It had taken quite a bit to convince the concierge to allow Grissom and Catherine to examine Bucket's suite – it usually did, even when a case involved the sort of no-tell that charged an hourly rate. What happened in Vegas, the saying goes, likes to remain in Vegas. However, the death of a minor celebrity and the potential negative publicity such an event would bring to the MGM Grand went a long way to greasing the diplomatic wheels. As far as that went, Grissom was one of the most diplomatic men on the force, if only because he knew enough of the penal code to get his foot in many legal doors. Person-to-person, he was generally slightly less so. It was a running joke among the team that he got along better with Madagascar hissing cockroaches than he did with people. At least, people outside the department thought it was a joke.
"Excuse me!" The words came as sharp as a whiplash. "Are you supposed to be here?"
Grissom and Catherine turned towards the speaker, a young blonde woman in an evening dress with a pair of strap-backed heels dangling from one hand – apparently deciding to turn in early at 1:15 in the morning. Catherine could sympathize – no matter how comfortable the shoe looked and felt in the store, anything with a high heel turned into a medieval torture device after a few hours.
"We're with the Las Vegas Police Department," Catherine said, showing her badge. She pulled out the photo of Charlie Bucket and showed it to the woman. "Have you seen this man around the hotel?"
The woman peered closely at the picture, and then smiled in recognition. "It's hard not to. My room's right next to his, and he's easy to pick out of a crowd anyway. Bright blue suit, you know."
"Have you heard anything strange coming from his room, Miss…?"
"Salt. Veruca Salt – and I've heard all the wart jokes, so don't even bother. As for any funny noises coming from his room – I didn't come to Vegas to stay in my room all night when the Cirque du Soleil is debuting their newest show. An old friend of mine managed to find a place in the troupe this year, and it just wouldn't do for me not to come see her perform."
"How about in the last couple of days?"
"Not really, no. When I was in my room he was fairly quiet. Of course, you could probably set off a grenade in any of the rooms here and the only way they'd hear it outside would be if the balcony door was open."
"Okay. Is there a number where we can reach you if we have any more questions?"
"Well, I don't see what else I could tell you, but I'll give you my card." She reached into her handbag and pulled out a business card, handing it to Catherine. "My cell is always on."
Catherine glanced at the card. "SALT'S PEANUTS, New York City, NY," it announced in festive type, "We may be nuts, but we're good nuts!" At the bottom was a phone number, presumably Veruca's cell as promised.
"I do have one more question," Grissom spoke up as Veruca unlocked her hotel door.
"Yes?"
"Might I have the name of your friend in the Cirque?" He smiled in his quietly disarming way. "I enjoy the shows too."
Veruca smiled in return, clearly flattered by Grissom's interest. "Violet Beauregard. She plays the Oceanid Princess in the show – a hand-balancer and, without exaggeration, the most amazing contortionist you'll ever see."
"I'll be sure to check it out," Grissom replied amiably. Veruca nodded and vanished inside her room.
"I didn't know you dug contortionists," Catherine remarked after the door clicked shut.
"Not particularly, no," Grissom replied offhandedly, once again all business, "I've never even been to the Cirque du Soleil, to be honest."
"Then why the interest in Veruca's friend?"
"If Violet is an old friend of Veruca's, then there's a good chance they talked together at some point."
"Is Veruca a suspect?"
Grissom gave her a look of almost childlike curiosity. "Should she be?"
With that, he nodded to the concierge, who unlocked the door to Charlie's room. He tried to follow them in, but Grissom put up a hand to block him.
"It's best if you wait in the hall," he explained, "In case there's any evidence that would lead to a suspect." The concierge nodded in understanding and stayed outside.
"Tidy room," Catherine observed.
"Efficient maid service," Grissom replied grimly, examining the discouraging lack of wreckage, "They probably come in and tidy up at least once a day. Good for business, bad for evidence."
Hugging a wall, he made his way to the bathroom and peered in. "I got a shaving kit, unpacked. From the way his effects are lined up on the counter, it probably hasn't been used since he checked in." He scanned his eyes across the safety razor (Gilette), toothbrush (Oral-B), toothpaste (Smilex), and comb (Ace) lined up on the expansive vanity counter (marble, probably the genuine article) like members of a suicide cult waiting for the Kool-Aid to do its work.
"I got a laptop," Catherine reported from the bedroom. Grissom glanced up, seeing mainly Catherine's backside through the bedroom doorway as she bent over what may have been the laptop in question. Any other man might have paused to contemplate the continuing effects of her early career as an exotic dancer (and how beautiful a woman she still was, even approaching the dark and dangerous neighborhood that was her fortieth birthday), but instead Grissom entered the doorway in time to see Catherine's latex-gloved fingers fail to charm the laptop (which was an unlikely shade of purple) into giving up its secrets.
In response, a cheeky security program put up another graphic of the top-hatted ringmaster, who shook a finger chidingly at her. "Ah-ah-ah!" the laptop scolded in a tenor voice that was almost cartoonish in its squeakiness, "You forgot to say the magic word! GOODBYE!" And with that the laptop shut down.
"We'll send it to Data Recovery," Grissom reassured her, "They should be able to crack the password."
"I'll bag it," Catherine replied, clearly annoyed at being scolded by a laptop. As she did so, she looked around. "I don't see any signs of a struggle here."
"Do you see any other signs of Charlie Bucket?" Grissom asked.
She looked around the bedroom. "Well, there's the shaving kit you found in the bathroom, the laptop… Samsonite luggage in the corner." She wandered thoughtfully towards the wardrobe in the corner, and opened it to find six suits, in varying shades of brilliant technicolor, accompanied by six impeccably polished pairs of wingtips. "This guy had the fashion sense of Austin Powers."
