Fourteen minutes into the midnight show as Caesars Palace, the sixth showgirl descended
the left side of the Staircase from Heaven tripped. Her name was Sue Ann Jefferson, from Amarillo, Texas, although in Vegas she was known as
Taffy. Her long legs had shaken throughout the 9:00 P.M. show. Under the tight blue-sequined helmet with ice-blue feathers rising two feet into the air, her face was the color of the waiter's linen.
Her huge brown eyes remained wide open and unblinking during her fall, which tumbled her and her enormous blue angel wings forward into the showgirl on the step below. That girl, the most spectacularly built of a spectacular group, wobbled. To keep her own balance and restore Sue Ann/Taffy's, she thrust her gorgeous body backward. Her
smile stayed hard and false as the blue diamonds in her shoulder-length earning. Over her shoulder she hissed, "Bitch! Stay off the junk when you're working!" Eighteen steps below, the famous
singer in the white dinner jacket sang on, unaware. Sue Ann lurched upright, took another hip-swaying step downward on five-inch sequined heels,
and wobbled again. This time her knees gave way. She sat down hard on her step, just as the showgirl above her, smiling fixedly out at the audience, put out her foot to descend to that same step.
The foot encountered Sue Ann, not firm ground. The other girl stumbled, gave a small cry, and fell on top of Sue Ann. Both girls caromed into the spectacular body in front of them. The left side on
the Staircase from heaven crashed down the steps in a tangle of feathers, legs, wings, tassels, breasts, and earrings like flying chains. The
audience laughed and pointed. The famous singer half-turned his head, glimpsed the writhing female pile at the bottom of Heaven, and kept on singing. His eyes were volcanic rock. In the line of showgirls on the right side of the staircase, Jeanne Cassidy watched, smiled, waved her arms like an angel, and took the next step down. She
know that Sue Ann wasn't using. Sue Ann was Jeanne's best friend. Sue Ann had been like this -- shaky, glassy-eyed -- for twenty for hours now. She hadn't slept. She wouldn't eat. She wouldn't
tell Jeanne what was wrong. The fallen angels picked themselves up and backed up the left side of the stairway, lining up with those on the
right. Only Sue Ann stayed where she was, sitting in a heap on the stage, staring at nothing. The line descended slowly, smiling, and walked around her. Dawn had lost one earring. Tiffany's
stocking had torn and her knee bled. The jeers in the audience died slowly away as the customers, in suits and cowboy jackets and evening clothes and polo shirts with shorts, grew uncertain.
The famous singer finished his song and started another. The girls sashayed behind him, arms on each other's shoulders, a line of half-naked
pelvises and long legs that blocked Sue Ann from audience view. Jeanne saw the stage manager rush out, grab the girl under the armpits, and drag her off stage left. Kemper's fat bulging face was
purple. The song finished. The audience laughed and applauded. The famous singer bowed extravagantly, his moussed hair bouncing. The curtain
swept closed. Jeanne pushed her way through the chattering gleaming bodies. When the wall of flesh proved too solid, she used her elbows.
"Oww! Bitch . . ." "Where is she? Fred, where did she go?" "Outta here!" Kemper
yelled. "A million dollars sitting in the audience and you bitches think you can go on using --" "Taffy doesn't user," Jeanne said coldly.
"Where is she?" "In the can. You get her outta here, Amber, I'm telling you, outta here before Bobby gets back here, he'll have her tits in a
jar --" Bobby was the famous singer. Jeanne pushed her way to the backstage ladies' room. Sue Ann sat on the toilet, her body stocking in place, the stall door open. Two girls dressed like most hairless tigers stood at the sinks. They bustled out, striped
tails twitching, without glancing at the stalls. Jeanne knelt in the narrow space. "Sue Ann? What is it? What happened honey?" The girl didn't seem to hear. Her eyes, huge and fixed, stared at something straight ahead and invisible. "Susie, it's Jeanne. I'm here. What is it? Is it Carlo? Did you have a fight?" "Carlo's dead." Jeanne put out a hand, steadied herself on the side of the stall. Sue Ann's tone scared her more than the words. "Dead? How do you know, Sue Ann?
