Gumshoe Gorilla (23 page)

While Drew went to slap a tracker on the limo, I rummaged through the clothes I had in the trunk. I keep a wide variety of stuff back there, since you never know what you'll need on a stakeout. By the time Drew came back, I had on a black leather miniskirt, spiked heels, a ruffled pirate shirt and a top hat. Unfortunately, I didn't have a mask in the trunk. But necessity is the mother of invention. I found an eyebrow pencil, and used it to draw a black domino mask on my face.

Drew gave me a skeptical look.

"Don't laugh," I said. "Because you're next."

I looked him over. White T-shirt and jeans. Not a lot to work with.

"OK. First off, lose the shirt."

Drew rolled his eyes, but grudgingly complied. Luckily, he's got more of that vain gay gym-boy thing going than he'd care to admit.

"I don't have much in the trunk that will fit you," I said, reaching in to get the spiked collar and leash. "So this will have to do."

Drew took the collar but didn't put it on.

"May I ask why you...?" he started to ask something, then thought better of it. "Never mind. I really don't want to know."

He put the collar on, and then I went to work on his face, drawing a domino mask to match mine. I finished, and took a look at my handiwork.

"You know Drew, you make a pretty convincing love slave. Ever thought about..."

"About how I'm going to make you pay for this later? Yeah, I'm working on it."

We walked over to the club and waited in line. The woman ahead of us had on a tuxedo and Groucho Marx glasses, and behind us were two buff guys in velvet leggings and vests. One of them had on a moon mask and the other one had on the sun. When we finally got to the front of the line, the doorman gave Drew and I a funny look, like he wasn't sure that our costumes were quite up to snuff. To seal the deal, Drew started growling and barking at him.

I yanked hard on the leash, pulling him back.

"Bad dog!" I said, in my best campy Marlene Dietrich German accent. "You must forgive my little love puppy. Some days he doesn't want to play nice."

That put us over the top. The doorman waved us through, and inside a guy at the cash register charged us a whopping forty bucks a piece for cover. I tried to talk him down, explaining that Drew was a seeing-eye dog and shouldn't be charged admission, but the guy wouldn't buy it. Oh, well. It comes under the "plus expenses" clause of our agreement with Skye.

Finally, we were admitted, and pushed our way through the strips of hanging fabric into the Blue Room. Drew stopped dead in his tracks, trying to take it all in. Can't say I blame him. It makes quite an impression on you, the first time.

Blue eyed bartenders in blue uniforms poured drinks into cobalt blue glasses on a blue tiled bar. The light in the room came from a series of -- you guessed it-- blue stained glass windows with lights behind them, depicting blue birds and blue skies.

I looked around for our three Rockland clones and their mystery woman, but I didn't see them anywhere. Drew was still blinking and trying to get his bearings, so I gave his leash a little tug.

"Come on rover. I don't see our boys in here. Let's try the next room."

We pushed our way through the crowd and into the Purple Room. Here, the stained glass depicted grapes and satyrs, and some big hairy guy that I think was supposed to be Bacchus. A pair of tinted spotlights lit up a disco ball, which rained shards of purple light down on the dance floor. Even this early, it was packed. The speakers were blasting a song by that prefab boy band that does covers of Romantic poets. Xanadu, that was the name of this number.

Beware! Beware!

Her flashing eyes, her flashing hair!

The crowd and the crazy lighting made looking for our targets a tricky proposition. I pulled Drew out onto the floor, and we navigated our way around sweaty dancers for ten minutes without catching sight of them. Oh well. On with the tour.

The next room was, thankfully, a quiet zone. The decor was retro-techno, and the light came from a series of antique computer monitors flashing random streams of numbers in phosphorescent green. Even more than the other rooms, the light here gave everyone a weird, otherworldly look. There were some tables where groups were sitting with drinks, but not our four masketeers. We pressed on.

The Orange Room was small, and the light came from a series of spotlights shining down on boxes with go-go dancers on them. A woman with obviously fake breasts wearing a tiger mask. A burly body builder in a Bat Man cowl. An anorexic little waif hiding her face behind a veil. And one rather fetching young man in a gargoyle mask, who was demonstrating a truly impressive degree of flexibility and balance. While I watched, he boosted himself into a handstand, and then curled back down and held his legs out in a seated press.

I couldn't resist. I went over to his box and swiped my cash card through the reader, punching up a five dollar tip.

"Thanks," he said.

"No, thank
you
," I said. "So you a gymnast or something?"

The dancer laughed, and his legs shook, as he tried to maintain the press.

