Drawing Dead (17 page)

And with the top down, Louise at the wheel, it was awesome.

We flew to the Wynn. The wind was too loud for conversation. Which was helpful.

The valet guy at the Wynn knew her, too.

The place was huge beyond thought. Like most of the newer Vegas monstrosities. And they did their frantic best to make everything appear terribly classy. Lots of designer shops in the vast entrance promenade. Thirty-foot ceilings that bizarrely squashed down to ten or so—or so it seemed—when you entered the gaming area. I pondered why that might be. More space above for floors of rooms, I supposed. But since building heights appeared to be effectively infinite in Las Vegas, that didn’t really seem to explain it. More to the point, maybe, they wanted to keep your eyes down, on the games, the machines, the compelling lights and noises, and the near-naked shopgirls stuffing drinks into your face to fuel the urge to spew your hard-earned cash into those selfsame machines or the rigged-in-favor-of-the-house games, which constitute all of the games. Except poker, of course, though only in a specialized sense, because the house still takes a regular and usurious chunk of change from the poker table in the form of a rake, sometimes a piece per player per half hour and sometimes a piece of every pot, a rake that to be a winning player you must overcome by winning more off the other guys than the rake takes off you. Which for an accomplished player isn’t that hard, but still. Somebody’s getting ripped off. You just better make sure it’s not you.

We went to the twenty-fourth floor. We walked several hundred yards to the door of her suite.

Normally, when you’re standing in front of the hotel door of an attractive woman, she’s getting out her key, you aren’t thinking about a business meeting. You have other responses.

I was having them.

Cognitive dissonance. Bodily dissonance. Cognition in dissonant state with bodily reaction.

Her suite could not have been more different from our motel home. The chairs were deep and comfortable. The furnishings elegant and expensive, if a little overdone, impersonal.

Nothing like a change of scenery.

She unbuttoned her jacket. Placed it on the back of a chair. I supposed the gesture was meant to create a sense of informality.

It didn’t work.

I sat. She sat. She crossed her legs.

She did it very well.

Leg crossing. There’s no official competition. But if there were, Louise would definitely be on the national team.

I didn’t know what the lovely Ms. Chandler really wanted. Still less did I know what might impress her. And at the end of the day, I reminded myself, this was business. I could entertain all the fantasies I wanted. About her ambiguous Looks. My irresistible charm. The likelihood of my actually scoring big in the World Series. But really, when you came right down to it, the best cost-benefit wager here was to play on the impression Kennedy had fostered. To keep her as a paying client. Do what we could for her. At least, I mused, for as long as it took to earn the money I’d stolen from her.

I congratulated myself. Damn. From time to time I still had the capacity to think straight. Maybe, just maybe, I could make a living. Afford my daughter’s tuition.

Mr. Redman, said Ms. Chandler, interrupting my reverie.

Yes? I responded. I’m sorry. I was thinking about my daughter. She’s a freshman in college. Middlebury. I worry about her.

Ms. Chandler smiled. A warm smile. I was mildly shocked. Maybe there was more to her than style. She sat on a gold divan. Brought her legs up to the side. Tilted her head. She looked like a thirties movie star.

Just about as touchable.

I told Ms. Chandler about my trip to Henderson. The mention of a bartender. The description of the couple.

Yes, she said, that’s them. She loves those Japanese outfits.

I thought it was Chinese.

You thought wrong.

Of course, I said. I will defer to your judgement on matters of women’s clothing.

I suggest that you do.

Concession made. Meanwhile, I’d suggest you defer to me on matters of investigative procedure.

Have I interfered with your procedures?

No indeed. But then, I haven’t given you the opportunity. Yet.

I look forward to the chance to do so.

I look forward to giving it to you.

Can I get you a drink? she said, uncoiling herself from the divan.

Scotch. Whatever they have. Make it a double.

She complied.

Oh, I said when she’d rearranged herself. There was something else. Probably not a big deal.

She looked at me with an air of indifferent expectancy.

Apparently some FedEx package had arrived. After she’d moved out. For the boyfriend.

Really?

Yes. I’m sure it’s nothing.

You might want to let me be the judge of that.

