What's The Worst That Could Happen (24 page)

“Never been there in my life,” she assured him. “Politics was all the gambling we ever did in my family.”

This conversation was taking place in a cab headed uptown, late Wednesday afternoon. They’d had lunch with Gus and Gus’s friend Tillie, and then they’d taken in a movie down in the Village, and now they were on their way back uptown to what until recently had been Kelp’s apartment but which was now rapidly becoming “their” apartment, and here it turned out Anne Marie wanted to come along on the caper in Vegas. This was enough to cause Kelp to undergo a major reappraisal of the relationship right here in the taxi, with bright–eyed Anne Marie studying his profile the whole time.

Over the years, Andy Kelp had had a number of relationships with persons of the opposite sex, some of them solemnized by the authorities in various rites and rituals, others not. He didn’t divide these relationships by the degree of their solemnity, however, but by their length, and in his experience there tended to be two kinds of interpersonal intergender relationships: (1) short and sweet, and (2) long and bitter.

Kelp knew this wasn’t everybody’s experience. John and May, for instance, and others he could think of. But for himself, up until now, it had always been true that every new pairing started off on a happy high, which gradually ebbed, like the tide. Short relationships, therefore, tended to leave a residue of nostalgia, a semihappy glow in which the rough spots were gauzed over and the highlights highlighted, while longer relationships tended to come to a close with bitterness and recrimination, bruised egos and unresolvable disputes, so that only the wens and warts remained outstanding in the memory.

So the question he had to ask himself, Kelp thought, riding there in the taxi beside the expectant Anne Marie, was how did he want to remember her. Did he want to remember her warmly and sweetly, or coldly and bitterly? If she was important enough to him so that he would want the memory of her to be golden — and she was, she definitely was — then wasn’t it about time to let memory begin its useful work, by saying good–bye, Anne Marie, good–bye?

On the other hand, he had to admit, he was somehow finding it difficult to think about life after saying good–bye to Anne Marie. He enjoyed her, and he knew she enjoyed him. And in one significant way, she was different from every other woman he’d ever met, and a very pleasant significant difference it was. In essence, she just didn’t seem to give a damn about the future.

And that, so far as Kelp was concerned, was unique. Every other woman he’d ever met, when she wasn’t being worried about her appearance, was being worried about what was going to happen next. They were all of them fixated on the future, they all wanted assurance and reassurance and something in writing and a
plan.
For Kelp, who lived his life with the philosophy that every day was another opportunity to triumph over the unexpected — or at least not get steamrollered by the unexpected — this urgency to nail down tomorrow was completely inexplicable. His reaction was: Say, you know, it isn’t even that easy to nail down
today.

(Of course, that this very philosophy might be the cause of the nervousness in his woman friends that made them fret more than they otherwise might about events to come, had not as yet occurred to him. However, since all his days were brand new, since he wasn’t stuck to a predetermined pattern, it was a thought that could still occur; nothing is precluded.)

Still, the point was, Anne Marie was different. She took the unexpected in stride and didn’t seem to worry much about anything, and particularly not about whatever might be coming down the pike. This made her very easy for a guy like Andy Kelp to hang out with, and maybe it’s also what made it easy for her to hang around with him. Here today, and who knows about tomorrow, right? Right.

The cab was approaching
their
apartment. Anne Marie waited, a little half–smile on her lips, a bright look in her eye.
She
isn’t worried about what’s gonna happen next, Kelp realized, so why should I? I don’t want to break up with her today, I know that much.

“If you came along,” he said, knowing that even to start a sentence with the word
if
was an acknowledgment that she was going to get her way, “if you did, what would you do with yourself?”

She beamed. “I’ll think of something,” she said. “We’ll think of something together.”

Behind him, Brandon Camberbridge had been roving restlessly around the cottage, fussy and picky, not only a nellie but a nervous nellie, his reflection flickering across the glass in front of Wylie like the ghost of Franklin Pangborn, but now he came forward to present his fretful profile to Wylie as he also looked out at the lake. “Oh, Wylie,” he said. “We can’t disturb the lake.”

