Neon Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Just a couple more questions.”

  He waited.

  “The CinSims are strictly tied to their performance areas, right?”

  “Theoretically. It depends how diligent the hotelier is about keeping a leash on them.”

  “And you?”

  “I’d find it more interesting it they would depart from the script. Call me contrary, but tourists like the unexpected.”

  “So you don’t have them tied down as tightly as some.”

  “No.”

  “And Sam Spade might have gotten up to the Inferno Bar on his own.”

  “If he’d had the will. That’s the intriguing part. Does a CinSim have free will?”

  “Humans do.”

  “They seem to think so.”

  “And an unhuman like you?”

  “Are you certain I’m unhuman, or what kind of unhuman I might be?”

  The rumor said master vampire. I wasn’t so sure. “No. That’s your devilish charm.”

  I doubt many people made Snow laugh, but I did then.

  “That’s my devilish charm,” I said.

  But he didn’t answer, only reached down and snapped his forefinger on my bracelet, my bond, his former lovelock, making it chime.

  “What else did you want to know?” he asked.

  “Which other hotels host Bogart SinCims, and what incarnation they use.”

  “Easy. My office computer has stats on all the competition.”

  ON THE WAY BACK UP in the elevator, the pink ruby collar buzzed. His forefinger stabbed the black onyx stone.

  “The police and interested CinSim parties are getting restless, boss,” came a deep, growly voice.

  “Keep them busy. I’ll want them in my office in a bit. We may have something for them soon.”

  I was indignant. “‘We’, white man?” Well, he was literally white from crown to toe, as far as I know, or ever wish to know.

  “You’ve got an idea on this CinSim murder, haven’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes. Maybe you can just read my mind and take it.”

  “Maybe I like you working for a living.”

  Me, too. I’d been an unemployed TV reporter until this paranormal investigator gig evolved. Actually, I enjoyed working for someone other than Hector Nightwine, my landlord and somewhat ghoulish mentor.

  Snow’s office sported a lot of glossy black furniture and a huge tufted white leather executive chair.

  Even the laptop computer case was glossy black.

  I saw myself, darkly, in its reflective surface while his pale hands with the china-white fingernails punched keys and scrolled and hunted.

  “All right,” he said at last. “The Gehenna has the only other Bogart film leased.”

  “To Have and to Have Not, right?”

  “Is that a proposal or a question?”

  I made a face. I always knew that Snow had designs on me. I just didn’t know what for. Or why.

  “Not one of Hemingway’s best novels,” he said. “Or Bogart’s best roles.”

  “Can I see the screen?”

  He spun the laptop to face me.

  I started punching my own buttons, looking up the original cast and the reviewer notes.

  Aha!

  That film had debuted Bogart’s future wife, long, lean teenage model Lauren Bacall, and had made them into “Bogie and Bacall” for eternity. Her character in the movie was even nicknamed “Slim.” That was the film where she’d taunted the Bogart character that he knew how to whistle for her, didn’t he? “You just put your lips together and…blow.”

  It’s amazing what passed for racy seventy-some years ago.

  “I figured out,” I said, “who killed the Sam Spade CinSim. And why.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s all your fault, you know.”

  “My fault?”

  “You like your CinSims on a loose leash.”

  “Free will is a noble concept, especially for indentured servants.”

  “Sorta free will. Get Captain Malloy and the interested parties in here.”

  “Oh, excellent. You’re going to do the pin-the-rap-on-the-perp shtick. Classic mystery finish.”

  I said no more, waiting.

  Within ten minutes, the interested parties were herded into the room by the huge white tiger, who shifted into a skinny, six-foot-something black woman with long white hair like Snow, green eyes, and red-painted nails long and sharp enough to eviscerate an adult male. She was wearing purple leather Escada and did it look good on her.

  “We’ll take the Inferno to court,” croco-man Peter Eddy was sputtering as he took a seat, “if you deny our substantial financial interest in the now-useless CinSim.”

  “We’ll take you to jail,” Captain Malloy told Snow as she took her seat, “if you’re ducking any wrong-doing on your part here.”

