Temptation Town (2 page)

I didn't have to answer. He knew I got it.

"I'll find her," I said. "And if
possible, I'll make sure she's safe."

He pulled an envelope from the inside pocket of
his suit jacket. "Here's half now," he said, sliding it across the
table at me. "The other half will be waiting for you when you deliver your
report to me. I want the truth, you understand? No matter what."

I put my palm over the envelope. "You'll get
it, Mr Lansdorf. I can't promise you'll like it, but you'll get it."

We shook hands and rose from the booth.

≈≈≈

I cashed out of the poker
game and headed home. As I motored out of Binion's garage, I started thinking
about Lansdorf, wondering what it must be like to be him. To have a gorgeous
daughter who no doubt had all the advantages growing up, only to piss her life
away in the sex trade of Las Vegas. What the fuck was she thinking? He's
probably wracked his brain a thousand times trying to figure out where he went
wrong as a father.

"I guess that's how it is with fathers and
daughters," I said aloud over the car radio, wending my way through the
downtown streets. "Daddy blames himself when his little girl goes wild.
Like there was something he could've done differently."

Let me tell you, I've been around enough of the
daddies and enough of the wild childs to know that girls like Emily, they're
not usually thrown off course by the actions of their fathers. They've got
something inside them, way deep inside them, rotting away in their DNA, tugging
them in that downhill direction. And all the private schools and credit cards
and BMWs in all the world can't save them.

I can also speak from hard experience. I think
that was what twanged inside me when I saw Emily's picture in that ad. It took
me back to Redondo Beach.

Back to Lyla.

Back, shit. She's still with me. Her memory's all
over me. Like a stain that won't scrub clean, an open sore that never heals.
Stings every time I touch it.

Lyla wasn't a daughter, of course, because I have
no kids, but she was someone who … Never mind. I don't want to think about it
right now.

But she was like Emily and all the other girls who
end up where Emily's heading. They're like alcoholics in that respect, being
swept to their doom in the swift current of that whiskey river. Before they
drown, they've got to dig down within themselves and find something they think
is worth saving. And they've got to do it all alone.

I thought about it some more, then, as I arrived
home, I put it aside and quickly crawled into bed.

A
cold front moved into the Las Vegas Valley overnight, dropping temperatures to
near freezing. Stumbling out of bed in the morning, I shivered my way to the
thermostat on the wall where I cranked up the heat full blast. Twenty minutes
later, with steamy coffee in front of me, it was bearable.

As I stirred my coffee, I hit my laptop for a
reverse phone number search on the white pages websites. As I expected, no
luck. The name and address behind the number in
Las Vegas Weekly
were
"unavailable".

Back in
the bedroom, I grabbed my California PI credentials off the dresser. A few
years ago, I'd put in for a duplicate, saying I'd lost the original. When they
lifted my license, I gave them the dupe.

I opened the top dresser drawer and eyed my
Springfield .357 SIG, matted black in its leather holster. On an impulse, I
reached for it, then thought better of it. I didn't have a license to carry in
Nevada. Since this was just prelim work right now, I didn't see any sense in
risking a major pinch if I didn't really need the weapon. I closed the drawer.

Out the door into the cold, windy day I went,
holding a paper napkin with an address on it.

The drive out Maryland Parkway wasn't too bad. The
sun had risen high enough so it didn't irritate my eyes through the driver's
side window. Traffic flowed smoothly, very rare for this street. I caught a lot
of green lights and pretty soon I was turning off onto Sierra Vista Drive.

Despite its exotic name, Sierra Vista only sounds
pretty. It's a street that runs perpendicular behind the east side of the Las
Vegas Strip, densely lined with B-grade apartment complexes. For the most
part, these places house a lot of the hourly wage earners in the big hotels
just a couple of blocks away. The street is known in some circles as Cocaine
Alley.

I rolled into the parking lot of the address
Lansdorf gave me, an unpleasant-looking spot called the Arrowhead Apartments. I
found the office and went in. The wind almost blew the door out of my grip. I
had to use both hands to shut it.

A woman's voice came at me from behind a plain
wooden desk.

"Wind sure picked up, didn't it?"

I straightened myself out, admitting it had indeed
picked up. Her name badge read "Jane Sandemore, Resident Manager".

Beneath straight brown hair, she looked me over
with dark eyes. It looked like she was surprised to see me, but then I saw her
brows were naturally arched too high on her forehead, giving her a look of
permanent astonishment. I guessed her to be in her late forties, though she
appeared older.

"Ms Sandemore," I began, "my name's
Jack Barnett. I'm a private investigator." I flashed the wallet ID, just
long enough to give her a quick look. "I'm here to inquire about someone who
used to be one of your tenants. Maybe she still is, actually."

She looked up from my ID straight to my eyes. I
could tell she didn't like anything about this encounter.

"Who would that be?"

"A girl by the name of Emily Lansdorf. Age
twenty-three. Pretty girl. Blonde hair, blue —"

"I know who you mean," she interrupted
in a controlled,
 
tight voice. She had no
accent I could identify. "No, she's long gone from here. Left sometime
last spring. May, June. Somewhere around there. And good riddance, I might
add."

"Why. Was there a problem?"

"Ha. Saying there was a problem with her is
like saying it gets a little warm around here in the summertime. That girl
brought in more lowlifes than you can imagine at all hours of the day and
night. Made all kinds of racket."

I took the seat facing her across the desk.
"No offense, Ms Sandemore, but how do you know this. I mean, you've got
lots of other tenants here and she's just one girl."

"She lived in the unit right next door to the
office," she said, pointing to her left. "I could see her out the
window bringing in one scummy guy after another. Day in and day out, it was. I
had to call the police one day after I heard a gunshot in her apartment. Say,
is she in trouble or something?"

