I Don't Like Where This Is Going (6 page)

Gene Woodling saw what I was up to, sat down at the next phone, picked up the
Sun
, stared at the driver's license photos of the fifteen victims found in the Moapa Valley, and said, “I've thought a lot about the girls who die in Vegas.” He stared up at the map of Clark County over our desks and said, “They were the prom queens, the cheerleaders, the soloists on their dance teams, the female leads in the drama club's production of
Our Town.
They come from Sioux Falls or Kamloops or Charlottesville or Walla Walla.”

I asked Gene where he was from.

“Star City, Arkansas.”

“And you knew a girl like this?” I said.

“Kiernan Carlisle.” For a moment he took off his glasses, covered his eyes, and drifted away. “One day our beautiful girl realizes—because the evidence is all around her—that the very best life she can hope for in her humble hometown is a solid marriage to a handsome and dependable professional from a respectable family; a storybook home in a leafy neighborhood; a couple of captivating and dutiful children; membership at the country club; and a torrid, brief, regrettable, but unforgettable affair with the husband of a friend. But it's the image of herself at the country club having
drinks under an umbrella on the patio with the rest of the ladies after a Tuesday afternoon doubles tennis match that depresses her. She sees herself in a sky-blue T-shirt that reads
PLAY. WIN. LUNCH.
, a flouncy yellow Stella McCartney tennis skirt that's feeling a little tight, and a leopard-skin visor. What are her exquisite good looks and seductive charm good for if all she can look forward to is the depleted American Dream and the inevitable weight gain? Her depression turns to panic; the panic ignites her flight response, and she catches the first plane to Vegas.”

I said, “You really have thought a lot about this.”

He raised his eyebrows and held up a finger—not finished! “She checks into an unembellished motel—it's tiny but at least it's cleanish—freshens up, slips on her vampiest black stretch velvet dress and the red sling-back pumps, and sets off to find herself a local boyfriend at one of the flashier casinos. Boyfriends in Vegas are like fire ants at a picnic. She sits at the bar, orders a Cosmo, flips her hair, and waits. She knows she's going to change her name but she's not sure to what. Either Lacey, Jade, or Rhiannon. She takes a selfie with her phone and texts it to her friend Rita back home.
Digging the life
, she writes.

“The boyfriend she meets has single-karat diamond studs in both his ears, a black Movado watch, white K-Swiss Classics, and red ankle socks that match his red silk T-shirt. His cargo shorts are gold-stitched denim, his hair is roached; his eyes are blue and dreamy. He used to wear Oakleys, but now he wears Ray-Bans. He drives a Jag, or someday he will. His name is TJ or Markus or Fadeproof, and it's not long before he's taking Lacey shopping for threads and bling at the Palazzo and escorting her to all the best shows in town: Celine, Shania, Donny and Marie. He rents her a tastefully furnished apartment in Sunrise and buys her a shih tzu she names Bianca. They make love every night he's free. He's
coy about his employment. He's in the entertainment business, he tells her, and squeezes her ass. She gets a facial, a body wrap, and a sugar scrub every Saturday at the spa at the Four Seasons. She's over the moon, she texts Rita: he says he has a friend who's dying to meet her.

“She'd do anything for Markus. She owes him, doesn't she? Soon she's giving the visiting radiologist from St. Louis the whole girlfriend experience; she's going down on the prosecuting attorney from Sacramento; getting nasty with the handsome and dependable professional from a respectable family with the wife and two kids and the country club membership.”

I asked Gene if he had followed Kiernan to Vegas, if he had stopped looking for her.

He said, “How does she die? Let me count the ways,” and tallied on his fingers. “Addiction. AIDS. Assault. Suicide. Betrayal. A misunderstanding. A miscalculation. Her john's a psychopath. She decides to go solo and Markus finds out.”

I asked Gene if he knew a sympathetic cop, one who might share info about Layla. He did not. I asked him about the girl from yesterday, the one weeping in the conference room. He told me they'd taken her to Refuge House but she left.

