I needed to check out the Capri, where I figured the “caper” actually took place, to see if anyone there remembered anything that would help me with my “cover,” another word used only by private eyes in bad movies. I pulled on sneakers and black socks to go with a pair of yellow shorts, and my brightest shirt, my “cover” as a tourist, and headed across the strip for the Capri. I was getting good at this.

It had been built ten or more years ago, at the start of the building boom in Vegas, and was the queen of the strip before the Venetian and the Bellagio came along. It was spectacular still. While most of the theme hotels had gone for miniaturization, a smaller Statue of Liberty or Eiffel Tower, the Capri had gone the other way. Its theme was the Blue Grotto and it had been built on a scale of one hundred feet of the Las Vegas grotto for every one foot of the real grotto to allow room for restaurants and shops along its banks. It opened onto a huge outdoor pool, of course, with a swim-up bar inside the grotto, and if you were dressed there were gondolas on a track to take you from the outside to the dock of the restaurant of your choice or the wedding chapel. The blue light was created by electricity, not by Mother Nature, and changed on a timer to violet, green and orange.