I Don't Like Where This Is Going (15 page)

MIKE CAME HOME
with his right hand wrapped in a bloody Brunswick bowling towel. He told me he'd cut his knuckles when he punched an annoying little Ted Nugent–impersonating cocksucker who was trying to sell him a paintball gun and wouldn't take
Get the fuck out of my face, needledick
, for an answer.

“I've still got a piece of his tooth in my knuckle.”

Mike rinsed his hand at the sink, and I filled a plastic bag of ice from the freezer. Django swatted a fallen cube across the floor and sped off after it. I gave Mike the bag. “So you punched him, and then what?”

“I picked him up and punched him again. And he cried.” Mike said good night, headed to his room, slipped on the ice that Django had abandoned, and said, “That cat's going to kill someone.”

Elwood stopped by the house on his way to the TV station. He told me he had found out the identities, but not the whereabouts, of K-Dirt and Bleak. He'd brought along two bowls of jook, a kind of rice porridge, that he'd picked up at Seoul Brothers. I sniffed and decided that maybe jook was an acquired taste and saved my bowl for Bay.

Elwood said, “Kaiden Castle and Ben Alexavier. A pair of Jack Mormons from Twin Falls, Idaho. They were on their mission here in Vegas and were preaching the good word to a clutch of hookers in what they suddenly realized was a brothel and not the home of
a large and very blessed Catholic family. The girls did some laying on of hands and speaking in tongues, as it were, and there ensued the weeping, the moaning, and the gnashing of teeth, and then the boys dropped to their callused knees and praised God and the Angel Moroni for delivering them to their terrestrial kingdom.”

“What do they do?”

“Whatever they're told, apparently. Except go to temple anymore.”

“But you can't find them?”

“I'm expecting a call.”

Elwood sprinkled sugar on his jook. He said he was posting a story on his blog later today about Layla's horrific death and about the seemingly incompetent, perfunctory, and perhaps compromised investigation into her case. “The authorities won't be able to ignore this.”

He asked me what we had to drink.

“Milk? Juice?”

“I was thinking breakfast spirits.”

“I've got this bacon-infused vodka in the freezer.”

“Drop a raw egg in it.”

He would report what we had learned from Blythe through Julie Wade and what he had learned from an anonymous source at the coroner's office. Zohydro had been found in Layla's system. Didn't sound recreational to me.

I said, “Did you speak with the police?”

He told the police what we knew about the killers. No corroboration, no comment. He asked them if they knew that Layla's sister was a prostitute and drug addict. No comment. He asked if anyone in the police department understood the nature of their job. No comment. “When I got back to my car, I had seventeen citations on the windshield, a broken sideview mirror, and a note
that threatened me with arrest should I persist in interfering with an ongoing police investigation.”

“But they closed the case, I thought.”

“Keeping it open just enough so no one gets in.”

I GOT A TEXT
from Patience. Charlotte would be arriving at noon in Vegas on a flight from New River. Could I fetch her? Evidently, Patience never made it to Immokalee, but Charlotte made it out. Bay joined me for coffee and jook. He decided the jook needed a little salt. And a little sriracha. I told him about Charlotte.

He said, “I love a full house.”

“Should we all meet for lunch?”

Django hopped up on the table and sniffed at the jook. Bay said Django needed a time-out. Django sneezed and backed away from the bowl. Bay said, “Where should we meet?”

“Mladinic's. One-ish.”

THE EAGER PASSENGERS
arriving on Virgin flight #321 were so hell-bent on gambling that they stopped to play the slots in the terminal. A slender Filipina in a zebra-striped jersey and black pedal-pushers hit the jackpot on Firehouse Hounds and got so excited, she had to suck on her asthma inhaler.

I saw Charlotte walking toward me up the ramp, holding a canvas shoulder bag with both hands. She looked a bit weary and a lot relieved. She wore a blue cotton short-sleeved shirt dress, red running shoes, and a red Fort Myers Miracle baseball cap. We hugged.

“So good to see a friendly face,” she said.

