The Big Dirt Nap

Two men are better than one? Two men are better than one girlfriend? Was she coming or not?

I stared at the message and read it again. Something about it was off. For one thing, Lucy generally signed with the letter L or Loo-scious, if she had the time. It wasn't like her to blow me off completely without more of an explanation—unless a job or a man was involved. And with Lucy, each was a distinct possibility.

Lucy and I had met in high school, back in Brooklyn, when we unwittingly shared a boyfriend. Lars was a beautiful Danish exchange student with cornsilk hair and Mick Jagger lips. She had him Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and I had him Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Presumably he rested on Sunday, but we were never sure—there were a dozen sniffling girls at his going-away party. You could either get angry or laugh it off. We laughed it off and got close.

We were in and out of each other's lives during college, then reconnected a few years back at a television programming market in the south of France. Not bad for two Brooklyn girls. We were about the same size and had the same long dark hair, but hers was more likely to be sporting hand-painted caramel highlights and a four- hundred-dollar haircut and mine was more likely to be stuffed up under a Knicks hat, especially now that I'd made the move to the hinterlands and couldn't afford a chichi stylist, even if one had existed in Springfield.

I texted her back, saying I'd call in the morning. If I hadn't committed to writing the article for the Bulletin, I would have been packed and on the road back to my nice little house, where there were no dead bodies, or at least none recently. I'd give the corpse flower overnight to show some more signs of life, but after my chat with Mishkin I was out of there. Maybe I'd give Hector a nice tip and ask him to send me a picture.

Revived by the beer and annoyed by Lucy's e-mail, I brushed away the crap on the coffee table and turned on my computer to work on the story. I did an online search for anything I could find on the titan arum and the Titans Hotel. I sent them to my desktop at home, where I'd print them out in a day or two when I sat down to finish the piece. Then, just because I had the time and a second Sam Adams, I did a search on Indian casinos.

Hector was right, it had all started with bingo. In 1972, the state of Connecticut enacted something called Las Vegas Nights, a limited measure to help churches and nonprofits raise funds. Good people at the Knights of Columbus or Elks clubs, raising money for team uniforms, the way I imagined it. That was the intention. At the time no one could have guessed how dramatically that statute would change Connecticut's future.

Fifteen years later, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that state and local governments couldn't regulate bingo parlors on Indian reservations, those two events combined to open the door for the mega-casinos that have since appeared, Oz-like, on the Connecticut landscape—not always with the blessing of the neighboring towns, and not always benefiting the people the ruling was passed to help.

And now, even though the Las Vegas Nights statute has been repealed, any group of people claiming Native American heritage can seek federal recognition and announce plans to open a casino. Some residents were against them, but plenty of others were more than happy to bankroll the legal fees for their claims in the hopes that the tribe would eventually be recognized and they'd share in the multibillion-dollar-a-year business Connecticut casinos have become.

I sent the casino info to my home computer along with the rest, got up to stretch, and walked to the minibar for another beer. I leaned across the bed to pluck a foil-wrapped chocolate from the pillow on the far side. One of las dulces, the sweets. What had the maid said? Something about forgetting the sweets? But nunca, what did that mean? I'd have to ask Anna when I got home.

Before I knew it I was out cold.

Some time later the phone rang. It was Rachel Page, Bernie Mishkin's assistant. He'd been called away to a meeting in Hartford but could see me at 6:00 P.M. when he returned. I peeked at the digital clock on the nighttable, 7:13 A.M. Why the hell was she calling so early?

Rachel sounded surprised when I answered, but offered me a late checkout and a free spa day if I wanted to stick around to wait for Mishkin. She sold me on the idea of a body treatment—after my Dumpster experience, it sounded like a good idea, although nothing less than sandblasting would make me feel clean again.

'Sveta is wonderful. You'll feel like a snake shedding your old skin,' she said.

I mumbled yes and hung up. Why not? Wasn't that one of the reasons why I came . . . a little R & R?

I rolled out of bed and instinctively reached for my phone. One new text message: Not coming. Lucy

Five

I left a message on Lucy's cell. It was still too early to call her office, and it would be hours until my appointment with Bernie Mishkin or my spa treatment with the scary-sounding Sveta, so, laptop and camera in hand, I once again set out to explore the hotel.

The Titans dining room had the look of a hospital cafeteria, a little less antiseptic, but not much. It was nearly empty. Based on what Hector had told me, I figured most of Titans's guests decamped for the casino as soon as they woke up to get in a full day of hot slots and video poker—but for all I knew everyone else had heard about Nick and I was one of the few foolhardy guests still registered.

I picked up a newspaper and headed for the deepest corner of the dining room, away from the all-you-can- eat buffet. As late as the murder occurred it hadn't made that day's front page and probably wouldn't until the following morning.

A busty waitress named Laurie came to take my order—coffee, fruit salad, and whole wheat toast.

'You can get the buffet for two dollars more,' she said mechanically, before the words had fully left my lips. I resisted the temptation.

While I waited for breakfast I logged on to the computer and within minutes I was in Sumatra, Indonesia, the only place in the world where the corpse flower grows in the wild.

Anyone in the United States can buy a titan arum bulb from a mail-order catalog. Still, it's appropriate that the bestselling plant in America is called the impatiens, nature's answer to the artificial flower. Most people don't have the patience to babysit spring bulbs planted in the fall, much less one that takes seven years or longer to bloom—if it ever does. Flowering is exceptionally rare for corpse flowers in cultivation, and it only happens when the plant is hand-pollinated—the botanical equivalent of in vitro fertilization.

I scrolled through the listings of documented flowerings from the last ten years: the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Virginia Tech, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. It was hard to imagine Bernie Mishkin's hotel joining that rarefied group, even temporarily.

My order came fast and I slid the laptop over to the left-hand side of the table so I could pick at my food and continue reading; the waitress sneaked a peek as she refilled my coffee.

'Is that what that thing in the lobby is gonna look like?' she asked, pointing to the screen with the coffeepot. I held my breath, visualizing scalding hot decaf soaking in between the keys of my new Dell.

'If we're lucky,' I said, nudging the computer a few inches farther away.

'They've had someone out there measuring it every couple of hours for the last two weeks. Damn, that's like me weighing myself when I'm on a diet—every couple of hours, to see if not eating that cookie has made me any thinner.' I could identify with that; it made me like her.

'I'm not surprised about the frequent measurings,' I said. 'It can shoot up as much as five inches in a day. When the growth slows down, that's when you know it's ready to flower.'

'You ever seen one?' she asked, ignoring the couple who had just walked in. She waved her hand in a motion that told them to seat themselves.

'Once. A few years ago in Brooklyn.'

'Brooklyn, Connecticut?'

It's a fact that most people from Brooklyn, New York, think there's only one Brooklyn. When you can see chewing gum in France with a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge on the package, and T-shirts in Zanzibar with the Brooklyn Dodgers logo on them, it's a natural assumption, but it's not true. At least four states have Brooklyns and