Neon Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  The third figure was the Inferno’s head honcho, a rock superstar I’d both tangled and tangoed with. Cocaine was an updated, albino Elvis in tight white leather pants, long white hair, and mirror shades. No one quite knew what he was—vampire, fallen angel, con man CEO—besides sexy.

  I was an ex-TV reporter, so I sashayed right over.

  “Miss Delilah Street,” Cocaine said in his belly-tightening bass voice. His stage costume included a flowing white poet’s shirt open to his navel. Despite having just finished a two-hour show, his albino skin was dry as a bone. No one had ever seen him sweat. No one had ever seen his eyes, either. I didn’t care to. Ever.

  “Who owns the body?” I asked.

  “Just what we were discussing,” the dead-croc hugger said. “I’m Peter Eddy, the intellectual property rights attorney for IFX-MS, Industrial Special Effects and Magic Show. Mr. Cocaine here is refusing to let our technician download what’s left of the persona into his computer. And the police captain has been none too friendly either.”

  “Police captains aren’t promoted to be friendly. Any suspects?”

  “None.” Eddy shuddered at the very idea. “An unfortunate accident. The CinSim must have fallen on a bar implement. Perhaps it was drinking. The technicians can’t control their every move. Yet.”

  I eyed the tech guy. “Aren’t they chained to their venues? This guy should have never left the Club Noir level to come up here.”

  “Absolutely right.” His hands with their bitten-to-the-quick nails smoothed the small, unmarked silver case slung over his shoulder.

  “Your name is?” I always like a full cast of suspects.

  “Reggie Owens. Our program prevents unauthorized wanderings. Someone must have hacked into the programming to move him here. I could upload Bogart and Spade right now, and let the police and Mr. Eddy dispose of the Z-canvas, but Mr. Christophe won’t okay it.”

  “Christophe” was Cocaine’s supposed real name, first and last, but the fans in the mosh pit screamed themselves hoarse begging for their drug of choice by the nickname they gave him. His friends called him Snow, and so did I, even though I wasn’t exactly a friend. Call me a thorn in the side.

  I lifted an interrogatory eyebrow in his direction.

  “Nobody,” he said, “is disabling an Inferno Hotel CinSim on my premises. I want to know who offed it, and how and why. And I want Miss Street to do the job.”

  Goodie. Put me on the hot seat between three quarreling superpowers in Las Vegas. I decided to let them fight over the retread corpse and excused myself to hunt up any possible witnesses.

  Nick Charles was lighting a cigarette for a willowy woman in sleek Nora Charles evening velvet. He had quite a following at the Inferno Bar. Like Snow, the CinSims had their devoted fans. Called CinSymbs, for CinSim Symbiants—yes, if you’re good at tongue-twisters, this is your subculture—they dressed in vintage clothes, but in black and white, including their clown-white made-up skin and vamp-black dyed hair.

  “Thanks, Nicky,” the sexy probable platinum blond said, patting her pale gray hair in a weird, grandmotherly way.

  He turned to me with relief.

  “Now that we’re alone, what did you see?” I asked him.

  “The bar was mobbed from the Seven Deadly Sins performance, with a monster mash of Cocaine groupies, the usual CinSymbs doing both the rock concert and the bar scene, tourists milling around with their plugged-in communication cameras. Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. A little gin was all it took to get high in my day, and the sex came without that blaring musical accompaniment. Maybe just a little Noel Coward.”

  “And a lot of gin in your case, Nicky.”

  “Guilty. But not of this CinSim’s current condition.”

  “You don’t say ‘dead’?”

  “It’s debatable, isn’t it? The…personage was discovered when the crowd began to thin after the Sins concert. Just there.” He pointed.

  “Had you ever seen him before?”

  “No, but I knew of him. He was the coming thing, with that tough guy stuff. No white tie and tails and smooth patter for him. And it was ironic that Sam Spade was portrayed by an actual swell like Bogart, who’d been expelled from a fancy Eastern prep school. Film can be fickle.”

  I lowered my voice. “Are you aware of other CinSims leaving their, um, moorings.”

  “Well, our Invisible friend gets around.”

  I checked the neighboring empty barstools for a betraying depression in the middle, but they were all undimpled red leather.

