Chapter 9

Sunday, December 18

Sekhmet came home! And she wasn’t wearing the jeweled collar! The cat was on my bed when I woke up. She was really back, and after I got up she stretched out on top of my TV as though she’d been doing it for years. So there, Sierra, I couldn’t help thinking. Eat your sorry heart out.

I made some coffee and thought about going to church. When I do, I go to St. Andrew’s, my brother’s church in North Las Vegas. It’s not that I really like going to church or that I get anything spiritual out of it, but when I first moved to Las Vegas, it was church or no social life at all. So I went to the eleven o’clock service a few times, even though I was the only one of my kind in attendance. Most of the people who go to St. Andrew’s are ninety and white, forty and Filipino, or homeless. I have to give Michael a lot of credit for shepherding that flock. He does a lot more than hand out wafers and wine. He’s always looking for housing, finding medical care, and rescuing abandoned babies. This is no exaggeration. About a week after Thanksgiving, somebody left a little boy in a shopping cart on the church doorstep. Really, sometimes I think Michael is a saint.

But that didn’t make him a great landlord. And he was definitely my landlord, not my host. I’d been paying rent since the day I moved in. I think if you pay rent, you should get to do what you want. I would never have agreed to being a long-term houseguest. I don’t always like to make my bed, and I also like to share it with a naked man from time to time. Shouldn’t rent give me the privilege? It was fair-market rent, too! Sierra works for a real estate company and would never have agreed to anything less. I was paying the same goddamn rent they would have gotten if they’d advertised in The Light. But even so, I could never convince them to keep a landlord-like distance. They truly believed they had my best interests at heart when they checked up on me and reported on my activities to Mom and Dad.

I decided to skip church. There was film in the camera I found in Victoria’s zipper bag. I decided to take it to the one-hour film place at the drugstore on Charleston and see if there were any pictures on it. Then I’d go to the Starbucks at the Howard Hughes Center, commandeer a whole big table, and set up shop with my laptop and Victoria’s files. I needed to get a better handle on all the stuff she had given me, and I couldn’t do that without serious coffee. Also, I’ve always liked working in public. I don’t know why. I just do.

When I walked outside with all my stuff, Sierra was just walking outside, too. Michael had to get up in time for the eight o’clock service, but Sierra always slept in and joined him at eleven.

“Delilah is gone,” she said. “I guess she decided not to adopt either of us.”

“We’ll see,” I said, deciding to take the high road and not gloat.

“I’m really sorry,” Sierra said.

I couldn’t tell whether she was disappointed because Sekhmet had disappeared or whether she was apologizing for crying yesterday, but I didn’t ask for clarification.

“Will you go to church with me?” she asked. I looked at her. I was pretty sure she’d been crying again, even though her makeup was perfect. It’s hard to disguise puffy red eyes. Her shoulders drooped a little, and she looked like a puppy whose owner had just walked out the door.

“Okay,” I said, glad that I’d slipped into black pants instead of torn jeans. “But I’ll take my own car. I’ve got errands to do afterward.”

“Okay,” she said. “See you there.”

Driving up to St. Andrew’s, I actually found myself looking forward to the service. Advent is my favorite liturgical season. I like the anticipatory feel of it, and I like the purple candles on the advent wreath. All four would be lit today, which meant Daniel’s advent was nigh—only five more days! The church was fuller than usual, too. I’d say there were close to eighty people there, which for St. Andrew’s is a mob. The soup kitchen gets swarmed every day, but even a sip of wine isn’t enough to get the chow-line folks into a room where a collection basket is passed.

One time I helped count the collection, and the take was so pathetic I suggested the church might do better putting a couple of slot machines next to the baptismal font. Now that I think about it, video poker in every pew would definitely do the trick. But St. Andrew’s is a “mission,” which means that the other Episcopal churches in Nevada have to share their booty to keep it going. For all I know, the more prosperous ones actually do have gambling machines in their sanctuaries, but more than likely, they just count some God-fearing casino owners among their members. At least I hope so. I hope the Catholics and Mormons don’t have them all.

Because I’ve always had trouble sitting through sermons, I’d long ago cultivated the habit of taking books to church with me. I knew I couldn’t get away with a magazine, but tastefully applied black paper had done an excellent job of making my mom’s ancient copy of Valley of the Dolls look like a Bible when I was in fifth grade.

