While Drowning in the Desert (3 page)

She must have been something, I thought. In fact, she was not at all unattractive now. And there were still a couple of hours before the flight, the airport was close and I could still get Nathan back to Palm Desert tonight.

“You know how it is,” she said.

Yeah, I thought. I was young once myself.

Chapter 3

Las Vegas is the weirdest place in the world.

I’ve been to some pretty weird places. Hell, I grew up—or failed to, depending on your perspective—in New York City. Weird. I’ve worked cases in San Francisco (weird), London (weird) and Hollywood (very weird). I even spent three months as a prisoner of sorts in a Buddhist monastery in the remote mountains of western Sichuan in China (very, very weird).

But on the general scale of weird, Las Vegas has all these places beat hands-down, so to speak.

I think it’s what happens when you have a combination of unlimited space and unlimited money unconstrained by common sense or good taste. Things can get pretty weird.

I mean here in a state run by Mormons you have a town founded by a Jewish gangster whose nickname was Bugsy. He gets the weird ball rolling when he builds the first casino and calls it what? The Flamingo.

In a desert.

A big pink bird that lives in the water.

In Africa.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m standing in the middle of a Nevada desert, one of the first things I think of is
not
an African bird that stands around with one leg in the water.

But, then again, the guy’s nickname was Bugsy, right?

So Bugsy built the Flamingo, came in way over budget and got a Mafia pink slip. After the funeral, a couple of other boys built casinos with names like the Sands (not weird), the Oasis (not weird), and the Sahara (confused, but not weird) but that’s where the non-weirdness stopped.

Because people started coming to Las Vegas.

To do what?

Lose money.

It became one of the great American pastimes. Save your money all year to go on vacation and lose the money. People started treating it as if it were some sort of wonderfully guilty pleasure.
Yeah, I went to Vegas last week and really lost my shirt. Heh-heh-heh.

The gangsters couldn’t believe it. Here they’d spent all those years of effort and planning on
crime
and it all suddenly seemed like such a waste. Now all they had to do was build a bunch of hotel rooms, tell people they could stay in them for twenty bucks if they promised to lose five hundred at the tables, and people actually went for it.
Yeah, I went to Vegas last week and dropped two grand. But guess what? My room? Twenty bucks. And the buffets …

Mob-organized bank robberies stopped virtually overnight. Why go to all the trouble and danger of robbing a bank when all you had to do was invite the bank to come to Las Vegas? And the beauty of it: it was all perfectly legal.

Anyway, the money kept coming in and the casinos kept going up and the weirdness quotient kept rising.

To the point where you could now walk, as I was doing that Sunday afternoon, from a casino where they have a mock volcanic eruption every two hours, to a pirate ship, to ancient Rome, to a paddle-wheeled steamboat, to a Chinese temple, to a circus where they have acrobats flying around over your head while you’re trying to drop twenty bucks’ worth of quarters into a slot machine while some waitress dressed like a lion tamer offers you free drinks.

Weird.

Not that I was gambling. I wasn’t. In the first place I don’t like gambling and in the second place I was too busy looking for Natty Silver and dreading the phone call I had to make.

I finally pulled my sorry ass into a phone booth and made the call.

“So how’s Palm Springs?” Graham asked.

“Uhhh,” I answered, “it’s a nice town.”

There was a long pause.

“You’re not there, are you?” Graham asked.

“Uhhh, yes,” I said.

“Yes, you’re there?”

“Yes, I’m
not
there.”

I don’t have any bananas, either.

Another silence.

“How’s Silverstein?” Graham asked.

“Funny,” I said. “He’s a funny old guy.”

A sigh of resignation then, “He’s not there, is he?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“That’s sort of the question of the hour, Dad.”

I hated saying it. Hated explaining it to Graham. Hated the sound of the words as they came out of my mouth. But it was the truth.

I’d given Nathan and Hope an hour and when I went back to the room no one answered. I ran down to the lounge, checked it and several other lounges, ran through the gaming tables, the slot machines, the sports room, the pool complex and then thought of the white tigers exhibit.

