“Peter,” I asked, “did you talk to Ernst about finding an attorney? Did he have any names for us? We’re going to need one, very soon.”
“It’s Saturday. He wasn’t in the office. I left a message on his cell phone asking him to call either of us back. What do you think about what Annie’s saying? Justin Passenger is here. He’s got the means.”
“I just spent two months on location with him for Satan Gone Bad, and he’s worked for me for two seasons on Mid-Evil. I don’t believe he’s capable of murder; at least not to ensure himself a part in a film. I don’t care if the great Orson Welles was directing. Justin didn’t do this. But you’d better talk to him. Make sure he has an alibi.”
The waiter came over with the Pimm’s Cup. Annie took it out of his hand before he could set it on the table. “Thanks,” she said, knocking it down two inches before she handed it to Peter. “Ash is here, too, you know.”
“What do you mean? Ash Rowley?” I asked. “He’s not at the convention. I personally approved everyone appearing.”
“Yeah, but he’s, like, here in town. They’ve got flyers for his band at the concierge’s desk in the hotel. You know, The Violet Tendencies? They’re playing a block from here on Toulouse Street, at One Eyed Jacks. He’s probably on stage right now. Hey, you guys wanna go?” She fell off her chair.
I looked at Peter. He gave the slightest nod and raised his hand to flag down the waiter for the check. I put my hands under her arms, blocking any images I might get from physical contact— I didn’t want to know anymore about her than I absolutely had to— and lifted her to her feet. She was heavier than she looked. No ass to speak of, but those store-bought breasts added a couple of pounds.
“You’re not going anywhere, Miss Ross, except back to the hotel and into your bed. We’ve got a lot to deal with tomorrow. I’ll help you as much as I can, but first you’ve got to sleep it off.” The Saints cap was on the ground. I plopped it back on her head and pulled the brim down as far as it would go. Too bad it wasn’t a helmet with a face mask instead.
24. PETER
I paid for Annie’s muffuletta and the Pimm’s Cup, which she’d finished off after she got up from the floor, and left a tip for the waiter, who looked old enough to have served Napoleon himself. Although according to the legend on the menu, Napoleon never made it to the place. It was the home of the former mayor of New Orleans, Nicholas Girod, and in 1821 Girod offered the entire upstairs apartment to Bonaparte if he could escape from the island of St. Helena where he’d been exiled for six years. Poor guy died before he could take Girod up on his offer. The name stuck though. The Girod House became forever known as the Napoleon House.
I wonder if Ovsanna knew Napoleon. Wouldn’t that be a trip. I’ll have to ask her next time we’re alone.
We walked out into the heat and humidity, which was staggering for that time of night. “It’s almost one,” I said. “Ash is probably in the middle of a set. I should get over there before he wraps it up. What did you say the band is called?”
“Violet Tendencies,” Annie slurred.
“Oh, great. I can’t wait. What do they sound like— an effeminate Barney?” I looked at Ovsanna. God, she’s striking. “Are you two okay getting back to the hotel without me?”
She glared back at me. Even when she’s pissed, she’s striking. “Sorry,” I said, “an ingrained response drilled into me by an Italian mother. I forgot who I was talking to for a second.”
“Uh-huh,” she answered, with just the hint of a smile. “Are you okay getting to One Eyed Jacks without me?”
“Well… it won’t be the same without you, but I’ll make it. I’ll call you in the morning.” I didn’t want to kiss her good night— well, I did, but I wasn’t about to, not on the corner of St. Louis and Chartres. Not with a slew of drunken tourists staring at us.
She and Annie headed toward the hotel. I went east on Chartres, turning left on Toulouse. One Eyed Jacks was halfway down on the right, between a Cajun-Creole restaurant and an art gallery. There was another gallery across the street with a huge crowd milling around in front of it. It looked like most of them were waiting in line to get into One Eyed Jacks. That didn’t make sense to me until I saw the sign saying the second show didn’t start until one o’clock. Only in New Orleans.
