I Don't Like Where This Is Going (18 page)

“This is quite the mess,” I said.

“He found out I was here.”

“By tracing you to us, no doubt.”

“Time to vanish again. Alone this time.”

MERCEDES SET CHARLOTTE UP
in her den with a fold-out bed. Charlotte excused herself, saying she was going to take a long, contemplative bath. I sat at the kitchen counter. Mercedes set out a plate of Manchego cheese and Sardinian parchment crackers. She told me her roommate Mindy was at her boyfriend's friend's condo. The boyfriend's married. Mindy gave him an ultimatum. Tonight's the night. He has a wife and two kids. Mindy's been seeing the asshole for two years. Found out about the wife at Christmas.

I said, “He's not likely to leave the wife.”

“I know that and you know that.”

“Of course, he might tell her that he is.”

“So what are we drinking, Wylie?”

“I'm driving.”

Mercedes wasn't buying the charade. “We all drink and drive in Vegas.”

“But that doesn't make it right.”

“But it hurts a lot less when you crash if you're flushed.”

“We're being irresponsible.”

She held her thumb and finger an inch apart. “A little one.”

“What's your specialty?”

“A Paralyzer.”

“Well, that sounds harmless.”

“Kahlúa, vodka, and Coke.”

“A little one.”

“The caffeine'll keep you alert.”

I got a text from Gene asking me to meet him tomorrow:
Name the time and the place. A quiet place. And wear your therapist hat. I need to talk
.

I replied,
Aloha Shores Park at eleven
.

I asked Mercedes how her twins story was going.

“I started a new one.”

“What about?”

“A dying man wins the lottery.”

“I wanted to know what happened to the twins.”

“So did I, but they stopped cooperating.”

“Lock them into a room until they come clean.”

“What are we going to do with Charlotte?”

“Get her out of town.”

10

I
'M HONEST ENOUGH
to know I have to lie from time to time. I lied to Gene because I thought he needed me to. I told him I didn't think there was anything inappropriate about his dating Chyna, and I was sorry if I had left that impression. “Sometimes I speak without thinking.”

“Sometimes the spontaneous utterance is the unvarnished truth,” he said.

“I thought you were trying to ignore me.”

“I was. I know these girls are safe with me. I do what I can to help them leave this place.”

Gene and I were sitting at a shaded picnic table near the roller hockey rink in Aloha Shores Park. For the next hour and a half, Gene talked candidly about his life, and I listened. All his previous reticence had vanished. He lived, he told me, a celibate life. By choice, he said, or, more correctly, by compulsion. He understood that he was being irrational, but he believed that all sexual intercourse was an act of violence.

I said, “We can work on that.”

He said, “I don't want to work on that.”

I said, “Where did this notion come from?”

Gene's father, Delmer, president of the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Star City, was both a pillar of the community and a monster in the home, a man who enjoyed cruel and brutal sex with Gene's mom and with his assorted mistresses. Gene had twice witnessed his naked father choking and punching his helpless mother after he'd run down the hall to see why his mother was screaming. After that, his parents mercifully locked the door, and he stayed in his bed with the pillow and blankets over his head, trying to block out the sobs from down the hall and the slap of his father's leather belt on his mother's raw skin. “Accident-prone,” they told their friends, to explain the bruising and welts and burns. “All thumbs.” “Clumsy as a June bug.”

“Eventually she killed him. Left me with his millions. Drove herself and his sorry ass off the 165 bridge and into the Arkansas River down in Pendleton.”

Long story short, he said, his unwillingness to copulate had alarmed Kiernan, who made it quite clear that she was not about to live in a sexless and childless marriage, and then she hopped a bus to Las Vegas. Gene followed her and began the six-month search that culminated when she was found murdered in her condo. No one was ever arrested for the crime. Gene bought a small house and began his volunteer work, hoping to do some good.

I said, “How are you feeling?”

“Good.” He lied to me because he thought I needed to hear a cheery answer.

I said, “If you want to work on the sexual issue—”

He said, “It's not that big a deal. Think of me as a priest.”

“You told me to wear my therapist hat.”

