“What do you think?”
“About the new threads?” I asked. “Or about the fact that Carmen likes to buy them for you?”
Sam shook his head gently, and I could hear the throaty tang of a little chuckle come out of the darkness. “See, that’s the thing. I don’t know one other guy who would ask me that question. Not one. And that’s why I’m okay with the fact that you’re an asshole sometimes.”
“Goodnight, Sam. Thanks.”
I was halfway home before I realized that I’d spaced out telling Sam about my visit to Doyle’s house with the Realtor the previous night.
44
My girls were sleeping in separate beds when I got home. The dogs were squirrelly though, and I had to spend ten minutes outside with them before I could get them settled. Emily detected the scent of a critter of some kind while we were walking the lane and once we were back in the door she strolled the entire perimeter of the interior of the upstairs of the house checking to see if an unseen enemy had succeeded in breaching our defenses. Ultimately confident that all of our flanks were protected, she plopped at my feet with a satisfied sigh.
The entire house shook when she landed.
I was thinking about calling Sam to get his inevitable rage over my visit to Doyle’s house out of the way, when the phone rang.
I pounced on it: Raoul.
“I’m starting to get somewhere. Couple of pieces,” Raoul said.
His tone told me that he hadn’t found Diane, so I didn’t ask. His words told me that he wanted to confront the practical, so I refrained from asking the question that was second on my list: How are you doing with all this? Instead, I said, “What do you have?”
Raoul started with bad news, not, in my mind, a good sign. “Marlina’s a dead end. The woman from Venetian security? One more meal with her tomorrow, and I’m done. I know exactly why the woman’s been divorced twice though I still haven’t figured out how she got married twice. She’s playing me.”
“Okay, then what pieces do you have?”
“Two. The guy from the craps table? The shopping center developer who was playing craps at the same table as Diane? He finally called me this morning, told me he’d been drunk when I phoned him and he’d forgotten to call me back. He was cleaning out the memory on his mobile and saw my number. Anyway, he said that Diane was his luck at the craps table that night and when she cashed out, he decided to do the same. He said he was right behind her as she was walking through the casino.”
“Sounds kind of creepy.”
“Sí. He says as Diane’s walking across the casino, two guys walk up to her, say hello. Pretty well dressed. Both of them forty to fifty. One tall, one average. One of them whispered something to her. She seemed happy to hear it and the three of them walked on together, talking. She had her phone in her hand, dropped it trying to shake hands with one of the guys. He picked it up and she stuffed it in her purse. One of the two reached around behind Diane, took the phone right back out of her bag, and tossed it on the floor by a row of slot machines. He said the guy was smooth; he picked Diane like a pro. Until the man dumped her phone, the guy from the craps table thought one of the two guys was Diane’s husband, or boyfriend.”
“Fits with what I remember, Raoul.” I paused before I added, “The guy from the craps table was going to hit on her, wasn’t he? That’s why he was following her?”
“Yes,” said Raoul without any animosity. He understood these things.
“So that was it? He never reported this to anyone?”
“He said that Diane didn’t seem to be in any distress. The phone thing was odd, but she went with them voluntarily.”
“But he doesn’t know where they went?”
“They were walking in the direction of the lobby, but he didn’t follow them out of the casino. He went up to his room.”
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I’m thinking what he said to her had something to do with Rachel Miller. That’s why she went with them-she thought she was going to get a chance to talk with Rachel.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, too.” I paused for a moment. “Somebody must have picked the phone up off the floor and put it in the tray of the slot machine where that drunk woman found it.”
“It also explains why Venetian security isn’t too eager to let me see the surveillance tape. Probably looks a lot like a rendezvous to them. You know, something between… adults.”
“But they must have a picture of these two guys, right?”
“Right. You can’t walk out of a casino without a camera seeing you. No way.”
“You said you have a couple of pieces of news. What’s the other one?”
“Norm Clarke came through. I should’ve called him the first day I got here. I can be such a putz.”
I was surprised-no, shocked-at the Yiddish. I didn’t know it was part of Raoul’s language repertoire. I grabbed a beer from the kitchen so I could sit down and listen to his story about Norm Clarke.
Any good big-city daily newspaper that doesn’t take itself too seriously has one, though few are fortunate enough to have that special one that becomes a silk thread in the urban fabric. San Francisco had Herb Caen. Denver has had Bill Husted for as long as I can remember.
What’s their role? Gossip columnist? Man about town? If they’re good, the phrases don’t do them justice. These guys, and a few gals, take the pulse on their city. They tell the rest of us what happens behind closed doors, what happens after the bars close, what’s new, what’s old, what’s coming next. They invite us to the city’s water cooler for the latest gossip on the movers and shakers, and they whisper the latest dish over the city’s backyard fence. They’re the ones who know what local boy has done good, and what local girl has gone bad. What famous visitor has been spotted where, doing what, with whom.
Las Vegas’s version was Norm Clarke.
Norm had briefly gone head-to-head with Husted back in Colorado, scrounging the usually dull Front Range of the Rockies for paltry scoops, but years before he’d moved on to ply his trade at the Review-Journal in the much more fertile gossip terrain of Las Vegas. By all the reports that made their way back across the Great Basin and the Rocky Mountains to Denver, Norm soon owned his adopted town.
He knew everybody in Vegas, had spies everywhere, had eaten at every now table, could get backstage at any show, and was escorted to the front of the line and past the velvet rope at any trendy club. After a few years in the desert Norm had, literally, written the book on Las Vegas, and was always busy taking notes for the next edition. His mug, and his column, graced the front page of the paper every weekend.
Celebrities weren’t really in Vegas until Norm said they were in Vegas. Some begged him for ink. A few had managers and publicists call and beg him to please, please, please forget what he had seen or heard.
Back in his days at the Rocky Mountain News, Norm had done a feature on Raoul, and on Raoul’s golden touch incubating Boulder tech companies during the heady days of the early 1990s. Raoul, who generally despised publicity, thought the piece was on the money, and he and Norm had become casual friends. They’d stayed in touch over the years even as each of their lives grew more complicated.
When Raoul called Norm asking for help in finding Diane, he was asking Norm to do something that Norm wasn’t often asked to do: He was asking him to keep a secret.
Raoul’s first sit-down with Norm had taken place almost twenty-four hours before in one of the many bars that dot the expansive, expensive acreage on the main floor of the Venetian. After some pleasantries Raoul had told Norm that he had a personal favor to ask, and asked Norm if he could speak off the record. Raoul proceeded to provide only the Vegas pieces of the puzzle: that Diane was in town to talk to a patient’s mother, which was as good an excuse as she needed to spend some time playing a little middling-stakes craps. On Monday evening Diane had been talking to a friend on her cell while walking through the Venetian casino, and hadn’t been heard from since. She’d disappeared. Hadn’t returned to her hotel room. Hadn’t called anyone. Nothing.