He checked his watch, said he had a flash of lightning—a glass of Tanqueray—waiting for him at home. There was something subtly disharmonious about Gene that bothered me, but I couldn't put my finger on which of his anomalous behaviors or features it might be. Whenever he sneezed, he sneezed exactly three times. Not a character flaw, of course, and neither were his ubiquitous plaid slacks and his Birkenstock nubuck clogs. He carried his right shoulder lower than his left. He wore aviator-style glasses with tinted lenses that were annoyingly crooked on his thin face. He had a graceless gait. His uncoordinated arms were alarmingly out
of sync with his ungainly legs, resulting in a rather dissonant visual rhythm—two competing melodies making for one discordant marching song. Watching Gene walk was like trying to enjoy a dubbed movie—the lips are saying one thing, the voice another.

Before Gene left, he handed me a file folder, labeled
Abrel D'Arville.
“Another unsolved mystery,” he said.

Every weekday during his sixteen-plus years of marriage, save two weeks every July, Abrel D'Arville kissed his wife DeFonda goodbye at seven-thirty and drove to work at a small regional office of a large national insurance company, and every weekday evening at five-thirty, DeFonda met Abrel at the front door with a kiss and a smile. She'd take his briefcase and bring it to his office while he changed out of his gray suit, white shirt, and pebbled black Florsheims, and into his khakis, polo shirt, and Cordovan loafers. They'd enjoy a casserole dinner, and, if the weather was pleasant, a stroll through the neighborhood.

The D'Arvilles were childless, petless, and serenely resigned to their cloistered solitude. As DeFonda described it, they lived in a suburban world of their own making that had not otherwise existed for decades except in old movies and TV reruns, the kind of world where a gentleman wore a suit to a cocktail party, stored his cigarettes in a monogrammed case, sat, leaning toward the conversation, in an upholstered chair, while his wife, in her strapless satin dress, sat on the arm of the chair and every now and then rubbed the back of her husband's neck. When hubby raised his empty cocktail glass, she knew enough to refill his drink. Abrel didn't drink, didn't smoke, and didn't gamble, but sometimes, at home, he pretended he did.

And then Abrel disappeared. This was around the time that severed feet were turning up all along the Gypsum Wash, so the police took immediate interest when DeFonda called to report
him missing. Investigators were puzzled when they learned the large national insurance firm did not have a small regional office within two hundred miles of Las Vegas and did not have any Abrel D'Arville in its employ. That's impossible, DeFonda said. I've called his office a thousand times. The local phone number she gave the cops was no longer in service.

Yes, we had our little differences, DeFonda told the detectives. I was pie; he was cake. I was water; he was milk. I was fresh air; he was AC. I was romance; he was true crime. No, she said, she didn't know anyone who would want to harm her husband. We weren't close to many people. We had acquaintances, not any friends familiar enough to get worked up about some imagined insult.

There were no federal or state income tax records for Abrel D'Arville. No area bank accounts in that name. There was no birth record for Abrel D'Arville in Moab, Utah, where he claimed to have been born. There were no sisters in Boulder. DeFonda wondered, if that was the case, then whom had she been speaking with every Christmas Eve over the years? When Abrel's photo appeared in the
Sun
and on local TV stations, he was identified by multiple callers and online commenters as the man who spent his mornings at Sunset Park, sitting in his fold-out camp chair, reading a book under a mesquite tree. A waitress at Knockout Lunch in Henderson said he came in every day at twelve-thirty—you could set your watch by him—and ordered chicken and waffles, a side salad with ranch dressing, a slice of chocolate cake, and a glass of whole milk.

Three days after Abrel went missing, the body of a man was found in a shallow grave in the desert west of the city. The victim's spinal cord had been severed, and he may have been buried alive. The labels on his clothing had been removed. The dogs that had unearthed the body had done some damage to the lower extremities. Police found no matching dental records.

The victim was identified by his clothing, the gray suit, the white shirt, his mongrammed initials ACD on the left cuff of the shirt, and by the pale but distinctive Lichtenburg figure on his left arm, a fractal fernlike scar left by a lightning strike two weeks earlier. The body belonged to Abrel D'Arville, but Abrel D'Arville didn't exist. A mystery was solved; another was posed. Who killed the man who would be Abrel D'Arville, and why? Where did the man called Abrel get his money? Who was he? DeFonda said, Can you be married to a man who does not exist?