“I've never talked about my father before. It helps.”

On the walk back to our cars, Gene told me that he suspected,
and had for some time, that girls at Refuge House were being sold into slavery. “That's what it amounts to,” he said. “The girls were being shipped out of Vegas to the small towns around the state, maybe around the West, where there was a demand. “Sorry I lied when you asked about it that time.”

He'd gone to the police and the FBI with his suspicions and his anecdotal evidence—straight from the girls' mouths—and the FBI and the cops did nothing. Unless they were doing something undercover. We could hope. He told Helen Lozoraitis what he had learned, and at first she laughed at the implausibility of the story, but then became furious. At him, not at Refuge House. He didn't think Helen knew anything about the trafficking, that she, in fact, worked very hard at not knowing the truth. The truth would upset her world too much. She had to think of herself as doing nothing but good in order to live with herself. “I suspect she has some serious demons locked in her attic.”

He'd heard rumors that the Danites, a Samoan Mormon gang, were behind the enterprise, and rumors that it was the Polynesian Saints or the Vascos, a gang of Basque cowboys out of Elko, but he didn't buy any of it. Yes, they were all useless and dangerous people, but the gangs had enough on their plates already. It was much simpler than that. What we had here was a gaggle of unaffiliated entrepreneurial businessmen taking advantage of an auspicious investment opportunity. Sex sells and greed motivates. Lust and lucre; supply and command. But it wasn't exactly free enterprise and the American way. It was a feudal system, and the lords lived here in Vegas.

When Gene spoke with Mr. Jory Teague, director of Refuge House, Inc., and told him what he suspected was going on, thinking that Mr. Jory Teague had no idea what certain of his perfidious employees were up to behind his back, Mr. Jory Teague put down
his egg salad sandwich, picked up his brass desk lamp, and smashed it against the side of Gene's head. Gene was then threatened with further bodily harm by a bruiser with a black truncheon but no neck, and threatened with a lawsuit by a cadaverous attorney with half-glasses and loose dentures, if he were to go public with these obscene lies and unfounded allegations.

I asked Gene how shit like this could happen in a civilized country, or any country, for that matter. Gene responded with a history of the world in thirty-seven seconds. Fade in: A hulking troglodyte with a boulder crushes the skull of a terrified little herbivore who's had his beady eyes on one of the feracious females in the cave. Might makes right. He who wields the biggest club runs the meeting, gets the girl, eats at the head of the trough. When the more discerning of the diminutive others grow tired of being pummeled or worse, they invent gods and worship and priests. Vengeful and capricious gods. Solemn and uplifting worship. Arrogant and pietistic priests, they who must be obeyed, who then preach to the shock-heads on the necessity of turning their clubs into plowshares or risk the same dire oblivion that befell their cousins the Neanderthals. And then come villages and cultivation and testosterone-soothing domesticity, and with settlement come laws and courts, and crime and punishment, and private property and money, and wealth becomes muscle. He who wields the largest stock portfolio runs the meeting, gets the Kardashian, eats at Per Se. And we're right back to where we started.

So, Gene said, we give everyone enough money to live with dignity and not a penny more. When everyone lives with dignity, he said, religion will rise on its slow haunches and slouch off to oblivion.

Gene said, “Here we are.” He put both his hands on the driver's window of his red pickup, pushed the window down,
reached inside, and opened the door. “Refuge House is one of several distribution centers run by an affiliation of investors that I haven't yet been able to identify. But I will.”

I gave Gene Elwood's contact info and told him to give Elwood a call.

AND THEN I GOT
a call from Elwood on my way to the airport to pick up Patience. Told me his car had been stolen. I said was he sure it wasn't impounded. Good point! He called back to ask if I could drive him to the bank for cash and to the police impoundment lot.

“Will an ATM work?”

“Need more than the limit.”

Patience looked more beguiling than ever. She wore a white linen shirt with a paisley necktie, a black sport coat, jeans, and blue sneakers. She asked about Charlotte, and I filled her in. I told her our first trip would be with Elwood and our second with Charlotte. Said she couldn't wait. “Great to see you, Wylie.”

