Las Vegas Noir (10 page)
“Yeah, the last owner died and my boyfriend was a regular there, and I thought, what the fuck, I’ll buy it and let him run it. Well, that didn’t work out, did it? That was him behind the bar.”
“The, uh, that guy tonight?”
“Yeah, the shitfaced guy. He didn’t used to be like that. Guess I shouldn’t have bought him a bar.”
“I guess not.” I’m stopped at a long light and a tiny old woman shuffles across. She doesn’t look like she belongs in Vegas at all, let alone out on the street at 1:45 in the morning.
“Look at that poor old gal,” Babs says. “We should offer to take her home, except we’d probably scare her into a heart attack. So what brings you to Vegas?”
“Going back to L.A. Bugged out after the Northridge quake and spent a few months tending bar in Wichita.”
“Wichita? Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“I grew up in Wichita! For a few years anyway. My dad was stationed at McConnell. I had a little dog named Teenchie.”
“Teenchie? You a
Song of the South
fan?”
“Yeah, I love it. I know it’s supposed to be all politically incorrect and it probably is, but I saw it when I was little, so I can’t be objective. The other one I really love is
Saludos Amigos
. Ever see that one?”
“Part of it. I wrote my master’s thesis on Disney animation.” As a matter of fact I didn’t, my cousin did at USC, but I do know more than the average guy on the subject, and I’m truly bowled over to be asked such a nerdy question by this magnificent creature.
“Just loved all that shit when I was little. When I first started dancing, I used Teenchie as my stage name, can you believe that?”
So she is a dancer after all. I’m slightly more than half in love with her at this point in our ten-minute-long acquaintance, and I figure if the lush behind the bar at the Tumblin’ Dice is my competition, I’m in like Flynn.
But it’s late, so the aforementioned Midwestern politeness fails to stop me from asking the first question that pops into my head: “How can you afford to buy a bar on what a dancer makes?”
“Who said I was still a dancer?” She grins, a lopsided thing that shows a big expanse of teeth. She has, I finally notice, a slight overbite that makes her face perfect. She doesn’t offer any more than that, so I don’t pursue it further. “Turn left up here.”
Something that should have been nagging me all along starts doing so. “Hey, you know that gal Nicki I was talking to?”
“God, do I.”
“She told me she had her girlfriend murdered.” When I say it, I can feel microscopic particles of Dexedrine racing up my spinal cord to my brain.
Babs snorts. “Jesus.”
“Said this girl ran up a thirty-thousand-dollar tab on Nicki’s MasterCard.”
“Think about it, Tate. If you were the bank, would you give that crazy bitch a MasterCard with a thirty-thousand-dollar limit?”
“I guess not.”
“I mean, what would she put on the application where it says
occupation
? Crack whore? Meth cook?”
This sends the Dexedrine particles back down out of my brain, and a feeling of relative calm comes over me. We’re heading into a nice neighborhood now, a strangely empty subdivision. There aren’t any cars on the street, not even parked, and there aren’t any lights on anywhere; no late-night TV viewers or insomniac readers or dog walkers.
Finally, we get to a McMansion with all its lights blazing and two cars parked on the street in front despite a three-car garage.
“Did you ever see
The Omega Man
?” I ask. “This is sort of like his place.”
“Kind of spooky, isn’t it? The subdivision went bankrupt before it was all the way finished and the developer’s on trial. They managed to rent out a few of ’em to people who sublet the extra rooms.”
“Is this where you live?” I ask, hoping she’s bringing me home, even as I recognize the pathos of the fantasy.
“Hell no. I own, in a hell of a lot better nabe than this. This is where we’re getting your present for Skip. Park on the street, not too close to the streetlamp.” She opens up her bag and hands me a pistol. I’m a Kansas boy and I’ve hunted since I was little, but I’ve never had a real pistol in my hands, and to her consternation I hold this one like it’s a live fish.
“Hold it straight up and keep your index finger on the trigger guard.”
“What’s this for?” I ask.
“This guy’s an asshole. I just want you to stand there and look big, and if things get tense you pull the grip out of your waistband so he can see it.”
Not that I like anything I’ve heard in the last thirty seconds, but the thing I like least is the part where I stick a firearm down my pants. I can’t stand the idea of looking weak in Babs’s eyes, though, and by this time she’s out of the car, so I follow her to the door.
