“My life has been in danger since I was four years old. No risk, no gain,” Ric said.
He drained the Bloody Mary before setting it down on a table.
“Your commercial instincts are second to none,” he told Christophe, “but there may be more seriously heavy players at work in Vegas than even you suspect.”
Christophe stood too. He was taller than Ric, but not by much. Ric suspected some lost Cuban blood in the water-dowsing peasant Montoyas.
The rock-star mogul’s eyes, and therefore expression, remained concealed by dark glasses, but a hand went to his throat as if touching a talisman. The neck collar’s vibrant pink rubies? Were they more than gemstones, as the vivid bruise might be something more?
Ric knew his hint had shaken the usually controlled stage performer. He also figured the babe who’d given ‘Snow’ that royal purple hickey must have been showgirl-tall, or wearing spike heels. An ex-FBI guy observes the little things.
“I’ll think about your offer,” he told Christophe.
“What does that mean?”
“What I said.”
Chapter Six
RIC KNEW HE had to figure out what was best for . . . a robot. She was even more zombielike than the walking dead he’d raised since a small child.
After the penthouse elevator deposited him on the main casino floor, Ric headed for the Inferno Bar in search of a dapper fellow in white tie and formal black morning coat, whose face and hands were as black-and-white all over as his nineteen-thirties’ monkey suit.
It was a fine point whether Nick Charles, the lush detective, held up the bar or it held him up.
Built like a giant aquarium with glass sides, the bar had a long top of polished wood carved into demonic faces. The scene below the bar top was a Hell in miniature, with tiny capering demons leaping within the same corona of colored flames that circled the hotel’s exterior.
Nick Charles had leaned a hip on a red enameled steel stool and rested his crooked right elbow on the bar. He was rapt at the moment, gazing into a martini glass holding something liquid and bright blue.
Ric had stopped in front of him, himself a wall of well-tailored pale linen suit. As a respected private consultant on finding suspected murder victims, he dressed the part.
“Well,” Nick Charles blessed him with an approving sideways look. “If it isn’t Cesar Romero back from working a case with Charlie Chan in tropical climes. What may I do for you, young man?”
Ric shot his suit sleeves to reveal Day of the Dead grinning-skull cuff links, then leaned a hip on the adjoining barstool. “They had a Chinese detective in the old movies, and a soused one. Why not a Latino one? Why not Cesar Romero or Ricardo Montalban as a private eye?”
“Because they had Zorro, who was far more interesting.” Nick Charles’s forefinger stabbed a drunken Z into the air. “I do like your style,” he said, looking down his pencil-thin mustache and not quite focusing. “But you’re missing something.”
“What?” Ric demanded, surprised.
“Bartender.” Nick Charles raised his free forefinger and gestured to Ric. “A Blue Coast martini for my new friend.”
Ric stifled a smile and a sigh. The famous film detective was just a shill for selling drinks these days, now that the Immortality Mob had merged his onscreen image with a 3-D zombie body.
Ric accepted the gaudy drink, and eyed it before sipping. “Is this a Delilah Street Special?”
“Lord, no, my lad. Her Silver Zombie is a marvel of delicate blue hue with a noose of electric Blue Curaçao at the bottom and top. The Inferno Bar doesn’t have rights to that recipe. She didn’t invent it here, just the Albino Vampire and the Vampire Sunrise. So the management is trying to push this abomination, a vodka martini, on the public. Martinis are always made with gin, preferably Boodles.”
“Any port in a storm for Christophe, huh?” Ric suggested. It was hard to not get quippy with the founding father of screwball mystery films.
“A common saying . . . oh, you mean port as in wine.” Nicky gave him a broad wink and sipped his Blue Coast martini. “And do you have a right to t-t-take . . . my second favorite wife’s name in vain?”
“Naughty Nicky,” said the willowy brunette CinSim who draped a manicured hand and winsome face over his shoulder. “What’s this about your ‘second favorite wife’? Are you aching for a second favorite life?”
Nick left his glass on the bar and put his hands up. “I’ve got a second life here and now, you audacious woman. That was just a figure of speech, wifey dear.”