I’d been to the club once before, during a drunken four-day bachelor party for a friend of mine on the force. We landed early on a Thursday evening and went right to One Eyed Jacks for their weekly dance night. I don’t remember much about the wedding or the rest of the four days, but man, I remember that night. The best 80’s music I’ve ever danced to. I danced with anyone who wasn’t prone— even the groom to be. We both still get ragged about our moonwalking whenever we see the other guys. It was a fucking great night. Maybe better than his honeymoon, since the marriage didn’t last a year.
The bouncer had his hands full with the ticket holders; he saw the glint of my badge and waved me in, no questions asked.
Most people think the club’s name comes from the brothel in the series Twin Peaks. Not so. One of the owners is Rio Hackford, son of the director Taylor Hackford, who named Rio after Marlon Brando’s character in his favorite western, One-Eyed Jacks. Hence the Mexican bordello decor. The walls are covered in flocked red-velvet wallpaper. Hung with gilt-framed, black velvet paintings of matadors and nude senoritas.
I made my way through the front room where the bar was on the left and a genuine crystal chandelier was suspended from the ceiling. The stage was at the far end of the back room. That room was lit primarily by sconces on the walls and votive candles on the horseshoe-shaped bar in the middle. The building had housed a burlesque theatre in the 70s, so the floor is raked. Makes it great for viewing. There were only two people on stage when I walked in: the drummer and a sound engineer, fiddling with the mics.
Well, I could see where the band’s name came from. Not Barney, that’s for sure. The drummer was half naked in a purple g-string with matching codpiece and sheer purple thigh high stockings. Every part of his exposed skin was tatted in shades of violet and lavender. Magenta curlicues around his nipples. A grape-colored Masonic eye covering his navel. His overhanging belly had deep purple arrows pointing down to whatever he was hiding in the codpiece. Lilac trees tatted on his biceps. He had a purple gas mask hanging around his neck and his hair, what there was of it, was fluorescent pink. His drums were, what else, violet. He was adjusting the hi-hat and didn’t bother looking up.
This time I flashed the badge at the engineer just long enough to establish some bogus validity and asked him where I could find Ash Rowley. He pointed me to a hallway that led backstage.
The door marked Green Room was closed. I knocked. Someone yelled from inside. “Yeah, yeah, we know. Five minutes. We’re chill, man. We’ll be there when we’re there.”
I knocked again.
The door opened, Ash Rowley standing there. “What the fuck, man? This ain’t the Grand Ol’ Opry. Let those dickheads wait a few minutes. I got to get my head together, you know what I mean?” He flicked the spliff in his hand. Hard to believe but his costume was even purpler than the drummer’s. Only his wasn’t inked on. Well, he had the same purple G-string and codpiece, but his legs sported purple leather over-the-knee boots that stopped halfway to his crotch. He had some kind of lavender-colored metal breastplate covering his chest. The plate had sharp fluorescent purple spikes protruding from it. More spikes coming from the metal bands around his arms and the gloves he wore, which gave him talons for nails to rival the ones I’d seen Ovsanna manifest. Ovsanna’s were real. His were some kind of sharply filed plastic. Painted violet. I took a guess he didn’t play guitar.
“I’m not the stage manager, Mr. Rowley. I’m Detective Peter King and I’d like to ask you a few questions.” I didn’t say ‘I’m Detective Peter King with the Beverly Hills Police Department and I haven’t got fuck-all authority to question anyone in this town.” Let him jump to conclusions; what does he know from New Orleans
cops.
“Oh yeah? About what? I got to get on stage, man, or there’re gonna be some angry dudes on my ass.”
“What about let the dickheads wait ’cause you’re not the Grand Ol’ Opry?”
He grabbed a Mardi Gras mask off the dressing table, purple velvet with pink ostrich feathers shooting up from the eyeholes. “What’s this about, man? Can’t it wait ’til after the show?”