I asked Petra, the available desk clerk at the Luxor, to ring up Layla Davis's room. I told Petra she had beautiful eyes. She smiled and looked up from the computer screen. She'd been told that a thousand times, I knew. I asked her what color she called them. She said, Hazel. I said I had hazel eyes and they looked nothing like hers. I'd call yours chartreuse, maybe. She said they turned yellow when she wore green. She also told me that Layla Davis was not registered at the hotel. I said I knew she'd checked in Friday. Not according to our records, Petra said. She clicked her elegant magenta fingernail on the computer mouse and shifted her weight from one leg to the other. Are you sure you have the right hotel? I didn't ask Petra about the recent suicide because I didn't want her to lie to me. I asked where I could find the Lost and Found. She directed me to a computer and said there would be a form to fill out.

I couldn't describe the items Layla had left, of course. I wrote that the lost items were last seen in her room. I didn't know the room number. I went back to the reception desk and asked a young man if I could speak to his supervisor. A Mr. A. Jones asked how he might help me.

I explained that my sister Layla Davis left behind some items, and I was hoping to locate them in a real Lost and Found, not a
virtual one. He said he'd see what he could do. And he clicked his pen and let it hover over a notepad. I told him she'd checked out in a hurry. Top floor. Not sure which room. He asked for an ID, and he noted the difference in our last names. I said Layla was married. Hubby was a reprobate. It was a long story. He said, I really can't help you unless I have proof of your relationship. Then I showed him Layla's photo and asked if there was any possibility he might look through the top floor's security camera files for the last few days. I'm just so worried about her, I said. He said that would not happen, even if he wanted it to. I said, Why wouldn't you want to? He said, Not my circus, not my monkeys. And then he told me there were no cameras in the hotel corridors. When I expressed disbelief, he said the only thing that needed protection was the money on the casino floor.

I knew that somewhere in this hotel, in some locked storeroom, no doubt, might be everything that Layla had brought with her—the suitcase, clothing, toiletries, the clueful cell phone, a suicide note, perhaps. Answers! I needed a passkey. I walked up to a shampoo porter who was buffing the lobby floor and asked him how I could get a job in housecleaning. He said, Vienen cuando eres mexicano.

Bay texted me a video of himself standing on the porch of Chicago Joe's where he'd eaten lunch. He said he'd be at the Bellini Bar at the Venetian until five. And then he lifted up off the ground a foot or so, and then he vanished. He asked me how things were going at the Luxor. Bay always knows where I am or at least where my phone is. He's got an app that can find me. So later I met him at the bar. He was drinking a blueberry lime rickey. I ordered an espresso martini.

I said, “At first I was curious, now I'm pissed. The silence. The cover-up. Must mean something.”

“Means business as usual around here.”

I told Bay about Petra's denial, about A. Jones's disinterest, and about the hotel's documented denial that Layla had ever been there. “They're like the Soviets airbrushing undesirable enemies of the state from the propaganda photos, hoping the world will forget the former comrade's existence.”

“Nikolai Yezhov.”

“Who?”

“It worked. Chief of the Secret Police under Stalin.”

“Or was he?” I told Bay I thought he was right. We didn't see a suicide.

Our waiter, Nevin, shook the cocktail shaker over his right shoulder and poured my drink with artful nonchalance. He patted his modified canary-yellow Skrillex hairdo and asked if that would be all for now. It would.

I told Bay about Tristina M., a client of mine, who was twenty-one when she jumped off the Cypress Avenue Bridge and hit the foredeck of a passing Bimini yacht. She had come to me for help, and I had failed her. Tristina lived with her elderly grandmother, the only family she had. She dated a man, Ron Someone, who punched and slapped her in private, insulted her in public, who neglected her but was insanely jealous and controlling. She couldn't or wouldn't leave him. When I asked her what she got out of this malignant relationship, she said she got the chance to love someone. When I asked why she had come to therapy, she said to make herself worthy of Ron. Not in so many words, but that was the gist. She jumped, but he pushed. Her grandmother died a month later. I may be the only person alive who remembers Tristina, thinks about her. I still see Ron around Melancholy. He has a wife and two adorable daughters and a steady job at Home Depot. He grew up. Good for him. Tristina did not. I want to make sure Layla's not
forgotten. Maybe I think this . . . this investigation is my shot at redemption.