Elwood was waiting outside his house. He had sad news, he said, after he shook hands with Patience. His pal Detective Lou Scaturro had suffered a stroke. He was at Desert Springs intensive care, and his wife was due any day now. When Elwood learned that Patience was a travel agent—another moribund profession—he told her he had always wanted to go to Tristan da Cunha, the most remote island in the world.

Patience knew Tristan. “There are two hundred and sixty people, all farmers, and eight surnames. There's one pub, one volcano, one crayfish-packing plant, and one cop who's made zero arrests ever. The jail cell door is made of plywood. No one's rich. No one's poor. No one's alone. And there's no place to hide. There is no private property.”

I said, “It would be a great place to set a murder mystery.”

Patience said, “You can't fly there. You can take a ship from Cape Town, but that takes six days, and you might have to wait awhile for the next ship.”

Elwood said, “Let me think about it.”

BAY TOLD CHARLOTTE
she had a reservation at the Silverland Inn and Suites in Virginia City under the name Alice O'Malley. She said she'd always wanted to be Irish. Bay said he wouldn't hold that against her. She asked why he would say that, and he said, “The eight hundred babies buried in a septic tank by nuns in County Galway.”

“I see.”

He said, “We'll have all the necessary paperwork in Alice's name in two days. In the meantime, you'll stay with Mercedes.”

Four of us were sitting out on the patio at Mladinic's nibbling on platters of fish carpaccio and grilled spicy sausage. Bay, Charlotte, and I were drinking beer. Patience thought she'd try the Croatian national cocktail, which was made with cherry liqueur, sour cherry juice, candied orange peel, and garnished with wild cherries. She loved it.

Bay and Charlotte had already gone shopping for prepaid phones, prepaid phone cards, prepaid credit cards, an iPad mini, and a cute little ten-million-volt pink stun gun. They'd taken ample cash out of Charlotte's Wells Fargo account and set up a Nevada corporation online for a few hundred dollars. This way, in the future, in an emergency, she'd be able to use the corporate credit card without her name being attached to the purchase.

Patience might have been enjoying her Crocktails a little too much. She was smiling brightly at a black bird under our table
that was wrestling a scrap of fish into submission. I asked her if she was okay. She said, “I'm lovin' that buzzard.”

“It's a grackle.”

“Just lovin' it to death.”

Charlotte owed no back taxes and had no outstanding debts, which was good, Bay said, because people you owe money to are better at tracking you down than the cops are. You can't vanish forever under an assumed identity, but maybe you could confuse the authorities and any skip-tracers the Kurlanskys might have hired long enough for the skies to clear. As we spoke Mike was driving his Hummer through northern Arizona and southern California with Charlotte's debit card, leaving a trail of ATM transactions and gasoline and sundry purchases that would keep any investigators busy for a while.

WE DROVE THE MIRAGE
up the mountain to Virginia City and arrived in midafternoon. It felt like it might snow. This was not a town you passed through on your way to anywhere. This was a destination, though not necessarily, we hoped, a final one. Virginia City seemed remote enough to be overlooked by sleuths, public or private, small enough to simplify Charlotte's obligatory vigilance, but not so small she couldn't blend immediately into the community of eager tourists, grizzled eccentrics, shopkeepers, artists, and artisans. We checked Charlotte into her room and walked out for a farewell meal. We found a place that served crispy pork bellies and medieval duck and had a fully stocked bar, and we knew Charlotte would be okay for a while. She told us that she had memorized her new Social Security number and had made up her family, the O'Malleys, in case anyone should ask.

Alice O'Malley grew up in Revere Beach, Mass. Her brothers
Tommy and Stephen were Massachusetts state troopers. Little brother John Jo was a Maryknoll priest, and was preaching the good word in the South Sudan. Her big sister Maureen had passed. Little sister Meg, the feisty one, was a flight attendant for United. Alice's dad's family hailed from County Mayo. Mom's family, the Mad Lomasneys, were from Cork. “I'm working on cousins now. The family's like a fisherman's sweater—large and tightly knit.”