I Don't Like Where This Is Going (7 page)

“You're so Catholic.”

“Lapsed.”

“The most dangerous kind,” Bay said. “Maybe we did see a suicide.”

“I could live with that, but I have to be sure.”

Bay smiled. “You're going to get us in trouble, you know that.”

“Maybe Blythe can be saved. Layla didn't give up on her sister. We shouldn't give up on her.” What I was thinking was how I gave up on Cam and how you don't need a god to know that you must atone for your sins. “So now it's also a rescue mission.”

“And here's something else for you to worry about. We've got sixty thousand honeybees in the eaves of our house.”

“The hum!”

Bay drew a deck of cards out of his cargo vest pocket—he was dressed, apparently, as a fly fisherman for this evening's round of poker, all the better to distract his opponents—and shuffled them.

I said, “How did you find them?”

“I saw the honey melting down the wall out back.”

“Did you call the landlord?”

He nodded. “I had Arthur, the bee guy, out for an assessment.” Bay spread the cards in front of him on the bar. “He told me that all honeybees in Las Vegas are Africanized.”

“That's not good.”

“One sting won't kill you, but fifteen might.” Bay told me to pick a card, any card.

I slid one card halfway out of the deck, slipped it back in, and chose another. He flipped the spread deck over, so I could see they were ordinary playing cards. He turned my card over: a joker. The little jester in motley clothes and belled shoes held a fool's scepter
and strutted across the back of a flying honeybee. Bay said, “The TV reporter.”

“Who?”

“He knows about her death—he found out who she was. Call him.”

“Do you remember his name?”

Bay found the Channel 14 website and showed me a photo of Elwood Wingo. He said the bee removers would be by in the morning. “Arthur likes his coffee black. And you can take the car home. I'm playing through the night.”

AT HOME I GOOGLED
Kiernan Carlisle and found her 2008 obituary. I learned that she was “a loving sister, daughter, aunt, and friend to all that knew her,” that she was “unique, special, intelligent, and compassionate,” and that she was “taken too early.” I was not told how she was taken. I found out how in a related article from the
Lincoln Ledger
out of Star City. She had been strangled in her own condominium in Las Vegas. Police were investigating. A neighbor who knew Kiernan “about as well as anyone can know an exotic dancer,” and who requested anonymity, said, “I'm going to get me a gun permit tomorrow.”

THE BEES HUMMED
like a Tesla coil. I made a small pile of Kitty Yums for Django by the kitchen table. He ran across the kitchen and slid into them. Back on the Internet I learned that jumping from a high place was only the seventh most effective way to kill yourself, just after stepping in front of a train and just before exsanguination. I read my book (
To the Wedding
) till I couldn't keep my eyes open. I got into bed, put on my sleep mask, stuffed in my
earplugs, and stretched out under the covers. Django hopped up on my chest, stuck his wet, cold nose under mine to see if I was breathing. I've had insomnia since I was a kid. Cam, up on the top bunk, slept like the dead. My frustrated father once whispered in my ear, “Why won't you sleep, honey?” I said I didn't want to sleep because I didn't want to be alone. And nothing has changed.

4

W
HAT WOULD SLEEP
be without a monster lurking in the dark?

I was wrong, of course, to think I ever slept alone. Every night the people I unconsciously contrived visited me in dreams, and last night's dreams were uniformly distressing. In one, I made several annoyingly shy toddlers weep by asking them hideously avuncular questions like,
What is your favorite subject in school?
and,
What do you want to be when you grow up?
My words were met with mute disdain, but I wanted them to like me so badly that I felt compelled to impart some palliative wisdom that they might groove on. Children, I said, be bright in your lavish youth because time darkens everything. And that's when one sobbing boy bit his lip, shut his eyes, and told me I was stealing his childhood.

I woke when I heard the bee wranglers setting up their ladders and estimating the gallons of honey they'd harvest from this job. I tried to remember which Renaissance artist it was who first proffered the artistic and philosophical advice I'd inflicted on the children in the dream. After I'd dressed, I e-mailed Elwood Wingo, the TV reporter, explaining who I was and why I wanted to speak with him. He answered immediately and told me to meet him at
a certain food truck parked on Fremont at noon. Bay came home from his long and successful night at the tables with breakfast burritos, Bloody Marys, and a lovely young woman named Mercedes Benz. I made coffee and set the table. “Your name,” I said.