  Reggie, the IFX-MS technician, slouched into another leather tub-chair and shrugged his disdain for the whole inquiry. “It doesn’t matter what all you honchos decide. I just need to strip our programming pronto. Then you all can fight over the remains.”

  “Sure you really need to deprogram the fallen CinSim?” I asked. “Let me see your portable programmer.”

  “No! It’s IFX-MS property.” He clutched the slim case to his side, but Grizelle, Snow’s security chief, leaned over to slash through the leather shoulder sling with one red, tigerish claw. She slung the item down on the desk in front of me.

  I tapped around and found I couldn’t get anywhere without an entry code.

  Everyone was watching me. Malloy was irritated. The lawyer was fixated. The tech guy was looking constipated, and who knew what Snow was thinking behind those impervious shades.

  Okay. Time for a little silver medium work. These SinCims were my people, peeled from silver nitrate and given latter-day life. I let my fingers wander, like a musician. I was looking for the one right note in Sam Spade’s key…a code name Sam/Humphrey would know and love.

  Effie. The name of Spade’s loyal secretary. Every private dick in those days had one. Nothing. Iva. Nothing. Bridgid. Rhymes with “frigid.” Hammett named the “Fat Man” Gutman, so he was trying to tell us something. Nothing. None of the story dames registered. It had to be a woman. I tried the actress names: Mary Astor. Lee Patrick. Gladys George. Nothing.

  Leather chairs creaked as representatives of three powerful forces in Las Vegas grew impatient.

  Nothing from the fourth and key figure, Snow.

  I entered an all-American name. Betty. Betty Bacall, before the “Lauren” became her screen moniker.

  Suddenly I was in the Sam Spade file. What was left of it. Hopefully, all. Yes!

  “You’ve already uploaded the Spade and Bogart personas.” I looked up to accuse Reggie, the tech guy. “You erased the canvas. You stuck the dead man’s chest with a redundant corkscrew to hide the fact that the canvas was already empty. Why?”

  “Me? I’m only the tech zombie. I just do my job.”

  “The whole CinSim was right in your porta-puter all the time. You were going to pretend to upload the personas from the ‘mysteriously’ dead CinSim body. Why the subterfuge?”

  Reggie squirmed in his chair, but Grizelle’s red-taloned hands held him still. She leaned her face close to his and gave one of those Big Cat snarls.

  “S-s-secret orders. Get this thing away from me!” Grizelle backed off her face, but not her claws. “There’s nothing illegal here. No ‘murder.’ This CinSim was rogue. The chip told us he was trying to leave his venue. That’s why I had to waste him in the Inferno Lounge. One CinSim wanders off its contracted premises, it’s history, like it was before.”

  “Why not just withdraw the lease?”

  “Too many questions. Money loss. Besides, Mr. Christophe is not a team player.” He glared at our host.

  I tapped some commands into the console. Up came a screenful of gobbledygook.

  “Why?” Captain Malloy wanted to know. “Why get a crime scene team out here for n
onsense. You can’t kill a CinSim.”

  “Only by computer” I said. “I’m guessing the IFX-MS brass didn’t want to antagonize Christophe. He’s a good customer, if willful. They cancelled the contract without having to pay a kill fee. Created a mystery. A philosophical conundrum. The CinSim is indeed their property, but it was wandering and the contract hadn’t run out. An executive decision. This tech man is only the hired hand who did the take-down.”

  Captain Kennedy arched a pale eyebrow. “Not everybody can take down Sam Spade.” She eyed Christophe. “You want to charge fraud?”

  “I want my CinSim back. I’ll say if it’s out of bounds, not IFX-MS.”

  I spun the tech’s computer across Snow’s desk to face him. “Be my guest.”

  Captain Malloy stood. “There’s no crime here. Don’t call the police the next time you corporate zombie-lovers have a spat. There are some things we expect you dealers in immortality to work out for yourselves. We work the real dead beat.”

  She left.

  The lawyer bowed out too. “It’s obvious that a CinSim can’t die. My job is done. You tech geeks and ghouls and girls settle it between you.”

  It was just the four of us. And the megabytes of Sam Spade and Humphrey Bogart.

