The Final Country (24 page)

Except the pack of his silent, swarthy foreign partners. And his aunt, who still lived with him on Almadura, his ranch estate that took up more of Gatlin County than Tom Ben owned. Lomax had all the money in his part of the world but for some reason he never explained, he wanted more, he wanted Tom Ben’s ranch, wanted to develop the last large piece of open land in the county. Maybe it was simply greed, maybe just madness. He seemed to have no other vices, except for beautiful women and having his way like a spoiled child. He didn’t drink and there had never been even a rumor of drugs in his life. After the death of his first wife, Hayden had dallied and married and divorced several actresses and models and heiresses over the years. About three years was the usual length of their stay, but he had been married to Sylvie for almost seven.

Sylvie Catherine Bessiere had arrived at the University of Texas with an American passport and a transcript and diploma from a boarding school in Marseilles, which had since closed its doors. She was allowed to register provisionally as a first-year graduate student in French, but at such a late date it suggested to Carver D that some sort of regent or alumni pressure had been applied. She met Hayden Lomax at the dedication ceremony for an athletic dormitory annex bearing his name. Sylvie hadn’t bothered withdrawing from the university. They were married the next weekend. A few months later Sylvie’s crippled French aunt joined Alma at the ranch, one big happy family. Or so it seemed.

Access to information about the big happy family was tightly controlled, Carver D wrote — when they left the estate they traveled like royalty: closed limos, private airplanes, and a phalanx of bodyguards — but neither Hayden nor Sylvie were particularly circumspect about their sexual liaisons. Although a persistent rumor insisted that they had agreed not to see just one other person at a time, thus preventing the complications of infatuation or romance. For people like that, I supposed, it made a perverse sense.

I had been going to Vegas for various things for thirty years. Foolishness, mostly — gambling, whoring, that sort of thing — and I also had married my fourth wife there on a cocaine toot almost twenty years before, one of my several marriages in which the divorce seemed to take longer than the marriage. Except for my second wife, who had died in a car wreck with four sailors on a mountain curve outside Susanville, California, it seemed all my divorces were like that. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I stopped getting married. Eventually. And I seemed to have stopped gambling about the same time, too. I had heard that the new corporate Vegas — which was as unfamiliar to me as if I had never been there — was just as sharp, shifty, and greedy as the old one but not quite as friendly. I rented a Mustang convertible at the airport, then checked into one of the less expensive Strip hotels, a faux-stucco castle not too far from Molly Molineaux’s address, using the Malvern ID, hoping to lose myself in the crowd of nickel slots players.

During a room service meal and a couple of beers, I skimmed the classified ads, found a 10mm Glock 20 for sale — a pistol I didn’t particularly like — called the number, slipped into a pair of thin leather gloves, then drove into a bedroom neighborhood beyond the UNLV campus, where I paid an out-of-work pit boss as much cash as he wanted without dickering for the pistol, a nylon holster, and three loaded clips. Judging from the man’s shaking hands and sweating face, the cash would be up his nose before I got back to the hotel. I found a twenty-four-hour auto parts store, bought a can of Armor All, then went back to the room, broke the piece down, unloaded the clips, and sprayed every surface that might hold a fingerprint. Often, buying a pistol in America is easier than buying drugs. I wondered if perhaps it shouldn’t be the other way around. Then I packed the pistol, the fake ID, the cocaine, and my badge into a briefcase, dropped the briefcase at the desk to be locked in the hotel’s safe, then drove through the sparkling electrical night into the soft dark of the desert to call Betty on the scrambled cell phone.

“I’m at Cathy’s,” she explained when she answered. “The ranch house, it seemed so … I don’t know,” she said. “Lonesome, maybe.”

“I hope I haven’t ruined your lifestyle by taking you out into the world,” I said, then chuckled.

But she didn’t. “It’s a goddamned wild-goose chase,” she said seriously. “That’s what’s ruining
our
lives. Where are you staying?”

“I’ll probably be moving around,” I said. “Take your time on the way out here, love. Take I-10 to Phoenix, then go north to I-40, cross at Bullhead City, then check into the Golden Nugget in Laughlin, and call me on the scrambled cell phone. I’ll meet you there.”

“And just how fucking long am I supposed to wait?” I could almost hear her foot tapping on the other end of the connection.

