I do not chew tobacco, however, and I do not like it when the usual stew of milling human presence is supplemented by various latex smells from items called Spock ears and Bajoran noses. To confuse the crime scene even more, various vendors have set up illegal carts to hawk green glow-in-the-dark alien-faced soap.
Holy Madam Curie! Anyone addicted to that glowy stuff ever think about radium exposure? I suppose there are “trace” amounts, but for one of my build and size, that is a lot of “trace.” Perhaps they have a new safe potion for the same effect.
I gaze at the rows of slanty-eyed faces with the green visage of a seasick Siamese. I never noticed before that those big-eyed little gray men much resemble those furless fancy cats called the Sphinx breed.
I want to make tracks out of this madhouse, but instead dutifully thread my way around the occasional potentially lethal Klingon boot and plenty of flip-flops, looking for Miss Temple’s arrival. I know she will be here somewhere. She cannot resist trying to straighten out a public relations disaster of this size and momentum. Misguided loyalty is her main flaw. She responded to what seemed to be a nice old gent, and now he has got us all in the soup.
I have been suspicious of Mr. Silas T. Farnum since the first time I took a ride on the Wynn’s floating parasols to keep an eye on him. Now he has imported a masquerading mob that could disrupt any unfound evidence at the crime scene.
This makes the savvy operative suspicious that that whole scheme is a put-up deal for just such a purpose.
One purported to be far wiser than my kind, but also dead (so I still have the advantage), noted “Where do you hide a leaf? In a forest.” This melee is just the thing to put the murder case on the back burner of public interest.
Fortunately, I am beset by my breed’s hallmark curiosity. The minute I realized Miss Temple was being drawn to this site someone had settled on for a body dump, I put my nose into overtime.
It is not enough that I see the lay of the land. I must also sniff it. Of course, I am attracted to unfinished construction, which is a jungle gym to those with my athletic prowess. Ever since I could put one paw in front of the other, I was fond of heights. I can run along the business edge of a construction two-by-four like nobody’s business, except that it is my business, since I am a shamus or a private eye or what you will.
Imagine my surprise when I start to scale this lovely conglomeration of concrete and steel and wood and plastic sheeting, and I find I have to break and enter.
That is right, folks. I never am for a moment deceived about there not being a building on this site hidden by whatever string theory, Einstein premise, or difference engine thingamajiggy Mr. Silas T. Farnum has funded to create an illusion.
I will not believe it until I smell it, and what I smell here (fresh paint, carpeting, electrical wiring) tells me that spectacular spinning UFO is just a Big Brother to the floating parasols at the Wynn. I am guessing it is another revolving restaurant togged out as an alien ship.
You know that famous book and movie where Miss Dorothy Gale’s little dog, Toto, pulls the curtain aside and the Wizard of Oz is proved to be just a puppeteer?
Well, anything a dog can do, Midnight Louie can do better, and I am about to pull several stories of plastic sheeting down on this phony “third encounter of the weird kind” act.
I start climbing an exterior spiral staircase made of Plexiglas. The central core of this structure is the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan turned inside out. How do I, a humble Vegas gumshoe, know about tony Frank Lloyd Wright classic designs in the Big Apple?
Simple as making Baked Alaska.
All things crass and cultured come to Vegas sometime. Thus I was able to stroll through the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum during its seven-year tenure at the Venetian Resort Hotel-Casino.
Naturally, my strolls were of the wee-hours variety, when I had a much less obstructed view of the treasures and minus human lower extremities in an odiferous array of vented and unvented footwear. That is to say, sandals and sweaty tennis shoes. It is hard to say which style is most repellent to the ankle-level nose.
Anyway, here I am now, making architectural connections and scaling this giant spiral shell under the cover of lots of canvas and plastic swaddling. I plan to reach the top and schuss down the unanchored billowing canvas so like a wooden ship’s sails.
I am pretty sure this act of derring-do will be the disruption that can break the spell of the stealth machine, which is the only real science fiction item on-site, and unveil the actual structure in one heroic, guaranteed viral media moment.
