Chapter Twenty-Five
I dropped the CinSymbiant clothes back at Deja-Vous the next morning. They rented or sold their wares and offered me the gown and clips for $600 but I settled for the gray contact lenses for $30. I'd enjoyed wearing undercover eyes and might want to use them in the future. Like a lot of people with vivid blue eyes, I was tired of being remembered only for that.
I did have to pay for the three missing hairpins I'd let the Cocaine groupie have. A buck-forty. I should have charged her the going rate for a Cocaine memento. Might have been able to afford the gown then.
It also turned out that the "owner" had ordered that I be given a twenty percent "handling discount" on the entire package. Cute. Call him Cocaine, Christophe, or Snow, this guy didn't miss a trick.
I hopped into Dolly with a high heart, my laptop in the passenger seat. Quicksilver was not institutionally welcome and I was visiting the Nevada Historical Society library to look up missing-person candidates for the lovers buried in Sunset Park. I'd even called the police captain Ric counted as a source, Kennedy Malloy.
I almost swallowed my wisdom teeth when an alto woman's voice answered to the name. She did tell me, reluctantly, the mint year of the silver dollars found at the site, 1921. Still in circulation in the seventies. I couldn't tell if her reluctance was the usual police reticence, or if she was as startled as I was to suddenly find Ric a bridge to a strange woman.
When I thought about it, it figured that his inside man at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police would be a woman. What woman wouldn't want to tell Ric anything he'd want to know? Maybe I was prejudiced. As I drove I replayed our meeting. Had we been hit with some love potion that had been trapped with the dead lovers all these decades? Everyone liked to think romance was magic, a form of mysterious chemistry, but what if it was something catching, like the plague?
I was glad to be heading for a place where I'd always been able to keep my feet on the ground and my head in the here and now: a library.
A quick online search revealed the Clark County Library had the Las Vegas Evening Review Journal from 1930 through 1958 -when it had long been just the LV Review Journal-on microfilm. I explained "no dogs in the library" to Quick and soon had Dolly aimed toward the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The Clark County Library was only a block or so from campus on E. Flamingo Road.
Once there I settled in, grateful modern microfilm was nothing like those old reels of white-on-black filmstrips people had to reel past at seasick speeds years before, If I found anything of interest, I could simply print out a facsimile for a small fee.
My only distraction: the ads for what were now vintage clothes... oh my! Cheap as Saturday night sin. If only time travel was a post-Millennium Revelation option!
When I got home, I noticed a scent of lemon oil and Mr. Clean. Someone had been tidying the premises. Quick was out. That wasn't unusual.
During our first night in the cottage, he'd pawed open the French lever on one of the living room windows. I didn't know he'd been gone until he jumped back in that way when I was making breakfast. I tried tying the window lever shut, but he used another one. The next night I tied them all shut... and he untied one with his teeth. This was not a dog that would sleep by a cold fake fireplace all night.
So I now left the window over the laundry table open and Quick spent his nights doing whatever really big dogs do. I couldn't blame him for not wanting to be cooped up. I just hoped he didn't get hurt. Even Superdog could run into trouble.
I put down my photocopies and headed along the hall to the bedroom to change into something comfy, like T-shirt and shorts. My image in the mirror at the hall's always-dusky end made me pause. Last night when I'd come in, it seemed as if I had glimpsed someone else in that mirror, a different girl in a different vintage dress.
Then my double vision had cleared and I saw it was me, only I had blue eyes in that reflection, not gray, despite the color-dampening contact lenses. Weird. But the hall was ill lit with a single overhead fixture, and I'd been drinking, not to mention scared and stressed. Now, in daylight, I just looked like me, only more casually dressed in slacks and a knit top. I'd barely changed before the doorbell rang with an old-fashioned melodic chime.
When I rushed to open it, I found a little green man standing on my stoop. No, he didn't have the big black bug-eyes of an extra-terrestrial. He just looked like an impish offspring of the Jolly Green Giant of TV commercial fame. The silver sandals he wore did nothing for his hairy hammertoes.
No ho-ho-ho from him. "Sign here, lady." As he handed me a computerized device I noticed a green delivery truck outside the open gate. The print on the side read Mercury Express. Homegrown Delivery Service.
