I Don't Like Where This Is Going

by John Dufresne

  I asked Gene if he knew a sympathetic cop, one who might share info about Layla. He did not. I asked him about the girl from yesterday, the one weeping in the conference room. He told me they’d taken her to Refuge House but she left.

  He checked his watch, said he had a flash of lightning—a glass of Tanqueray—waiting for him at home. There was something subtly disharmonious about Gene that bothered me, but I couldn’t put my finger on which of his anomalous behaviors or features it might be. Whenever he sneezed, he sneezed exactly three times. Not a character flaw, of course, and neither were his ubiquitous plaid slacks and his Birkenstock nubuck clogs. He carried his right shoulder lower than his left. He wore aviator-style glasses with tinted lenses that were annoyingly crooked on his thin face. He had a graceless gait. His uncoordinated arms were alarmingly out of sync with his ungainly legs, resulting in a rather dissonant visual rhythm—two competing melodies making for one discordant marching song. Watching Gene walk was like trying to enjoy a dubbed movie—the lips are saying one thing, the voice another.

  Before Gene left, he handed me a file folder, labeled Abrel D’Arville. “Another unsolved mystery,” he said.

  Every weekday during his sixteen-plus years of marriage, save two weeks every July, Abrel D’Arville kissed his wife DeFonda goodbye at seven-thirty and drove to work at a small regional office of a large national insurance company, and every weekday evening at five-thirty, DeFonda met Abrel at the front door with a kiss and a smile. She’d take his briefcase and bring it to his office while he changed out of his gray suit, white shirt, and pebbled black Florsheims, and into his khakis, polo shirt, and Cordovan loafers. They’d enjoy a casserole dinner, and, if the weather was pleasant, a stroll through the neighborhood.

  The D’Arvilles were childless, petless, and serenely resigned to their cloistered solitude. As DeFonda described it, they lived in a suburban world of their own making that had not otherwise existed for decades except in old movies and TV reruns, the kind of world where a gentleman wore a suit to a cocktail party, stored his cigarettes in a monogrammed case, sat, leaning toward the conversation, in an upholstered chair, while his wife, in her strapless satin dress, sat on the arm of the chair and every now and then rubbed the back of her husband’s neck. When hubby raised his empty cocktail glass, she knew enough to refill his drink. Abrel didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and didn’t gamble, but sometimes, at home, he pretended he did.

  And then Abrel disappeared. This was around the time that severed feet were turning up all along the Gypsum Wash, so the police took immediate interest when DeFonda called to report him missing. Investigators were puzzled when they learned the large national insurance firm did not have a small regional office within two hundred miles of Las Vegas and did not have any Abrel D’Arville in its employ. That’s impossible, DeFonda said. I’ve called his office a thousand times. The local phone number she gave the cops was no longer in service.

  Yes, we had our little differences, DeFonda told the detectives. I was pie; he was cake. I was water; he was milk. I was fresh air; he was AC. I was romance; he was true crime. No, she said, she didn’t know anyone who would want to harm her husband. We weren’t close to many people. We had acquaintances, not any friends familiar enough to get worked up about some imagined insult.

  There were no federal or state income tax records for Abrel D’Arville. No area bank accounts in that name. There was no birth record for Abrel D’Arville in Moab, Utah, where he claimed to have been born. There were no sisters in Boulder. DeFonda wondered, if that was the case, then whom had she been speaking with every Christmas Eve over the years? When Abrel’s photo appeared in the Sun and on local TV stations, he was identified by multiple callers and online commenters as the man who spent his mornings at Sunset Park, sitting in his fold-out camp chair, reading a book under a mesquite tree. A waitress at Knockout Lunch in Henderson said he came in every day at twelve-thirty—you could set your watch by him—and ordered chicken and waffles, a side salad with ranch dressing, a slice of chocolate cake, and a glass of whole milk.

  Three days after Abrel went missing, the body of a man was found in a shallow grave in the desert west of the city. The victim’s spinal cord had been severed, and he may have been buried alive. The labels on his clothing had been removed. The dogs that had unearthed the body had done some damage to the lower extremities. Police found no matching dental records.