The drummer came up behind me. “Hey, Ash, we’re ready. Let’s boogie.” He turned and headed for the stage. Three other costumed band members came out of another room, following the drummer. Ash angled past me and started down the hall.
I called after him. “It’s about Derek Connors. You know him?”
That stopped him. “Yeah, sure. What about him?”
“He’s dead. Found his body a couple of hours ago at The Rising Hotel, where the horror convention is going on.”
I couldn’t read his eyes behind the mask, but he’s a damn good actor anyway, so I didn’t expect to see any tells. He acted surprised. Not upset, though.
“Wow, that’s shitty,” he said. “Well, I don’t know what you think I can tell you, but you’re gonna have to wait, man. I gotta get on stage. Stick around— I take a ten minute break in the middle of this set while the guys do an instrumental. Gotta imbibe, you know? I’ll catch you then.” He disappeared around the corner. Five seconds later the crowd started screaming. Great. I was going to have to sit through an hour of Violet Tendencies. Probably akin to chopping ice in a blender. I should have downed that Pimm’s Cup when I had the chance.
25. OVSANNA
I picked up on the music from a block away— it was a cover version of an Armenian folk tune I’d grown up with hundreds of years ago. Not something I associated with the bars in the Quarter. The music got louder as we rounded the corner to the hotel. Flash bulbs lit up the lobby from the inside. I dug in my purse for my cell phone and dialed the front desk.
“This is Ovsanna Moore,” I said to the girl who answered, “I’m outside the hotel with Annie Ross and I’d rather not subject her to any more press or paparazzi. Would you please open up the back door to Sam Koh’s office so she can get to her room without being seen?”
The girl was happy to comply. She met us at the fire exit and offered to accompany Annie upstairs. I was sure she was hoping for Annie’s autograph; she gushed non-stop about what a big fan she was of Mid-Evil. I was just as sure Annie was too out of it to notice. After they left, I wrote the girl a short thank you note on Sam Koh’s personalized Post-Its, inviting her to stop by Annie’s booth tomorrow and have her picture taken. Stuck it to the back of Sam Koh’s office door so she’d see it when she came back through. Then I opened the door to face whatever was going on in the lobby.
SuzieQ was going on in the lobby, much to the delight of the room full of onlookers. Two hours earlier they’d been mourning Derek’s death; now they were catcalling SuzieQ’s impromptu performance. SuzieQ and her cold-blooded companions.
Someone had shoved two coffee tables together to form a makeshift stage. Suzie was standing on top of them, rolling her beautiful belly and dancing with her snakes. She had her iPhone plugged into a miniature speaker, with Dick Dale’s Tribal Thunder version of Misirlou overpowering the hotel’s sound system. Aaron Neville didn’t stand a chance.
She was wearing the same costume she’d worn the first night I’d seen her perform in an Armenian restaurant in Glendale. Peter took me there on our first real date. (I don’t count Christmas Eve at his parents’ house.) It’s the de rigueur belly dance costume— although if the women of my village wore anything like that when I was growing up, I never noticed. I was too busy staring at their mustaches. Suzie’s outfit consisted of a sparkly push-up bra with lots of gold spangles and a low-cut, gauzy skirt cut in ankle-length panels of turquoise chiffon. Plus the snakes, of course. Anthony Weiner, Edwin Edwards, and Spiro Agnew— the orange milksnake, the green boa, and the white python. She looked like she was wrapped in an Irish flag.
Which quickly came unfurled when a costumed mother and her young daughter entered the lobby from outside. The mother was dressed as Elphaba, the Wicked Witch from the musical Wicked. And the little girl… well, at first I thought she was in a costume from that Toddlers and Tiaras show. She couldn’t have been more than six years old. She had on full stage make-up, foundation and blush, powder, black eye liner, pink eye shadow, false eye lashes, painted-on lips. Thick bleached blond braids extended down from a sparkly gold straw cowboy hat with pearls and rhinestones all over it. They matched her earrings and the numerous strings of beads around her throat. She was wearing white cowboy boots, a denim skirt, and a stretchy, off-the-shoulder frilly top exposing an odd shade of orange spray-on tan. It was only when I read the banner across her outfit that I realized it wasn’t a costume at all.
