'I can call down.'
'No,' I said.
'Why don't we go downstairs and have lunch.'
'What if somebody sees me?'
'Bibi,' I said, 'somebody killed Shirley Ventura Meeker in a vacant lot a half mile down the Strip.'
'Who did it?'
'I don't know, but it makes everything different. A lot of people are going to see you before this thing gets straightened out.'
'This thing?'
'This thing,' I said.
'Whatever it is. Let's eat.'
I put my hand out to help her up. She ignored it and stood and hesitated and then went out the door ahead of me. She never said a word down in the elevator, across the casino, and into the restaurant, where, only this morning, Susan and I had eaten breakfast together. I looked at my watch. She'd be landing in about an hour.
She'd stop at Henry's, get Pearl, and go home. She'd feed Pearl, unpack and hang everything up carefully, iron things that had wrinkled, take a bath, put on the pajamas she usually wore when she slept without me, get in bed with Pearl, have a half cup of frozen chocolate yogurt sweetened with aspartame, and watch a movie. Pearl would burrow under the covers and then Susan would fall asleep with the television still on.
'Hey, Boston,' the waiter said, 'how ya doin?'
It was Bob from Dorchester. Bibi ordered a glass of white wine.
I had decaf. Bibi asked for a cheeseburger and fries. I ordered something called a Roman salad. I didn't know what it was, but Vegas was very taken with ancient Rome, and I wanted to be with it.
'What do you want to talk about?' Bibi said when Bob went away.
'You.'
'Oh God,' Bibi said.
'You know how many times I've heard that line?'
'Tell me about yourself.'
'Yeah. You know what it means?'
'Sometimes it means tell me about yourself,' I said.
'Mostly it means, 'Let's fuck.' 'Tell me about you and Marty and Anthony,' I said.
Bob brought the decaf and white wine. I looked at Bibi. She was a handsome woman with very big greenish eyes, and a wide mouth.
There was very little life in the eyes. Besides the scar under her right eye, there was some thickening to her nose, not much, but a little the way fighters sometimes get it. A little like mine. Her teeth were white and even and might have been capped. There was about her the quality, almost the aroma, of sexuality. Susan always C H A it would ask how I knew. I could never tell her exactly, except that when I'd seen it before and put it to the test, I'd nearly always been right.
'What's to tell,' she said.
'I was with Marty, now I'm with Anthony.'
'How was it with Marty?'
She shrugged.
'Marty's a pretty dangerous guy,' I said.
'He's a pig,' she said.
'Yes, he is. That why you left him?'
'Yes.'
'Why'd you marry him?'
Bob returned with the Roman salad and the cheeseburger. The Roman salad looked very much like a tossed salad except that it had green olives and wedges of artichoke heart in with the cherry tomatoes and shredded carrots and red leaf lettuce. Bibi took a small bite of her cheeseburger.
'Was he a pig when you married him?' I said.
Bibi chewed carefully and swallowed. She picked up a French fry and ate it.
'He's always been a pig,' she said.
'But I didn't always know it.'
'He treat you right?' I said.
'He beat the shit out of me,' she said.
Everything she said was flat and offhanded as if nothing mattered more than anything else, and she was kind of bored to have to tell me.