  The victim was identified by his clothing, the gray suit, the white shirt, his mongrammed initials ACD on the left cuff of the shirt, and by the pale but distinctive Lichtenburg figure on his left arm, a fractal fernlike scar left by a lightning strike two weeks earlier. The body belonged to Abrel D’Arville, but Abrel D’Arville didn’t exist. A mystery was solved; another was posed. Who killed the man who would be Abrel D’Arville, and why? Where did the man called Abrel get his money? Who was he? DeFonda said, Can you be married to a man who does not exist?

  I asked Petra, the available desk clerk at the Luxor, to ring up Layla Davis’s room. I told Petra she had beautiful eyes. She smiled and looked up from the computer screen. She’d been told that a thousand times, I knew. I asked her what color she called them. She said, Hazel. I said I had hazel eyes and they looked nothing like hers. I’d call yours chartreuse, maybe. She said they turned yellow when she wore green. She also told me that Layla Davis was not registered at the hotel. I said I knew she’d checked in Friday. Not according to our records, Petra said. She clicked her elegant magenta fingernail on the computer mouse and shifted her weight from one leg to the other. Are you sure you have the right hotel? I didn’t ask Petra about the recent suicide because I didn’t want her to lie to me. I asked where I could find the Lost and Found. She directed me to a computer and said there would be a form to fill out.

  I couldn’t describe the items Layla had left, of course. I wrote that the lost items were last seen in her room. I didn’t know the room number. I went back to the reception desk and asked a young man if I could speak to his supervisor. A Mr. A. Jones asked how he might help me.

  I explained that my sister Layla Davis left behind some items, and I was hoping to locate them in a real Lost and Found, not a virtual one. He said he’d see what he could do. And he clicked his pen and let it hover over a notepad. I told him she’d checked out in a hurry. Top floor. Not sure which room. He asked for an ID, and he noted the difference in our last names. I said Layla was married. Hubby was a reprobate. It was a long story. He said, I really can’t help you unless I have proof of your relationship. Then I showed him Layla’s photo and asked if there was any possibility he might look through the top floor’s security camera files for the last few days. I’m just so worried about her, I said. He said that would not happen, even if he wanted it to. I said, Why wouldn’t you want to? He said, Not my circus, not my monkeys. And then he told me there were no cameras in the hotel corridors. When I expressed disbelief, he said the only thing that needed protection was the money on the casino floor.

  I knew that somewhere in this hotel, in some locked storeroom, no doubt, might be everything that Layla had brought with her—the suitcase, clothing, toiletries, the clueful cell phone, a suicide note, perhaps. Answers! I needed a passkey. I walked up to a shampoo porter who was buffing the lobby floor and asked him how I could get a job in housecleaning. He said, Vienen cuando eres mexicano.

  Bay texted me a video of himself standing on the porch of Chicago Joe’s where he’d eaten lunch. He said he’d be at the Bellini Bar at the Venetian until five. And then he lifted up off the ground a foot or so, and then he vanished. He asked me how things were going at the Luxor. Bay always knows where I am or at least where my phone is. He’s got an app that can find me. So later I met him at the bar. He was drinking a blueberry lime rickey. I ordered an espresso martini.

  I said, “At first I was curious, now I’m pissed. The silence. The cover-up. Must mean something.”

  “Means business as usual around here.”

  I told Bay about Petra’s d
enial, about A. Jones’s disinterest, and about the hotel’s documented denial that Layla had ever been there. “They’re like the Soviets airbrushing undesirable enemies of the state from the propaganda photos, hoping the world will forget the former comrade’s existence.”

  “Nikolai Yezhov.”

  “Who?”

  “It worked. Chief of the Secret Police under Stalin.”

  “Or was he?” I told Bay I thought he was right. We didn’t see a suicide.

  Our waiter, Nevin, shook the cocktail shaker over his right shoulder and poured my drink with artful nonchalance. He patted his modified canary-yellow Skrillex hairdo and asked if that would be all for now. It would.

