Ghostflower Court is a collection of 1950s bungalows on the Las Vegas outskirts, where Doc Sportello and Trillium Fortnight take a two-room unit while looking for Puck Beaverton. The motel briefly offers them a place to sleep and regroup, but its leopard-print water beds, one of which Trillium later leaves behind as she goes to see Puck, also mark how provisional their shared refuge is.

Setting and Accommodation

Doc and Trillium reach Las Vegas by plane, rent a bright red 1969 Camaro, and look for somewhere near the airport so Doc can make a quick visit and leave. Their route takes them east along Sunset Road toward Boulder Highway, through low-end motels, local casinos, and bars with live rock ’n’ roll, before they settle on Ghostflower Court. The setting is not a glamorous casino hotel but a small cluster of older bungalows, slightly run-down from the outside yet spacious and comfortable within.

Their unit has two rooms, a shake roof, a refrigerator, a hot plate, air-conditioning, cable television, and two king-size water beds covered in leopard-print sheets. Doc wonders whether the beds vibrate; they do not. The detail gives the room a comic, mildly deflating intimacy: it promises a little extravagance, then delivers only a practical place to stay.

A Temporary Base in Las Vegas

Ghostflower Court becomes the pair’s base while they pursue Puck. After an episode involving gambling winnings, Adolfo takes charge of Tito’s—or, more accurately, Einar’s—money, and the group drives back to the motel. Doc finds Trillium asleep on one of the water beds and makes his way to the other. The scene briefly gathers the traveling party under one roof, with the motel functioning as a pause between the erratic encounters that drive the search.

That pause does not last. Doc wakes in the early afternoon to find Trillium and the Camaro gone. He buys cigarettes, coffee, and Ding Dongs at a small store down the highway, then returns to watch television while waiting. As evening approaches, Trillium comes back and asks him not to be angry. She explains that she had Puck’s telephone number all along and had kept calling until she reached him; she had gone to see him near dawn at an apartment over a garage in North Las Vegas. Ghostflower Court is thus the place from which Trillium slips away to pursue her own connection to Puck, and to which Doc returns alone before she reappears.

The Motel and the Desert City

The motel’s modest amenities sit within a larger portrait of Las Vegas as a place whose apparent prosperity unsettles ordinary explanations. While Doc waits for Trillium, a visiting Marxist economist on local television struggles to explain a desert city that produces no tangible goods, yet draws money in and sends it back out. His confusion turns the motel interval into more than downtime: Ghostflower Court is a practical shelter within a landscape where the boundary between material comfort and economic illusion is itself uncertain.

The motel’s role remains deliberately limited. It does not resolve the search or make the travelers’ relationships secure; it supplies a room, beds, and a place to return to while the surrounding city redirects them. Its ordinary domestic details stand against the unsettled movement outside—highway, casino, desert, and the North Las Vegas apartment where Trillium finds Puck—making Ghostflower Court a temporary anchor rather than a lasting home.