“Except they didn’t come back.”
“Right, right, right. They were killed, so you don’t want to think there’s a connection.”
“They weren’t just killed. I never really took much of a look at it, but weren’t they mutilated or something?”
“Something like that – all the more reason for you to shy away from any connection to your case. But what I’m saying is that there’s a parallel. So maybe you should check it out. Go out there.”
“To Vegas? Why?”
“If it’s me? Because you can gamble all night and the food is great.” He lets out a high-pitched laugh, but then gets down to business. “I’m serious. I can see what you think of this, but I’m telling you…” His voice trails away and he resets himself in the chair. “Look at it this way – your instinct to follow up on the Sandlings was right, okay? Twins.”
“But they were the same age, they were kids-”
“But now you’re making a lot of assumptions. You’re thinking it’s about kids – and maybe it is. But you shouldn’t assume that. What if it’s about twins? It always struck me as odd – taking two kids. That didn’t sit right. You wanta get your kids back? – you gotta have an open mind. Because you don’t know. It might be about kids. It might be about twins. Or it might be about something else, something we can’t even guess yet. But your sons are twins who disappeared and the Gablers are twins who disappeared.”
“I don’t know.”
“So what – you think it’s a waste of time,” Shoffler says. “Like you’ve got something better to do?” He gestures toward the study. “Like you’re hot on the trail?”
I shrug. He’s right. I don’t have anything better to do, except stay in lockstep with my e-mails and phone lists.
“Look, it’s a lead. You might not like it, but like the man says, if you didn’t have this lead, you wouldn’t have no lead at all. I’m telling you. How many sets of twins who disappeared popped up in your research? I’ll tell you because I went the same route.” He counts them off on his fingers. “One – you got the Ramirez boys – but the guy who popped them popped himself. Nothing there. Then you got the Gabler girls. Then you got the Sandling boys. Maybe looking into the Gabler twins is a waste of time. But maybe not.”
“I don’t know.”
He picks up the notebooks in one hand and holds them aloft, as if we’re in court and they’re evidence. “I looked through these, I gave them a good hard read. And the only thing that stuck out – and this is a professional opinion I’m giving you now, after my eighteen years as a detective. The only thing that stuck out was the Gablers. That’s the only unturned stone.”
“This is… I mean, is this a hunch?”
“Don’t underestimate that shit.”
I shrug. “If you think it’s worth a shot.” I’m in what-the-hell territory, but it isn’t that simple. Maybe I’m agreeing to the trip as a way to make up for my earlier rudeness. Maybe Shoffler is selling me on Vegas and the Gablers because he thinks it will be good for me to get out of town.
“Anyway, it’s cheap as hell this time of year,” Shoffler says. “And I’m wired into the homicide squad there.”
“I hear you’re wired in everywhere.”
He makes a cynical face, but behind it I can see he’s pleased to hear that assessment. “Yeah,” he says, “I’m AT &T. For all the good it does.” He shakes his head. “No evacuation plan – can you believe it? We got this high-falutin’ antiterrorism task force and this is the major policy decision so far. It’s like the opposite of evacuation. We’re talking about a military cordon – keeping D.C. residents in.”
“People will go nuts if it leaks.”
“Oh, it’s gonna leak. I might dime the Post myself.” He pulls a hand back over his forehead. Under what, for lack of a better word, you’d call bangs, his forehead gleams a startling white. “Anyway… Vegas,” he says. “There’s this guy out there, friend of mine – Holly Goldstein. He’ll get you the file on the Gabler girls.”
“Holly?”
“Ha! Yeah – that’s the nickname of a nickname. Hollywood Mike Goldstein. Everybody just calls him Holly. I’ll give him a heads-up.”
CHAPTER 21
Vegas. I’ve never been to Vegas before. It just never happened. But like everyone, I guess, I had a full-blown notion of the place – equal parts glitz and sleaze. As it turns out, my mental Las Vegas pales before the real thing.
The initial mile out of the Avis lot from McCarran Airport is sleazy, as torn-up and funky as any disreputable stretch of Route 1. Tired motels and seedy casinos vie for space with down-at-the-heels wedding chapels and fringe commercial enterprises. The Hearing Palace. Leonard’s Wide Shoes. The Laughing Jackalope. This last is a motel-casino right out of a B movie. In fact, you wouldn’t get away with inventing The Laughing Jackalope. It’s too seedy. The sign features a sinister rabbit decked out in a green tuxedo lounging against a fan of cards.
I pass a giant billboard advertising MICROSURGICAL VASECTOMY REVERSAL. (Is there a big market for this? The sign lists four locations.) Then I hit the first big hotel-casino, the sheathed-in-gold Mandalay Bay.
It’s unbelievably huge, bigger than any structure in the D.C. area except maybe the Pentagon. And it’s the first of many of these monsters. I’m reduced to gawking as I drive up the Strip in my rented Ford. Each hotel is like a separate theme park, a huge and lavish stage set. Mandalay Bay, Luxor, New York New York, Paris, the Bellagio, Caesar’s Palace. A tidbit from the flight magazine said that the light from the Luxor’s obsidian pyramid can be seen from outer space. The gigantic faces of Vegas-centric celebrities loom everywhere on massive billboards. David Copperfield, Lance Burton, Penn and Teller, Wayne Newton, Cirque du Soleil, Céline Dion.
Lights, billboards, crowds. It’s Times Square on steroids.
But I’m not staying in one of these nouveau palaces. Priceline found me a bargain at the Tropicana. It’s still huge, but compared to the new places, it seems almost petite. I drive around to the self-park lot and go into the hotel through the casino.
Which is so crowded it’s hard to walk. A barrel-vaulted stained-glass roof sprawls above endless ranks of slot machines. Four women in bright green sequined costumes sing and dance on a stage-lit elevated platform. Lights flash, twinkle, pop. The air is filled with Nintendo tunes, a constant beep and boink of canned melodies interrupted by the occasional grace note – a cascade of coins as a machine pays off. Every pop phenomenon – movie, sitcom, celebrity, popular toy, ethnic emblem, nursery rhyme – boasts a slot machine counterpart. Falsetto choruses burst forth at regular intervals, caroling signature phrases. “Wheel of Fortune!” “Come on Down!”
By the time I fight my way through to the registration desk, I need a sensory deprivation chamber.
“Welcome to the Big Sleazy,” Holly Goldstein says when I get him on the phone. “I pulled the files on the Gabler case. Got some time at three if you’re not tapped out from your flight.”
I tell him I’ll be there.
“Grab a pencil,” he tells me. “Folks expect we’re right near the Strip or in old Vegas, but we’re way out of town. In fact, if you’re on the Strip, technically you’re not even in Las Vegas. You’re in Paradise.”
“What?”
“Yeah. With a capital P. The developers incorporated the Strip as a separate jurisdiction called Paradise.”
“Really.”
“Yeah – in which case, you could say that the Las Vegas P.D. is a long way from Paradise. They stuck us out here in the burbs, like a bunch of dentists. It’s about a thirty-minute drive, depending on traffic.” Goldstein gives directions in the sonorous voice of an anchorman or voiceover specialist. Even his laugh is mellifluous, a liquid chortle. Shoffler told me that Goldstein was in showbiz before he turned to law enforcement. “That’s what the ‘Hollywood’ is about. Holly did a cop show about twenty years back and his true vocation called him.”