Chapter 2

Monday, December 12

David was right about Zion. It was fantastic, fully deserving of its National Park status. I hiked the Riverside Walk and made it back to my car just in time to see the sun set on a huge red-rock formation called the Temple of Sinawava. The only thing that could have made my day better was if the man who held the keys to my heart had been there with me.

Daniel Garside was the one person who could have kept me on the East Coast. When he got an internship at the National Arboretum after college, I tried to find a job in Washington, D.C. New York was the closest I could get, which at least allowed us to spend a lot of weekends together. I figured we’d find a way to live together once he decided on a graduate school, but then he got a Wilberforce Fellowship and flew off to Costa Rica to study tropical mistletoe. We talked almost every day, but I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since February. The countdown to Christmas seemed interminable, but somehow I had to make it through another twelve days.

I had breakfast in the house with my sister-in-law before we both went to work. We watched The Morning Show while we ate. Kathie Pitchford was interviewing a woman named Victoria McKimber. Even though Victoria looked like she was on the wrong side of forty, she had masses of curly platinum blonde hair. It had to be a wig, although her fair skin and blue eyes made me wonder if it might be real. Then again, maybe the fair skin and blue eyes were fake, too. Anyway, she was wearing a tight, low-cut knit top that showed off a pair of casabas that were either very expensive or a sure sign God loved her.

“When you entered American Beauty’s Queen of Sales contest, did you tell American Beauty the true nature of your profession?” Kathie asked.

“No,” Victoria replied, “and they didn’t ask. The contest was open to active distributors of American Beauty products, which I have been for the last ten years.”

“So you didn’t tell them you work for—”

“That I’m a prostitute? No. There was no reason. Prostitution is legal where I work in Nevada.”

“She’s a hooker,” Sierra said, her mouth full of cinnamon toast. “I knew it. Although she’s farther over the hill than most.”

“How do you know?” I asked, though I wasn’t surprised she did. My sister-in-law had been my main source of information about Nevada culture ever since she and my brother invited me to move into the apartment over their garage.

Sierra’s a native. She even worked as an “exotic dancer” after she graduated from Bonanza High School. That’s a secret, though, at least as far as my parents are concerned. Sierra’s convinced they’d die of blue-blooded shock if they knew their son was married to a woman who used to give lap dances. She’s probably right. They have a hard enough time telling their Fairfield County friends that both of their children live in Las Vegas—by choice!

“Oh, come on, Copper, look at her. She’s closing in on fifty. Most of them are your age—mine at the outside.” Sierra turned thirty-two on Halloween.

We kept watching as Kathie elicited all the details of Victoria McKimber’s rise to Sales Queen fame. She’d won local and regional contests before heading for Kansas City, where a few days ago she beat out a dozen other American Beauty distributors to win a tiara, a pink Impala, and a year-long contract to star in American Beauty’s television commercials.

And now, American Beauty was going to take it all away. Accusing Victoria of concealing information that she knew would damage the company’s reputation, American Beauty’s top brass had rescinded her crown, cancelled the Chevy, and torn up the contract.

“When I revealed my profession at the first pageant, they were horrified, but they hoped I’d lose the regional competition and just disappear,” Victoria told Kathie. “They were total jerks about it. And then I won, so they threatened to take away my distributorship.”

“And that’s when you hired an attorney?” Kathie asked.

“Yeah, I got a lawyer interested,” Victoria said, “and she told them to go pound sand. But now that I’ve won the crown, they’re freaked about one little ol’ working girl—” She paused, looked straight at the camera, and shook her mass of blonde curls. With a smile, she went on. “They think I’m out to destroy their brand, so they’re pulling out the big guns. But I’m not going down without a fight. This is the United States of America, and I’ve done nothing illegal.”

“Oh, my God,” I said, looking at my watch. “I’m late for work.”