“It’s a dang security nightmare,” Wylie told him.

“But it’s so beautiful,” Brandon said. “It’s a perfect part of paradise.”

“Sooner or later,” Wylie said, “it’s gonna have to get shut down for a while anyhows, drained, cleaned out, spiffed up. So why not do it now? Anybody asks, it’s just regular maintenance.”

“Thursday,” Brandon said, counting days on his fingers, starting with today, progressing from there, “Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. The big cheese isn’t going to get here for four more days, Wylie. You want that beautiful lake turned into a dry quagmire for a
week?
”

“Quagmires aren’t dry,” Wylie said.

“You know what I mean.”

“You mean you want everything pretty,” Wylie accused him. “You mean you don’t care if the head cheese, or whatever you call him —”

“Big cheese, Wylie,
please.
”

“You don’t care if the big boss comes here and gets robbed or wounded or worse, just so’s your little kingdom stays pretty.”

“That’s unfair, Wylie,” Brandon said, and he looked briefly as though he might cry. “You
know
I’m doing everything in my power to see to it the big cheese is protected, but I do not see how draining our beautiful lake is going to do one single thing to help in that way at all.”

Wylie sighed, and shifted position, to stand with the other hip cocked. Earl Radburn, head of security for the entire TUI and a tightass pain in the butt if there ever lived one, had been and come and gone and went, leaving Wylie in charge of security for Max Fairbanks’s upcoming visit. He’d also left beefed–up security behind him, in the form of a bunch of beefed–up security guards, extra ones from other parts of the TUI empire, now temporarily under Wylie’s orders, so that Wylie knew for sure and certain, if anything
did
happen to go wrong during the Fairbanks stay, it would be his own head that would roll as a result and not Earl Radburn’s, and certainly not this goddam faggot next to him.

Wylie didn’t particularly want his head to roll. He liked it here. He liked his job, he liked the authority he held over other employees, he liked the first–rate salary he hauled in, he liked banging the boss’s wife — that Nell, whenever she wasn’t away on one of her eternal shopping and shagging trips all over these United States of America, was a real tigress in Wylie’s rack, not getting much by way of satisfaction from the pansy she’d married in a moment of inattention — and he didn’t want to have to give it all up just so this self–same pansy could go on gazing at his goddam fake lake.

But it wasn’t an argument Wylie was going to win, he could see that now, so the hell with it, they’d just have to line the goddam lake with beefy security men the whole time Fairbanks was here, whether Brandon Camberbridge liked it or not, and hope for the best. In the meantime, there was no point pressing the issue any more, so Wylie shut his trap and squinted out at the tourists, imagining them all as armed desperadoes in disguise. Hmmmmm; some of those were awfully damn good disguises.

Wait a second. Wylie squinted more narrowly, this time for real. That fella there …

He did his quick draw after all, bringing up the walkie–talkie, thumbing Send, saying, “One to Base. One to Base.”

Brandon, jumpy as a schoolgirl at a Hell’s Angels picnic, said, “Wylie? What’s wrong?”

“
Base. What’s up, Wylie?
”

“Thayer,” Wylie said, recognizing the voice through the walkie–talkie’s distortion, “we got a doubtful on the east walk, just south of the lake, before the cottages.”

Wide–eyed, Brandon whispered, “Wylie? Is it
him?
Which one is it?”

More importantly, the walkie–talkie said, in Thayer’s voice, “
I got two guys right near there. What are they lookin’ for?
”

“Midforties,” Wylie said, observing that lurker out there. “Six foot, one–eighty, Caucasian, light blue shirt, wrinkled gray pants. Hands in pockets. Hangdog look.”

“
Got it.
”

“Ten–four,” Wylie said, and holstered the walkie–talkie with one smooth motion of his arm.

Brandon, meanwhile, who’d picked out the object of Wylie’s attention from the description, was now staring at the lurker, who continued to lurk. “Wylie?
That
fellow? You don’t think
he’s
the one we’re looking for, do you?”

“Not for a second,” Wylie assured him. “No. What I think that fella is is a dip.”

