Before you could say “illegal entry,” I had another uninvited hand on my bare back, this one clammy. I turned around to see . . . nothing. I felt another brush.
“Cut that out!”
I still saw nothing.
“Ah, lady, give a guy a break. It’s pretty lonesome walking in my shoes,” said a street-weary voice.
I glanced down. The plush blood-red carpeting that paved the casino area we were walking through was registering the imprint of a pair of size twelves, but that was the only sign that a fresh CinSim who was about as sexy as a cantaloupe was following me.
“Nicky!”
He was bringing up the rear, and I was beginning to wish it was my rear.
“Claude gets a bit carried away,” Nicky said. “He’s been invisible for almost eighty years. He hasn’t had much chance to make a . . . hic . . . pass at anything more than a visiting breeze.”
My knowledge of vintage film was finally paying off. As I recalled, H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man, played by Claude Rains in the classic film, was a scientist who found that his secret formula for invisibility turned him into an insane killer.
Just who I’d want feeling up my spine. Science gone wrong was always turning people into monsters in the movies from the nineteen-thirties to the fifties. I sure as heck didn’t need one of them guarding my back.
“Shhh!” Nicky leaned against a wall. “This is the entrance to Christophe’s office. Only Claude can disable the security cameras.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I’m invisible, silly,” Claude said with a parting pinch to my butt.
“Watch that! Vintage velvet fingerprints, you know.”
“So I see.” Claude chortled like a lovesick seal, but I felt the air rush of him passing me to slip through the office door.
“Do we really need that creep?” I asked Nicky.
“He’s just misunderstood.”
“He pinched me!”
“Believe me, I would myself if I didn’t think Nora was out there somewhere, waiting for my personal attention in that area.”
“I’m sorry, Nicky. It must be terrible being separated like this.”
“At least Godfrey manages to come in now and again when his boss releases him for an errand.”
“Releases?’”
“We’re tied to our environments. We’d melt like the Wicked Witch of the West if we wandered off without permission and suitable . . . adjustments. Has to be that way. Couldn’t have valuable investments like us two-stepping down the Strip to the next hotel.”
“That’s outrageous!”
“It’s better than being trapped onscreen saying the same lines over and over the rest of our, er, lives. However, I do relish a return to my detecting days. What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know. A reason why an Inferno gambling chip that’s no more than three years old would show up in an eighty-year-old mob burial site.”
“How do you know it’s a mob burial site?”
“It’s on present-day public land that was raw desert decades ago. And inside was a dead couple. In evening dress. Coupling. Shot and stabbed to death.”
“Flagrante delicto, right?”
“Is that a dessert?”
“No, my dear, it’s a refined way of saying they were caught in the act and nailed for nailing. That does indeed have an old-time mob feel to it. Gangsters’ molls were major players in early Las Vegas.”
“I was thinking more Romeo and Juliet. They seemed young.”
“The bones?”
No, the vibes, but I couldn’t admit my occult visions, not even to a walking illusion.
“Aha!” Meanwhile, the Invisible Man was having a field day rooting through a sleek white Louis XV desk in front of an audio-visual equipment wall that made Nightwine’s look like a Tinker Toy.
“Is this what you wanted, lady fair?” Claude asked with demented courtesy.
On the desk’s glass surface a series of sketches spun to catch my eye. I rushed over. At first I took the drawings for coin designs, but then realized that they were sketches for the Inferno casino chips.
I’d never gotten a good look at the one Detective Haskell’s CSI team had unearthed and bagged. Now I was looking at the drawings of its prototype, of several prototypes. Curiouser and curiouser. The styles were a parade of decades, from the forties to the teens of our own century, and they all bore the unmistakable mark of that Art Deco master, Erté. Who’d lived into his nineties, but had been dead these, um, thirty–some years. Maybe.
I sat in one of the white leather and steel chairs before the desk, flipping through a cavalcade of designs. It was like ogling Cadillac dream cars from the forties to my Dolly in the mid-fifties to the post-2000 all-electric and hybrid models of the present day. It was like viewing the
private commissions of a dead artist.
“I really need to see the version of the chip Haskell’s got in his evidence baggie,” I murmured, knowing I had about as much chance of that as flying.
Someone answered my request, though, with a deep, throaty growl.
I looked over my shoulder.
Oh. A huge white tiger sat between the door and me. I felt the air-rush of the Invisible Man living up to his name as he whooshed right out of the room. The longer tufts of hair at the tiger’s cheeks . . . jowls . . . trembled in the vroom of Claude’s unseen departure. The Fuller-brush stiff whiskers twitched, but the jungle-green eyes remained focused only on mine.