Since church had been a last-minute decision that morning, I didn’t have a book. Desperate for something to get me through the service, I’d grabbed a spiral-bound calendar from Victoria’s document box. It didn’t look like a Bible, but it didn’t look like the National Enquirer, either. With luck, Sierra wouldn’t find it too sacrilegious. She was nowhere to be seen, anyway, I noticed as I walked down the center aisle in search of her. I took a seat in an empty pew several rows from the front, and by the time the organist started grinding out the first bars of “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” she still hadn’t appeared.

Church services would be much easier to endure if there wasn’t so much physical activity. Just when you get all nice and comfortable, you have to stand up and sing a hymn or kneel down to say a prayer. Today, the transitions were particularly inconvenient because Victoria had stuck a newspaper clipping inside the calendar. It fell out when I stood up and flew under the pew in front of me. I fished it out from between the feet of an old lady with tattoos of barbed wire around both of her ankles. I read it during the epistle.

“POLICE SEIZE MARKS COMPUTER” read the headline on a story from The Light dated last March 25th. Bobby Marks, Charlie Marks’s brother, apparently enjoyed looking at pictures of underage girls. Only the first page of the story was there, but it looked like Bobby had been caught red-handed with some pretty damning evidence on his super-duper Mac. The story also mentioned that he had three kids: a teenage son from a previous marriage and two little daughters from a new teenage wife.

I didn’t know Charlie Marks had a brother, much less a depraved one. I’d heard Charlie’s daughter had been kidnapped once, but lots of money had gotten her back alive and installed her abductors in sandy graves somewhere west of Red Rock Canyon. Well, that last part is a rumor, but David Nussbaum told me it was probably true because no other relatives of Charlie Marks had been snatched since. Word gets around, David said, to the people who need to know. David had never mentioned Bobby, however. I decided to find out why.

Michael delivered a sermon about looking for God in unexpected places. Michael is a talented preacher, and I did my best to pay attention, but my mind wandered first to the Beavertail and then to Victoria. I spent the rest of the service wondering whether I would be able to craft a story that would do her justice—or even make sense. After we closed the service with “Oh, Come, Oh, Come, Emanuel,” which I have to admit I love and which at least one other person sang with me, I dutifully retired to the parish hall. The “hall” was really a trailer that used to be the office on a construction site. I poured myself a Styrofoam cup of thin coffee from a dented percolator on a rickety folding table, but I didn’t have to drink it because Sierra never showed up. Michael was into a heavy conversation with the old lady with ankle tattoos, and a homeless man wearing a sleeping bag with two armholes cut in the sides was next in line. I dumped the coffee into the trash and slipped outside. Sierra’s car wasn’t there. What was wrong with her? She’d asked me to come to church with her, but then she didn’t come herself! What the hell was her problem?

At Starbucks, I got a table to myself, but a guy with a big mustard-colored unibrow kept staring at me. He had his laptop open, and I could see a Playboy sticker on the top. If there’s one thing I detest, it’s guys who display bunny logos. As far as I’m concerned, that’s as big a turnoff as bad breath. Damn. It was only a matter of time until the creep thought up some excuse to talk to me. I wished I was wrong, because I didn’t really want to leave. I had all of Victoria’s stuff nicely arranged on my table, and I’d actually been making some headway organizing it. Besides, I had just gotten another eggnog latte.

Fortunately, I remembered a technique honed to perfection by my best friend in college. Jessica was a red-haired amazon who attracted weirdos by the battalion. “When a creep’s eyeing you, get on the phone,” she’d say. “You still have to use a crowbar on the determined ones, but it gets rid of the wimps.”

I had a new wireless headset I used for talking with Daniel over the Internet—one of those things you see supergeeks walking around with in the supermarket while they buy their Tater Tots. I usually avoided using mine in public, but I slapped that thing on and began an intense one-sided conversation with my screen saver. It worked. The eyebrow took his bunny sticker to a table where he could stare at a heavily pierced teenager in a hanky top that was failing to cover a pair of breasts the size of volleyballs.

