“Why is that?”
He made a face. “Some people up there seem set on doing me in.”
“Goodness,” Andrea said, “you’ve been a busy fellow. Why are they set on doing you in?”
“I don’t know.”
A slow, incredulous smile crossed her face. “You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t.”
She nodded soberly. “Some odd things go on out here.”
“I believe it.”
“And what are you running to?”
“Well, I guess that remains to be seen.”
She gave him a long, direct look, then nodded again, as if a conjecture had been confirmed. “You lie very well, David—perhaps too well for your own good.”
He blinked, taken aback. “Why do you say that?”
“Shouldn’t I say that?” she asked innocently.
“Well …”
“You were lying weren’t you? When I asked what you were running to?”
David stared down into his drink for a few moments. “Yes, I suppose I was, a little.”
“And what’s the truth?”
He laughed nervously. “The truth is that I’d feel foolish talking about it.”
“That’s much better, isn’t it? The truth, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“No bones broken?”
“No.”
“This is something I learned long ago, David. Lies are like sleeping pills. You should only use them when you absolutely have to. They spoil everything if you make a habit of them.”
“True.”
She shook her head in amused disgust. “You say ‘true’ as if you already knew it, and yet just one minute ago there you were, telling me a lie you didn’t need to tell, simply as a matter of reflex.” She gave him a knowing smile. “I’ll bet you left your wife because you just couldn’t stand lying to her anymore.”
“Ouch. Are you a compulsive truth-teller then?”
“Oh no, far from it. I’m a very accomplished liar. But I never lie out of cowardice, and I don’t care to be around people who do.”
He frowned, digesting the implications of this.
“And now you’re feeling affronted, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m trying to decide what I’m feeling. Give me a little time and maybe I’ll feel affronted.”
Andrea laughed. “I’ll bet you married young.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Oh, men who marry young fall behind a bit. You have some catching up to do.”
David shook his head helplessly.
“Say it, my dear. Be courageous.”
“You’re quite a handful.”
She laughed again, and, in spite of himself, he liked the wholehearted way she gave herself up to it.
“Well,” he said, “I’d better be on my way.”
“I won’t hear of it,” Andrea replied firmly. “You’d be sure to get lost and you wouldn’t get back to town before dawn. Besides, I’d like you to stay. I get bored without people around.”
“There’s no one here but you and Marianne?”
“There’s Dudley, of course, but he really is a nontalker. During the summer and the ski season the house is jammed with people.”
“Who’s Dudley?”
“Dudley Case. A post-graduate anthropology student. A very serious fellow.”
“I see.”
“I’m pretty sure the hook room is all made up.”
“The hook room?”
Andrea laughed again. “I shouldn’t call it that—it makes it sound sinister. Last fall we had a guest who was a chronic insomniac. She literally had to be rocked to sleep, and we suspended a sort of cradle from the ceiling for her. I haven’t gotten around to having the hooks removed, so we’ve fallen into the habit of calling it the hook room. But it’s not time to think of going to bed yet, is it?”
David agreed it wasn’t and made them another drink.
She asked him about the career he’d abandoned and listened with more attention than David had thought her capable of. When he was finished, she said: “What you’re saying is that you got out when you realized that the real function of the schools is to deceive.”
“I don’t know that I’d go as far as that. The real function of the schools is to produce workers—people who have no choice but to find someone who will give them money in exchange for labor.”
“But they have to be convinced that they have no other choice, don’t they?”
“That’s certainly part of it.”
“Then are they deceived or not?”
“I truthfully don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”
Andrea smiled. “Oh, you are truly an enchanted people.”
“Enchanted?”
“I’m not a learned person—I wouldn’t want you to think that. But there is one statement I came across in Plato’s Republic that I thought was worth remembering: Whatever deceives may be said to enchant. You have been monstrously deceived—and are therefore monstrously enchanted.”
“You speak as though you weren’t one of us.”
“Of course. Anyone who shakes off the deception shakes off the enchantment as well—and ceases to be one of you.”
“And who is it who enchanted us?”
“Oh, you managed to do that for yourselves, long ago.”
David shook his head. “I’m afraid we’ve reached a point where I don’t have the slightest idea what we’re talking about.”
“Ask Dudley to explain it to you. He understands it very well—almost instinctively. His people have managed to resist the enchantment for three or four centuries now.”
“His people?”
“He’s a Navajo.”
David made himself another drink and asked how she’d come by the pre-Columbian head downstairs. Without hesitation, she launched into a long, hair-raising tale that was a near relative to Raiders of the Lost Ark. When she was done, he said, “I see why you call yourself an accomplished liar. And the truth?”
“Oh, the truth is rather boring. I picked it up before such things became fashionable.” She answered his look of exaggerated skepticism with an arch smile and said: “I’m older than I look.”
