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I corrected him good-naturedly:
800 years. That seems pretty damn old to me.
And he replied:
The petroglyphs in Chauvet are 30,000 years old.
I googled where in France they were. I texted back asking if he had seen them firsthand. Of course, he had:
We had a project in southern France. The ones there are interesting for ice age paintings. There’s a cave lion. There’s a rhinoceros.
And that was the very last text I would receive from him. It was the very last text or phone call or technological contact that anyone anywhere in the world would ever receive from him.
I began to worry when my texts at three and four in the afternoon went unanswered, and I was alarmed by five. That gift of fear? It’s real. But it was not until almost quarter to eight, as the sky was darkening, that the two detectives came to my hotel suite and told me that three hours earlier, a pair of young climbers had found his corpse.
The climbers, I learned, were college kids, a boy and a girl. Already, one of the detectives hinted, the body had begun to smell in the oppressive, windless Nevada heat.
Part Two
I kept hearing this name, Erika Schweiker, and I had no idea who she was until I looked her up.
My first thought? She was a moron. Even I knew the difference between gazpacho and Gestapo. The Gazpacho Police weren’t coming for anyone’s guns.
But she did like crypto. So, that proved that you probably can, in fact, lead a horse to water and make her drink.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Crissy
When my mother died, the waterfall of grief began with phone calls from back east.
When Yevgeny Orlov died, it began with two detectives ringing the doorbell to my hotel suite. My first instinct was that they were hotel security because one of the front desk managers was with them, but then my mind registered police even before they showed me their badges—maybe it was the dark blazer on the guy a little younger than me or the dark slacks on the woman a little older—and then it went straight to Betsy. They were a different pair than the two who had come to my dressing room to ask me about Artie Morley, and whether he’d been depressed and what our last conversation had been like. Once we got through the formalities, the manager—a newbie named Harvey with great, slicked-back gangster hair that made him look more boyish than brutish—excused himself. He was clearly unnerved that he was bringing two of Las Vegas’s finest to the hotel room of casino talent. Then the detectives joined me in my reading nook. The nook had those two chairs, which I offered them, and I carried in a third from my vanity for me.
“You are among a very small group of people to ever have sat in those,” I told them.
“You don’t have a lot of guests?” asked the younger of the pair. He’d introduced himself as Detective Patrick O’Connor.
I considered motioning at the bed and telling him that I entertained my guests there, but I couldn’t think fast enough of a British expression that would have landed the joke. The one who was in charge, a woman I pegged for midforties who had said her full name was Felicia Johnson (but I could call her “Detective”), got to the point. “A fellow named Yevgeny Orlov had a room key to your hotel suite in his wallet.”
“Had?” I asked.
There was a beat. “He’s dead. I’m sorry,” she told me.
I felt a wave of dizziness, not unlike when my mother had died or when people I knew had passed from Covid.
“Was he staying here? With you?” she went on.
I nodded, stunned. “That’s why you had Harvey with you, isn’t it?” I asked. I put my forehead in my hands and stared down at the carpet. There was a small stain there the shape of a seahorse that I’d never noticed before. “You needed to find out what door—what room number—the card opened.”
“So, he was here with you?” she asked.
“Yes. Last night. How did he die? What happened?” Beside her, Patrick had gotten out a pad and pen and was already jotting notes.
“Some climbers found his body at the bottom of a cliff out at Red Rocks. They summoned the park rangers, who called us.”
“He’d been there a few hours,” Patrick volunteered, rolling his eyes. Felicia gave him an angry, side-eye glance.
“Do you need some water?” he asked, chastened. I must have looked pale.
