Vision?

The night was cold and a bitter wind was blowing down from the north with the sharp bite of Saskatchewan.

As Ms. Danna replaced the keys in the lockbox she made it clear that she was eager to show me a couple of other “things,” though “the price points are up a notch or two from here.” I declined, although I admit that I was curious exactly how many digits constituted a “notch” in Boulder’s hyperinflated housing market. Resigned, she gave me her card and asked for one of mine.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t have any with me.”

It was partly true. I didn’t have any with me.

But I wasn’t sorry.

I walked her down the serpentine front walk to her big Lexus and shook her hand, thanking her for her time. Over her left shoulder-at the upstairs window of Mallory Miller’s house-I spotted what I thought was the same silhouette I’d seen the night before while I’d been trespassing in the backyard with Sam.

Ms. Danna saw me looking. “Such a tragedy,” she said. “That girl’s father must feel…”

Awful.

“Finding reality here is like looking for condoms in a convent. There might be some around, but they’re not going to be easy to locate.”

Raoul was talking to me about Las Vegas, and about how he’d spent his day. His voice was as tired as my toddler’s when she was up past her bedtime. Raoul was an optimist by nature, an entrepreneur by character. Watching him treading water in a sea of despair was so unexpected that it felt surreal.

The Las Vegas cops remained uninterested in Raoul’s missing wife. He had pressed them to try to ascertain at what point Diane would be considered “missing.” One detective told him that, “Given the circumstances, it would certainly take more than a long weekend. And so far, Mr. Estevez, that’s all she’s been gone. One long weekend.” The hospitals continued to have no inpatients matching Diane’s name or description. As a sign of his desperation, Raoul had hired a local private investigator who was apparently chewing up money much faster than he was uncovering clues about Diane’s whereabouts. All he’d learned so far was Rachel’s address. When he checked for her there, no one answered.

Marlina, the woman from Venetian security, enticed Raoul to buy her breakfast at a place near downtown that was filled mostly with locals. They spoke Spanish while they ate. Raoul learned that Marlina’s brother was in INS detention in Arizona, learned how he got there-or at least Marlina’s version of how he got there-and learned in excruciating detail how Marlina felt about the whole affair, but he didn’t learn anything about what the casino surveillance tapes revealed.

After the frustrating breakfast, Raoul moved on to an alternative avenue of investigation: The Love In Las Vegas Wedding Chapel. As he told me about it, my impression was that relating the story of what happened there seemed to relax him.

According to Raoul’s tale, the minister of the Love In Las Vegas Wedding Chapel was the Rev. Howard J. Horton. By training he was an actor who had enjoyed some success as a young man on Broadway, even once landing the role as understudy for the lead of some Tommy Tune extravaganza. After a move to California to find fortune on the Left Coast, Horton had actually defied the odds and made a living in Hollywood until his thirty-seventh birthday doing bit parts on sitcoms and lawyer and cop shows and getting occasional throwaway lines on big-budget features. In successive years in his late twenties he had been filmed making cocktails for Sean Connery, being pistol-whipped by Al Pacino, and flirting shamelessly with Sharon Stone just before being pummeled into submission by her leading man.

Raoul didn’t think he had caught any of those particular movies.

The bit parts hadn’t been enough to provide the foundation for Horton’s hoped-for long-term career as a distinguished character actor, and as his face matured the parts he was being offered didn’t. To pay the bills he’d eventually gravitated to dinner theater and later on made his way to Vegas, where he did some emceeing at shows on the Strip, fell in love with heroin, heroically managed to “divorce the damn bitch,” and eventually ended up winning a thirty-nine percent stake in the Love In Las Vegas Wedding Chapel in a poker game with some locals that had started one cocktail hour on a Wednesday and ended late in the morning or early in the afternoon-Horton didn’t quite remember; it had been that kind of game-the following day.

Horton was forty-seven years old and had been the minister of the moment at the Love In Las Vegas for almost seven years. On bad days he consoled himself that it paid the bills.

The British accent and aristocratic demeanor that Horton employed for the tourists who came to Vegas for matrimony were pure shtick, and the slick Vestimenta suit he wore in the relentless Nevada heat nothing but costume. He’d won the suit from a gay guy from Atlanta in another poker game-that table populated, with the exception of Horton, entirely by out-of-towners-and he told Raoul a hilarious story about them both stripping down to their undies to exchange clothes after the game. Howard had given up his favorite pair of cargo shorts and a well-worn Tommy Bahama silk shirt.

Raoul promised me that he’d get around to telling me the part about the protracted negotiation for the Atlanta man’s thong another time.

“You promise?” I said.

“Absolutely,” Raoul assured me.

In a city where visitors were primed to expect spectacle, Horton’s wedding show at the Love In Las Vegas was a whisper of sophisticated, or faux-sophisticated, understatement. At the Love In Las Vegas, tourists who were so inclined could be married, not by an Elvis impersonator or a cross-dressing reject from Cirque, but by an ex-patriot British lord who seemed intent on bringing his interpretation of a little bit of the best of the Church of England, whatever that was, to the Nevada desert.

While Raoul waited to get a few minutes alone with the Rev. Horton so he could ask some questions about Diane and Rachel Miller, he had to choose between frying outside in the parking lot in the he-was-told unusual-for-January ninety-three-degree heat or sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of the chapel and observing the nuptials of a young couple that had driven all the way from Spraberry, Texas-that’s just outside Midland and not too far from Odessa-to tie the knot in Las Vegas.

The engaged had written their own marriage vows and brought a cassette of the music they wanted played during the ceremony. Her vows ran onto three legal-sized yellow tablet pages.

His didn’t.

The bride wore white-an ill-fitting empire-style dress with a long train that her second cousin had scored at the Filene’s Basement annual everything-for-$299 wedding dress running-of-the-bulls in Boston. The bride was twenty-two, but didn’t look it. She was as innocent as the prairie, and her face was full of the wonder that every woman’s face should have before she weds for the first time.

On the final stretch of Highway 95 into Vegas she’d made a valiant attempt to memorize all the vows that she had penned onto the yellow legal pad on the haul from Spraberry to El Paso on Interstate 10, but during the actual ceremony she’d had to consult her notes every few seconds during her long recital of eternal love.

In his retelling, Raoul generously wrote it off to nerves.

Her betrothed was twenty-six years old and was dressed in a tuxedo jacket he’d borrowed from his sister’s husband, a ruffled-front tux shirt sans tie, and clean-and pressed-Wranglers. His hair, greasy from all the road time, was combed into a mullet that was as sleek and shiny as the skin of an under-refrigerated fish. This was his third marriage and his second wedding in Las Vegas-he was once widowed and once divorced-and by demeanor and practice he was a love-honor-and-obey-till-death-do-us-part kind of groom. By history he apparently wasn’t exactly a love-honor-and-obey-till-death-do-us-part kind of husband, but he’d promised his fiancée repeatedly-including once during the ceremony-that all that rutting was behind him.