Chapter Twenty-Two

My own mother wouldn't have known me when I arrived at the Inferno at 9:00 pm.

Not that I'd ever had a mother to know me, or to not know me.

The hotel-casino was a bat-winged swoop of opaque black glass towering fifty stories or so. It was ringed with moats of fire and ice, with holographic figures writhing in them like the naked babes in the opening credits to an old James Bond movie. I always tried not to look at the naked and the dead if I didn't have to. Something about both states was unnerving.

I was fairly self-conscious when I turned Dolly over to the valet parking chap: he was a symphony of milk chocolate skin wearing a pleated white ancient Egyptian kilt, shoulder-spanning beaded collar, gilt sandals, and a jackal-head mask tricked up with really heavy eyeliner. At least he could remove his makeup with the flick of a wrist.

Who was I to snicker at the underdressed help?

The last I'd seen of myself in the Deja-Vous mirror, my baby blues were hidden behind gray contact lenses. My hair and skin had been deemed black and white enough already for the silver screen. The dress du jour was a floor-length black velvet thirties gown with a giant pair of rhinestone clips on the shoulder. The severe neckline cut across my collarbones but draped well below my waist in backless splendor. I wore white satin pumps and carried a silver fox stole that I was assured had died for our sins eighty years ago, way before the animal rights enlightenment, so why waste it? My hair had been drawn back and coiled into a thick figure eight at the nape of my neck, giving me a Spanish air that I sure wished Ric was here to see. Ol��!

Lots of lone women like me were ankling into the Inferno in various cinematic get-ups swiped from the birth of film around 1900 to fifties' science fiction thrillers. I'd never been a groupie before. It was unnerving, since I wasn't sure who or what we were being groupies of. Or for.

My palms were a tad damp on the soft velvet bag that matched the dress. The duds were due back at Deja-Vous in the morning, so I desperately didn't want to get sweaty fingerprints on the vintage silk-velvet that went for hundreds of dollars a yard now. That was the trouble: I knew how rare and costly vintage clothing was, and we all shouldn't be traipsing around in this stuff like giggly prom queens... because my partners in crime pouring into the Inferno were definitely gigglers from ages eight to eighty-four. We fanned out through the icy, air-conditioned casino that blasted screams and moans and flares of fire as the slot machines swallowed bills and spit out mostly sound and fury, not coins. Miniaturized versions of the mirrored balls from Jazz Age ballrooms floated above and around us like flocks of intrusive heavy-metal bubbles.

The Inferno Bar seemed like a familiar refuge when I first spotted its mirrored wall of endlessly reflected liquor bottles. Then I noticed that the bar top was polished exotic wood carved with exotic demonic faces. It rested on a giant Plexiglas aquarium filled with leaping flames and tiny capering devils. What were these things? Fire lizards? Projections? Or slaves of the decor? Some god-awful rock music was drilling through the sound system, all wailing guitars, manic drums, and tortured saxophones.

The sight of a dignified figure in a well-cut tuxedo (with white skin, black hair and pencil-thin mustache) was like glimpsing an angel on the threshold of hell. He was holding forth between two barstools of red enameled steel, a martini glass in one hand and a sterling silver cigarette lighter in the other. (Gold, of course, would not match the strict B/W dress code.)

"Hello, sir," I greeted him over the racket, "your cousin Godfrey suggested I introduce myself to you."

"Ah." His eyes were slightly bleary. "How is old Godfrey anyway? Still seeing that dippy socialite?"

"No, he's... employed now."

"Sorry to hear it. Work will be the death of the leisure class. Martini, m'dear?"

"Not... yet. Godfrey said you could orient me to this place."

"My bar is your bar, sweet lady. Have a seat."

"There aren't any free."

"Oh, so there aren't. A shame you shall have to balance on those tricky little evening slippers. I suppose I'm forgetting myself. I'm rather prone to that." He put down the cigarette lighter after servicing ladies on bracketing barstools. "Charles is the name."

"Nice to meet you, Charles."

"No. The surname. Charles. Nick Charles."

