Love Bites (6 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

I hate driving in L.A. Most of my clan does. It’s impossible to filter all the input. If I don’t keep my senses tempered, I end up listening to the gangbangers in the Escalade ahead of me, talking about their latest drive-by shooting. At least, I think that’s what they’re saying. The way they butcher the English language just pisses me off more. Then I want to follow them and do a little killing of my own, which will just make me late for whatever appointment I’ve got. The whole thing is one annoying distraction. I make Maral drive.

But she’d just gotten home from LAX, and it was already six o’clock. I asked Sveta, one of our office receptionists, to drive me home. I sat in the backseat and thought about Peter and smiled. A real date with Detective Peter King, no family members involved. I wondered if he was putting his job in jeopardy. Was he allowed to date someone he’d met on a case? And what did he have in mind for the evening? He hadn’t said what he wanted to do. Not go to dinner, I hope. What the hell was I going to wear?

“It looks like there’s something going on at your house, Ovsanna,” Sveta said from the front seat. “I can’t tell what it is from here.” She slowed the car.

There are times when my heightened senses of smell and hearing intrude on my existence and I have to damp them down deliberately to concentrate on other things. Not so my vision. Being able to see the minutest details from hundreds of feet away, even in the dark, always comes in handy. I stared up the road at the shapes Sveta couldn’t decipher.

It was the paparazzi again. The same seven who had been there Christmas Eve night, plus two more. They were milling around the middle of the road, cameras dangling from their necks. Waiting for me. What the hell was going on? Well, I wasn’t going to give them any more photo ops, whatever they wanted them for. The Mercedes had tinted windows. They wouldn’t even know I was in the car. I stretched out in the backseat and let Sveta drive through, parting them like Moses at the Red Sea. As the gate closed behind us, I turned to watch them. They were eerily silent, staring at the car.

Maral was waiting outside the front door, anxiety on her face. She’d gone back to her natural hair color the day before she’d left for Louisiana. The red looked gorgeous on her, but it was stringy and unwashed, and there was a peculiar smell coming off her, as if she’d brushed up against something briny. I wondered if the paps had gotten any shots of her. She wouldn’t like it if she showed up on
TMZ
under “Celebrity Hair.” Not looking like that, at least.

“What’s wrong with you? You look like shit,” I said. Two days at home with her family in the bayou and she was a mess.

“I have to talk to you. Before you go in the house. I’ve got someone in there, and I’ve got to explain.” Her voice was brittle with tension. She stepped in front of me to block me from entering. Normally I would have taken her in my arms to calm her down, but the smell wafting off her made me keep my distance. It was someone’s body odor, not hers, and it had settled on her like skunk spray. It was foul.

“What the hell is going on, Maral?” I said. “What’s that odor? Who’s in the house?”

“It’s my brother’s friend. But he’s not in the house, he’s in the guesthouse. That’s what I have to talk to you about. I had to get him away from Jamie. I had to bring him back with me from my momma’s. I know I smell, I sat next to him on the plane. We just got here and I haven’t had time to take a shower. But I don’t trust him enough to leave him alone anyway, so I was waiting for you to come home.”

“All right. All right. Settle down. You’d better tell me what you’ve got to tell me fast because I have a date and I’ve got to get ready. I’m leaving here at 7:30.”

“A date? With who?”

Like quicksilver, accusation replaced the nervousness in her voice. I didn’t have time to deal with it. “Never mind,” I said slowly. “Just tell me who the fuck this guy is, and why have you got him in my house?” I drew out every word deliberately.

“He’s that dealer, Ovsanna. He was selling drugs to Jamie, and I couldn’t get Jamie away from him. Jamie thinks they’re best friends. I didn’t know what to do. I just want to get rid of him. Jamie told him I work for ‘that scary lady in the movies,’ and he thinks you’re Mary Tyler Moore. He thinks you can introduce him to Ashley Judd. He wants to do a commercial for zit medicine so he can make a lot of money and get his face cleared up. It’s absolutely gross, covered in pussy pimples. I told him you’d put him in the movies if he came with me, and he believed me.”

“You told him what?”

“He thinks he’s going to meet Jack Bauer. Like
24
is real.”

“Maral, are you nuts?”

