She wouldn’t.
I called Raoul at home to see if he’d heard from her. He wasn’t there.
I followed happy voices down the hall and found Lauren and Grace on the bed in the master bedroom, where I interrupted Lauren’s dramatic rendition of Alice in Wonderland. She told me she thought she had Raoul’s mobile number in her Palm. With monumental inefficiency, and only after pecking enough tiny faux buttons to book an entire round-trip flight to Kathmandu-including arranging for Sherpas-I tracked down Raoul’s mobile number and dialed the ten digits.
“Raoul,” he answered almost immediately.
He sounded tired. The usual gorgeous timbre of his voice was disguised by the wireless ether.
“Hey, Raoul. It’s Alan. Where are you?”
“San Francisco, consulting at a clueless incubator. How these people expect to make any money is beyond me. What’s wrong?”
His question made perfect sense. I don’t think I’d ever before called Raoul on his mobile phone. Instinctively, he knew I wasn’t calling him in San Francisco to recommend a restaurant.
“It’s probably nothing,” I said.
He replied, “Mierda.”
26
Raoul’s voice, when he wanted it to, carried no echoes of his childhood in Catalonia. I’d never given much thought to whether or not the tonal charade required much of his energy or attention. I’d always assumed that he could move back and forth between the American and Catalonian accents effortlessly, the way that a skilled actor does Kerry one minute and New Jersey the next.
Raoul said, “Back up. When did all this start? When did she call you?”
I heard echoes of Barcelona, and of worry, in his perfect English. I supposed that I was hearing the Barcelona only because I was hearing the worry. The caller ID unit by the phone told me that Diane’s call to me from the craps table had come in exactly forty-seven minutes earlier.
“Forty-five minutes ago,” I told Raoul.
“So she’s been out of touch less than an hour?”
“Right.”
“That’s not a big deal.”
I’d been doing the same comfort calisthenics. But I clearly remembered the intensity of Raoul’s barely contained outrage while Jaris Slocum was holding Diane hostage in the backseat of the patrol car after Hannah Grant’s death, and I remembered how resistant he’d been to any reassurance at that time. I knew that all the fret-yoga he was doing to convince himself that the current circumstances were some version of ordinary wouldn’t, ultimately, do him a bit of good. Diane being out of touch for forty-seven minutes in the current circumstances required explanation.
And when I told him what I knew, I knew he’d agree with me.
“Raoul? Do you know why Diane went to Las Vegas?”
He spent a couple of heartbeats mining the apparent innocuousness of my question for innuendo before he replied, “She likes it there. She missed her chance last month when… you know.”
“Do you know why she went now?”
There it was again. The shrink’s “precipitating event” question.
Why now?
Raoul was one of the brightest people I’d ever met. I could almost hear the gears turning in his head as he tried to make sense of the bare glimpse he was getting as he strained to see where it was that I was leading him.
“She told me that a patient’s mother was there. In Vegas. Somebody she wanted to talk to about a case. That was her excuse, but she really wanted to play craps and the mountain casinos have a five-buck limit. Small bets bore her.”
“It wasn’t one of her patients’ mother she was planning to talk to, Raoul.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The patient whose mother is living in Las Vegas? That patient wasn’t Diane’s; it was Hannah Grant’s.”
I could hear his breath blow hard against the microphone. “And you knew this? You knew that was why she was going?”
It was an accusation. His unspoken words were “And you let her?” I felt his finger pointing at me physically, felt it mostly in my gut. I could no more have stopped Diane from going to Las Vegas than I could prevent January from being colder than July. But that didn’t matter to Raoul, not then.
“She told me she was thinking about it, about going to Vegas to talk with this woman. But I thought she was just being provocative with me. You know how she is. I didn’t think she’d really go.”
“Diane always does things that other people don’t think she’ll do. It’s who she is.”
It was another accusation. And it was right on target. “I wish I’d listened to her. I’m sorry.”
Raoul had no time for my mea culpas. “Had she talked to this person, yet? This mother?” he asked.
Before I replied I used a moment to recall the specifics of my last conversation with Diane. “When we talked, she told me that she’d found her, tracked her down. I don’t know whether or not she actually spoke with her. I think that’s what she was going to tell me when she got outside. She said it was important.”
“You know what patient it is, don’t you, Alan?”
My impulse was to hesitate, to cover my ass. To my credit, I didn’t. I mouthed a simple “Yes.”
“You know who the mother is, too?”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to tell me.”
“You know how this works.”
Raoul was the husband of a psychotherapist. Spouses of mental health professionals know the rules. He said, “This is Diane we’re talking about. You are the one who had better know how this works.”
I tried to deflect him, to steer him back to the current crisis. I said, “I don’t even know where’s she staying. Where do you stay when you’re there?”
He took a deep breath. “I try not to go at all if I can help it, but where faux Italian is concerned I prefer the Bellagio. The fountains are… something. She’s at the Venetian,” he said, confirming my suspicion. “She likes the canals. I take her to Venice, I take her to St. Petersburg, I take her to Amsterdam; it turns out the canals she likes best are inside some vapid casino in Las Vegas.”
“I’ll try her room and call you back.”
“You’ve tried her mobile?” he asked.
“A few times.”
“Merde.” I recognized the move from Catalonian to French. The man could curse in more languages than anyone I knew. He never cursed in English, however. Not in my presence.
“It’s probably nothing.” I didn’t believe my own words. I said it because it was just one of those things that people say in circumstances like those.
While Raoul was still on the line, I pulled Lauren’s cell from her purse and punched in Diane’s mobile number. After three rings someone answered.
A female voice, not Diane’s, said, “Yeah? Who is this?”
Speaking into both phones simultaneously, I said, “Hold on a second, Raoul. Someone’s on her cell.”
“Go on,” he said. “Allez!”
The voice on Diane’s phone demanded, “Who’s Rule?”
The lilt of the woman’s voice triggered some clinical trigger in my brain. Instinctively I went into therapist mode, specifically I went into psychiatric-emergency-room therapist mode. My voice calmed, my hearing sensitized for the unexpected. Psychologically speaking, my weight was on my toes; I was prepared to change directions in a heartbeat.
“This is Dr. Gregory, may I speak to Dr. Diane Estevez, please? You answered her phone.”
“Well, she’s not home.” The woman laughed. “No one’s home. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Not being home? This is about as far from home as I get. So there.”
I considered the possibility that I’d dialed Diane’s number incorrectly and that I was simply being confused by the lottery of errant connection. Then I heard the familiar frantic calliope riff of a slot machine jackpot and I knew that what had happened wasn’t a simple wrong number. This woman was in a Las Vegas casino and she was holding Diane’s phone in her hand. Why?