“My father had a droll sense of humor,” Mercedes told me.

I passed on the Bloody Mary.

“He was so droll my mother left him and joined a cult.”

I said, “Which?”

“Branch Davidians. She took me with her.”

“Waco.”

“We had been disfellowshipped by that time. When Koresh started raising the dead, Mom packed our bag. We took the bus to Colorado City, Arizona, and Mom married an FLDS Mormon with three other wives and two mentally retarded sons. One of the wives was fourteen.”

“How old were you?”

“Twelve.”

Django brushed up against Mercedes's leg. I refreshed our coffees. She lifted Django to her lap, and he allowed her to scratch him under the chin.

I said, “Were you worried you'd be next at the altar?”

“Yes, but by then my whimsical father had come to rescue me, and we moved here to Vegas. I went to school for the first time.”

Django looked deeply into Mercedes's eyes and bit her finger. She said, “He's a naughty boy.”

One of the bee wranglers whooped. He'd located the queen. In ancient Egypt, a man like Arthur was called the Sealer of Honey. The harvesting of honey began in Lower Egypt in first dynasty, and the pharaoh was called the Bee King, and Osiris was worshipped in the Mansion of the Bee. Mercedes tapped Django's nose and told him, “No!” He sprang from her lap and shot off for the
living room, but slid into the cabinet beneath the sink making his turn. He just lay there like he'd meant to do it, dignity intact. Mercedes said her mom was still in Colorado City and had four other children whom Mercedes had never met. Her dad, she said, was a nomad. He called every few months. Last call came from Alberta. He keeps drifting farther north. The cold seems to comfort him.

Mercedes worked as a waitress at Yardbird Southern Table at the Venetian and shared an apartment in Spring Valley with another waitress. She took creative writing classes at UNLV. I said I'd clean up. Bay said we should all meet for dinner. Seven-thirty at Emeril's at the Grand. They bade me farewell and headed off to bed. I hoped Django wasn't in Bay's room bothering them. I called for him. He wasn't answering. I took out a can of sardines. Nothing like the sound of the can leaving the drawer to get Django's attention. Before I even snapped the tab on the sardines, there he was purring like mad and rolling on his back at my feet. I gave him a treat instead.

ELWOOD RECOMMENDED THE EGG
burger and the duck-fat garlic fries. And the lobster mac and cheese.
To die for
. And the zucchini fritters.
Ambrosial
. And the bacon-fried rice. I ordered the burger, the shitake flan, and a bottled water; Elwood, the burger, fries, and a Diet Dr Pepper. He excused himself, answered a call on his cell, walked to the row of six empty newspaper vending machines, and leaned back against the
Las Vegas Weekly
. He put a finger in his unoccupied ear. Elwood was a large young man with small hands, long ears, orthopedic shoes, and snaggled bottom teeth. The sign on the grim-looking hotel/casino at the corner read $
2
B
LACKJACK
$
1
C
RAPS
. This unsightly stretch of the Fremont East District was sun-bleached and deserted except for the occasional solitary
pedestrian slouching his way toward Binion's Horseshoe. Elwood apologized for the interruption—his handyman had run into a problem with the porch repair.

We carried our food to the shaded Eighth Street bus stop shelter, sat on the uncomfortable metal seats, and ate our lunches off our laps. The burger was so damn good I wanted to put a runny fried egg on top of everything. Elwood flashed his eyebrows and smiled. “Told you.”

When he remarked that he and I seemed to be the only people interested in getting to the bottom of Layla Davis's death, I told him what Julie Wade had learned about Layla's sister Blythe. He guessed that Blythe would have been, or might still be, involved in prostitution.

He said, “There are thirty thousand very busy prostitutes in Vegas, where prostitution is illegal but only a misdemeanor.” He wiped his lips with the napkin. “I figure hundred and eighty thousand blow jobs a day in Clark County. Makes you burst with civic pride.” He thought we were unlikely to find out much more about Layla. Unless.

“Unless what?”