“Well, I tried to pay him to leave Jamie alone, and he said, sure, he’d take my money, and as soon as I left, he’d get the retard to pay him again. That’s what he called Jamie—a retard—and I wanted to kill him. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I just wanted to get him here; I thought if I could get him here, maybe you could—”

“What? I could what?” I was getting pissed. “What were you thinking, bringing a drug dealer into my house?! Get him out of here!”

“Don’t yell at me, Ovsanna, please.” She clenched her hands in front of her as though she were praying. “You offered to help. You said if there was anything you could do . . . well . . . I thought you could—do what you do. Get rid of him somehow. Like you got rid of those beings in Palm Springs.”

“Oh, damn it, Maral. You’ve been around me ten years and you still don’t understand how any of this works. I am an actress and the head of a film studio. I am not a hit man. I don’t go around baring my fangs whenever someone becomes an inconvenience. And I am not going to kill someone just because you ask me to!”

“But Ovsanna—”

“Now, look, I don’t have time for this right now. And I definitely do not want to see this person in my house. It’s bad enough I can smell him. Get him out of the guesthouse. Put him in a hotel. Take him to the studio tomorrow morning and find him something to do to keep him busy until we can deal with him. And for God’s sake, tell him to take a bath!”

I moved around her and opened the door, but she grabbed my arm before I could enter. “What?” I demanded, shaking loose of her grip.

“You’re going out with Peter King, aren’t you? You’re going out on a date.” There was panic in her voice.

I hated seeing her upset. She’s like a little girl whose mother leaves her on the first day of school. I put my hands on her shoulders and forced her to look in my eyes. Again, I spoke slowly. “Maral, what I do when we’re not together is no business of yours, unless I choose to make it so. Yes, I’m spending the evening with Peter, and when he arrives—after you’ve had a shower—you’re going to greet him like my personal assistant and stop acting like a child. What’s gotten into you?”

“It’s him, Ovsanna. You shouldn’t be seeing him. He’s a cop and he knows what you are. You can’t trust him.”

“That’s ridiculous. He helped save our lives two weeks ago. He saw my clan, the Vampyres of Hollywood, and he saw Lilith and Ghul and every one of those Ancients and weres we were battling. He killed some of them, for God’s sake. And he hasn’t said a word to anyone. Nor will he. I trust him already.”

“No, Ovsanna! You give him enough time to think about what he knows and he’s going to have to tell someone. He’s a cop, and that’s got to come first. And he’s a man. He’ll turn on you if he has to. They all do!” She was pleading with me, yelling in my face. “He can’t be trusted!”

I grabbed her face with my hand and dug my fingers into her jaw. She couldn’t move her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears. I held her like that.

“Breathe, Maral. Calm down and breathe.” She did what I said. Her eyes softened and her face went slack. I released her jaw. Her cheeks were red with my fingerprint. I pushed her hair off her forehead and said as gently as I could, “He’s become my friend, Maral. I want you to accept that. If he does something to betray my trust, I’ll turn my back on him—instantly. But until then, I want him around. Do you understand?” When she got out of control like this, I had to talk to her like a child.

She didn’t answer. Like a child.

It was a scene we’d played out many times before, in one form or another. Maral doesn’t have a lot of self-worth. She doesn’t know she’s valuable simply because she’s a good person. She has to rely on her position as my assistant to make her feel important. She needs the adulation and ass kissing that comes with being with me—the reflected glory—to help her believe she’s worthwhile. I suppose it’s the same mind-set that keeps the wives of all those philandering Republicans standing in the back on the dais while their husbands utter their mea culpas for CNN.

So Maral can share me with my career, but if anything else, anyone else, takes my attention, she sees it as a threat to her place in my life. And without me, she doesn’t think she exists. I’ve spent years trying to reassure her. It’s exhausting. More and more these days I just lay down the law.

“And I’d prefer it if you spent the night at the Malibu house. I’d like to have some privacy when Peter and I come back.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

What the hell was I going to do with Ovsanna on a date? The woman’s a movie star—more than that, she’s a
vampyre
who’s a movie star; it’s not like I could just take her anywhere. We couldn’t go bowling. She’s too strong. She’d probably take out the back of the building with a spare. She’s got a screening room in her house; she doesn’t need to go to the movies. She’d be mobbed at the Grove or the Promenade. And she doesn’t eat. Normally I would have reserved one of the private booths for dinner at La Bohème, but what was she going to do, sit there and watch me devour a steak? That seems rude. Not to mention maybe dangerous.

