Dancing With Werewolves (9 page)

Chapter Fifteen

I was surprised the next morning when the outer gates at Castle Nightwine opened instantly for us and the squawk box recognized us. Apparently everybody knew our names at Hector’s place. Kinda like on
Cheers.

“Miss Street and Mr. Dog,” came the cultivated voice over the microphone.

“Mr.
Quicksilver
, Godfrey. He has a name now.”

“Very good. Proceed to the main door and do scrape your shoes and paws on the welcome mat.”

Quicksilver had surprised me this morning with a natty coat under which not one half-were puncture or scratch lurked. Of course he’d kept me awake almost half the night with the sound of his relentless licking and grooming. Still, the results were worth it. He looked downright awesome now that his leather and silver collar had a Manhattan-tugboat-size chain for a leash.

We trotted up to the entry doors, which resembled the approach to a cathedral. Godfrey was his same dapper self, including the curled upper lip we knew and loved.

“Is the master in?” I asked, handing Quicksilver’s heavy-duty leash into Godfrey’s white-gloved hand.

“Mr. Nightwine is in,” Godfrey said carefully. He eyed Quicksilver with a certain camaraderie. “As to who is the master—?”

Words I loved to hear. I’d thought I knew enough now to squeeze Nightwine by his carnivorous balls, and I would find out just how much shortly.

The study was the same scarlet lamp-lit retreat, a place of cigar smoke, aged brandy, and leather-bound books. Daylight never penetrated here. Maybe Nightwine was a vampire. The surname was highly suggestive and anyone could be undead these days. Nowadays, playing pin the fang on the vampire was a better—and scarier—social game than guessing gender preferences used to be.

“I thought you’d be back,” Nightwine informed me in rotund syllables, like a judge. Or a parole officer.

“I thought you’d want that.”

“Miss Street, is it? Really and truly?”

“Yes. It is.” As much as a made-up name invented by a social agency could be real or true.

“You must understand that yesterday I thought you were using a pseudonym. I thought you might be a Lilith imposter playing some sort of con game.”

“That’s what Adam told Eve and look where it got him. Confining clothes and original sin. No fun fast.”

Nightwine was silent. So I spoke again.

“So her name was Lilith. Wasn’t Lilith the uppity woman Adam banished from Eden so Eve could get down with the snake and queer the whole deal? And then they both blamed Lilith?”

“That’s ancient legend. I deal in the present and the future. The fact is, as I now see, you are a stranger to Vegas and to my production company. You must understand. We’re talking copyrights here. I bought all rights to Lilith’s likeness and its reproduction. I have the same deal with all my corpses, living or dead. Lilith was unexpectedly . . . unique. Superb. A horror director’s dream. Alas, I’ve been given to understand she requested a genuine dissection.”

“Genuine? You mean you actually kill people onscreen?”

“Certainly not, that would be murder! But some are

freshly dead, yes. If they wish. We don’t kill them, we

don’t assist them in any way, they do it themselves. In

order for our agreement to be valid, they must use some

means that doesn’t leave disfiguring marks on the body.”

“Suicides still have to be investigated, just like murders. And autopsies performed and . . . ”

“Miss Street, as we have established, you are new to Las Vegas. You are also ignorant of its laws. Let us just say that certain statutes have been passed that allow for our use of such “talent,” as we call performers in the entertainment industry, and that all investigatory and legal procedures are followed. The
order
of those procedures may simply differ from the order elsewhere. Las Vegas has always accommodated the entertainment industry, Miss Street. It is one reason Nightwine Productions are located here rather than Los Angeles.”

Had I mentioned I wasn’t in Kansas anymore? I wasn’t even in Southern California’s LaLa Land — and I thought that was as weird as a place could get.

“I think I understand, Mr. Nightwine. If your corpse is a real corpse, it is . . . ah . . . fresh and free of the . . . um . . . imperfections of death?”

“We prefer to ‘dress’ our own corpses.”

“So the maggot in the nose was a director’s touch?”

“Lilith made such a beautiful corpse that the director went light on the maggots, bloating, and rot. Etcetera. Do sit down. I realize our modus operandi is a shock. I’m sorry. Some people are
dying
for a taste of fame, even if it’s posthumous.”

I sat. “But . . . she wore my blue-topaz nose stud.”