“Oh, come on, Wylie,” Brandon said. “You see criminals everywhere. That out there is just your normal depressed family man, that’s all.”

“Then where’s his family?”

“In the pool, maybe.”

“He’s hangin’ around this same area, I’ve been watchin’ him twenty minutes,” Wylie said. “He isn’t with nobody else. He is not a vacationer. He isn’t a homeless, because he doesn’t look at the money in the lake.”

“None of that,” Brandon said, “makes him a pickpocket.”

“He’s a undesirable,” Wylie said, “let’s just put it that way.” And he nodded in satisfaction as the two beefy security men appeared, bracketing the lurker without appearing to notice him at all. “So we’ll just move him along,” Wylie said.

Brandon, frowning at the fellow out there on the curving sloping walk, surrounded by all the open–mouthed families in their gaudy vacation finery, sighed at last and nodded his concurrence. “He doesn’t,” he admitted, “look much like a customer.”

In any event, he’d seen all he needed to see for now. The casino, the lake, the cottages where Fairbanks would be staying, the general lay of the land. So he yawned and stretched, he looked around like any innocent fellow without a care in the world, and he strolled away from the lake and the cottages, toward the main building and the casino and beyond them the Las Vegas Strip. And every time he happened to glance around, those two security men were still somewhere nearby.

Well, he’d been warned. He’d been warned three times, in fact, and all of them friendly warnings, given with his best interests at heart.

The first was last night, when he’d flown in from Newark, and walked through the terminal building at McCarran International Airport, ignoring the gauntlet of slot machines that seemed to snag one tourist in ten even before they got out of the building. Outside, in the dry night heat, he threw his suitcase and then himself into the next taxi in line in the rank, and said to the cabby, a scrawny guy in a purple T–shirt and black LA Raiders cap, “I want a motel, somewhere near the Strip. Someplace that doesn’t cost a whole lot.”

The cabby gave him the fish–eye in the rearview mirror, but all he said at that point was, “Uh huh,” and drove them away from there.

Nighttime on the desert. High stars, wide flat dark empty land, and out in front of them the city, burning white. They rode in silence for a while, and then the cabby said, “Bo, a word of advice.”

Dortmunder hadn’t known he needed a word of advice. He met the cabby’s unimpressed look in the mirror, that scrawny pessimistic face green–lit from the dashboard, and said, “Sure.”

“Whatever the scam,” the cabby said, “don’t try it.”

Dortmunder leaned forward, resting a forearm on the right side of the front seat–back, so he could look at the cabby’s profile. “Say that again?”

“This town knows you, Bo,” the cabby said. “It’s seen you a thousand times before. They’re fast here, and they’re smart, and they’re goddam mean. You think I come out all this way to haul a cab?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Dortmunder said.

“You are not a tourist,” the cabby told him. “Neither was I. I come out eleven years ago, I figured, this is a rich town, let’s collect some for ourself. I was down on the sidewalk with a shotgun in the middle of my back before I could even say
please.
”

“You’ve got me confused with somebody else,” Dortmunder said.

“Uh huh,” the cabby said, and didn’t speak again until he stopped in front of the office of the Randy Unicorn Motel & Pool. Then, Dortmunder having paid him and tipped him more decently than usual, the cabby said, with deadpan irony, “Enjoy your vacation.”

“Thanks,” Dortmunder said.

The Randy Unicorn was long, low, brick, and lit mostly by red neon. When Dortmunder pushed open the office door a bell rang somewhere deeper inside the building, and a minute later a mummified woman in pink hair curlers came through the doorway behind the counter, looked him up and down, and said, “Uh huh.”

“I want a room,” Dortmunder said.

“I know that,” the woman said, and pointed at the check–in forms. “Fill that out.”

“Sure.”

Dortmunder wrote a short story on the form, while the woman looked past him out the front window. She said, “No car.”

“I just flew in,” he said. “The cab brought me here.”

“Uh huh,” the woman said.

Dortmunder didn’t like how everybody around here said
uh huh
all the time, in that manner as though to say,
we’ve got your number, and it’s a low one.
“There,” he said, the short story finished.

