“Here it is, Miss Prouix,” said Mrs. Selegard as she came back with the card. “I’ll need to see your identification and then have you sign.”

Beth reached into her bag, pulled out a wallet, unfolded flap after flap as if searching for something long hidden away. I thought she was laying it on a bit thick, but finally she pulled out the driver’s license and Mrs. Selegard started taking down the information.

“Do you have a home here, Miss Prouix?” asked Mrs. Selegard offhandedly.

“No, I live in Philadelphia. But my parents live here and I keep some things for them.”

“I hope they’re in good health.”

“Still,” said Beth, rapping on the wooden desk.

“We have experts in estate planning if they’re looking for someone to talk to.”

“Thank you, but I think they have a lawyer here working on it.”

“Good, that’s smart. No reason for Uncle Sam to get more than he must. I see, Miss Prouix, that your license has expired.”

“Has it?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Selegard looked up at Beth. “A year and a half ago.”

“I gave up my car when I moved to Philadelphia, so I suppose I hadn’t noticed.”

“You should take care of that.” Pause. “It says here your eyes are blue.” She looked at Beth for a moment. “They don’t look blue.”

“In some lights they’re bluish,” said Beth.

Mrs. Selegard examined the ID again and then Beth’s face. “Well, in some lights,” she said, “I’m a size six.”

The ladies laughed at that, sharing a little piece of vanity among themselves. I could tell that Beth wasn’t a natural at playacting. She was giving too much information, seemed to have an answer to everything when answers weren’t required. If it were me with the fake ID, I wouldn’t have been chatty with the account-executive lady, I’d have acted as if none of it was any of her damn business. But I had to admit, the “In some lights they’re bluish,” line was genius.

“If you’ll just sign here, Miss Prouix,” said Mrs. Selegard, handing her the card. There were a series of lines on the card, with some signatures by Hailey, all duly dated. Without hesitation, Beth signed. She had been practicing all morning in the hotel room, writing out the name based on the signature on the license: Hailey Prouix, Hailey Prouix, Hailey Prouix. It wasn’t a perfect match, but the flourishes were the same, and it was close enough, and after their little laugh together Mrs. Selegard barely glanced at the card before standing from her desk.

“Is your friend coming, too?” asked Mrs. Selegard, gesturing in my direction.

“You mean Raoul?” said Beth. “Sure, why not?”

I tossed Beth a “what the hell are you doing?” expression as we followed Mrs. Selegard to the vault, but Beth, feeling good after having passed her test, only smiled.

The door was a foot thick, the vault itself a closet-size opening walled on either side with the fronts of boxes, two locks on each. Mrs. Selegard placed a key in one of the locks of Box 124, and Beth placed her key in the other, and they both turned at the same time. The metal box slid out of its opening. Mrs. Selegard handed the long, narrow box to Beth and led us to a small room beside the vault with two chairs and a narrow shelf. When the door closed behind us, Beth placed the box on the shelf and we both sat in front of it and stared.

“That went well,” said Beth.

“Raoul?”

“It just came to me.”

“I don’t look like a Raoul. I always thought when I turned gigolo my name would be something more like Giorgio.”

“I wasn’t thinking gigolo, I was thinking cabana boy. Aren’t you going to open it?”

“Sure. Soon. But suddenly it feels weird, doesn’t it, looking into a dead woman’s safe-deposit box?”

“You couldn’t have thought of that in Philadelphia?”

“But now we’re in Las Vegas, land of morality.”

“And all of it cheap. But I think maybe we should check it out before the smarmy Gerald Hopkins comes back from lunch.”

She was right, of course, and I stood again, but before I opened the box’s lid, I hesitated. It wasn’t that I thought I was violating Hailey Prouix’s last hiding place. Someone would eventually open this box, some investigator would eventually cotton to the knowledge that it existed and get some court order and scour it for clues, and so I rationalized that the initial scourer might as well be me. Who, after all, was working more in her interests than myself, sworn as I was to see her killer punished? But still I hesitated, and why was not a mystery to me even then, in the middle of the hesitating, when things suddenly seemed so confusing. “Last thing you want,” she had said, “are any surprises.” I used to think I knew what I needed to know about Hailey Prouix, I used to think I knew the basics, that maybe I knew her heart. But I didn’t think that anymore, and that’s what forced my hesitation. Because as that box with its secrets lay before me, I was deathly afraid of what it was I might learn.

“Go ahead, Victor.”

And go ahead I did. I slipped on a pair of rubber gloves. I took hold of the box. Slowly the top slid off, and there it was, Hailey Prouix’s safe deposits. What lay inside were clues to a whole brutal world I would just as soon had stayed closed to me forever, a world that told me more than I ever wanted to know about a woman named Hailey Prouix and the strange murderous past where were born both her sadness and her death.

23

HENDERSON, NEVADA, used to be a little desert town between Las Vegas and the Hoover Dam. I say “used to be” because now it’s a boomtown, in the truest sense of the word, its growth fueled not by a discovered silver mine or a new technological industry but because the Boomer generation is looking for someplace to retire, and tens of thousands have decided that Henderson is it. It’s got sun, it’s got Lake Mead, it’s got the Las Vegas Strip not six miles away. Henderson is now growing so fast they can’t print maps speedily enough to keep up with the newest walled developments. It is growing so fast it is now the second-largest city in Nevada, leaving Reno in the dust. They’ve trucked in palm trees by the thousands to line the boulevards, housing prices are rising like helium, people are moving there at the rate of twelve hundred a month. And it’s not as if the city has discouraged the grand influx. Seattle’s motto might just as well be “Stay the hell in California because we don’t want you here.” Henderson’s motto is “A place to call home.”

I suppose that was the idea behind Desert Winds, a huge, first-class assisted-living facility built on the edge of the vast desert that leads to Lake Mead. Located on a flat spread of desert rubble with wide pathways and small patches of green grass, more intimations of lawn than lawns themselves, Desert Winds consisted of a series of large buildings in the ubiquitous Spanish Colonial style, with red asphalt roofing and barred windows. The campus was Disney-fascist, a relentlessly upbeat place to wither and die. Despite the evident number of rooms, the landscape was deserted. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe the intended clientele hadn’t yet ripened. The Boomers moving to Henderson weren’t ready yet for a nursing home. They wanted developments like Sun City, where the houses were built side by side and the residents could drive their personal golf carts to the clubhouse and the card games and the golf course and the pool. They had come for the active lifestyle promised in the brochure. The Boomers moving to Henderson weren’t ready yet for a nursing home. Not yet. But it was only a matter of time. In that great Nevada tradition, the owners of Desert Winds were betting on the come.

The office was in a separate building in the center of the campus.

“Are you here for a tour?” chirped the cheery receptionist as I signed in.

“No,” I said. “We came to visit one of your residents.”

“How wonderful. Our members so love to have visitors. Are you expected?”