I Don't Like Where This Is Going (5 page)

Why had Donny been able to go on when Cam and Layla could not? Cam had been variously diagnosed as bipolar, as borderline schizophrenic, as having delusional disorder symptoms and substance dependence. I could see that he was often anxious and more often depressed. He was unable to get outside himself. The
pain demanded all of his attention. Donny had some interest in and curiosity about the world outside himself and that saved him, I think. He understood he was not alone. Had Layla been depressed? Anxious? Had she come to feel helpless? Maybe there were some clues among her personal affects. If I could only get to them.

I felt a buzzing in my pants, reached for my cell phone, and came away with a pink-eared mouse with a bell at the end of its tail. And then I grabbed the phone. Bay wanted to know where I was. I looked up. “The National Atomic Testing Museum.”

“Wait there. I'll pick you up in ten.”

On the drive back to the house, Bay said that he'd been disarmed by a waitress he'd met at the casino, and I thought, So that's today's theme—one-armed bandits. He told me to close my eyes for an experiment. He was going to ask me to inhale a fragrance. “Don't describe the smell,” he said. “Just tell me what image pops into your head.” I shut my eyes. He handed me a small bottle and told me to unscrew the cap. I sniffed and sneezed. I said, “Loomis. I see Loomis, the nail-biting security guard at the Luxor.”

“Do you know why you saw Loomis?”

“No.” I looked at the label on the cologne bottle. Prada's Infusion d'Homme.

“Sillage—the trail left in the wake of the wearer. When Loomis jabbed you in the chest, waves of that noxious scent rolled off his arm. It was like he soaked his jacket in it.”

I sniffed again. Fatty, waxy, like a soapy musk. A smell I somehow hadn't noticed at the time of our altercation. But my olfactory neurons had. What we smell we remember, even if we don't remember smelling it.

Bay told me he was going to play a song on the CD player. He said, “Close your eyes and tell me what you see.”

The resolute music throbbed out of the speakers, and I saw
Layla's broken body on the hideous carpet. “What the hell is that dreadful noise?”

“Techno Muzak. Donna Summer's ‘I Will Go with You.' The tune the model with the luxury car was dancing to when Layla fell.”

So now I knew what I hadn't remembered smelling or hearing. What hadn't I remembered seeing? And what trigger might bring that back?

Bay said he'd gotten a call from our friend Charlotte. Her Yorkie Henry had gallstones. An ultrasound confirmed it. He was on all kinds of meds and antibiotics and was scheduled for exploratory surgery. Charlotte had taken a waitressing job at the fish camp in Immokalee where we all spent our last evening together. I should tell you about her.

3

C
HARLOTTE EDGE UNDERSTOOD
that confession needed to be a part of her new life, and she was ready, if not eager, to disclose her sins when Bay, Patience, and I, three desperate fools, stumbled into what had been her quiet world on this past Easter Sunday morning. We were trying to steal her Lincoln Town Car. She objected. We explained our harrowing circumstances, and when Bay flashed a clever facsimile of an Eden Police Department badge, Charlotte handed him the keys and hopped into the passenger seat with her very agitated lapdog, Henry VIII. Bay drove us away from the mayhem on the beach and away from the local law enforcement authorities, who had unfinished business with the two of us, regarding a police department death squad, Ponzi scheming lawyers, several gruesome murders, corrupt public officials, and both the Italian and Russian mobs, but that's a story for another time. Patience and I sat in the backseat wishing we were anywhere else but here, like in Peru, I was thinking, visiting the Uros people on their floating reed islands in Lake Titicaca. Far away from here.

Charlotte closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. Henry whined and licked her face. She asked us if she was in trouble for
what she had done . . . for what had happened . . . to Mr. Kurlansky. Bay's eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. He raised his brow and shook his head like,
What's going on?
Bay's not an actual cop, Patience said. Bay held up the badge and made it vanish. Charlotte bit her lip and wept. Patience leaned forward and told Charlotte that I was a therapist for real, an accomplished listener. Charlotte looked at me. I nodded. Patience touched Charlotte's shoulder. Henry settled himself on Charlotte's lap. Charlotte took a restorative breath and told three strangers the story that no one but Henry had ever heard until then, a story of her sustained emotional and physical abuse at the hands and fists of the brutal Mr. K., a story of assault and degradation, of years of vicious humiliation and exhausting pain, all of which ended quite suddenly with his fall from a seaside cliff on a moonless night in Mendocino. “One minute he was squeezing my shoulders, shaking me, threatening me, and the next he was gone.”