The woman read the short story with a skeptical smile, and said, “How long you plan to stay?”

“A week. I’ll pay cash.”

“I know that,” the woman said. “We give five percent off for cash, and two percent more if you pay by the week. In front.”

“Sounds good,” Dortmunder lied, and hauled out his thick wallet. He was paying cash here, and his own cash at that, because the kind of credit card he could get from his friend Stoon might shrivel up like the last leaf of summer before this excursion to Las Vegas was finished. And although it was his own cash at the moment, it had in fact come originally from Max Fairbanks, one way and another, so it seemed right to spend Fairbanks’s money to hunt Fairbanks down.

Also, the reason he was staying at a motel a little ways off from the Strip, rather than at the Gaiety, was because he knew Fairbanks knew he was coming, so any singleton guy checking into the Gaiety the next few days would be given very close observation indeed. In fact, pairs of guys together, or groups of guys, any combination like that, would be scrutinized right down to their dandruff, which was why none of the people coming out to help Dortmunder in his moment of need would stay at the Gaiety, but would all be around, here and there, somewhere else.

The mummified woman watched Dortmunder’s wallet and his hands and the money he spread on the counter. He put the wallet away, she picked up the cash and counted it, and then she said, “It’s none of my business.”

Dortmunder looked alert.

“I wouldn’t do it if I were you,” she said.

Dortmunder looked bewildered. “Do what?”

“Whatever you’re thinking of,” she said. “You seem okay, not full of yourself or nothing, so I’ll just give you some advice, if you don’t mind.”

“Everybody gives me advice,” Dortmunder complained.

“Everybody can tell you need it,” she said. “My advice is, enjoy your stay in our fair city. Swim in the pool here, it’s a very nice pool, I say so myself. Walk over to the casinos, have a good time. Eat the food, see the sights. A week from now, go home. Otherwise,” she said, and gestured with the handful of money, “I got to tell you, we don’t give refunds.”

“I won’t need one,” Dortmunder assured her.

She nodded. “Uh huh,” she said, and put the money in the pocket of her cardigan.

So that was the second warning, and the third warning was this morning, in the cafe a block from the Randy Unicorn where he ate his breakfast, and where the waitress, at the end of the meal, when she slid the check onto the table, said, “Just get to town?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Just a friendly word of warning,” she said, and leaned close, and murmured, “Just leave.”

And now, he’s less than an hour at the Gaiety Hotel, Battle–Lake and Casino, and he’s got security guards in both hip pockets. What’s going on here?

It was a twenty–minute walk from the Strip back to the Randy Unicorn, through flat tan ground with more empty lots than buildings, and none of the buildings more than three stories tall. And back there behind him loomed those architectural fantasies, soaring up like psychedelic mushrooms, millions of bright lights competing with the sun, a line of those weird structures all alone in the flatness, surrounded by Martian desert, as though they’d sprouted from seeds planted in the dead soil by Pan, though actually they’d been planted by Bugsy Siegel, who’d watered them with his blood.

Walking in the sunlight through this lesser Las Vegas of dusty parking lots and washed–out shopfronts of dry cleaners and liquor stores, Dortmunder reflected that somehow, once he was out of New York City, he was less invisible than he was used to. He was going to have to move very carefully around this town.

When he came plodding down the sunny dry block to the Randy Unicorn, he had to pass the office first, with the rental units beyond it, and as he sloped by, the office door opened and the mummified woman stuck her head out to say, “Over here.”

Dortmunder looked at her, then looked down along the line of motel room doors that faced onto the blacktop parking area between building and street. A silver Buick Regal was parked among the vehicles along there, nose in, probably in front of Dortmunder’s room. It was quite different from the dusty pickup trucks and rump–sprung station wagons in front of some of the other units. Dortmunder couldn’t see the license plate on the Regal, but he could guess. And he could also guess what the mummified woman wanted to say.

Which is what she said: “Some fella picked his way into your room awhile ago. He’s still in there.”

“That’s okay,” Dortmunder said. “He’s a friend of mine.”

“Uh huh,” she said.