Dancing With Werewolves (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three

After Snow left, it was as if an invisible bubble around us had burst. The crowd tightened around me, buzzing as lights bathed the stage. All the nearby women eyed me, their expressions drenched in envy.

Looks can’t kill . . . yet. So I held back and stood apart as the women surged forward to watch the Seven Deadly Sins strut onstage to screams, whistles, and applause.

The woman in shreds of glittering crimson costume that bared almost everything could only be Lust. Another woman in equally skimpy lurid poison-green was obviously Envy. The rest were guys in stock rock uniforms: tight black leather pants and tarted up jackets, vests, and shirts. Gluttony must be Mr. Patchwork Velvet Vest in vegetable shades of greens, orange, and yellow. Sloth sported drapey silver-gray jersey slathered with white rhinestones. Anger’s black leather biker jacket was inset with blood-red lightning bolts. Greed’s outfit was the color of money, a forest-like mélange of green, amber, and rust with an overall glitter of gold and silver.

The Sins began playing. Gluttony’s insistent initial percussive beat gave way to Anger’s rumbling bass guitar. Sloth’s rhythm guitar amplified the low vibration until a raw, repeating riff from Greed on lead guitar seized the stage. Then Lust and Envy joined in with a harmonic chorus of mock-orgasmic “oo-oos.”

The audience’s screams greeted a gorgeous life-size dragon (assuming dragons were the size of a killer whale) as it descended from the high above-stage flies, snorting clouds of smoke and fire from its two heads. I recalled from my Our Lady of the Lake religion classes that Revelations portrayed the Devil as a dragon.

The pale glittering figure on this dragon’s back slid down one formidable scowling, bestial head to bound to the stage. The crowd went wilder.

Snow was Pride, of course, the only missing Deadly Sin.

His costume, bejeweled white from shoulder to white patent-leather boot-top, evoked Elvis. The whipping mane of white hair recalled blues-man Edgar Winter, but the total effect was pure blazing fallen archangel, Lucifer in the Sky with Diamonds.

Whew. I found it all so obvious . . . yet completely fabulous erotic-rock theater. The memory of Snow’s far more understated dalliance with me only intrigued me more. Why hadn’t the rabid fans swarmed us? Was he somehow invisible to them? I bent to reclaim my fallen hairpins before they were trampled flat. A woman nearby bent to help. We rose together.

“Can I keep one?” the woman pled.

I summed up her pleasantly plump face and the embroidered velvet shawl that camouflaged middle-aged spread. She’d obviously stayed behind to assist me.

“Why?”

She leaned up to whisper hotly in my ear. “He touched it.” Her warm, worshiping gaze flicked to the curls I was twisting back into a chignon and pinning into place. He’d touched them too.

“Listen,” I told her. “My name’s Delilah. I cut people’s hair, not the other way around. So forget it. No locks for the lovelorn here.”

“I’d pay . . . five hundred.”

“He’s just a stage performer. It’s all glitter and illusion. Who is he anyway?”

“Cocaine’s been the Seven Deadly Sins’ lead singer for ten years, but he’s so much
more.
He owns this hotel-casino and hot properties like it all over the world. They’re the only places SDS performs anymore.”

She had leaned so close that her breath and words blended in my ear.

“The online chat groups say his mouth is hotter than brimstone and they call him Ice Prick, though no one knows from personal experience. The tabloids claim he’s an albino vamp. He denies it violently, but I saw him looking at your throat. Let him have it, honey. It’d be heaven.”

This was way more than I wanted to know. If I’d read this description in a personals ad, I’d react with a shudder rather than a frisson, given my personal history. What creeped me out most was the frigid prick part, not the vamp suspicions. Accused witches in medieval times had claimed the Devil had an icy penis. Now I knew the reason for the nickname, Snow. It was all sex, drugs, and rock and roll. With the supernatural follies mixed in until
un
done.