Of course. Of course. Anyway, I didn’t open it. I’m not sure I can. Legally. It’s a piece of mail. Addressed to someone else.

To whom?

I told you. The Russian guy. At least, I assume it’s him. It was a Russian name.

What name?

I don’t remember.

Mr. Redman, she said severely.

I know, I know. It’ll come back to me. Don’t worry. I mean, who else could it be?

I don’t know. It is my understanding that it is your job to ascertain the facts.

Yes. Of course. Anyway. It was old. A little battered. Something
was leaking out of the corner. Some brown substance. Granular. I assume some kind of drug.

I see, she said. Mr. Redman, I think I need to see this envelope.

Yes, well. I understand. But there are issues.

Issues?

It’s addressed to someone else. It’s a piece of mail. Or the equivalent. It’s not at all clear that we have any right to open it. That I have a right to give it to anyone. Other than the addressee.

Mr. Redman, she said.

Yes?

I’m paying you a large sum of money.

Actually, I thought, I wasn’t entirely sure of that. I had the big retainer, of course, or rather, what was left of it, but I wasn’t at all sure how much of it I was earning. Was I on an hourly rate? Contingency? We’d never discussed it. And the last thing I wanted to do was bring it up. Seeing as how I’d effectively embezzled the funds.

Wouldn’t be prudent.

At any rate, I said, we can defer this conversation. I’ve sent it out for testing.

She gave me a sharp look. Began to twist the watch on her wrist. I braced myself for a lecture.

There was a long silence, her eyes on mine.

I began to think maybe a lecture would be preferable.

I took a deep breath.

She arranged herself again. This time she sat a little sideways. The jut of her hip through the black skirt. How flat her stomach was. Every pose was somehow different. How did she do it? Was it practice? Or natural talent? I vowed to ask her. Some day.

I had to break the silence.

I told her more about Eloise’s former home. How the house had looked. How it had felt. What Dani had told me of Eloise and her friend.

I left out some details. The soft pneumatic pout of Dani’s lips. The seductive lilt of her Oklahoma accent. The question mark at the end of every phrase.

Didn’t seem relevant.

I see, she said.

Not much, I said.

Not much, she repeated.

There was another silence. It pulled at me. I felt obliged to fill it. I started telling stories. Poker stories. I didn’t have any other kind of stories. None that you would tell a cultivated woman, on just your third encounter.

I told her about Brighton Beach. The Russkies. Fat guys. Skinny pockmarked guys. How endlessly entertaining it all was. I told her about Dinnie the Magician. Charlie Kick-Ass. Evgeny.

She laughed. She leaned forward in her chair. She seemed fascinated by it all.

Tell me about the most outrageous one of all, she said with a tiny tilt of the head.

That’s a tough one, I said.

I thought about it.

Well, I don’t know if you can say what’s most outrageous, I said, but here’s a pretty funny one.

Go ahead, she said.

There’s a guy, name of Maxie Veinberg, I said. Maxie’s the shape of a stuffed sausage. A very, very stuffed sausage. He can’t be more than five foot six, must weigh close to three hundred pounds. But his arms and legs aren’t fat at all. They’re sort of tiny. Thin and delicate. His arms are way short, barely long enough to handle his cards and chips. And his legs aren’t even close to strong enough to carry him around. At the casino he uses one of the electric carts. Seeing as he’s a big-time whale, the staff is always happy to park it for him, bring it back to the table when he needs it.

So Maxie’s a bit of a freak. But he’s a good guy. He loves to play, doesn’t care about the money. He loves a good joke.

One night, we’re playing in the high-limit room at the Borgata, in Atlantic City, and another guy at the table is this big old Texan, with the cowboy hat and all, a mindlessly happy rich guy with a hundred-thousand-dollar stack and an easy way with losing it. I don’t remember his name. Tex, probably. So, Tex orders some food, which in the high-limit room you can get delivered to the table, and it takes a long time to come, and he’s bitching and whining about it, and meanwhile Maxie’s giant chocolate ice cream sundae’s arrived, and he’s sucking it down like only a fat man can, when Tex’s food finally comes, and it looks like greasy fried rice with green over-boiled lasagna piled on top, the most revolting thing you’ve ever seen short of a rat-mole colony,
in one of those crinkly aluminum takeout things, and the waiter puts it down, and Tex plows into it, and Maxie looks up, and totally deadpan and without missing a beat, he says:

That come with a toilet brush?

