Dancing With Werewolves (18 page)

“You’re not staying for the main course? It’s fit for a king.”

“I eat like a bird.”

Especially after dining with Hector Nightwine! He had a real future as a diet guru, through aversion training.

If I hurried, I might catch Vilma Brazil at the Twin Peaks.

Chapter Thirty

Dolly purred like a puma when I revved her out of the cottage’s carriage house and through the gate onto Sunset Road.

I think she approved that my get-up matched her DOB: Date of Birth to us crime reporters.

I’d freshened up at the cottage, putting in my gray contact lenses and running black lipstick over my original red. Moving among CinSymbiants and CinSims as either of them was a great disguise in Las Vegas. The hall mirror insisted on imprinting on my eyes as true blue, but my purse mirror told me I was passing as cinematic gray.

I left Dolly to the tender mercies of a parking valet who resembled a young Arnold Schwarzenegger and clattered solo into the Twin Peaks on my fifties spike heels. Where was Perry Mason when you needed him?

Where fashion made forties women look statuesque and stern and seriously sexy in a dominatrix way, fifties women had looked fussy and frivolous and French maidish in a Trixie way. That look suited me fine right now. Nothing like being underestimated for collecting lots of information.

The Twin Peaks had a CinSim transvestite revue. Now that’ll blow your mind. Velma, I discovered, was wardrobe mistress. I found her backstage sewing chorines of indeterminate gender into torn costumes and gluing marabou feathers back onto pasties and posing pouches. Good thing I was a hardened reporter.

“Vilma Brazil?”

“Yes, dahlink?”

She looked ninety the way it would look on silicone and bleach, kind of like your brain on speed: scrambled. But beneath the drawn-on eyebrows reaching for the sky and the frizzled platinum curls, her eyes were blackberry-bright and nicely avaricious.

I sat on a plain wooden chair in front of a mirror dusted with powder and glitter. Funny, my CinSymbiant-gray contacts never registered in a mirror. I faced my blue-eyed self and then forgot about it.

“If you have a tip for me,” I told Vilma, “I have a few tips for you.” I let the corner of a twenty-dollar bill play Peeping Tom out of my evening purse. Luckily, legal tender doesn’t change much through the decades.

The twenty disappeared down her cavernous cleavage. One thing will never let a girl down: silicone.

“Whatcha wanna know, baby doll?”

“I need to speak to a vampire.”

“Are you press, that it? You want, like, an interview?

“I am press, and, yes, I want an interview, but not with just any vampire.”

“Honey, any vamp is hard to come by in Vegas nowadays.”

“I need to speak with a vampire of the old school. One who was here during the Werewolf-Vampire Wars.”

“
Shhh!”
She looked around, as if even the wig stands had ears.

Well, the Big Bad Wolf from Little Miss Riding Hood had had great big ears. And eyes. And teeth. One wondered what else big he had.

“That’s so dangerous, dahlink,” she whispered to me. “If the
WW
s don’t devour you for it, the
V
s would drink you dry.”

“Then there are still . . .
V
s in Vegas?”

“Just a bloody few. All the Old Ones left; only a few young hotheads stayed behind.”

“How young?”

“Pre-Millennium Revelation, but only by a few decades.”

“All I need is one that witnessed the wars.”

“There
is
only one of that vintage and he’s kept under wraps so deep you could wear them on an Arctic expedition.”

He.
The oldest living, sort of, relic of the wars. He’d be at least a hundred-something, young in vampire years. A kid in their terms.

“Where can I find him? How can I, um, interview him?”

Velma’s blood-shot old eyes were focusing hard on the poker hand of twenty-dollar bills that fanned through my fingers.

“There’s a way you might do it, but the odds of you getting out of there undead are pretty low.”

“Money talks, Velma honey. Now you talk to me.”

So she did.

Chapter Thirty-One

Déjà-Vous outfitted me again and Dolly got me to the rambling wreck that was left of the 1001 Arabian Knights Hotel and Casino. Or so the mostly shot-out neon sign said. The name made me think of a cultural blend of Sinbad the Sailor and King Arthur’s Round Table, but people were a lot less politically correct in the mid-twentieth century. The place sat on the bitter south end of the Strip below all the new high-flying hotels, where even the Johnny-come-lately hotels had not yet hung out their neon shingles.