That’s another thing I had come to know and love about Las Vegas: hall-of-fame hooters wherever you turn. From the car wash to the dentist’s office, I was always surrounded by awesome racks, and I didn’t think it was coincidental that the Yellow Pages listed an amazing number of plastic surgeons. Damn it! Daniel was going to love Las Vegas.

But I couldn’t think about Daniel right then. I had to stay in Hercule Poirot mode. I’d made myself a list of suspects—anybody who might have benefited from Victoria’s death. Now if I could just get them all into a grand old manor house or a snowbound train, I was sure I’d be able to trick the guilty party into confessing with some clever banter. Not that I’d want to be cooped up with a bunch of whoremongers and a sex deviant, not to mention a slick-haired weasel and a pudgy dough boy.

That’s what the two guys in the pictures on Victoria’s camera looked like. There were three shots of them on the film I got developed, and I was almost positive they worked for American Beauty. The reason I thought so was that the pictures were date-stamped, and the date matched an entry on Victoria’s calendar:

December 15 — 10:00 a.m. — Meet AB reps at Pair-a-Dice Casino – Rick Mack (V.P.), Duncan Frazier (attorney?)

Casino designers often don’t have a lot of imagination, so the pictures could easily have been taken in the same coffee shop at the Pair-a-Dice in Pahrump where I recovered after being thrown out of the brothel. The two guys were sitting at a table with folders and papers in front of them. The best evidence, though, was the little tape recorder in the corner of the picture. It looked just like Victoria’s. I remembered her lawyer had told her to tape everything that might end up in a court case, so I was pretty sure the weasel and the dough boy worked for American Beauty, although I had no idea who was who.

There were only two other pictures on the film, and they were a mystery. They showed close-ups of a face, one with the lips curled and teeth bared, and the other with the tongue sticking out. They had the same date stamp as the other two—December 15—but I had no idea who that face belonged to. Whoever it was had a chipped tooth on the left side. It was pointy, like a cat’s.

When I left Starbucks, I rewound the tape in Victoria’s tape recorder and then listened to it as I drove to Tacos Mérida for a quick bite to eat. The conversation seemed to match what I had seen in the photos. Victoria had spoken with two men, and the background noise sounded like a casino coffee shop. Both men chose their words carefully, which I chalked up to the presence of the tape recorder. One of them did most of the talking, and he kept referring to a “settlement package” American Beauty wanted Victoria to accept. Victoria kept saying that she’d have to consult her lawyer, and the men kept telling her that the offer would expire if she didn’t act immediately. All three of them kept referring to numbers and details on papers that must have been on the table, and I made a mental note to look at everything from American Beauty in Victoria’s files again.

I kept hoping I’d hear a direct threat against Victoria, but there were none. The closest thing to coercion was when one of the men said, “You should consider your family, Ms. McKimber. You have it in your power to keep them out of harm’s way.”

The phrase struck me as odd because it was so commonly used by politicians and newscasters to talk about soldiers in the line of fire. While Victoria’s husband and son might suffer humiliation from her public appearances, their lives weren’t at risk.

After two tacos and a horchata at Tacos Mérida, I headed home. I listened to the rest of the tape on the way, but it was all small talk. I clicked the recorder off and parked on the street to keep the driveway clear. Unless both cars were in the garage, Michael and Sierra weren’t home yet.

As soon as I got to the bottom of my stairs, I saw that the door to my apartment was standing open. My first thought was, “Damn that Sierra! How dare she go into my place without asking?” Yes, it could have been Michael, but I was still kind of irked at Sierra for conning me into going to church and then bagging out herself.

The lights were off. When I stepped onto the rug inside the door, something crunched under my feet. I flipped the light switch.

My whole place—which is really one big L-shaped room and a bathroom—was a disaster area. Every drawer had been pulled out of my dresser and kitchen cabinets and dumped upside down. The crunching noise at the front door came from the shattered remains of a globe lamp that had sat on an orange crate next to my sofa. The sofa cushions had been pulled out. The mattress was half off the bed, and the bedding was in a pile on the floor.

I stood gaping at the scene for a while. Then I backed up, turned the light off, shut the door, and retreated down the stairs. Not knowing what else to do, I headed into the vicarage. I wasn’t sure whether anybody was home, but I had a key. At least I could collect my thoughts, I figured, and decide what to do next.