I got the vintage film reference right away. "Not the famous detective from the pen of the man who created Sam Spade? You solved the Thin Man case."

"Well, I and my wife Nora did. And Asta, our intrepid wire-haired terrier. And a few bottles of Gilbey's. Have you ever heard of an intrepid wire-haired terrier?"

"No, only of an intrepid Lhasa apso."

"Don't know that breed. Sounds rather Shangri-La, something chichi the ladies always go for."

"As a matter of fact, the breed was sacred to the Dalai Lamas and forbidden to leave Tibet, but an Englishwoman smuggled out a breeding pair decades ago."

"Ah. The English make the best spies. Look so harmless, don't you know? 'A breeding pair.' I'm always in favor of procreation, so long as it doesn't result in children."

"This was puppies."

"Noted. What do you wish to know?

"What is this noise?"

"I quite agree." Nick Charles took a long swallow of his martini. "I prefer Paul Whiteman. That 'noise,' I fear, is at the behest of our host and my estimable employer."

"Our host?"

"Christophe, of course. Showy fellow, but low-brow. I imagine the man never owned a monkey suit." He spread his arms to display his handsome tuxedo. "After six there is nothing else I'd rather be seen in, except a bathtub full of gin."

"Godfrey said you could show me around the Inferno. The less public areas."

"I'm supposed to anchor the bar, but I might be able to slip away for some detecting work. Even better, I have a reliable chum who might be up to an easy break-and-enter job."

He gave me a friendly and totally gin-disabled lascivious once-over. "Poor fellow. He is always overlooked and eager for recognition. Speaking of which-" Nick Charles ran his glance over the line of female CinSymbiants lining the bar. "Where's Nora? Nora should be here. She always sees to me and my martinis."

Several slinky dames in gowns like mine presented unlit cigarettes, many in holders. Nick Charles dutifully lit them in turn, if a bit shakily.

Where was Nora Charles? That woman was the pepper to his salt, Myrna Loy to William Powell, his sophisticated wife. But now William Powell was a split-screen personality: Godfrey at Nightwine's place, the Good Time Charles, Nicky Charles, at the Inferno. And no one had thought to give either Powell CinSim the women made for them in the movies: Carole Lombard and Myrna Loy.

I felt a chill of apprehension and indignation. Nightwine was right. The CinSims shouldn't be up for sale, ripped from their film environments and partners, doled out among Las Vegas hotel-casinos and clubs as enslaved attractions, without free will or a say in their own usage.

Before I could launch into a barside invective about that I noticed that Nicky Charles had ebbed away down the polished if perverse wood.

"I've been waiting for you," a velvet basso voice said behind me, close enough to send a subtle vibration from my ear down to the soles of my dancing slippers. It was a stage voice, all timbre and open throat and intimate inference.

At least he hadn't added the hokey "all my life."

I turned around to eyeball him and then I wasn't sure he had a life.

He was as white as a corpse... whiter. He had white-as-marble clothing, skin, hair. He seemed as tall as the white cliffs of Dover and I was wearing high heels. The only thing dark on him was the rimless sunglasses that obscured his eyes.

"Dance?" he asked. "The floor is solid black walnut and very smooth." When I looked around to see some couples in motion around us, I was in sudden motion too, my white-gloved right hand in the custody of his left, my feet forced to retreat to a rhythmic advance.

No. The eyes behind the glasses wouldn't be white. They'd be pink. Mr. Foxy Fox Trot wasn't the walking dead (maybe). He was an albino.

"I don't usually do the senior shuffle," he murmured into the coils of my fancy bun, behind my left ear, "but I had to get my hands on that magnificent back."

And he was doing just that, getting his dead-white hand on my naked back as we danced. His temperature felt neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm. His oddly callused fingertips (maybe horny in both senses of the word) played my spine from nape to bottom curve like a musical instrument.

