The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [35]
Jameson said, “In the first ten seconds you were sitting here, what did you observe about me?”
Nada said, “I never tell anyone the things I notice about them.”
“Why is that?”
“Because no one really wants to know how other people see them. And I don’t see what just one person sees. I’m more like a whole team of people studying you. Taking notes. Gossiping. Making judgments. Do you really want to hear their summation?”
“Fair enough.”
“I have too few friends as it is,” she said.
The couples, now bathed in different lights—reds and yellows and purples and blues—continued stepping to different beats.
“Nevertheless, a person of your abilities should have many opportunities,” Jameson said.
Nada had worked two real jobs in her life, both for weekend poker warriors whom she had busted and impressed at the table. One was the CEO of an insurance company. The other ran a public-relations firm. Neither job lasted a month.
She said, “I came to Vegas to play cards and I stayed here because I like it. This place can be all the way on or all the way off, you know. The Strip and the desert. I’m like that, too.”
Jameson smiled. “You didn’t only play cards here.”
She shook her head. “Some attorneys paid me for jury consulting. But I could also offer them the truth. Sometimes they paid me what the truth was worth. Sometimes they didn’t, but I gave it to them anyway, if it was the right thing to do.”
“And how did you determine when it was the right thing to do?”
She noticed more than a few of the girls along the bar admiring Kelvin, as she often did when he reached for a bottle. “Half the time, the prosecution and the defense are both peddling stories to the jury that they know are bullshit, because the truth isn’t so good for either of them. They don’t want to give the jury all the facts. They want the court to see only blue and yellow so the jury can make green. I was there to make sure the system got it right every once in a while, and I did a better job of figuring out who was guilty and who wasn’t than any jury ever could.” The vodka had left a sting in her nose and she pinched it away with her fingers. “Hell, there were more than a couple innocent guys whom Clark County would have charged if I hadn’t stopped them.”
Jameson paused for a very long time. He made a tent with his right hand over his left and tapped a large gold ring with his platinum wedding band from underneath. The gold ring had a triangle of diamonds on its face. “I’m a very lucky man, Canada. I have a lovely wife of thirty-five years. Two grown children, both very successful. This is all information you can look up for yourself.”
“I will,” she said as her drink arrived. Then she noticed something at a table to her right, just a blur of it, but … “Damn.”
“What?”
“Did he put something in that girl’s drink?”
“Who?”
The kid might have turned twenty-one yesterday. He had close black hair and a short-sleeved shirt with a tropical print. Nada could see tiny hairs on his bare arms standing on end, from cold air, from nerves. He was sitting across from a ponytailed blonde whose WASPy features had been elongated by upper-class inbreeding but more recently slackened by Long Island iced tea. Jameson turned quickly and Nada put a hand on his arm to restrain him. “In the blue shirt,” she said. “He’s here with three other guys.”
“You saw him put something in her drink?”
“I didn’t see it exactly. I wasn’t looking at him. I mean, I think he put something in her glass when she checked her purse under the table.”
“Like what?”
“Don’t know. What does a douchebag like that put in a party girl’s glass?”
“What exactly did he do?”
“It happened fast.” She looked Jameson in the eyes and began running her words together, getting them out of her mouth as quickly as she was able. “Sometimes it’s like I remember things—I have the chart, a record of having