Cat In A White Tie And Tails

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It didn’t surprise him that he’d been replaced by a woman.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What shocked him was that he’d been replaced by an utterly new name in the magic-show firmament.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.