“FAR BE IT from me,” said my landlord, Hector Nightwine, the next morning while I squirmed on the carved wooden chair opposite his office desk, “to insert myself into the course of true love, but you and the Cadaver Kid have been absent from the Strip for too long.”

He sat in an even more massive chair that cupped him like King Kong’s palm would surround a giant prune Danish. For once, I didn’t know what to say.

The mental picture of Hector Nightwine inserting himself between Ric and me was physically impossible and emotionally repulsive.

Hector was a mini-me of Star Wars’ Jabba the Hutt in an Orson Welles smoking jacket. If he knew I had a metal bikini top from the first film of Cleopatra in my cottage quarters on his Sunset Road estate, I’d be kept in chains on the set of his CSI V TV series forever.

The “Cadaver Kid” nickname was from Ric’s few years in the FBI, where his “gift” for finding buried dead bodies was considered gee-whiz great profiling, not an inborn paranormal ability.

As for true love, I doubted Nightwine would ever know it unless it came wearing a bottom line, and I was even more superstitious now about calling what Ric and I had anything that resembled a clichéd happy ending.

So I addressed the only possible part of his comment I could.

“The Strip, Hector? Some new mega-billion behemoth going up there? Where on dry Nevada earth is there room?”

Hector’s chubby, hairy hand stroked the black beard that concealed his multiple chin collection.

“No, this is a modest … shop, I’d call it. It’s sprung up on one of the odd bits of untaken Strip land housing one-story enterprises.”

I made a face and crossed my legs to distract his attention to my Betty Grable pin-up shoes: forties platform-sole spikes in VE-Day red. Better to have him leering at my ankles than my bustline. At least I thought so.

“You mean,” I asked, just to be clear, “among the cheapie tourist shops, scalped show-ticket booths, palm readers, and naughty lingerie hucksters?”

Something had to occupy and pay rent on the odd Las Vegas Strip corners not commandeered by hotel-casino frontage. What I couldn’t figure out was why international media mogul Hector Nightwine cared about a dinky new shop.

He couldn’t wait to tell me.

“Some of your old friends,” he said, waggling his coarse eyebrows, “are busy vying for this spanking new enterprise. I’d think you’d want to visit, since a new friend of yours is the merchant in question.”

“Merchant? I don’t know any ‘merchants’ except for a certain ghoulish TV mayhem huckster in my twenty-twenty sights at this moment.”

Nightwine’s plump hand dipped into a wooden salad bowl filled with crunchy little nothings from the lower orders of planet life. Dead now, I hoped.

“Flattery will get you everywhere, dear Delilah. I confess. You are such a modest little thing.” He wagged a forefinger that dangled something black and slimy and boneless. “Does Mr. Montoya know you’ve set up a bare-chested hunk in a commercial hot spot?”

I straightened my spine, imagining myself standing at my immodest full five-eight, though seated, and glowered to encourage him to go on. Which he did.

“Two major Strip forces you know, Delilah, are fighting wolf-fang and tiger-claw to acquire the business for their hotels, and no doubt franchise it.”

Now I got it. “Cesar Cicereau’s Gehenna Hotel werewolf mob versus Christophe’s rock-star Inferno Hotel?” I asked.

“Mais oui, ma petite. I’m considering entering the fray. The concept is genius, my dear Delilah. You did sign Mr. Shezmou to a personal contract, did you not?”

“Ah …” I was so shocked I descended into mob-speak. “He owes me.”

“Very wise. Well, trot yourself and your canine companion over there and prepare to protect your interests. And not only from bigwigs. The showgirls and tourist ladies are lining up for blocks in the hot sun in designer heels you would kill for.”

I stood. “I don’t have to, Hector. I have my own collection.”

“Ah, yes, the Enchanted Cottage’s new Bottomless Closet. How did you manage to convert the old-fashioned and invisible brownie and pixie helpers that came with the place into a host of personal Red Carpet stylists?”

“Your estate spy cameras are worthy of Excess Hollywood.”

“I am always the auteur, my dear, the director who writes his own scripts. But, sometimes, I admit, you write yourself into the most delightful corners, far beyond my humble powers to manipulate. Beware, Delilah. Powers less benign than I have also realized your potential.”

“Great.” I turned on my heel, or Betty’s. “Don’t forget that I protect my interests, to the hilt.”

“And to the last man. Yes, I know.”

NIGHTWINE’S MAN GODFREY was waiting outside the door, as usual.

His pencil-thin mustache surmounted a slightly receding chin and he had a slightly receding dark hairline. Still, his white tie and tails were always a swooningly crisp black and white. If you’d ever wanted to glide across the dance floor with a larger, wryer Fred Astaire, Godfrey was your man.

“The master is right,” Godfrey told me. “You’ve been undertaking dangerous duty in the dark lately.”

“Godfrey, you eavesdrop?”

“Religiously.”

I followed him and his button-down black tails down the Sunset Road mansion’s back stairs to the kitchen, our steps clattering on the uncarpeted wood.

In a moment the click of nails joined our percussive procession. The back stairs were narrow and turned like a ballerina on a music box. At the bottom, Quicksilver had come to heel at my side, not that I ever commanded him to do anything.

We faced Godfrey.

“Quick was with me on those missions,” I told him. “And Ric knows what he’s doing out there on the desert.”

“Of course,” Godfrey said. “My … cousin at the Inferno Bar, Nick Charles, well knows the combined power of man, woman, and dog. Who am I, a humble butler-in-disguise, to argue with that magic? But we CinSims are all merely motion picture phantasms in a way, Miss Delilah and Master Quicksilver. We are dancing with the dead, the resurrected bodies that serve as our sturdy immortal canvas, ever so much more resilient than film. We are not as fragile as living flesh, either.”

“But you are as dear,” I said, brushing my hand against his black sleeve. CinSims were solid, but I hesitated to touch a phantasm.

Since almost losing Ric to the Karnak vampires, I’d become a real softie.

“Part of the service,” Godfrey said, a pre-Technicolor twinkle in his gray eyes. “I was not a matinee idol for nothing.”

Well, William Powell had been a starring character actor, really, but I’d always had a weakness for character over flash.

“Sometimes, Godfrey,” I told him, “you make me feel like Dorothy on a road trip with one of her trio of cool dudes.”

He shrugged modestly. “You’d better follow the yellow brick road to the Strip, Miss Delilah, as the Wizard of Sunset Road suggested. Mr. Nightwine has an infallible eye for the main chance. And take your big dog too.”

I curtsied and almost skipped my way out the back door and down the flagstone path to the Enchanted Cottage, so very glad I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

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