The engaged had written their own marriage vows and brought a cassette of the music they wanted played during the ceremony. Her vows ran onto three legal-sized yellow tablet pages.
His didn’t.
The bride wore white-an ill-fitting empire-style dress with a long train that her second cousin had scored at the Filene’s Basement annual everything-for-$299 wedding dress running-of-the-bulls in Boston. The bride was twenty-two, but didn’t look it. She was as innocent as the prairie, and her face was full of the wonder that every woman’s face should have before she weds for the first time.
On the final stretch of Highway 95 into Vegas she’d made a valiant attempt to memorize all the vows that she had penned onto the yellow legal pad on the haul from Spraberry to El Paso on Interstate 10, but during the actual ceremony she’d had to consult her notes every few seconds during her long recital of eternal love.
In his retelling, Raoul generously wrote it off to nerves.
Her betrothed was twenty-six years old and was dressed in a tuxedo jacket he’d borrowed from his sister’s husband, a ruffled-front tux shirt sans tie, and clean-and pressed-Wranglers. His hair, greasy from all the road time, was combed into a mullet that was as sleek and shiny as the skin of an under-refrigerated fish. This was his third marriage and his second wedding in Las Vegas-he was once widowed and once divorced-and by demeanor and practice he was a love-honor-and-obey-till-death-do-us-part kind of groom. By history he apparently wasn’t exactly a love-honor-and-obey-till-death-do-us-part kind of husband, but he’d promised his fiancée repeatedly-including once during the ceremony-that all that rutting was behind him.
The groom’s self-written vows were an obviously plagiarized, parsed version of the popular standard. Raoul’s impression was that the guy would have been better off just allowing Rev. Horton to do his almost-Anglican-cleric thing. But, Raoul noted, the bride didn’t seem to be at all offended by her husband-to-be’s lack of vow-writing prowess.
The wedding music, which was played over and over and over again in a toxic loop, consisted of a single upbeat song by Shania Twain with a lot of uh, uh, oh s in the lyrics. Raoul couldn’t quite figure out the romantic relevance of the tune, but the cumulative weight of the pure repetition of the uh, uh, oh s eventually rendered him willing to accept the silky voiced singer’s implied warning about whatever the hell it was. By the time the ceremony was over and the newlyweds had kissed and kissed again and walked hand-in-hand down the aisle toward the desert inferno that awaited them outside, Raoul knew just about all he wanted to know about the couple from Spraberry whose wedding he had just helped celebrate, and he also knew he never wanted to hear the damn uh, uh, oh song again in his life.
Ever.
“He may have divorced ‘the bitch’ but Reverend Howie still sleeps with her cousin,” Raoul said to me. “He drinks a bit, and then he drinks a bit more. We spent most of the afternoon at the kind of saloon the Vegas Chamber of Commerce doesn’t want tourists to see. That’s when I heard his life story and got all that fascinating background on the happy couple from west Texas. Have to give the guy credit, though-Howie knew I was paying but he got the same crappy well-scotch he drinks in that bar every day. He didn’t ask the bartender to dust off the single malts just because I was running the tab.”
“Did you learn anything?”
It was late in Colorado-almost eleven at night-and I was exhausted. Although it was an hour earlier in Nevada, Raoul’s voice told me that his long day and long story had left him every bit as tired as I was. Maybe more. But something about his day had at least temporarily softened the edge of his despair.
“He wouldn’t talk to me about this Rachel woman. I could tell from his little act that he knew who she was, but he wouldn’t answer any of my questions, wouldn’t even admit that she hung out at his chapel. When I showed him Diane’s photograph he wouldn’t admit that he’d ever seen her before. I knew he was lying; wasn’t sure exactly about what, or why, but I knew he was lying. I was beginning to think I was going to have to just stake out the damn wedding chapel and wait for Rachel to show up again and lead me to Diane.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no. That’s when it hit me. I lowered my voice to a whisper, pulled a little pile of thousand-dollar chips from the Venetian out of my pocket, stacked them up in front of me, and asked Howie exactly how much he was being paid.”
“Paid for what?” I said.
“That’s just what he said to me. All offended and everything. Reverend Howie’s a smart guy. He’s on the edge, but he has some pride. I don’t think he’s too dishonest. At the chapel he makes a living providing a service, as screwy as the service is. He supplements his income by taking people’s money, or whatever else they might want to bet, in high-stakes poker games. But he plays those games fair. His MO? He sets people up by being a better actor than they give him credit for, and then he takes their money by being a better poker player than they give him credit for. This time? I already know he’s a good enough actor, and I wouldn’t think about sitting down to a hand of Texas Hold ’Em with the guy.”
“Yeah?” I had one ear focused on Raoul’s Las Vegas story, the other tuned to Grace’s room. She was making the kinds of nighttime noises that often precede one of those restless nights that end up with one of her parents dozing nearby on the rocker in her room until dawn. I said a silent prayer that my little daughter was merely enduring a troublesome dream.
Raoul said, “Eventually, he told me. I had to make it clear I wasn’t going away, but he finally said, ‘Fifty.’ ”
“I’m sorry, Raoul. I’m too tired. I don’t get it.”
“I didn’t get it at first, either. See, my brainstorm was that I thought that Rachel Miller must be paying him. That that was why he let her attend all the weddings. I figured she might be slipping him five bucks, maybe ten, per ceremony. But he was trying to convince me that she was paying him fifty bucks a pop-fifty-to sit in this tacky chapel while Reverend Howie did his pretentious I-now-declare-you-husband-and-wife song and dance.” Raoul paused. “Do you know how many people get married in Las Vegas on an average day? One hundred and fifty-three. That’s what Reverend Howie told me.”
“If it’s people, wouldn’t it have to be a hundred and fifty-two or a hundred and fifty-four?” I asked. “Maybe you mean couples; the number can’t really be odd.”
Raoul sighed. “Alain, your point?”
I did the math. Five weddings a week: two hundred and fifty dollars. Ten weddings a week: five hundred dollars. Five weddings a day, with one day off each week: fifteen hundred dollars. That meant that for Rachel Miller to attend weddings to her heart’s content would cost somewhere between two thousand and six thousand dollars a month, or between twenty-four and seventy-plus thousand dollars a year.
Plus gifts. Holy moly. Where the hell would a schizophrenic woman living on the streets of Las Vegas get that kind of money?
I asked Raoul, “Do you believe him?”
“At first, I thought he might be inflating the numbers to see how the negotiations would go with me, that I might be sitting in that saloon watching him drink scotch so that I could try to outbid Rachel for some crazy reason. You know, offer him more than fifty to turn her away.”
“He’s making pretty good money by allowing her to stick around for weddings.”
“That part seems clear. Tell me, how sick is Rachel? No details-I’m not asking for anything confidential-just rate it for me. Do it in a way I can understand.”
I couldn’t tell him anything specific about Rachel’s mental health mostly because I really didn’t know anything specific about Rachel’s current mental health. “With the kind of disease that someone like Rachel has, with the kind of chronicity she’s endured-she could have very visible symptoms. If you were to measure the disease of a person like that on the figurative ten-scale, say, on a bad day-a day when she’s not taking appropriate medicine-she could be approaching double digits.”