(I am miffed by my junior partner, Miss Midnight Louise, going viral first by hopping a ride on a Segway tour on the Las Vegas Strip not too long ago.)
This little stunt will put the V in “viral” and make the “Midnight” in “Midnight Investigations, Inc.,” a household name. Plus, it is a much better curtain-pulling-back act than any little black dog could manage. This is ten stories, folks, a small step for Las Vegas and mankind but a giant leap for Midnight Louie and catkind.
Like the movie stunt boys and girls do, I will land safely on several feet of piled canvas and plastic and my own legendary feet.
Uh-oh. I hear a strange whirring sound above. So does everyone present.
Great Bast’s Ghost! The entire doughnut-shaped revolving UFO restaurant is spiraling down on me like the head of a screw in the grip of a giant alien screwdriver.
Abandon mother ship!
I look down in horror as my nimble frame twists and plummets like Mr. Max Kinsella on a bungee cord.
I am not alone in this fall to earth.
A hitchhiking scene-stealer has crashed my act and is falling much less gracefully.
I am heading down at thirty miles an hour in the close company of some dude with a terminally dark George Hamilton tan who one-ups me as the main attraction, being both naked and dead.
Chapter 28
The Unusual Suspects
Molina stood with her back to Temple, boot-toed cowboy mules planted wide on the sandy soil, hands on hips. The stance reminded Temple of a gunfighter poised to draw, except, instead of carrying six-guns, she probably had a fancy foreign pistol stashed in a shoulder holster or tucked in the back of her pants or strapped to an ankle. Ruined the whole look.
Still, wearing her David Caruso CSI sunglasses as she turned sideways, Molina looked ready for a shoot-out in Miami, if not Las Vegas.
Temple saw another thing that ruined Molina’s whole Metro detective hard-nose look. She was interrogating the nervous dwarf at her side. Silas T. Farnum wore a gray-and-white-striped seersucker suit reminiscent of a convict’s outfit. His polka-dot tie also ruined the whole look.
“This has been a crime scene for more than forty-eight hours,” Temple heard Molina say, the words spit out like a Thompson submachine gun spraying bullets, actually. “You have had a concealed experimental scientific device on this site and did not report its presence? I don’t know how many charges an inspired assistant DA could string together, from violated city ordinances to one big mama of an illegal parking ticket.”
“But, Lieutenant. I’m an entrepren—”
“Now,” Molina went on at the same furious but controlled pace, “some poor soul who got caught up in your UFO fever scheme has plummeted to his death. Was it a construction worker? A tourist who glimpsed the shenanigans going on here and tried to climb his way to an answer? One of your so-called silent partners or fans or detractors? Homicide wants to know.”
Temple had been ordered to “Stand there.”
So she was kept mute five feet behind Molina and her victim but every word nailed her guilty conscience as well. She’d worn her dust-shedding red patent-leather pumps to the site, but she wasn’t comfortable.
“Explain yourself,” Molina barked at Farnum. By now Temple was envisioning the woman’s dark bobbed hair above a khaki pantsuit as the black-and-tan of a German shepherd guard dog on the attack. She really must rein in her imagination.
�
��I—I’m an entrepreneur, ma’am,” Farnum said.
“So was Bugsy Siegel,” came the icy response, “and look how he ended up. You’d be downtown getting your pinkies scanned for fingerprints if I didn’t need you to explain your science fiction device.”
“It’s not a device.”
Molina’s face donned an Are you contradicting me? glower.
Farnum continued his explanation. “I’m trying to explain the inexplicable here. It’s a process, actually. The structure employs metamaterials with a light-bending technology. You combine polymer substratas and gold and copper, which forcibly bend electromagnetic waves around an object. Light hitting the object is diverted around it. The light is not reflected nor refracted.”
Molina absorbed this cascade of technological terms, then shoved the sunglasses up onto her head and whirled to pin her gaze on Temple’s. Temple had always found the effect of intense blue eyes in an olive complexion like being hit by a blinding blue laser.
