My remaining possessions were in storage in Wichita, so I drove into Las Vegas with what was on my back and in the back of my car: laptop computer, my sterling silver collection courtesy of Frigidaire, Achilles’ ashes. The trunk was large enough to hold a living room suite or about six dead bodies, so both my regular and vintage clothes had made the drive with me.
Luckily, the southern Las Vegas Strip fringes still support some low-end lodging. The Araby Motel decor was mock-1001 Nights and obviously functioned more as an oasis for quickies both paid and unpaid and had hourly rates as well as nightly, weekly and monthly. I took a room for a week. I’m usually an optimist. This was just a landing spot while I got the lay of the land.
Within forty-eight hours I discovered this glitzy adult entertainment theme park was seriously bipolar. Days were sun-baked and sweaty, but nights were dark and balmy under a blitz of dazzling light shows.
This was not Kansas anymore. Gone was the green and gold landscape surmounted by blazing blue sky. Instead, Las Vegas was the world’s biggest velvet painting, all dark of night lit up by neon pinks, blues, yellows, greens, reds, and purples. Its daytime sunlit face seemed dull, a little sleazy, and oddly lifeless despite the crowds gushing like tides in and out of Strip hotel-casinos.
What had been Vegas landmarks at the turn of the Millennium—The New York, New York faux skyscraper silhouette, the half-size Eiffel Tower—were barely visible today. Even the concrete-needle condo towers that began sprouting in 2006 were mere dull gray exclamation points in a cityscape that sizzled, literally. The roar of the MGM Grand’s golden gate-keeping lion and the Mirage’s volcano were lost in the flame-throwing torrents that washed down and spouted up from the new generation hotel-casinos like the Gehenna and the Inferno, whose swooping architecture looked chillingly organic.
My target was not the Strip’s new hellfire glory. The street map I’d bought at Sam’s Town on the way in almost covered the chintzy bedspread of my Araby Motel room. Yes, a fold-out paper map. It provided the detailed overview I needed. The Araby still had rotary phones, a wireless connection was out of the realm of the possible.
Nightwine Productions took up a whole block of Sunset Road, opposite Sunset Park. Sunset Park . . . Sunset City. Maybe the word “sunset” was a good omen.
At least I was out of the Araby Motel’s damp and tepid air-conditioning by four that afternoon, just when the afternoon sun was at its most blistering. The 60 SPF sunscreen lay on my skin like heavy cold cream. I’d tried calling Nightwine productions but had given up on explaining my mission after encountering an endless menu of options all inappropriate to talking to a human being. It was high time I was off to see the wizard in person.
Sunset Park boasted a lot of what Las Vegas has little of: trees shading a walkway meandering around a small, central lake. Plaques near the trees dedicated them to deceased loved ones. So Sunset Park was a memorial garden, if not an outright graveyard.
Farther back around the lake my shoes oozed into marshy ground sprouting grasses tall enough to mask hidden lurkers, or dead bodies. Walt Whitman had called grass the “green hair of graves” and back here I could believe it. This swamp-grass jungle you couldn’t see past, or be seen in, recalled the creepy reeds where black-clad Victorian ghosts as solid as ebony tombstones appeared in an old movie that had scared the heck out of me. When I was a kid, those distant, formal, thoroughly solid phantoms had terrified me more than all the gouts of blood ’n’ guts in teen slasher pics.
Now that chilling memory drove me back to the trees dedicated to the dead, which seemed more normal. From there I had a Realtor’s eye-view of the Nightwine headquarters on Sunset Road, a nice, noirish address for a TV production company specializing in criminal forensics. All it needed to be a Sunset Boulevard was a nice, classic filmland murder.
More than a house or an office, it was a sprawling walled estate occupying a full city block, not far from Wayne Newton’s spread, Shenandoah, on the same street. Newton’s place was unforgettable for the life-size 3-D bronze sculpture of horses galloping out of the wall onto a grassy corner area. (Newton was a noted horse rancher as well as a headlining Vegas vocalist and had looked preserved in something even before the Millennium Revelation.)