“And a dainty, poignant touch it was. Er,
is
, in your case. Like a tiny bejeweled tear. Exquisite.” His beady black eyes actually weltered in some fluid as he eyed my nose and its little glint of bling.

“Well, Hector, I’m not dainty and bejeweled or crying,

not to mention dead. I’m from Kansas and I’m somebody

else than this Lilith entirely. I am not a posthumous

person. Get it? I live, breathe, want answers.”

“It just can’t be. Not two of you in the world. So . . . telegenic. If you’re not a sham, reneging on our deal, maybe you’re Lilith herself. Maybe she made arrangements with a cheap reanimator.”

“Cheap! I’m getting the impression that cheap is
your
style.”

“You can’t be real.”

I’d felt that notion often enough in my dreams to feel my legs quiver a little. The reporter’s credo: When in doubt, ask a hard question.

“Why not?”

“Well, we don’t make mistakes. We offer untold opportunities to our non-extra performers.
We
are
in high demand as a corpse factory. Our players are either alive mimicking death, or truly dead, and we keep scrupulous books on that, as the deceased often bequeath their royalties to loved ones. Lilith had no one to leave anything to.”

“Right. Your corpses. Tell me about them—us, Hector.”

“Ah, merely that we’ve found that the hyper-reality of modern media often requires real people for corpses. It saves dough and camera time to dissect them . . . dead. It’s a last, spectacular way to make an impact as you, er, go.”

“Nope. Dream on, Hector. I’m not reanimated.”

“Ah. So. Then I would guess that you’re an obsessed fan of the show. Perhaps you’ve undergone massive plastic surgery to become my Maggie.”

“No scalpel has ever touched my lily-white skin.”

Bad choice of image. I watched a soupçon of drool decorate his plump red lips.

“What can I say?” Hector tried next. “The corpse in question said her name was Lilith Quince and she swore she had no family.”

“I don’t either,” I said. “That’s why I want to find her.”

“If she’s really still alive, I do as well.”

He’d knocked me speechless at last. What a cold-blooded—

“Her . . . and
your
Black Dahlia beauty,” he went on, “has made Lilith the most beloved corpse on the series. The popularity spike is already awesome after only a couple weeks. DVDs are selling like crazy. I’m even licensing ‘Maggie’ dolls and other tie-in merchandise via China.”

“Maggie wasn’t her name,” I said, confused.

Oh. I got it with a sinking stomach. The name memorialized the
maggot
emerging from poor Lilith’s topaz-studded nostril. Hector Nightwine was one money-sucking ghoul!
Oops.
He might actually
be
one.

“I am so sorry, my dear. None of us anticipated her popularity. Please. You look even paler than usual. Have some wine, a bit of food, perhaps during an unreeling of a vintage film? I am quite the
cinéaste,
you know.”

Maybe I know. Maybe I don’t want to know. The plate of scones he passed over his desk looked . . . half-baked.

“No, thanks.” Who knew where that stuff had been? “Cinéaste? That’s a perversion I haven’t heard of.”

Hector sighed, a gesture that shook his brocade vest like a bowlful of eels.

“It’s not a perversion. It means I am a gourmet of cinema. A devoted aficionado. One who appreciates the art of film on a deep and knowledgeable level.”

I appreciated the art of film; my vintage mania meant spending way too much on classic film DVDs. His “appreciation” meant he produced a global television series that gloried in women’s corpses literally littering the cutting room floor? I contemplated Lilith’s likely fate—though Nightwine’s initial suspicions about me being a reanimated version of a deal-breaker hinted she might not necessarily be dead—and mine. Funny, if I was so damn beautiful, why didn’t anybody ever offer me a home? I picture me at age ten: pale, skinny, and mop-haired. You don’t feel beautiful if nobody ever wants you. And then, all of a sudden, it looks like everybody wants you . . . dead. Vamps. TV producers. Nutso fans with a necrophiliac streak as wide as the Styx, the river that runs through Hell. Nightwine still frowned into his scones, which made crunching sounds like bones as he nibbled away on them.

“Twin is out?” he asked.

“Possible but unlikely.”

“I know! Clone?”

“In Kansas? We still use rainmakers. Besides, it would need to have been done in the twentieth century.”

“Not too far back. Lilith wasn’t a day over twenty-five.” He blotted crumbs from his over-colored lips with a crochet-bordered linen handkerchief. His currant-black eyes twinkled with a sudden thought.