  “Your company doesn’t like my operation,” Snow said softly Reggie Owens and Peter Eddy, “you come to me. You don’t sneak onto my premises to off my CinSims. Got it?”

  The guy was just a low-level techie. Following orders. He swallowed, glanced at Grizelle, then fled in Eddy’s wake, leaving his porta-puter.

  “Bogie’s all here?” Snow asked me, patting it, “both role and actor?”

  “I think so.”

  He nodded at Grizelle. She left with the computer and file, walking with one Jimmy Choo spike swaggering in front of the other, like a Big Cat stalking. Sam Spade would soon be restored to his rightful starring place in the Inferno firmament.

  Snow leaned back in his infinitely programmable executive chair, running his dead white fingers through his dead white hair.

  “So, Delilah. It was just unsanctioned industrial espionage. The Immortality Mob needed a comeuppance. Thanks for the quick solve. Your fee will be waiting at your cottage on Nightwine’s estate.”

  “That may not be enough in this case.”

  “No? We had a deal.”

  “You realize why Bogie-Sam was wandering.”

  “He could?”

  “You’re a generous slave-holder, but no.”

  “I give them leeway. Why leave my hotel?”

  “Because you don’t lease Betty Bacall.”

  “What? You’re saying he needed a girlfriend?”

  “I’m saying Bogie needed his wife.”

  Snow was silent, taking in all the implications. Then he sat up, wired. “The CinSims want a life? Real life?”

  “They’re a blend of actor and role...” I shrugged.

  “They’re a blend of actor and role,” he repeated, “and corporeal canvas.”

  “Exactly, but the role is written. The actor has a soul. Humphrey Bogart wanted to replay the part that united him with the woman he loved in the real world.”

  “Lauren Bacall, not her character in the film, ‘Slim’ Browning?”

  I nodded. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  “I understand that this is a most…interesting development. More interesting than IFX-MS’s tawdry attempt to confuse the issues with a phony homicide.”

  “I agree.”

  “I’ll have to pay a bundle for the Casablanca cast. Ingrid Bergman was a much bigger star than Mary Astor. The Gehenna will want more for To Have and to Have Not and Lauren Bacall. On the other hand, I always thought she was a classy dame.”

  “Noir does not become you, Snow. And while you’re arranging for new CinSims, I have a suggestion.”

  “Suggestion?”

  “Demand.”

  “And you want—?”

  “Given the smidgeon of soul you’ve now discovered in the CinSims, I think, at the least, that Nick Charles deserves a Nora Charles at the Inferno bar.”

  “What a romantic you are, Delilah Street. And pretty pricey yourself.” Snow made a note on the laptop. “I’ll look into a Myrna Loy/Nora Charles lease in the morning. I suppose you want the damn dog too?”

  My hand unconsciously went to the damned silver bracelet, once a lock of Snow’s hair as white and supple as my lost Lhasa apso’s floor-length coat. I nodded.

  “And Asta, the wire-haired terrier,” Snow said as he typed, long, white fingers playing the keyboard like a piano. “One dead dog, coming up.”

  Didn’t I wish.

  AUTH0R’S NOTE: Animal lovers, don’t despair. Since many characters in Delilah’s world have some supernatural mojo, I wouldn’t bet that Delilah’s little white dog, Achilles, won’t be found quite alive…somewhere, somehow. Meanwhile, she’s rescued a paranormally talented 150-pound wolf-wolfhound-cross dog she names Quicksilver.

  The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora Charles and Asta

  http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2011/12/nick-nora-charles-drinking-their-way.html

  THE SECOND TALE

  INTRODUCTION

  DOUGLAS’S BLACK-CAT DETECTIVE, Midnight Louie, invokes his feline mystical side to visit Delilah’s alternative Vegas and discovers murder afoot. Louie not only does not deign to “speak” to humans, his narratives don’t use contractions. Since he always wears “black tie,” he is a formal kind of guy. With Delilah as lead detective, the pair set out to unmask the would-be murderer among some intimately bonded vampires and humans. But is a different sort of supernatural on the prowl? And will visiting sleuth Louie survive a feline fatale who can really get her hooks—and fangs—into him?

  THE NAME IS LOUIE, Midnight Louie. I like my night life shaken, not stirred.

