I called the Waiters Agency in Reno. Arnie's wife and partner Phyllis told me that Arnie had taken an early plane to Vegas. Harold Harley's two-tone Plymouth had been spotted at a motel on the Vegas Strip.
Not more than two hours later, after a plane ride of my own, I was sitting in a room of the motel talking with Arnie and the Plymouth's new owner. He was a man named Fletcher who said he was from Phoenix, Arizona, although his accent sounded more like Texas. He was dressed up in a western dude costume, with high-heeled boots, a matching belt with a fancy silver buckle, and an amethyst instead of a tie. His Stetson lay on one of the twin beds, some women's clothes on the other. The woman was in the bathroom taking a bath, Arnie told me, and I never did see her.
Mr. Fletcher was large and self-assured and very rough-looking. His face had been chopped rather carelessly from granite, then put out to weather for fifty or fifty-five years.
`I didn't want to buy his heap,' he said. `I have a new Cadillac in Phoenix, you can check that. He didn't even have a pink slip for it. I paid him five hundred for the heap because he was broke, desperate to stay in the game.'
`What game was that?' I asked him.
`Poker.'
`It was a floating game,' Arnie said, `in one of the big hotels. Mr. Fletcher refuses to name the hotel, or the other players. It went on all day yesterday and most of last night. There's no telling how much Harley lost, but he lost everything he had.'
`Over twenty thousand, probably. Was the game rigged?'
Fletcher turned his head and looked at me the way a statue looks at a man. `It was an honest game, friend. It had to be. I was the big winner.'
`I wasn't questioning your honesty.'
`No sir. Some of the finest people in Phoenix visit the little woman and I in our residence and we visit them in their residences. Honest Jack Fletcher, they call me.'
There was a silence in which the three of us sat and listened to the air-conditioner. I said: `That's Fine, Mr. Fletcher. How much did you win?'
`That's between I and the tax collector, friend. I won a bundle. Which is why I gave him five hundred for his heap. I have no use for the heap. You can take it away.'
He lifted his arm in an imperial gesture.
`We'll be doing just that,' Arnie said.
`You're welcome to it. Anything I can do to cooperate.'
`You can answer a few more questions, Mr. Fletcher.'
I got out my picture of Tom. `Did you see this boy with Harley at any time?'
He examined the picture as if it was a card he had drawn, then passed it back to me. `I did not.'
`Hear any mention of him?'
`I never did. Harley came and went by himself and he didn't talk. You could see he didn't belong in a high- stakes game, but he had the money, and he wanted to lose it.'
`He wanted to lose it?'
Arnie said.
`That's right, the same way I wanted to win. He's a born loser, I'm a born winner.'
Fletcher got up and strutted back and forth across the room. He lit a Brazilian cigar, not offering any around. As fast as he blew it out, the smoke disappeared in the draft from the air conditioner. `What time did the game break up this morning?'
I said.
`Around three, when I took my last big pot.'
His mouth savored the recollection. `I was willing to stay, but the other people weren't. Harley wanted to stay, naturally, but he didn't have the money to back it up. He isn't much of a poker player, frankly.'
`Did he give you any trouble?'
`No sir. The gentleman who runs the game discourages that sort of thing. No trouble. Harley did put the bite on me at the end. I gave him a hundred dollars ding money to get home.'
`Home where?'
`He said he came from Idaho.'
I took a taxi back to the airport and made a reservation on a plane that stopped in Pocatello. Before sundown I was driving a rented car out of Pocatello along Rural Route Seven, where the elder Harleys lived.
16
THEIR FARM, GREEN and golden in the slanting light, lay in a curve of the river. I drove down a dusty lane to the farmhouse. It was built of white brick, without ornament of any kind. The barn, unpainted, was weathered gray and in poor repair.
The late afternoon was windless. The trees surrounding the fenced yard were as still as watercolors. The heat was oppressive, in spite of the river nearby, even worse than it had been in Vegas.
It was a far cry from Vegas to here, and difficult to believe that Harley had come home, or ever would. But the possibility had to be checked out.
