afraid ten/twenty is the highest we have right now.”

“Too bad. I’ll try another room. Maybe I’ll find Happy there too.”

Mai turned on her heels and stalked off, leaving the guy to look at me again for an explanation.

On our way back to the main floor, I told her, “She’s not here. We need to get going to your place.”

She continued eyeing the tables we passed. “Let me try one more thing. Do you still have that card with my cell number?”

“What for?” I checked my pockets and handed her the card.

She approached an empty roulette table overseen by an older Asian woman and took a seat.

“Good evening, good evening,” the woman said, her crow’s-feet blooming as she smiled. “Try your luck tonight?” She was barely five feet and looked elegantly comical in her bow tie and vest.
Despite the “Betty”on her nametag, her accent was strong and unmistakably Vietnamese
.

Mai set four crisp hundred-dollar bills on the felt and said, “In quarters please.”

After flashing the bills to the pit boss, Betty pushed a small stack of blue chips in front of her. Each chip, I noticed, was worth $25.

“Excuse me, sir. If you not playing, I can ask you step back from the table? Maybe stand behind pretty lady here?”

She flashed us both another toothy smile and announced, as if the table were full of people, “Place your bets.”

I muttered in Mai’s ear, “Is this all necessary to ask her a question?”

“What’s your birth date?” she whispered back.

“Jesus. September seventeenth.”

“Of course you’re a Virgo.” She took four chips and placed two each on 9 and 17. The minimum bet for the table, a sign said, was ten dollars.

“No more bets,” Betty announced and waved her hand over the table like a magician. She spun the roulette wheel, her smile as empty as her wandering look around the casino.

“My friend Happy deals here,” Mai spoke up, riffling her chips. “Is she on tonight?”

“Oh, you know Happy?” Betty replied brightly. “No, she don’t work tonight.” The ball landed on 23, and she raked in all four of Mai’s chips. She clucked her tongue sympathetically.

Mai again placed two chips each on 17 and 9. “I heard she got hurt bad the other day. She’s doing better?”

It took Betty two long seconds before she nodded. “Yes, that’s right.” She spun the wheel again and looked back quickly at us. Her beaming had lost none of its wattage, but there was a new depth in her eyes, a stillness.

The ball landed on 17 this time. My heart jumped, but Mai gave no reaction. It was like she had expected it. As she watched Betty count out her winnings, about $1,800, she started speaking Vietnamese to her in a measured voice.

At the roulette table next to us, a gaggle of young dudes in khakis and starched shirts were clapping and cheering. I wondered at first if Betty had heard Mai over the noise, but as she pushed four towers of blue chips toward her, she shook her head like she was apologizing and murmured, “I don’t know anything.”

Mai kept at it, her Vietnamese voice tinged with a formal sincerity I hadn’t heard yet. She wasn’t asking questions. She was revealing things.

The humor drained from Betty’s face. She glanced around us. “I don’t know anything,” she said again, soberly this time, and put up a hand as if declining a gift.

A man appeared behind her, in another impeccable double-breasted suit, the pit boss no doubt, brandishing a ringed hand on the felt. He said politely to Mai, “Excuse me, miss—mind if I check your ID there?”

She had it ready for him, apparently used to this. He examined it, then handed it back to her. “Thanks so much. Some people look a little young, is all. You have fun now, miss—but you can only speak English to the dealer, okay?”

“Sorry, sir,” Mai said. “We have a friend in common.”

“That’s fine, but English only, all right? You all enjoy yourself.”

As he walked away, Betty finally looked up from the table, her smile tired now, her silence purposeful.

Mai whispered to me over her shoulder, “What’s my mother’s birth date?”

“We need to go.”

“Just one more bet.”

I told her June 15, and she promptly placed an entire stack of chips each on 6 and 15.

“Jesus, how much are you betting?” I asked her.

“I don’t know—five hundred on each, I think.”

Betty focused on me now like I’d really been the one interrogating her. When the roulette ball landed, she announced “thirty-five” in a small voice and cleared the table of more than half the chips Mai had won in the last spin.

“I’ll cash out,” Mai said. “In blacks, please.” She took out the business card I’d returned to her and placed it on the felt, her phone number faced up.

Betty counted out her remaining chips, announced the cash-out to the pit, and set nine black chips—$900 total—in front of Mai. “Thank you for playing,” she said and mustered one last halfhearted smile for us.

Mai stood from the table, palmed four of the chips, stacked the other five on the card, and slid it toward Betty. “For you. Please tell Happy to call me at that number. Tell her it’s Hong, and that I really need to speak to her.”

Betty looked wary of both the tip and the card.

A man in a black turtleneck and a sport coat appeared at the table with a blond half his age and twice his height, his hand on the small of her back. In one smooth movement, greeting them as she had greeted us, Betty scooped Mai’s $500 tip into her tip bin and slipped the card into her vest pocket.