"No, ma'am. She's not in trouble. I'm just
trying to locate her. Now, with this gunshot incident, was anyone hurt? Were
there arrests made?"

"No, none. The sleazeball she was with left before
the police arrived. When they got here, she said the gun went off accidentally
while he was cleaning it and she didn't know his real name. The next day, she
had a black eye."

"Did she leave any kind of forwarding
address? You know, for mail and such?"

"None whatsoever." I could tell she had
quite enough of me and my questions. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have
work to do."

I thanked her for her time. As I wrestled with the
door on my way out, she hollered above the blustery wind, "If you find
her, tell her she owes me eight hundred in rent!"

I
knew what my next move would be. I hopped back into my car, then headed over to
see Ronnie Wills.

Ronnie was a cab driver who worked swing shift.
Every once in a while, he'd drop into Binion's to play a little poker after
getting off work. That's where I met him.

He'd been driving in this town for over thirty
years, since back in the days of the "old Vegas". He was full of
stories, but more importantly, full of knowledge about how this town works. If you've
got your eyes and ears open, he always said, you can learn anything you ever
wanted to know while driving a cab.

He lived a couple of blocks from the cab yard. It
was theoretically downtown, or at least on the lip of it. But you wouldn't find
downtown tourists anywhere near here. Only a grouping of grim, single-story
buildings along Main Street, housing bottom-level businesses: cheap furniture
outlets, body shops, greasy diners, and the like.

Move one block off Main and you enter the land of
the lost. Ramshackle apartment courts and duplexes lined First Street, the last
stop for many of those who never made the Big Las Vegas Score.

Hollow-eyed and ashen, each one of them carries a
story of a life that jumped the tracks somewhere. You can see them shamble
along the emptiness of First and Second Streets, running out the clock.

Very little vegetation intruded into this expanse
of flat, white concrete. Just a few blocks away, though, sat the silvery downtown
hotels and office buildings, sparkling cold beneath the winter sun.

Ronnie Wills lived here, along First Street, but
he wasn't like the rest of them. He didn't have a drug problem and he drank no
more than a few beers after work. He lived here for one reason only: because it
was two blocks from the cab yard and he didn't own a car.

I parked in the front lot of his apartment
building, right outside the office. Even though I drove a ten-year-old car, I
didn't want to get careless. I couldn't afford to let it get stolen. The moment
I stepped out, the cold wind slapped my face. I zipped my jacket up all the
way, but the chill still sliced through me.

Steps creaked on my way up to the second floor. As
I meandered down the landing past graffiti and dirty windows, I heard yelling
in one or two of the apartments, and it wasn't from a TV. Ronnie's place loomed
alone down at the end.

The wind picked up, and I turned the collar up on
my jacket. I figured he'd be watching a DVD, so I knocked on his door a few
times, with hard raps so he would hear me through his headphones. Eventually, I
heard him fiddle with the locks. Down on the street, two police cars roared
past, sirens blaring.

The door opened. "Jack!" he said. His
full beard tried to hide his gap-toothed grin. Headphones hung around his neck.
"Well, what the hell are you doing here on a day like today?"

"Hey, Ronnie." We shook hands.

"Yeah, hey. Come on in, man. Really, now,
what brings you over here? No game at Binion's?"

"I don't play day shift. You know that."

We sat down. He took the easy chair, I took the footstool.
They were the only seats in this private, inner universe of his. A quick look around
showed me the mattress and box spring still over in the corner, along with a
tidy kitchenette tucked off to one side. A portable floor heater tried its best
to warm the room up, with little luck. I kept my jacket zipped.

Two other
doors were closed — a bathroom and a closet, as I recall. The only window
was blacked out by a blanket tacked to the wall. What light there was in the
room came from a plain overhead low-wattage bulb covered by a frosted glass
bowl. No phone, no TV. Neat stacks
of DVDs covered the floor. Hundreds
of them.

He showed me his DVD player. It was a small item
that fit on his lap with maybe an eight-inch screen. A black-and-white image,
frozen in pause mode, was visible on it.

"
The Roaring Twenties
," he said. "Cagney and Bogart. A
Warner Brothers classic. This's the scene where Cagney gets killed and Gladys
George is standing over his corpse. The cop is taking information from her and
asks her what Cagney did for a living. So she goes, 'He used to be a big
shot'."

He spoke
with a lot of passion. I could see he treasured that scene.

"I
hope I didn't come at the wrong time, you know, I don't want to ruin the movie
for you."

"Ah-h,
don't worry about it. I've seen it a hundred times. You ever seen it?"

I shook
my head.

"Jack,
man, these old movies are like nothing else. They reveal a side of America
that's lost forever."

"What,
Jimmy Cagney getting killed?"

"No,
not that. It's all of them put together. The big picture." His faded blue
eyes grew intense, and his voice rose to the occasion. "You watch these
movies and you slowly realize what this country was like back then. The way the
scripts were written. The way the scenes were constructed. The way the actors
spoke. It all fit together somehow. It painted a picture of our values and our
morals of that era. Now … well, let's just say it can never be the same. We've
lost a … a piece of our cultural soul. Something irretrievable."

I blinked
at his articulate description. I'd never before heard him speak at that level.

"Beer?"
he asked.

"Sure.
Thanks."

He
hustled over to the kitchenette, where he pulled two cans out of the small
fridge. He popped both tops and handed me one. Even though it was a little
early for a beer, it tasted good going down.

We passed
a little more small talk. Then he shifted in his chair, settling into listening
position. "So … what's on your mind, man?"

He took a
long pull from his beer, as I set mine down on the floor. I reached into my
jacket for a copy of
Las Vegas
Weekly
, opening it to Emily
Lansdorf's picture.