“Trust me. I’ll be there.”

“Trust you?” she said. “Ha. Isn’t that a little far out of town?”

“We’ve had a lot of luck so far,” I said. “There’s no need to push it. I don’t want you in Vegas until I’m sure what’s going on.”

“Remember, cowboy, you don’t do a single goddamned thing until I’m there,” she said. “Just look around, all right?”

“Trust me,” I repeated.

“I sure as hell hope I can,” she said, sounding very far away, “I feel very goddamned left out.” In the background I could hear Willie Nelson singing the opening bars of “Redheaded Stranger.”

“And tell Cathy to kiss my ass,” I said, but Betty didn’t laugh, so I hung up.

* * *

The next morning, though, my luck ran out big-time. Molly Molineaux’s address was one of those chain mailbox drop and packing outfits instead of an apartment complex, and on a busy street, not exactly a place I could stake out without drawing the attention of the local police. So I took myself down to the police station like a good little boy. It took two hours to work my way past a bored desk sergeant, a surly lieutenant, and into the office of a deputy chief, a tall, thin man named G. Donald Willow, with drooping jowls and wispy hair. Somebody once told me that when you meet a man who uses an initial in front of his name, you should at the very least lock up the hen house. And not because you’re worried about him stealing the eggs. Even a sardonic smile didn’t lift his wattles as he tossed my license back to me. I hadn’t used my badge because I didn’t want anybody in Gatlin County to know where I was in case Willow checked.

“Okay, partner,” he drawled. “What the hell do you want?”

“Well, sir, I wanted to let the local law enforcement know that I was in town,” I said. “I’m looking for a skip,” I added even though I suspected it was already a lost cause.

“If you’ve got a name and address and a warrant,” Willow said, “I’ll have him picked up.”

“All I have is a picture and places he sometimes hangs out,” I said.

“Degenerate gambler?”

“That’s what his boss says.”

“No criminal charges involved?”

“No, sir. The boss is his brother-in-law. He just wants him back.”

Willow looked out the window into a desert sunshine as thin as his hair. “I just love you out-of-town assholes. Do you have any idea how many of you creeps show up every day,” Willow said. “If you had a bail-jumping warrant, maybe, instead of a license that means as much to me as a sheet of used toilet paper, I might give you permission to hang around my town. But being as how you’re some low-rent peeper without a warrant, my advice for you is to gather up some local licensed professional help.”

“I’m sorry?” I said, confused.

“Hire yourself a licensed private investigator here in town,” Willow said, handing me a card, “because if I catch you on the street — loitering, shadowing, or spitting — you’ll spend your Vegas vacation in a holding cell. But you probably called it the drunk tank back in the old days.”

I started to tear up the card and toss it on the desk, and tell the asshole something about the old days, but I swallowed my anger, glanced at the card, and stuffed it in my pocket. J. Michael Fresno, Investigations. Another one.

“Well, thanks for your advice,” I said, then left, figuring to take my chances on my own.

* * *

I stopped at the hotel, checked out, picked up the briefcase, and found a gun locker where I could stash the briefcase and the phones. Then I drifted down the Strip until I found a suite with a Jacuzzi at one of the more expensive hotels, where I checked in, threw my war bag on the bed, and went to work. I didn’t have any interest in subcontracting my case to some other PI but I hoped that if I hired a cab and some help it would pay my dues into the local economy. So I gave the doorman a fifty-dollar tip and asked him to find me an independent cab or car service that would be on call twenty-four hours a day. With a driver who only answered to himself. Or almost only to himself, as it turned out.

The first car was driven by the doorman’s cousin, and the second two by guys with heavy beards and the superficial politeness of ex-cons, so I declined. Then a perfectly maintained shiny black classic Buick Invicta station wagon with heavily tinted windows pulled under the hotel’s portico. “Red’s Car Service/The Last of the True Independents” was lettered on the side. The doorman waved it toward me. As the Buick stopped in front of me, I opened the front passenger door. But somebody was already in the front seat.

“Excuse me,” I said as I climbed into the back.

