“And I work.”

“I got her number.”

The redhead dug around in her purse and handed me two cards, one of Hope White’s and one of her own.

“If Hope can’t do it,” she explained.

“You’ll be the first I call,” I said. “Thanks.”

I looked at Hope’s card. It read, The Great Hope White. Cocktail Chanteuse Extraordinaire.

The Great Hope White. Pretty funny.

“Hi,” I said when Hope answered the door of her old bungalow in Vegas’ declining old section. “Can Nathan come out and play?”

Hope was wrapped in an unbelted white robe probably designed by Omar the Tentmaker.

“Nathan’s not here,” she said.

“Would you like to come in?” Hope asked me.

Without waiting for an answer she took my shoulder and guided me past her into the living room. Her perfume smelled liked gardenias-lots of them.

Going from the hot dry air outside into her house was like stepping from a desert into a jungle. It was actually humid in there. Fetid, one might say if one said graduate school words like ‘fetid’ and ‘bathos.’ If, indeed, one said words like “one” when referring to oneself.

Anyway, it was hot and humid and chock-full of plants, which was a relief to me. I was afraid it was going to be cats. But it was plants and they were everywhere. Not cactuses either (yes, I know it’s “cacti,” but I’ve already used “fetid,” “bathos,” and “one,” and even I have a limit on being pretentious). No, these were leafy green plants of the kind I regularly killed when I had an apartment in New York, and they were all dripping with moisture. It looked like she watered them maybe fifteen times a day. I half-expected an alligator to come running out from behind one of them.

“My babies,” she explained.

“You must have a green thumb,” I answered.

Back to the lack of wit thing.

She motioned for me to sit and I plopped down on an orange sofa that looked around vintage 1965. There was a glass coffee table, a television set, two other chairs from the Johnson administration, and two or three hundred framed photographs.