Exhale. He felt light-headed.
Roz came in. “Mr. Schwartz, your next appointment is here.”
“Where’s the time gone!” Bernie sprang to his feet, which made Peter levitate too. “Now, you go and write me a script about high-stakes gambling and card counters and throw in some sex and laughs and I promise I’ll read that. I’m so happy we were able to meet, Peter. You give my regards to Mr. Kemp. And listen, I’m glad you drove. Personally, I won’t fly anymore, at least commercial.”
When Peter got back to his small ranch house in Spring Valley that night there was an envelope sticking out from under his welcome mat. He tore it open and read the handwritten letter under the porch light.
Dear Peter,
I’m sorry you struck out with Bernie Schwartz today. Let me make it up to you. Come over to Room 1834 at the hotel tonight at ten.
Victor
Peter was tired and dispirited but it was a Friday night and he had the weekend to recover.
The check-in desk at the Constellation had a room key waiting for him and he went straight up. It was a big two-bedroom suite with a great view. The coffee table in the living room sported a fruit basket and a bottle of iced Perrier-Jouet. And another envelope. There were two cards inside, one a voucher for $1,000 of merchandise in the Constellation shopping plaza and the other a $5,000 line at the casino.
He sat down on the sofa, stunned, and looked down onto the neon landscape.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in!” he called out.
A female voice: “I don’t have a key!”
“Oh, sorry,” Peter said, sprinting for the door, “I thought it was housekeeping.”
She was gorgeous. And young, almost girlish. A brunette with an open, fresh face, firm ivory flesh pouring out of a clingy black cocktail dress.
“You must be Peter,” she said, shutting the door behind her. “Mr. Kemp sent me to say hello.” Like many in Vegas, she was from somewhere else-her accent had a hillbilly twang, dainty and musical.
He blushed so brightly his skin looked like it was made of red plastic. “Oh!”
She slowly walked toward him, backing him up toward the sofa. “My name is Lydia. Am I okay?”
“Okay?”
“If you’d prefer a guy, that’s cool. Didn’t know for sure.” She had a charming ditziness about her.
His voice got squeaky from laryngeal constriction. “I don’t like guys! I mean, I like girls!”
“Well, good! ’Cause I’m a girl,” she purred with practiced artifice. “Why don’t you sit yourself down and open that bottle of champagne, Peter, while we figure out the kind of games you’d like to play.”
He reached the sofa as his knees were buckling and went down hard on his rump. His brain was swimming in a sea of juices-fear, lust, embarrassment-he’d never done anything like this before. It seemed so silly, yet…
Then, “Hey, I’ve seen you before!” Now Lydia was genuinely excited. “Yeah, I’ve seen you tons of times! It just hit me!”
“Where? At the casino?”
“No silly! You probably don’t recognize me because I’m not in that stupid uniform. My day job is at the reception desk at McCarran Airport, you know-the E.G. and G terminal.”
The rouge drained from his face.
This day was too much for him. Too much.
“Your name’s not Peter! It’s Mark something. Mark Shackleton. I’m good with names.”
“Well, you know how names are,” he said shakily.
“I get it! Hey, none of my beeswax! What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, honey. If you want to know the truth, my name’s not Lydia.”
He was speechless as he watched her strip off her black dress, showing all her black lacy gear underneath, talking a mile a minute as she went. “That is so cool! I’ve always wanted to speak to one of you guys! I mean how crazy must it be to commute to Area 51 every day. I mean it’s like so top secret it basically makes me hot!”
His mouth fell open a little.
“I mean I know you’re not allowed to talk about it but please, just nod if we’ve really got UFOs we’re studying out there cause that’s what everybody says!”
He tried to keep his head still.
“Was that a nod?” she asked. “Were you nodding?”
He composed himself enough to say, “I can’t say anything about what goes on there. Please!”
She looked bummed then brightened up and started to work again. “Okay! That’s cool. Tell you what, Peter,” she said, swinging her hips, slowly approaching the sofa, “I’ll be your personal UFO tonight-unidentified fucking object. How would that be?”
JUNE 23, 2009. NEW YORK CITY
Will had a devastating hangover, the kind that felt like a weasel had woken up warm and cozy inside his skull then panicked at its confinement and tried to scratch and bite its way out through his eyes.
The evening had begun benignly enough. On his way home he stopped at his local dive, a yeasty smelling cave called Dunigan’s, and downed a couple of pops on an empty stomach. Next up, the Pantheon Diner, where he grunted at the heavily stubbled waiter who grunted back at him and without exchanging any fully formed phrases brought him the same dish he ate two to three days a week-lamb kebabs and rice, washed down, of course, with a couple of beers. Then before decamping to his place for the night he paid his wobbly respects to his friendly package store and picked up a fresh half gallon of Black Label, pretty much the only luxury item to adorn his life.
The apartment was small and spartan, and stripped of Jennifer’s feminizing touches, a truly bleak uninteresting piece of real estate-two sparse white-walled rooms with shiny parquet floors, meager views of the building across the street, and a few thousand dollars’ worth of generic furniture and rugs. Truth be told, the apartment was almost too small for him. The living room was fourteen by seventeen, the bedroom ten by twelve, the kitchen and bathroom each the size of a good closet. Some of the criminals he had put away for life wouldn’t see the place as a major upgrade. How had he put up with sharing the flat with Jennifer for four months? Whose bright idea was that?
He hadn’t intended to drink himself stupid but the heavy full bottle seemed to hold so much promise. He twisted off the top, cracking its seal, then hoisted it by its built-in handle and glugged a half tumbler of scotch into his favorite whiskey glass. With the TV droning in the background he sofa-drank, steadily sinking into a deep dark hole as he thought about his effing day, his effing case, his effing life.
Notwithstanding his reluctance to take on the Doomsday case, the first few days had been, in fact, rejuvenating. Clive Robertson was killed right under his nose and the audacity and perplexity of the crime electrified him. It reminded him of the way big cases used to make him feel, and the kicky pulses of adrenaline agreed with him.
He’d immersed himself in the tangle of facts, and though he knew that epiphanous moments were the stuff of fiction, had a powerful urge to drill down and discover something that had been missed, the overlooked link that would tie together two murders, then a third, then another, until the case was cracked.
The distraction of important work had been as soothing as butter on a burn. He started by running hot, pounding the files, pushing Nancy, exhausting both of them in a marathon of days bleeding into nights bleeding into days. For a while he actually took Sue Sanchez’s words to heart: Okay, this would be his last big case. Let’s ride this sucker out and retire with a big old bang.
Crescendo.
Decrescendo.
Within a week he’d been burnt out, spent and dispirited. Robertson’s autopsy and toxicology reports made no sense to him. The seven other cases made no sense to him. He couldn’t get any feeling for who the killer was or what gratification he was getting from the murders. None of his initial ideas were panning out. All he could fathom was a tableau of randomness, and that was something he had never seen in a serial killer.