“I do, of course, have samples of Lilith’s DNA. We don’t want any hanky-panky as to the identity of our corpses,” Hector conceded. “If yours matches hers, I suppose you’d be entitled to a small royalty.”

“I don’t want money.”

“But you admit you’re an orphan. She could have been lost kin.”

“I don’t want money from her . . . death.”

He licked his tongue against his teeth. It was over-colored too, and moved like a sea slug.

“Don’t be foolish, my pearl. You wouldn’t believe the crazies in this town who would snatch you and dissect you on camera and then sell a tape of it, Maggie is that popular. I must protect my investment. And you might be of some use. You were an investigative reporter, I believe.”

“You’ve been checking up on me.”

“Yeth,” he admitted with a lisp as he bit into a dark purple plum from his desktop bowl. Nightwine was always eating or drinking something.
Euww.

“And then”—His glance was as encompassing and lewd as when he mentioned his beloved black-and-white movies—“I’ve had a chance since your last visit to scan all of my security tapes from Sunset Park the first day you visited. And the day after.”

He paused as though to allow me time to tremble in my boots. Never gonna happen. It was too hot here for boots. I was wearing my forties purple platform sandals that made me six feet tall, for courage.

He reached out a plump forefinger and pushed the horns on the bronze sculpture of a bull on his desk.

I heard a mechanical whirring sound and turned as one section of paneled library shelves slid away to reveal a wall of television monitors. The central flat-screen one was huge, seven feet or so.

Nightwine lifted a remote control sporting about a hundred luminous buttons and pressed one. What was he doing, showing me a soap opera in progress?

Oh. It was Ric’s face maybe two feet high and it was fine. He was making love to . . . my hair, and I was writhing into his body like a mink in heat as the image drew back at the clicking command of Nightwine’s remote control.

The camera panned down to document our totally compromising positions and lingered suggestively on the operative prong of the dowsing rod shaking and dragging my hands as it plunged toward the ground. Who did this guy think he was? Alfred Hitchcock?

This wasn’t just a security tape made by an automatic camera. Nightwine fancied himself a director. He’d taken control, captured every moment of the lost time when Ric and I had found the dead bodies and I’d channeled their last, lascivious, live moments.

I felt a flush sweep up from my chest over my cheekbones. God, we looked hot. Nightwine thought so too, or he’d have never stepped in to “direct” this routine surveillance moment personally. The original must have been an uninspiring long shot.

“This is when I realized that my Lilith,” he said, “is worth far more alive. I could sell this . . . outtake . . . for hundreds of thousands.”

“You’re telling me that I’m a live dead sex symbol? You don’t understand. That footage is not what it looks like.”

“I do understand, Miss Street.”

The remote chattered like a chicken. I was treated to a rapid run-through of the police scene the next day, the bodies in their excavated tomb, even me wandering over to the dog area to adopt Quicksilver.

“Perhaps you may be disinclined to believe it,” Nightwine droned on in his prissy, pseudo-Brit diction, “but I actually am agoraphobic. I dread crowds and open spaces. I could use a . . . leg woman.”

He leaned over his desk to eye my gams. I thought they were fairly okay too, hence my vintage shoe collection. Now I wished I’d worn leg warmers.

“You see, Miss Street, I am a victim of extreme success. I have so many spin-off franchised
CSI
shows that even an army of writers can’t come up with sufficiently provocative scripts. So I mine the murders of yesteryear. Obscure ones, of course. Unsolved, as a matter of fact. You show more than a seasoned reporter’s skills on my tapes. You have . . . something extra. And so does the most interesting Mr. Montoya. I agree that this cozy footage of you two is more than an idle turn-on for any passing voyeurs.”

Ugh!
Was he talking about himself?
Yes!!

“I suspect that you are gifted as your equally attractive but lamentably absent ‘sister’ was not. You’re a medium, my dear.”

“Me? Ridiculous. I’m a reporter. I live and die by cold hard facts.”

“I live and die by cold hard bodies. If you do indeed have a direct line to the dead, I want you to develop these skills. I want to know who those entwined corpses were. I want to know who killed them, and why. I want them to be the centerpiece of a
Las Vegas CSI
episode. I’ll pay you well for any results you can . . . dig up. How you pay Mr. Montoya is your own business, but he is clearly an accessory before the fact.”