Las Vegas Noir (23 page)
Raven and I had stopped working together, professionally, about a year and a half earlier. The jobs dried up for the big shows in town and I really didn’t want to work the ships. They weren’t my kind of crowds. They were looking for safe and I equated that with boring. At least doing what I was doing, hustling tourists to give them the “street magic experience,” gave me the opportunity to keep my close-up chops. Doing nothing but boxes on a cruise was death to me. Besides, the ships didn’t really approve of you laying a week’s salary on red. So I didn’t go and Raven quit being my assistant. We stopped seeing each other personally not long after. Seems I wasn’t fulfilling potential, was only hurting myself, and she was tired of supporting me and my bad habits.
That’s the thing about habits, though, everyone has them. And I was Raven’s. Just because we’d stopped dating didn’t mean she wasn’t available for a quick fuck whenever I was in the mood. We had something together neither of us had alone, and for her it was a driving force.
“Do you have an idea?” she asked without looking at me. She had made her way to the stage. It was the first time I’d seen her completely lit in months. She still took my breath away. Did I have an idea? There was a mattress propped against the wall behind the stage. It wasn’t clean but it was more comfortable than the floor.
“I might.”
Maybe she could hear my thoughts in my voice. Maybe she knew me as well as I thought I knew her. Maybe it was all part of the game we were both playing, but she turned and stared across the room at me. She smiled. A sad smile. “I like fresh sheets these days, remember? It’s not like it was.”
We’d been on that mattress more times than I could count. It was what we did during rehearsals, after shows, before breakfast. But she was right. It wasn’t like it was. She was in trouble and I was here to help. She wanted me to be her white knight, but I was rusty. I drained my beer. The right lubrication can ease any passage.
“Did you give back the diamonds?”
She looked at me like I was a black man at a Klan meeting.
Of course. Charon pegged her for the body, not the brains. I wanted to laugh. The layman realizes how little the illusionist actually does, though. The magician dances out his choreography while the assistant does all the work, squeezing and running and hiding while the props move around them. One false move and it’s the girl in the box who’s getting impaled while the magician wields the blade. “Charon didn’t know you took them.” It was the only explanation. “And he didn’t know anything else was gone.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a handmade velvet bag. I’d seen it before. She got it when she bought a necklace from a beach vendor in Santa Monica. She used it to keep her valuables.
“And now he knows either me or Paul has ’em and I’m sending you away?”
“You can have half.”
“I’m covered, thanks. I got what I was after.”
She turned toward the back door. “This was a mistake.”
I could have let her go. I could have let her walk out the door and face whatever was beyond it. That would have been the smart thing to do. “Wait.” I was never that smart.
She turned back, grateful. I didn’t move. She crossed the floor and into my arms, hugging me hard. I didn’t want to but I hugged back. It was a reflex. “Oh, Remy,” she whispered in my ear. “Thank you. I was so scared …” The words trailed off as I turned my head. Her fears melted into passion. Just another emotional outlet.
I lifted her up, her lips still locked with mine, and set her on the “Impaled” table. The floor would have been more comfortable. The bottom half of “Impaled” was the receptacle. Perched above it, Murphy-bed style, was a rack of sharp metal spikes. Real ones. It was part of the gag. The magician would prove the spikes were real while the assistant was being chained to the table. A light would be positioned behind her and a thin curtain in front, so the audience could see her struggling. There was a time limit, artificially imposed, something to add more drama to the situation. When the clock ran out, the spikes would fall, and if the girl was still there, well …
At just the right time, though, the light went out, the spikes fell, and the girl reappeared someplace else, safe and sound. It was foolproof. There was a safety catch so the spikes couldn’t fall if the girl was still chained up, and she had a foot switch to release the spikes when she was in position. It looked dangerous and evil. It was the kind of illusion I could never perform on a cruise.
It was a new prop in the warehouse and I’d never before used it for this purpose. It supported our combined weight nicely, creaking and groaning along as if it were an active participant in our lovemaking.
Afterwards, we lay there in each other’s arms, slowly becoming aware of the cold metal table beneath us. She laughed as I shivered.
“Can you really get me out of here?”