“I know Delilah’s figure very well,” Nora purred, curving her nails into his well-padded jacket shoulder. “You’d better not, or I’ll divorce you and take Asta. And the key to the liquor cabinet.”
Before Nick could defend himself, Ric said, “Delilah’s my amiga.”
“Well said, amigo.” Nick Charles gulped the rest of his cocktail. “Bartender, another for me and a nice, fresh one for the lady.”
Ric eyed the couple, back and forth. They liked to spar and probably “spark” too, in the old-fashioned way of public snuggling and private whoopee.
“I need to know something,” Ric began.
“Nicky is the best man for the job in every bar in Manhattan or Vegas,” Nora said, using her long forefinger nail as a swizzle stick. She offered her bluish finger to Nicky, who dutifully tasted it, then nodded thoughtfully. “Needs curing another ten minutes.”
Ric shook his head at the byplay. “I need to know if you know who and what you are.”
“The ball and chain just told you,” Nick said. “I’m the smartest sloshed detective in the business and she’s the sassiest siren on the planet. And rich too.”
“What you’re saying now sounds similar, but you’ve never said these lines onscreen,” Ric said.
“Oooh, Nicky,” Nora’s lips looked rouged in black as she cooed into her husband’s pale gray ear, “the darling boy watches our home movies.”
“Hardly home movies,” Ric said. “You two were box office magic eighty years ago. You must remember that. Does your CinSim life allow you to improvise? Do you like that? Or do you hate being stuck in this one bar scene, on this one set, glad-handing every starry-eyed tourist who wanders by?”
“Nicky,” Nora said. “The man is deeply troubled. We must help him.”
“Of course.” Nick’s hands lifted, martini-less, and patted the air like a conductor’s.
Looked damn like one in that formal suit, Ric thought.
“Have you ever heard of the fourth wall, my boy?” Nick asked.
“Sure. The part of a stage set that faces the audience. No wall at all. And I’m closer to thirty than to twenty, so I’m nobody’s boy.”
“Yes, you are,” Nora said, as if cooing to Asta. She also made a kissy face at him that was too damn attractive even if she was technically a hundred and ten years old. “Don’t call the man a boy, Nicky. If you want to call someone that, we’ll be forced to have children and you know what will happen to the key to the liquor cabinet, then.”
Nicky contained a shudder. “I believe we’re being subjected to a serious interrogation, my love. What a novel experience.”
“I was in the FBI,” Ric pointed out.
“Did we have that in our day, dear?” Nora asked her husband.
“They were out there, but all about low dives and criminal vices and not in our elevated social circles at all.”
“Apparently they’ve improved,” Nora said, eyeing Ric’s suit and, he’d swear, speculating on what was under it.
Nick mock-slapped her hand on his suit shoulder. “Drink your drink.”
“Yes, dear.” She sipped provocatively, her eyelids half-closed under the thin sweep of eyebrow arches plucked to within an eighth-inch of their lives.
Ric remembered then. Delilah said Myrna Loy had been stuck playing pulp fiction Asian dragon ladies before she snagged the part of Nora. Holy Excess Hollywood! He was beginning to think like a film buff. All these CinSims h
anging out at local hotels and casinos and watering holes made that likelier.
“Don’t you miss playing other roles?” he tried to ask the actors that underlay the personas before him.
“Mr. . . . ?” Nick began.
“Montoya.”
“Montoya,” Nora echoed in a naughty tone.
“Mr. Montoya, I can see you are the sincere sort,” Nick Charles declared with an air of sober dignity. “Rather dull for our Delilah, I fear, but we certainly regard her as one of our rare, real friends. If you are asking how we like our current lives, I can only reply that our careers were dead. We were almost forgotten, except on those interminable nostalgia documentaries. Gin was going undrunk. Our dog, Asta, was only a name in thousands of dreary crossword puzzles. ‘Myrna’ and ‘Loy’ got in them, but ‘William’ and ‘Powell’ almost never.”
“Not my fault,” Nora caroled, “if you were born with a stuffy offstage name.”
“The producers did give you the ‘Loy,’ love. Shorter on a marquee than Williams. Your actual surname was a tribute to me, if you think about it.”
