Stateline (2 page)

“Do you have a decent-looking sports coat?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Well, this is a fancy wedding. Don’t try showing up in jeans.”

“Of course not.”

“And getting drunk would be totally uncalled for.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not drinking anymore,” I said.

“Or any less, I’m sure.”

I cleared my throat. “So, who’s the lucky groom?”

“Sylvester Bascom. Desiree’s been going out with him for years. Haven’t you ever met him?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You’d remember if you did,” she said. “His family is one of the richest in California. The wedding’s going to be fantastic.”

“I’m still wondering why I’m invited in the first place.”

“My family still likes you, Dan.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I helped Desiree with a lot of the arrangements. It’s going to be the largest wedding ceremony they’ve ever had at Caesar’s.”

“Jesus, how many people are going?”

“Over five hundred,” she said.

“No shit, huh?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she hummed. Julia was a huge fan of weddings. “It will be something else. The Bascoms are paying for the whole thing. The wedding party’s been up at Tahoe all week, living it up, skiing, the nicest restaurants every night, staying at the best hotels, all on the Bascoms’ tab. The rehearsal dinner is at the Mountainside Mine. They’ve reserved the entire restaurant on a Friday night for a private party of two hundred. Can you believe that?”

“No kidding,” I said, properly impressed. The restaurant was probably the most exclusive steakhouse between Sacramento and Salt Lake City. I’d never eaten there, but I’d occasionally stopped by the adjoining Midnight Tavern to enjoy a cocktail in their funky old-West-style barroom.

“It’s true,” Julia said. “John Bascom, Sylvester’s dad, is mega-rich. He’s the president of the Bascom Lumber empire. Listen to what Desiree told me about how he arranged the Mountainside Mine.”

As might be expected, Julia explained, John Bascom had some difficulty convincing the restaurant’s management to close the facility to the public and host his son’s pre-wedding party on a Friday night during the peak of the ski season. The majority owner, a severe-looking man who was also the head chef, had treated Bascom with disdain, as if Bascom were a typical commoner trying to finagle a table without a reservation. Bascom had offered two hundred dollars a head, or forty grand total, and when the owner refused, Bascom asked him to name his price.

“You can’t afford it,” the man said, his assistant manager smirking behind him. Bascom stepped back, instructed his personal clerk to write a check, then handed it to the chef. “I assume that will do,” Bascom said. The man nodded, holding the $100,000-check in front of him with both hands, an uncertain smile on his face.

“In the future, don’t ever tell me what I can or cannot afford,” Bascom said, then walked back to his limousine, his aide hurrying to keep up.

Julia also went into detail about the lavish arrangements for the wedding ceremony and reception. Desiree, a sleek, blond, twenty-four-year-old, was grateful for Julia’s help with the wedding plans. Since so many people were invited, there was a number of challenging logistical issues. For instance, the chapel at Caesar’s was much too small, so the grand ballroom was converted into a makeshift church, complete with portable stained-glass façades and an elaborate multi-tier pulpit. I found myself wondering if Desiree’s father, Jerry McGee, felt awkward about his daughter’s wedding being paid for by the groom’s parents. Jerry was a dentist and was still recovering from personal bankruptcy. Julia said Jerry insisted on paying for the flowers, but had no idea they would cost upward of $10,000. John Bascom’s wife, Nora, sent him a dummied invoice for $900.

I’d met Jerry a number of times, and I knew Desiree casually, so I guess that was good enough to make the invite list. It wasn’t much to be proud of, but at least I still had a friendly relationship with my ex-wife’s family. It was more than I could say for most of the divorced men I knew.

• • •

The rain slackened outside of Stockton as I headed north on Interstate 5. I pulled into a fast-food joint, ordered a chicken sandwich, and ate in my car as I drove. An hour later it started raining hard again. I was in the foothills, nearly to Placerville, and thought about stopping for a whiskey at the old Liars Bench Bar and maybe having one for Wenger, who despised liquor and did not even tolerate a glass of wine with dinner. He had gotten drunk a couple times in college, and made such an ass of himself he swore off alcohol for life. But I resisted the temptation and drove on through the wet gloom. Ten miles up the grade, the rain turned to snow, slowing my progress until a man in a yellow slicker and a cap with a Caltrans insignia flagged me over to the side of the road. “You got to chain up,” he said.