“No, excuse me, please,” the shadowy figure said with a soft elegant voice, then turned to offer a gloved hand. “I’m Mrs. Eileen McCravey, and this is my son, Craig, who prefers the unfortunate sobriquet, ‘Red.’” Mrs. McCravey was as tall and darkly majestic as an Ashanti queen — so much so that I nearly kissed her hand — but her son’s face was as white as the Nevada sun except for a faint trace of freckles across his cheeks and a pair of sunglasses that were large and dark. A vague notion of pink nestled at the roots of his white kinky hair that poked out from under his soft cap. Even sitting on a pillow, Red was almost short enough to see under the steering wheel, and he had padded extensions on the pedals. I introduced myself to the McCraveys as politely as if they were long-lost family.

“How’s it hangin’, man,” the driver said, holding out a palm to be tapped lightly, then he handed me a card. “Doorman says you looking for a long-term investment in car time. You making a movie or what?”

“Or what, more likely,” I said as I placed ten hundred-dollar bills in Red’s hand. If this notion was going to work, I wanted it to work quickly. I had to trust somebody. “I’m looking for a woman.”

“That ain’t my style, man,” Red said stiffly, glancing at his mother.

I dug out my PI license and showed it to them. “A long-time stakeout, then maybe a long time tailing. Let me know when this runs out.”

Red handed the money back to his mother. “She your wife? Or she steal your money?”

“More like my pride,” I said. “She set me up to be killed.” I had no reason to be candid with this strange couple, but perhaps it was easy to be honest with them because they seemed so odd, as far outside the norm as I was.

“Killed, man? That’s cold. You gonna pop her?” Red asked.

Mrs. McCravey gave her son a hard look and a sardonic moue, then folded the bills and stuffed them into her purse. “Thank you, sir. And please forgive my son for his curious candor. He’s both cynical and excitable.”

“Whooee, that’s me, man. The excitable cynic,” Red said. “You mind if I drop my Mom off before we go to work?”

“Not a bit. It’s a pleasure to ride in a classic station wagon big enough to be a hearse.”

“Hell, man, it’s big enough to live in,” Red said.

As we drove down the Strip toward downtown, Mrs. McCravey continued, “We’re at your service, sir. The cards have been remarkably unkind for several weeks now.”

“She’s a professional poker player,” Red said proudly, “with a Ph.D. in economics from Wharton. So she knows her numbers, man. Me, I’m more a people person. I ain’t into numbers. Not like she is.”

“Actually, it was just a master’s,” she explained. “And a long time ago. When I tried to go to work on the Street, my race and my gender seemed an insurmountable problem. Or if surmountable, certainly not worth the effort on my part. So I went back to Detroit and another sort of life altogether. Then moved down here on the arm of a second-rate Sammy Davis wannabe.” She paused, smiling like a woman who had enjoyed this other sort of life as well as she could. “Mr. Milodragovitch — is that right? — have you been in the investigation business for a long time?” she asked.

“Except for forays into the bar business, I’ve been a PI since I got out of law enforcement thirty years ago,” I told her.

“But you have no Texas in your accent.”

“Texas is a fairly new vice,” I admitted. “I grew up in Montana. Meriwether.”

“You must have known Big John Reynolds?” she said.

“Sure. John owned the game at the Slumgullion, where I made my first foray behind the stick. He and my father were cronies. I can’t remember when I didn’t know John.”

“I played against him a few times down here,” she said. “He was charming, but lord was he tough. There aren’t too many players like him anymore.”

“He was a great friend,” I said.

“So what can we do for you?”

“There’s this mailbox place over on Trocadero,” I said, handing her a picture of Molly Molineaux. “Maybe we can park somewhere around there until she shows up. Then follow her home.”

“Then what?” Mrs. McCravey wanted to know.

“Then I try to talk her into going back to Texas with me,” I said.

“I’ve seen this woman somewhere,” Mrs. McCravey said as she handed the picture back. “And it is not my impression that she was exactly a hooker. If she is, she’s one of the few true freelances in town. Which means she’s either very connected or very tough.”

“If she’s expensive, maybe she’ll respond to money,” I said as we parked in front of Benion’s. “That would make it easier,” I said, “if she’ll talk to me for money.”

“Be cautious, sir, and remember that everything in this town turns on money,” she said, “but not always the way you want it to turn out.” Then she climbed out, and walked into the front door as I climbed into the front seat.