A vampire bite isn’t fatal, everybody knew that now, unless the parties wanted it to be. Some vamp tramps ached to become vamps themselves, despite the inconveniences, and that took an exchange of all bodily fluids. Some longed to be drained to death. Maybe it personalized the slitting-one’s-wrists in the bathtub form of suicide.

For me, I’d not yet found a way into workable ordinary human sex. Now that I’d connected with Ric, I didn’t need to take the obscenic route. But I’d sure enjoyed our little tango duel. Hell, I was only human, even if Snow wasn’t. I knew enough to know what I really wanted and needed: a little love and support. Hard to come by, but I’d glimpsed it now, in two forms, man and dog. I was one lucky girl since arriving in Las Vegas. All I had to do was stay alive to enjoy it.

I peeled the groupie’s avid hand off my wrist before the woman tried to skin my back for a trophy–Hector had been right that ghoulie groupies would tear apart the objects of their obsessions—and gave the mock-blind man in the bright lights a last glance. The music was raw, rhythmic, but I didn’t need to listen.

Nick Charles waited for me beside the Inferno Bar, his comforting, smartly sloshed, dapper self, a spare martini in hand just for me.

“Thanks, Nicky. I needed this.”

“Everyone does but they don’t know it yet.” He reeled only slightly as he picked up his own almost empty glass. His martini glasses were always almost empty.

I leaned against the bar to sip gin and vermouth like the lady Myrna Loy’s Nora Charles always was, wishing I had my own Asta on a leash at my feet. Poor little Achilles. Sudden tears stung my eyes like undiluted gin. The unconditional love of a dog is impossible to replace, even with another dog as awesome as Quicksilver.

“I’m glad—” Nicky leaned groupie close on a soft scent of vermouth. After all, we
were
married for the evening, “—we met up. Word around the watering hole here is that the Inferno is the hub of all the straight and kinked crime in Las Vegas. That chap onstage in the shiny pajamas is rumored to be the headman of the mob that runs this place. Hard to believe his act. What is his problem?”

I took his arm with a smile. Sexy
no
w translated way different from when he’d been the sex kitten’s pajamas back in the day.

“Another one for the road?” Even as Nicky spoke he nodded at the bartender. “The traffic on the Strip could kill a sober pedestrian.”

I laughed and hitched my skirt and myself onto a bar stool to eye the bartender. “I’ll have an Albino Vampire.”

His congenial face went as white as mine was naturally. All along the bar, chitchat stopped. Glasses ceased clinking. Other bartenders froze in the act of pouring scotch, gin, vodka, wine, beer. Obviously, Christophe’s staff knew the boss hated that rumor.

“What’s . . . in it?” My bartender sounded like he was being invisibly throttled.

Behind me Cocaine—Snow must be a,
hmm
, pet name–was pouring out a great rock ballad about Lady Velvet. I could feel his sunglasses zeroing in on my bare, defenseless, and still so well pampered back, and proceeded to ad lib a recipe. “A jigger of white Crème de Cocoa, a jigger of vanilla Stoly, a jigger of Lady Godiva white chocolate liqueur topped with a swirl of Chambord raspberry liquor the color of blood, in a martini glass.”

Nick Charles regarded me with awed approval and a gentle palm clapping. The bartender shortly after presented me with a dazzling white dessert of a drink tricked out with a hint of hot pink. The boys and girls at the bar gasped as one.

Nick and I chimed rims, then I swiveled to face the stage.

Cocaine/Snow still had the spotlight but the sunglasses might be looking anywhere.

I lofted my glass in a farewell toast.

Snow lashed his spun-glass angel hair around like a white Persian cat-o’-nine-tails and ended the song with long, wailing banshee of a guitar chord.

I’d have liked to think the final flourish was just for me, but then so did every woman present, and most of them were storming the mosh pit, clawing each other for the honor of being one of the women Snow bent down to kiss.

Ridiculous. I turned to Nicky. “Time to rock ’n’ roll.”

“Could you say that in English, please?”

“Time to do a do-si-do around the executive offices here. Are you and your friend in Security game?”

Chapter Twenty-Four

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.