While Drowning in the Desert nc-5 Read online

  “If Hope can’t do it,” she explained.

  “You’ll be the first I call,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I looked at Hope’s card. It read, The Great Hope White. Cocktail Chanteuse Extraordinaire.

  The Great Hope White. Pretty funny.

  “Hi,” I said when Hope answered the door of her old bungalow in Vegas’ declining old section. “Can Nathan come out and play?”

  Hope was wrapped in an unbelted white robe probably designed by Omar the Tentmaker.

  “Nathan’s not here,” she said.

  “Would you like to come in?” Hope asked me.

  Without waiting for an answer she took my shoulder and guided me past her into the living room. Her perfume smelled liked gardenias-lots of them.

  Going from the hot dry air outside into her house was like stepping from a desert into a jungle. It was actually humid in there. Fetid, one might say if one said graduate school words like ‘fetid’ and ‘bathos.’ If, indeed, one said words like “one” when referring to oneself.

  Anyway, it was hot and humid and chock-full of plants, which was a relief to me. I was afraid it was going to be cats. But it was plants and they were everywhere. Not cactuses either (yes, I know it’s “cacti,” but I’ve already used “fetid,” “bathos,” and “one,” and even I have a limit on being pretentious). No, these were leafy green plants of the kind I regularly killed when I had an apartment in New York, and they were all dripping with moisture. It looked like she watered them maybe fifteen times a day. I half-expected an alligator to come running out from behind one of them.

  “My babies,” she explained.

  “You must have a green thumb,” I answered.

  Back to the lack of wit thing.

  She motioned for me to sit and I plopped down on an orange sofa that looked around vintage 1965. There was a glass coffee table, a television set, two other chairs from the Johnson administration, and two or three hundred framed photographs.

  The photographs occupied virtually every inch of space that wasn’t being taken up by organic matter. There were photos on the walls, on the coffee table, on several little side tables that seemed to exist for the purpose, and on the television set.

  Most of the photos were pictures of Hope with people. Some were celebrities-I recognized Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Wayne Newton-and some of them seemed to be entertainers whose names had never made it above the title. Judging from their placement it didn’t seem to make any difference to Hope-the famous and anonymous were comingled in this gallery of show biz friendships.

  I even spotted a couple of pictures of Natty. He was younger then, but had the same sparkling eyes and narrow-mouth smile, especially as he had his arm draped over the broad shoulder of a younger Hope White wearing a chorus girl outfit. Her long legs and ample bosom were on professional display but her eyes were all her own. Cornflower blue, sparkling and smart.

  My earlier opinion had been dead on: Hope White had been something then, and she was something now.

  “Would you like a drink, dearie?” she asked.

  “Do you have any hemlock?”

  She thought about it.

  “No,” she said, “but I have Haig amp;Haig.”

  Soothing as it might have been to sit in that hothouse and get pleasantly stewed, I still had a job to do: find Nathan Silverstein and get him back to Palm Desert.

  “A Coke, please?”

  “One Coke,” she said brightly, “coming up!”

  “How long have you known Nathan?!” I could hear her in the kitchen messing around with an ice cube tray.

  “A long time!”

  “Did you date him?”

  “Honey, I carbon-dated him,” Hope said as she came in with the Coke, which was in one of those old soda fountain glasses. She had a martini for herself.

  She sat down on the couch next to me.

  “I met him in the bad old days when he was doing the beach movies,” she continued. “He hated them but was paying about three alimonies at the time so he needed the money. Mind you, he was no spring chicken even then. He used to say, ‘I’d like to be a has-been, but I don’t have the money.’”

  “I think I saw a few minutes of one of those movies on TV one night,” I said.

  “You must have been up late,” Hope said. “They were awful! And they gave poor Natty stupid lines to say. He hated them! The poor little honey was so unhappy, and he used to come to town to try and have a few laughs. I was still in the line in those days-I think it was at Harrah’s-and Natty came backstage after the show and asked me out.”

