broken venetian blinds. I saw an ancient desktop computer in the corner of the front room, and then I spotted what Ripley had told me to look for: her Wi-Fi router.
“How’d you find me?” Turner asked.
“Google.”
“Everything’s on the goddamned internet now. Coffee?” She reached for a carafe on the counter.
“That would be great,” I said, though my nerves were already twitching. I accepted a steaming mug and we sat down at her kitchen table. She took out a pack of Virginia Slims and lit one with a pink disposable lighter.
“How long have you lived in Las Vegas?” I thought a warm-up question was in order, but Turner got right to the point.
“Did you really come here to talk about Devereaux?”
“Yes.”
She frowned and tapped her cigarette over an old Sam’s Town ashtray. “You want to trash him on his way out?”
“I just want the truth.” I shrugged. “I was hoping you could tell me what happened.”
Turner laughed. “You read the thing. You already know.”
“He fired you because you knew too much.”
She took a drag, stood up, and extracted a bottle of Jim Beam from her pantry.
“That ’92 special was huge. It made him.” She poured a shot into her coffee cup, took a sip, and closed her eyes.
It was working; she was talking. “Do you mind if I take notes?”
“Knock yourself out.”
She came back to the table, and I fired up my laptop. I was in a tender situation. I had to revive her anger at Devereaux so she’d spill some of his secrets—namely, where he kept his props—but if I pushed her too far, she might get offended and shut down completely. I started with an easy question.
“In the article, you said the flying illusion was Devereaux’s idea, but that you came up with the method?”
She gave me a knowing shrug.
“How could he afford to let you go? Wasn’t he afraid you’d talk?”
She laughed, a bitter bark accompanied by a rush of smoke. “Sweetheart, he has enough lawyers to fill T-Mobile Arena. If I’d said two words about it, he’d have sued the skirt off my ass.”
I nodded, but I detected some playacting on her part. If he was so sue-happy, why hadn’t he gone after the blog that published her interview? I needed to rile her up more.
“Do you have any proof that it was your idea? Notes, sketches, emails? Anything?”
Turner set her cigarette in the tray and leaned toward me. Her mouth was a thin line.
“You don’t know what it was like being a woman in magic back then.” She sat back and absently wiped a smear of lipstick off her mug with a thumb. “We were all glorified Vanna Whites. Look pretty in spandex and smile at the big magician. He thought I was lucky to have a job, let alone a job working for the greatest illusionist who ever lived.”
“Devereaux actually said that?”
“What does it matter who said it? It was true. I was a girl in tights, and he was the best in the world.”
I watched her pick up her cigarette again. I wasn’t sure she was telling the truth, but her emotions seemed genuine.
“That would have pissed me off.”
She made a dismissive gesture. “It was a long time ago.”
“So he blacklisted you from magic. What do you do now?”
“Real estate,” she said, deflating. “And I waitress a couple of nights a week at Boulder Station. The market’s been pretty dry since the crisis.”
I’d read about the crash of ’08 in my online econ class—but that had been over a decade ago. Renée Turner was living in the past.
She took another sip of spiked coffee. “You want to see something?”
She got up and walked to a bookshelf in her living room, reaching out once to steady herself on a ratty armchair along the way; I guessed this wasn’t her first cup. She returned with a photo album and flipped through it until she found what she was looking for.
“This was taken at his production office. Spring of 1990, maybe ’91.” She laughed. “You can tell the date by my perm.”
There she was in a faded snapshot, her hand on Devereaux’s shoulder. She looked to be in her midtwenties.
My computer had finished booting up, so I tapped out a few random keystrokes to make a show of taking notes, then clicked on the Wi-Fi icon as Ripley had instructed.
“His production office,” I said. “That’s the place in Summerlin?”
She frowned. “No, that’s his house. The production office was downtown.”
On-screen, the list of local Wi-Fi networks was still