damn like one in that formal suit, Ric thought.
“Have you ever heard of the fourth wall, my boy?” Nick asked.
“Sure. The part of a stage set that faces the audience. No wall at all. And I’m closer to thirty than to twenty, so I’m nobody’s boy.”
“Yes, you are,” Nora said, as if cooing to Asta. She also made a kissy face at him that was too damn attractive even if she was technically a hundred and ten years old. “Don’t call the man a boy, Nicky. If you want to call someone that, we’ll be forced to have children and you know what will happen to the key to the liquor cabinet, then.”
Nicky contained a shudder. “I believe we’re being subjected to a serious interrogation, my love. What a novel experience.”
“I was in the FBI,” Ric pointed out.
“Did we have that in our day, dear?” Nora asked her husband.
“They were out there, but all about low dives and criminal vices and not in our elevated social circles at all.”
“Apparently they’ve improved,” Nora said, eyeing Ric’s suit and, he’d swear, speculating on what was under it.
Nick mock-slapped her hand on his suit shoulder. “Drink your drink.”
“Yes, dear.” She sipped provocatively, her eyelids half-closed under the thin sweep of eyebrow arches plucked to within an eighth-inch of their lives.
Ric remembered then. Delilah said Myrna Loy had been stuck playing pulp fiction Asian dragon ladies before she snagged the part of Nora. Holy Excess Hollywood! He was beginning to think like a film buff. All these CinSims hanging out at local hotels and casinos and watering holes made that likelier.
“Don’t you miss playing other roles?” he tried to ask the actors that underlay the personas before him.
“Mr. . . . ?” Nick began.
“Montoya.”
“Montoya,” Nora echoed in a naughty tone.
“Mr. Montoya, I can see you are the sincere sort,” Nick Charles declared with an air of sober dignity. “Rather dull for our Delilah, I fear, but we certainly regard her as one of our rare, real friends. If you are asking how we like our current lives, I can only reply that our careers were dead. We were almost forgotten, except on those interminable nostalgia documentaries. Gin was going undrunk. Our dog, Asta, was only a name in thousands of dreary crossword puzzles. ‘Myrna’ and ‘Loy’ got in them, but ‘William’ and ‘Powell’ almost never.”
“Not my fault,” Nora caroled, “if you were born with a stuffy offstage name.”
“The producers did give you the ‘Loy,’ love. Shorter on a marquee than Williams. Your actual surname was a tribute to me, if you think about it.”
Nora made a face at him. Nick frowned and sipped.
“In addition,” he told Ric, “if you were to ask your Miss Street, she would tell you that I have been of some small service as an investigative advisor and that she derives any style sense she may have from my lovely and patient wife, with whom she helped to reunite me. As well as with the dog.”
Nick Charles took a pause in his speech to sigh. “Where is the dog, dear?”
“Asta is on the other side of the bar, enjoying a dish of tourist pant legs, with discreet growls. No one can hear in this crazy, jingling jazzy casino.”
Now Ric was patting the air, a conductor trying to hush his massive winds section.
“I think I get it,” he told Nick. “You can’t break character, but you’ve got more options than any of the Inferno Hotel brass might suspect.”
Nora’s observant eyes nailed her husband’s. “Maybe not all of the Inferno Hotel brass. Nicky, you might want to direct the young man to the naughtier levels on the Nine Circles of Hell.”
Nick edged along the bar, forcing Ric to retreat. It wasn’t that Nicky used any muscle, more that Ric wanted to avoid direct CinSim contact. Who knows what they were made of besides zombie bodies and cinema silver nitrate and dreams?
In a few seconds, he saw how foolish that recoil was.
“We Darkside bar habitués,” Nick Charles said, “work the civilized side of the Strip. I personally am glad that Nora and I are more known for our repartee and taste in booze than any intimate hijinks.
“Not that we didn’t get up to them, my lad, but the scripts stopped to discreetly draw the curtains. You’ll find the more ‘personal’ CinSims below. I had my share of lady fans, but I was valued for my mind and inimitable style, rather than my physique. We all acted the scripts we were given. How someone