  “Did you know who he was?”

  She sipped her martini and smiled. “Oh sure. In this town you make it your business to know who’s out front, so I knew Natty Silver was in the house. But I never thought I’d step out with him.”

  “Why did you?”

  She seemed to give this question some serious thought, then she said, “He was just so funny.”

  She must have seen the quizzical look on my face, because she leaned forward, patted my hand, and said, “Let me tell you a secret, honey: You make a girl laugh and she’ll make you smile, if you know what I mean.”

  And she blushed.

  “Miss White, do you know where he is?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Honest Injun, I left him at the Mirage.”

  “He checked out.”

  She opened her cornflower eyes nice and wide, smiled, shrugged, and finished her drink.

  “Do you have an idea where he might have gone?” I asked.

  “Honey,” she said, “Natty Silver was once a headliner in this town. He can go anywhere he wants. This isn’t New York or Hollywood. Las Vegas has a memory.”

  That’s what I was banking on.

  I thanked her and got up to leave.

  “Do you have a girl, Neal?” she asked me at the door.

  “A fiancee, actually.”

  “Do you make her laugh?”

  “Oh, she thinks I’m a stitch.”

  I don’t think she bought it, because she said, “Have Natty give you some good jokes.”

  If I can find him, Hope. If I can find him.

  Chapter 4

  I left the jeep with the valet-parking guys and walked into the lobby of the Sands. I hung around the high-roller blackjack tables and made myself conspicuous until I saw a barrel-chested guy who gave me a twice-over.

  I walked over to him.

  “I’d like to see Mickey the C,” I said.

  “And you are?”

  “Neal Carey.”

  “Does Mickey know you, Neal Carey?”

  “No,” I said. “But he knows people who know my boss.”

  “Give me names, Neal Carey.”

  “Joe Graham, Ed Levine, Ethan Kitteredge.”

  “Who do they know?”

  “People in Providence,” I said. “People in New York.”

  All kinds of people in both places. But in this case, “people” referred specifically to wise guys, mobbed-up guys, connected guys. See, Friends of the Family did all sorts of confidential things for its rich and influential clients, and if you’re going to do confidential things for anybody in New York and Providence, you’re bound to make some connections with the mob.

  The same might be said of Las Vegas, which is what brought me to the Sands Hotel to talk with Mickey the C. I’d never met Mickey the C, but I’d heard about him since I was a kid.

  The guy thought about it for a second and said, “Why don’t you sit down and have a drink?”

  “Thanks.”

  I found an empty barstool and ordered a beer. The bartender waved me off when I tried to pay for it.

  The Sands Hotel was a big contrast to the Nugget. It was sleek, stylish, and looked like serious money. It was run by serious people, too, which is why I had come here after Hope said she had no idea where Nathan had gone after their matinee romance.

  I sipped my beer and watched the high-rollers, Armani-clad guys escorted by skinny blonde
s in black sheath dresses, win and lose at blackjack. Mickey the C was probably watching me on a monitor and making the necessary calls.

  A few minutes later the barrel-chested guy came back and said, “Neal Carey, Mickey would like to see you.”

  I followed him upstairs to the security room, where somber men and women sat staring into monitors, watching the doors and the tables. The watchers could punch a few buttons and zoom in on a dealer’s hands or a player’s face or an individual coming through a door. The owners of serious casinos liked to know who came in and out of their places. They hired people like Mickey the C to know these things.

  Mickey the C was in his early sixties but looked younger, which I attributed to a daily regimen of razor cuts, manicures, steam baths, and massages. Mickey was wearing a conservative gray suit that cost at least a thousand bucks, a monogrammed white shirt and an Italian print tie. His black Oxford shoes were polished to a high shine.

  Mickey the C was serious people.

  We shook hands.

  “Neal,” he said. “It’s a late Sunday night on the East Coast so I didn’t make the phone calls I probably should make, so I hope you’re not screwing around.”

