Two for the Show (11 page)

There was the e-mail reply back from Wallace to Wallace. I thought Wallace the Amazing might simply pretend not to have seen it, since acknowledging it would begin to lend credence to it, which would be the wrong tack for him to take. His return e-mail to Archer—all one line of it—was sufficiently cryptic to have no definitive meaning in an investigation or a court of law. But it was a clear enough indication of his stance, of his temperament, and even of a sense of irony.

TO: Archer Wallace

FROM: Archer Wallace

SUBJECT: Who do you think you are?

A few hours after that—once I’d returned to my own condo, safe again, now that I wasn’t trying to hide from the Stewartsons—Wallace the Amazing amazes me once more.

Because Detective Armondy and Detective Hammer of the Las Vegas Police Department are suddenly at my door. Flashing badges in the Vegas sun. Squinting into the cool darkness as they step inside. Just like in the movies—as if they know how they are expected to act. The whole deal. And big boys too, both of them. Meaty as offensive linemen. “Can we sit down?” As in, we’re gonna be here a little while.

The LVPD. One of the detectives is studying me. I already have the sense. That Wallace to Wallace e-mail. They must have seen it too.

They settle themselves carefully into the chairs I direct them to. Chairs no one had ever sat in before, I realize. Before I got taped into one.

“What’s this about?”

“Somebody is trying to blackmail Wallace the Amazing.”

Wow. A preemptive strike. Wallace the Amazing has brought in the Vegas police. Gutsy. Risky. He is going to head this off quickly, fire from both barrels—presumably because he is truly concerned about everything coming undone.

I’m smart enough not to say, “What’s that got to do with me?” I know why they’re here. My being cc’d on the e-mail is at least as mysterious to them as it is to me. “I know the e-mail you mean,” I tell them. “I thought it was sent to me by mistake, or else a joke I didn’t get.” Wallace the Amazing obviously forwarded the e-mail, as is, to the police. They have not been able to trace it to the sender either. But they have been able to find me, the cc, the e-witness. Is Wallace the Amazing willing to risk connecting the two of us? After all our cautiousness, after all these years? Does this simply prove further he doesn’t really need me?

“You know who sent it?”

“No.”

“You know Wallace the Amazing?”

“I know
of
him. I’ve seen him perform. I watch his show. He
is
amazing.”

“He said he knows you.”

My heart pounds. Did he give me up? Just like that? Turn on me? Over this? My strangled look of fear, of anguish, is maybe taken for anger, irritation.

“He couldn’t have said that. Because he doesn’t know me.”

Hammer smiles. “No, he said he doesn’t. We were just . . . asking.” A clever little play by the LV detectives, the kind they love—not in the manual, but certainly in the playbook.

“And you don’t know who sent it?” I am asked again, seriously. Back to the real question.

“Well, maybe I
do
know them”—I’m establishing a tone of scrupulous honesty—“but the
to
is the same as the
from
, so I can’t tell who it is.”

“Any guesses?”

I shake my head.

Detective Hammer settles back a little. “See, thing is, this isn’t just garden-variety blackmail.” He cocks his head, looks around my neat, spare condo, blankly assessing. “Wallace the Amazing is an institution. He generates revenue for this town. Employs lots of people. Gives generously to local organizations. Police. Fire. Children’s hospital wings. Cut to the chase: guy is part of the local economy. Big part. Maybe whoever sent this has really got something on Wallace. But personally, I’d rather not know what it is. And Las Vegas doesn’t want to know what it is. Because whatever it is, it can’t weigh in at nearly what this guy Wallace has done for this town.”

He looks at me, making sure I understand. “Okay, so you don’t know who sent this.” He pauses meaningfully, he’s nobody’s fool. “But if you figure it out, it might be good to convey this sentiment, this point of view, to whoever sent it. There’s an extra level of, uh, local sensitivity that they need to be aware of. There’s more at work here,
capisce
?”

Wallace. Impresario and civic supporter. Piling high the chips of goodwill. Of social capital. As if anticipating such a calamity. His high-profile, unsubtle insurance policy against it.

Why
did
Archer Wallace put me on the e-mail? To push me out into the open? Or just to warn me? Or—and as soon as I think of it, I know this is the reason—because any subsequent electronic tampering I might try would now be detected by the police. He was tying up my nimble keyboard fingers.