I told Charlotte she had nothing to worry about.

Patience shouldn't have said, but said, “Some motherfuckers need killing.”

Charlotte said, “I didn't—”

Bay said, “Amen.”

Charlotte said she had no idea why she put up with it all those years, why she didn't leave. How had she allowed herself to become irretrievable and pathetic and imprisoned?

I said, “Why don't you begin with the day you met Kurlansky.”

Patience handed Charlotte a tissue, arranged a lock of Charlotte's damp hair over her ear.

Charlotte told us that the story started before that. Way before. “First you need to understand the foulness I was coming from.”

And as Bay drove on deep into the Everglades, and with Henry curled and snuffling on her lap, Charlotte told us the unexpurgated
story of her once-shattered life, and of her eventual triumph over squalor and misery, over self-pity and malice, and as she spoke, the heaviness in her heart was lifted, and the scales of shame and secrecy fell from her eyes, and she glimpsed a resplendent future ahead.

We ended up at Fatty Goodenough's Fish Camp close to Immokalee, and we were famished. Our waitress wore a T-shirt that read
PUBLIX EXPLOITS FARMWORKERS.
We ordered and ate piles of gator tail, catfish, frog legs, and hush puppies and washed it all down with swamp water cocktails. Henry ate the scraps and drank water from his plastic bowl under our picnic table. We told Charlotte about the sunrise wedding we'd attended that morning and the gun battle that ended the ceremony. Charlotte thanked us, gathered herself, and asked if there was anything
we
were ashamed of.

Patience said, “Stealing a car.”

“But I gave you the keys.”

“Not this car,” she said. “I was young and foolish and in love with a bad boy.”

Bay said he once left a woman at the altar.

I said, “My twin brother lost himself in drug addiction, and I tried to help him, until I got too angry, and I stopped trying, and then he died.”

And so we talked and smiled and told each other tall tales about close calls and lucky breaks, and we drank the heart right out of a fine Easter Sunday afternoon.

BAY PUFFED ON
his vaporette between sips of coffee. Django sat in the chair between Bay and me at the kitchen table, waiting for one of us to turn his head and leave his breakfast plate unguarded. I told him I knew what he was up to. He closed his eyes so I'd disappear. Bay said he'd heard from his friend Julie at the Wade
Detective Agency in Memphis, and we'd had a bit of luck. Layla Davis was Julie's client.

Bay said, “Julie Wade called me after she got my text and after she'd called the Clark County coroner, Vegas Metro, and all the area hospitals. This was the first she'd heard about the death, and no one she called had anything to say to her on or off the record. Layla had hired Julie to find her sister Blythe, and Julie had traced Blythe to Vegas.”

Bay wiped his fingers and opened his laptop. Django laid himself down on the keyboard. I lifted him off. Bay opened an attached file on Julie's e-mail and read. Layla was born and raised in Monroe, Louisiana. A beloved older brother, Kyle, was killed in a water-skiing accident when he was in high school, and the tragedy sent the family into a tailspin. The father, Alton, eventually quit his job at the paper mill, abandoned his wife and daughters, and found himself a more sanguine family in Carthage, Texas.

Layla was salutatorian of her graduating class at Neville High School and earned a scholarship to Centenary College. Her sister Blythe, seven years younger, got mixed up with rednecks and crystal meth, lost all of her friends, some of her memory, six of her teeth, twenty-three pounds, her muscle tone, the sharpness in her motor coordination, the luster and elasticity of her skin, and the will to live a productive and examined life. When their mother, Mary Grace, died of emphysema and the bank foreclosed on the house, Blythe moved to Memphis to live with Layla. She went through detox a second time, and it took. And then she did thirteen weeks in rehab and went to a meeting every day for ninety days, got her teeth reconstructed, and seemed to have begun her second act. But when life with a steady job, an orderly and unsullied home, a devoted sister, and trustworthy friends proved unsatisfying, Blythe, like her daddy before her, vanished. That was a year
and a half ago, and that's when Layla called Julie. Julie was certain that Layla was not suicidal. But then you never really know what's going on inside people, do you?