  “I’m on the job, Mr. C.”

  “I know who you are,” Mickey said. “You’re Joe Graham’s gofer.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Well, it was accurate enough.

  “You did a big favor for some people in Providence a while ago,” Mickey said.

  “I was doing my job and it coincidentally worked out for them,” I answered, ever modest.

  “Anyway you’re good people,” Mickey said. “Why are you reaching out?”

  “I messed up.”

  I told Mickey about Nathan Silverstein.

  Mickey laughed and said, “Natty Silver gave you the slip?”

  “That’s what it comes down to.”

  Mickey the C chuckled, then said, “Why don’t you have another beer and relax. I’ll put a call out. Everyone in town knows Natty, we’ll have him in maybe half an hour.”

  “That’s why I came to you, Mr. C.”

  It wasn’t just shameless brownnosing, it was also true.

  Mickey said, “That’s one smart thing you did today, anyway.”

  “I knew there was something.”

  “Take it easy, kid,” Mickey said. “Nice to meet to you.”

  “Thanks for taking the time, sir.”

  “You have good manners,” Mickey the C said. “Joe Graham did you okay.”

  Yeah, he did.

  It took two beers instead of one, but I had just drained the second one when the barrel-chested guy found me at the bar and said, “Mr. Silver is at the Flamingo, in the Palm Room. Their guy is watching him till you get there.”

  I thanked him and left a tip for the bartender that was more than the beers would have been. Anything less would have been bad manners.

  As I stepped down into the Palm Room I heard Natty say, “Guy comes home and finds his wife rubbing her breasts with newspaper. He asks her what she’s doing. She says, ‘I read in a magazine that if you rub your breasts with newspaper they’ll get bigger.’”

  There was an expectant chuckle from the small crowd in the cocktail bar. (I was going to say a “titter of laughter,” but I thought better of it.) Natty waited out the laugh, then continued, “The guy says, ‘Newspaper? You should try toilet paper.’ The wife says, ‘Toilet paper? Why?’ and the guy says, ‘Well, it worked on your ass’.”

  The dozen or so people in the room roared. Didn’t laugh-roared. I slipped into a booth at the back and hoped Natty didn’t see me from the tiny stage. I looked around for the plainclothes security, made him in about three seconds, and nodded. The guy gave me a quick wave and strolled out.

  It wasn’t too tough to reconstruct what had been happening. The piano player, a young guy with slicked-back black hair, was sitting back on his bench, relaxing, sharing the fun, and figuring his tip jar wasn’t going to suffer because the customers were getting some free laughs. The few drinkers in the place just looked surprised and delighted that this impromptu stand-up routine had started from this ancient guy they maybe recognized from TV.

  And Natty Silver was having fun. Standing on that shitty little stage, leaning on his cane, eyes sparkling, teasing the crowd with his deadpan delivery and killer timing.

  “Guy and a dog walk into a bar…” he was saying.

  I checked my watch. If I grabbed Natty right now we could still make the plane and I could wrap up this errand. It would be a simple matter of getting up, easing Natty off the stage and grabbing a cab to the airport. Otherwise we’d miss the last flight to Palm Springs and that would mean spending the night in Vegas. Another night away from the old thesis, another night away from Karen.

  It would mean an extra day of babysitting an old man who had a seemingly endless repertoire of old jokes.

  I started to slide out of the booth.

  Shit, I thought. Shit, shit shit.

  I signaled the waitress, ordered a scotch rocks and sat back in the banquette.

  What’s another night? I thought. I had a lot of them and Natty Silver probably didn’t.

  “Guy says to the dog, ‘You never behaved this way before.’ ”

  Natty Silver looked very much alive as he teased the punch line.

  “Dog says, ‘I never had money before.’ ”

  Hope was right: Natty Silver was very funny.

  Chapter 5

  “You want what?” I asked natty as we left the Flamingo and headed back to the Mirage.

