Free Accustomed to the Dark by Walter Satterthwait Page A

Keep in touch. Asshole.”
    â€œI’ll do that, Hector.”
    I reached Las Vegas at about one o’clock that afternoon.
    Money had come in with the railroad, back in the 1880s, and the people who brought it out here to the Wild West had used it to re-create the East they’d left behind. They had built the grand Victorian houses of wood and brick and stone that still sat back on bright green lawns, spacious verandas cooled by towering oaks and elms. Driving down those broad shaded streets, I could have been in Vermont or New Hampshire or upstate New York.
    The address I had for Sylvia Miller was on a small side street. The house was smaller than the Victorians on the main drag, a white frame bungalow with a screened-in porch. There was no garage, and no car in the narrow asphalt driveway. A hedge of juniper ran down each side of the neat rectangle of lawn, hiding it from the houses on either side. The house across the street, a small brick cottage, seemed empty.
    I drove past the house and parked a couple of blocks beyond it.
    I was wearing a blue oxford shirt, a pair of tan corduroy slacks, a pair of Tommy Mahan ostrich-skin boots. I swiveled around, reached over the console, wrestled my carryall to the backseat, opened it. Slipped out the flat leather wallet that held the picks, stuck in it my back pocket. Slipped out the blue blazer, and then a tie of red and navy blue silk. I shut the suitcase.
    I turned back around and admired myself in the rearview mirror as I wrapped on the tie. I looked a bit less degenerate than I’d looked this morning.
    I put on the blazer. Then I bent down and retrieved the Beretta from beneath the passenger seat, shoved it between my belt and the small of my back. I picked up Leroy’s phone, flicked the switch that turned off the ringer, dropped it in my blazer pocket.
    The clipboard was beneath the driver’s seat. I bent over and pulled it free.
    Carrying the clipboard, I got out, locked the Jeep, and walked down the shaded sidewalk to Sylvia Miller’s house. I ambled up the driveway, up the cement steps to the porch, pulled open the screen door, stepped inside, rang the bell.
    No one answered it. I could see nothing through the heavy lace curtains that hung like veils beyond the window. I tried the door. Locked.
    I left the porch and walked around back. The hedge concealed the entire rear of the yard. Unless someone had seen me approach the house, I was fine. I didn’t think that anyone had seen me.
    A tall galvanized metal garbage pail stood to the right of the rear door. I lifted the lid. A bulging black plastic bag, its top tied with string in a tidy square knot. I put back the lid.
    I went to work on the lock at the door. I’m not very good with locks, but this one didn’t take me long. In only a few minutes I was inside the house, standing in the kitchen. I lay the clipboard on the counter, pulled out the Beretta, and I listened for a while. I heard nothing. After a few moments, I started to poke around.
    The kitchen was an exhibit dedicated to the 1950s, stocked with aging artifacts, all well preserved and spotlessly clean. Floors of dark green linoleum. Cabinets of pale wood, yellowed now by countless coats of varnish. Crouched along countertops of red Formica were bulbous appliances—a fat toaster, a squat waffle iron, a huge old Mixmaster, its circular stand supporting three porcelain bowls carefully nestled one within the other.
    The gas stove and the refrigerator were bulky and their once-white enamel had cracked and yellowed, but they were as immaculate as everything else. On one of the stove’s burners sat an old coffee percolator. It had been scoured inside and out. In the refrigerator I found only a few jars of condiments. No milk bottles, no leftovers, nothing in the vegetable crisper except a single limp gray shred of lettuce. The freezer compartment held two empty aluminum ice trays and three Weight Watchers TV dinners. There