The one very bad thing about having to bring morning coffee for your boss is that he always knows if you’re late. Fortunately, Chris Farr was even later than I was, and his latte was cooling on his desk by the time he arrived.

I was on the phone with a publicist from the Golden Sands when David Nussbaum appeared at my desk.

“Yes,” I was saying, “I got the press release on Friday, and it’ll be in this week’s Dazzle section.” I hung up. “The Golden Sands is having open tryouts for a new Golden Girl.”

“You get all the fun stories, Copper.”

His comment didn’t deserve an answer.

“Remember how you were asking about call girls on Friday?” David continued. “Well, I’ve got to interview one today, and I thought you might like to come along.”

“What’s the story?”

“She won a national sales contest sponsored by a cosmetics company, and—”

“Victoria McKimber?”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“I saw her on TV this morning,” I said. “But she was in New York. She was on The Morning Show.”

“She would have been on Late Night tonight, but she had to come home.”

“Home?”

“Yup, she’s one of our own. Works at the Beavertail Ranch in Pahrump.”

“I’d love to go, but I can’t leave now,” I said. “It’s Monday, and—”

“I know,” David said, “but she doesn’t get in until this afternoon. I’m meeting her at the Silverado at five. You can ride with me if you like, and I can bring you back here afterward.”

The Silverado is a “locals’ casino” a few miles south of the airport. I had never been there even though the person handling their publicity offered me free tickets to a magic show every time I talked to her. I was going to have to skip lunch and talk fast to get all my Monday calls and calendar updates done, but Chris Farr had an editorial meeting at four o’clock. If I got caught up, he wouldn’t mind if I left half an hour early.

I was about to meet a real live hooker who was smack in the middle of her fifteen minutes of fame. And for fifteen minutes, the Calendar Girl could feel like a real reporter instead of the title of an old Neil Sedaka song.

David Nussbaum reappeared at my desk just as I was making my last call, and we walked out to the parking lot together. David is an East Coast Jewish preppie who wears tweed jackets, rimless glasses, and Hush Puppies. But instead of the Saab that would complete his Ivy League style, he drives a Jeep, and it isn’t one of those upscale soccer mom models. It’s a basic canvas-topped Army man vehicle. It’s even got two extra gas cans strapped to the back, as though David’s never sure when he might get an assignment in the middle of Death Valley.

Not that I think it’s fair to judge someone on the car they drive. I mean, I hope no one thinks mine is a four-wheeled personality statement. I drive a white Chrysler minivan, a “Town & Country” I would never in a geologic age have selected for myself. My father chose it using the flawed logic that I’d be safer driving a large vehicle. He drove the thing—“right off the lot”—out to Princeton in October of my senior year. My mom followed in their BMW, and they handed the keys to me over dinner. “Happy Birthday!” they said. My birthday’s in March, so the car was definitely a surprise. So was the fact that it looked like the sort of thing a suburban housewife with a large brood might drive.

The supreme uncoolness of my ride was not lost on my best buddy Jessica.

“It looks like a Kotex!” she proclaimed as soon as she saw it. “Big enough for those extra-heavy days!”

She had a voice like an alpenhorn, and I had managed to pause in front of Witherspoon Hall at rush hour.

“Dude! It’s a freakin’ maxi pad!” she added in a voice that could shatter glass, and that sealed my poor minivan’s fate. From then on, it was known as the Maxi Pad. Contrary to my father’s safety-conscious thinking, it wasn’t really a plus that the car seated seven people with dedicated seat belts, because it could carry at least double that if the riders were willing to share. Whether I liked it or not, I was an instantly popular designated bus driver. By the time I graduated, “the Maxi Pad” had mercifully shrunk to “the Max,” and “the Max” it has remained, but only because I’m used to it and no one in Las Vegas knows what it’s short for. I’d trade it in for a Jeep like David’s in a New York second, but I know it would hurt Dad’s feelings. And I have to admit that I like being able to buy bookcases and take them home without renting a truck.

