B009XDDVN8 EBOK (2 page)

I jammed the keys in my pocket, along with the money. I removed the gun from the bag, unwrapped it, checked that the clip was loaded and the chamber empty like Augie had taught me, and put that in the briefcase. I was about to close the safe-deposit box, when I thought better of it and grabbed one of the condom boxes. Augie always told me, with a jaunty voice over the phone, that when I stopped by I shouldn’t forget the jimmy hats. The condom boxes were old already and still unopened, but I took one anyway in case he needed a few; dealing with Augie meant it was always better to be prepared.

Look at me there, leaving the bank with my sunglasses on, a wad of cash in my pocket, my briefcase holding condoms and
a gun. Look at the swagger, at the hint of a smile, like I have the world beat, look at the utter fatuousness of the middle-aged suburbanite playing at being a torpedo. If any man was ever in need of a punch to the face, it was he, me, and it was coming, yes, it was. Sometimes the aardvark imagines he’s a lion, but the hyena always sets him straight.

Before returning to the car I slipped inside a drugstore next to the bank and bought a box of chocolates, the biggest they had, bound with frills and goofily shaped like a brontosaurus heart, a deranged greeting-card magnate’s idea of a romantic gesture. Then it was back to the sun-drenched morning as I steered the rental across West Sahara to South Rainbow Boulevard.

The residential parts of Vegas are lousy with walls. Every development is surrounded, every backyard. If Robert Frost had ever seen Vegas he would have had a breakdown. I was stopped at a light on West Twain with walls all around me, when a motorcyclist pulled up beside me and revved his engine. At the sound, my blood fizzled like I was mainlining Alka-Seltzer and I felt a throb at my throat.

I tried not to look, but I couldn’t help myself. The rider was older, with a gray beard and a denim vest. He seemed to be ignoring me, and I turned my face to the windshield so it seemed I was ignoring him, too. But I wasn’t, with all my concentration. I was always jumpy when I saw a biker, felt the twin urges to run away and to run the bastard over. When the light turned, my foot stayed on the brake as the motorcycle zipped away.

After a few bleats from behind, I started up again down South Rainbow. A hundred yards on, I turned into a gap in the wall to my right. S
PRING
V
ALLEY,
read the dusty old sign. Why, if I didn’t know any better it might have sounded like the sweetest little place on earth. Spring Valley. Where the sun always shone down softly and pussy willows waved in the breeze. But I wasn’t entering Spring Valley for the scenery.

An old friend hadn’t called, and I was paying him a visit to see if I still had a life.

A
LL THE HOUSES
in Augie’s Vegas development looked alike, sunbaked squat boxes offering nothing to the street but drawn curtains and garage doors. The place was as amiable as a rock. For a time Spring Valley had been hot, prices had more than doubled, fancy cars had been parked in the driveways, lawns were green and shrubs were blooming and S
OLD
signs sprouted like desert flowers after a rain. And then the bubble burst.

Now the development was littered with forlorn F
OR
S
ALE
signs and every other house seemed to be abandoned to the bank. The cars on the street were old, battered, a few draped with pale covers like the furniture in haunted houses. The street signs were so caked with red dust it was impossible to read them. It looked like the place had been hit by a neutron bomb. And it had.

Is anything more destructive in this world than easy money?

Augie lived on a road that ended in a cul-de-sac. When I reached the mouth of Augie’s street I slowed for a bit but kept going. I didn’t see any motorcycles parked at the entrance, or anything at all suspicious, but still I sure as hell wasn’t pulling into his driveway. When I asked him why he had bought on a cul-de-sac, he said it was great for kids. He also mentioned something about the schools, and the park a few blocks away. The whole thing made me laugh, considering that Augie had been fixed years ago. It was obviously part of the real-estate agent’s
spiel as she sold him more house than he needed when the market was rising, houses were selling at above the asking price, and every mortgage seemed like a license to steal. It was only later that everyone realized who was actually doing the stealing. Augie was repeating the patter to convince me of the quality of his purchase, which was sweet and all, but frankly I didn’t care. Truth was, I didn’t mind him blowing his cash on more house than he needed—hadn’t we all done that?—I just thought he should have been a bit more careful in his choice of location. One way in means one way out.

I turned left one block past Augie’s cul-de-sac and backed into the empty driveway of the eighth house, a small ranch with its windows curtained and a patch of dead sand in the front, like an ironic comment on the very idea of a suburban lawn. I knocked at the door with the briefcase by my side and the heart-shaped box of chocolates clutched to my chest. I had to knock twice before I heard the shuffling.

“Who is it?” came a rasp of a voice from inside.

“Is that you, sweet Selma?” I said.

The peephole darkened for a moment and then the door opened. The woman standing in the doorway with the help of a metal cane was short and thick, with skin supple as jerky. A cigarette drooped from her lips, her eyes were squinting from the smoke, her hair was so jet black it would have looked false on a Chinaman. “What’s that nonsense in your hand?”

“Chocolates,” I said.

“Are you trying to seduce me with bonbons?”

“Would it work?”

“Thirty years ago, with a little charm, maybe. Now, honey, it’s liquor or nothing. But since you’re here…” Selma grabbed the box, gave it a shake, opened the door wide. “Get on in if you’re getting in. I don’t want to lose the air-conditioning.”

