The Ragged End of Nowhere Page 2

  And then one day he drove along Highway 91 to Las Vegas. The city on the edge of nowhere. Money flowed freely and the bright lights burned around the clock. The town was wide-open and howling. A man was limited only by his ability to cough up the jack, the scratch, the greenbacks, the cold hard cash. And there was a lot of cash to be made.

  Hagen found employment in one casino, then another. With his military background and his professional soldier’s physique he gravitated toward security work. He landed a job at the Sands Hotel casino, dropped the name Wolfgang and became Karl Hagen, casino security officer and general enforcer of the rules.

  For thirty years Karl Hagen kept watch over the green felt tables at the Sands casino, looking for the dice sliders, the card counters, the pickpockets, the shiners, the crooked card dealers who pocketed chips, the cage cashiers who pocketed banknotes, coin cup thieves, slot machine slug artists, cooler move operators, camera schemes, big six dealers, card daubers, prostitutes who were too obviously plying their trade. Some of them were rousted out of the casino and told never to return. Some of them were turned over to the police. A few of them were taken out into the back parking lot for a quick hard lesson in casino decorum, then kindly relieved of their winnings.

  The first rule in Las Vegas is that the percentage always stays with the house. And it was Karl Hagen’s job to enforce that rule, whatever it took.

  Bodo Hagen kept one eye on his rearview mirror.

  He was being followed.

  At the cemetery a black Chrysler parked down the street had pulled out behind Hagen when Hagen pulled out to follow McGrath’s Chevrolet. At the first intersection McGrath and Hagen turned left. The Chrysler sped up and took the turn too fast, as though the driver was afraid of being caught at the light and losing sight of Hagen. The driver gained ground, then eased off the gas pedal. Dropped back. Changed lanes. Now he was pacing Hagen from forty yards back.

  As Hagen passed through the next two intersections the Chrysler held steady behind him. But a quarter of a mile farther on the Chrysler faded back into the traffic, slowed to make a turn, disappeared.

  A false alarm. A touch of paranoia. Hagen chalked it up to nerves. He was tired, probably more tired than he realized. This wasn’t Berlin. Anyone who might want to keep him under surveillance was half a world away.

  McGrath worked out of Las Vegas Metro’s substation on Spring Mountain Road, not far from the Strip. The building looked like a concrete bunker surrounded by ornamental landscaping. McGrath’s office was small and tidy. On one wall hung the plaques and awards accumulated over McGrath’s twenty-eight years on the force. The window behind his desk looked out on a row of black-and-white Metro squad cars freshly washed and shining in the sunlight.

  “What have you been up to since we last talked, Bodo?” McGrath said when he returned from the break room with two Styrofoam cups of coffee. He set one down in front of Hagen, then stepped around behind the desk.

  “When was it, the last time we talked?”

  McGrath eased himself into his chair, took a sip of the coffee, made a sour face. “About the same time this pot of coffee was made.”

  Hagen could remember when McGrath was still a patrol officer, twenty years ago. He’d been one of the men who used to come by the house from time to time to sit out on the patio with Hagen’s father, drinking scotch and barbecuing steaks while they talked shop, the ice cubes in their highball glasses rattling together like dice in a cup. Casino security officers sometimes worked closely with the police and Hagen’s father had made many friends among the Las Vegas Metro force. Bodo Hagen had also worked at a casino for a time, and he’d run into McGrath once or twice then. Those encounters had been on a more professional basis.

  While Hagen gave McGrath a brief and not entirely forthright account of his time in Germany, he studied the older man’s face. McGrath’s dark eyes seemed to have sunk into the heavily wrinkled skin around them. His cheeks were drawn in and gave him a sickly aspect. A heavy line of sweat left by the sweatband of his cowboy hat circled his matted gray hair, making him look even more unhealthy, like a man caught in the throes of a bad fever. If McGrath was still drinking as much as he used to then maybe it was time for him to lay off the sauce. The cigarettes weren’t doing him much good either.