Anyway, David’s Jeep was covered in a thin layer of dust, which made me wonder if he might actually get assignments in the howling desert.

“Sorry it’s dirty,” David said as he opened the passenger door and moved a plastic bag and a stack of mail to the back. “I had to cover the groundbreaking for a housing development in North Las Vegas. No pavement.”

We took the freeway south to Blue Diamond Road and arrived at the Silverado with ten minutes to spare.

“I told her I’d meet her in the coffee shop,” David said as we wove our way through the slot machines.

The coffee shop was sparsely populated, and even in the dim light it was easy to see that Victoria wasn’t there. A hostess showed us to a table near the entrance.

Before we could check the menu, Victoria materialized in front of us, enveloped in a cloud of musky-smelling perfume. She was wearing the same outfit she’d had on for The Morning Show: a purple leather miniskirt and a low-cut black leotard top. She’d clipped her hair into one of those deliberately messy up-dos, and she was carrying a zippered shoulder bag big enough to hold a body.

“Victoria McKimber,” she said, holding a scarlet-taloned hand out to me.

“Oh! Hi! I’m Copper Black,” I said, “and this is—”

“You must be David,” Victoria said. “Thanks for coming down here to meet me. I came directly from the airport.”

“The pleasure’s mine,” David said. “Please, have a seat.”

“Thanks,” Victoria said, but she didn’t sit down. Plunking her huge shoulder bag on the table, she rummaged through it and extracted a glasses case. Then she pulled out a package of batteries, a gold cigarette case, a disposable lighter, a notebook, two pens, and a small tape recorder.

I couldn’t help staring as she unpacked. She was so … constructed. Not one square inch of her was accidental, and there were many square inches. She was a lot taller than I’d expected, taller than me, taller than David even. I glanced down and saw that her stiletto heels had something to do with it, but even flat-footed she had to be nearly six feet.

“I hope you won’t mind if I record our conversation,” Victoria said as she sat down. “My lawyer’s advice.”

“Not at all,” David said, “as long as you don’t mind if I do the same.”

Victoria laughed, and her laugh struck me as being just as calculated as her appearance. Slightly breathy, intentionally sexy. “Of course not,” she said as she snapped batteries into her tape recorder.

Just then, the waitress came back. We all ordered coffee, and David started asking questions.

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen David in action. He had invited me to an air show at Nellis Air Force Base when I first started working at The Light, and in the last few months I’d tagged along to a motorcycle rally in Laughlin, a bomb scare at a high school, a tour of a gypsum mine, and the opening of a new fire station on the Las Vegas Strip. But as I listened to him talk to Victoria, I realized that this was the first real one-on-one interview I’d watched him do, and he was good. Better than Kathie Pitchford, even. In three minutes, Victoria had repeated everything she’d said on TV, and David was probing deeper.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Forty-seven,” she said. “A prime number.”

“And you’ve been selling American Beauty products since 1999?”

“November of ’98. I’m their top distributor in this region. Utah-Nevada-Arizona-New Mexico. And I’m damned if they’re going to take that away from me.”

“How do you manage it? I mean, isn’t your work at the Beavertail a full-time job?”

“Yes, when I’m there, which is usually two weeks a month. I’m due back out there Thursday, as a matter of fact, unless this American Beauty mess blows completely out of control.” She sighed a stagy sigh and patted her hair. “I have a partner, and he does all the paperwork. Richard. My husband.”

Her husband? I stared at Victoria again, and I can’t swear my mouth wasn’t open. How could a prostitute have a husband? And what kind of husband would a prostitute have?

“Yes, I’m married, honey. Twenty-three years.” Victoria patted my hand, and I looked at those talons again. So perfect, and even though her hand had a few ropy veins poking up, it was unblemished and soft.

“You had to know you’d stir up controversy,” David was saying, “as soon as they found out.”