It was true vampire time now, the dark of night lit by street lamps. Blowing sand beat a tattoo on the deserted hotel’s shabby fifties-Moderne sign out front, still advertising
Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme.

Right. Steve and Edie who?

This property was clearly condemned. The windows were boarded over and the entrance was marked: DANGER. ACCESS FORBIDDEN. Not to mention the forbidding razor-wire-topped cyclone fence surrounding everything.

I parked Dolly across the Strip at our old home away from home, the Araby Motel. Having lived briefly at the Araby Motel, I’d soon found a low-profile parking space for Dolly behind a Dumpster under a broken parking lot light. No reason
she
needed to associate with that broken-down dump. The Arabian Knights, not the Araby Motel. Maybe that was how the motel had been named, after its big brother.

I felt conspicuous as I crossed the wide street, but nothing much was happening down here. The sun had taken a dive behind the Western mountains. One of those faint twinkles in the foothills was Los Lobos. In an earthy flashback, Ric was sensuously edging my skirt waistband down past my belly button in some instant rewind in the sky and from the scrapbook of my memory.

Meanwhile, I was edging my laced-up oxfords, virginal white, over the glass-strewn sand that surrounded the Arabian Knights. The outfit from Déjà-Vous was as authentic as it was ridiculous. The clerk, a pimply-faced punk, had winked, clicked his tongue, and noted that this getup was hot stuff among the geriatric set.

Right. White hose, white garter belt, and white cotton, waist-high, full-coverage panties—ick! I’d read that Elvis had gotten off on those but he was
soooo
over. My get-up was fifties kitsch, not to mention the dead-white uniform and the kinky little black bag.

But a reporter on the trail will suffer anything for a prime interview and Vilma had promised that I’d meet a mondo-big player from the vampire side of the WW-V wars if I played it right.

A mini-tape recorder was stashed under one the ridiculous steel garters . . . those things left welts on my thighs! Water-weight again. I had tucked a tiny notepad and pencil up my tight, short white sleeve. The whole outfit was undersized, with the blouse buttons straining to display my cleavage, but I’d been assured this was the exact right costume from the exact right film of the period.

The lobby was empty, dusty, and moth-eaten.

A shred of desert wind shuffled all the litter around. Gaming tables tilted on three-legged stands. Playing cards with their numbers sand-tattooed off laid false trails through the endless rooms.

I found a bank of elevators. Even back in the forties, Las Vegas hotels aimed at height. This one was only ten stories, but it had been a Tower of Babel in its time.

Litter snaked across the marble floors. I jumped, imagining rat claws.

What I saw was even worse: a trio of shambling figures in the long black coats of always-cold junkies. They slunk along the outer walls like mongrel dogs, cowed but ready to attack in a pack at any sign of weakness.

Their eye whites and fangs glittered in slivers of light from the streetlamps. One limped. Another gnawed compulsively on his own filthy knuckles. The third edged nearer.

I retreated to the elevator bank and paced along the closed doors, pushing dead buttons and wishing for a nail file.
Let me in, let me in
! My disguise would earn me a pass from the chief resident vamp, Vilma had assured me, but she hadn’t mentioned the homeless, hungry vamps on the chief’s perimeter.

They were coming closer, forming into a gang of three. One brushed its long, filthy nails at my arm. Undead Ted looked like the prince of vampires compared to these vagrants.

Above one set of elevator doors the floor number ten lit up.

I can’t explain how spooky that was. One floor on one elevator. I’d been told something was here. Apparently, something had noticed that I was here and that I wasn’t going away.

The light descended slowly on the dusty gilt monitor. I pressed my back to those elevator doors and reached into the black bag, which made my circling vamps pause. Did I carry a wooden stake in my little black bag? Didn’t I wish! Above me the numbers lit up in turn: Eight. Five. Three. Two. One.