“Unless Blythe is still alive.”

“And we can find her.”

“Do you have a photo?”

I didn't, but I would have Bay check with Julie Wade. I told Elwood that the hotel cameras that I was told did not exist must have captured the activity on the thirtieth floor when Layla was disposed of. Elwood said he'd already checked on that, and the cameras,
he
was told, were not working that day. They couldn't even get their lies straight. A green and yellow Google Maps Street View car drove by snapping photos with its roof-mounted camera. Elwood said, “Now we'll always be those two unhealthy
guys guzzling fast food and waiting for the Boulder Highway Express.”

And then he said, “It's my job to investigate Layla's death. Why are you doing it?”

“You can't just sit by.”

“Of course you can. We do it all the time.”

“Because I was a witness. I saw those eyes and that broken face, and I can't forget. And because an acquaintance, a Memphis PI, the Julie I just mentioned, was hired to find her, and my friend Bay and I are doing what we can to help. Because I think she was killed, and someone's getting away with murder.”

“Justice is a game of chance.”

He told me he grew up in Manhattan on the Upper East Side, and had gone to prep schools and to Princeton. When he told his parents he wanted to be a reporter, not an academic, they laughed. But they weren't laughing now. His dad, Dr. Ned Wingo, was a Freudian analyst who rode motorcycles and fancied himself a swinger. Ned called Elwood on occasion to ask for his advice with younger women, whom he just couldn't figure out. Elwood's mom, Lainey Roth Wingo, was an atypical Jewish mother who wrote YA novels and did not like to be disturbed by rambling phone calls from her only child, whom she had fictively killed off in her breakout novel,
Rap City in Blue
(peanuts/anaphylaxis). The parents were not divorced but lived apart except for the month of August, when Ned migrated to Provincetown with all the other analysts, and Lainey joined him. They brought along their current girlfriends.

Elwood answered his phone, told whoever it was that he'd be there in five minutes, and invited me along to a breaking story. “A body's been found in the lot behind Lamps Plus on South Maryland.” Elwood drove a Fiat 500 in which he'd installed a workstation in the passenger-side front seat—swivel desktop, computer,
police scanner, and wireless printer. I climbed in back and shoved the camera bag and food wrappers to the side.

He said the on-air reports were essentially eye candy for the easily distracted. His real journalism happened on his station-sponsored blog, where he could go into depth on a story. We arrived at Lamps Plus. It helped that Elwood knew the detective leading the crime scene investigation. He and Detective Lou Scaturro belonged to the Bocce Club of Las Vegas.

I said, “You play bocce, Elwood?”

“For the Knights of Cabria. Lou plays for the Sons of It'ly,” Elwood shook hands with Detective Scaturro and introduced us. “What do we have here, Lou?”

What we had was the body of a young woman, which had been discovered that morning by a homeless guy out Dumpster-diving. The body had been wrapped in the distressing green, gold, and black pleated polyester bedspread that was now folded next to the corpse. The girl, Detective Scaturro told us, had been garroted with an electrical cord, which was still coiled around her neck. He unzipped the body bag and held it open. A cluster of red dots rimmed the girl's eyes. Her lips were swollen. Elwood squatted to get a closer look. Her shaggy hair was black; she wore a nose ring on her left nostril and smelled like melting plastic. Her left arm was crosshatched with razor cuts. Detective Scaturro resealed the bag and nodded to the EMTs, who lifted the body onto a gurney. He said, “She hasn't been dead long.”

Detective Scaturro had a high forehead and a thick brush of russet hair. His eyes were forest-green, his chin modest and dimpled. The wrinkles around the eyes suggested easy and eager smiles. I knew from his guileless face that Scaturro was married and had a flock of boisterous kids. I knew he speculated in real
estate. I knew he drank modestly, favored grappa, and had never even considered smoking cigarettes. I knew he kept no untoward secrets and told no unnecessary lies. And when I say
knew
, I mean, of course,
imagined.

Most body dumps are tough to unravel, but this one would not be. Detective Scaturro said, “Miss Doe was murdered elsewhere.”

“And I know where,” Elwood said. “I recognize the bedspread. Check the Starlite Motel on South Las Vegas Boulevard.”