I said, “You're staying with us, of course, but first lunch.”

“Great. I'm starving.”

I saw no pet carrier. “Where's Henry?”

MLADINIC'S TAVERNA IS ONE
of the city's most venerable eating and drinking establishments. It's nestled in the surprisingly verdant John S. Park neighborhood, far enough away from the Strip and from downtown to escape the hyperstimulated hordes of tourists held in thrall by the scintillant neon. When Pete Mladinic, a Croatian immigrant, opened his bar in 1935, he could see as far as Red Rock Canyon to the west and all the way east to Frenchman Mountain. The vista has changed; the tavern has not. There's a shaded patio out back where Charlotte and I would be meeting Bay and Mike, and a cozy little bar inside—six stools and two tables—where I sat on my first visit here when I fell in love with the place.

That day I sat at the only vacant barstool, a stool, I would soon learn, that was normally reserved for one Ren Steinke, but Ren was, on that day, over at Green Valley Gastroenterology Associates enduring a colonoscopy. I ordered a Croatian beer. The wiry cowboy to my right, the one who told me about his pal Ren, introduced himself as Ellis Derringer and tipped his Stetson. He said that for the past fourteen, fifteen years, he and Ren met here every weekday at noon to watch
The Young and the Restless
on the TV over the bar. He asked me if his cigarette was bothering me. I said it wasn't. I'd been a smoker once myself. Then you know the hunger, he said. He told me he wished his life was like the lives of the characters on
Y&R.

He held up two fingers to the bartender, Tatjana. He said he would put up with all manner of betrayal, infidelity, and deceit if only his life could mean something. “Not one person on this show is happy. Me, I'm happy as a dung beetle in a shit storm,
but I'm just sitting here on my bony ass going nowhere fast.” He pointed to the TV screen, where a gray-haired gent with several chins and ropy forearms was telling a skittish blonde that his wife knew about everything.

“Take Adam and Chelsea,” Ellis said. “They're doomed. But theirs is a magnificent train wreck of ruin. Something you could write home about.”

Tatjana brought our beers. Ellis lit a Lucky Strike and said, “My old lady stole away in the middle of the night. Gone like she never happened.” He sipped his beer and said maybe he deserved the desertion: he was no day at the beach.

He said, “Sometimes I think I'm happy because I have unfulfilled desires and that gives me hope. It's not all belly-up for old Ellis, you know?”

The credits rolled on the show, and Ellis said, “Sometimes I imagine I have amnesia. I'm not Ellis Derringer at all. I'm Clu McClure. I'm from Genoa Falls, and I'm related to the Abbotts and the Newmans, only I, sitting here talking to you, don't know it.”

“You do know the show's made up, right?”

“And what I imagine is I get bonked on the head again, and I wake up in a hospital, and I know who I am, and I ask the nurse for a telephone.” Ellis put down his beer, left his money on the bar, shook my hand, and said he was off to fetch a polyp-free Ren and drive him home.

I noticed that the stocky woman with a gray chignon to my left was solving quadratic equations on her iPad. I smiled and told her I'd flunked algebra twice in high school.

“And yet look at you now!” she said.

She told me her name was Colette and that she'd been a nun—Sisters of St. Joseph—for twelve years, during which time she taught high school math.

I bought us both pints of Wittgen Amber.

She said, “And then I left the convent. I married Mr. Buzzy Schott in Chillicothe, Ohio, and we had two daughters, a house in the 'burbs, and a border collie, and then I realized I was a lesbian, and I moved out on Mr. Schott. The older girl, Clois, is a doctor and a mom. Her younger sister is an idiot just like her father.” Colette sipped the ale. “Now I live two blocks from here with my partner, Mary, who's an accountant at the MGM Grand.”

I held out my hand. “Wylie.”

“As in
cagey
?”

“I prefer
artful
.”

Colette put down her stylus and picked up the iPad. She said that when she looked at a math equation, she saw a world so exquisite it was beyond words. “And every time I look at the equation again, I see something I hadn't seen before.” She borrowed a pen from Tatjana and drew an equation on a napkin:

e
^iπ
+ 1 = 0

She smoothed the napkin and asked me to tell her what I saw.