"I know." "Did you see it? What happened?" "What do you think happened? You know what he is. Was." This was said in the same voice: calm, empty, completely without inflection. Jeanne's spine turned cold.
"Susie --" "And now I'm dead, too." The ladies door opened. Jeanne felt her heart skip. A sudden vertigo took her, like the swoop of a great dark bird, blinding. A showgirl dashed into the stall next to
theirs and muttered, "Damn!" In a moment urine tinkled into the bowl. Jeanne's vertigo passed and she could see again: Sue Ann, motionless on the toilet, white to the lips. "Sue Ann, you've got to get out of here. Now. Kemper says you're fired anyway." Sue Ann appeared not
to have heard her. "He loved me," she said tonelessly. "Carlos loved me." "Now, Sue Ann." "He did love me. He would have left his wife. Soon." "Right. Get up. Stand up now.: "I was the first woman he really ever loved. I mean really." Her eyes stared expressionlessly at the stall door. Jeanne got to her feet. The weird toneless monologue made her stomach lift and shiver. She heard the music start onstage for the next number. She was supposed to be in
it; so was Sue Ann. Without them both the line would look skimpy. Carlo was dead. Panic turned her angry. "Get up damn it! Get up off that
toilet!" Sue Ann didn't get up. But she turned her face to Jeanne's, slowly, mechanically, like an automatic flower. "Cadoc. Verico. Cadaverico." "What?" Jeanne said. Her stomach flopped again. Sue Ann had snapped. She was standing in a Las
Vegas toilet with a crazy girl marked for death. Then she realized Sue Ann was speaking Italian. Something Carlo had taught her, some lying dago sweet talk from a two-timing son of a bitch.
"It's a joke," Sue Ann said in that same flat voice. "A joke that will make me dead." Jeanne grabbed both Sue Ann's hands and yanked her off the toilet. She dragged her out of the ladies' room and into the showgirls' dressing room. Kemper had gone. From
the stage floated the music for "Somehow I've Always Known." "Put this on." She shoved jeans and a yellow cotton sweater at Sue Ann. When the
girl didn't move, Jeanne grabbed Sue Ann's headpiece and yanked. A handful of hair came off with the sequins and feathers. Jeanne shoved the sweater over Sue Ann's head, right over the body stocking
and sequined pasties. The sweater stuck. Sue Ann gasped, unable to breathe, and then pulled the sweater down over her head. Without prompting, she kicked off her heels and pulled the jeans over her
feathered G-string. Her face was still expressionless. Jeanne pulled on her own clothes and sneakers and grabbed her purse and Sue Ann's. Both
woman still wore stage makeup. Their hair, Sue Ann's dyed platinum and Jeanne's natural red, stuck out wildly. Jeanne clutched Sue Ann's arm and steered her down the back subterranean corridors
stifling with boiler heat, and out a door beside a loading dock far from the casino's glittery entrance. What if they were out there now, in the
parking lot? Waiting? She forced herself to walk normally. But nothing was normal, nothing would ever be normal again. Nothing had been
normal for four months, not since she'd come to Las Vegas to be Amber, not since she'd driver her third-hand Ford Escort, a graduation present, out of her father's East Lansing driveway because East
Lansing, Michigan, wasn't good enough for her, not her, not for Jeanne Cassidy who was made for fun and bright light and excitement. . . . Her stomach flopped again and she thought she was going to
be sick. Sue Ann moaned softly, the sound oddly indifferent. Jeanne had heard that sound once, from a jack rabbit caught in a coyote trap, resigned to dying. "Keep walking," Jeanne hissed, although Sue Ann hadn't stopped. One mile, two . . . the parking lot seemed endless.
