"There's plenty of room up there," Nicky said. "Not over the entire area, but there's the command post, and various service accesses to the cameras. Nobody messes with them that often. The guy could have been shot a week ago, and not be detected until next Easter. We're lucky the ceiling panels gave way."
"Please." Van was beginning to look in need of a seat herself. "My expertise is hotel management, not such sleazy matters as spying on our customers and employees. I do hope that man hasn't been dead for as long as Nicky thinks."
"No way," said Temple, not mentioning the slight, sweet-and-sour odor she had detected.
Death was a fast mover, but the man's ghoulish pallor indicated an earlier date with death than the moment of his fall. "And why would the ceiling give way?" she wondered aloud. "A man doesn't weigh any more dead than alive. Maybe someone pushed him, all right, but after he was dead."
"Why?" Nicky was skeptical. "That means risk of exposure. The pusher would have to get out of there fast."
"Everyone was too distracted by his spectacular descent to react quickly enough to catch anyone. Security sent some guys, but they didn't find anybody. You can bet the police won't."
"They may find how the ceiling was rigged to fall," Van von Rhine put in. Her china-blue eyes narrowed. "I supervised every stage of this hotels renovation. I can testify to the impossibility of a ceiling giving way like that, particularly one in the security area." Temple's thoughtful scowl matched Van's frown. ''You know, this kind of death is not without precedent in Las Vegas."
''What do you mean?" Nicky asked.
Temple shrugged. "A man was found dead some months ago in the security area over the Goliath Hotel casino."
" 'In?' " Nicky questioned.
Temple nodded soberly. "He didn't fall on any gaming tables, but he was just as mysteriously dead as this guy. Murdered."
"Anybody know why?" Van sounded aghast.
"The case is still open, as far as I know," Temple said. And, she added to herself. Max Kinsella is still a prime suspect.
Even as she worried at the knots of her particular past, the curtains behind them parted to a stream of exiting police technicians. Lieutenant Ferraro, uniformed officers and, finally, the dark plastic length of a body bag.
"This way." Van intercepted Lieutenant Ferraro to conduct the mob to the shortest, if not the sweetest way out, Nicky close behind her.
Even then the procession had to pass before quite a crowd. Gape-mouthed gamesters focused bleary eyes on the pre-funeral cortege before turning back to their diversion of choice.
After a hesitation in the spinning, chiming and clatter of the slot machines, the hubbub resumed its tempo and traditional volume.
Temple, forgotten but not gone, shook her head and retreated down an aisle of nickel slot machines. She could see the hotel's security staff dismantling the curtains that surrounded the fatal craps table.
While she watched, an unholy cataract of coins slammed into a stainless steel sill behind her. As seldom as Temple gambled, she couldn't resist the sound of pay dirt being struck.
She turned to the still-clucking slot machine to see a sheepish figure hunched on the stool before it. He held his hat, a Frank Sinatra-style straw fedora, under the blizzard of coins as they overflowed the till and streamed onto the floor.
Temple squatted quickly to scrape up the overflow before someone else did. She rose to drop two fistfuls into the hat.
''Looks like you hit it rich, Eightball."
The old guy rubbed his mostly hairless head with one hand and wrinkled his nose at the loot.
''I ducked down this aisle so the cops wouldn't spot me. Then I threw a few nickels in the slot for cover, and now I'm the center of attention.''
Temple studied the wide-eyed players gathered around to watch Eightball stuffing nickels into stacks of paper cups.
''Jeez," he complained, "If my pals hear I hit a big payoff on the nickel slots my name'll be mudslide in this town. Nickel slots are for tourists and cheapskates."
"Then why'd you put a nickel in?" Temple asked, her mind adding the rest of the old lyric, in the nick-le-lod-e-on; all I want is you and mu-sic, mu-sic, mu-sic.
Eightball's answer surprised her.
"I needed to duck the cops."
"Why? You're an honest private investigator, aren't you?"
"Reasonably so," he said sourly. His money transferred to a formation of paper cups, he clapped his trademark straw fedora back on his head. "That dead guy there?" He jerked his head toward the fatal craps table.
"Yeah?"
"I think he's someone I been looking for."
"Who?"
"Just a guy someone wanted to find."
"What someone?"
"You know better than to ask that. A client."
"I'm glad to see that you abide by client confidentiality rules."
Eightball's crooked smile showed crooked teeth. "Yup, little lady, sometimes I abide by the rules, even when I'm itching not to."
He stood up. "Better cash out before anyone who knows me sees me with all these damn nickels."
"I'll help you carry them to the cashier," Temple volunteered.
"You're a real lady," Eightball said with a half-courtly tow.
"Whoopee," came a gleeful cackle from the slot machines opposite.
A white-haired woman wearing a mint-green knit pantsuit over a wildly overgrown blouse of violets turned to grin at them, her finger never leaving the button that rotated a greengrocer's rogues' gallery of renegade fruits. "Just imagine. Eight-ball O'Rourke busted down to playing the nickel slots. Wait'll I tell the Glory Hole Gang."
''Hester Polyester," he retorted with gusto, "if you squeeze out a peep about my activities today, I'll get a knitting needle and sew your lips shut so tight that you'll never shout 'Bingo!'
again."
The woman recycled some dead nickels from her till back into the machine's pitiless maw, never losing her rhythm: feed/ feed/feed . . . push . . . scrape/scrape/scrape . . . push.
"So you claim you're too hoity-toity for the nickel slots, are you? Guess you got a secret vice, O'Rourke. As for sewing up anybody's lips, you're so crooked you couldn't stitch a straight seam up a highway center line."
Hester Polyester was still cackling and cranking away as Temple and Eightball elbowed through the crowds to dump their booty of nickels at the marble-silled cashier's booth. Its brass grillwork made it look like a cross between a downtown bank's teller station and St. Peter's toll booth at the Pearly Gates. In a couple of minutes, Eightball was pocketing forty-three dollars in crisp bills.
They turned as one back to the casino floor. The craps table that had been the center of attention was indiscernible from the other tables in play, unless you knew exactly which one it was. And you could only tell that by looking up at the ceiling where a piece of bland cardboard filled in a jagged hole.
The Crystal Phoenix had little to worry about. Most gamblers never looked up, not even the ones who knew--or cared--about the Eye in the Sky.
Eightball shrugged without saying anything.
Carole Nelson Douglas
"I wish I knew who your client was." Temple said with a sigh. "I bet the police would love to know too."
"A client," Eightball said, with a particularly piercing look as if toothpicks in his eyeballs wouldn't get any more details out of him. "A client who's gonna be mighty disappointed to know his search has hit a dead end."
"He?"
"You're fast. Missy, but so are chuckwalla lizards. I don't tell them the time of day, neither."
His horny fingertips touched his fedora brim before he left, both a poorer and a richer man.
"Cliff Effinger." Temple breathed out the syllables with which Van had labeled the dead man, lost in a fog of speculation.