“Maybe it’s not just coincidence. Are you seeing your dad this trip?”
“Lunch Monday. He wants to meet you.”
“You didn’t tell me any of these plans beyond the Sunday dinner.”
“And you didn’t ask, wise woman that you are.” Matt came around the couch to fold her into his arms. “I didn’t know how it was going to work out. I’ll probably be playing therapist all four days. You’re just the gorgeous, charming distraction I need to keep me sane, and keep my crazy family on their company toes so a total meltdown doesn’t occur.”
“Funny, I’m just in this trip for the sex.”
“And you’ll get it,” he promised, moving his lips to her ear. “After you see the way my family has messed up, you’ll know we can’t help but get everything right.”
The moment was interrupted by a harsh, sawing sound. Oh-oh. Louie had abandoned his catbird seat on the couch. It sounded like he was making retching noises behind it. By the time Temple got there to tend him, he’d turned away and was vigorously scraping his nails all the way down to the tough jute backing of the costly carpet.
Obviously, Louie was sharpening his utensils in preparation for Sunday dinner, which was held, as it always was in the Midwest, in the middle of the day, after church.
The only more intimidating scene for their first social appearance as an engaged couple Temple could imagine was at the Barr family home in Minneapolis.
Chapter 8
Doves vs. Pigeons
To enter the Goliath Hotel, one had to walk or drive under the three-stories-high statue of a straddling man, the said Goliath, although his kilt looked more like a sumo wrestler’s diaper.
“Older” in Vegas meant cornier. Passing through the showy mirrored copper entrance onto a carpet bearing woven-in camel figures, Max wended around a twelve-foot-wide meandering lobby waterway called “the Love Moat,” where tourists lounged in automated red-velvet-lined gondolas.
Finally he made it through the noisy, crowded casino to where red velvet ropes blocked off an attraction that went “dark” during the daytime.
Max stood staring at a placard mounted behind glass at the Goliath Hotel Sultan’s Palace Theatre.
SOPHISTA, MISTRESS OF MAGIC OF THE 21ST CENTURY.
It didn’t surprise him that he’d been replaced.… His run had ended almost two years ago.
It didn’t surprise him that he’d been replaced by a woman. The magic field had been a male domain for too long.
What shocked him was that he’d been replaced by an utterly new name in the magic-show firmament.
Not that anybody would recognize him now.
He’d worn his usual self-effacing casual black but had sacrificed his thick black locks to a messy postmodern crew cut. Now he looked like any gel-laden spiky-topped hipster out there, vaguely gangsta but also slickly Hollywood. Pretty soon he’d be growing a soul patch … and goatee. Zeus forbid!
Given the new hollows on his already angular face, the look was hip and sinister enough to blend in like a lot of other Vegas wiseguys on the make.
“Hot, ain’t she?”
Max corrected his line of vision from the magic show headline to the magician’s Victoria’s Secret pumped-up bustline. “But can she make rabbits leap out of hats?” he asked.
“Man, I would leap out of hats for that babe.” The guy was a Chris Rock wannabe, too genial to be quite as hard-edged as he hoped for. He glanced up at Max. “You a fan of magicians, or those major perky rabbits?”
“I’m a fan of illusion.”
“Wow, dude, you should have seen the magician they used to have here. The guy walked on air in a snowfall of pigeons.”
“Doves.”
“Oh, yeah, doves. Wonder what happened to him? Wonder what happened to all that bird shit?”
Max laughed. “No wonder he walked on air.”
“Right. Right!” The guy shot his trigger finger at him. “Good one.”
After the man moved on, Max remained staring at the glossy babe who’d replaced him without seeing anything but the makeup and costume. They might remember his act, but not his working name, or him. Good to know the new look was working.
He turned to wander back through the casino area listening to the chortles and screams and clucks of the push-button slot machines that silently swallowed five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills. “One-armed bandits” was a vintage expression now. Only the die-hard slot addicts could find a machine with a physical lever to pull.
And if they did, the hotel would know. Sensors populated casinos like popcorn multiplied in movie theater aisles and seats. They resided on every slot machine, every ATM, every computerized door lock system. Computersville. Max refrained from gazing above the gambling tables and apparatuses. A casino this size might install three thousand eye-in-the-sky cameras but had only fifty monitors watched by six or so people. Casino surveillance was geared to archives, not live issues.
That meant a dead man among the camera-servicing pathways might lie undiscovered there for a while, given all the remote recording methods nowadays. Max needed to get up in the ceiling service areas to explore.
Some casinos also had catwalks in the ceiling above the casino floor, catwalks that allowed surveillance personnel to look directly down, through one-way glass, on the activities at the tables and/or slot machines. On him.
Luckily, casinos still lavished mirror on many surfaces. Max studied the camera placements in eye-level reflections.
All the casinos also relied on the old mechanical “eye in the sky,” hyped up for the new century. Max checked his watch, knowing a PTZ, the devilishly versatile Pan Tilt Zoom security camera, could read the time and count the hairs on his wrist. The catch was, what was happening above the PTZ went unrecorded, and undetected … unless a tattletale body crashed through the fancy ceiling tiles.
Not his, he devotedly hoped.
Chapter 9
Tunnel Vision
Max had finally found a service entrance and was elbow-crawling through the ceiling access tunnels above the Goliath casino area. The aging hotel’s multimillion-dollar face-lifts over the years had left much of the interior infrastructure in place.
Sure, the cameras and remote-viewing equipment were state of the art. Yet the light maintenance modern cameras required meant that outmoded and bypassed air-conditioning ductwork that was as forgotten, narrow, and tortuous as secret passages in the Great Pyramid at Giza could be used. At least access to the murder scene hadn’t altered since then.
Ga-cheez. Max sneezed at the dust. He was proceeding not by memory, but by what he could find about the hotel’s layout on the Internet. What a pathetic amateur memory loss had made of him.
After scouting the building’s well-disguised functional areas, he’d found the battered gray-painted metal door that led to this area. Service stairwells sported so many of these doors that the thrum of recognition in his mind at seeing it could have been déjà vu instead of resurrecting memory.
All he knew from Temple Barr, his lost love, and Molina, his unremembered enemy, was that a body had been found in the above-casino area of the Goliath. Molina, at least, had given him the vic’s name. Max lifted an elbow to claw farther forward and banged his funny bone on a metal strut.
Not funny, he thought with gritted teeth, biting back monumental curses. The drilling pain made him wonder why torture by funny bone had never been popular. What had Temple said? The man had been stabbed. That method of murder made sense in these cramped labyrinths, but one sure couldn’t lift an arm far to get in a decent killing blow.
According to Review-Journal archives the victim, Anthony Hedberg, had been the Goliath’s assistant security chief. Had Tony happened on a crime in the making, say abetting big-time cheating on the gaming tables below, or blackmailing the cheaters, or even a heist? Or was Hedberg a good guy gone bad? Was he setting the stage for any or all of the above?