A
ting
like a microwave finished cooking hit my ears. Any sound but wind here was shocking. The doors did what elevator doors are supposed to. Open.

My heart beat me half senseless. This was what I wanted, but it was totally spooky.

I backed inside and pressed the top button. Ten. The penthouse. That’s where the story was. The vampire trio had decided to get bold just as the elevator doors snapped shut. One pinned a narrow finger in the closing crack, leaving a shriek behind as the car shot upward. A convex mirror in a corner of the elevator ceiling made me look like Jessica Rabbit, all mammary glands, all the time, in the distorted reflection.

The car zoomed upward with surprising, twenty-first century speed.

                                                                                          * * * *

When the elevator door opened at the top, a weary man in a gray flannel suit was waiting for me.

He eyed me up and down with contempt and resignation.

“He’s waiting for you. You’ll have to pass through security. Let me see that bag.”

I handed it over, feeling like any cowed modern airport traveler.

Wow. Inside was a stethoscope. A packet of hypodermic needles. A bottle of alcohol and lots of cotton balls. Latex gloves. And an instant camera. Weird.

“This way, Miss.” He returned the bag to me unrifled.

The guy showed me through a plain brown door. The moment it shut I regretted being here in the worst way. The room was a giant shower stall, all white tiles and fluorescent lights. No windows, no obvious doors. I was totally trapped.

The lights went nova. A deep male robotic voice instructed me to turn with my arms extended. I quavered about the presence of my blouse-sleeve notebook, but didn’t set off any alarms.

A section of tiled wall opened and I was in another chamber where a moving spray misted me from stem to stern. The odor was evergreen and eucalyptus and I had a sense of being scanned, as if by X-rays.

The next room was steam-filled and almost wilted my starched uniform.

I passed into yet another chamber, dim-lit after the glaring inspection room, and managed to rub my thighs together to activate the tape recorder.

“Nurse Wretched,” a voice declared from an overhead PA system. I’d given my name as “Ratched.” “This is your patient.”

The dim lights came up.

I was not alone. Really not alone. A half dozen clones of me—busty young women in tight white uniforms—flocked around a hospital bed accessorized with trees of IVs and other high-intensity medical paraphernalia.

The object of their attention lay sprawled on the sheets before me, Las Vegas’s oldest living vampire, a scrawny, filth-brown man with nails the length of an abused pony’s hooves and hair long and unkempt enough to make a supermodel’s career.

My heart, and gut, sank.

I’d fought my way into this?

The rasp of heavy breathing magnified by machines surrounded me. My sister nurses grinned to show their sharp canine teeth. The breath sounds? Mine. I was the only breathing being in this place and I was being monitored as if
I
were the sick person.

“You’re here to h-h-help me?” the skeletal figure on the bed wheezed.

I grabbed the stethoscope, finally understanding what a forgotten nest of undead this place was, my knees shaking.

“Breathe,” I said, placing the silver circle on that hollow, filthy chest.

“You must be kidding.”

“No. I can . . . read your state of health through this instrument.”

The wild-animal glittering eyes focused on me. “And . . . my state is—?”

“Vigorous.” I snapped the bag shut, determined to bluff my way through this. I actually believed it and he so needed to hear it.

The balloon-bosomed nurses arrayed themselves around him like chorus girls. He was used to flunkies, but was essentially a never-satisfied man.

I played doctor, rather than nurse, because only an authority figure could get anything out of this lecherous geezer. “I believe that unresolved issues from your past are hurting your recovery now. Why did the vampires lose the war?”

Even I sensed the instant suspension of all sensory devices: the security, the girls’ phony solicitousness.

“Not lost,” he huffed, clutching his bony chest.

I immediately applied the silver stethoscope head to it again. My medium. Silver. Even when it was chrome.

“Cold,” he complained, writhing with the satisfaction of feeling something, anything. The surrounding nurses showed their fangs and backed off. Those shrunken gums grinned up at me, the teeth brown and sharp, like rusty razors.

“I can make you a star,” he promised.

                                                                                          * * * *

If there’s one thing some men like better than gratuitous sex, it’s telling war stories.

