He paused for a few moments, lost in thought.
“Very well. I shall take the case. But I’ll require a fee.”
“My chief has already okayed it.”
Holmes grunted approvingly before turning his attention from Capaldi to the scene beyond his window. The flashing lights, the dreamlike outlines of the different hotels, the churning throng on the sidewalks below.
“Just out of interest, Mr. Holmes,” he heard Capaldi venture, “what exactly do you think of Vegas?”
“Even by the standards of modern day America…” and the great detective lowered his tone, aware that honesty required being rude, “it is utterly preposterous.”
Holmes weaved through the dense crowds on the Strip. The heat and noise seemed to lash at him like whips. People in this modern age moved so quickly and with such noisy bustle, even when they were taking their leisure. He missed London. He missed his flat over Baker Street. And most of all, he missed Watson, although that final emotion was tinged, as ever, with a faint coloring of guilt. The poor old fellow had finally succumbed to a pulmonary canker. Had voluminous doses of secondary pipe-smoke been the cause of that?
It was the worst thing about immortality, seeing those that you’d been close to disappear behind you on the river of implacable time. Lestrade himself. Mrs. Hudson. Even those urchins called the Baker Street Irregulars had grown up, then greyed and met their final hour before his very eyes. Perhaps that was why he had left England. He kept constantly on the move these days, as if he were trying to avoid growing attached too much to anything. Currently, he was travelling the length and breadth of the United States. But after those were done with, where might he wind up?
There was no point, he told himself, either in being maudlin or in wondering too deeply what the future might hold. His longevity was a fact that he had little choice but to accept. Focussing his thoughts on something that could not be changed was an absurd waste of his talents. It was better to stay in the realms of the possible and direct his mind to more constructive ends.
Like solving this terrible case, for instance. That would keep him busy for a while.
Holmes was in disguise, realizing his normal garb would draw too much attention to himself. He needed to blend in, so he had on a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, canvas shoes, a beige baseball cap and a pair of chinos. It was the best compromise that he could manage. He would rather die a hundred deaths than resort to jeans or shorts.
He had come here for two reasons only: First, to see the place with his own eyes, and secondly, to visit Star Trek: the Experience. He had become a devotee of the original show and its movie spin-offs, since he felt a great affinity with the character called Mr. Spock.
He’d intended to spend two or three days here at the very most. Then the murders had begun — he had immediately suspected his assistance might be called upon. In fact, he had already been making some enquiries of his own.
Most of the people around him were tourists, here for the shows, the restaurants and bars, the dolphins and white tigers and only a little flutter on the side. They interested him not a jot. At the heart of this case lay gambling in the serious sense and the caprices of fortune; he was utterly certain of it. That commodity could be found in any place here, any time of day and night. This was a town where the game was constantly afoot.
He headed for the Paris, the setting of Kyle Monoghan’s triumph and the last place that he had been seen. There was one thing Holmes was convinced of, whoever was behind this, there were more than one of them. Harriet Ellison could have been abducted by a single individual, and Daniel Besset had been elderly and slightly built, but Monoghan and Lawrence Mark were both robust and burly. No drugs had been found in the toxicology, so there were at least two murderers involved.
He went through the lobby and into the labyrinthine depths of the casino, his attention gliding watchfully from side to side. Nothing that he saw surprised him after more than a week in this place. Lights flashed everywhere, and there were constant, repetitive clangs and hums and clatters. But that summed up this ultra-modern age, now didn’t it? For all of the advances that mankind had made, most of it wound up as pointless sound and fury.
The majority of the visitors in here were, as out on the sidewalk, merely tourists. They were gambling, but only with a sense of merriment. These were the kind of folk who set a fifty dollar limit, or smaller, for the entire evening. The kind who gambled at all merely because they could not do the same back home.
Scattered among them were other individuals whose presence Holmes found considerably more ominous. Older women wearing gloves, so that they’d not callous their fingers with their constant tugging at the one-armed bandits. Pale, intense men hunched as though in prayer over the blackjack tables. People standing near the roulette wheels with starved-looking gleams in their dull, tired eyes. There was nothing merry about these sorts. Gambling fever had them in its grip as tightly — nay, savagely — as any opiate. They had become slaves to the habit, and poorly treated slaves, at that.
Mostly, they were cheaply dressed. There was evidence that they had pawned watches and rings in some cases — all it needed was a swift glance at their lower finger joints and wrists. But it was their expressions that struck most at the great detective. Hope would flare up as the card was dealt, the wheel set spinning, but it would give way, almost invariably, to horrible disappointment, made all the more profound by the fact that it was a familiar sensation.
He headed for the bar area, glad to leave the poor wretches behind. It was not a busy hour of the day, and there was just one man working behind the counter.
“What’s your poison, buddy?”
Holmes ordered a piña colada, a drink for which he had acquired a taste. They’d not had much in the way of pineapples in Victorian London, and he relished the flavour.
“That unfortunate fellow they found this morning. He was in here yesterday, wasn’t he?”
“You bet,” the barman frowned. “Had an incredible run at the tables.”
“Did he celebrate here afterwards?”
“Where else would he go?”
“And he attracted a big crowd?”
The barman grinned sardonically. “Pal, when you’re on a winning streak in Vegas, hell, you’ve always got a load of friends. The dames especially … that is, till your luck runs out.”
“Does anyone in particular linger in your memory?”
The man thought about it. “There was this chick dressed in black. Chinese or Japanese or something. She didn’t kind of pounce on the guy. She just moved in on him slowly, till finally she had her arm around him.”
Holmes felt his pulse quicken. In all the enquiries he had made so far, there had been mention of an Oriental woman.
“And did Monoghan leave with her?”
“Friend, I was too busy mixing drinks to even know.”
Holmes thanked him and then headed back towards the gaming area. He already had a plan. In fact, he’d come to see that what he needed to attract these villains was a winner. Someone on a lucky streak. That was the kind of person who they targeted.
There was nobody he could make out who answered that description at the moment, so he would have to engineer it.
It would be childishly simple to join one of the high stakes blackjack games and start to win a fortune by the trick of counting cards, but establishments like this one were accustomed to such practices — the security goons would descend on him before the killers could. So Holmes turned to the roulette area instead.
The first three wheels that he looked at were functioning perfectly, but the fourth? There appeared to be some very slight wear to the bearings. Patterns — too small for a lesser intellect to notice — were being repeated in the places that the ball fell. Holmes stood back for fifteen minutes, taking mental notes. Finally, he felt confident a goodly amount of lucre could be made here.