  “Not tonight,” Nick said, sipping from his martini glass. “Not that I know of. I was distracted, of course,” His pleasantly hazy eyes sharpened. “It’s as if the body was planted here. When the crowd parted like the Red Sea, voila! Somebody wanted it to be found, and publicly.”

  I accepted what Nicky offered: the Albino Vampire cocktail I’d invented from white chocolate liqueur and vanilla vodka to piss off Snow. He’d merely appropriated it for the bar and made a mint.

  While I sipped and thought, I felt a sharp bite on my rear. No, the barstools didn’t have teeth and claws. The Invisible Man was announcing his presence. Being Invisible, he hadn’t had a date since the nineteen-forties and pinching unsuspecting women was his kick. Since he’d once saved my life, I put up with his idea of a pick-up line.

  “I knew,” he whispered in my ear, “Sam was going to make a run for it. Humphrey was hankering to visit another venue.”

  “You saw him get to the bar area?” I mumbled to my glass rim. The dame next to me with the cigarette gave me an “Are you nuts?” glance.

  “Hell, I helped him get off Circle One,” the Invisible Man mumbled. “He mixed with the CinSymbs up here, blended right in. I lost him until Nick and everyone saw him frozen on the floor when the crowd cleared. Talk about a ‘still’ life.”

  “Why the corkscrew?”

  “I don’t have the faintest, Miss Street. Umm, you smell good.”

  “It’s not me, it’s my Albino Vampire.”

  “How naughty of Christophe to rip you off like that. You want me to put quinine in his onstage bottled water?”

  I shook my head, getting another Look from the woman on my right.

  “Can I have a sip?” the Invisible Man cajoled.

  “I guess.” I watched the smooth white liquid in my martini glass descend an inch. “Sip?”

  “Umhmm, good. They never feed or water me. The corkscrew? I don’t know. Someone hurled a switchblade at me once. It stuck, but it didn’t hurt, and it didn’t do any damage. It was like it hit corkboard. These borrowed bodies are sturdy.”

  “How’d they manage to make you invisible?”

  “It comes with the character, not the canvas.” I felt a white chocolate buss on the cheek. “’Bye, baby.” Sweet.

  I glanced at the triumvirate with ownership interests in the Bogart/Spade CinSim. The lawyer and the techie were sweating bullets, but Snow seemed cool as an ice cube. I ambled over to eavesdrop.

  “While you let this Street woman pretend to investigate, I don’t trust the police to guard our property,” lawyer Eddy told Snow. “Some of these rubber-necking tourists might violate our copyright and tear away pieces of its clothing.”

  True, the crime scene was surrounded by tourists five-feet deep, not to mention the Inferno’s hovering airborne flock of mirror-ball security cameras the size of grapefruits.

  Cocaine/Christophe sighed and reached up to the pink ruby-dotted black leather collar circling his dead-white neck. He pressed a faceted black gemstone separating the rubies.

  “I’ll have my head of security watch the…er, canvas…while I escort Miss Street to the CinSim’s home environment.”

  The tourists parted with oohs of anxious wonder. A six-hundred-pound white tiger with green eyes stalked past the people and the police CSI crew to stand by the body. They all moved back. Way back.

  “Nicky,” Snow said. “Get the gentlemen some drinks while I escort Miss Street below.”

&nb
sp; “Charmed,” Nick Charles turned to the two IFX-MS guys. “I recommend gin. And gin. And gin. Which would you like, sir? A gin rickey? Martini? Gimlet?”

  “You checked your security satellites?” I asked Snow as we moved away. He was an Invisible Man himself once offstage. I don’t know how he managed it, but he avoided being mobbed. Some things you don’t want to know in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas. I had my secrets too.

  “Checked them immediately. The crowd around the bar was too thick to isolate anyone. Whatever stopped Sam Spade cold, it happened during my…er, curtain call.”

  Except there was no curtain, just the band drawn back onstage by clapping, hooting, digital screams. I could picture every eye fixed onstage as he bent down to uplift a dozen lucky, screaming female fans for what they called the Brimstone Kiss. It wasn’t just a hasty smooch, either. Perfect timing for an unprecedented murder.