The hooks were definitely not what took the eye in the hook room. Though the furnishings were as elegant as elsewhere in the house, Andrea evidently understood that guests would need a relief from the flamboyance of her own personal style. Next to the ultramodern and the primitive, she seemed to like the work of the deco period, and this room was completely dedicated to it, with a platform bed, low, heavy sofas and armchairs, tables with glass tops and metal tubing legs, and a breathtaking cabinet running the entire length of one wall and filled with treasures of crystal, porcelain, bronze, ivory, coral, and silver. The other walls were given over to posters by Cassandre, Colin, Loupot, Gise, and Carlu. Incredibly, beside the crystal ashtrays and enameled silver cigarette cases, were set out 1930s matchbooks from the Providence Biltmore, the Gladstone, the Hotel Barnum, and the Zebra Room of the President Madison; David wondered whether anyone ever inadvertently used one of them.
The next morning, on coming out of the bathroom (opulent but strictly modern except for the Lalique light fixtures and an exquisite green and gold lacquer mirror), David discovered that someone had collected his luggage from the hotel. After hovering for a moment between being indignant and being flattered, he decided to be flattered.
It was eleven-thirty when he left his room to seek food and company. The hallway and the living room downstairs were empty. So was the immense dining room next to it and the kitchen (probably salvaged from the Titanic). A door from the kitchen led to the building he’d seen from the road the night before; it was what it had appeared to be, a greenhouse—uninhabited by either plants or people. He went back upstairs and knocked on Andrea’s door: no response. Beginning to feel a little neglected, he climbed the stairs to the third level of the house and found himself in another living room, as enormous as the one below,
but more casually furnished and brightly lit by floor-to-ceiling windows at each end. It seemed to double as a game and music room, having a tournament-size pool table and a billiard table, a grand piano, and a stereo system with wall-mounted speakers the size of steamer trunks. This too was unoccupied, and he passed through it to a smaller dining room and finally into another kitchen, all stainless steel and butcher-block wood. Here at last he found a bit of human activity. A dark, barrel-shaped man in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt was stirring something on the stove.
He looked up, regarded David solemnly for a moment, and said, “I heard we had company. I’m Dudley Case.”
David stared at him dumbly, and the man turned back to the stove.
“I’m just making some lunch,” he said. “There’s enough for two if you like Texas-style chili.”
David, his mouth suddenly parched, still couldn’t find his tongue. The last time he’d met this man his name was Horse Killer.
CHAPTER 34
While David was upstairs in Andrea’s bedroom discussing deceit and enchantment the night before, other conversations had been taking place elsewhere. Howard and Tim, having arrived in Las Vegas in the early evening, were at the El Moreno talking to Jack Golding about the check Tim had received in the mail that morning. Ellen, having been transported to an isolated house outside Grand Junction, Colorado, was talking to her captors, the spurious Chicago detectives Artie Goodman and Nick Wolf.
Neither conversation proved very fruitful.
Jack Golding, comfortably ensconced in a booth in the dining room, was as affable as ever. His partners hadn’t faulted him for his handling of David Kennesey nor blamed him for David’s defection; they agreed that, short of shackling the man to a table, nothing more could have been done. It would mean a thin week for the casino, but the publicity had been welcome, room bookings were noticeably higher, and, as Golding had predicted, their handle was up. Though David had cost him some money and some prestige, Golding felt no personal animus toward him—or toward his son; after all, if he’d been in David’s shoes, he knew he wouldn’t have given back even so much as a nickel.
“But I don’t know what more I can tell you,” he said. “The man walked in, wiped us out like a bandit, and blew town. That’s all there is.”
“He could have just checked into another hotel, couldn’t he?” Howard asked.
“Sure, but why? Here it was all comped—the best rooms in the joint, meals, drinks, everything. Besides, if he checked in anywhere else, I would’ve heard about it. You gotta understand, the man was a celebrity.”
Howard nodded sourly and looked at Tim. Tim looked back, hands folded on the table in front of him, calmly waiting for Howard to pull a rabbit out of an empty hat.
“Do you know if Mr. Kennesey made any friends while he was here?” Howard asked. “Anyone he hung around with in the bar, for example?”
Golding shook his head with a clear conscience, knowing that Michelle was as much in the dark as he was. He nearly smiled, remembering the hooker’s lethal fury at David’s escape.
“When he left Indiana, he was driving a Volvo,” Howard went on doggedly. “According to the register, he was driving a Corvette when he checked in here. I don’t suppose he happened to mention to anyone how that came about.”
“If he did, I don’t know about it.”
“And he didn’t drop even a word about where he was going next? North, south, east, west?”
“Not a word that I know of.” Golding scratched a blue jaw thoughtfully. “I tell you what I’d do if I were you, though. Vegas is a town of name-droppers if there ever was one—everybody wants to get next to somebody or make you think they’re next to somebody. If I were you, I’d put out the word that you’re looking for information about the guy who took the El Moreno for sixty-eight grand. If he did tell somebody where he was going, that might turn him up. What I mean is, he might just come around to see if you were somebody to get next to—somebody he could make a story out of.”