  McGrath was interested in Hagen’s contact with his brother in recent years. Hagen couldn’t help him. In the last five years there had only been the handful of letters he’d received from Ronnie, and the letters hadn’t told him much.

  “When he was in France, how far away was he from where you were, in Germany?” McGrath said.

  “Twelve-hour drive. Maybe a bit longer.”

  “He was there for two or three years?”

  “Three years.”

  “You didn’t see him during that time?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Hagen didn’t have an answer for that. Why not, indeed? He’d intended to visit Ronnie in Aubagne, but it hadn’t happened. “I don’t know. Didn’t get around to it. What are you getting at, McGrath?”

  “Just grist for the mill, Bodo. Don’t take offense.”

  McGrath got up from his chair, retrieved two dark brown file folders from a wire basket on top of a file cabinet, returned to the desk. With one of the folders lying open in front of him he proceeded to give Hagen a description of the case as it stood.

  It wasn’t much of a case.

  Ronnie Hagen was killed by a single gunshot wound to the head. He was in the driver’s seat of a rented car parked at a scenic overlook on the east side of Hoover Dam at the time of death. The bullet entered just forward of the left ear, traveled through the skull and exited. The round was found deeply embedded in the passenger seat. The trajectory of the bullet was consistent with a shot fired by someone standing beside the open car window. The medical examiner’s report set the time of death between midnight and three o’clock in the morning on the previous Friday. The report from the Firearms Examination Unit indicated that the round was .38 caliber. An analysis of gunpowder residue on the side of the deceased’s head was consistent with a shot fired at extremely close range. The gunpowder residue pattern and marks on the round were also consistent with the use of a silencer, possibly homemade.

  The fact that none of the security guard staff at Hoover Dam heard a shot fired also suggested the use of a silencer. “An unsuppressed gunshot at Hoover in the middle of the night would carry up and down the canyon quite a ways,” McGrath told him. “But no one heard a thing.”

  The body was discovered by a security guard shortly after four o’clock in the morning and reported to Las Vegas Metro. Hoover Dam was federal land and by rights it was a federal case but the Bureau of Reclamation security guards were in no way prepared to launch a murder investigation and the local Federal Bureau of Investigation office wasn’t too interested in pursuing it. So while the case was, on paper, an FBI investigation, the FBI had requested the assistance of Las Vegas Metro, the law enforcement agency responsible for all unincorporated areas of Clark County as well as most of metropolitan Las Vegas.

  “The FBI boys say the only federal aspect of the case is the fact that the victim was found in a parking lot owned by Uncle Sam,” McGrath said. “They’ve handed it to us. We’ll do the legwork and wrap the case up all nice and tight and then we’ll give it to the FBI and they’ll act like they knew everything all along. But I’m glad I’m working this case, Bodo. I’m going to find whoever killed Karl Hagen’s boy and I’m going to nail his ass to the wall.”

  “No leads on the shooter?”

  McGrath shook his head. “Some good prints in the car, but it was a rental that Ronnie picked up at McCarran the day he flew in, so it’s likely that those prints belong to the people who clean the cars there.We’re following up though. Forensics vacuumed out the interior of the car but they’re still poking through the dust, so we don’t have a report on that yet either. The trunk of the car and the glove compartment were tossed after
Ronnie was shot, which suggests that it was a robbery, but none of the other facts seem consistent with a robbery. Unless the shooter was someone who knew Ronnie and knew that he had something with him worth stealing.

  “The only other thing we know is that the day before your brother died he rented an apartment in East Vegas. He paid the deposit and the first month’s rent in cash. We don’t know where he stayed before that. We went through the apartment on Saturday—didn’t come up with anything. His personal belongings amounted to two suitcases of laundry. But it’s early, Bodo. Something’s going to turn up.”

  Hagen pointed at the two file folders. “Can I take a look?”

  McGrath pushed the two files across the desk. Hagen studied the labels. One of them was the investigation report. The other file contained the medical examiner’s autopsy report.

