I reached up to tear the last form from my hair, but it eeled away from my touch. I never wore the sides of my hair pushed up. The 1940s coiffure reminded me of the Black Dahlia, the era's most famous female victim and, now, of Cicereau's poor dead daughter. So the moveable silver thread looped around my neck into the form of a narrow snake chain, produced a smooth bezel and added a large faceted blue topaz.
Cool. I decided to take the hint and wear my forties white linen suit with shoulder pads big enough for a modern-day linebacker. Girly and gritty. It was something Ingrid Bergman might have worn in Notorious or Casablanca to meet a cynical Cary Grant or a bitter Humphrey Bogart. But the man I was going to see about a corpse was neither of those things. He was just Hell on wheels.
I ankled into the Inferno Bar on my white leather platform sandals with the, well, ankle straps. The area was awash with so many CinSymbiants-as devoted CinSim fans were called-in vintage drag it was hard to tell who were the real Cinema Simulacrums. CinSymbs dolled themselves up as their favorite CinSims, white-face and all. They gathered in droves here in the evenings, before the Seven Deadly Sins performed.
I wended my way past Clark Gable from Mogambo chatting with a blond Vivien Leigh from A Streetcar Named Desire. A CinSymb could pay personal tribute to any actor/role he or she wished. This Gable was short and stout and Vivien weighed two hundred pounds, but their costumes were perfectly in period and they looked quite dashing. The sound system was playing Big Band music that covered most of the eras represented. "In the Mood" was one of my favorites and I couldn't help swaying my hips to the choo-choo motion that made Swing king for a couple decades.
"Wheuuut-woo," Nick Charles wolf-whistled as I approached, turning to pull the white gardenia boutonniere in his dark tux jacket free and tuck it behind one of my ears. '"Sweet Leilani', one of Bing's best," he said, citing a Hawaiian ballad from his thirties' heyday.
"Think Snow will dig this outfit?" I asked him, taking a red-enameled steel barstool.
"White? What's not to like?" Nicky snapped his off-white fingers. The barman produced the cocktail of my invention, an Albino Vampire, in a minute flat.
"I need to talk to the boss," I said after the first, long, luscious sip. Damn, this was good! Too bad you can't copyright drinks.
"With you in that outfit, he'll be here before you can kiss that martini glass rim goodbye," Nicky warned. "Nora will be chartreuse with envy if she hears about this."
"Are you flirting with the customers, as ordered?" a deep baritone asked behind us. "Drink up, Delilah," it added, lowering a register into a soft purr. "I want to dance with you."
Why did that voice resonate in the pit of my stomach? Why did I know it wasn't addressing Nick Charles after the first question? Maybe because he was a Vegas entertainment icon or maybe because I was nervous or maybe because it came from the pit of Hell.
I took a long, long swallow of the vodka and white-chocolate-liqueur blend, then turned, ready to face the music and dance.
Snow wasn't performing until later. No white leather catsuit open from throat to navel. He was wearing a white silk Italian suit with white ostrich cowboy boots, only the roach-stomping pointed toe-tips visible, a white poet's shirt open at the neck to show off the pink ruby dog collar around his albino-white neck, and the usual black sunglasses.
I stood. Ric was tall but Snow was taller. Ric could salsa with the werewolves, but Snow could rock with the Seven Deadly Sins.
He held out his hands and I moved into his ballroom embrace.
How could so much white be so hot? White-hot maybe?
I really had no rhythm and I couldn't dance. Ric overcame that with his sexy human, Hispanic warmth. Snow overcame everything with his icy unhuman perfection and command. He led a dance partner like a cobra, fast, sleek, sinister.
I could feel his hands sucking the warmth and courage from my body as we foxtrotted around the dance floor, alone in the crowd. For such a high-profile personality, an international rock star and Vegas kingpin, Snow could become oddly invisible to the mob at will.
He pressed me close, moved his hand from my shoulder blade to my lower back, took the other to cradle it on his shoulder, then tangoed me like a puppet over the floor. I felt like a girl in a Parisian Apache dance, slung from pillar to post, winning the battle of the sexes through submission.
Snow had made a career on being ridiculously sexy. I had made a career on being totally impervious to sexy ploys. I was the objective reporter. Incorruptible. He was corruption personified. I knew he wanted me, but he wanted me ruined. That would never happen.
He stopped the sweep around the dance floor, released me. "You are really as tempting as an Albino Vampire in that ensemble. Is that why you wore it? What do you want from me?"
I quoted Patrick McGoohan as Number Six in The Prisoner. (I'm a vintage film junkie, occasionally even if it was on TV in color.) "Information," I intoned.
"Always your petty self-serving goals. Always nothing really interesting."
"You have got me so wrong, Snow. Self-serving is your modus operandi. What I want to know might help you and your Vegas empire. Interested now?"
"In what you're up to? Always."
"In what I know or don't know. Always."
He shrugged. It only enhanced the lines of his three-thousand-dollar suit. Armani, I bet. "The office, I suppose. You're so tediously dedicated to business rather than pleasure."
"Here," I retorted, "business is pleasure, and damnation."
His fingertip touched the blue topaz stone nestled on my breastbone. It grew suddenly warm, as did his tone. "You've been plumbing the depths of personal pleasure lately. It makes you very…persuasive. Come to my office, Delilah, where we can talk in private."
As if we weren't in some bizarre bubble when he moved through the public places of his empire… I followed in his wake, feeling a little like Captain Ahab. "Whales" were big spenders and gamblers in Vegas. I bet that Snow was a "great white whale" when it came to the top rank of hotel-casino owners.
At the door to his office he hesitated to allow me to enter first. As I did, he plucked the gardenia from my hair, inhaled its heavy, sweet aroma, and then put it in the buttonhole of my suit lapel. It had become a midnight-red rose wafting almost narcoleptic scent.
He sat in the white leather executive chair behind the desk, tented his long white fingers and let me gaze at my tiny reflection in those jet-black lenses.
I felt like a suspect up before a homicide cop. There were those "depths of personal pleasure" I'd been delving with Ric in the presence of Snow's lock of long white hair turned body jewelry, turned snitch. There was my secret plan to attempt to reform hooked Snow groupies into free women I hadn't yet done anything about. Soon.
I sighed as if bored and sat on one of the white leather and steel chairs facing his desk.