  “You know you won’t win custody in court,” I told Snow as we headed toward the roaring dragon’s mouth that housed the elevators to the Inferno Hotel’s lower depths. “You’re just a leasee. And no one will claim the anonymous, illegally resurrected body.”

  “Sure this isn’t your FBI friend Ric’s work?”

  “Ex-FBI. And Ric dowses for the dead, he doesn’t create them. He doesn’t trifle with the resurrected Dead like you Vegas moguls do.”

  The brushed stainless steel doors opened between flaming jaws seven feet wide and high. I admit to a tremor. I’d never been below the Inferno’s main floor, which was bad enough.

  In the elevator, Snow tilted his head back against the stainless-steel-mirror walls.

  “This is important, Delilah. My people are my people, CinSims or not. No one messes with me and mine. Not even you. Find whoever, or whatever, did this. I’ll handle the cops and the corporations.”

  “Haven’t you got ‘people’ to do that? Attorneys, muscle?”

  “I run a hands-on operation.”

  I was sure the eyes behind those glossy black lenses were giving me a lazy and provocative half-stare.

  Or maybe they were eyeing the Elsa Peretti sapphire-studded sterling silver bangle on my left wrist. I can’t afford that high-end sort of bracelet, but silver is a sort of familiar of mine. This particular piece of it had a literal lock on me, having started out as a lock of Snow’s angel-white hair. It changed from weapon to bond to bling and migrated all over my body. I’d touched the damn strand Snow sent me because it reminded me of my white Lhasa apso dog, Achilles, lost to a vampire bite. He bit the vampire, mind you, but died of blood poisoning. Or maybe not. He kept turning up alive in my dreams. Anyway, my weakness for Achilles had led to having Snow’s creepy lock of hair as a permanent fashion accessory-cum-martial arts attachment.

  “Besides,” he was saying, “I didn’t want to miss the opportunity of working with you.”

  “Why? You know I despise you and all your works.”

  “That’s why. You’re totally objective.”

  “Just show me where the dead CinSim was supposed to be.”

  “This level is all key clubs,” he said, waiting for me to exit the flaming dragon’s mouth on Circle One. I knew what that meant. The first of the nine circles of Hell from Dante’s Inferno.

  “Fantasy enviros,” Snow went on, proud of his hellfire clubs. “Club Noir offers all the famous names and faces from the era. Here’s The Maltese Falcon boutique hotel and bistro. Please don’t be hard on Peter Lorre; he gets kicked around enough in the film.”

  By then we’d entered a pair of etched glass double doors bearing the film’s name. Beyond them lay a moving wax museum of movie moments: walls playing the famous scenes in 3-D, the reel characters moving around, mumbling lines, intermixing with real-life visitors to Vegas who’d paid for the privilege.

  Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo caught my eye, and scuttled away. He didn’t know much in the film and he wouldn’t know much now. Snow was right. He was too pathetic to bother with, and so Sam Spade had also determined.

  “I’m bad,” Mary Astor as Bridgid O’Shaughnessy was breathing at a fat man in a Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts. “I’m so bad.”

  I’d seen at a glance that Bogie was missing from the scenery, so I stepped into Mary’s barside seduction scene.

  “Get lost, tourist,” I said. The guy bristled, but obeyed. “So did you do in Sam?” I asked Bridgid.

  “Who are you to ask questions like that? You’re not in the script.”

  “Neither was an offed Sam Spade. When did you last see him?”

  “Sam? Dead? It can’t be?”

  “It is. ’Fess up, sister. You know you had the hots for him and he was ready to send you up river on a murder rap. Why wouldn’t you drive a corkscrew into his chest if you had a chance?”

  “No! I loved him. I’d never kill him.”

  “Seems like you set him up a few times, for just that result.”

  “That was the script! I had to do it. I hated the ending. Sam would never have sold me out. He didn’t give a toot about his partner, Miles Archer. He’d been screwing Archer’s wife, Iva, but then he met and loved me. He really loved me. The scriptwriters messed us up. Why don’t you ask Iva where she was when Sam got corkscrewed?”

  Good point. I racked my brain for the cast list from the film. Snow stepped into the scene, a hand-held computer showing just what I’d wanted.

  “Thanks, Jeeves.” I was getting into the fact that maybe he really needed me to solve this. If that entitled me to hand him some lip without personal peril, it was pretty sweet.