  A veteran PI can never know his home turf’s dark side well enough, and I have padded the neon-lit Strip of Las Vegas and its byways and backways for a long time.

  Vegas has always been known as Sin City, but the “Sin” part has gotten a lot deadlier since the Millennium Revelation at the turn of the twenty-first century revealed some of the bloodsuckers in Vegas were actually supernatural—such as vampires, and werewolves.

  I admit that I am not au courante, so to speak, with all the varieties of crime and punishment on the paranormal side of the street. So I have made it my business tonight to leave the Las Vegas of my normal existence (as if Vegas could ever be “normal”) and find an entrance to that nomadic subterranean pit of the dark side of sin called the Sinkhole.

  Given the so-called “mystical” side of my kind, it is easy to slip into the paranormal underworld.

  I am not impressed. Sure, the full moon is putting on a show topside, so I must dodge werewolves in the street, but I find they are mostly living La Vida Loco after their nightly blood-thirsty runs and now are only running up bills in the Sinkhole’s gin joints and casinos.

  Midnight Louie is light on his feet and used to keeping a low profile—a very low profile—abetted by the fact that I am short, dark, and handsome. My thick black pelt blends into the night, except for my baby greens, which can emit a demonic glow when the few street lights hit them.

  My kind has had a bad rep since witches were burned at the stake. I find that useful in my work. In fact, a tourist couple happens to notice me and runs the other way, shrieking that I must not cross their paths.

  Fine with me, folks. Your footwear bears an odor of bunions. Or is that “onions” from a zombie burger joint?

  All around me echo the same sounds of merriment and debauchery you get in mainstream Vegas, interspersed with occasional screams, growls, and moans.

  Then I catch an aroma that perks my wing flaps and tingles my tail section.

  Something feminine and feline this way comes, and it is not the shape-shifted leopard devouring a Happy Meal at the MacDungeon’s across the street.

  The faintest brush against my shiny satin lapels reveals a pal
e feathery plume tickling the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.

  Wow. This first-class dame is draped in luxuriant furs, cream with crimson tips, the breed color called a flame-point. If the Sinkhole is the path to hell and this hot little number is on it, I am homeward bound!

  “My name is Vesper,” she breaths in my perked ear. “I have not seen you in these parts before, Big Boy.”

  Actually, I am. Big that is, and surely a boy. Perhaps some self-description is appropriate now that the action has turned romantic. First, I am twenty pounds of solid muscle. Check. Hairy chest, check. Concealed weapons? Sixteen shivs ready to slash from my mitts and feet in a street rumble. Check.

  Best of all, I have—as they used to advertise sports cars—four on the floor and come fully equipped from the factory.

  All this means I am ready, willing and able to take on any Sinkhole-dwelling humans or unhumans, and also, of course, any lone ladies requiring defensive and/or intimate maneuvers.

  While I am planning the evening’s escapades, the lithesome Vesper has diverted down a dim alley, only her flame-tipped train beckoning from around the corner. I hasten to follow her.

  Now, any simpleton knows this is probably a trap. So do I. Not that I am a simpleton, although I am a simple fellow at heart. No, I figure I will find out what the lady really wants, and if it is a patsy, we will have a discussion. Either way, I intend to get to know her a lot better.

  So I edge into the alley, my laser-sharp night vision kicking into full power.

  Yup. Another flash of tail deep in the darkness. Classic. I slink along the Dumpsters, ignoring the octopus tentacles writhing over the edges. This is no time for sushi.

  Even the noise of the main drag has faded. I am invading No Man’s Land. Luckily, I am no man. I have almost caught up with the elusive Vesper when I stumble across the expected trap.

  It forms an unseen barrier, less than two feet high and six feet long. I peer over it only to see Vesper’s eyes gleaming red in the reflected light of the street.

  Hmm, I think to myself. We commune over a dead body. Whose? How? Why? I have my work cut out for me, I see.

  Vesper hisses, baring long front fangs (so misnamed as “canine”) also gleaming red in the night light. True, neon is common in Vegas, and below it. However, this looks like the sheen of blood. Could Vesper have killed this man?