The plain white box was big, flat, and light, but way too deep to be pizza, unless it was a triple deep-dish Chicago style one. Besides, it was only faintly warm from the summer's day and the sun-heated back of a metal truck.
I gave the green guy a three-dollar tip and got a nasty look in return. "I should get hazardous duty pay for delivering to Nightwine's place, lady."
Twinkletoes stalked away, chiming. I hadn't noticed the bells on the toe sandal straps before. Only in Las Vegas, where every service person wore bizarre themed costumes. It had been a costume, hadn't it?
I was chuckling to myself when I laid the box on the dining table and pulled off the annoying invisible tape at the sides. I heard the encouraging crinkle of tissue paper.
This was beginning to look like a present. Had Ric -?
Okay, my mind was jogging on only one track lately.
Oh. No! It was the gown, and clips, from Deja-Vous. A sheet of white vellum written on in thick dark burgundy ink read: "With my deepest compliments and self-interest. Snow."
Amid the folds of black velvet coiled a slender lock of white hair, maybe nine inches long. Then I noticed a P.S. under the note's signature: "If I give you a piece of my power, maybe you won't feel compelled to cut it off, cut it all off, my modern-day Delilah."
I could practically hear him purring those words. Ridiculous. I couldn't, wouldn't accept anything from him, and had, in fact, refused to accept the "handling discount" even though the clerk had whined about making out a new receipt. You might have thought the guy feared his far-distant boss.
I was more angry than annoyed now. The soft lock of hair reminded me, so painfully, of my Achilles that it brought tears to my eyes. I couldn't resist the temptation of recapturing the lost sensation of petting my lost Achilles, of reaching out to touch the long, pale hair.
The damned thing... moved, faster than I could see. Like a serpent it coiled around my right wrist, then tightened into something hard and silver and familiar. One-half of a handcuff.
Gooseflesh ran up my right arm along with an interior shiver that made me shudder. As soon as I'd registered the lock's silken circling of my wrist I'd felt it harden into cold metal.
The doorbell rang again.
Honestly! Couldn't anyone just leave me alone today?
I stomped to the door in my bare feet and pulled it violently open.
The man on the stoop looked familiar, but totally human at least. Well, sort of. I placed him: the police guy from the Sunset Park crime scene. That bigoted Detective Haskell. How had he gotten in here without going past the security system and Godfrey? Obviously, the delivery service had been passed through security, because it was a previous visitor, given the crack the guy made about Nightwine's tips.
"Yes?" I asked. "You want?"
He walked in like he owned the place and planned to rent it to someone else.
"You. Downtown."
"Me? There must be some mistake."
"Yeah. Yours. This isn't an invitation." He grabbed my arm.
I pulled away.
He jerked it back so hard I grunted protest.
The sound of a motorcycle revving its engine distracted us both.
We had not heard an engine. It was the deep sustained growl of a hundred-and-fifty-pound dog, like something you might encounter in a tiger cage. Quicksilver was standing in the hallway arch, moving forward.
"Jesus!" Haskell didn't drop my arm. He drew his semiautomatic from a rear paddle holster with the other hand and pointed it at Quicksilver.
"No!" I twisted myself between Haskell and Quicksilver. No more dogs died on my watch, in my own place. "Don't shoot. Quicksilver, no! Sit."
Haskell unleashed his own version of a growl. "Get that animal locked out of my sight or he's chopped liver."
Quicksilver was strong, big, and fast, but I wasn't going to risk him against a hail of bullets, and I was sure Haskell was the type to overkill.
"Back, boy!" I didn't have a good place to pen him up, so I pushed him into the kitchen, and then shut the pantry door on him. "Stay!"
When I turned, Haskell was right behind me, stuffing the gun down the front of his pants as proud and pleased as if it was something else.
My heart was still pounding from the sudden threat to Quicksilver, but I found my calm, cool TV reporter voice. "What's this about, Detective?"
"Dead freak at the Inferno and you're all over the security tapes mixing it up with her in fancy dress. Very fancy dress." He eyed me slowly, as if I was a naked centerfold.
"If you want to talk to me about it-"
"Talk, nothing. I want your fingerprints. Your DNA." He swaggered closer on each sentence.