  I told Bay about Tristina M., a client of mine, who was twenty-one when she jumped off the Cypress Avenue Bridge and hit the foredeck of a passing Bimini yacht. She had come to me for help, and I had failed her. Tristina lived with her elderly grandmother, the only family she had. She dated a man, Ron Someone, who punched and slapped her in private, insulted her in public, who neglected her but was insanely jealous and controlling. She couldn’t or wouldn’t leave him. When I asked her what she got out of this malignant relationship, she said she got the chance to love someone. When I asked why she had come to therapy, she said to make herself worthy of Ron. Not in so many words, but that was the gist. She jumped, but he pushed. Her grandmother died a month later. I may be the only person alive who remembers Tristina, thinks about her. I still see Ron around Melancholy. He has a wife and two adorable daughters and a steady job at Home Depot. He grew up. Good for him. Tristina did not. I want to make sure Layla’s not forgotten. Maybe I think this . . . this investigation is my shot at redemption.

  “You’re so Catholic.”

  “Lapsed.”

  “The most dangerous kind,” Bay said. “Maybe we did see a suicide.”

  “I could live with that, but I have to be sure.”

  Bay smiled. “You’re going to get us in trouble, you know that.”

  “Maybe Blythe can be saved. Layla didn’t give up on her sister. We shouldn’t give up on her.” What I was thinking was how I gave up on Cam and how you don’t need a god to know that you must atone for your sins. “So now it’s also a rescue mission.”

  “And here’s something else for you to worry about. We’ve got sixty thousand honeybees in the eaves of our house.”

  “The hum!”

  Bay drew a deck of cards out of his cargo vest pocket—he was dressed, apparently, as a fly fisherman for this evening’s round of poker, all the better to distract his opponents—and shuffled them.

  I said, “How did you find them?”

  “I saw the honey melting down the wall out back.”

  “Did you call the landlord?”

  He nodded. “I had Arthur, the bee guy, out for an assessment.” Bay spread the cards in front of him on the bar. “He told me that all honeybees in Las Vegas are Africanized.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “One sting won’t kill you, but fifteen might.” Bay told me to pick a card, any card.

  I slid one card halfway out of the deck, slipped it back in, and chose another. He flipped the spread deck over, so I could see they were ordinary playing cards. He turned my card over: a joker. The little jester in motley clothes and belled shoes held a fool’s scepter and strutted across the back of a flying honeybee. Bay said, “The TV reporter.”

  “Who?”

  “He knows about her death—he found out who she was. Call him.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  Bay found the Channel 14 website and showed me a photo of Elwood Wingo. He said the bee removers would be by in the morning. “Arthur likes his coffee black. And you can take the car home. I’m playing through the night.”

  AT HOME I GOOGLED Kiernan Carlisle and found her 2008 obituary. I learned that she was “a loving sister, daughter, aunt, and friend to all that knew her,” that she was “unique, special, intelligent, and compassionate,” and that she was “taken too early.” I was not told how she was taken. I found out how in a related article from the Lincoln Ledger out of Star City. She had been strangled in her own condominium in Las Vegas. Police were investigating. A neighbor who knew Kiernan “about as well as anyone can know an exotic dancer,” and who requested anonymity, said, “I’m going to get me a gun permit tomorrow.”

  THE BEES HUMMED like a Tesla coil. I made a small pile of Kitty Yums for Django by the kitchen table. He ran across the kitchen and slid into them. Back on the Internet I learned that jumping from a high place was only the seventh most effective way to kill yourself, just after stepping in front of a train and just before exsanguination. I read my book (To the Wedding) till I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I got into bed, put on my sleep mask, stuffed in my earplugs, and stretched out under the covers. Django hopped up on my chest, stuck his wet, cold nose under mine to see if I was breathing. I’ve had insomnia since I was a kid. Cam, up on the top bunk, slept like the dead. My frustrated father once whispered in my ear, “Why won’t you sleep, honey?” I said I didn’t want to sleep because I didn’t want to be alone. And nothing has changed.

  4

  WHAT WOULD SLEEP be without a monster lurking in the dark?

  I was wrong, of course, to think I ever slept alone. Every night the people I unconsciously contrived visited me in dreams, and last night’s dreams were uniformly distressing. In one, I made several annoyingly shy toddlers weep by asking them hideously avuncular questions like, What is your favorite subject in school? and, What do you want to be when you grow up? My words were met with mute disdain, but I wanted them to like me so badly that I felt compelled to impart some palliative wisdom that they might groove on. Children, I said, be bright in your lavish youth because time darkens everything. And that’s when one sobbing boy bit his lip, shut his eyes, and told me I was stealing his childhood.