From my kitchen window, I looked across my yard and saw SuzieQ on the computer in her breakfast nook. She was online, so I IM’ed her a single word: “Help.” She was out her door and in my kitchen in a flash. For five years she’s been a great friend and neighbor and the perfect tenant. Well, except for the times her snakes get loose. Jesus, there’s nothing I hate worse than waking up to a errant python in my bed.

She never bothers to knock. “Hey, sugar, what’s up? I got your sweater on. I just love it.” She was wearing the turquoise sweater I’d given her for Christmas. “My babies do, too. I swear Ollie North gets off just rubbin’ against it.” Ollie North is one of SuzieQ’s snakes. She’s named them all after crooked political figures. I was hoping she’d buy another one and call it Blagojevich.

“Do snakes really get off, SuzieQ?” I stared at the sweater for a second, hoping she was exaggerating. I still hadn’t recovered from the night she’d called me over to see one of them giving birth. Twenty-four baby snakes popping out on the closet floor. Gave me nightmares for a week.

She opened my fridge and poured a glass of eggnog while I picked her brain about where to go on a date with Ovsanna. I couldn’t tell her about the eating thing, so I just said I wanted to do something other than go to a restaurant.

“Why don’t y’all drive to the beach? I love doing that. ’Course, I haven’t had a date in so long, I don’t even know if the water’s still there. I swear, I don’t know what’s wrong with the men in this town. Look at me! I’m a good-lookin’ woman.”

“You’re an intimidating woman, SuzieQ, and the snakes don’t help. You’re hot as hell, but you’re scary ’cause you’re larger than life. A lot of men can’t handle that. It’s like me asking Ovsanna out. She’s a movie star, for Christ’s sake. She’s got more money than God and almost as much power—in her business, at least. She hangs out with other movie stars.” Okay, okay, so some of them have been “dead” for thirty years, but I couldn’t tell SuzieQ that. “What’s she going to see in me, was my first thought.”

“Yeah? And what was your second?”

“You can guess. But right now I’m trying to think of a place to take her. So drink your eggnog and give me some help here. Look through this copy of
City Beat
.”

By the time Suzie and I came up with a plan and I had showered and shaved, it was almost seven thirty. I put the top down on the Jag and hoped Ovsanna wouldn’t mind a little wind in her hair. “The Jag” sounds more impressive than it is, believe me. It’s forty years old and needs a new clutch kit. It was my father’s, back in the days when a gallon of gas cost thirty-one cents. He sold it to me just before 9/11. Any day now, my ego is going to lose out to my budget and I’ll start using a patrol car for my dates.

This time, there were no photographers at the gate. I was glad about that. The less anyone knew I was seeing Ovsanna socially, the better. My Captain would shit. Ovsanna had been connected to the Cinema Slayer case. As long as he thought the case was still open, he’d be less than happy about my seeing her. That reminded me, I was going to have to come up with some way to provide a perp for the five dead victims. I knew the killer was Lilith, and I knew she was dead, but there was no way I could deliver her to the Captain. I couldn’t even tell him about her. I pressed the button on the intercom and checked my teeth in the mirror while I waited for the gates to open.

Once again Ovsanna was waiting for me outside the front door, once again looking fantastic. Come to think of it, the only time I’d ever seen her not looking great was when she turned into that prehistoric monster, with wings coming out of her back. Even then she’d been pretty striking. This time she had on black leather pants and a hunter green sweater. My eyes went to her necklace. Carved gold lying flat against her chest, with a tiger’s-eye scarab resting on the spot I’d like to be.

“That’s a great necklace,” I said, nervous all over again, as though we hadn’t already spent an entire evening together. Well, hell, it was impossible to predict what an evening with her might bring.

“Thanks,” she said, looking down at the carved beetle. “I’ve had it for years.”

“I’ll bet. A gift from the Etruscan who made it?”