“Blackmail is illegal, whatever the facts behind it,” Hammer says pompously. “Whoever sent this is doing something criminal already, right off the bat, whatever he may or may not be holding over the victim. That’s why it’s good Wallace came straight to us with this and didn’t try to handle it himself. His instincts are good. But even if this blackmailer ultimately wants to come to the police with whatever it is he has, he needs to think about it. You know, whatever it is, if Wallace hid it all these years, the police could hide it too.”

He shrugs. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t dare. It is as if the words exist, float independent of him, as if he has nothing to do with them.

Why is he revealing so much to me? Clearly because he knows that I know more than I’m letting on. That I’m connected in some way that he’s not forcing me to say. Not yet, anyway.

I promise them that I’ll call if I get another suspicious e-mail. I show them out politely. “What line of work are you in?” Hammer asks.

“Computers.”

He looks at me. I answer before he can ask.

“I tried to see where that e-mail was coming from,” I pretend to confess. “I couldn’t trace it any better than your guys could.”

He smiles. That seems to satisfy him.

The Vegas police. Preemptive strike from Wallace the Amazing. Upping the stakes. Throwing me over? Or warning me I’d have to swim on my own from here.

I now have to move carefully, I realize. I’m probably now being physically observed. Can’t contact either the Stewartsons or the real Wallace. We’ll have to stay away from each other. This might be the end of any involvement for me. Have to keep my nose clean.

It was only later that I realized what the Amazing Wallace was doing.

Local civic booster. Part of the economy.

I’d watched Armondy and Hammer’s unmarked car pull out slowly—circle around and pass by again ten minutes later, as if to convey to me explicitly that yes, they would be watching from here on in.

It was all perfectly staged. The ten-dollar haircuts, the leathery too-long-in-Vegas tans, the physical heft of doughnut stakeouts. So it took me a while to realize that those weren’t real detectives. That Wallace the Amazing would never alert the police, never risk bringing in the real thing, when he could head everything off with these actors, and there was no risk of the curiosity of the real police, and he’d still be safe. Wallace would never risk it if he didn’t have to. Look at his show, the care, the planning, the elimination of variation and risk. No, this was certainly the route he would take. As if confirming, or commenting on, his own permanent impersonation, by siccing a secondary impersonation on us.

That little detective show was intended primarily for the real Wallace—maybe a fake restraining order with it, I’d bet. Probably they couldn’t find him, in which case I was the next-best thing, and made an excellent dress rehearsal. And if I did know where the real Archer Wallace was, I’d pass on the news—the police position on this, the high hurdle that had already been set in front of exposing the truth, so maybe it was better to back off, call it off, etc.

Preemptive strike, indeed. A cleverer one than I’d thought.

And was I just as inauthentic a detective as they were? Since I didn’t originally detect their artificiality? Are they inadvertently—or purposely—some sad commentary on my own cut-rate brand of detective?

I had to find the real Wallace. Before they did.

EIGHT

Fortunately, he stands out physically.
Shockingly. That extreme emaciation, the thin tufts of hair, the translucent skin. Yet the Stewartsons and the fake detectives haven’t seen him, and they have all, I’m sure, cruised the Vegas night, the hooker-dealer-gambler-pimp neon night, and haven’t located him.

Which tells me what I need to know. That he has found his way someplace where he is
not
standing out. Where he is blending in. Unobtrusive, unnoticeable. I have spent twenty years blending in like that, learning to go unnoticed; I’ve learned a thing or two about it.

The unseen Vegas. It is indoors, as artificial and hermetic and self-contained and well air-conditioned as casino Vegas, but there the similarity ends. The unseen Vegas is retirement communities, eldercare facilities, nursing homes, for our failing parents and grandparents. An unseen Vegas population that does not match, that contrasts with, the city’s youthful, brazen, bronzed, endless-night culture but is there beside it—white, weak, moving their fragile bodies through the dry, mythically salubrious desert air. The only place Archer Wallace can disappear. The only place his appearance makes him
unnoticeable
. (Here, or a hospital. Not out of the question, but a higher standard for entry—verifiable sickness, after all—and maybe too confining and closely observed once you’re in.)

It would probably be a big facility, where his arrival will go mostly unnoticed, unremarked upon. A big facility. With Wi-Fi and free Internet access and computer terminals for the patients/residents lined up in the hall so that they can go online easily, check headlines and box scores and stock quotes and look for the lone stray e-mail from a distant guilt-racked relative. I call the four biggest eldercare facilities, tell each administration I’m looking for my uncle, who, with his failing memory, neglected to tell me which one he was going to be checking into, but let me describe him—lean, bald, white-skinned.