Nicky edged away from the desk. “I need another martini.”
I eyed the tiger. “I don’t think it does room service.”
So there we were: me on the chair, Nicky against the wall, and the tiger between the door and us. I continued to study the sketches, there being nothing else to do. Maybe a dozen different designs, from the female nude holding up a bubble to the silhouette of a spike-spired castle to the open-jawed, fang-toothed maw that could have been a striking serpent, or snake, or tiger.
“What d’you wanta bet the fangs are the current chip design,” I said. Nicky didn’t venture an opinion.
I looked up. The tiger was still doing guard duty, but its gaze was focused behind me.
I looked across the desk’s sleek surface and, sure enough, the tufted white patent-leather executive throne was occupied. Must be a back entrance to this office.
“Imagine seeing you here,” Snow said.
“Yeah. I feel the same way. Déjà vu to you too.”
Still the same? Not quite. He was wearing a silky white satin jogging suit and his hair ended in damp rat-tails. He was fresh from the shower after the long, hot shower of adulation in the mosh pit.
“You are the elusive Christophe, I presume.”
“Not so elusive. You, however, appear to have slippery talents. Those sketches are unsigned, of course, but are still valuable.”
“Especially since the artist was dead for the later dates on these drawings.”
“Death,” Snow mused, “the artist’s last, best agent. Value skyrockets post-mortem. You were planning to steal and sell these?”
“No.” I tossed them back on the desktop. “Just to admire them. I don’t believe in ripping off the dead.”
He pushed the black sunglass lenses tight against the bridge of his nose. “Death. So hard to tell what it is nowadays. Take Nicky here, for instance.”
“Sorry, boss.” Nick stepped away from the wall, empty martini glass in hand. “I was looking for an open bar.”
“Better skedaddle back to the Inferno bar, my friend. You know they always serve your brand.”
Nicky glanced at me, the tiger, Snow. “Miss, I don’t fancy leaving you here.”
“I can take care of myself, and several others. Cheers, Nicky. Keep that new cocktail on the menu for me.”
The tiger growled. Snow frowned. Nicky left.
“Leave us,” Snow told the tiger.
It didn’t move, its gaze sharper than a mine-cut emerald while it watched me.
“Now,” Snow said.
I turned to him in surprise. The command had been harsh, but who could read those mirror-shade eyes? When I turned back, the tiger was gone.
“So,” he said. “What do you want?”
It was a global question, but I managed to concentrate on the immediate. “I want to know when the Inferno chose its chip design, and what that was.”
His pale hands fanned the white drawing paper like cards in a deck. His fingernails, I noticed, had no moons at top or bottom, but were the uniform dead white French manicure nail-tips.
“You were right. The fangs, of course. Why did you want to know? So badly. ”
“I investigate these things.”
“The icons I choose for my hotel?”
“You’re really Christophe?”
“Among other things.”
“And I don’t want to know that badly.”
“No, not itinerant young ladies who show up at dangerous places in backless gowns.”
He smiled as he dealt the sketches like a hand in a game of cards. It was hard to see him smile; the lips were so pale against that whitewashed skin and shark-strong teeth. His canines were slightly elongated, no more than I’d seen on some perfectly normal humans.
“The Inferno,” he said, “has always been a dream, or a nightmare, in men’s eyes. Trying to date it or its artifacts is like trying to pin down sand. Take these drawings, study them. They are all dust in the wind.”
I stood. “No thanks. I’ve seen what I needed to. They imply the Inferno isn’t the brand-new concept it pretends to be. That somebody has been waiting and planned to spring it on the Strip for a long time. And now here you are.”
I’d hoped my hint that I suspected he himself went “way back” like the chip designs would get a response, but I was disappointed. Snow remained enigmatic, saying nothing.
No tiger still stood behind me, though, when I turned to leave. I paused.
“What?” he asked.
“I don’t want to give you my back.”
“It’s a little late, don’t you think?”
“Never too late.”
I started to turn, then whipped around to look back. He was gone, the chair empty, the precious drawings still lying there to be studied. Never trust a deal that came so easily. The Devil was good at those.
I walked out, heaving a huge mental sigh of relief, wondering what Ric Montoya and Hector Nightwine and my own investigative reporter’s instincts had gotten this Kansas orphan into. Nothing I couldn’t handle. I hoped.