I Don't Like Where This Is Going

by John Dufresne

  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

  CHARLOTTE 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 produc
tive 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.

  Gene Woodling saw what I was up to, sat down at the next phone, picked up the Sun, stared at the driver’s license photos of the fifteen victims found in the Moapa Valley, and said, “I’ve thought a lot about the girls who die in Vegas.” He stared up at the map of Clark County over our desks and said, “They were the prom queens, the cheerleaders, the soloists on their dance teams, the female leads in the drama club’s production of Our Town. They come from Sioux Falls or Kamloops or Charlottesville or Walla Walla.”

  I asked Gene where he was from.

  “Star City, Arkansas.”

  “And you knew a girl like this?” I said.

  “Kiernan Carlisle.” For a moment he took off his glasses, covered his eyes, and drifted away. “One day our beautiful girl realizes—because the evidence is all around her—that the very best life she can hope for in her humble hometown is a solid marriage to a handsome and dependable professional from a respectable family; a storybook home in a leafy neighborhood; a couple of captivating and dutiful children; membership at the country club; and a torrid, brief, regrettable, but unforgettable affair with the husband of a friend. But it’s the image of herself at the country club having drinks under an umbrella on the patio with the rest of the ladies after a Tuesday afternoon doubles tennis match that depresses her. She sees herself in a sky-blue T-shirt that reads PLAY. WIN. LUNCH., a flouncy yellow Stella McCartney tennis skirt that’s feeling a little tight, and a leopard-skin visor. What are her exquisite good looks and seductive charm good for if all she can look forward to is the depleted American Dream and the inevitable weight gain? Her depression turns to panic; the panic ignites her flight response, and she catches the first plane to Vegas.”

  I said, “You really have thought a lot about this.”

  He raised his eyebrows and held up a finger—not finished! “She checks into an unembellished motel—it’s tiny but at least it’s cleanish—freshens up, slips on her vampiest black stretch velvet dress and the red sling-back pumps, and sets off to find herself a local boyfriend at one of the flashier casinos. Boyfriends in Vegas are like fire ants at a picnic. She sits at the bar,
orders a Cosmo, flips her hair, and waits. She knows she’s going to change her name but she’s not sure to what. Either Lacey, Jade, or Rhiannon. She takes a selfie with her phone and texts it to her friend Rita back home. Digging the life, she writes.

  “The boyfriend she meets has single-karat diamond studs in both his ears, a black Movado watch, white K-Swiss Classics, and red ankle socks that match his red silk T-shirt. His cargo shorts are gold-stitched denim, his hair is roached; his eyes are blue and dreamy. He used to wear Oakleys, but now he wears Ray-Bans. He drives a Jag, or someday he will. His name is TJ or Markus or Fadeproof, and it’s not long before he’s taking Lacey shopping for threads and bling at the Palazzo and escorting her to all the best shows in town: Celine, Shania, Donny and Marie. He rents her a tastefully furnished apartment in Sunrise and buys her a shih tzu she names Bianca. They make love every night he’s free. He’s coy about his employment. He’s in the entertainment business, he tells her, and squeezes her ass. She gets a facial, a body wrap, and a sugar scrub every Saturday at the spa at the Four Seasons. She’s over the moon, she texts Rita: he says he has a friend who’s dying to meet her.

  “She’d do anything for Markus. She owes him, doesn’t she? Soon she’s giving the visiting radiologist from St. Louis the whole girlfriend experience; she’s going down on the prosecuting attorney from Sacramento; getting nasty with the handsome and dependable professional from a respectable family with the wife and two kids and the country club membership.”

  I asked Gene if he had followed Kiernan to Vegas, if he had stopped looking for her.

  He said, “How does she die? Let me count the ways,” and tallied on his fingers. “Addiction. AIDS. Assault. Suicide. Betrayal. A misunderstanding. A miscalculation. Her john’s a psychopath. She decides to go solo and Markus finds out.”