  McGrath got up from his chair, closed the door of his office, then stepped over to the window and opened it a crack. “Mind if I smoke, Bodo?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’ve been notified by my betters that this building is now a nonsmoking piece of property, but I don’t give a shit. I just close the door and puff away. The way they carry on, you’d think I was running an opium den.”

  While McGrath stood by the window smoking, Hagen opened up the investigation file and began to read.

  The accumulated reports, what few there were, corroborated at great length what McGrath had just told him succinctly. But the photographs of the crime scene, contained in a manila envelope, came as a shock. A corpse, hunched over in the front seat, the right arm limp, the right hand lying palm up on the gearshift console, everything in the photograph washed out by the powerful blast of the police photographer’s camera flash. The facial profile of the corpse from this angle, shooting inside the car from the open passenger-side door, was nothing but an indistinct mass of torn tissue and dried blood.

  Could that be his brother? Could that possibly be Ronnie?

  Hagen forced himself to study each of the photographs closely.

  When Hagen was done with the investigation file he set it aside, opened the medical examiner’s report. The autopsy notes were bare. On a sheet of paper were four outlines of an anonymous nude male body—front and back, left and right side. The medical examiner had penciled in arrows to reflect the trajectory of the bullet and the injuries to the head. Beside these wound location diagrams the examiner had written the essential information—the estimated time of death, a general description of the body. Cause and manner of death were listed as “massive head trauma resulting from a close proximity gunshot wound.” The mode of death was listed as “homicide, unknown person(s).” The examiner had noted the presence of a large tattoo on the upper right arm of the deceased—something Ronnie must have picked up in the Legion. A notation at the bottom of the sheet indicated that the results of the toxicology tests were pending.

  The autopsy file also contained a small sealed envelope with a micro-casette inside—the medical examiner’s portrait parlé—and a manila envelope containing the autopsy photographs. The air-conditioning in McGrath’s office was strong and cold and the chill of the air against Hagen’s skin as he studied the photographs gave him a macabre sense that he could actually feel the coldness of the steel morgue table, the coldness of the exploratory scalpel, the coldness of his brother’s pale skin.

  Hagen had seen enough. He’d seen what he needed to see. He returned the photos to the envelope, closed the medical examiner’s file and pushed both files across the desk toward McGrath, who had finished his cigarette and returned to his chair.

  “It’s tough, looking at those files,” McGrath said.

  Hagen got up from his chair. “I’d better get going.”

  “How long are you in town?”

  Hagen didn’t know. A couple of weeks, maybe longer. He wanted to look up a few people. Hagen told McGrath where he was staying and McGrath told him to give him a call, once Hagen got settled in. McGrath handed Hagen a business card with his home phone number written on the back. Then McGrath made a call to the property room downstairs, and arranged for Hagen to take possession of his deceased brother’s belongings on his way out.

  McGrath leaned back in his chair, his elbows on the armrests, his fingers loosely pressed together, fingertip to fingertip. Like he was praying. “Give the Sniff my regards, Bodo. Tell him I’ll be dropping by to see him soon too. And Bodo, if you hear anything, you’ll call me.”

  “Sure, McGrath. Thanks for the coffee, or whatever it was.”

  3.

  HAGEN COULD RECALL, when he was a boy, watching the Sniff practice with a deck of cards for hours each day—dealing cards, pulling them in, reshuffling, dealing again. His fingers so fast that it seemed impossible to tell whether the cards were coming from the top or the bottom or the middle of the deck. “What do you want to see, Bodo?” the Sniff would say. Hagen would call out a poker hand and seconds later the Sniff would send those very cards sailing out of the deck and across the table to land face up in front of him. When the cards came up different from what Hagen called out, the Sniff would laugh and say that it was on purpose. “Got to deal a little trash or else the marks will wise up. And we can’t wise up the marks, can we?”