They weren’t there, either. Oh, the white tigers were there, just no sign of Nathan or Hope.

“How do you lose an eighty-six-year-old man?!” Graham yelled. “What did he do, Neal, outrun you? Cold-cock you with his cane? Gum you into unconsciousness?”

“He got out of my sight, I guess.”

Graham screeched, “Why did you let him get out of your sight?!”

So he could get laid or whatever, I thought. But I was too embarrassed to say it so I settled for, “We bumped into an old friend of his and they took off together for a few minutes.”

“Who was the old friend? Mother Teresa?” Graham asked. “She outrun you too?”

“Some of those nuns are pretty fast, Graham.”

Some of them are, too. Especially with a ruler in their hands.

Graham asked, “Who was the friend?”

“A woman.”

Sigh. “Name?”

“Hope.”

“Last name?”

“Dunno.”

“So, can you find him?” Graham asked.

“Dad, the way he’s dressed, Stevie Wonder could find him.”

“Stevie Wonder’s blind—”

“Yeah …”

“—he’s not a moron!”

Click.

I went back to the bar. In the first bit of good luck I’d had since I got out of the hot tub the same bartender was
on
duty.

“The woman who was sitting here with me and Natty Silver?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Do you know her name?”

“Yes I do.”

My headache started to come back.

“What is her name?” I asked.

“Hope.”

“Does Hope have a last name?”

“Yes, she does.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“Yes, I do.”

What have I done? I thought. What have I done to deserve all these little torments?

I decided that it was some sort of cosmic female conspiracy—that was it. Let a basically decent guy hesitate for the slightest second to instantly impregnate his fiancée, on her slightest whim, and the whole universe starts messing with him.

“What is her last name?” I asked.

“Her last name is White.”

“What do you know about her?”

“Lots.”

“Listen,” I said, “I’m just trying to help Mr. Silverstein.”

The bartender chuckled.

“Looked like he was doing all right by himself,” the bartender said. “Besides, you’re not his buddy. You were laughing at him.”

“You were laughing at him, too.”

“I was
laughing
at him,” the bartender said. “You were laughing
at
him.”

I thought about it for a second then said, “Yeah, you’re right.”

“Yes, I am.”

I got up from the stool. “Thanks for the name.”

“Hope White,” the bartender said, “used to be a chorus girl. Worked all the big shows. When gravity took its toll she switched to cocktail-bar piano. She’s good enough to work the morning shift in the older casinos. You know, Cole Porter tunes to guys with hangovers waiting for a table in the breakfast buffets. I think maybe now she’s at the Nugget. She gets off, she plays the slots. Nice lady. That’s Hope White.”

“Thanks.”

“Thanks for saying thanks.”

And thanks for reminding me what a total asshole I can be.

Like Hope White and Natty Silver, the Nugget had seen better days. And like Hope White and Natty Silver, it wasn’t going down without a few laughs.

The walls were dingy, the carpets worn. The tables had seen more than their share of winning and lots more than anyone’s share of losing. The clientele were blue-collar workers on an economy vacation, or local seniors on a fixed budget, or those few sad high-rollers for whom a string of sevens was a distant memory of something that never happened. The casino smelled of stale smoke, old booze and drugstore perfume.

I found the piano bar. A middle-aged woman with dyed red hair sat at the keys, trying to stretch “I Get a Kick Out of You” into ten minutes. She was doing pretty well at it, too. I took a seat at the piano and put a five in the glass.

When she wound up the tune she said, “You’re a little young for this place, honey.”

“I’m looking for Hope White.”

The redhead smiled. “You’re a little young for her place, too.”

“I’m throwing a birthday party for my mother,” I explained. “I want to see if I can hire Miss White to come play.”

“She’s eight to noon, sweetie.”

“And I work.”

“I got her number.”

The redhead dug around in her purse and handed me two cards, one of Hope White’s and one of her own.

“If Hope can’t do it,” she explained.

“You’ll be the first I call,” I said. “Thanks.”

I looked at Hope’s card. It read,
The Great Hope White. Cocktail Chanteuse Extraordinaire.

The Great Hope White. Pretty funny.

