Old Bobo, standing still behind Cutlip, snickered, his twisted teeth catching bits of yellow light.

“But I can’t rightly say too much about that one. When the girls they was fifteen or so, I figured I was done, that they could make it on they own. Had some opportunity out here and I took it. I had a lot of drinking to catch up on and I did. Didn’t I, Bobo?”

Bobo nodded. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It was party time.”

“Bobo was just a kid when I first met him, a runaway, come to sin city to make good. I showed him around, helped him out. Now I got him this job.”

“Mr. Cutlip’s been good to me.”

“That’s my Bobo. He’s from out your way, some beach town in Delaware, ain’t that right, Bobo?”

Bobo smiled and nodded. “Dewey Beach.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Inland from there.”

“But he ran into trouble and came out here and I sort of adopted him. I take care of him like I took care of them girls.”

“You kept in touch with Hailey, Mr. Cutlip?” I asked.

“I did, yeah. For a while, right after I left, I lost touch, but then she came out and found me. After that, we kept in touch. We was closer than the normal uncle and niece, you know, me and Hailey.”

“You ever visit her in Philadelphia?”

“Nah. I don’t travel much no more. I like it right here in the desert. Nice and hot, nice and dry.”

“Did she tell you about Guy Forrest?”

“Just that she had decided to marry. I told her it was a mistake. The Hailey I knew wasn’t the marrying type. And when she told me they was fighting over the money she spent to put me in this place, I knew it would all go to hell. But Hailey, you could never tell her nothing. I would have told her to stop the fighting, to forget about the money, but I needed someplace. You ever hear of beriberi? It tears you apart from the inside, paralyzes you piece by piece as you swell to twice your size.”

“Beriberi?” said Beth. “Like sailors used to get?”

“That’s it. Strange to catch it in the desert, ain’t it? Nothing I could do, it came and ran through me and destroyed half my insides. I needed this place.”

“There are plenty of places,” said Beth.

“Yeah, I knowed. I was happy just out in that motel I was living at, but she said I deserved a place like this. Couldn’t talk her out of it. She said I deserved it, and said she knew how to get it for me. And she said I deserved having Bobo to push me around, and that I figured was all right, since I had pushed him around long enough.”

“Did she tell you about anyone she was seeing besides Guy?” I asked.

“There was someone else, she said. But she never told me who. Was it you, you Hebrew son of a bitch?”

“No,” I said, stunned and trying not to show it.

“You sure?” The old man stared at me for a moment, and I thought again I saw that snakelike flutter.

“I’m sure.”

“Good.” He smiled and then he turned to Beth. “It could have been him. It could have been anyone. To know Hailey was to want her, and even when she was with someone, they was always someone else. But she didn’t tell me things like that. Never did. From the time she was fifteen or something, she just closed right up and told me nothing.”

“Did she ever mention anyone named Juan Gonzalez?” said Beth.

“Is that the other fella she was sleeping with? Is that the fella, some Mexican? Had she fallen that low?”

“I don’t think that was the other man,” I said, relieved that his suspicions were so wild as to alight on any name tossed out.

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” he said, staring at me again. “Never had no idea what kind of scum riffraff she’d end up with.”

“In your conversations before her death,” said Beth, “did she mention to you that she was scared of anyone?”

“No, Hailey wasn’t scared of no one.”

“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to do her any harm?”

“Nope, none, except she was aiming to marry one man and sleeping with another and that’s a dangerous proposition in our part of country.”

“In our part of the country, too,” I said. I looked at Beth. She put her sunglasses back on. I slapped my thighs and stood. “I think that’s everything. Thank you for your help, Mr. Cutlip.”

He lifted one of those big hands and pointed at me. “You said you was going make the man who did that to my Hailey pay.”

“Yes I did.”

“Don’t be acting like a lawyer. You be true to your word there, boy.”

“Count on it, Mr. Cutlip.”

“I aim to.”

I nodded at Bobo, standing behind the man with a smile fixed dully on his face, and started heading for the door when Beth asked a final question.

“That boy, Hailey’s friend. You said he died out near some quarry?”

“Jesse was his name. Jesse Sterrett. That’s right.”

“How did it happen?”

“It’s a mystery, ain’t it? Don’t nobody knowed what he was doing there. All they knowed is that somehow he cracked his head and fell into the water sittin’ there at the bottom.”

“They ever find out who killed him?”

“Coroner ruled it an accident.”

“But no one believed that, did they?” said Beth.

“Don’t know what no one believed. Coroner said he slipped and cracked his head before he fell off the ledge they all used to hang out on. That’s what the coroner said, and how the hell you all the way over here fifteen years later can think something different is a goddamn mystery to me.”

“Just like that,” she said. “Fell off a ledge just like that.”

“That’s what he said, good old Doc Robinson. Best-loved man in the county. Good doctor, bad cardplayer. Ruled it an accident.”

“What did Hailey think happened?”

“She didn’t much say,” said Cutlip. “We done never talked about it. She wasn’t much interested in legal stuff then.”

“Only after. Thank you, Mr. Cutlip,” said Beth. “You’ve been a big help.”

24

OUR PLANE didn’t leave McCarran International until late that evening, we were red-eyeing our way back to Philly, so I took the scenic route west toward Lake Mead. The narrow two-lane road, with shoulders soft and gravelly, twisted through hills and canyons. The desert here rose on either side in great piles of singed rock. There was a sign, LAST STOP BASS ’N’ GAS, there was a sign warning of the danger in an abandoned mine, and then just the road. In the desert, with the top of our convertible down and the wind rushing over our heads, the world seemed still raw and the Strip far, far away, even though at night its gaudy lights would fill the sky like a hundred thousand beacons.

Beth hadn’t said much during the drive, and that had been fine by me. There was much I had to think about, the young Hailey with tattered dresses hanging from her bones, the uncle exiling himself to the slaughterhouse to keep his nieces and sister fed, the boyfriend dead in the quarry, Hailey’s subsequent tepid relationship with the football player who preferred showering with his teammates to pitching woo with his girl, the long, improbable haul through college and law school, only to end at the wrong end of a gun. It all seemed to amplify the tragedy of Hailey’s story, turning the bare bones of what she had told me into some sad Gothic opera.

Beside me Beth shuddered, as if she were thinking through the same things, and then she chuckled.

“So you’re the mystery man who was sleeping with Hailey Prouix,” she said.

I played it nonchalant. “Except when she was out on the town with Juan Gonzalez.”

“He looked at that moment when he made his wild accusation as if he wanted to strike you dead.”

“Like a protective papa bear.”

Beth didn’t reply.

We were driving slowly on the road, enjoying the scenery. A big black Lincoln, with its windows up and air conditioner undoubtedly blasting, blew by.

“I had this image when he was talking,” I said, “of him in the slaughterhouse, surrounded by carcasses, ankle deep in blood. It was something, what he did, sacrificing almost a decade of his life so his sister and his nieces could live decently. However he wasted his life before or after, and it seems he wasted it badly, at least he did that one noble thing.”