I held her face in my hands and looked directly into her eyes. “I’m gonna get us a blanket first.”
She laughed again when I rolled off the table. I bumped my hip as I got to my feet. I looked over at her. She was beautiful. For just this moment, it was like it was. I went into the front office to grab a blanket. Raven had rolled over, away from me, when I returned. She was still naked.
I stopped and looked at her, wishing she didn’t have to go away. But I knew there was no other choice. If she was still here it was dangerous for everyone involved.
As I approached the illusion I hit the foot release.
I made myself watch as the spikes came down.
She turned her head at the sound, but there was no chance to get out of the way. She didn’t even have time to scream. With an illusion, there’s no point in a slow death. Of the forty spikes, no more than six or seven hit her, but it was enough to do the job. The rest slid into their proper channels with a sickening metal-on-metal grate. The blood channels, built into the table for show, worked just like they were supposed to, draining the red flow away from her body and collecting it in a basin at the foot of the table.
I threw the blanket I was still holding over the whole mess. I got dressed before I retrieved the diamonds from her pants pocket. I had plans for the little beauties.
The blood was overflowing, dripping on the floor. The basin was never really meant to hold anything. I grabbed a rag to sop it up.
The back door opened. Pierre Charon stepped in, cell phone in his hand. “She called me.”
“When?” I asked, not looking up.
“Now.”
I went to the other side of the table and lifted the blanket. Her eyes were still open, still filled with shock and horror. Her cell phone was in her hand, the connection still open.
“She fingered you from the beginning.”
“It had to be one of us.”
“You made the right choice.”
I stood up and tossed the velvet bag to him. It was caught and pocketed in one motion. I was on my honor they were all there.
“We good?”
He looked from the bag in his hand to the dead body and back again. He had the diamonds and someone to blame for it. “We’re good,” he said.
“Now what?” I asked.
He tilted his head toward Eastern Boulevard. “Eden Memorial. We’ve cashed in a few favors.”
By the time the hole was filled, the sun was just beginning to rise. Sunrise in Las Vegas is something to behold, the way the rays reflect off the gold and brass of the Strip hotels. With no way to know from which direction the light is really coming, there’s no way to set your compass. I lit a cigarette and basked in its directionless glow.
People in other academic disciplines made fun of American Studies. The joke went: If you check “undecided” one too many times as your major, they put you down for American Studies. Ortiz was in his fifth year as a graduate student in American Studies, and he still hadn’t decided on a topic for his master’s thesis. He hoped Professor Philippe Talon, the ethnographer, might become his thesis advisor, but he’d have to impress the man in some unusual way to earn this honor.
Dr. Talon, a burly Belgian, was the author of numerous studies of aboriginal peoples throughout the Americas. Talon was fond of debunking other anthropologists’ accounts of the innate peacefulness of native peoples—to him, violence was a constant universal, and he was full of tales of aboriginal violence. Rumor had it that he had eaten human flesh with cannibals in the jungles of eastern Peru, that in Venezuela he had been forced to take part in a ritual castration of a Yanomami captive, and that he had fathered a child among a war-loving, Stone Age people in Brazil. Students who had been to his home reported seeing a shrunken head on his mantel. Ortiz had never spoken to him at length, though whenever the redoubtable professor happened to be in his office, and Ortiz happened to pass by, he invariably glanced in to behold the man buried among his papers and journals, his thick, blondhaired fingers stabbing at his keyboard, his neck spattered with the red tattoo of some indigenous ceremony he’d participated in in the Amazon rain forest.
In that fifth year of his graduate program, Ortiz decided to go to the annual convention of the American Culture Association. The ACA conference was the main gathering for the American Studies crowd. Ortiz believed a couple of days listening to panel discussions by eminent figures in his field might inspire him to finally decide on a thesis topic. If he got lucky, some of those people might invite him to a few after-sessions drinks; the thought caused him to nibble the ends of his long hair with excitement.
