“Thanks,” Dortmunder said.
The Randy Unicorn was long, low, brick, and lit mostly by red neon. When Dortmunder pushed open the office door a bell rang somewhere deeper inside the building, and a minute later a mummified woman in pink hair curlers came through the doorway behind the counter, looked him up and down, and said, “Uh huh.”
“I want a room,” Dortmunder said.
“I know that,” the woman said, and pointed at the check-in forms. “Fill that out.”
“Sure.”
Dortmunder wrote a short story on the form, while the woman looked past him out the front window. She said, “No car.”
“I just flew in,” he said. “The cab brought me here.”
“Uh huh,” the woman said.
Dortmunder didn’t like how everybody around here said uh huh all the time, in that manner as though to say, we’ve got your number, and it’s a low one. “There,” he said, the short story finished.
The woman read the short story with a skeptical smile, and said, “How long you plan to stay?”
“A week. I’ll pay cash.”
“I know that,” the woman said. “We give five percent off for cash, and two percent more if you pay by the week. In front.”
“Sounds good,” Dortmunder lied, and hauled out his thick wallet. He was paying cash here, and his own cash at that, because the kind of credit card he could get from his friend Stoon might shrivel up like the last leaf of summer before this excursion to Las Vegas was finished. And although it was his own cash at the moment, it had in fact come originally from Max Fairbanks, one way and another, so it seemed right to spend Fairbanks’s money to hunt Fairbanks down.
Also, the reason he was staying at a motel a little ways off from the Strip, rather than at the Gaiety, was because he knew Fairbanks knew he was coming, so any singleton guy checking into the Gaiety the next few days would be given very close observation indeed. In fact, pairs of guys together, or groups of guys, any combination like that, would be scrutinized right down to their dandruff, which was why none of the people coming out to help Dortmunder in his moment of need would stay at the Gaiety, but would all be around, here and there, somewhere else.
The mummified woman watched Dortmunder’s wallet and his hands and the money he spread on the counter. He put the wallet away, she picked up the cash and counted it, and then she said, “It’s none of my business.”
Dortmunder looked alert.
“I wouldn’t do it if I were you,” she said.
Dortmunder looked bewildered. “Do what?”
“Whatever you’re thinking of,” she said. “You seem okay, not full of yourself or nothing, so I’ll just give you some advice, if you don’t mind.”
“Everybody gives me advice,” Dortmunder complained.
“Everybody can tell you need it,” she said. “My advice is, enjoy your stay in our fair city. Swim in the pool here, it’s a very nice pool, I say so myself. Walk over to the casinos, have a good time. Eat the food, see the sights. A week from now, go home. Otherwise,” she said, and gestured with the handful of money, “I got to tell you, we don’t give refunds.”
“I won’t need one,” Dortmunder assured her.
She nodded. “Uh huh,” she said, and put the money in the pocket of her cardigan.
So that was the second warning, and the third warning was this morning, in the cafe a block from the Randy Unicorn where he ate his breakfast, and where the waitress, at the end of the meal, when she slid the check onto the table, said, “Just get to town?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Just a friendly word of warning,” she said, and leaned close, and murmured, “Just leave.”
And now, he’s less than an hour at the Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino, and he’s got security guards in both hip pockets. What’s going on here?
It was a twenty-minute walk from the Strip back to the Randy Unicorn, through flat tan ground with more empty lots than buildings, and none of the buildings more than three stories tall. And back there behind him loomed those architectural fantasies, soaring up like psychedelic mushrooms, millions of bright lights competing with the sun, a line of those weird structures all alone in the flatness, surrounded by Martian desert, as though they’d sprouted from seeds planted in the dead soil by Pan, though actually they’d been planted by Bugsy Siegel, who’d watered them with his blood.
Walking in the sunlight through this lesser Las Vegas of dusty parking lots and washed-out shopfronts of dry cleaners and liquor stores, Dortmunder reflected that somehow, once he was out of New York City, he was less invisible than he was used to. He was going to have to move very carefully around this town.
When he came plodding down the sunny dry block to the Randy Unicorn, he had to pass the office first, with the rental units beyond it, and as he sloped by, the office door opened and the mummified woman stuck her head out to say, “Over here.”
Dortmunder looked at her, then looked down along the line of motel room doors that faced onto the blacktop parking area between building and street. A silver Buick Regal was parked among the vehicles along there, nose in, probably in front of Dortmunder’s room. It was quite different from the dusty pickup trucks and rump-sprung station wagons in front of some of the other units. Dortmunder couldn’t see the license plate on the Regal, but he could guess. And he could also guess what the mummified woman wanted to say.
Which is what she said: “Some fella picked his way into your room awhile ago. He’s still in there.”
“That’s okay,” Dortmunder said. “He’s a friend of mine.”
“Uh huh,” she said.
44
“Ah, the open road,” Andy Kelp said, at the wheel of the Regal. (The license plates did say MD, as Dortmunder had expected, and were from New Mexico.)
Interstate 93/95, between Las Vegas and Henderson, was a wide road, all right, but with all the commercial traffic highballing along it Dortmunder wouldn’t exactly call it open. Still, they were making good time, and the Regal’s air-conditioning was smooth as a diaper, so Dortmunder relaxed partly into all this comfort and said, “Lemme tell you what’s been happening here.”
Kelp glanced away from the semis and vans and potato chip trucks long enough to say, “Happening? You just got here.”
“And everybody,” Dortmunder told him, “makes me for a wrong guy. Like that. Like that.” The second time he tried to snap his fingers, he hurt something in a joint. “Right away,” he explained.
Again Kelp gave him the double-o, then looked back at the highway in time not to run into the back of that big slat-sided truck full of live cows. Steering around the beef, which looked reproachfully at them as they went by, Kelp said, “I see what your problem is, John. You don’t have a sense of what we call protective coloration.”
Dortmunder frowned at him, and massaged his finger joint. “What’s that?”
“You’ll find out,” Kelp promised him, which sounded ominous. “When we get back from seeing this fella Vogel. But let’s get this part squared away first.” Shaking his head, weaving through the traffic in all this sunlight, Kelp said, “I hope he’s got what we want.”
“It would help,” Dortmunder agreed.
Dortmunder had phoned Lester Vogel from Vegas to introduce himself and get directions, and they found the place the first try, in a low incomplete tan neighborhood of warehouses and small factories in the scrubby desert, just beyond the Henderson city line. A tall unpainted board fence ran all around a full block here, with big black letters along each side that read GENERAL MANUFACTURING , which didn’t exactly tell you a hell of a lot about what was going on inside there. However, when Dortmunder and Kelp got out of the Regal’s air-conditioning and into Nevada’s air, there was a smell wafting over that fence to suggest there were people somewhere nearby stirring things in vats with one hand while holding their nose with the other.