At this end there were no limos, no Caddy's, no Porsches. Jeanne had left her Escort beside a wooden fence, hoping for some afternoon shade. Now the fence was a shadowed looming barricade. It could
hid anything. . . She shoved Sue Ann into the car, locked the door, and scrambled into the driver's side. On the highway, Jeanne suddenly felt
better and then, a few minutes later, worse. Another wave of vertigo took her and the car swung to the left. She pulled it back into the lane. "Cadoc," Sue Ann said tonelessly, "Verico, Cadaverico." "Will you shut up with that stuff?" A joke that will make
me dead. "Listen Susie, where are your family? Your parents?" "No Parents." "Sisters, then. Or brothers. Anybody." "Nobody." "Damn it,
you must have somebody! Everybody's got somebody!" "I had Carlo." Jeanne wanted to slap
her. Instead she kept her eyes on the entrance to McCarron Airport. A jet screamed overhead, landing. Her abdomen began grinding again and something wet and sticky slid between her legs.
Her period. Now. "Susie, where can you go? With who? Think, damn it!" Sue Ann's voice, for the first time, lost a little of its toneless despair. "My cousin Jolene. In Austin. . . ." "Fine, Cousin Jolene, then. Fine." She would put the ticket on Visa. If there was still room, there had to still be room, but she'd bought those snakeskin boots --
Jeanne parked in Short Term Parking and yanked open Sue Ann's door. The movement made another gob of blood spurt between her legs -- she could
feel it, oozing through her body stocking and around her G-string. Her fucking period always started at the wrong time, and it was always bad. Her stomach ground and flopped. "Come
on, Susie --" They hurried, wild-haired, across two lanes of cars in the brightly lit parking lot. Pain stabbed at Jeanne's stomach.
She faltered, "Listen Sue Ann, I just remembered, I have Tampax in the car, and I need -- "No! Don't leave me --" Jeanne peeled Sue Ann off her. "Just for a minute, I promise, I'm bleeding like a pig, and the ladies room is always out in places like this. . . . I won't put it in
until you're on the plane, I promise, but I have to get it from the car. . . Sue Ann, let me fucking go!" Sue Ann started to cry.
Jeanne pulled herself loose and sprinted between two parked cars, toward her Escort. Sue Ann wrapped her arms around herself, shivering in the night desert air. It was 1:12 A.M. The black car tore around the corner of the line of cars and barreled toward Sue Ann. Jeanne, turning at the sound, her body whirling slowly, slowly as if
this were a dream, saw Sue Ann lift her face to the oncoming car, the same way she'd lifted it to Jeanne in the toilet stall. Cadoc. Verico. Cadaverico. Yellow floodlight glreamed on Sue
Ann's white lips. Overhead a jet screamed its descent. The car hit Sue Ann without slowing down. Her body bounced off the grille onto the
hood, then backward. She hit another car, a green Toyota spotted with rust, and slid to the ground. The black car, a Buick LeSabre with California plates, disappeared around the lane of parked
vehicles. Jeanne stood without moving, still in the eerie slow-motion dream. When her legs did move, they carried her in a hesitant step, like
a wedding procession. Everything looked too bright, as if it had been drawn by a child with new crayons. She saw, so sharp that it hurt her eyes, the rust smeared from the Toyota on Sue Ann's yellow
sweater, at a precise point just above the left breast. Below the rust, a blue-sequined pasty showed lumpy through the thin cotton. Sue Ann hadn't zipped her fly all the way. Her eyes were still
open. Jeanne knelt beside the body and groped for a pulse in the wrist. She didn't know how to find one anyway. She put her head on Sue Ann's
quiet chest, then yanked her head back as if it were burned. After that, she couldn't think what else to do, so she did nothing. From somewhere
far, far away, someone shouted. Then there were running footsteps, and the screech of sirens, and someone saying "Miss? Miss?" Later, there were bright lights and coffee she didn't drink and blue
uniforms with gun belts and questions. Many questions. But that was much later in this queer slowed-down time, and by then Jeanne had already decided what she must not say, ever, to anybody,
anyplace, anytime. Not here, not at home in East Lansing, where she was going as soon as they let her leave Las Vegas, nowhere. Not to anyone. Not ever.
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