I lounged alone on the hospital bed with my host while his rakelike fingernails unthinkingly caressed the tape recorder lump on my thigh, taking it for some sort of vibrator, no doubt.

The creepy girl vamps hugged the room’s walls, waiting for the old guy to fall asleep. Then they’d storm me for a group bite. I wasn’t as worried about them as the lean and hungry vamps on the street level. Besides, I bet it was hard to catch the old guy asleep. As long as I kept him talking about his glory days of yesteryear, I was okay.

“So you’re the sole survivor,” I encouraged him, forcing my nurse-white false fingernails (thank God I could ditch them afterwards) through his kinky, gray, snarled locks. Snow’s hair was sable-soft but right now his metal familiar had shrunk to a cheesy ankle bracelet with a dangling (two guesses what parts were dangling) Playboy Bunny charm. I was not here to think about Snow, but the old guy might give away something about him before I left.

“Sole survivor.” He relished the words the way Nightwine savored mobile olive slices. “The sole survivor to stay on, despite all the mob action, even if I had to play dead to do it. See, my empire was going south. My lieutenants were using the fact that I like my privacy to take over. The Big Boys from the East Coast and Chicago outfits had brought me in to clean up the Alakhazam Hotel operation, but my own staff was conspiring to take over my Las Vegas interests. The only option was to let someone they couldn’t buy or bully take over for me.”

I got it. “You made an alliance with the vampires.”

“Yeah. Good businessmen. Went for the jugular, like I did. Immortality would allow me to pursue my first loves, flight and females. I loved engineering things that people believed couldn’t be done. Nice undergarment you’re wearing, by the way. I invented that fashion-forward look.”

I stared at him the way he was staring at my conical brassiere.

“What?” he demanded defensively. “I read Victoria’s Secret catalogues. Better class of model in them than in Playboy these days. That Hugh Hefner was just a wannabe me.”

Actually, Howard Hughes, or what was left of him, had a point.

And then he stuck that point, a curling, yellowed fingernail, down my open blouse front while I pretended to wriggle away in delight rather than disgust.

“You’re quite the aerodynamic genius, in the air and in the sack,” I cooed. “So who did the deed? Who bit you over to the Dark Side?”

“I’d only let a woman. No guy was sucking on anything of mine. She was a beauty. Dark-haired like you. Built. Lips red as roses. I was going to make her a star.”

Wow, was that a tired line! I glanced at the hovering nurses, who were clearly slavering over my virgin neck, wrists, and femoral arteries. All brunet. Crimson-lipped, white-toothed. All right out of a Hammer film from the sixties.
Vampire High. Rocky Transylvanian Horror Show Mountain High.
I’d fit right in if I didn’t figure out an escape ploy.

I’d read up on Howard Hughes during my research. He wasn’t in on the founding of Las Vegas, but came along shortly after. And he had indeed been asked by the mob to clean up the situation at the hotel. His playboy days were fading then, and he probably was tending toward the obsessive-compulsive disorders and paranoia that ended with him holing up in a string of hotels he owned, possessed of a germ mania but in a skeletal, filthy, unkempt state himself, with long tangled locks and mandarin fingernails like claws.

His reported death and burial in the seventies and the location and state of his huge assets and will remained lucrative tabloid paper mysteries for years. He could darn well be exactly what he seemed to be: a madman who had made a deal with the undead. The ramifications were mind-boggling.

Meanwhile, I needed to know more.

“Oh, Vampy Boy.” I let a false fingernail coil in his iron-gray chest hair. Singular, as in one hair. “Tell me who bit you into eternity? I need a role model.”

The cunning eyes in their corroded setting squinted at me. “Looked a lot like you. A Black Dahlia. Dark devilish hair, heavenly blue eyes, wanton red lips. Vida was her name.”

Vida
. Spanish for “life.” She couldn’t possibly be—? No. But she could still be . . . alive, so to speak.

He went on reminiscing. “She worked for the werewolves, but her heart had turned vampire. Liked the kick of giving blood along with her body. I suggested they turn her all the way just for me, so I could pick who’d suck me into immortality.”

The selfish bastard!