ass.”
Fieldston shook his head. “No. Honestly. I know better than that.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a checkbook. “See?” he said. “Here it is. It’s a ledger of the transactions over the past five years. It’s in his checkbook. I found it. We’ll destroy it right now and you can tell them everything is okay.”
He said, “You should have told them yourself.”
Fieldston said, “But I was told never to use the telephone to talk to Mr. Balacontano.”
The name. He wasn’t surprised, just glad it was over. He decided to make it simple. He aimed carefully and placed the single shot in the center of Fieldston’s forehead. The pistol spat once, Fieldston’s head jerked slightly, and the body crumpled to the floor. He looked at his watch. Not even three o’clock, he thought. Plenty of time.
When Elizabeth awoke there was a moment before she remembered. It was like the moment the mind realizes that the foot onto which the body’s weight is about to shift should already have touched solid ground, but didn’t. Then there was the rapid succession of feelings—remembering, alarm, and the mind’s recognition of an emergency that is somehow already determined and familiar—not less unpleasant for the recognition, but a mishap of a particular kind and consequence, and therefore accepted with frustration instead of terror. Palermo was dead.
She sat up in bed and looked at the alarm clock. It was almost three o’clock in the morning. She had slept for over eight hours already. The sheriff had driven her to Carson City, and she’d taken a plane back to Las Vegas after waiting until two o’clock for the first flight. It was nearly four by the time she’d made it to the FBI office.
Why hadn’t Brayer called her? He hadn’t been at the office or at the hotel. If he’d taken a plane to Washington he should have arrived hours ago. And Connors or Padgett would be there to give him the message: Elizabeth had done it again. Palermo was dead. Go back and try to pick up the pieces of the investigation. It had to be her telephone.
She turned on the light. There was no point in trying to go back to sleep. She had used up the eight hours of unconsciousness she’d purchased with the exhaustion, the disorientation, and the shame of the morning. Now she had to face whatever was left of the night. It was six A.M. in Washington.
Elizabeth dressed. If she was doomed to spend the next few hours thinking about it, then thank God it was Las Vegas. Downstairs there would be something to eat, and crowds of people still gambling and drinking and living some life that didn’t have to include an awareness of what sharpened metal did to flesh and arteries.
She took the elevator to the ground floor and walked through the casino. There were only a few tables open now, and people were playing blackjack and craps with a slow and leisurely alcoholic intensity in pools of light that swirled with blue-gray wisps of cigarette smoke. Elizabeth couldn’t decide whether these were the serious gamblers who stayed on like permanent features of the landscape while the ephemeral hordes of tourists came and went around them, or just a straggle of losers who stayed on because there was nothing better to do than play away their last few chips, no place that offered more. It didn’t matter. They were all here together at three o’clock in the morning—Elizabeth too.
She walked past the restaurants. They had closed hours ago. Nobody who was up at this hour wanted beef Wellington or sole bonne femme. The coffee shop was still ablaze with lights, but far off in the corner behind a stockade of upturned chairs a black man was following a vacuum cleaner in its jerky foragings beneath the tables. She picked a table away from the vacuum cleaner. She was only two tables away from a pair of beefy middle-aged men in gray suits, but at this hour it seemed best. It was inhabited ground, at least, and it made her feel less alone.
The waitress, she decided, had been pretty once. Maybe she was pretty still, but she looked tired and worn. The hairnet didn’t help much either. She looked like a man wearing a beret. The waitress walked by on her way to the kitchen and slapped a menu on Elizabeth’s table. In a few minutes she was back, standing over Elizabeth’s table with her pad in her hand.
Elizabeth said, “I haven’t decided yet. What’s in a Donna Summer sandwich?”
“Pastrami. Chopped liver. Cole slaw.”
It sounded about right, Elizabeth thought. She hadn’t eaten in—how long? A whole day, at least. “I’ll take that. And coffee.”
The waitress nodded as she wrote. Her face retained its stony efficiency. In a very low voice she said, “By the way, do yourself a favor.”
Elizabeth looked up, and saw that the waitress’s eyes were sliding in the direction of the two men at the next table. Elizabeth said, “Favor?” in the same low voice.
The waitress said, “Don’t try to sell it in here, honey.” She tipped her head so slightly in the direction of the two men that even Elizabeth wasn’t sure at first that it meant anything. Then she said, “Vice squad.”
Elizabeth’s mind sprinted to catch up. Of course. The only women she’d seen in the casino had been a group of four motherly ladies in pantsuits at a blackjack table together, all giggling and silly like the teenagers they’d probably been the last time they’d been out late in a pack like this. She said to the waitress, “Thanks,” and the waitress disappeared.
Elizabeth looked at her watch. Almost three thirty. On some other night it might have struck her differently. But now it felt as though she’d been slapped. Was it her clothes? She wanted to tell someone something that would prove they were all wrong. Had they all been thinking that? But the words that rose to the surface of her mind were, “No, you’re wrong. I got good grades, and worked hard!”
It was so peculiar it distracted her from the embarrassment. What had she stumbled on? Grades. Hard work and doing what they told you to do. Good girl. Ever so good. College. Scholarships. Business school. A government job. No mistakes, no flagging to attention, no momentary lapses, and you stayed at the top, the surface. Because just below the top it was dark and there was no way to see what lurked there. Something terrible. Everything terrible. And each step of the way was cumulative, like climbing up a ladder to avoid a flood. It got you farther and farther away from whatever was down there. Humiliation.
The waitress returned with the sandwich and Elizabeth started to eat. It was so thick it strained her jaw to get her mouth around it, but she decided she didn’t care. And she didn’t care about the calories either. Bad girl. She smiled. So what? Today I’m a failure. A fat failure. Who looks like a prostitute.
She began to feel better almost immediately. In another hour or two Brayer would turn up, and it would be a new day. And Palermo had told her quite a bit, after all. When she finished eating she’d go upstairs and write it all down, so it was ready when Brayer returned. And there was still Edgar Fieldston. He couldn’t stay out of sight forever.
She was aware of a voice beside her. She turned to see that it was one of the men at the next table, leaning his pink face toward her and smiling, the angle of his head making his tight collar cut into his shaven jowl. He said, “Would you like to join us for dessert?”
Elizabeth kept chewing and shook her head.
The man’s smile only widened, his tiny white teeth like a string of pearls. “Oh, come on. I’ll buy.”
Elizabeth swallowed, then said, “Shut up and go away. I’m thinking.”
HE KNELT OVER FIELDSTON’S body and placed the towels underneath the head. It wasn’t bleeding much, considering. In a little while it would stop, when the body cooled. Meanwhile, there was plenty to do.
The briefcase was exactly as Fieldston had said. He’d never seen so much money, he thought. Hardly anybody had. What had he said? Four million. Must be all thousand dollar bills. So maybe he hadn’t been running. He could hardly have expected to spend those bills without being noticed, and without Balacontano’s organization to launder them. So what the hell was he doing? All right, take him at his word. He was planning to pay Balacontano and then disappear, with Orloff’s checkbook as the threat that would convince Bala to leave him alone. Which meant the bookkeeping at FGE was perfect unless there was a key. But that was practically impossible. How could it be that good? The fool. Balacontano would have helped him disappear all right.
He made a quick search of the house. Fieldston apparently hadn’t touched anything in the other rooms. He must have known Orloff well. Certainly Fieldston wasn’t smart enough to have found the room without knowing, not if he’d been stupid enough to think he could blackmail Carl Bala.