Bay said, “Julie would appreciate knowing anything we can find out about either sister. She was hired to find Blythe and get her the help she needed, and she wants to finish the job.”

“Sounds like we're deputized.”

“If Layla didn't kill herself, then someone else killed her.”

“The plot thickens.”

“Tell me something. Why have you been so preoccupied with her death?”

“Because Loomis told me not to be.”

“He didn't say a word.”

“Because the media has pretty much ignored it, and that means, or might mean, that something dire and volatile has happened right before our eyes.”

“Or something unfortunate happened which, if people found out, would be bad for business.”

“How did Julie trace Blythe to Vegas?”

“Lied to creditors and banks, probably. Slogged through arrest records and mug shots. That would tell her Blythe was back on the streets and back on drugs. Blythe's last known address was the Lucky Boy Motel on East Bonanza, but that was a year ago.”

“When do we start?”

“We already have.”

“What do we do next?”

“It would be nice to find her suitcase. Her phone. Whatever she carried with her.”

Bay's phone tweeted, and he slipped it out of his pocket.

I said, “Who is it?”

“Little Bob.” Little Bob was Bay's dad.

“Where's he at these days?”

“Flaubert, South Dakota. Twenty men in the town and three are sex offenders.”

“What's he doing there?”

“He followed a woman home from Pierre. He only texts when he needs money.” Bay opened the text message and shook his head.

“What?”

“He thinks he got that gal in trouble.”

“How old is he now?”

“Old enough to know better.”

“Seventy . . . ?”

“Four.” Bay sent Little Bob a reply and set the phone on the table. “You never stop worrying about them.”

Layla played viola, devoured the novels of Anthony Trollope and the stories of Alice Munro. She had a weakness for Gus's fried chicken, but then, as Julie noted, who doesn't? She loved the music of Tigran Mansurian, especially “. . . and then I was in time again.” She kept a framed photo on her desk at work of her family in happier days at a picnic on the bayou, all five of them on lawn chairs, biting down on deviled eggs.

I said, “Why would she come all the way to Vegas to find her sister and then kill herself?”

“Maybe what she found was very bad news.”

But now I was thinking that suicide seemed less likely. Suicide is not about ending a life but about ending the pain. Layla's pain would have been relieved with the knowledge of her sister's whereabouts. Hope is a universal analgesic.

While Bay drove me to the Crisis Center, rolling a silver dollar over his knuckles in one hand and steering the car with the other, I called the cops—Las Vegas Metro—and asked the woman who answered for information on Layla and/or Blythe Davis.

She said, “And they are?”

I explained that Layla had died quite violently at the Luxor the day before last—you might have seen it on the news, I said (she hadn't)—and Layla might have been here in town looking for her little sister who had an addiction problem and would likely have been familiar to the police.

She said, “Are you a lawyer?”

“I'm not.”

“Reporter?”

“Nope.”

“What are you?”

That sounded like a trick question.

She said, “What's your relationship to these women?”

“I'm a concerned citizen.”

“I'm not authorized to provide information to the curious.”

“Can I speak with your supervisor?”

“This isn't Kmart, sir.”

“What if I had said I was a lawyer?”

She said, “Then I would have told you to send in a written request,” and hung up.

KENNETH WHEELER, TWENTY-SIX,
single, and a clerk at the Smarty's on South Durango, was last seen by his neighbors on Wednesday, parking his Celica in the condo's parking lot on West Sahara. Jimmy Hecker of Jacksonville, Florida, was staying a week with an uncle in Henderson. He stepped into a cab outside the Bellagio just before midnight on March 31 and had not been seen or heard from since. I was reading through the missing persons reports at the Crisis Center. The phones were quiet; the anemic coffee tasted slightly of cauliflower. Tejuana Figueras sent an e-mail to
her aunt Kiki from her room at the Motel 6 on Dean Martin and then vanished—six weeks ago. And then an item from the morning newspaper: The remains of fifteen prostitutes were discovered in a mass grave in the Moapa Valley. The women, in some cases girls, had gone missing over the course of four years. Here's a voice mail I listened to:
My friend Anthony checked into the El Mirador last week, but he and none of his belongings are in his room. Anthony is mental! And without his meds he is a danger to himself and could be easily taken advantage of by others, and the cops don't give two shits. Help me find Anthony please!
And there was a number to call.