The conference was being held that year in Las Vegas at a hotel-casino on the Boulder Strip in East Las Vegas called ¡Viva!, a brand-new place with a Latin theme: dealers in sequined matador jackets, waitresses topped with fruit headdresses à la Carmen Miranda, that sort of thing. Ortiz had to go on his own nickel—his university would only pay for his trip if he were presenting a paper, which he wasn’t. But Las Vegas was just half a day’s drive from L.A., and he planned to stay at the Lucky Cuss, a cheap motel on the Boulder Strip not far from ¡Viva!
It had stormed in the Mojave that spring, and as he drove up I-15 the flowering desert spread vast and golden before him like the carpet of ¡Viva!’s casino floor, which he’d seen on an Internet virtual tour of the place. The air smelled fresh and washed, very unlike casino air, but he kept the windows of his vintage Mustang closed because his hair tangled easily.
His glossy black hair and high cheekbones occasionally led people to mistake him for an Indian. “Native,” he corrected them, and didn’t disabuse them of the notion. No doubt he did have Native blood, on his Latino father’s side. His mother was English, but his father’s people had been in California since the mission days, and their blood had surely commingled with that of some long-lost tribe. Even better, he might be kin to some still-existing group, one of these tiny tribes with its own casinos and whose members were all millionaires. Maybe he could take a DNA test to prove the connection. That would be something.
He drew his Vegas street map from his satchel—a satchel made of Moroccan leather, yet old and worn enough to be worthy of an academic—and smoothed it over his steering wheel. He liked studying things when he was driving long stretches—maps, articles, even books. He played a sort of game in which he kept his eyes on the text as long as he dared before snapping them back to the road. He found that while the danger often prevented him from immediately comprehending what he was reading, it had the strange effect of stamping the information photographically in his mind, and afterwards he could recall, in what psychologists called
anamnesis
, whole passages verbatim: a nifty trick for impressing colleagues.
The way to ¡Viva! was simple enough: Continue along I-15, then hang a right on Tropicana and keep going east to the Boulder Highway. ¡Viva! stood midway between Sam’s Town and the Lucky Cuss. Sam’s Town had an Old West theme, complete with something called a Western Emporium and a nightly laser show called the “Sunset Stampede.” Vegas! No wonder the American Culture Association loved meeting here.
He followed the directions he’d memorized and headed east on Tropicana, surprised at how run-down some of the neighborhoods became, jumbles of low-slung bungalows and mobile homes faded in the sun. Obviously not everybody in Vegas was a lucky cuss.
Curious about a particularly shabby-looking neighborhood, he hung a right onto a street with a paintball store on one corner and a liquor store on the other. He followed the winding street past some more trailers and a dried-up park. Going slow now—the street was full of potholes—he opened his window. The warm air carried odors of raw sewage, boiling corn, and burning rubbish. Farther along, a truly foul scent hit his nostrils and he saw a dead Chihuahua in the gutter, bloated to the size of a dachshund. He rolled his window up fast.
The street turned gravelly and petered out at a hodgepodge of trailers and cinder-block huts. In one area, the dwellings were arranged around a kind of courtyard, bare earth save for a dusty elm tree. A compact man dressed entirely in white squatted beneath the tree, hewing, with quick strokes of his machete, a length of wood. The blade of the machete was worn to a wicked thinness: It looked like a long dagger. Behind the man, half-hidden in a doorway, stood a young woman in a white dress colorfully embroidered at the square neckline, biting her knuckles, her black eyes following Ortiz. Two other men, also dressed in white, ducked ghostlike into a squalid alley and disappeared.
The squatting man looked up. Ortiz waved hesitantly, and the man raised his machete in an aggressive salute. Ortiz followed the line of the machete to its tip, and there, as if speared by the blade, he beheld ¡Viva!’s red neon sign, its letters curved into the shape of a chili pepper.
There didn’t seem to be any direct way through the wretched little neighborhood to the casino, so Ortiz headed back the way he’d come. But somehow he got turned around in the maze of dirt roads, and found himself driving in a circle. Once again he passed by the dusty square, and once again the young woman’s eyes followed him, and the man with the machete watched him too, this time without greeting. Ortiz clutched the steering wheel with both hands, and noticed that the hair on his arms had risen on end. The stench of the dead dog, and the heat, and the pounding brightness of the light made him want to puke.