“Wow!” she teased. “A police detective who knows what an Estruscan is? I’m impressed.”

“Hey, I like studying historical objects. Why do you think I asked you out?”

“Oh boy,” she said, laughing, “you’re going to pay for that.”

I wanted to take her someplace she hadn’t seen before. I didn’t get the feeling vampyres made a big deal out of Christmas, and it didn’t seem very movie star–ish to cruise the streets of the Valley, so I took a chance she’d never been where I wanted to go. I drove out the 101 and exited at Winnetka. That put us in the middle of a long line of cars driving through a neighborhood of decorated houses, each one more elaborate than the next. Candy Cane Lane in Woodland Hills. With light bulb reindeer bouncing over every roof, and red and green garlands roped around the palm trees. One yard had an entire crèche made out of Legos. Another one had a full-size Frosty made of popcorn balls. There was a red-capped SpongeBob fighting for lawn space next to a ten-foot-tall inflatable Santa Claus with an electric air blower up his butt. SpongeBob’s blower must have been broken because he couldn’t stay upright; his nose kept bouncing on the ground. Made him look festive, though, like he was dancing—or drunk. The requisite Salvation Army solicitor—human, not inflatable; nothing up her butt that I could see—stood on a corner with her cauldron and her bell. Passengers handed her dollar bills. She wasn’t doing as well as the homeless guy across the street, though. He was raking it in. The sign he was holding said: “Aging comedy writer. Will work for Disney.”

Ovsanna laughed. “Maybe I should get his card,” she said. “See if he’s got a spec script sitting on a shelf. If there’s one thing vampyres are sensitive to, it’s ageism.”

The traffic slowed as we drove past three wise men and a cardboard camel. Time to find out more about Ovsanna. “So . . . I started to ask you the night of the fire, but I got sidetracked . . . do you celebrate Christmas? I mean . . . not just . . . vampyres in general, but you . . . did you celebrate when you were growing up? How
did
you grow up? How does all that work with . . . your people?”

“Well, I was born a vampyre, not made. Not turned, which is what I did with Rudolph Valentino. Rudy was in his mid-twenties when I turned him. But I was born vampyre—of a vampyre father and a
strega
mother. Do you know what a
strega
is?”

“Not the way you do,” I answered. “As far as my family’s concerned, it’s an Italian liqueur my mother made us drink if we had a stomachache. You weren’t born in a bottle, were you?”

She laughed again. “No,” she said, still smiling. “Although
strega
means ‘witches’ love potion.’ Somebody had a good idea for a marketing ploy. No, my mother was a witch—a real witch who could put spells on people and hex them and wreak havoc with their lives if she chose to, which she didn’t, very often, at least. Except for my father. That’s how she kept him in line. And you’ve got to know she was really powerful, because he was a vampyre of the Dakhanavar clan, in Armenia. Not easy to control, except by my mother. She’d mix up some powders and potions and set them burning, and when my father inhaled the fragrance, she’d put a spell on him. Then he’d follow her around like a puppy. He roamed the countryside a lot, defending the villages from interlopers, and my mother raised me, most of the time alone, in a village near Mt. Ararat. And of course, by the time I was born, the Armenians were all Christian. In fact, Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion, back in the fourth century. So the villagers celebrated Christmas—on January sixth, that’s the Armenian Christmas—and I used to listen to the music and go to the feasts. I never ate the food, but I had a good time.”

“But you don’t believe in God, do you? Heaven and hell?” I wanted to stare at her. Her face was so animated when she talked that I couldn’t stop watching. I dragged my eyes back to the car in front of us, barely missing the guy’s bumper before I braked.

“You know, it’s not a concept I spend much time considering, Peter. When you’re fairly immortal, you don’t worry about an afterlife. You don’t need to create an idea of what it might be like after you’re dead. And you certainly don’t need anyone to pray to—for forgiveness or anything else.” She tucked her feet under her on the seat and turned to face me. “Plus, I think most of us are so bored after living eight or nine hundred years that the thought of dying doesn’t carry with it any fear. Maybe just relief. When you’ve seen firsthand what humanity does to itself . . . well, as young as I am in terms of my kind, there are days when I wouldn’t mind if it were a little easier for me to get gone.”