I wondered what Hector Nightwine was as I studied the façade of his encompassing, stay-out wall. Obviously a man with a sense of humor, or hubris. The larger-than-life-size sculpture galloping out of his wall was . . .were . . . the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You could almost hear those armored, crushing steel steeds snorting. The ghoulish berserker warriors on their backs representing War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death bristled with enough broad-axes, swords, and pikes to quell a riot.
I crossed the boulevard, darting between traffic, to eye the scrolled-iron gate blocking the driveway. That’s all there was. No foot approach. I retreated back to the park to sit on a shaded bench and plan my attack on Nightwine’s castle, obviously his home as well as his office.
I’d made sure to dress in my respectable investigative reporter gear: conservative blazer, blouse, and skirt. No checks or prints to give the camera’s eye double vision. Everyone else around me was casually dressed in shorts and sandals and tees.
Except one.
I caught the gold glint of cufflinks on French cuffs. Custom-made silk-blend white shirt. Cream summer-weight wool-silk pants, knife-edge pressed, also expensive. A silk tie as smoothly blue as the cloudless sky, barely loosened at the collar. A suit jacket draped over the corner of a picnic table. Everything fit for a Fortune 500 executive in a boardroom, except the slim gold herringbone belt that curled around his narrow hips like a luxurious snake.
I took all this in within two seconds. Instant observation is a reporter’s first line of offense. The expensive clothes played off a dark olive complexion too smooth to be a tan. His long-fingered hands incongruously held a small dead branch from one of the nearby trees, which he was showing to three young black children dressed in rainbow colors.
Their mother, thirtyish black velvet in Queen Latifah duds, relaxed at the concrete picnic table’s other end, watching the man, and I could sure see why. His strong narrow Hispanic features had an aristocratic grace, as did the relaxed length of him.
It was easy to ogle him. All his attention was on the youngsters, who were jumping up and down around him, yelling “me first.” That phrase had been so common at the orphanage it still put me off. I’d never crowded forward to beg for anything, even attention. They said I was distant, a loner, but it got me through better than vying for beta spots against the alpha toughs who ran the secret gangs institutional life spawns.
A pig-tailed six-year-old girl in pink and lime-green won the prize first: strutting over the grass, the Y-shaped twig in her hands like bicycle handlebars, or as if she were pushing an invisible lawn mower. Mr. White-collar Coolio walked right behind, smiling and encouraging her, the two older boys trailing them. Curiouser and curiouser. I wished I had a videographer with me. They made a pretty, contrasting picture: corporate Pied Piper leads urban kids. Something resonated with me that made my throat tighten. Prince Charming was focusing on the kids with genuine interest and obvious enjoyment. When the girl stopped to bound up and down in frustration, he bent over her, put his fingertips just ahead of her beautiful dark little hands on the sticks and they walked on together.
The girl squealed with joy and triumph as the bottom of the Y-shaped twig jerked down at the grass. Oh. Dowsing for water.
In Las Vegas? Except for cultivated water, like man-made Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam, and this picture-book lake, or sprinkler systems, it must all be desert under the well-watered grass.
I watched the man waltz the two young boys around the same territory, where each one “dowsed” successfully in the same spot once he added his own touch to the process. They were too young to realize they were all “discovering” the same “well.” Probably a buried sprinkler head.
The Millennium Revelation had indeed proved Hamlet right that “there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of”—including a large dose of Hell that would have really bummed out the Melancholy Dane. But some superstitious water dowsing wasn’t among them. We had weather witches in Kansas who could play a lot of tricks with rain, wind, and fire, so why bother dowsing for water? It was a pre-Millennium Revelation cheat and outmoded anyway.
The guy, another under-thirty, surely, returned his gullible little friends to a very grateful mama, plucked his jacket off the picnic table, slung it over one shoulder, then looked right at me.
The tables had turned so fast that I couldn’t pretend to be glancing away. And he was coming straight for me over the grass on those braided leather Italian shoes anyway.