“Sir, we’ve got dozens of new arrivals who match that description. Just give us his name.”

But of course, I know he’s not using his own name. It’s the one name he won’t be using: Archer Wallace.

I tap into each facility’s credit card transactions. Looking for the flurry of activity indicating a new arrival. The facilities have everything already—bedding, food—but maybe there’s something. Some medication. Anything.

At Golden Care, a clothing purchase. Who shows up without clothing for a terminal stay, a visit until death, except Archer Wallace, who has no clothes? I tap into the inventory control on the computer of the local store where Golden Care made the purchase (Jesus, no security at all) and find the transaction. Three men’s medium short-sleeve shirts. Three men’s pants. All of it a single purchase. All waist twenty-six. Someone thin. Emaciated. Bingo. A little more investigation of Golden Care, and I see they’re at the low end of these facilities—a Medicaid facility, pay weekly, indigent care provider, not much checking on residents. I can see how he could make his way in.

I head over to Golden Care at sundown—golden hour—mealtime for the institutional elderly. When I can review all the residents,
dining together in their depressing dining area, in various states of alertness. I pull into the lot of Golden Care and take it in: a series of buildings tossed up together sometime in the sixties, I’d say, without apparent benefit of an architect or site plan. (Wide-open, dirt-cheap desert land so who cares, what the hell.) Sidewalks overgrown with high weeds. A deeply cracked entrance fountain that hasn’t seen water in decades. Lots of plate glass, so the residents can look out on empty, relentless nothingness, an earthly proxy of the cosmic nothingness they are all headed for. It’s easy to locate the dining area—the longest row of windows. I scan carefully from outside the plate glass, observing the white-haired men and women hunched over their meals, slurping, mumbling, or chatting with one another.

Or at a table alone—reading a newspaper.

There he is. Wallace.

Maybe I
am
a detective.

The dining area lets out onto a sorry little patio. I enter the dining area through the unlocked patio door. The few Golden Care staff members I see are all preoccupied with empty dishes, wheelchairs, phone calls.

I sit down opposite him—carefully, slowly, as if he’ll dissolve right in front of me. He looks up like he’s been expecting me. No smile. Barely an acknowledgment of my being here, of my finding him here, but acknowledgment enough.

“Sorry to run out on you like that,” he says. “Bet you figured I wouldn’t last an hour.”

“Something like that,” I confess.

“Obviously I’m a little heartier and more resourceful than I appear,” he says.

“And highly motivated.”

“My e-mail.”

“The only thing that surprised me more than your boldness in taking on Wallace yourself was including me on your e-mail. Copying a third party. That has to be a blackmail first.”

He doesn’t answer, just smiles.

“I don’t know whether you want me as a witness, in case something happens, or you want to drive a wedge between Wallace and me because you suspect some association between us, or you want to prove some connection to me, or all of the above.”

He doesn’t answer me, as I knew he wouldn’t, but he does respond.

“And what
I
don’t know,” he says, “is whether my old friends the Stewartsons have won you over, or offered you a deal. They can be persuasive . . .”

Now it’s my turn to be silent.

“On the other hand, you’re here without them. So you haven’t shared my whereabouts with them. Not yet, anyway.”

He picks at his food for a moment, looks up at me. “He stole my money. He stole my identity. There should be consequences.”

“Should be.”

“And the fact that there may not be . . .” He shakes his head. “But there are
going
to be.” He says it firmly, angrily, resolved. A few of the elderly look around at us.

I lean in conspiratorially. “If he refuses—you must have thought about this—are you really prepared to go to the police?”

“If I have to, yes. Because if I don’t, he’ll dodge the wheels of justice forever.”

“He’ll probably dodge them even if you do tell the police.”

“That’s a chance I’m prepared to take.”

“He sent a couple of detectives to see me,” I tell him.

“What?” This surprises him. “
He’s
gone to the police?”

“They were really looking for you, asked me if I knew where you were—because of my being cc’d on your e-mail, I’m sure. They found me, couldn’t find you. But I think they’re expecting me to pass the message on to you . . .” I did not tell him the detectives were imposters. The threat of real cops was more likely to deter him from his quixotic mission.

“Did the police follow you here?” he asks. A little panicked.

“Not that I could see.” I had looked behind me repeatedly, doubled back on myself, saw nothing. “So the message for you . . .”

“Yes?”

