Lisa hadn’t left a phone message so far. Maybe she had changed her mind about speaking to him. Maybe she was already in Los Angeles with her lover. Maybe she had returned home to remove her things from their house. Or maybe she was consulting with an attorney about a divorce.
He disguised his wounds as best he could and made his way down to the casino bar, where he was convinced he had made a total ass of himself the night before. He remembered that he was fairly drunk at the bar. He remembered singing an aria. He cringed at the thought of his singing voice.
Charlie also remembered the bartender, a redhead with freckles and a prettysmile. He remembered the way she wore her hair up and how she had spoken with an accent.
He adjusted his sunglasses in the reflection of a restaurant marquee as he made his way to the bar. He wondered how bad his bruises would look to the redhead.
“Devil’s Lake, where?” he asked her.
She was wearing the standard casino uniform: black pants, white shirt with ruffles, and a checkered vest with a nametag. Her red hair was up again. It was held in place by a white barrette.
Her eyebrows furrowed when she saw him. “Charlie?” she asked.
“It gets even worse,” he told her. He flipped his sunglasses down to expose his two black eyes.
“Ouch,” she said.
“I was mugged. After I left here last night.”
She was still looking him over. A customer called from the opposite end of the bar. “I’ll be right back,” she told him.
He watched her fluid movement behind the bar. He could tell she was experienced. She reached for bottles in the bar well without having to look at them. She poured drinks without having to measure.
Her body wasn’t bad either. He guessed her to be 5-4, no more than 120 pounds. He put her age somewhere between 30 and 35 years old. When she was up close again, he noticed she had bright blue eyes.
Later, when the bar was less active, Samantha Cole answered his original question.
“North Dakota,” she said.
Charlie was caught off guard. “Huh?”
She pointed to her nametag. Charlie read it aloud. “Samantha Cole, Devil’s Lake, North Dakota.”
“But you can call me Sam,” she said. “We already did this last night, you know. You probably don’t remember. You were pretty drunk.”
“Let’s do it again anyway.” He extended his bruised right hand across the bar.
Samantha took his hand carefully and smiled.
“See? Now I remember.” He was looking into her eyes then.
“What?”
“Why I came back down here tonight,” he said. “Your pretty smile. I remembered your smile.”
He was there the night before. He had left her a good tip and never caused her trouble. He had actually made her laugh a few times.
Tonight he was banged up from a mugging, he told her. She wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth, but he wasn’t making anything more of whatever had happened to him. He told her he was mugged. He showed her his black eyes and bandages. There were no excuses or macho story to go along with his bruises. He had remembered her and wanted to see her again.
Because she had a pretty smile.
Between serving drinks, wiping down the bar, and running tabs, Samantha enjoyed her brief conversations with Charlie. She watched him watching her as she worked behind the bar. Last night he was drinking gin and tonics. Tonight it was straight club soda. He had told her he was staying off the booze to regain his equilibrium.
“How long you here for?” she asked.
“Few more days,” he said. “I feel kind of awkward going back home like this. I’m hoping some of the bruises will clear up.”
She had noticed he was wearing a wedding ring the night before. Now he wasn’t.
“I was a little worried I acted stupid last night,” he said. “Being so drunk and all. Tell me I wasn’t obnoxious.”
“You were fine. You remember hitting the four aces?”
“Vaguely.”
"Well, I do. You left me a fifty-dollar tip.”
He thumbed over his shoulder toward the casino. “Better you than them.”
Samantha was curious. “Did they get your money? The money you won from the four aces? When you were mugged, I mean.”
“That’s the crazy thing. No, they didn’t. Nothing. They didn’t take anything.”
She pointed to his left hand. “Except your wedding ring,” she said coyly. “Unless you’re not wearing it tonight.”
Charlie looked at the ring finger of his left hand. He smiled when he remembered why the ring was gone. “That’s the other thing,” he said. “My wife dumped me.”
John Denton held a cold wet towel against the left side of Lisa’s badly bruised mouth. She was barely awake. The painkillers permitted her to drift into sleep. She would need to go back into surgery again later. They would have to stay in Las Vegas another few days before she was healed enough to travel.
The oral surgeon had told them Lisa was lucky her jawbone wasn’t broken. Although she lost one of her upper front teeth, the surgeon was pretty sure he could save the other three that had been pushed back. At least he was sure of saving one.
So far there were more than twenty stitches inside her mouth. She would need at least one false tooth. She might need an entire bridge. Her mouth would be sore for a few weeks. She would require return visits to a periodontist for several months.
Denton wasn’t sure what had happened or why. He was awakened by a cracking sound he later assumed were Lisa’s teeth breaking. There was a follow-up thud, he guessed, when she hit the floor. He saw two men in the doorway. One had pointed a gun at him. The other man was kneeling or squatting. He saw the man get up and put something in a handkerchief. He saw both men leave quickly. One of them slammed the door closed.
Denton had rushed off the bed to the floor where Lisa lay unconscious. Her mouth was bleeding badly. The floor was stained with a puddle of her blood. He turned the lights on. Her lips were one giant mass of swollen flesh.
He called 911 for an ambulance. Because of the nature of the emergency, the police responded to the call as well. They questioned him for a long time before Denton was released. He was forced to tell them the entire story: How he was the woman’s lover. How the woman had left her husband during their vacation. How she had called him in California and asked him to come to Las Vegas.
None of it, he knew, sounded very plausible. He was an attorney himself. Denton knew how ridiculous a position he was in. He knew how bad he looked to the police.
“Yes, they knew each other a long time… more than two years… Yes, they had had a previous affair… Yes, the husband had known about it… Yes, he was married too… He had left his wife… No, his wife didn’t know who Lisa Pellecchia was… No, he didn’t expect Lisa would ask him to come to Vegas… Yes, he loved her… Yes, she was leaving her husband for good… Yes, Lisa left her husband a note… at the hotel they were staying… Harrah’s… room 1719… Yes, he had met the husband before… in New York… on business… Yes, he saw Mrs. Pellecchia during that trip… Yes, the husband was confrontational… No, but, well, yes, the husband had issued a threat… not exactly a threat… a kind of threat.”
His Q &A with the police had gone on for more than an hour. In the end, the police seemed to think it was the husband who had assaulted Lisa. Denton didn’t think so, but he couldn’t be sure. Charlie Pellecchia had been dumped in a very abrupt way. Denton felt guilty about it, but only for Lisa. It made him sick to think he might be responsible for what had happened to her.
He didn’t like providing the police with the story about how he and Charlie had first met, but Denton knew he could be liable as an attorney if he held anything back. He wasn’t exactly on moral high ground, being where he was with another man’s wife, but if it was Lisa’s husband who had assaulted her, he wanted a full prosecution of the crime.
It wasn’t starting off the way he had hoped. He was sick from what had happened to Lisa. He held her left hand as she lay asleep in the hospital bed. After a minute of watching her sleep, he leaned over to kiss her forehead.