"Or something," he said, but before he could explain further, Drew tapped me on the shoulder and pointed out a familiar party of four vanishing around the corner into the next room.

"Lousy timing," I muttered under my breath. I got a last eyeful of gargoyle boy, and headed after our quarry.

The next room over was another quiet area, the White Room. Everything done in ivory tile and porcelain. Two of the Rockland boys, Wolf mask and Hawk, had grabbed a table with the mystery woman, and looked to be getting pretty cozy with her. The third, Horse, was grabbing drinks for them from the water bar.

Drew snagged a table across the room from them, and I went to get us a couple of Saratogas with a raspberry twist. We lingered over our glasses of pricey H2O, pretending to flirt with each other, and surreptitiously keeping an eye on the woman in the waterfall dress. If the Rockland boys were any indication, she must have been darn near the most fascinating conversationalist on the planet. They were all leaning in to hear what she said, and every time she finished a sentence all three of them broke out laughing.

They downed their expensive water over the course of a few minutes, and then continued on into the next section of the club, the Violet Room. This was the back dance floor, smaller than the one out front, lit by black lights. The music was edgier here, more primal, and it only took the boys a couple of minutes to lose their shirts. The woman moved between them, taking turns with each. Their bodies pressing against hers. Their hands on her hips. Her hands on their backs, their chests, their arms.

I felt my face getting hot, and my anger started to get the better of me. What the fuck was Charles doing? I'd seen him with Skye. They had something good together. And she was absolutely crazy about him. So why was he throwing it all away for some bleached blond in an expensive dress? Are men just terminally stupid, or what?

The foursome retired from the dance floor, and moved on to the last room, the Black Room. Also known as "the make out room". Black velvet drapes hung from the walls, a big grandfather clock stood in the corner, and black couches were pushed together into mosh pits. The only illumination came from some candles behind a set of red glass windows, and they threw a weak bloody light over everything.

Drew and I pretended to neck by the clock, while the foursome staked out one of the sofas. It began with a not-so-innocent massage --Horse mask rubbing her feet, Hawk mask working on her shoulders, Wolf carrying the conversation-- that quickly moved from a PG rating, to PG-13, and then to R. Nothing that would actually get you busted for public indecency, but a few things that were pushing the envelope.

I decided that when this case over, I was gonna throw in a special whammy on Charles for free. Something very educational.

It was a strange night. Cool and clear, and oddly alive. Beautiful, I guess, if you were into the whole fairy tale thing. Silver clouds made faces at me as they drifted by on the wind. The shadows of trees pointed at me as I walked passed, and whispered dark secrets to each other. A little whirlwind swept up some grass clippings, and for a second they danced in the shape of a young girl.

Sleep deprivation will do some freaky things to your perceptions.

It had started to catch up with me at the Masque. All the weird lighting, the funky costumes. It was easy for reality to slip through my fingers, just a little. Figures in stained glass windows that seemed to move. Little faeries that appeared in the flickers of light from the disco balls. A winged snake rising like steam from the body of a sweating dancer. And in the black room, darkness that seemed to flow like water along the black velvet drapes, wrapping itself around people, revealing animal faces, and the bodies of things half human and half beast.

Eventually, the Rocklands and their blond paramour got up and left the club. Jen and I had followed them back to their limo, which drove south for a while and then took up a holding pattern, circling the park over and over and over again. It didn't take a genius to figure out what the four of them were doing in there. --Ok, maybe someone who's really good at geometry, but not a genius.-- But there was a big difference between us knowing it and us having the proof to take back to our client. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out a way to get video footage from inside a moving limo. I mean, a hotel room is easy. You can slip a fiber optic snake under the door, bribe a maid to lend you her pass key, all kinds of things. But a moving target with tinted windows? I was stumped.

Jen was a little more determined. She'd sunk her teeth into this case, and would not let go. While we drove around in circles following the limo, she laid out out one of her patented crazy schemes. Now, in fairness, Jen actually has about a thirty percent success rate when it comes to doing the impossible. However, listening to this plan, I was pretty sure that it fell into the other seventy. Among other things, I don't think a conventional glass cutter will even work on that bullet proof stuff they use in limos. And Jen didn't actually have a skateboard in her trunk, so we couldn't have tried it even if we wanted to.

After an hour, the limo broke from its holding pattern and drove to the Omni, where it dropped off the blond woman in the waterfall dress. I snapped another picture as she walked up the steps. The disheveled state of her hair was at least circumstantial evidence. I hopped out to follow her, while Jen took the car and stuck with the brothers.