  I woke when I heard the bee wranglers setting up their ladders and estimating the gallons of honey they’d harvest from this job. I tried to remember which Renaissance artist it was who first proffered the artistic and philosophical advice I’d inflicted on the children in the dream. After I’d dressed, I e-mailed Elwood Wingo, the TV reporter, explaining who I was and why I wanted to speak with him. He answered immediately and told me to meet him at a certain food truck parked on Fremont at noon. Bay came home from his long and successful night at the tables with breakfast burritos, Bloody Marys, and a lovely young woman named Mercedes Benz. I made coffee and set the table. “Your name,” I said.

  “My father had a droll sense of humor,” Mercedes told me.

  I passed on the Bloody Mary.

  “He was so droll my mother left him and joined a cult.”

  I said, “Which?”

  “Branch Davidians. She took me with her.”

  “Waco.”

  “We had been disfellowshipped by that time. When Koresh started raising the dead, Mom packed our bag. We took the bus to Colorado City, Arizona, and Mom married an FLDS Mormon with three other wives and two mentally retarded sons. One of the wives was fourteen.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twelve.”

  Django brushed up against Mercedes’s leg. I refreshed our coffees. She lifted Django to her lap, and he allowed her to scratch him under the chin.

  I said, “Were you worried you’d be next at the altar?”

  “Yes, but by then my whimsical father had come to rescue me, and we moved here to Vegas. I went to school for the first time.”

  Django looked deeply into Mercedes’s eyes and bit her finger. She said, “He’s a naughty boy.”

  One of the bee wranglers whooped. He’d located the queen. In ancient Egypt, a man like Arthur was called the Sealer of Honey. The harvesting of honey began in Lower Egypt in first dynasty, and the pharaoh was called the Bee King, and Osiris was worshipped in the Mansion of the Bee. Mercedes tapped Django’s nose and told him, “No!” He sprang from her lap and shot off for the living room, but slid into the cab
inet beneath the sink making his turn. He just lay there like he’d meant to do it, dignity intact. Mercedes said her mom was still in Colorado City and had four other children whom Mercedes had never met. Her dad, she said, was a nomad. He called every few months. Last call came from Alberta. He keeps drifting farther north. The cold seems to comfort him.

  Mercedes worked as a waitress at Yardbird Southern Table at the Venetian and shared an apartment in Spring Valley with another waitress. She took creative writing classes at UNLV. I said I’d clean up. Bay said we should all meet for dinner. Seven-thirty at Emeril’s at the Grand. They bade me farewell and headed off to bed. I hoped Django wasn’t in Bay’s room bothering them. I called for him. He wasn’t answering. I took out a can of sardines. Nothing like the sound of the can leaving the drawer to get Django’s attention. Before I even snapped the tab on the sardines, there he was purring like mad and rolling on his back at my feet. I gave him a treat instead.

  ELWOOD RECOMMENDED THE EGG burger and the duck-fat garlic fries. And the lobster mac and cheese. To die for. And the zucchini fritters. Ambrosial. And the bacon-fried rice. I ordered the burger, the shitake flan, and a bottled water; Elwood, the burger, fries, and a Diet Dr Pepper. He excused himself, answered a call on his cell, walked to the row of six empty newspaper vending machines, and leaned back against the Las Vegas Weekly. He put a finger in his unoccupied ear. Elwood was a large young man with small hands, long ears, orthopedic shoes, and snaggled bottom teeth. The sign on the grim-looking hotel/casino at the corner read $2 BLACKJACK $1 CRAPS. This unsightly stretch of the Fremont East District was sun-bleached and deserted except for the occasional solitary pedestrian slouching his way toward Binion’s Horseshoe. Elwood apologized for the interruption—his handyman had run into a problem with the porch repair.

  We carried our food to the shaded Eighth Street bus stop shelter, sat on the uncomfortable metal seats, and ate our lunches off our laps. The burger was so damn good I wanted to put a runny fried egg on top of everything. Elwood flashed his eyebrows and smiled. “Told you.”