I pulled on my coat and stepped into the flurries. The temperature was in that indeterminate range where it was cold enough to snow but not quite freezing. I lugged my chains out of the trunk, along with a tarp, channel locks, and a pair of canvas gloves, and went to work on my front tires. I finished without too much trouble and was congratulating myself when I noticed the late-model Ford station wagon that had pulled in behind me.

A man lay on his back in the muddy slush, struggling with a set of chains. He wore an Indiana Jones brown leather jacket that looked a size too small, and his hands were red with cold. He pulled himself out of the muck, looking around in despair. I could see a woman in the passenger seat of the station wagon, trying to calm two crying toddlers in the back.

“Trouble?” I asked.

The man threw up his arms. “I thought there would be some of those guys who install chains for twenty bucks,” he said, shaking his head. He was chubby and balding, his face flushed from his efforts.

“Let me take a look.” I laid out my tarp next to his car. Cable-style chains hung off his front tire.

“Hey, you don’t have to. I’ll pay you.” He pulled his soggy wallet from his back pocket.

“Naw, that’s all right,” I said. I finished his first tire quickly and was moving the tarp to the other side of the car when a white Chevy four-by-four truck came roaring around the bend, its oversize, off-road tires spitting chunks of ice and gravel. The driver set the truck up in a four-wheel drift and came within six feet of where we stood, spraying slush and dirt all over both of us and our cars. A dude with dirty blond hair stuck his head out the passenger window. “Get a four-by-four, losers!” he yelled, and backhanded a partially full Coors can in our direction. It skipped off the hood of the station wagon and skidded through the scree and into the pine trees. I wiped my face and stared, hoping to get a license plate number, but my view was cut off by the chubby man sprinting after the truck.

“Lousy punks!” he screamed, hurling a handful of slush in their direction.

• • •

By the time I cleared Echo Summit and dropped into Tahoe Valley, it was dark. My visions of early happy hour had turned into a soggy two-hour drive over the pass at twenty-five miles an hour. I took the chains off and drove down Highway 50, South Lake Tahoe’s main drag. Most of the businesses had left their Christmas lights on for the winter, and the colorful patterns reflected off the deep banks of snow lining the roadway. The brightly lit casino hotels loomed ahead at the Nevada border, dominating the skyline and overlooking the splendor of the lake. I’d spent plenty of long nights in those casinos, throwing away money and slurping free casino drinks.

Nora Bascom had arranged for a block of rooms to be reserved for the wedding guests at the Lakeside Inn, which was a step up from the cheap hotels I was used to. I walked into the lobby and smiled. The hotel was on the Nevada side of the border, in the city of Stateline, Nevada. You always knew you were in Nevada when you smelled the cigarette smoke and heard the clanging of slot machines. It was like walking into a different world, or like stepping back in time, to a place where bars never closed, gambling and prostitution were respected industries, and drunk driving was still treated as a minor offense.

• • •

I chucked my bag on the bed and unpacked, hanging my sports coat and slacks. The wedding would be a swank affair, and I wanted to look presentable in front of my ex and her family, most of who would be there.

Although Julia and I were on friendly terms now, our divorce five years ago had been ugly. Julia had accused me of being a drunken loser, and despite what I thought was a reasonable excuse for my drinking, she was uncompromising. I’d been hitting the bottle hard during a depressing investigation involving a child pornography ring, and in the end I learned the hard way that women generally do not find excessive drinking an endearing trait.

The porno case culminated when the ringleader, a pedophile named Elrod Bradley, tried to slit my throat in the parking lot of the Y-Not Lounge in San Jose. I had left the bar after last call and was walking out to my car when Bradley emerged from the shadows behind me and got his arm around my neck. After a brief struggle, I managed to pull my Beretta .40-caliber pistol and stick it against his ribs. He had me in a chokehold from behind and was trying to crank my head back to cut my jugular with the stiletto knife in his left hand. Once I had my gun out, I gave him one warning, told him to drop the knife, then I felt a stinging pain as the blade nicked my ear, and I jerked the trigger. The hollow-point bullet entered the side of his ribcage and blew a fist-sized chunk of his spine and guts into the open window of a blue Corvette that belonged to the late-shift bartender at the Y-Not.