As we walked away, I glanced back and caught her eyeing us. I asked Mai, “What did you say to her?”

“I told her Happy’s in trouble and needs our help. Did you see her face?”

“You can’t go around right now giving strangers your number.
There’s no telling who or what she knows—or if she’s even loyal to Happy.”

“She doesn’t need to be to deliver the message.”

“You’re taking too many chances.”

“I was right, though. You saw her face. A middle-aged Vietnamese woman dealing in a casino? Good odds she’s been here a while and knows every Vietnamese woman who works here, who they’re married to, who they love and hate. She’ll deliver the message.”

We elbowed our way through a thick crowd of people waiting in the lobby for the start of some live music show. Mai bumped the arm of a guy twice her size, who muttered after her, but she kept walking like nothing had happened.

We returned to the elevator, and again we rode it alone. Mai stared at the elevator doors as though she could see some distant destination through them.

It wasn’t recklessness. She was too deliberate for that. What worried me was her unpredictability, always another plan or urge withheld. It had loomed inside her mother too, that same shadowy sea creature right beneath the surface of the water. You’re alone in the company of such people.

“There was more,” I said. “You said something else to her.”

Mai passed a hand through her hair. “I said they’ll hurt Happy again if we don’t help her. They’ll kill her next time.”

When the elevator opened, she marched toward the Jeep. It took me some effort to keep up with her.

T
HREE MILES EAST
of the Strip, we disappeared into a dusky neighborhood of low apartment buildings, gravel lawns, and famished pine trees, a few of them lazily adorned with Christmas lights. Mai turned into an alley that led to a small walled-off parking lot behind her complex. She parked beside a rusty VW bus with two flat tires and cut the Jeep’s engine. I had to adjust to the quiet, slot machines still ringing in my ears.

I followed her through a gate with a hole where the knob should be. Her complex looked more like an abandoned motel: two stories of crusty peach stucco wrapped around a dusty gravel courtyard and a lit-up swimming pool half filled with greenish water and leaves, its bottom a brown blanket of scum.

Chicano music drifted from somewhere in the darkness.

We clanged up a metal staircase to the second-floor balcony that led around the building. She led me past dark windows, vacant inside perhaps or nobody home. Across the courtyard, two young black men stood smoking on the opposite balcony, leaning out of the shadows, their murmurs echoing across the way in some African language.

We turned the corner and approached a Mexican man on a plastic stool with a beer in his hand and a small boy in his lap, wrapped in his coat. I smelled grilled onions. When we passed their window, I saw a woman working the kitchen stove and three more children crowded around a small TV on the carpet, beneath a painting of the Virgin Mary framed with Christmas lights. Mai and the man nodded at each other, and the boy watched us intently as we made our way past and arrived two doors down at Mai’s apartment.

When she inserted her key, I said, “Let me go in first. How many rooms are there?”

“Just my bedroom. The kitchen opens to the living room.”

I flipped on the lights, smelled the cold odor of cigarettes. I pulled out my gun and gestured for her to stay by the doorway.

Her place was small, the walls completely bare and the brown shag carpet dark enough to hide stains. The only furniture, shoved into the center of the living room, was a leather recliner, a coffee table littered with a pizza box and soda cans, and a fancy big-screen TV as tall as Mai. In the cramped kitchen, my jacket snagged on the chipped edge of the Formica counter, which looked more yellowed than yellow and held a microwave and a rice cooker and nothing else.

The walls of her bedroom were also bare, her bed a mattress on the floor, a tangle of yellow sheets. Beside the head of the mattress was a lamp and a cardboard box of file folders as well as piles of books stacked against the wall.

I came back out to wave her in. I picked an empty cigarette pack off the floor and set it on the counter. “You get robbed recently, or did you just move in?”

Mai closed the front door, locked it. “I live simply,” she said and walked past me into her bedroom. She opened the
closet, pulled out a black suitcase, and started throwing clothes inside.

“Take only what you absolutely need,” I reminded her. “Once everything cools off, we can get someone to come back for the rest of your stuff.”

“I can get new stuff.”

“Won’t your landlord wonder?”

“I’ve always leased month to month. He’ll be more than happy to take the big-screen.”

I noticed a bunch of poker manuals among her books, some Hemingway and Chandler novels, a few books on yoga and Eastern spirituality.

My foot knocked over an ashtray and I apologized, picking up the cigarette butts despite it not mattering. I checked my watch. It was nearly 7:00. Victor said we had until 8:30, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

“Can I ask a question?”

“Why do I live in a shit hole?” She set the file folders atop the clothes. The top one had “Bankroll” written on it, the others neatly labeled too, by far the most meticulous things in the apartment.