Back in Black (12 page)

Bitch.

Adam waved a hand. “Count me out.”

“I'm with you, my man.” Parker gave Adam a fist bump.

“I was thinking females only,” Cammie clarified. “The sight of you two in leather corsets is deeply scary. Dee?”

“Tacky Vegas clothes? I don't think my rabbi would want me to wear stuff like that.”

“Your rabbi isn't here, Dee,” Cammie pointed out.

“Oh, he knows everything—he doesn't have to physically be there. Also, I read in this brochure that there's a past-life-regression yoga class at the Venetian that I'd like to check out.”

Cammie waved a hand in the air. “Check away, Dee. You're on your own. If you think your rabbi would approve.”

As far as Cammie was concerned, Dee was getting loonier by the nanosecond. Better for her not to participate.

Parker grinned. “Hey, here's an idea. The guys should pick the winner.”

“Oh, yeah,” Adam agreed. “
And
the prize.”

“As long as the prize isn't either one of you,” Sam joked.

Dee nodded earnestly. “Because that would mean you weren't being true to Eduardo. I guess you could just not tell him. Do you think it's cheating if you do something and the other person doesn't know you did it?” Dee mused. “I still think it's cheating.”

Cammie narrowed her eyes at her. “How many little Dees are in there having a conversation with you right now?”

“She's shining you on, Dee,” Adam assured Dee, who still had a quizzical look on her face. “We'll just have to come up with some deeply diabolical prize.” The limo crossed a bridge over Interstate 15, the main route between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The Palms was just a quarter mile or so ahead, on the left-hand side.

“Do your worst, gentlemen,” Anna challenged.

Anna's voice grated on Cammie's ears. It sounded so Old Hollywood, like from those black-and-white 1930s and 1940s movies her dad used to make her watch with him when she was a kid, under the guise of preparing her for the business that he wanted her to enter. Greer Garson in
Mrs. Miniver.
Kate Hepburn in
The African Queen,
back before she'd turned into a vibrating old prune. Cammie had no intention of following in her father's footsteps, but those actresses and movies had stayed with her forever. Not that she had a clue as to what she
did
want to do with her life. She just couldn't abide the notion that she would follow her father and loathed stepmother, Patrice, a well-known actress, into the family business.

“We can go clothes shopping together right after we check in,” Sam suggested to Anna. “We just have to find the tackiest place in town.”

“Want to come with us, Cammie?” Anna asked.

Double bitch. Like Anna really wanted Cammie to come along.

“Oh, I'll just cruise on my own,” Cammie replied, as if it were exactly what she wanted to do. “May the best woman win.”

That was
so
going to be her.

She'd have to do it quickly, though. Because now that she'd arrived in Sin City, there was something else on her mind. Make that
someone
else.

Male. And his name wasn't Adam.

Voodoo Economics

T
he Palms Hotel and Casino, also known as Hollywood in the desert. Even now, a few years after it had opened with much fanfare and hype, the Palms was still
the
Las Vegas home-away-from-home for the movie and TV industry glitterati. At least, the on-camera glitterati. Producers and writers (who could afford it) tended to favor the Bellagio—there were times when the Prime Steakhouse restaurant there was as jammed with producers and scribes as the
Desperate Housewives
writers' room after a profanity-laced phone call from some ABC network executive deep-sixing an episode outline. But most actors and actresses preferred the Palms. They thrived on attention and knew there'd be plenty of people to stare at them.

The limo pulled into the wide circular driveway and came to a halt in front of a long row of glass doors. As it did, Sam read the large marquee behind her:

F
RIDAY
N
IGHT AT
R
AIN
: L
ENNY
K
RAVITZ

Rain was the Palms' post-trendy nightclub. Sam had no intention of going to see Lenny with the masses, even if the place
was
supposed to be happening. She'd seen him last year with Dee (courtesy of Dee's record producer dad) at an industry showcase at the House of Blues. There had been an audience of maybe a hundred, plus a killer buffet of mini saffroned scampi crepes and twenty different types of imported caviar with various toppings—sour cream, capers, minced red onions, crushed egg. They'd been invited to Lenny's private party afterward, of course. At Rain there would be an audience of a couple thousand tourists killing themselves not to look like tourists. Not Sam's idea of a good time. She found herself wondering if Eduardo had ever been to Las Vegas. She made a mental note to ask him.