“If I’d told them at the get-go, they would have barred me from competing while they could still get away with it,” Victoria said. “So I kept quiet until I won the first contest. Once the media knew about me, they couldn’t ban me without stirring up more controversy.” She shrugged. “So they harassed me in every other way they could think of. Followed me whenever I wasn’t at the Beavertail, dug into my past, dug into my husband’s past—”

“And your motive in all this was—?”

Victoria laughed. “You won’t believe this, but at first, it was one lousy case of Forever Young.”

“Forever Young?”

“American Beauty’s new antiwrinkle face-firming lotion. Any distributor who entered the contest and wrote a 300-word essay about how great Forever Young is would get a whole case. Twenty-four jars. Four hundred dollars retail. Richard figured there was no downside, so he sent off an entry in my name. I didn’t even know about it until his essay qualified me for the local pageant.”

“What made you go for it?” David said.

“I decided it was my chance to improve the status of working ladies. Get us some respect.”

Victoria had a lot to say on the topic of “sex workers’ rights,” and David let her ramble. At first, I wondered why he was allowing her to run the conversation, but gradually I realized that even though it seemed inefficient, it was a fabulous way to get answers to questions you’d never think to ask. As Victoria regaled us with her grand plan to elevate legal prostitutes to the level of other “personal therapists,” she also revealed that her husband had been a mechanic for Nate’s Crane until his left elbow was crushed in a construction accident. Their fifteen-year-old son, Jason, also had health problems, and their medical bills had added up to over $76,000 so far this year. There was so much more on David’s cassette when he finally clicked off his recorder that I was jealous. He had probably captured a Pulitzer-worthy story on that tape.

The whole time Victoria was talking, my mind kept traveling back to my last semester in college, when I wrote my senior thesis. What I would have given to talk to Victoria back then, while I was struggling to make my case about the motives and fates of women heroines like Cleopatra and Joan of Arc. Victoria McKimber wasn’t a real queen or a national hero, but she had all the qualities of a genuine crusader.

My heart beat faster as I wondered whether I could meet her again and interview her myself. Maybe I could give Victoria what she needed—a respectful ear—and get what I wanted, too—a brilliant article that might get picked up by a big-name magazine. I didn’t feel right about barging in on David’s interview and asking for her phone number, but maybe he would share it with me later.

My mind was still buzzing with hopes and fantasies as David wound things up. He was about to say good-bye when Victoria surprised me.

“Copper, I’m so glad I got to meet you. And I’m wondering—” She paused and shot me a look that almost qualified as shy. “Well, here’s the deal. I’m going to the New Moon Ceremony at the Sekhmet Temple tomorrow night. I’d love it if you’d join me.”

Shocked by the unexpected invitation, I was still trying to formulate an answer as Victoria went on.

“I’d invite David, too, but men aren’t allowed. They can come to the Full Moon Ceremony, but the New Moon is goddesses only.”

“I’d love to go,” I replied immediately. David shot me a disapproving look, but damn! This was way more than I’d hoped for. I had no idea what a New Moon Ceremony involved, but I wasn’t going to let a chance to spend time with Victoria slip by.

“That’s great!” Victoria said with a wide smile. “If you meet me here at six tomorrow, I’m happy to drive.”

David let me have it on the way back to The Light.

“Do you know what you’ve gotten yourself into?” he asked. “Do you even know where the Sekhmet Temple is?”

I shook my head. “I don’t even know what it is.”

“Then why did you say you’d go?”

“I’m kind of fascinated by her. She’s nothing like I expected. And I would really like to know more—”

“Take your own car,” David interrupted. “Rule number one is: Stay in control. Don’t become part of the story.”

I wasn’t sure I liked David bossing me around, but I let it slide.

“So where’s the temple?” I asked.

“Indian Springs. About forty miles north on Highway 95. You go by the prison, then take a left just past Creech Air Force Base, where the Predator squadron lives.”