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“By harking back to the past,” Temple repeated.

“You can’t move forward if you don’t look back and put the past to rest,” Eightball O’Rourke said.

Temple felt another little Ghost Suite shiver.

How could she put her past to rest if she never found out what had happened to Max?

“We’ll talk more about it,” Nicky said, rising to see Temple off. “You and me,” he added with emphasis.

Temple wondered why the Ghost Suite mention had made him uneasy. In fact, something about this meeting struck her as slightly “off.” Maybe that was her. They’d talk later, as Nicky had said. Meanwhile, she needed to refamiliarize herself with the Crystal Phoenix’s most unsung tourist attraction, a famous ghost in supposed residence.

A shiver waltzed down her spine again. Gee, the air-conditioning was frigid in these Strip hotels, even during a recession.

She wasn’t afraid of ghosts. Was she?

Spooky Suite

What had passed for a Las Vegas suite in the 1950s was not square footage in the thousands, as in high-roller-suites today.

Still, the brass numbers on the door reading 713 were shined to a spit polish, and Temple knew she’d find the interior dusted and tidy. She doubted Jersey Joe Jackson had done household chores. A Crystal Phoenix maid must pay a daily visit.

She turned the doorknob and pushed.

Yup. Walk right in. Sit right down. Wait for an apparition.

The room didn’t smell stuffy and closed, either, although the wooden-slatted blinds were drawn almost shut against the exterior glare. She walked to the elaborate gray satin drapes that framed the double window. Her fingertips found not a fleck of dust in their sculpted folds.

Her spike heels left faint pockmarks on the flat, tightly woven floral carpeting, marks that disappeared even as she watched. That was the most ghostly effect in the suite she remembered from a couple of social visits.

Midnight Louie had been the Phoenix’s “house” cat even before he had crossed Temple’s path at the Las Vegas convention center and they had ended up finding a corpse together. If there was any “ghost” of a past occupant here, it was the big black cat’s. Nicky and Van said he’d loved to sleep in the dim, undisturbed vintage elegance of the Ghost Suite.

She couldn’t find a trace of him anywhere. So much for the Phoenix’s self-appointed “watchcat.”

Temple smiled as she sat gingerly on a chartreuse satin upholstered chair. As usual, her feet just grazed the floor. She frowned to notice a short black hair on the arm. According to legend, Jersey Joe Jackson’s ghost had silver hair to go with a faint, silvery outline.

If Gangsters Hotel-Casino was going to have a Jersey Joe Jackson memorial suite, it would have to up the square footage and all the forties bells and whistles. Sheer size was a Vegas landmark now.

She shut her eyes, envisioning elements. Maybe a silver-dollar theme. The gambling chips should mimic them. And the underground tunnel between the two hotels, Gangsters and the Crystal Phoenix, had a Prohibition-era feel. Santiago wasn’t proposing a ride, really, but an experience.

Why had the mention of physically linking the two back-to-back properties aboveground made Nicky nervous? True, the rears of Vegas’s major hotels housed a lot of mundane service areas, but it was wasted space, above-and belowground. Temple had a feeling the Fontana family was finally making a more public move with its Las Vegas interests, and Nicky was uneasy because Van wouldn’t care for that. Temple thought of the Fontanas more as local color these days than ghosts of a mobster past. After a certain length of time, notoriety became nostalgia.

She liked bouncing ideas around up here. The old-fashioned suite’s stillness worked on her like the cool-down ritual after a yoga-Pilates session, lying on a floor mat with a scented cloth over her face and the instructor intoning a relaxation ritual.

Why not a … Ghost Suite Spa at Gangsters Hotel? Ultra–New Age, right? Up to the minute with a vintage forties ambience. What scents would evoke the 1940s? Something exotic and South American, maybe, like the Big Band music of the era. And the decor then had thronged with large, exotic, fleshy blossoms, like Peruvian daffodils and giant orchids and calla lilies.

Oops, that made her think of the Blue Dahlia supper club and Lieutenant C. R. Molina as Carmen, crooning out an alto version of “Begin the Beguine.” Oh, they had to use that song on the Gangsters Casino playlist. She adored the lushly Latin song of frustrated passion, so complex and compelling no musician could play it from memory, without sheet music, not even Cole Porter himself. He’d composed the song at the Ritz Hotel bar in Paris, the same one Princess Diana had left before her fatal crash. Wow. Come to think of it, Carmen Molina could kill that song.

Lieutenant Molina was not a relaxing thought for Temple, not even distanced by her torch-singer persona. Nor was Diana’s crash. Temple always found her mind segueing from high style to extreme mayhem.

Think spa. A deluxe, woman-only spa, she told herself. Female guests loved pampering. Temple pictured attendants in pale, draped pseudo-Greek gowns. That was a forties look. Ooh. Better idea: male attendants in short, draped Greek-god togas in the outer areas. The outer areas of the spa, not the outer areas of the attendants, she was thinking.

Caesars Palace had cornered the market on the splendors of antiquity on the Strip and Flamingo intersection for decades, but it was solidly Roman. A touch of Greek would be refreshing. Cultural. Hot.

Then there was the tunnel. Always an attraction. People subconsciously adore that rebirth effect. An old-fashioned “ride” wouldn’t have worked. Too many average Joes and Jills nowadays felt they’d been “taken for a ride” by their mortgage companies, bankers, stockbrokers, employer 401K plans, greedy CEOs, and even Uncle Sam.

But when a ride was not just a ride, but a “ride …”

According to the preliminary figures Nicky had flashed along with the architectural plats for the two properties, Gangsters Limo Service was one of Vegas’s top off-Strip attractions. The concept was raking it in like the 11:00–2:00 A.M. wait line at the Flamingo’s Margaritaville. Had Bugsy Siegel only known that a beachy Cajun-croon guy could be a meal ticket in Vegas, he would have wasted away in Jimmy Buffetland with a margarita headache rather than end up wasted in L.A. with two bullets zapped through his skull. There she was, back to gangland violence again.

Okay. How would she sell Nicky’s new idea?

You go to Gangsters or the Crystal Phoenix hotels and you get a real “ride,” speeding limos trekking tourists back and forth through the underground tunnel past Pirates of the Caribbean–like vignettes of mobsters at play and pay from B to C, Bugsy to Al Capone. Anything mob would flash past your tinted glass “mobmobile” … Chi-Town, the Big Apple, the Big V in the Mojave. Inside you’d be sipping champagne and gulping Glenfiddich. Outside you’d become a spirited-away witness to the bloodiest crimes of the mob era, a CSI tech on speed. Hot cars, hot crimes, hot times.

Did she have a commercially twisted mind, or what?

What would Matt think?

Nowadays? He would totally get it.

And Max?

He would think she was unsafe at any speed, as usual.

But surely not as much as he would be, if he was still alive.

Again with the macabre thoughts!

A ghostly waft on her calf made Temple jump and look down.

A black cat was waiting to cross her path. Not Louie. Midnight Louise was standing at her feet, swishing her plumy black tail. Midnight Louise’s coat was far too long to have left the skimpy black hair on the chartreuse chair, though. That was a souvenir of Mr. Midnight himself.