The limo driver opened the doors for his passengers. Sam noted his perfect silver hair and the perennial tan and chiseled profile of a former somebody reduced to a current nobody. She made another mental note: He'd be a good character for some future movie—a one-hit wonder who had faded into oblivion and fallen on hard times, reduced to chauffeuring around the kind of people who used to ask for his autograph. Maybe he'd been a professional boxer. Lots of them tended to settle here in Vegas, where all the championship bouts took place.

“Miss Sharpe?”

Sam realized she'd been staring. “Oh, thanks.” She smiled at him as she stepped out into the warm night air.

“You're welcome, Miss Sharpe.”

He popped the trunk; an insufferably hip valet in knife-creased black pants, white shirt, and black sports jacket extracted a mountain of luggage from it. His thick glasses and black hair made him look like Elvis Costello. Sam suspected that he encouraged the comparison.

The driver handed Sam his card; Sam said she'd call when they needed him. Then she pressed a twenty-dollar tip into his hand—a reasonable amount of money, but not so much that Mr. Now-Nobody would turn into a fawning sycophant. There were enough of those hanging around her father … and, by consequence, her. She and the others followed the valet and their luggage through the front doors.

The Palms had no lobby per se. Just the expanse of the casino—slot machines, blackjack and craps tables, bars, and noise. The registration area was over to the left—a long and narrow counter with just enough room for the young, brown-uniformed desk clerks to check them in. Sam understood full well why the area was so cramped. Every square foot of casino space was precious. Lobbies and registration desks didn't generate cash 24/7 the way slot machines and table games did. In Vegas, it was all about the chip.

The hotel was surprisingly crowded for an ordinary Tuesday in April. Old ladies wheeling portable oxygen tanks mixed with young couples; the well-dressed skirted the tacky as if the tack would rub off on them; the desperate and the thrilled and the burnouts and the superstars mixed in a mosh pit of money, a certain percentage of it lost every day to the house. It was an equal-opportunity wasteland of voodoo economics.

But the Palms sold something else besides Hollywood glitz to the eager consumer: sex. Behind the reception wonks were a row of about twenty video screens showing a loop of Rain on a hot night—mostly videotape of scantily clad girls in their twenties dancing as sexily as they could without being arrested for public lewdness. Ditto video from Skin, the outdoor poolside club, which featured the same girls in white string bikinis. Intercut with these were clips of the Palms Girls, the hotel's resident babes-of-the-year. The six Palms Girls even had their own Web site. New Palms Girls were selected annually at a poolside competition every June that coincided with the owner's birthday. It was your basic
Playboy/Penthouse
-type sex-bomb contest: If you looked the part and were willing to publicly shake your parts, you might be in. When the Palms had sent Jackson Sharpe a gift basket for his Oscar nomination, on top of a thousand dollars in poker chips and a bottle of Cristal champagne had been a Palms Girls calendar.

“Hey, Sam, check it out.” Parker touched her arm as they approached a long line snaking back from the reception desk. “Is that Ben Affleck?” He nodded his head toward a dark-haired guy who was threading his way through a bank of slot machines with what looked like a Budweiser in each hand. He was gone before they could decide for sure.

“Hmm. Imagine the possibilities,” Sam grinned.

“Hey, you're already taken,” Adam joked.

“Let's see,” Cammie teased. “You or the male star of
Jersey Girl.
Who to pick?”

A sign on an easel at the reception desk welcomed Magic Johnson Enterprises to the Palms for the company's annual retreat. Sam considered the delay, then crooked her index finger at a bellboy—young, tennis-player buff, with long blond pin-straight hair—and beckoned to him. He reminded her of photos she'd seen of Andre Agassi from back when Andre had hair. And hadn't Agassi been from Las Vegas?

“Yes?” he asked.

Huh. Maybe this guy was his doppelgänger. Sam handed the bellboy a hundred-dollar bill. “Be a sweet-heart and register for us, okay? We're the—”

“Sharpe party! They told us you were coming. I saw that piece in
Vanity Fair
a couple of months ago. Your father got robbed the other night, by the way.”