My recollection of what happened after that is disjointed. I remember holding my ear as Elrod Bradley gurgled his last bloody breaths into the broken glass and dirty gravel coating the parking lot. The blood dripped steadily from the deep slice in my ear, running through my fingers and soaking my sleeve. The bartender and three or four of the local drunks came out after they heard the gunshot, and a minute later the San Jose PD showed up, their sirens wailing, their lights turning the night into a carnival. A detective led me aside and started questioning me, but I had a damp bar towel clutched to the side of my head and didn’t hear much of what he said. Eventually a uniformed cop took me by the arm. I stood under the kaleidoscope of blue and red lights while he cuffed me, drunk and disoriented and wondering what the next chapter of my life held in store.

I
t was past six o’clock, and when I looked out the hotel window toward Lake Tahoe, the snow was falling steadily against the dark silhouettes of the pines. I showered and put on dry clothes, resisting the urge to first go downstairs for a drink. I had spent three years dead sober before I started working for Wenger, but I fell off the wagon the day he hired me, somehow already knowing I would need to drink to tolerate him. This time though, I had figured, I’d manage my drinking with the maturity befitting a man who had survived himself into his thirties. That’s what I kept on telling myself.

The alarm on the clock radio must have gone off while I was in the shower—country-western music blared through the cheap speaker. I switched it off when I saw the message light blinking on the phone. I stared at it for a minute, hoping it wasn’t Wenger. It would be like him to leave a message on my hotel room phone instead of just calling my cell. It was Wenger’s way of trying to be unorthodox or unpredictable. I never quite understood his motivations in this regard. His voice came over the phone, and I frowned, as if battling a persistent case of diarrhea.

I listened to Wenger prattle on about a few spelling mistakes in my report, his need for me to arrange a second meeting with Lem Tuggle, and his expectation that I’d be in the office early on Monday. He was still talking when he exceeded the time limit and was cut off. I made a mental note to not tell Wenger where I was staying in the future, and deleted the message.

Through my window I could see the snow was now falling in a thick curtain. I stared, mesmerized by the random patterns of the snowflakes. If the storm let up by Sunday morning, there would be epic skiing conditions at South Lake Tahoe’s massive resort. I ran my fingers down the edges of my skis, which I had propped up in a corner of the room. A good day on the slopes might be just the thing to put me in a positive mood come Monday morning.

• • •

It wasn’t until I pulled into the Midnight Tavern and began futilely searching for a parking spot that I remembered the rehearsal dinner. Sylvester Bascom and Desiree McGee’s dinner was being held that night at the adjoining Mountainside Mine restaurant. The parking lot was crammed full with the cars of the two hundred guests attending the event. I found a spot down the street and hiked through the snowfall back to the bar.

As I was passing the restaurant, I noticed a white Chevy truck parked in a handicapped spot. It was maxed out with off-road gear, including a lift kit that made it sit high above its thirty-eight-inch mud tires. The front grill, headlight guards, and steel step bars were polished chrome, as was the six-point roll cage mounted behind the extended cab. I looked through the windshield and saw a handicap permit hanging from the rearview mirror.

The permit looked bogus; the color seemed wrong. I walked around to the tailgate and checked out the license. The customized California plate under the steel bumper said “PSYCHIC.” It looked suspiciously like the truck that rooster-tailed me with road snow earlier in the day, and I had a hard time believing the driver of this vehicle had handicapped parking privileges.

I climbed the four wooden stairs to the main entrance and pushed through the bar’s heavy saloon-style doors. The restaurant was to the right, and was well known for its expensive menu and celebrity clientele. The Midnight Tavern, on the other hand, was targeted at less-discerning customers. It was popular with the local crowd, which, in Lake Tahoe, meant hard-partying snowboarders, timeshare salespeople, blackjack dealers, and miscellaneous loadies. But it also attracted its fair share of tourists looking for a real drink, hot pub food, and a break from the casinos.