Unable to think of any useful questions to ask beyond that, Howard thanked him and took Tim to another table to confer. After ordering a cup of coffee, he closed his eyes. They felt scorched and achy, and he spent a few moments trying to knead away the pain.
It had been a weird day, and he felt disoriented, unbalanced, as if he’d gone to the circus and suddenly found himself in the center ring dressed in a clown suit. He couldn’t completely take it in that he was in Las Vegas, asking foolish questions and making inept motions at being a detective. It didn’t make sense. As a bigcity dweller, he’d learned long ago not to let himself get sucked into other people’s troubles—unless he was being paid to be sucked in, of course. There are just too many people with too many troubles for that. But he’d certainly slipped up this time—and what bothered him was that he didn’t know why. Was he getting sentimental in his old age? Doing the Edmund Gwenn bit in Miracle on 34th Street? Whatever mad impulse had prompted him to undertake this foolishness, it was obviously clouding his judgment. In his right mind—if he’d been hired to find David Kennesey—he would never have gotten on a plane and flown to Las Vegas; it was disastrously wasteful, entirely unprofessional. Bringing Tim with him was even worse, the work of a lunatic. It was as though he’d forgotten all his years of experience. He was acting like an amateur, and it upset him.
And Tim upset him, with his unspoken and apparently limitless faith in him: Howard was now in charge of Tim’s life and was going to make everything right again—was going to find his father, was going to find his mother, and was going to bring them all back together to live happily ever after in Runnell, Indiana. If Tim had been a client, Howard would have told him right at the outset, “Look, I’ll do the best I can, but I can’t promise miracles, okay?” But there was no question of saying that to Tim now. He wasn’t a client, he was a ward, a responsibility, and Howard had nominated himself to be his fairy godfather. Making it all happen was something that simply had to be done, and if miracles were required, well, he’d just have to come up with them.
Tim, watching Howard rub his eyes, slumped over the table, knew that something was bothering him. On that first night he’d been affable, casual, solicitous. But in the hours they’d spent first on the plane and then waiting for Jack Golding to come on his shift, he’d become increasingly grouchy and tense. He’d seen this happen often enough with his parents not to worry about it and knew that the best thing he could do was to be as inconspicuous and undemanding as possible until it blew over. Which is what he thought he was doing now.
“Well,” Howard grunted, straightening up at last, “what do you think?”
“What do I think?”
Howard made an elaborate show of looking around their table. “It looks like there’s nobody here but us, Tim.”
“God,” Tim said. “You’ve had a lot more experience with this sort of thing than I have. I mean, this is what you do for a living, isn’t it?”
Howard just barely managed to disguise his growl as a sigh. Then, thinking about it, he realized that Tim’s question gave him an opportunity to clarify the situation and reduce the weight of his burden. “Look, Tim, I’m not exactly here in my professional capacity. If I were, I would have come by myself. I don’t usually take my clients with me wherever I go.”
Tim mulled this over for a moment. “What are you saying? That I’m not your client?”
“Something like that. In this thing, we’re more like partners. Which is why I ask you what you think.”
“I see,” Tim said gravely. “Then I think we should follow Mr. Golding’s suggestion and put out the word that we’re looking for information.… Why are you laughing?”
Howard was indeed laughing, his whole body quaking, his head in his hands. He was laughing because it was obvious to him now that his brain was turning to mush over this thing. After one conversation, it was plain that they were at a dead end here, and he’d already decided that the only sensible thing to do was to turn around and fly home. But now, h
aving named Tim a full partner in the investigation, he couldn’t very well tell the boy that his opinion was worthless.
“I believe,” he said, wiping his eyes, “that the expression is ‘hoist with his own petard,’ though I’ve never had the foggiest idea what a petard is or what it means to be hoist with one.” Tim asked him what he was talking about, but Howard just shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll start putting out the word tomorrow and see what happens.”
“You’ve kidnaped my son,” Ellen stated.
“No, lady,” Wolf said, “we haven’t kidnaped your son.”
“Then you’ve kidnaped David.”
The solid mass of red hair didn’t stir as he shook his narrow head. “Lady, we haven’t kidnaped anyone. Except you, of course.”
This conversation was taking place in the living room of an old, shabbily furnished farmhouse that seemed to have retained the chill of winter in its bones. Artie Goodman was out trying to scare up enough wood for a fire in the stove. Ellen, sitting in the middle of an exhausted sofa, and Wolf, across the room in an oak rocker, might have been taken for a married couple worrying a subject they’d disputed a dozen times without resolution.
“Why?” Ellen demanded bitterly. “What do you want?”
Rocking, his hands folded in his lap, Wolf closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Do you want money, for God’s sake? We don’t have any money.”
“We don’t want your money, Mrs. K. Just take it easy. Think of it as a little vacation from Runnell. Relax. Imagine you’re in Bermuda or something. It’ll all be over in a couple days, and you probably won’t even be needed.”