Sam sighed. “Yeah, thanks. Anyway, we'll stop back in twenty minutes.”

“Cool. Make it fifteen. If you'd like to run into Justin and Cameron, may I suggest you visit our—”

Sam cut off faux Andre with a curt shake of her head. If she wanted to hang with singers and actresses she knew, there were a hundred places in Los Angeles she could go. She suggested to her friends that they take a stroll around the Palms while the bellboy was getting them registered. Even this early in the evening, there was already a lot of action. The main casino was dominated by slot machines and table games. Cocktail waitresses in black bustiers, black pleather miniskirts, fishnets, and black boots wended their way among the guests, taking drink orders.

The casino was as loud as it was glitzy. Rock and roll piped in over the sound system mixed with the
whir-jangle-whir
of the slot machines, the shouts of the winners, and the groans of the losers. The air—despite the best ventilation that money could buy—still stank of cigarettes. Sam was momentarily nostalgic for the laws in California that prevented people from smoking in restaurants and bars.

Off to the sides of the casino were smaller, heavily monitored rooms reserved for high rollers. These were people who were willing to gamble thousands, or even tens of thousands, on a single turn of the cards or roll of the dice. These people didn't have to pay for anything—not their rooms or their meals or their drinks. And why should they, when they were capable of losing the median income of the state of Minnesota in the time it took to down a Sex on the Beach? Those rooms were already semibusy, the clientele mostly wealthy Asian men in their twenties and thirties. Sam idly wondered where they got their money. Everyone she knew who was rich was either in show business or connected to show business.

They checked out Rain. It wasn't open yet. Neither was Little Buddha, the chichi Chinese restaurant. Most people seemed to be eating at either the Mexican joint, the coffee shop, or at the ubiquitous buffet. Sam shuddered. Who knew how long that curried shrimp had been dying a slow death on the buffet steam table?

Directly across from the eating areas were a bank of small boutiques that opened directly into the lobby. The biggest one was called Stuff; one window mannequin wore a flouncy black lace miniskirt lined with pink tulle, and a black T-shirt that read,
I DON'T DO ROADIES
. Another mannequin had on a minuscule piece of black leather that was masquerading as a dress.

Yuh. Like I could ever get my ass into either of those,
Sam thought.

There were also a tattoo parlor and a jewelry shop; they passed both of these. Then Adam nudged Parker and pointed into the casino. “Hey, check it out: a James Dean slot machine.”

They drifted over to the machine, which featured an airbrushed photograph of the 1950s actor from his most famous film,
Rebel Without a Cause.
Sam knew—hell, everyone knew—that James Dean was Parker's patron saint, and not just because Parker looked an awful lot like him.

“That's so you, Parker,” Sam observed.

“You should try, Parker,” Dee urged. “Maybe James Dean wants you to win!”

“Um, Dee? No gambling?” Cammie reminded her in a long-suffering voice. “The age thing? Parker's ticket?”

“Oh. Right,” Dee agreed. “But I just thought since it's James Dean … Hey, I've got a great idea. We can set up a séance, and you can ask James Dean when the security guards won't check. Then you can come down and play and probably win big.”

Sam was more than a little afraid that Dee wasn't kidding.

“Don't worry, guys. I know a place that allows underage gambling,” Cammie announced. “We'll go later. Maybe Parker can win back his twenty thou.”

“Sweet,” Parker proclaimed. “Where is it and how fast can we get there?”

“Later,” she promised.

Sam saw faux Andre the bellboy waving to get her attention, so they headed back toward the reception area. “I booked three suites, by the way. Cammie and Adam, me and Anna, Dee and Parker. Unless you two don't want to share?”

“If it wouldn't hurt your feelings, Parker,” Dee told her friend, “I think I'd prefer my own space.”

“Oh, sure,” Parker agreed. “Totally.”

“You put this on your credit card?” Anna asked.

“Guaranteed it,” Sam reported. “We'll figure it all out later or whatever.”

Faux Andre hustled over to them even before they reached the registration desk, waving three envelopes with their key cards. “Your suites, Ms. Sharpe.”

“We'll need one more,” Sam instructed him, thinking of Dee.

“Right away, Ms. Sharpe, anything you ask. I'll have it for you in two minutes.” He hustled away.