When the door opens, an expressionless woman about seventy years old lets us in without a word. She has on a tank top and a pair of shorts that reveal a big scab on her shin. It looks like she slid all the way down her driveway with only one leg of her pants on.
There are three medium-to-hot young women in the living room watching
Cops
. The action is taking place in North Las Vegas, and they’re excited because the bust onscreen is happening on a street they know.
“There’s Lonnie’s, look,” one of them says. She has long, frizzy red hair and freckles as big as moles, and like the old lady, she has a big scab on one knee. She’s picking at it with one long, red fingernail as she watches.
“I’ve totally seen that dude,” one of her friends says.
“Which? The cop or the pimp?”
“Wannabe pimp, more like. He comes in for a drink when he’s got cash.”
“Gross.”
“Where’s Kleindienst?” Babs asks, and when they ignore her she grabs the remote and shuts the TV off, which prompts a volley of protest until she asks again, louder.
The redhead stops picking at the scab and half rises. “In the dining room, bitch. Gimme my fucking remote.”
Babs throws the remote behind the television to another chorus of abuse, and I follow her through the kitchen into a dark room where a man in what I take to be a blackjack dealer’s vest and starched white shirt sits with an overhead light shining down on him.
He’s playing solitaire and wearing a clear green visor, which gives him the pallor of a reanimated corpse and makes him look to my eye more like a dealer from a film than a real one. Remembering my role, I lean against the doorframe and fold my arms across my chest while Babs walks up to the table. I’m expecting something out of a movie, a tense, quiet negotiation followed by a quick exit, so I’m feeling suave and invulnerable, especially with the gun down my pants. It feels pretty cool, actually, like a second dick.
Babs opens with, “You lying, ripping-off piece of shit.” This gets the man to glance up from his game for the first time. “You owe me, Kleindienst.”
“I don’t owe you shit.” He looks over at me. I rise to my full height and move my hand toward my crotch. The adrenaline is pumping. “Who’s this cunt?” he asks. “One of your johns?”
He has just insulted the woman I sort of love, and I’m still feeling the effect of too many cross-tops—I just remembered numbers seven and eight, popped at a filling station around 8 p.m. just in case—and between those and my instinctive gallantry and the drama of the thing, I commit what will in retrospect seem an error in tactics: I pull out the gun and point it at Kleindienst’s face.
Babs looks at me for a millisecond, stricken. Then she pulls another pistol out of her bag and points it at the man’s face as well. “Turn the light on, Tate.”
“Tate?” Kleindienst says. “Your muscle’s name is Tate? Oh, my goodness gracious.”
I turn the light on. “Family name,” I say, trying to sound like a killer.
The room is white with brass fittings and mirrors. It doesn’t look as cool now as it did in the dark, and I see that Kleindienst is quite a bit younger than I’d imagined, maybe thirty or thirty-five. “Tell that bitch Darva to get in here with everything you got,” Babs tells him.
He yells through the kitchen and a girl appears who looks like a teenage runaway in a TV movie, complete with cutoff hot pants and a shirt tied at the midriff. “Run fetch me the whole batch,” he says. Then the three of us stand there feeling awkward, or at least the two men do. Babs looks perfectly comfortable.
A minute later, Darva reappears in the doorway holding up four good-sized packages wrapped in aluminum foil.
“Take ’em,” Kleindienst says. “No hard feelings?”
“You douchebag,” Babs says, and she opens one of the packages, snorts a little bit off the end of her finger. Jangly as I am, I’m relieved when she doesn’t offer me a taste, and after a cursory glance at the other three packages, she seals them back up. “Don’t ever fuck around like that again.”
We start toward the living room and before we get there Kleindienst yells something at us. I turn to find him holding a big fucking gun pointed in our general direction. I yelp and pull the trigger, and to my horror it just makes a clicking sound. I click again and again in Kleindienst’s direction as Babs fires, hitting him in the knee. He drops his gun, which sounds like a dumbell hitting the wooden floor, and falls clutching the gory knee, howling in an almost canine register. Poor Darva stands in the doorway of the dining room looking like she’s waiting for someone to tell her what to do.
“You’re going to need to take Billy to the hospital,” she says to the paralyzed trio of
Cops
fans on the way out.
We run to the car and I peel away from the curb. I don’t speak until we pull out of the subdivision. “How come mine didn’t go off?” I ask, mortified by my own whining tone.
