Love Bites (8 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I drove over the hill thinking about what I’d just seen and overheard. The image of Ovsanna’s fangs, claws, and glowing red eyes burned into my brain. That didn’t bode well for romance. Not for me, at least. I know, I know, I’d already seen her shifting into another form completely, but that wasn’t when I was imagining her beneath me on a king-size bed. I don’t care what all those vampyre novels say, protruding cuspids don’t do it for me. Maybe that’s a female thing.

Although I didn’t mind when she’d used my wrist as a protein shake. I felt her sucking, all the way down to the soles of my feet, and let me tell you, it was a whole new experience. I could definitely get into that.

The Captain had me driving to the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City. There was a woman’s mutilated body floating in the duck pond. One of the hotel bartenders had called it in.

The mutilation sounded like the Cinema Slayer’s MO. He’d left a charnel house behind when he’d eviscerated nine people in an S&M club in Boys Town. I mean, body parts chopped up and strewn everywhere. Studio City isn’t Beverly Hills precinct, it’s North Hollywood, but I was lead detective on the Slayer case, and as far as everyone else knew, that case was still open. So my Captain wanted me in on this.

I knew it wasn’t the Cinema Slayer. I knew the Cinema Slayer was dead. But I hadn’t come up with a plausible explanation I could spoon-feed to the department and the media. Lilith was the Cinema Slayer. Well, Lilith and her boy toy, Ghul. Somehow I couldn’t see releasing the news that three movie stars, a studio exec, and a makeup artist had been killed by some sort of vampyre beast, and that beast in turn had been killed by yours truly and another vampyre, who just happened to be a major Hollywood player. That’s a stretch, even for the
Enquirer
. So my Captain thinks whatever went down in Palm Springs had to do with some cult getting fried, and his Cinema Slayer is still on the loose.

The parking lot was swarming with photographers, most of whom I knew. I bypassed the valet and left the Jag at the front of the hotel. It was the same scene that had played out nearly three weeks before, with paparazzi and reporters screaming out my name, asking if the Cinema Slayer had killed again. A couple even asked if Ovsanna were involved. The din lessened as I stepped over the crime scene tape and headed toward the pond in the back.

A walkway divided the water into a large area on the left, bounded by the windows of the restaurant, and a smaller pond on the right, with a rocky plateau and a waterfall splashing into a short stream. There was a waist-high wooden rail fence keeping anyone from joining the ducks in the water. Four white swans and a black-and-white one squatted on the plateau, oblivious to the body resting ten feet away.

A small crowd, hotel guests most likely, had gathered behind the crime scene tape in the parking lot at the back of the pond. A couple of officers from the North Hollywood division had their notebooks out, taking names. I badged my way in, climbing over the fence as quietly as I could so as not to spook the swans. The Coroner Investigator hadn’t arrived yet, so I couldn’t touch anything, but I pulled a pair of evidence gloves out of my pocket, just in case. I knelt down and stared at the corpse.

Or what was left of it.

The victim was a woman, Hispanic probably—from the texture of her hair and what few features were left to study. Her huge breasts popped up over the scooped neckline of the bloodied blue T-shirt she was wearing. The water had washed them clean. She looked like she was serving up two smooth-skinned casabas on a turquoise platter. She had on tight black capri pants and a single turquoise ankle-strap high heel. Its mate was floating against the side of the pond. It was going to take a while to get an ID—her mouth and lower jaw had been torn off, as though some kind of sharp-toothed tool had clamped onto her face and ripped her jawbone out of its socket. Man, it wasn’t pretty. Both her arms had been severed, leaving jagged stubs above the elbows, and a huge chunk of her midsection was missing, along with the bottom of her T-shirt. No wonder the Captain thought it was the Cinema Slayer; the viciousness of the attack was right in the same league.

It looked as if she’d been in the water a while, although the water wasn’t as bloody as I would have expected. Hard to tell in the dark. There were pole lights along the walkway and low-level up-lights staked into the ground. They didn’t throw enough light to search the scene. One of the North Hollywood cops said they’d ordered halogen lamps, but she didn’t know when they’d get there. She looked a little queasy. I don’t think she minded the wait.

I made do with my flashlight. The walkway was clean; the grounds staff probably rinsed it every day. The sides of the pond were cement—no dirt to hold footprints. What little foliage there was hadn’t been disturbed. I didn’t see any sign of a struggle. I didn’t see anything out of place.