Nora made a face at him. Nick frowned and sipped.
“In addition,” he told Ric, “if you were to ask your Miss Street, she would tell you that I have been of some small service as an investigative advisor and that she derives any style sense she may have from my lovely and patient wife, with whom she helped to reunite me. As well as with the dog.”
Nick Charles took a pause in his speech to sigh. “Where is the dog, dear?”
“Asta is on the other side of the bar, enjoying a dish of tourist pant legs, with discreet growls. No one can hear in this crazy, jingling jazzy casino.”
Now Ric was patting the air, a conductor trying to hush his massive winds section.
“I think I get it,” he told Nick. “You can’t break character, but you’ve got more options than any of the Inferno Hotel brass might suspect.”
Nora’s observant eyes nailed her husband’s. “Maybe not all of the Inferno Hotel brass. Nicky, you might want to direct the young man to the naughtier levels on the Nine Circles of Hell.”
Nick edged along the bar, forcing Ric to retreat. It wasn’t that Nicky used any muscle, more that Ric wanted to avoid direct CinSim contact. Who knows what they were made of besides zombie bodies and cinema silver nitrate and dreams?
In a few seconds, he saw how foolish that recoil was.
“We Darkside bar habitués,” Nick Charles said, “work the civilized side of the Strip. I personally am glad that Nora and I are more known for our repartee and taste in booze than any intimate hijinks.
“Not that we didn’t get up to them, my lad, but the scripts stopped to discreetly draw the curtains. You’ll find the more ‘personal’ CinSims below. I had my share of lady fans, but I was valued for my mind and inimitable style, rather than my physique. We all acted the scripts we were given. How someone like Jean Harlow or Errol Flynn feels about a new life as the ultimate undead objects of desire, I am thankful to say I haven’t the slightest notion. And if I ever do, I can sip away all that is so casually crass and modern these days. Cheers!”
Ric thanked the family Charles and looked down to see a quizzical white-and-gray wire-haired terrier eyeing his pant leg with intent to water.
“Asta, no!” Nora ordered, but Nicky merely bent to pick him up and install him on the barstool Ric had vacated.
Ric left them there, a family portrait in dramatic black-and-white against the vividly colored liquors above and the dancing demons below, both under glass.
Chapter Seven
I STOOD BECALMED and frantic in a mirror-world turned into a thorny trap.
Where was Ric now? Who would warn him he was under attack if I was confined to fey stir?
Loretta Cicereau had used my curiosity and my guilt at imprisoning her to reverse our roles. Her boyfriend was not only dead and unrevivable, but mine might soon be in the same state by her hands.
“Any magic you can use to help me overcome this wall you created?” I asked Madrigal.
His broad bare shoulders shrugged. “Phasia and Sylphia supplement my powers, but they’ve gone off to sulk now that I’ve put a wall between us. I’m in the doghouse with them as much as your clever canine Quicksilver ever was, but they won’t abandon me here forever. They’re just miffed you and I reconnected through mirrors. Where’s the wolfbane of Cicereau’s pack now?”
“Not where I could really use him.” I couldn’t help sounding brusque. “I’ve never taken Quicksilver into mirror-world. It’s not like I need a bodyguard every minute.”
“Allow me to disagree.” Madrigal looked around. “I called up a protective wall, but this overgrown cage is like Sleeping Beauty’s thorn forest, and she was stuck behind the briars for . . . what? Decades?”
“Who’s counting? This thorn-spiked jungle transformed from those leaf-bare trees that were so petite and frosty and pretty when I entered the mirror, kinda like your fey assistants when I first met them and their claws were in.” I looked around and up. “The entwined branches lock us in on three sides, even on the Black Beyond above us.”
“Mirror backings are painted black,” Madrigal pointed out. “No wonder the edges of everything inside the mirror are dark and look impassable.”
I paced and tried not to grind my teeth. “I hope Loretta can’t travel with the speed of the disembodied now that she’s physical again. I’ve got to get out and get to Ric fast. I’ve got to get there before her.”
Madrigal again shrugged brawny shoulders. “I’m a novice at mirror magic, compared to you, but I believe even if you managed to retrace your steps, you’d be back to wherever you entered the mirror.”
