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.
I managed to work myself upright, despite the bruising handcuffs. I had excellent lower body strength from self-defense workouts. Too bad it hadn't paid to use them.
He drove me down the Strip, a slow, public route that allowed people to gawk at me when the car paused at the interminable stoplights. I'd known cops. I'd worked with them. Most of them were good, dedicated people. But when one went bad, he went very bad indeed.
At the cross street of Paradise, I spotted Quicksilver weaving in and out of the colorful trail of tourists on the sidewalks like a shaggy, ghostly greyhound.
The pantry door would have to be completely replaced by the resident brownies, but I didn't mind. It was good to know he was nearby and keeping it as discreet as an animal his size could.
Good dog.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Downtown" was more than a figure of speech in Las Vegas. The main police department offices were there, near the Fremont Hotel, but homicide, aka crimes against persons, had long since gotten its own building in the Sin City That Never Sleeps.
Haskell left me handcuffed to a small, scarred table in a miserable cubicle of a room with soundproof tile on the ceiling. (I wasn’t about to yell to that eye-in-the sky ceiling for help, anyway.) In front of me was a table bearing nothing but one empty ashtray stinking of tar and nicotine. I was sitting in a chair so plastic and imbued with sweat, fear, and other less mentionable bodily fluids that it made my skin crawl.
I really needed to go to the bathroom but knew that if I asked anyone he'd make sure I didn't. I'd covered crime stories. I knew how cops made suspects squirm by any means. So I was guilty of…what? Back exposure with intent to seduce? It actually crossed my mind to wonder if Snow would bail me out. It was probably his set-up anyway. His note had implied that I had power of a sort. Too bad nobody had clued me in on exactly what it was.
"Miss…Street?" The woman who poked her head in the door was blonde but hard-edged. Maybe five years older than I was. Carried her shoulders like she worked out and had mojo authority. Was a pretty cool chick, really. Ric's captain friend. Oh, shit. I nodded.
"I'm going to have to testify to your phone call proving prior interest in the Inferno, from witnessing the Sunset Park crime scene."
"Be my guest."
"Being a hard-ass won't help you."
"Funny. I thought telling the truth might."
"Haskell says before this came up you impersonated an officer on that crime scene."
"I implied, he inferred. He was being sexist."
Blondie's poker face didn't move. She faced sexist every day.
"And racist," I added.
A little of the ice broke. She really did like Ric.
"Haskell has issues," she conceded. Malloy started to leave, then hesitated. "You might want to reconsider saying anything."
I nodded. Message received. My truth could be my fall. I felt a shiver of silver moving along my arm to my hand. A white flash settled around my neck on a chain. Won't you wear my ring. No!
Haskell poked his red, hypertensive face into the room. "Guess what. Guess you do have a man upstairs. Your 'lawyer' is here."
All right! My lawyer. Pretty fast service from someone. Hmm.
"I hope you haven't cuffed her," I heard an authoritative voice say in the hall. A boldly black-and-white CinSim rolled into the room, maybe 270 pounds of designer suit. He had a baritone deep enough to take out the Three Tenors. Cool enough to chill dry ice.
"My name is Mason," he said. "Perry Mason."
Not Johnnie Cochran, but not bad.
Nightwine must have caught up with the tape pretty damn quick after we left. Who else would send Perry Mason, for God's sake?
I sat up straight in my scuzzy jailhouse chair. I couldn't wait for my next line. "My name is Street. Delilah Street."
He took the chair across from me like a pope deigning to sit on a toadstool. "What a coincidence. My personal assistant's name is Street. Delia Street. May I call you-?"
"Delilah."
He looked uneasy for the first time "Delilah. I like it. Now, Delilah Street, how do we get you out of this mess?"
"I thought that was your job."
"Here, yes. The convincing explanations later are up to you, young lady."
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Snow groupie had been found dead in a Dumpster at the hotel's rear the morning after my jaunt to the Inferno. She'd been strangled. Her image flashed into my mind's eye, a harmless-looking middle-aged woman, really, except for the fanatic's mania in her eyes and voice.
The hotel security cameras had recorded everything, including shots of this very woman looking green when Snow had come on to me. Cameras had also recorded our fight over the hairpins later and my obvious rebuff. The police theory was she'd come after a lock of my hair later and I'd killed her. Groupies could be annoying, but the police scenario did presume a certain element of self-defense on my part.
Perry had picked up on that immediately, ace attorney that he was in book and on film. When he drove me home in his black fifties Caddy convertible that felt like Dolly's love match, I told him I'd finished my evening at the Inferno breaking and entering the executive offices. He frowned impressively.
"Pleading innocence by virtue of being occupied in another crime is not a viable defense. Miss, er, Delilah Street. Also, from your own testimony, you left the office in plenty of time to commit mayhem elsewhere."
"Didn't the hotel cameras capture the body being Dumpstered?"
"A good question. No. A black batlike shape covered the lens for several minutes that early morning."
"Should they be looking for a vampire?"
"Perhaps. The neck was not marked by a ligature, or tooth marks, it was mauled. It would be impossible to tell if a vampire bite was involved. You, of course, are not a vampire?"
I showed my pearly whites, blunt and even. "Not to my knowledge. In fact, I have a deep aversion to vampires."
"Doesn’t everyone?"
"Not vamp tramps and Snow groupies."
"You think this woman could have had an opportunity to approach this 'Snow' person after you left his office, and he killed her?"
Was Snow a killer? I didn't know. What did I know…?
"The woman was demented," I said. "All those Snow fans are. You should see them claw each other in the mosh pit to be one of the so-called lucky few he bends down to kiss."
"On the mouth?"
"Yeah!"
I recalled how Snow rose after each extended smooch and placed his palm on the latest conquest's forehead like a televangelist to push her back into the crowd. How the woman fell, senseless, into a buoying mass of her sister fanatics. And then disappeared beneath the swell of clamoring wannabe recipients of what they called the Brimstone Kiss.
"Those mosh-pit women clot like those spawning fish called grunion," I said. "Someone could disappear in their midst and never been seen again until-"
"The Dumpster."
"Exactly."
"I've seen the security film the police confiscated," Perry said. "You don't look dressed to kill."