Except for one of the swans. In the decorative lighting she’d looked black and white, but in the high beam of my flashlight, the black turned dark red. She was a white swan with blood on her back. Blood and something else, something about an inch long and a quarter inch wide, resting on her feathers. I didn’t want to take the chance she’d swim off and toss whatever it was into the water, so I pulled on my vinyl gloves and moved toward her very slowly. Carefully, I reached out to remove it.

It was the tip of a fingernail. A long, unpolished nail, partially covered in blood. I dropped it into a Baggie and put it in my pocket. I’d hand it over to the evidence techs when they got there.

The swan slipped back into the water, and that’s when I saw the prints near her resting place. Two small handprints, like those a child might make in clay for a Mother’s Day gift, embedded so deeply into the dirt that it seemed as though someone had taken all his weight on his hands and not his feet. Tiny hands, though. In fact, there were no footprints at all, although it looked as if a big dog had been there recently. Just two palm prints and a fingernail. I wondered if they belonged together.

It was the bartender who had called 911. I walked to the front of the hotel and came in through the lobby. They’d remodeled since the last time I’d been here—the weekend Jenny and I had gotten married and her parents had stayed in one of the rooms. Now there was a bar in the lobby, off to the left, next to a white leather banquette. The banquette curved around most of a freestanding brass fire pit, complete with artificial flames. There was a pool table on the other side and a white-flocked Christmas tree in front of a wall mirror with a full-size plastic marlin hanging on it. I liked the old décor better.

The bartender was a woman.

“I take it you’re not Robbie,” I said, showing her my badge. “Did he go off work?”

“Nuh-uh. He’s working in the Muddy Moose. What’s going on? Everybody’s got a different story.” She was mid-twenties, tall, with short black hair that looked like she’d styled it in a Mixmaster. She probably paid somebody to cut it that way. Ah shit, I thought, I must be getting old. Her name tag said “Joc.”

“That’s really your name? Jock?”

“No, man. It’s Joc—like J-o-s. Short for Jocelyn.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. What time did you start work, Joc?”

“Right at seven.”

“And have you been here ever since?”

“Left around nine thirty to go to the john, but that’s just up those stairs. I wasn’t gone long. What should I have been looking for? There’s a dead body out there, right?”

“Yep. That’s right. Young woman, long black hair. Blue T-shirt, black pants, blue high heels. Maybe a working girl?”

“She didn’t come to the bar. Not this one, at least. You know where the Muddy Moose is? On the other side of the pond?”

The Muddy Moose was the sports bar attached to the restaurant on the west side of the property. I found Robbie working behind the bar, his back to a wall full of windows opening on the crime scene. From this angle, the body was hidden. The Coroner Investigator had arrived. I could barely make him out through the window, kneeling by the waterfall.

The Muddy Moose kept up the sportsmen’s lodge theme. Dark wood walls, low timber beam ceilings, and rusted iron chandeliers. The bar was tumbled stone boulders with a wood and stone surface. I expected animal heads on the walls. I got vinyl football pennants instead. For sportsmen of all kinds, I guess.

Robbie had a name tag, too. Partially covered in what looked like dried vomit. It was hard to tell in the low lighting, but I thought he seemed a little green. He had two customers at the bar, both drinking beer. An empty shot glass sat behind him by the register. I introduced myself and asked for a ginger ale.

“You found the body?” I asked while he was pouring. He put down the ginger ale and poured an inch of Johnnie Walker into the shot glass. Downed it before he spoke.

“Nah. I was in here, working. One of the guests came running in, telling me to call 911. Fuckin’ thing, I had to wait almost three minutes before I talked to a real person. You know how long that is when you’ve got an emergency? Fuckin’ politicians, spending our tax money on everything but what we need. The teachers aren’t getting paid, they’re bailing out AIG, but cops are getting laid off. What if that girl had still been alive? When were you guys gonna get here to help her if nobody even answers the fuckin’ phone?”

“I know. It’s a nightmare. Who was the guest, Robbie? Did you get his name?”

“Ah, hell, sure. He’s a regular. Lives back east, stays here all the time when he’s in town. He’s an actor. Tom Atkins. Likes Rolling Rock beer. Or sometimes Sam Adams.”

“He’s the one who found the body?”