Quicksilver's claws were bounding against the shut door. It wouldn't hold him forever. I had to get out of here before then. Cooperation, capitulation, was the best move for both of us.
"I'm onto you," Haskell said, getting literally in my face. "You're not ex-FBI, lady. You're nothing more than a suspect, a damn likely one. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an-" He stopped to stare at my wrist. "You're already wearing what's left of one set of handcuffs you've escaped?"
"It's a fashion statement," I snarled. Damn Snow for making me look like an escaped felon!
My show of resistance gave Haskell the spur he needed.
"You'll be making a statement, all right." Haskell spun me around to snap both my wrists behind my back into the real thing. "You damn Goth punks with your fake prison tattoos and your heavy-metal jewelry. Think you can sneer at the police. Think again."
He pushed me face-first against the nearest wall. I avoided a broken nose only be turning my head fast.
My heart was pounding so hard I could hardly hear anything over it. No wonder. First there'd been the threat to Quicksilver, now the swift administration of my favorite phobia: bound and in the hands of bullies. I didn't know what had happened long ago to kick it off, but this scene was much too close to that for continuing sanity.
I had to calm down and think.
Meanwhile, the bastard was indicating that I should spread my legs by nudging my inner thighs with the muzzle of his semiautomatic, simultaneously patting me down and feeling me up fore and aft.
Rage and fear mixed into a potent stew inside my chest, but my head kept fighting for control. He was police. He could maul me but he couldn't really hurt me.
"You white-trash bitches," he was muttering. "Always bad-mouthing white guys and you turn around hot to be Meskin meat. All that good white skin wasted as black boys' and bite boys' meat." He pulled my hair, hard, back to examine both sides of my neck as if I were a horse for sale. "No freaking bite boy nibbles. Wrists clean, but... oh, too bad, somebody's been bruisin' 'em."
Yeah! Him!
"Bet you've done this bit before, babe, and liked it."
He jerked on my handcuffs. I bit my lip to silence a cry. Evidence of fear and pain only encouraged sadists like Haskell. "Maybe you give out from the femoral arteries. That it? You a thigh baby?"
A deep voice tolled like a basso bell in my mind. You have a witness.
Haskell's head jerked up, as if he had heard it too. "Is there someone here?"
I could hear a faint throb of fear. Like all bullies, he feared someone bigger. And, yes, of course! I did have a witness!
"Nightwine," I called to the ceiling, remembering his security fetish. "Do something!" Just because his security cameras were rolling 24/7 didn't mean he was actually watching my particular episode of VPV; Vegas Police Violence at this moment. What could he do? Or Godfrey for that matter? Other than "witness."
The gun barrel left my thighs as Haskell stepped back to point it due north.
"You got an accomplice up there? In the attic? This is only a one-story place. Answer, bitch!"
"Nobody else is here, but this cottage stands on Hector Nightwine's property. He produces all the CSI shows."
He grabbed and pulled my hair again. "You think I care who you service?"
"He's my boss and a very paranoid man. The whole estate is covered with security devices. You're on Candid Camera, Detective Haskell."
"I don't believe you," Haskell said.
But he was nervous now and backed away from me. "Crazy too. Talking to the ceiling. You're making it way too easy. First I got you on impersonating an officer, and now the biggie, Murder One. Bet Cadaver Boy will be real upset about this. Too bad."
He grabbed my handcuffs and used them to pull, push, and half-drag me out of the cottage. How'd he get in here, anyway?
I saw his car parked on the street. He'd scaled the wall, so he must have disabled a section of the alarm wiring. Even better: Nightwine had him filmed violating personal property without a warrant outside as well as in, like the L.A. police getting into OJ. Simpson's Brentwood property after finding his estranged wife dead elsewhere. Johnnie Cochran could make quite a case of this. Too bad he was dead. Then again...
Haskell slammed me into the back seat of his unmarked car, not bothering to push my head down so it didn't bang the doorframe. I managed to duck, having seen enough crime shows on TV and enough live arrests in Wichita to know the drill.
I fell sideways on a seat that smelled of sweat, vomit, and strawberry car freshener. I almost added to the vomit and was half-sorry I didn't, although I wouldn't want Haskell to know what he'd done to my nervous system.