“Yeah, like I’m going to give you a loaded gun. I don’t even know you,” she says, and though my heart breaks a little, the events of the last five minutes have prepared me for the idea that there may be more to Babs than I previously fantasized. “Jesus, I didn’t tell you to pull the fucking gun on him. That could have gotten us both killed.”
“Is the mob going to hunt you down now?” I ask.
“What mob? Why?”
“For robbing a big-time dealer?”
“Billy Kleindienst? Give me a break. Billy’s a fucking courier. Was until tonight, anyway, now he’s just a crippled black-jack dealer. He’s about as low as you on the totem pole. What we took belongs to me and my friend Sandra anyway.”
“You think they’re going to drive him to the hospital or call an ambulance?”
She shakes her head. “Don’t give a shit, really. I did feel kind of sorry for that little Darva, though. I think she’s his girlfriend, which is just as pathetic as can be.” She looks over at me, shaking her head. “It all came out good, though, except for him getting it in the leg,” she says with a rueful, easy smile. “Billy fuckin’ Kleindienst.”
I drive her to her house, in another subdivision. It’s on a rise, and we can see the lights of the Strip in the distance. She’s calmed down considerably, and the conversation is back in the realm of friendly flirtation. “You want to come in and taste some of this?” she asks.
“No thanks,” I reply. I half-way think she’s going to insist, that the taste of speed is just a pretext for taking me inside and fucking me, but she doesn’t push it, just hands me Skip’s share of the crank and opens her door.
“Nice meeting you,” she says.
“If you ever come out to L.A., call me and we’ll go see an old movie,” I tell her. I wait until she gets inside before backing out of her driveway.
Heading into town, I watch those lights blinking and illuminating the early-morning sky, no longer dreading the crashed-out sleeping jag that lies ahead, and for the first time it occurs to me that there’s something I really like about Las Vegas.
S
ix months ago, before all this, I drove into Las Vegas on a hot August twilight. My first time in the city. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the far distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light, glowing alien and purplish in the sky. My tired, pulpy brain at the time, I thought it was a UFO or something and nearly hit the truck ahead of me. Fifteen minutes later, at a gas station, I was told about the beam of light from atop that pyramid casino and how you can even see the beam from space, given no clouds were in the way. My disappointment surprised me.
The drive from Oakland had taken me almost a full day, so I checked into the Motel 6 near Chinatown and fell asleep with my shoes on and my gun still strapped to my ankle. I slept stupid for nine hours straight and woke up at 6 in the morning, my mouth and nostrils so dry it felt like someone had shoveled dirt over me in the night. The sun had not yet come out, but it was already 100 degrees outside. Not a cloud in the sky.
After taking a long cold shower, I walked to the front office. The clerk—Chinese probably—was slurping his breakfast behind the counter and ignored me. I thought about flashing him my badge, but instead I brandished three days’ stay in advance, cash, which made him set down his chopsticks easily enough. He said nothing and hardly looked at me before handing me a receipt and walking back to his noodles or whatever the hell he was eating. When I asked him where I could get some eggs, he mumbled something in broken English, his mouth stuffed, glistening. In my younger days, I would have slapped him for his rudeness, just so I could. But I’d learned after Suzy left me to control my temper.
I did see a
ph
. shop across the street and hoped they made it like she used to—the beef not too fatty, the soup not too sweet. Turned out theirs was even better, which didn’t surprise me, but it reminded me of something her best friend—a Vietnamese girl named Happy of all things—once told me four years ago when she was over at the house for Sunday
ph
.. Suzy had been mad at me that morning for nodding off at church, as I often did since my patrols didn’t end until midnight, and though she knew I’d only converted for her and had never really taken churchgoing seriously, she chewed me out all the way home, and with more venom than usual. So when she stepped outside to smoke after lunch, I asked Happy, “What’s bugging her lately?” Happy knew her better than anyone. She had been Suzy’s bridesmaid, and they talked on the phone every day in a mix of English and Vietnamese I never did understand—but she just shrugged at my question. I chuckled and said, “Only me, huh? I bet she tells you every bad thing about me.” But again she shrugged and said, very innocently, “She don’t talk about you much, Bob.” I’d long figured this much was true, but it burned to hear it acknowledged so casually. Suzy and I had been married ten years at the time. She’d leave me two years later.
