Nick Charles waited for me beside the Inferno Bar, his comforting, smartly sloshed, dapper self, a spare martini in hand just for me.

"Thanks, Nicky. I needed this."

"Everyone does but they don't know it yet." He reeled only slightly as he picked up his own almost empty glass. His martini glasses were always almost empty.

I leaned against the bar to sip gin and vermouth like the lady Myrna Loy's Nora Charles always was, wishing I had my own Asta on a leash at my feet. Poor little Achilles. Sudden tears stung my eyes like undiluted gin. The unconditional love of a dog is impossible to replace, even with another dog as awesome as Quicksilver.

"I'm glad-" Nicky leaned groupie close on a soft scent of vermouth. After all, we were married for the evening, "-we met up. Word around the watering hole here is that the Inferno is the hub of all the straight and kinked crime in Las Vegas. That chap onstage in the shiny pajamas is rumored to be the headman of the mob that runs this place. Hard to believe his act. What is his problem?"

I took his arm with a smile. Sexy now translated way different from when he'd been the sex kitten's pajamas back in the day.

"Another one for the road?" Even as Nicky spoke he nodded at the bartender. "The traffic on the Strip could kill a sober pedestrian."

I laughed and hitched my skirt and myself onto a bar stool to eye the bartender. "I'll have an Albino Vampire."

His congenial face went as white as mine was naturally. All along the bar, chitchat stopped. Glasses ceased clinking. Other bartenders froze in the act of pouring scotch, gin, vodka, wine, beer. Obviously, Christophe's staff knew the boss hated that rumor.

"What's…in it?" My bartender sounded like he was being invisibly throttled.

Behind me Cocaine -Snow must be a, hmm, pet name-was pouring out a great rock ballad about Lady Velvet. I could feel his sunglasses zeroing in on my bare, defenseless, and still so well pampered back, and proceeded to ad lib a recipe. "A jigger of white Creme de Cocoa, a jigger of vanilla Stoli, a jigger of Lady Godiva white chocolate liqueur topped with a swirl of Chambord raspberry liquor the color of blood, in a martini glass."

Nick Charles regarded me with awed approval and a gentle palm clapping. The bartender shortly after presented me with a dazzling white dessert of a drink tricked out with a hint of hot pink. The boys and girls at the bar gasped as one.

Nick and I chimed rims, then I swiveled to face the stage.

Cocaine/Snow still had the spotlight but the sunglasses might be looking anywhere.

I lofted my glass in a farewell toast.

Snow lashed his spun-glass angel hair around like a white Persian cat-o'-nine-tails and ended the song with long, wailing banshee of a guitar chord.

I'd have liked to think the final flourish was just for me, but then so did every woman present, and most of them were storming the mosh pit, clawing each other for the honor of being one of the women Snow bent down to kiss.

Ridiculous. I turned to Nicky. "Time to rock 'n' roll."

"Could you say that in English, please?"

"Time to do a do-si-do around the executive offices here. Are you and your friend in Security game?"

Before you could say "illegal entry," I had another uninvited hand on my bare back, this one clammy. I turned around to see…nothing. I felt another brush.

"Cut that out!"

I still saw nothing.

"Ah, lady, give a guy a break. It's pretty lonesome walking in my shoes," said a street-weary voice.

I glanced down. The plush blood-red carpeting that paved the casino area we were walking through was registering the imprint of a pair of size twelves, but that was the only sign that a fresh CinSim who was about as sexy as a cantaloupe was following me.

"Nicky!"

He was bringing up the rear, and I was beginning to wish it was my rear.

"Claude gets a bit carried away," Nicky said. "He's been invisible for almost eighty years. He hasn't had much chance to make a…hic…pass at anything more than a visiting breeze."

My knowledge of vintage film was finally paying off. As I recalled, H.G. Wells's Invisible Man, played by Claude Rains in the classic film, was a scientist who found that his secret formula for invisibility turned him into an insane killer.

Just who I'd want feeling up my spine. Science gone wrong was always turning people into monsters in the movies from the nineteen-thirties to the fifties. I sure as heck didn't need one of them guarding my back.

"Shhh!" Nicky leaned against a wall. "This is the entrance to Christophe's office. Only Claude can disable the security cameras."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I'm invisible, silly," Claude said with a parting pinch to my butt.

"Watch that! Vintage velvet fingerprints, you know."

"So I see." Claude chortled like a lovesick seal, but I felt the air rush of him passing me to slip through the office door.

"Do we really need that creep?" I asked Nicky.

"He's just misunderstood."

"He pinched me!"

"Believe me, I would myself if I didn't think Nora was out there somewhere, waiting for my personal attention in that area."

"I'm sorry, Nicky. It must be terrible being separated like this."

"At least Godfrey manages to come in now and again when his boss releases him for an errand."

"Releases?"'

"We're tied to our environments. We'd melt like the Wicked Witch of the West if we wandered off without permission and suitable…adjustments. Has to be that way. Couldn't have valuable investments like us two-stepping down the Strip to the next hotel."

"That's outrageous!"

"It's better than being trapped onscreen saying the same lines over and over the rest of our, er, lives. However, I do relish a return to my detecting days. What are we looking for?"

"I don't know. A reason why an Inferno gambling chip that's no more than three years old would show up in an eighty-year-old mob burial site."

"How do you know it's a mob burial site?"

"It's on present-day public land that was raw desert decades ago. And inside was a dead couple. In evening dress. Coupling. Shot and stabbed to death."

"Flagrante delicto, right?"

"Is that a dessert?"

"No, my dear, it's a refined way of saying they were caught in the act and nailed for nailing. That does indeed have an old-time mob feel to it. Gangsters' molls were major players in early Las Vegas."

"I was thinking more Romeo and Juliet. They seemed young."

"The bones?"

No, the vibes, but I couldn't admit my occult visions, not even to a walking illusion.

"Aha!" Meanwhile, the Invisible Man was having a field day rooting through a sleek white Louis XV desk in front of an audio-visual equipment wall that made Nightwine's look like a Tinker Toy.

"Is this what you wanted, lady fair?" Claude asked with demented courtesy.

On the desk's glass surface a series of sketches spun to catch my eye. I rushed over. At first I took the drawings for coin designs, but then realized that they were sketches for the Inferno casino chips.

I'd never gotten a good look at the one Detective Haskell's CSI team had unearthed and bagged. Now I was looking at the drawings of its prototype, of several prototypes. Curiouser and curiouser. The styles were a parade of decades, from the forties to the teens of our own century, and they all bore the unmistakable mark of that Art Deco master, Erte. Who'd lived into his nineties, but had been dead these, um, thirty-some years. Maybe.

I sat in one of the white leather and steel chairs before the desk, flipping through a cavalcade of designs. It was like ogling Cadillac dream cars from the forties to my Dolly in the mid-fifties to the post-2000 all-electric and hybrid models of the present day. It was like viewing the private commissions of a dead artist.