I said, “Whatever it is on the left, it all adds up to zero.”

She squeezed my arm and said, “Poor baby.” But she wasn't giving up. “This elegant equation is known as Euler's identity. Gorgeous, no? Such purity and simplicity.”

I told her that I'd suffered a lifelong aversion to numbers.

She said, “Any in particular?”

“I'm arithmophobic.”

“I see, a concrete thinker. Well, then, let's think of the equation as a story and the figures as characters.”

“Go on.”

“
1
is a constant and it's where we begin when we count.
0
is our
youngest number. It indicates absence, and yet without it, there could be no math. You've probably met
π
before.”

“Pi are square.”

“
e
is Euler's constant, and, like
π
, is irrational and transcendent.
i
is an imaginary number.” She cocked her head and searched my face for a glimmer of understanding. “Your face is as empty as a null set.”

I said of the equation, “It's all Greek to me.”

She said, “Euler's identity is as sublime and beautiful as Van Gogh's
Starry Night
or Mozart's
Requiem
. And here's the kicker,” Colette said. “We can't understand it; we don't know what it means, but we've proven it, and so it's true.”

We raised our Wittgen steins in a toast. Colette said, “Here's looking at Euclid!”

I said, “And here's to Euler's pi that was infinitely delicious.”

I asked her if she thought there was randomness in the universe, that it had no purpose, no method, no order, and no coherence. She said not random, but unpredictable sometimes. Until we find a theory that explains it all. She asked me what I thought.

“There is no aim or purpose. There's just what happens.”

“The universe does seem to be on a drive to maximal disorder,” she said.

I said, “The evidence is all around us.”

“Numbers are infinite,” she said. “If you love numbers, there will be no end to your happiness.”

WHEN CHARLOTTE AND I
arrived at Mladinic's, Bay was dazzling Mike with some basic but deft sleight of hand. He did the French drop with a silver dollar, making it vanish and then reappear beneath Mike's hat. The straw trilby, by the way, was part of what I could
only describe as Mike's unanticipated but snazzy golf ensemble: blue polo shirt, red slacks, white belt, and saddle shoes.

We ordered a pitcher of Karlov
ko beer. Mike said, no, he didn't golf, but that didn't mean he couldn't look sharp. Bay ordered for the table: sardines in lemon juice to start, squid ink risotto, ground grilled meat, and pork kabobs. When the beer arrived, Charlotte gathered herself and began.

She told us that she had seen migrant labor camps surrounded by cyclone fences, razor wire, and armed guards. In Florida. In the twenty-first century. She'd seen twelve-year-old children working in the fields—child labor laws don't apply to agricultural work. The Obama White House scrapped the proposed rule changes that would have kept children away from hazardous work.

She'd seen men locked overnight in unventilated box trucks so they couldn't escape. She'd seen contractors confiscate workers' passports for “safekeeping.” She'd seen twelve men living in a dilapidated single-wide with faulty plumbing, rotted floors, leaky ceiling, and without AC, for which they were charged $2,000 a month rent. Pregnant women worked in tomato fields that were soaked in terotogenic toxins. “I'm not a troublemaker,” Charlotte said. “I've never had much nerve. I've never been one to stand up and scream. But I couldn't stand by.”

She'd seen heartbreaking photographs of children born without limbs, with fused limbs, with extra digits, one baby with a parasitic head attached at the neck, another with a single eye in the middle of her forehead. The congenital abnormalities were not a coincidence. Those fields were sprayed with methyl bromide, a Category 1 autotoxin that kills everything it touches. And all the while, Charlotte said, the growers themselves, the corporate farmers with their ag and business degrees from the University of
Florida and their bespoke suits and their vigorous children, enjoy their afternoons at the country club, their weekends in Vail, and their philanthropic fund-raising galas, and feign horror when they learn of the injustices inflicted on the workers by their trusted subcontractors and note that they, too, are victims, betrayed by heartless supervisors.