Louise smiled. I could see she was trying to keep it to a smile. But she couldn’t. She started to laugh. She took out a handkerchief. Coughed into it a while. She lifted her head. Looked at me with still-smiling eyes.

I like a man who can tell a story, she said.

Thank you.

I think it speaks well of you.

I thank you again.

As an investigator, I mean. It gives me confidence. If you can tell a story, you can see the story in things.

I hadn’t thought of it that way, I said. But perhaps you’re right.

She gave me a Look that said, Of course I’m right, you fool. I’m always right. And don’t you think for a second that the momentary loss of studied equilibrium your story occasioned is going in any way to give you some kind of advantage in your relations with me. Quite the contrary. I’ve given you a gift. And now you owe me.

There was a whole lot in that Look.

I
N THE CAB, WHICH SMELLED OF OLIVE OIL AND AMBIGUITY
, I thought about that last laugh. It’d been a good laugh. A real one. And when she’d unbuttoned that jacket. There was something awfully handsome going on under those elegant clothes.

I called Kelley. I hadn’t spoken to her in days. I was worried. I felt guilty. I was a father, I reminded myself. I reminded myself to remind myself. More often.

Kelley didn’t answer. I got her voice mail message: Don’t leave me a message! Okay. She’d see that I’d called. She didn’t need the message on top of it. She’d call when she damn well felt like it.

God, it’s awful. When they turn eighteen. Start getting a life of their own. She was twenty. It was getting worse.

We were stopped at a light. To the left, miles of low buildings, russet and ochre in the fading light. The hills beyond turning to a fine
powdery ash. It had a pull to it. I thought about the Europeans who’d first seen this stuff. Stumbled up to the Grand Canyon one day. There had to have been a first one. What the hell could he have thought? I reminded myself to look it up.

A mammoth red thing pulled up beside the cab. It looked like a forties Ford. In fact, it was a forties Ford. A ’47 half-ton panel truck, to be exact. I recognized it from the abstract arrow design on the side of the engine compartment. Amazing how far a little eclectic information from a misspent childhood can get you. Although, at the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what guessing the vintage of this hulking vehicle actually had bought me. It wasn’t restored to original condition. It was tricked out. The windows were tinted dark. Huge chrome exhaust pipes snaked out of the hood, raked back past the rear bumper and flared out, like an angry camel’s nostrils. The wheel rims were spinning, shimmering, doing their best imitation of the end of the world. Someone told me once you could spend twenty-five grand on rims like that. Each. A hundred grand for a set.

For some reason the thing made me nervous. It was throbbing and pulsing with the growl and shimmy of a classic giant V-8 engine. As though ready to rear up on its hind wheels. Maybe it was pimp associations. Though every two-bit casino manager had a pimped-out set of wheels by now. There just seemed to be something specially ominous about this one.

The cab inched ahead. The Ford’s engine gunned and slowed, gunned and slowed. It was loud. Obnoxious. The light was taking forever to turn green. I had an urge to tell the driver to floor it. Run the light. Get the hell out of there.

The cab driver inched forward a bit.

The Beast inched forward, too.

Now I knew I had a problem.

I mean, normally, they do that. Itchy macho guys with big wheels. They want to get off the blocks first. Show you what they have. But I was in a cab, for Chrissakes. An old, belching Chevy Impala. We weren’t about to take on Mr. Drag Racer Hot Rod Big Penis in a race to the next red light. There was something about it. I knew. I just knew. It was bad news.

The window of the Beast rolled down.

Shit, I thought. If I dive to the floor and cover my head, and it turns out it’s not a guy with an Uzi but some tourist looking for directions to Caesar’s Palace, I’m going to look Really Fucking Stupid.

Bruno’s fat smiling head leaned out the window of the Beast.

Redman! he called out. On your way back to the
mo
tel?

Fuck me with a spoon, I said to myself, feeling my bladder weaken.

Yeah, Bruno, I said. Maybe I’ll see you at the Bellagio later.