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.”
“On that ten-scale?” Raoul asked.
“Yes.”
He emitted a high-pitched whistle. “See, that’s what I thought. That kind of sick is scary to people like me. Which means that Rachel is ill enough to be a serious liability at a place like the Love In Las Vegas. What bride wants somebody that disturbed camped out in the front row of her wedding?
“Reverend Howie’s fee is insurance: He makes Rachel pay to attend the weddings. Who knows, he may even limit the weddings he lets her attend. Maybe he picks them himself. Makes a judgment about which ones are safe for her to be at, which ones she might create a distraction, cost him some business.”
“Raoul, if Rachel were attending all the weddings she wanted and if she were paying that much, it would cost a fortune. Where would she get that kind of money?”
Before the words were out of my mouth, I heard a prolonged whimper from Grace’s room. Damn.
“This town?” he said. “Too many bad ways to answer that question. Way too many.”
I shuddered at the thought of what perverse advantage some people might gain over someone as ill as Rachel Miller. “What did Howie finally admit to you?”
“Just that she gives him money so he’ll allow her to attend the ceremonies. And this is the funny part-she doesn’t pay him herself-the money comes from someone else, someone who makes Reverend Howie very nervous. He wouldn’t give me the person’s name. He said, ‘You can buy me scotch all day and all night and I’m not going to give you a name.’ I even pushed one of the thousand-dollar chips from the Venetian across the table and left it right in front of him. I said, ‘Name and phone number, Howard, and it’s yours.’ He picked it up, flipped it, ran his fingers over the surface, and pushed it back onto my side of the table.
“I added two more and made it a nice little pile. He pushed them all right back to me. I added two more. He did the same thing.”
Howie had turned down five grand. I was thinking, Wow. “So what are you going to do, Raoul?” I asked.
“I took four chips off the pile and slid the one that remained back across the table. I said, ‘Different question. Man or woman?’
“ ‘Yeah?’ Howie asked me. ‘For a grand? That’s all you want to know?’ I said that was the deal and he actually had to think about it. He is so wary of this person that gives him money so Rachel can attend weddings that he actually considered turning down a thousand dollars rather than reveal to me the person’s gender. Eventually, he picked up the chip and slipped it into his shirt pocket like it was a pack of matches. He said, ‘It’s a man. Not a man you want to fuck with.’ ”
“That was it?” I said. “That’s all you got for a thousand dollars?”
“In business you don’t always get value at the front end of a relationship. At the start you form a bond, establish platforms, ensure access. What I got for my thousand dollars is I got Howie on my payroll. And I reduced the possible suspects by half.”
“How do you find the man you’re looking for?”
Raoul sighed. “You remember a guy in Denver named Norm Clarke? Use to write for the Rocky.”
I remembered him. “The gossip columnist with the patch on his eye?”
“Sí. Well, I know him-he did a story on me back in the tech boom times. He lives in Vegas now, knows everybody. I’m meeting him downstairs a little later for a drink. I’m hoping he can help me find the man Howie was talking about.”
Grace’s unsettled whimper suddenly blossomed into a wail that was so powerful I could have sworn her lungs had been temporarily replaced by air compressors.
Raoul didn’t need to be told our conversation was over. I sprinted in Grace’s direction, praying that I could quiet her before Lauren’s sleep was shattered.
39
After getting all of four hours’ sleep I got all of four hours’ warning before the next shoe dropped. I spent most of those four hours wondering whether having any warning at all was a good thing or a bad thing.
I never quite decided.
Patients, when they call my office number, are given a voice-mail instruction to call my pager directly in the case of an emergency. How often do my patients take advantage of the opportunity to reach me on my beeper? Once or twice in a bad month, infrequently enough that the mere sight of an unfamiliar phone number on my pager makes me anxious. So, on Thursday morning, while I was idling at the intersection of Broadway and Baseline on the way to work and my beeper vibrated and displayed an unfamiliar (303) 443- number, I was wary.
The 443 prefix meant the call came from a Boulder address. That’s all I knew.
I returned the page as soon as I stepped into my office.
“This is Alan Gregory,” I said. “I’m returning a page to this number.” I don’t use the “Doctor” appellation in those circumstances because I don’t know if the person who called me will answer the phone or if someone else will. If it’s someone else, discretion might dictate that my profession remain secret.