  When the Sniff came to Las Vegas in the 1950s he was already an accomplished card mechanic. But the Sniff hadn’t made his money playing cards. With his skills, working the casino tables night after night would’ve proven dangerous. The Sniff would have quickly found himself in the “Griffin book,” the collection of mug shots and modus operandi that the casinos used to identify the more notorious cheats. And appearing in the Griffin book was nothing but a ticket to a beating or a jail cell or worse. Rather than risk his health or his life, the Sniff had sold his expertise directly to the casinos. Because he knew all the tricks himself, he could spot other card cheats at the gaming tables faster and more often than most of the casino security officers. For a time the Sniff had worked exclusively at the Sands with Hagen’s father. In later years the Sniff branched out and became a consultant who provided the security staffs of several casinos with ongoing instruction in the art and artifice of the mechanic.

  All the while, the Sniff kept one foot in the Las Vegas underworld of grifters, mobsters and racketeers. The Sniff had a lot of friends. Friends who told him things. Friends who the Sniff sometimes did favors for. And the more favors he bestowed, the more favors he collected. It was a game the Sniff played in the same way he played cards—serious and discreet, with his poker face giving away nothing for free.

  The Sniff had connections.

  The Sniff had juice.

  The Sniff lived now in a condominium complex that stood at the edge of a golf course fairway. The complex looked new and clean and tranquil in an anonymous middle-class way. It wasn’t at all what Hagen had expected. The Sniff had always displayed a taste for high living. This golf course retirement community didn’t look like the Sniff’s type of gig at all.

  But times had changed.

  “You look just like your old man, Bodo,” the Sniff said when he answered the door. The voice was thin and raspy, like a metal file scratching slowly against a copper pipe.

  “How’ve you been, Sniff?”

  “I’m sorry about Ronnie, Bodo. I truly am.”

  Hagen followed the Sniff down a short corridor and into a living room lined with bookshelves. On one side of the room stood a baize-covered casino blackjack table with one stool behind it and three more along the front. Across the room a set of heavy drapes were pulled nearly closed across a pair of sliding-glass patio doors. A narrow wedge of sunlight cut across the beige carpet.

  “Did you go to the cemetery?” the Sniff said.

  Hagen said that he had. “Thought I’d see you there.”

  “Bodo, I don’t go to funerals. You understand.”

  “McGrath turned up there. He’s working the case.”

  “McGrath? Small world. Is he getting anywhere with it?”

  “Spinning
his wheels.”

  The Sniff sat down behind the blackjack table. Situated in front of him were two decks of new cards, a glass full of melting ice, a pack of cigarettes, a gold lighter, and a brown glass ashtray half full of crushed white cigarette butts. A bright circle of light from a ceiling fixture shone down on the center of the table. The Sniff pointed toward the kitchen. “Get yourself a drink. Freshen this one up too, will you? Four fingers of soda and a splash of gin. Doctor’s orders. How was your flight?”

  “Long.”

  Hagen stepped into the kitchen and made the drinks. When he returned the Sniff was shuffling a deck of cards. The cards fell together in a soft whisper of motion. The sound of sand flowing into the bottom of an hourglass.

  Hagen set the drinks down on coasters and sat down across from the Sniff.

  The Sniff didn’t look bad. How old was he now? Seventy? Hagen wasn’t sure. He’d finally lost all the hair on the top of his head and the pair of metal-framed bifocals that hung down on his chest from a gold chain around his neck were new, but the Sniff looked about the same as he’d always looked. His pale blue eyes under his gray eyebrows were still sharp, as sharp as the creases on his starched burgundy luau shirt.

  But the remark the Sniff had made at the door—about Hagen looking like his father—had hit home. In recent years Hagen had watched his face in the mirror as it filled out, became squarer and harder. With the addition of a mustache and a bottle of hair oil to sweep his hair back he would look quite a lot like his father. Hagen found it disconcerting, this growing resemblance to his father, as though he was somehow falling into a life that wasn’t his, and that he didn’t want.