The door was unlocked, which instantly made me nervous. Had the big house been ransacked, too? Were the bad guys maybe still lurking around? But a light was on in the kitchen, and the living room looked the same as always. I was still carrying my laptop bag and my backpack. I dumped them on the sofa. I was about to yell, “Anybody home?” when I heard voices coming from the master bedroom in its own little suite off the entry hall.

Before I could make my presence known, I heard Sierra crying. Again! I couldn’t resist moving a little closer and listening.

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” I heard her wail. “I know I’m a horrible person for feeling this way, but I can’t help it!”

“Sweetheart, sweetheart,” Michael said. “Calm down. We don’t have to do anything we don’t feel completely right about.”

“What’s—his—name?” she sobbed.

“The nurses are calling him Sam. But we could name him whatever we want. He’s not even two years old.”

“Oh, God, Michael!” Sierra began wailing again. “Oh, God! All I want is to be a mom. Is that so selfish?”

“Of course it’s not selfish, sweetheart,” Michael said. “Of course it’s not.”

“Of—my—own—baby!”

More wails. More sounds of my brother trying to comfort her.

Well, at least now I know what her problem is, I thought. She’d been trying to get pregnant, and I had no idea.

“A lot of couples have their own children after they adopt,” Michael said. “That’s all I was thinking.”

“I know—I know—I know,” Sierra sobbed. “And I know this baby needs us—and I know—”

Loud wails.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay! God’s giving us a baby, and I—don’t—want—it!”

More sobbing. More wailing.

I started tiptoeing back to the front door. I’ll go outside, I thought, and make a racket coming back in. That way—

But I was too late. I had just put my hand on the doorknob when I heard the bedroom door open and shut.

“Oh!” Michael said, and the look on my face when I turned toward him told him everything he needed to know.

“You heard,” he said.

“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I swear. I just—”

“It’s been tough, Copper,” Michael said. “Really tough.”

“Yeah, well—”

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go into the kitchen where we can talk.”

“No—I’ve got to show you something,” I said. “I have a big problem.”

“You, too?” he said, and the look on his face was so tragic I almost felt like hugging him. “Copper—can’t it wait?”

“No,” I said. “I’m afraid it can’t.”

:: :: ::

It took about five minutes for Michael to survey the wreckage in my apartment, turn white, call 9-1-1 on his cell phone, and go back into the house to give Sierra the news. I heard sirens about the same time Sierra burst out the front door in the ratty old bathrobe she wears to sulk in.

“How could you do this to us, Copper?” she shrieked. “How could you? I told you not to go poking around where you don’t belong! I warned you!”

I have to give Michael credit for trying to calm her down.

“This isn’t Copper’s fault, sweetheart,” he said, putting his arms around her shoulders. “For all we know, this could be the work of the same burglars who hit Hans and Dustin’s house a couple of months ago.”

Hans and Dustin live around the corner. They’re an aging gay couple who own a wedding chapel on North Las Vegas Boulevard, and whoever broke into their house stole Mr. Simms, their forty-three-year-old Brazilian macaw, along with their extensive and supposedly world-renowned collection of Liberace memorabilia. The burglary practically killed Dustin, who immediately had a major asthma attack and spent nearly a week in intensive care. Mr. Simms and the Liberace stuff are still unaccounted for.

Just then, not one but two Metro police cars pulled into the driveway, each with one policeman inside. Sierra retreated into the house, and Michael explained the situation to the cop who was in charge, a guy about my age but an inch or so shorter. He looked like a brown-haired Richie Rich with muscles, and he made his uniform look remarkably cute, especially the black turtleneck with “LVMPD” embroidered on the neck in gold. Michael and I showed him the wreckage indoors while the other cop, an older, sandy-haired guy with a brush cut, clicked on a flashlight and said he’d look around outside.

“Did you go inside?” the young cop asked. “Was anyone here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t go past the door.”

“Good decision,” the cop said, unsnapping the leather holster on his belt. He pulled out his gun.

“Wait here,” he said. Ready to shoot anything that moved, he checked out the kitchen nook and the bathroom.

“Can you see what’s missing?” he asked when he got back to the door. I started to walk inside, but he stopped me.