"Who?"
"Never mind. It's not relevant." She examined each suit carefully. "No stray hairs, his or otherwise. Either he has a lint roller or these haven't been worn. We won't find anything on any of them."
"Bag one of them anyway. And a pair of the shoes, for the sake of completeness."
Grissom's cell phone chirped. He gave it a single apprehensive glance (he didn't want to have to go through that "magic" crap with Greg again) and answered it. "Grissom."
"Nick here. Warrick and I are on our way back from the candy shop."
"And?"
"And we found something we think you should see."
"That doesn't help me, Nick."
"Well, we found some witnesses actually hiding in the shop. Beyond that, I doubt you'd believe me."
Grissom pinched the bridge of his nose. He was starting to get a slight headache. "Nick, right now I am in the middle of searching Bucket's hotel suite for evidence. Catherine and I should be back to headquarters in an hour if we don't find anything. Is that quite all right with you?"
"Yeah. Sure thing. It's gonna take us a bit to get them all sorted out anyway."
"Whatever you say, Nick." He rang off.
"Problem?" Catherine asked, seeing his expression.
"It appears that certain members of the CSI Department are trying to play a bit of a prank on me. Let's finish the suite. I'm not going to give them the satisfaction of just walking into whatever stunt they have planned."
Fifteen minutes later, Captain Brass walked into Police Headquarters, followed by a long duckling trail of Oompa-Loompas. Another officer took up the rear, though he looked woefully unprepared should the Loompas decide to make a break for it and scatter. Brass knew people were staring. There was nothing he could do about it other than maintain his own appearance of dignity, no easy feat considering his immediate following. To their credit, the Loompas looked as somber as they had in the candy shop.
Fifteen minutes after that, Warrick had managed to record the names each Loompa went by (none of them had any ID so he had to take their word for it). He turned the small tribe over to the officers whose job it now was to sort twenty nearly identical Loompas into interrogation rooms to give separate statements. If they jibed, great. If they differed, something was wrong. If they were all absolutely identical, though, the police would have a little problem, namely a debate about whether the cloning process that produced Mini-Me was in fact possible.
Five minutes into that operation, a heated discussion ensued over which pink-clad Loompa was Betty and which was Nadine, which was settled soon after by the ladies in question themselves, who indicated that they were in fact Maxine and Gertie, and that those two Loompas were Betty and Nadine, in some order. The officers confessed that they could see no difference, which made Gertie cry and have to be comforted by a female officer, who confirmed that the offending officers were sexist pigs and would be yelled at later.
Two minutes later, one officer excused himself to have a migraine in the sick room.
It took an additional twenty minutes to figure out the logistics of distributing twenty witnesses among four rooms for separate interrogations.
Fifteen minutes after that, Grissom entered HQ, trying not to look as annoyed as he felt. Nick was there to meet his supervisor.
"Now, before you go in to see the witnesses—" Nick started.
"Nick, I don't have time to play games right now. We are in the middle of a murder investigation, and I do not appreciate you and Greg trying to play me for a fool."
Nick frowned. "What did Greg do?" Grissom sidestepped past him impatiently and continued on his way. Nick hurried to keep up. "Listen, there's something you should really know here—"
"What the hell happened to the lab?" Grissom stopped so abruptly that Nick nearly crashed into him. The mass spectrometer was half-melted, half exploded, and silver-white magnesium burns bubbled and streaked up the wall behind it and across the ceiling for about nine feet, like someone had set off the biggest Roman candle in the world. Greg acknowledged his boss with a slightly apologetic shrug as he cleaned up broken glass; thankfully the Plexiglas observation window was intact and Greg himself appeared unhurt. Not a bomb then. Thank God for small miracles.
"Listen, Griss, I really think you should—"
But Grissom was off again. He hurried after, and managed to catch his supervisor's shoulder just before he entered the observation area that looked into all four interrogation rooms. Grissom turned sharply, and Nick drew back slightly under the force of the CSI's glare. Grissom didn't get angry often, but when he did, you knew it.
"Nick," Grissom said, "Before you say or do anything childish that could possibly compromise the integrity of a murder case, I want you to think very hard about what in the world is that?" Grissom was now staring into one of the interrogation rooms, where an Oompa-Loompa (Elmer, if Nick recalled correctly, and he probably didn't) was sitting cross-legged on the table. Grissom's anger had, understandably, popped like a soap bubble.
"That's one of our witnesses," Nick explained "We found twenty of them still crewing the shop."
"Do they all look like that?"
"I… think you better see this for yourself. You're an evidence kind of guy, right?"
Nick took Grissom gently by the elbow and led him to the waiting room where two officers were supervising the remaining sixteen Loompas. As he pushed open the door, the Loompas got to their feet and looked up at the two CSIs expectantly.
Nick had seen a number of emotions in Grissom since he'd starting working for the Las Vegas Crime Lab. Flabbergasted was a new one, but it fit the open-mouthed CSI supervisor perfectly.
"Everything okay in here?" Nick asked the Loompas. With the synchrony of the Riverdance Irish dancing troupe, the Loompas crossed their arms across their chests and then lowered them back to their sides in a sort of affirmative salute.
Grissom looked sharply at Nick, who put his hands up in a warding gesture. "I can only explain as far as I know it, boss."
"You better do that. And you—" He pointed at the Loompas, who looked back at him like cats. "Um. At ease." The Loompas sat.
Grissom dragged Nick away for a debriefing.