There was nothing vintage about this dude, except maybe glam rock 'n' roll from the seventies. His white hair, shoulder-blade-brushing long, looked spun-glass soft. Spun fiberglass had been called "angel hair" when it decked fifties Christmas tree angels until recognized as a health hazard and taken off the market This image fit a guy wearing such opposite attire as a loose white poet's shirt that would have done Byron proud and supernaturally tight white leather pants that a young Mick Jagger would have killed to have six pair of in bad-boy black. The obsidian sunglasses added a Blues Brothers note and hid any creepy rabbit-pink eyes.

"And by whom do I have the honor of being fondled on the dance floor?" I inquired in Jane Austen diction.

"Gives great grammar too," he said. "Call me Snow, sweeting." His accent was part Brit, part indefinable European. "I'm the lead singer for Seven Deadly Sins." He gestured at an empty stage visible over a mob of bobbing heads between the bar and the distance stage.

"And which deadly sin are you?" I asked politely.

"Oh, all of them right now, I imagine," he purred. That baritone voice could indeed purr. "Pure Lust and Gluttony at this moment, can't you tell? I'll be mortal Envy if I learn you're taken, then Anger. When I get you into my bed I'll be Sloth incarnate, because we won't leave it for a month. I'll be sheer Greed for you the entire time."

This was flirting in hyper drive. Flirting was against my religion, but I realized that I could now get all the wrong frissons in all the right places since Ric and I had literally connected over the dead bodies in the park, not to mention certain dances with werewolves. As for dancing with Snow, his commanding lead made my two left feet into twinkle toes. But this guy was so over-the-top sexy and amusing that I couldn't take his line personally. A slinky Nora Charles gown had been inciting men on and off the silver screen for decades. Not to mention that I was getting the best back massage of my life. Well, the only back massage of my life.

What was it with men in Las Vegas? First Ric, then Nightwine, now this. Snow's fingers made a sensual glissando return trip up my spine to my nape, then began pulling out the industrial-strength bobby pins that held my chignon in place. My hair, like the walls of Jericho, came tumbling down.

"You're ruining the CinSymbiant illusion," I pointed out.

"Illusions are for small-time players. Reality rocks. What's your name?"

He gently tugged down my hair. What a cinematic game this was! I knew he'd really get off on it, so I spoke slowly through a Mona Lisa smile, like Lauren Bacall taunting Bogie with her "put your lips together and blow" how-to-whistle line in To Have and Have Not, a bit of dialogue supposedly written by either Hemingway or Faulkner. Who knew what those old lit guys could get up to?

"De-lie-lah."

"Ah, De-lie-lah." My dopey name sounded delicious in his hybrid accent. He was pulling my hair and head even farther back, almost like a vampire-a rather bloodless one-baring a throat. But a throat wasn't his thing at the moment.

"Instead of lusting to cut my hair," he said, "I suggest that you grow yours."

He released it and finger-walked down my spine again until his hand slipped under the draped velvet curtain of the gown. "When we make love under a curtain of black and white locks it will look very sexy in the Venetian glass mirror over the bed."

Okay, he was hinting he wasn't a vampire with that mirror reference, but he sure was a sensualist in my book. I stared into the disconcerting rimless black sunglasses. What's a pseudo-film goddess to do with a line like that?

"You might want to rethink that mirror, Snow. With me, I mean. I have a way with mirrors." I was bluffing, but my close recent encounter with the witch in the cottage mirror had made me cocky.

Maybe I wasn't just a medium, but a silver medium. I seemed to be sensitive to anything made of silver... a silver-screen movie strip, mirror backing, sterling jewelry... now, mirror-shade sunglasses.

Snow lifted one almost-invisible white eyebrow above the right dark sunglass lens as his hand polished my shoulder blades with my own loosened curls.

"A way with mirrors? Should be interesting. Gotta run, Delilah. I'll see you in your dreams if not in my mirror."

He left as swiftly as he had appeared. The air around us had been electric, charged, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, and always just right, like Baby Bear's bed was for Goldilocks. Except I was closer to Snow White and bears could eat up a girl abandoned in the woods as easily as they could gobble porridge.

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 m��lange 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 undone.

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 now 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 Creme de Cocoa, a jigger of vanilla Stoli, 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, Erte. 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. Deja 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.