Selma’s house was dark and cool, overstuffed with overstuffed furniture pushed against the walls of her tired little living
room. Along with the couches were piles of magazine and books, a television on a folding table, a broken chair, a statue of a mermaid in fake stone. The whole place was as cheery as a waiting room at the Port Authority, but the photographs on the wall of Selma as a perky showgirl circa 1962, along with Joey and Sammy and Dean, bespoke a jauntier history. I once asked her where Frank was. “Between my legs, honey,” she said with her hoarse smoker’s croak. I didn’t come to Vegas to make friends, but once I saw where Augie had bought his house, I had made friends with Selma.

When we were both inside the living room, she plopped down in the lounger marked with cigarette burns, ripped open the frills on the box, took a bite out of one of the chocolates. “Where’d you get this crap?” she said.

“I had it shipped from Paris.”

“It tastes like it came from a drugstore,” she said, dropping the half-eaten piece back into the box.

“A drugstore in Paris,” I said. “You don’t want it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then quit your whining. How are you doing, Selma?”

“Oh, I can’t complain.”

I laughed. “That doesn’t mean you won’t. So how’s Augie? Any suspicious strangers lurking about? Any wild pool parties?”

“Not since you were in last.”

“That, I want to explain, wasn’t my doing. For some reason Augie felt compelled to show me a good time.”

“And you boys had it, too, by the sounds of things.”

“He did, at least. Where he finds those girls, I’ll never know. They had more tattoos than the Sixth Fleet. I prefer quiet nights spent with distinguished elder ladies with jet-black hair.”

“You won’t get much of that, honey, if all you’ve got is drugstore chocolates.”

“Has he had any visitors?”

“Not enough. I’m worried about him, J.J.”

“How so?”

“I wanted to call you, but I couldn’t find your number.”

“Go ahead, Selma.”

“He’s been crying.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sometimes he sits by the pool late at night and cries. And it’s not quiet either. Quiet desperation I understand.” She took a long inhale from her cigarette, let it out slowly. “But this is something else.”

“Augie goes through things.”

“He needs a friend, J.J. He needs help. He needs to get sober.”

“That’s nothing new.”

“But he’s at the point where he needs it now. I’ve been there, I know. It’s not enough for you to just fly in for a day and then fly out. He has no family that visits, no one who he cares about, just you. You need to be a friend.”

I looked to the kitchen, as if I could see through walls. “Have you heard him crying in the last couple of days?”

“Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him.”

“Anyone knocked on your door looking for him? Or for me?”

“Who would be looking for you?”

“I think I owe a parking ticket from my last visit.”

“And they’re hot on your trail? No, sweetie, nothing.”

“Okay, thanks, Selma. Mind if I go the usual way?”

“You’re a certified kook, you know that?”

I leaned over, kissed her on the forehead. “I like to make an entrance.”

I picked my way through her living room, into the kitchen, and out the back door. When I stepped outside I was blinded by the fierce noon light before I put back on my sunglasses.

Selma’s small backyard was as dead as her front, just a gnarly plot of stone and sand and a few dead bushes, all surrounded by a wall about six feet in height. At the base of the wall were two cinder blocks piled one on the other that I had put there a couple
years before. I stood on the blocks and peered over the top of the wall.

Pretty much the whole of Augie’s backyard was taken up by the pool, a sparkling blue surrounded by cement and sand. But the water in the pool was low, it had evaporated beneath the level of the skimmer, and something small was floating in the middle of the expanse. It took me a moment to figure out what it was.

A bird, a species brown and small, facedown and dead.

I
HOISTED THE
briefcase to the top of the wall and pulled myself up with a grunt until my belly was resting beside the briefcase on the wall. Slowly I jiggled my legs over and across until I fell awkwardly onto Augie’s side.

A lounge chair, a lawn chair, a small row of empty liquor bottles, a net on a stick that could have been used to fish out the dead bird but hadn’t. I took the briefcase down and slipped around the pool to the door that opened off the master bedroom. The shade was drawn tight. Why is it that everyone who moves out to the desert for the sun does everything to keep it out once they get there?

I knocked and waited. Even past noon it was still too early for Augie to be up. I knocked again. Then I thought about Augie sitting in the lawn chair with a bottle, looking up at the imperfect darkness of the Vegas sky, and crying. And I thought about that bird floating facedown in the pool. And I caught a whiff of something ugly and suddenly I knew I could wait all day and the next and Augie wouldn’t be answering the back door. I slipped the key into the lock and gave it a turn.

When I stepped inside, the scent I had caught just a whiff of through the door slapped me in the face, something oily and thick and sickly cloying. I didn’t recognize the odor from personal experience, but something deep in my genetic code knew
exactly what this was. I stepped back outside, took a deep clear breath to fight the nausea that had blossomed in my gut, shielded my nose in the crook of my arm, and waded back into the dark mucky air, closing the door behind me for privacy. I gagged loudly twice before finding Augie naked and spread-eagled on his bed.

His body was strangely swollen, his skin was strangely marked, his flesh was strangely green, his jaw was strangely elongated, his eyes were strangely open.

My old friend was strangely dead.

And yet the most surprising thing about it all was how unsurprised I was. As a boy Augie had had the quickness and daring of a pirate, but his addictions had stolen his youth and now his life. Drugs and alcohol, prostitutes and pornography, gambling and violence and the adrenaline of fear—Augie became addicted to anything that pushed him closer to death. Too bad he never became addicted to success. He would have played the hell out of it; that would have been a party to remember. And Augie was smart enough to have pulled it off, too. I wouldn’t have been shocked if Augie Iannucci had ended up as the smarmiest politician on television, or a professional surfer, or a pitchman for ShamWow!, or even the dentist he talked about becoming, and not just any dentist—a dentist to the stars. Instead he let his hungers chew him up from the inside; his tragedy was that no matter the hunger, he could always afford to feed it.