The killings didn’t seem to bother me or, at least, they didn’t affect Lance, who was in the driver’s seat — so to speak.
Manuel let me out in front of the glass doors to my hotel.
The black van was already there, parked across the street. They hadn’t tried to kill me yet so I ignored them as I went in and up to my fourth-floor room.
Lying down on the hard mattress on top of the rough blue-and-tan bedspread, I gave in to the voices.
It was a juridical gathering, a meeting of the many after the trauma of such violence. Under the roof of my awareness, they argued for a very long time.
Some had never killed before. Others were ecstatic at the bloodshed and battle. There were calls for suicide and for going to the police. One powerful voice, that of a Spanish priest, said, “God will not forgive an unrepentant sinner.”
“God?” I said from the rafters of my mind. “How can you talk about God when you are where you are?”
“All deeds are divine,” Father Clemente replied in the same mental idiom. “He has placed me here to succor those lost and sundered souls.”
For a moment, I saw and felt what that Catholic minion believed. His sense of the Deity was so intense that I could not help but defer. I felt myself fading inside my own mind. Other voices gained ascendance calling out for confession and absolution. These voices were of all religions, and some were simply devout believers. They wanted to be freed from the prison they found themselves in. The husk of my mind was for them, at that moment, an unbearable limbo.
“No!” It was a man’s voice that cut through the moaning and wailing of religious piety and confusion.
This pronouncement was so loud that I was forced to sit up and then get to my feet. I went to the terrace and breathed in the chill night desert air. It was late in the evening. We had been at it for hours.
“They were going to kill us,” the new voice said above the waning din of pious complaints. “There was no choice, no crime. And we need more information before we can go to either God or the law.”
What should we do? I thought.
“Let’s make a call,” the as-yet-unidentified voice said.
On the walk from my bed to the terrace, I wondered if I was schizophrenic with side orders of multiple personalities and delusions. Had I been to a place called the Steadman and killed those men? Maybe I had stayed in this room the whole time imagining deeds, actions, and crimes.
A phone number worked its way into my thoughts.
After pressing a nine and a one, I entered the number on a tan phone that sat on the blue desk.
Six rings and she answered, “Yes?”
“Anna?” the man who stopped the religious convocation said.
“Yes?”
“This is Ron.”
“Ron?”
“Tremont.”
There was silence for a moment... two.
“Anna.”
“Who is this?”
“I don’t have time to explain, A. But I can tell you that on June 24, 1999, you did something to a man named Charles Willis that I cannot repeat on any phone line.”
“Ron?”
“You always called me Tremolo.”
“Ron Tremont is dead.”
“I thought that might be the case. But here I am... sorta.”
“Where are you?”
“Vegas. I’m... I’m not quite myself and I need help. You can get in touch with a guy named Jack Strong at the Motorcoach Extended-Stay Motel.”
“Your voice... it doesn’t sound like you.”
“On Tuesdays I always brought lemon-filled doughnuts to work wherever we were, and on Fridays you bought chocolate éclairs.”
Anna — Wolf was her last name, I knew — went quiet again.
“Anna.”
“How can you expect me to believe this?”
“Your husband came out to you four years before the divorce, but you remained faithful to him and never told his secret to anyone but me.”
“I was with you when you died,” she said.
I suddenly remembered driving down a two-lane highway outside Cincinnati. One moment I was fine, and the next my heart felt like an expanding balloon causing a pain I’d never experienced before. I pulled to the shoulder and threw open the car door. I heaved up and out of the driver’s seat while Anna was shouting my name. Three steps into my attempted escape from the heart attack, I fell to the ground. Anna rolled me over with some difficulty because I was a fat man. The last thing I remember seeing was her face. Her coloring was dark ocher. Her race was what is called African American.
“I was a coward at the end,” I/Ron said into the phone. “I begged you not to let me die.”
“Ron,” she said with a kind of semi-certainty.
“I gotta go soon, A. You still with the bureau?”
“Y-yes.”
“I’m in big trouble and I don’t understand it. Can you come out to Vegas?”
“I’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon.”
When I hung up, Ron Tremont stepped back from the forefront of consciousness. That’s how it felt. My awareness was like a pulpit or a podium that varied personalities approached in order to use their knowledge and abilities. I was always there but not necessarily in control.
There came a knock.
“Yes?” I said, standing to the side of the door, squatting low.
“Mr. Strong? It’s Alberto. Tony send me up to tell you somethin’.”
I opened the door on the red-skinned, fleshy-featured young man.
“These bad dudes come up to Tony and said where was you at? Somebody called before then asking for Jack Strong, but they hung up. Tony figured it was the bad men that called, but he didn’t know.”
“Who was calling?”
“The bad dudes,” Alberto said, upset that I wasn’t getting his meaning. “Tony sent ’em to a empty suite on the eighth floor, but you got to get outta here before they find out you’re not there. Tony already split ’cause he don’t want ’em comin’ after him. He called me on his cell phone an’ told me to warn you.”
“Is there a back way, Alberto?”
“I’ll show you.”
Before sneaking out the service entrance of the hotel, I told Alberto that if a woman named Anna Wolf called for me to have her call and ask for Carl Rothman at the Beamer Motel after six the next day. I repeated the message twice and gave him a hundred-dollar bill.
“My cousins Esther and Shoni work the switchboard,” he said with a smile. I noticed that an upper tooth was edged in silver. “They’ll do it.”
Two twenty-three in the morning found me at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop on the dowdy end of the Strip. I was sitting hunched over a table in a booth at the back eating a chili size and searching my mind.
Richards. Lance Richards. He’d been dead for a while. It was 2008 when Mr. Petron’s bookkeeper figured out that Lance had been skimming off the money Petron had been skimming from the big boss Ira Toneman. Lana Santini, the daytime bartender, and Richards had worked together to get a nightly bundle of twenty-dollar bills from the vig chest into their joint safe-deposit box. They’d been doing it for almost two years and had more than six hundred thousand stowed away.
But then it came out that Lance was the one who’d been stealing. He went to Lana’s, and she gave him a shot of whiskey. That was the last memory Richards could muster. She had probably killed him. He always carried the second key to the box in his wallet when they went to the bank in Phoenix. She probably thought he always had it there. It was only after he was dead that she must have realized her mistake.
He took the money, but Lana was the one who smuggled it out of the casino. Maybe Petron never suspected that Lance had a partner.