“That would be my residence,” I said absently. “The hall mirror there is a prop used for the Wicked Queen’s talking mirror in Snow White.”
“Really! Any magician would chop off his left hand to get ahold of a mirror with that provenance for illusions.”
“What good is it doing me now?”
“If that’s the mirror I’ve come toward from my own stage mirrors, it might amplify my magic, at least some. I don’t know how, though. I can quench the fire.” His theatrical gesture did just that, but the thick tangled wall remained.
“I haven’t time to wait for your apprenticeship to take hold.” I looked around desperately.
There was still no “back.” Madrigal was right. The towering thorn trees hemmed us in and the floor was black stone. I stamped my heel on it, which only sent an impact tremor up my foot and leg. Well, I was no dormant Sleeping Beauty waiting for my prince to come rescue me. I needed to go rescue him, so this Jill had better start climbing the beanstalk.
“What are you doing?” Madrigal asked as I leaped up three feet onto the nearest thick branch. “There’s nothing up there but matted limbs.”
“And homicidal thorns,” I said, discovering ten-inch-long spears hidden among the twisted, almost tortured black branches.
It was like climbing wrought iron with an ice storm slick on it. The surface now was numbingly cold, and slippery. And me wearing my midriff-baring salsa dancing top. Soon the red knit would be dyed a deeper shade of scarlet, if I didn’t watch it.
I’d always had a knack for climbing. I remembered unsanctioned solo adventures along the river cliffs, clutching fistfuls of leaf-stripped, whip-thin branches to pull myself over eroding roots and fallen tree trunks. River cliffs? In Wichita? Those memories must be from that summer camp I didn’t remember much.
I stayed close to the tangle’s interior. That meant the higher I went, the more the growth turned into an arch. Soon I was clinging upside down like . . . Sylphia. My palms were reddened and sweaty. I looked down over my shoulder. Yikes! It would be a two-story fall to solid stone.
Madrigal looked small and wee, like an elf, not a muscleman.
If only these were the short graceful tree limbs I’d seen when I first crossed into the mirror, the frost forest dangling glittering gemstones out of a fairy tale.
I looked up through the twisted mass of limbs and thorns and spied a flash of light just as I heard a tree limb crack. Now that I was hanging from the nasty growths, my weight had become too much for individual branches.
I climbed yet higher into the spiked nest. Yes.
This was a giant, thawed version of the frost forest. Huge pendants of faceted gemstones dangled above me, glimmering stars in a midnight-black sky. A clear glassy one was nearest.
If I broke the supporting limb and leaped into the plunging teardrop of rock crystal or zircon or even diamond, I could catch my reflection and jump through to . . . somewhere else.
That would require split-second timing and phenomenal luck.
And . . . those facets were another kind of thorn. The mirror of the dangling gemstone had already been shattered in a sense, to magnify the play of light. It would be like leaping through jagged plate glass into a network of deadly security lasers shooting back and forth inside. I’d be creamed corn.
Okay. I needed to woman up.
Marilyn Monroe had crooned that “diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” but they aren’t if you’re contemplating a leap of faith into the infinite hall of mirrors and angles inside a faceted jewel about four feet high.
Looking below, I saw the impressive figure of Madrigal still foreshortened to dwarf size.
Looking around the thorny hedge forming the wide archway, I spotted Sylphia and Phasia hanging upside down like bats, dainty, glittering bats preparing to loosen their unnatural holds and swing down to cocoon me as they once had imprisoned Loretta.
“Madrigal!” I shouted down. “Do you see it? The glimmer through the forest of branches.”
“Barely,” he shouted back.
“It’s cut like a diamond.”
“A diamond. That size? It would be invaluable.”
“It is invaluable. It’s my way out. I want you to melt it into a cabochon, a smooth rounded oval. Can you do that?”
“Alter an object? That large and distant? Transformation is a magician’s basic illusion. I possess some real talent beyond tricks, but, Delilah, I can’t guarantee anything. Even if I smoothed the stone, it might be acid inside, or boiling water. I’d have to melt it through a process similar to nature.”
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