“That Wallace is important to this town. Part of the economy. We don’t like things that make us or our citizens look bad . . . That kind of stuff.”

“But if I show them the evidence, they’ll have to do the right thing. They’ll have to investigate. Prosecute . . .”

I shrug. “Not necessarily. And anyway, what evidence exactly?”

He looks off.

That might be the dark and perfect beauty of what Wallace the Amazing had pulled off these many years. That there was scant evidence.

“Where do you stand?” he asks me point-blank.

Where
do
I stand? Help this underdog with his crazy plan, and bring a little justice into the world? Turn Wallace the Amazing in, or ally myself with the Stewartsons for my five million share? Or distance myself from both these blackmailers, and stay loyal and true to my previous life, to my paycheck, to my universe, to my employer, to the myth of him?

“I don’t want you to get hurt, Archer.” That’s all I really know at this point. That’s all I really know about where I stand, for now. His vulnerability, his aloneness, in taking on the entertainment juggernaut of Wallace the Amazing, a powerful system that I helped to hold in place, that I helped create, that controlled him—although it now seems the “system” isn’t me exclusively.

I look at him—hunched over, hiding out here, life and health gone. This stooped, prematurely aged, and beaten specimen, up against the institution of success and ingenuity and adulation that is Wallace the Amazing. All this man has on his side is the truth. It is literally his only possession. A commodity with little value in this town where the artificial reigned supreme. Where artifice is the founding principle. But truth is probably in equally short supply, of similarly little value, in every other city too. In Cincinnati, Dubuque, Boise, Racine, Saint Paul, Joplin, Iowa City. All the places they might have you believe—with their serious faces, their dark suits, their somber demeanors—that truth is worth something. Arguably Vegas is at least more honest with itself. Part of me wants to see where the truth would lead. Wants to help truth mount up, ride into town, and watch its effect from safely behind the saloon doors. Watch its white horse’s hooves circle in the dirt, watch the dust rise up and choke some people and make others cough uncomfortably. Truth, the new kid in town. With uncanny aim. Unrufflable nerves. Whatcha gonna do about it, pardner?

“All you’ve got is the truth . . .” I say aloud.

He looks at me. Lights up, comes alive at this. “Yes. And in the end, is it everything? Or is it nothing? That’s the multi-million-dollar question.”

Five million, to be exact,
I think to myself. Five million to me, and who knew how much more to the Stewartsons?

“Five million, ten million, fifteen million, give or take,” he says. Each figure tossed out with an accompanying twirl of his fork. Guessing, fantasizing. Obviously undecided on what he could or would demand. Uninformed on what was there.

Give or take, indeed.

Having found Archer Wallace so quickly, so adeptly, you’d think it would be easy for me to find Debbie, who, presumably, was in hiding somewhere, having done a smart little sidestep, probably out her back patio, to avoid the Stewartsons and their head-cracking greeting of me. She had not returned to her neat little home, as far as I could see, as I circled it slowly several times—and she did not come back to my condo either.

Maybe I was, for now, simply someone to avoid.
I
would avoid me. From her point of view, whatever I did for a living exactly, trouble was clearly tracking me now, and she might not end up so lucky the next time she had to save me. Maybe it was simply, understandably, self-preservation on her part. When I looked in the window of her place a day later, her cell phone was no longer on the counter. I assumed she had come back for it, and could reach me if she needed to. That is, if she wanted to.

But the other possibility, of course—the one that I tried to push out of my mind and couldn’t—was that the Stewartsons had found her at home the day they burst in looking for me, and they were now “keeping” her (somewhere) to ensure the trustworthiness and usefulness of their new partnership with me. (Pros like them, it must have been easy to find us—talking to neighbors at my condo, getting a description of Debbie, a description of Debbie’s Triumph, whatever.) And they clearly liked keeping people. Her cell phone might be in Dave Stewartson’s pocket—just out of her reach.

She had saved me from the Stewartsons. Was her reward to be chained to motel fixtures? And if the Stewartsons had her, they would probably have learned a lesson when I scooped up Archer Wallace. They’d undoubtedly be more prudent, more adept, in hiding her from me.

And though the adrenaline rush of her rescuing me had faded, my appreciation had not. I don’t know whether in the chaos of inverted identities and perceptions, of my life and beliefs thrown into a maelstrom, I was unconsciously drawn to an anchor, but she was the anchor I yearned for now. Maybe my new sense of closeness, of desire for her, was somehow worth the swirl of events, the uprooted craziness.