“Yeah. He waited while I called 911, and then we both went back to the pond. I couldn’t help it, man, I lost it. That girl looked like she’d been eaten alive.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In my four-hundred-plus years as a vampyre, I’ve never understood why women scream when they see a mouse. They don’t scream when they see a mole, or a gopher, or a hedgehog, or anything else that comes out of a hole. Why a mouse?

It was Wednesday morning early, and I was in my office on Beverly Drive. Sveta and Ilona, my two receptionists, were both screaming in that high-pitched tone they only use when they’ve seen a rodent. In Beverly Hills, we see a lot of them. I ran down the stairs to the lobby to find Ilona standing on her chair and Sveta scrunched into a corner with a staple gun in her hand, aiming it at the mouse as if it could fire lethal silver slivers or something.

As soon as I reached the floor, the damn thing ran past me and back up the stairs. It wasn’t a mouse at all; it was a rat. A nice big fat rat that was waiting for me on the sofa in my office.

I don’t have a problem with rats. I’ve worked with them in a couple of my films. They don’t seem to sense I’m not human, the way some species do. The only real problem with them in terms of making movies is that they can’t be trained to do anything. When I did
The Rat Movie,
we had to wipe me down with fish heads to keep them swarming over my body. As long as they thought I was something to eat, they’d stay in the shot.

So I stared at this rat and he stared at me, and the next minute, he was standing on his back paws with his stomach distending. His snout shortened, his tail disappeared, and suddenly Orson Welles plopped down on my sofa, covering his considerable nude girth with my cashmere throw.

“Ovsanna, darling,” he said in those same stentorian tones he’d used to sell Paul Masson, “do you think your business partner, the dear deceased Thomas, might have something in his office closet I could wear temporarily? I seem to remember he had great taste in clothes.”

I buzzed Maral and asked her to bring Thomas’s robe from his bathroom. He always wore it if he had a masseur come to the office after work. Then I locked the door and waited for her knock. She knew Orson was one of my clan, one of the Vampyres of Hollywood, but she didn’t need to see him
en dishabille
.

“What the hell are you doing here, Orson?” I asked. “And why did you come in as a rat?”

“It was easier than passing myself off as one of those Orson Welles impersonators you can hire by the hour. My God, have you seen that fellow in front of Grauman’s Chinese? I was never that huge, even when I was huge! All those people making a living off my visage, it’s absolutely annoying.” He rearranged the throw so it reached his chest.

“Well, you do look good. Living in seclusion must agree with you.”

“On the contrary, Ovsanna, that’s exactly what I want to talk to you about. I’m bored with hiding; bored with reading biographies about myself written in the past tense. Killing Lilith’s
dhampirs
and weres was more fun than I’ve had since the Dean Martin roast. I want to come back to the world. Specifically, I want to come back to the business; it’s time I was creative again.”

“And what do you want to do? Act again? Direct? Orson, you’re too recognizable; how will you explain your appearance?”

“I won’t have to if I take over Thomas’s job as your head of development. Thomas rarely left the office except to get his ashes hauled at those S and M clubs he loved so much. I’ve thought it all out. I can start out doing everything on the phone, and then you can introduce me as outside talent you found through a headhunter or something. There isn’t an agent in town who’s old enough to remember what I sound like, and after all, I’m an actor, my dear. I can create an illusion. I’ll lose a little more weight and shave my head. I’d get plugs, but I wouldn’t be able to explain why my scalp was healing before they’d even inserted the roots.”

Maral knocked on the door. I opened it just enough to take the robe, but when I turned around, Orson had shifted back to his rat form. His tiny little eyes were peeking out from under the afghan. I blocked Maral’s view.

“Peter King is on the phone, Ovsanna,” Maral said. If her voice had been any colder, I would have needed the afghan myself. “He wants you to meet him at the Coroner’s office. Now, if you can.”

“The Coroner’s office? Can I? Do I have anything scheduled this morning?”

She shook her head.

“Well, find out where it is and tell him we’ll be there as soon as we can. And tell the girls downstairs not to worry about the rat, I’m getting rid of it.”

I closed the door and turned back to Orson. He still had his tail and his snout, and he was perched on the arm of the sofa. “Honest to God, Orson, I don’t know what to do with you. I hadn’t even thought about who I want to replace Thomas.”

The rat made little biting noises with his teeth. The look he gave me could only be described as cunning.

“Let me sleep on it and let’s talk tomorrow,” I said. “And for God’s sake, if you’re going to shift again, bring a suit with you.”