“Hi,” I said when Hope answered the door of her old bungalow in Vegas’ declining old section. “Can Nathan come out and play?”

Hope was wrapped in an unbelted white robe probably designed by Omar the Tentmaker.

“Nathan’s not here,” she said.

“Would you like to come in?” Hope asked me.

Without waiting for an answer she took my shoulder and guided me past her into the living room. Her perfume smelled liked gardenias—lots of them.

Going from the hot dry air outside into her house was like stepping from a desert into a jungle. It was actually humid in there. Fetid, one might say if one said graduate school words like ‘fetid’ and ‘bathos.’ If, indeed, one said words like “one” when referring to oneself.

Anyway, it was hot and humid and chock-full of plants, which was a relief to me. I was afraid it was going to be cats. But it was plants and they were everywhere. Not cactuses either (yes, I know it’s “cacti,” but I’ve already used “fetid,” “bathos,” and “one,” and even
I
have a limit on being pretentious). No, these were leafy green plants of the kind I regularly killed when I had an apartment in New York, and they were all dripping with moisture. It looked like she watered them maybe fifteen times a day. I half-expected an alligator to come running out from behind one of them.

“My babies,” she explained.

“You must have a green thumb,” I answered.

Back to the lack of wit thing.

She motioned for me to sit and I plopped down on an orange sofa that looked around vintage 1965. There was a glass coffee table, a television set, two other chairs from the Johnson administration, and two or three hundred framed photographs.

The photographs occupied virtually every inch of space that wasn’t being taken up by organic matter. There were photos on the walls, on the coffee table, on several little side tables that seemed to exist for the purpose, and on the television set.

Most of the photos were pictures of Hope with people. Some were celebrities—I recognized Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Wayne Newton—and some of them seemed to be entertainers whose names had never made it above the title. Judging from their placement it didn’t seem to make any difference to Hope—the famous and anonymous were comingled in this gallery of show biz friendships.

I even spotted a couple of pictures of Natty. He was younger then, but had the same sparkling eyes and narrow-mouth smile, especially as he had his arm draped over the broad shoulder of a younger Hope White wearing a chorus girl outfit. Her long legs and ample bosom were on professional display but her eyes were all her own. Cornflower blue, sparkling and smart.

My earlier opinion had been dead on: Hope White had been something then, and she was something now.

“Would you like a drink, dearie?” she asked.

“Do you have any hemlock?”

She thought about it.

“No,” she said, “but I have Haig&Haig.”

Soothing as it might have been to sit in that hothouse and get pleasantly stewed, I still had a job to do: find Nathan Silverstein and get him back to Palm Desert.

“A Coke, please?”

“One Coke,” she said brightly, “coming up!”

“How long have you known Nathan?!” I could hear her in the kitchen messing around with an ice cube tray.

“A long time!”

“Did you date him?”

“Honey, I
carbon-dated
him,” Hope said as she came in with the Coke, which was in one of those old soda fountain glasses. She had a martini for herself.

She sat down on the couch next to me.

“I met him in the bad old days when he was doing the beach movies,” she continued. “He hated them but was paying about three alimonies at the time so he needed the money. Mind you, he was no spring chicken even then. He used to say, ‘I’d like to be a has-been, but I don’t have the money.’”

“I think I saw a few minutes of one of those movies on TV one night,” I said.

“You must have been up late,” Hope said. “They were awful! And they gave poor Natty stupid lines to say. He hated them! The poor little honey was so unhappy, and he used to come to town to try and have a few laughs. I was still in the line in those days—I think it was at Harrah’s—and Natty came backstage after the show and asked me out.”

“Did you know who he was?”

She sipped her martini and smiled. “Oh sure. In this town you make it your business to know who’s out front, so I knew Natty Silver was in the house. But I never thought I’d step out with him.”

“Why did you?”

She seemed to give this question some serious thought, then she said, “He was just so funny.”

She must have seen the quizzical look on my face, because she leaned forward, patted my hand, and said, “Let me tell you a secret, honey: You make a girl laugh and she’ll make you smile, if you know what I mean.”