  “Chocolate cake,” he said.

  “It’s ten-thirty at night.”

  “What, chocolate cake disappears at ten?” he asked. “There’s a law, all chocolate cake has to become angel food cake by ten-fifteen? We’re run by chocolate-cake Nazis now?”

  I wasn’t sure I even wanted to contemplate the image of a chocolate-cake Nazi, so I just sighed. “Where can we get chocolate cake?”

  “You’re the detective,” Nate snapped. “Find some.”

  “I’m not a detective.”

  “No, you’re an ‘escort’ with no bazookas.”

  I was about to say, given the cantilevered architecture of Hope White’s build, that he had more than filled his bazooka quota for the day, but I decided he’d have a punch line for that and I didn’t want to hear it.

  I decided to take a professional approach.

  “Look,” I said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go get your damn chocolate cake. Then we’re going back to the Mirage and then we’re going to bed. Then we’re going to get up early and catch the first flight back to Palm Springs. No booze, no broads, no pastry. Got it?”

  He looked at me with those little bird-eyes.

  “No breakfast?”

  It did sound a little harsh.

  “We can have breakfast,” I relented.

  “What?”

  “What ‘what’?”

  “What ‘what what’?” he asked. “What’s for breakfast?”

  “I don’t know,” I moaned. “Bacon and eggs.”

  “Eggs?!” he snapped. “What, are you trying to kill me?”

  I hadn’t been, but the concept didn’t entirely lack appeal at the moment.

  But assuming it was a rhetorical question, I didn’t answer.

  “And bacon?” he asked indignantly.

  “What’s wrong with bacon?”

  Apparently giving up on talking directly to me Nate mumbled to no one in particular, “He wants to feed bacon and eggs to an old Jew with a heart condition.”

  “I didn’t know you had a heart condition,” I said.

  “I’m eighty-six years old,” Nate answered. “That is a heart condition.”

  “Look, you can have gefilte fish and matzo balls for breakfast. I don’t care.”

  “What about the chocolate cake?”

  “For breakfast?”

  “Now.”

  I knew that. I was just giving him back
a little, you know.

  “I have an idea,” I said.

  “Excuse me, but I’m skeptical.”

  “Why don’t we go back to the Mirage and order the chocolate cake from room service?”

  “What are you, crazy?” he asked. “Room-service prices?”

  I didn’t care. I had the company’s gold card. With an American Express Gold Card in Vegas you could get a whole cake and someone to jump out of it if you wanted.

  Anyway, that’s what we did. (No, not the jumping-out part, just the cake part.) I could tell he was wearing out, so he didn’t give me too much of a fight. And on a Sunday night it was no problem extending his room. So Nate sat in his underwear eating his cake and watching old movies on TV while I called Karen.

  “Hi,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Knitting.”

  “The only thing I’ve ever seen you knit is your brow,” I said.

  Which was not overly bright on my part, but I was starting to get annoyed with the baby thing.

  “You can be such a jerk,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Don’t think admitting it is going to get you off the hook,” she said. “And I’ve been thinking.”

  Maybe, I hoped, she’d been thinking that getting pregnant right away was a tad premature and that we should wait until we’ve been married two or ten years. And that she was knitting me a sweater or a scarf or something.

  “What have you been thinking?” I asked as gently as I could. You know, to let her ease into backing down.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “that you’re not okay with parenthood because you never knew your own father and your mother was a heroin-addicted prostitute who didn’t nurture you and that you haven’t really dealt with your suppressed rage sufficiently to surrender your own childhood and adopt adult responsibilities.”

  Oh.

  “So you want me to come in every Tuesday, Doctor?” I asked.

  “See, there’s that hostility.”

  “Christ, I don’t know why I’d be hostile!” I yelled.

  “I think it’s healthy that you’re working out your anger,” she said casually.

  “I am not working out my goddamned anger!!!” I screeched.

  “You don’t have to get mad,” she said.