“You’re the PR whiz kid,” Molina said. “Explain what Farnum here has said in simple English.”
Temple tried. “From what I’ve found out, researchers have been working since the early 2000s to develop a material that can bend visible light around three-D objects. And it’s working. These metamaterials can conceal small objects, but are rapidly being applied to bigger projects. The implications for the military and, uh, police departments are enormous if this technology leaked into the wrong hands.”
“That’s an understatement.” This time Molina’s gaze snapped like heat lightning between Temple and Farnum, who shrugged at each other, hoping the other won the hot spot. “So the first commercial use of these ‘metamaterials’ shows up—or doesn’t show up—in Vegas? Tell me another fairy story.”
Temple directed her own steely look at her errant sorta client.
He caved. “It could only happen in Vegas, Lieutenant Mojito.”
“Molina!”
“Molina.” Farnum doffed his straw hat and wiped his sweat- beaded forehead with the back of his stubby hand at the same time. “The hotel consortium billionaires of the Strip are the only ones who could bankroll a weird science project like this.”
“Even they aren’t that crazy,” Molina said.
Farnum turned earnest, his huckster’s enthusiasm for his con coming forward. “Look at the space program. The U.S. government? Outta there. It’s up to the Russians and Chinese now. And to entrepreneurs, billionaire entrepreneurs from the U.S. and beyond, like Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Everything. Entrepreneurs are sending manned rockets into space. You don’t think one or more of them wouldn’t mind building a real Space Mountain in Vegas?”
“So,” Molina said. “You’ve been working on this secret construction under the cover of darkness and cutting-edge technology. What people saw was not really there. It was a … reflection of all the stalled projects around us?”
“Not exactly, but it’ll do.”
“And what exactly is the real construction I’m seeing now?” Molina sighed and turned to view the unveiled Disneyland structure of space ship top and residential tower. “It’s not much of a building.”
Farnum had the answer. “It’s the biggest building yet shielded from view.”
“Not now. Now it’s a crime scene. And how do these metamaterials turn off and on?”
“Trade secret,” Farnum answered promptly.
“It’s no secret that two bodies have been found on this site.” Molina lowered her sunglasses and looked sideways at Farnum. “This entire lot is a crime scene, including your trickster building. I’m posting officers around the clock, and not even Harry Potter will slip past them.”
Temple remembered that Harry had an invisibility cloak. Molina had read Harry Potter? Probably when Mariah was a kindergartner.
“Prepare to give me a list of who bankrolled what, or I’ll get a court order to view all the permits,” Molina told Farnum. “Even invisible buildings can’t go up these days without plenty of paperwork.”
Farnum backed away, bowing like a spurned suitor, his straw hat clutched to his heart.
Molina turned to Temple. “I see you’ve been chatting up the gathering UFO Looney Tunes division. You’re coming to headquarters with me to give a full oral report.”
Yo, ho, ho and little green gray men on a dead man’s chest.
Chapter 29
Fringe Benefit
Only in Las Vegas.
In only an hour or two, my spectacular Olympic-level performance in Downhill Racing is forgotten in the resulting chaos, although I am sure it will soon go viral and reality TV will be calling … and calling my name.
Police DO NOT CROSS tape has expanded to encompass most of the lot and now includes the nakedly exposed building. Crawford Buchanan is in all-too-prominent evidence, chatting up the crowd for a slot on the ten o’clock news. Onlookers and schlock-sellers form a thick lunatic fringe between the tape and the curb, creating a street circus atmosphere to mirror the Strip, although in small scale.
Still, it is hard for a dude of my stature to make an evidence-gathering stroll of the grounds. My Miss Temple captured me while I was still a bit disoriented from my ten-story slide. She hugged me and petted me and called me her very own, in full public view, which was terribly humiliating, then admonished me and locked me “safely” in the Miata convertible and flounced off to do spin control and snoop, as she is wont.