  Okay. Iva Archer. Miles Archer had been Sam Spade’s partner until he was killed. Iva had been the femme fatale in the threesome until Bridgid O’Shaughnessy had shown up. Was Sam Spade’s “death” today part of the backstory mayhem of The Maltese Falcon novel and film?

  I found Iva having a hasty talk with Peter Lorre/Joel Cairo. She was a refined beauty for a cheap PI’s wife.

  “Sam Spade has left the building,” I told her. The Elvis reference meant nothing, but her face turned a whiter shade of pale gray.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told me. “I live here. I’m a widow, don’t you know that? Who’d walk out on a widow? Sam wouldn’t leave me. Don’t you say that he would!”

  Women in film noir sure were hair-trigger. “Okay, okay. I just wanted to talk to him. I have a case.”

  She eyed me. “Yeah, you dames have ‘cases,’ all right.” She looked around. Looked harder. No Sam Spade to be found. “Get outa here! You’re crazy.”

  I backed off, but I didn’t stop considering which one of these fictional characters made flesh would want to kill the leading man, even if he was a hard-boiled son-of-a-gun who’d send his new sweetheart to the pen. And how had someone lured him out of his safe, scripted environment for a date with death in the Inferno Bar?

  I left The Maltese Falcon enviro, Snow at my side.

  “This is complicated,” I said.

  “This is Las Vegas.”

  I glanced around at the double-doored entries to many cinema worlds. We were in a freaking CinSim multiplex!

  “Is this an all-Bogart level?” I asked.

  “No. All noir. Only two of the clubs center on Bogart.”

  “Casablanca?”

  “My favorite. You want to see?’

  Snow, hooked on true love and self-sacrifice? Sell me another bridge in Brooklyn.

  “You must like the hot, dry Moroccan climate,” I hazarded.

  “Hot is my sexual preference.”

  “It was Satan’s too.” We went through another frosted glass pair of doors into Rick’s Café Américan Bar.

  Bogie was here, in a slightly wilted white evening jacket, leaning over an upright piano on which a black guy played “As Time Goes By.” Customers in Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts looked a lot more at home here. Ingrid Bergman sat alone at a table, looking pensive while being chatted up by two surfer dudes. And Peter Lorre lurked around the fringes, having again played the same con
niving, cringing lowlife he was so good at in The Maltese Falcon.

  I ankled over, and his beady eyes lit up. He wasn’t used to women seeking him out.

  “Hi, cutie, can I buy you a gin rickey?” I didn’t even know what a gin rickey was, except it evoked the name of the bar’s fictional owner…and of my own personal cutie, Ric Montoya, come to think of it.

  He would have looked good here at Rick’s place. Much better-looking than Bogart.

  “You can buy me some information,” I said, melding into forties noir-speak. “Have there been any attempts on Rick’s life lately?”

  “This is Casablanca. If the local occupying Nazis aren’t after you the international rat pack is. Rick can take care of himself.” Lorre eyed Bergman. “That dame is no good for him. That’s the kind of classy dame even a hard-headed guy could lose his sense of self-preservation over.”

  “He did,” I said. “Do you ever trespass on your ‘cousin’s’ scenario in the next club over?”

  “Never! We are forbidden to meet. It’s not in our contracts.”

  “Aren’t you even tempted?”

  “No. He’s a weasely little rat who will never get the girl. Here, I get to talk to you, cutie.”

  “Not any more.”

  I looked around for Snow. He was hanging over the top of the small, white upright piano, singing along to Sam’s soulful rendition of “As Time Goes By.” I suppose even a rock star harbors visions of crooning classics.

  On the “a kiss is just a kiss,” he turned those blind-man glasses my way.

  A kiss is just a kiss, my eye! His Brimstone Kiss after the show addicted the clamoring mosh-pit females to a repeat performance that would never happen. These pathetic Cocaine junkies attended every performance, living their lives only to support their doomed habit. I was secretly working to rehabilitate them, for my own reasons.

  “We done here?” I asked as I walked over.

  He finished crooning the phrase. Then, since the fundamentals still apply, he escorted me to the Circle One lobby.

  “Got any ideas?” he asked.