“Just look from here,” he said. “I’m calling Crime Scene Investigation. They’ll see what evidence they can collect. You don’t want to disturb anything until they’re done.”

While the cop went back to his car to make the call, I perused the scene as carefully as I could without stepping beyond the doorway.

Everything was messed up pretty thoroughly, but nothing seemed to be missing. I could even see my great-grandmother’s string of pearls lying on the floor next to my dresser. Those are probably the most valuable things I own. My TV looked fine, but the books on the shelves next to it were all on the floor.

“Do you think they might actually catch whoever did this?” I asked Michael.

“Not a chance,” he said. “St. Andrew’s has been burglarized at least six times in the past two years, and all we’ve ever seen is a police report.”

“What’s the point, then?” I said.

“Well, the report will come in handy if there’s anything worth collecting insurance on.”

We went back downstairs.

“It doesn’t look like anything’s been taken,” I said. “At least nothing I can see.”

While the cop was still writing, the crime scene investigators arrived, a man and a woman in blue jeans. They dusted for fingerprints and took a bunch of pictures. They didn’t say much, and when they were done, the cop told us it was okay to clean up. Then he gave me a piece of paper that explained my rights as a victim.

“A detective will be assigned to your case,” he said. “You can call this number after two weeks if you haven’t heard anything.”

Two weeks. That’d be next year. It felt like a long way off.

“You better sleep in the house tonight, Copper,” Michael said after everyone had left. “I’m pretty sure the sheets are clean in the guest room.”

I was happy to accept his invitation. I went back up to the apartment to dig through my clothes and find some sweats to wear and a T-shirt to sleep in. My bathroom cabinets had been emptied onto the floor, but my toothbrush was miraculously untouched in a glass on the edge of the sink. I grabbed it and picked my way back across my apartment, trying to avoid doing further damage.

I still didn’t see anything missing, though—just broken. I was going to need a new coffeemaker, some new wineglasses, a new lamp, and—damn it—a new tacky Las Vegas souvenir ashtray that says “Dan’s Butts” on it. I got that for Daniel the first time I went to Fremont Street, but since I never got around to mailing it, I was planning to give it to him for Christmas. He doesn’t smoke tobacco, but I thought it might come in handy for other flammable plants.

By the time I got back into the vicarage, Michael was in the kitchen halfway through a glass of something poured from a spherical bottle with a stopper shaped like a horse.

“It’s expensive bourbon Dad left the last time he was here,” Michael said.

I might have known. My father is one of the world’s great consumers of designer alcohol. When I was thirteen, my best friend and I got drunk one day after school on the best-tasting booze we could find in the liquor cabinet. When my dad got home, he was angrier about his empty bottle of limited-edition fifty-year-old Grand Marnier than he was about the two eighth-grade girls throwing up in the downstairs bathroom.

“I was saving it for a special occasion, and I figure this qualifies,” Michael said. “Want some?”

I shrugged and nodded. “Where’s Sierra?”

“In bed.” He poured a hefty slug of bourbon into a juice glass and pushed it toward me.

“Is she okay?”

“I think she will be.” He sighed. “Copper, are you sure you didn’t do something to cause this?”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to start in on me! I’m the victim here!”

Michael sighed. “Oh, calm down. It’s rough on all of us.”

“Well, it doesn’t help to make accusations! And anyway, I’m moving out right after Christmas. I never should have—”

“Truce!” Michael said, raising his glass. He pushed my glass a little closer, and I finally picked it up. He clinked his against it, and we both drank. I managed to suppress a cough.

“First thing tomorrow,” Michael said, “I’ll get the locks changed.”

I took my T-shirt down the hall and tried to settle into the guest room.” It was really just Sierra’s childhood bedroom, and it still looked like a kid’s room. I don’t mean a high school kid, either. I mean a kid who still plays with My Little Ponies. The four-poster bed had a pink net canopy with sparkles, and there were glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. At least thirty-five Barbies were lined up on a shelf over a little lavender desk with rainbow decals, and a big ugly bunny the color of Pepto-Bismol gave me the evil eye from the corner. Either Sierra was trying to pickle her youth, or she was too lazy to redecorate. Even the air smelled like it had been in here since the eighties.