Foolish girl. She ordered the Mazda model with the push-button top. The day, or night, Midnight Louie cannot paw-punch a button with enough force to operate it is the day I hang up my crime-busting credentials. She should know that by now. I have pussyfooted over enough of her landline and fax buttons in the past.
Granted, Miss Temple is somewhat dizzy from being the PR person in charge of this big-time would-be alien sideshow despite herself. I had heard her muttering about being stuck as “Molina’s Junior G-string Girl” or some such as she left me in temporary custody in the Miata.
I do enjoy the sweet smell and cushiness of leather seats, but I like a crime scene—no matter how grimy and bizarre—better.
So now I am footloose and fancy free, and following in Crawford Buchanan’s nosy newscaster footsteps, which smell of rose-scented athlete’s foot powder—oof! Above me, his oily baritone is drawing sensational comments from the gathered loonies—er, legions of UFO believers—and the usual Vegas suspects: onlooker tourists and local gawkers.
“I saw that UFO thingie just swallow up a building whole,” testifies an elderly dude wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops that sport gel-green frogs on the toes. Definitely a keen eyewitness. “This is obviously the first scout ship,” he adds, “but these alien thingies will be downing the Monte Carlo next. We are witnessing Armagideon.”
And Joshua and Jericho too.
The next camera subject wears jeans and Earth Shoes. I would have sworn that this ’70s’ artifact would have vanished from the earth, but no. It is a pleasure to see long pants in Las Vegas, and lots less human hair that looks like it escaped a coconut shell. I delicately walk my foretoes up the leg of the oblivious wearer and spot a halo of ungoverned Einstein hair on his head.
Perchance this dude will share a brainiac perspective.
“I was able,” he confides to Crawford and myself and the camera, “to shoot a cell phone pic of the unfortunate fallen corpse. This is clearly a returned alien abductee who either died in custody or was … experimented on to the death. Just like the helpless animals in our research labs. Our own sins are being visited upon our abducted members.”
This guy has a point. Should the wrong individuals spot me on the loose, I am in danger of going from confinement in a locked Miata to a wire crate on death row. This thought has me hotfooting into a swarm of tennis shoes, which are bulkier to hunker down behind.
However, the Crawfish’s two-tone loafers catch up with me.
“Your theories on the visitation to Paradise?” Buchanan asks the Nike-clad feet of a female of the species
, holding out his mic like it was as tasty as a licorice lollipop.
People today gravitate to the sweet smell of self-advertisement. Resistance is futile.
“Obviously,” says a woman in a MISKATONIC U T-shirt, “this is a close encounter of the sixth kind.”
“Sixth kind?” Buchanan sounds confused. “I’ve heard about the first kind and the second and third, but—”
“You reporters are so behind the times,” she enlightens us all. “The body expelled from the alien ship is obviously a captive of ancient aliens who’d preserved his life for hundreds of years before some space accident or just time caused him to finally expire. Surely you glimpsed the swarthy complexion, the noble Mayan profile, as etched into the stones of Calixtlahuaca. This is an ancient Mayan astronaut whose extraterrestrial duty has sadly ended after hundreds of years, yet … too soon.”
She flashes the face of her cell phone at the video camera eavesdropping over Buchanan’s shoulder. “This man was hot.”
I cringe in embarrassment for Miss Temple’s species.
Looks like alien abductees are the new multimedia, multicultural sex symbol, and then some.
Chapter 30
Fallout
“You don’t need to take me downtown, honest,” Temple said when Molina escorted her to a parked squad car.
“I should,” Molina answered. “I said to keep me informed, not to take us all to Oz, and your big cat too.”
Lieutenant Molina’s face wore a slightly sour professional scowl. Detective Su, Alch’s partner and a petite Asian woman who could out-scowl her superior officer, was leaning against the squad car’s door, keeping Temple sitting tight in the passenger seat.
Temple remembered she’d left Louie locked in her Miata ten minutes earlier. She needed to get him out before it got too hot, although he actually liked to snooze under the dashboard on the passenger side in the Circle Ritz parking lot … a spot that was warm, dark, and defended. And also kept close watch on her comings and goings.
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