She was Little Miss Smoked Meat Runner Up from Picayune, Mississippi.
Her mother had on as much make-up as she did, only Mother’s was green. Her entire face was all green, except for the black eyebrows and lashes. She was wearing a black cape and a pointed hat. Carrying a broom and a little dog, a Cairn Terrier.
Hence the unfurling of SuzieQ’s snakes.
SuzieQ was in the middle of a remarkable dance move. She’d turned her back to the audience and begun a slow back-bend, undulating her shoulders as she lowered her upper body and touched the back of her head to the floor. She stayed in that position, her back arched, her belly rolling, staring at us upside down while the snakes did their own dance on her arms and chest.
And then the dog attacked.
The dog saw the snakes and leapt from Elphaba’s arms in a frenzy of barking, pulling his leash out of her hands. He scooted into the crowd, sideswiping a Pumpkinhead impersonator who lost his pumpkinhead. The giant pumpkin smashed into Little Miss Smoked Meat Runner Up and she went flying. She landed on her banner and her cowboy hat went flying. The bleached blond braids were attached to the hat evidently, because they went with it. This poor little girl with the spray-on tan was left sprawled out on the floor, with a nylon wig cap flattening her hair to her head. When she saw her hat and braids land on Spiro Agnew, she started screaming.
Spiro slithered off Suzie’s chest. The hat stayed with him until the dog chomped down on it and Spiro got out from under. That left Toto tossing the braids back and forth like a buggy whip.
The other snakes slid off Suzie like oil on glass. Edwin Edwards veered for the dog— or maybe he wanted the hat and the braids, who knows? He took off fast toward Toto, his green markings camouflaging him against the carpet. I knew he wasn’t venomous, but if the boa wrapped around that puppy’s neck, it was good-bye yellow brick road. I reached out and grabbed him. He must have sensed a kindred spirit— well, a cold-blooded one, at least— because he immediately changed directions and began coiling up my arm.
A skinny kid who’d been working behind the desk came barreling out to tackle little Toto. Elphaba screamed at the kid to ‘get off her baby!’ but I don’t think he heard her over Miss Smoked Meat’s screams. Upside down, SuzieQ pulled the plug on her music. That left the Neville Brothers coming out of the hotel’s sound system. They were wailing “Way Down in the Hole”— which is where the desk clerk was going to end up if he’d smothered the dog.
SuzieQ took herself out of her backbend. “Aw, shit, y’all!” she yelled at the crowd. Her belly was still rolling, but only because she was screaming. “There’s no need to git riled up! Jest ’cause a chicken has wings don’t mean it can fly! My babies ain’t gonna hurt anyone. They’re scareder’n all git out. ’Specially seein’ that kid lose her hair. Now y’all jest hightail it outta here, and goddammit— watch where yer steppin’!” She jumped off the table and started fighting her way through the crowd, scanning the floor for her errant dance partners.
Elphaba grabbed Toto from the skinny kid and wrestled her daughter’s hat out of his muzzle. He wriggled around and sank his teeth into her elbow. She screamed. He wouldn’t let loose. Sh
e had to pry his jaws open with her other hand and then grab him by the scruff and dangle him out in front of her. Little Miss Smoked Meat— crying now, not screaming— picked up her mangled hat and plopped it on her head backwards. The bleached blond braids covered the tears running down her cheeks. Just as well, her false eyelashes were gone and her make-up was ruined.
I moved around the far side of the room, careful to keep as many people as I could between me and the paparazzi. As strong as I am, it took a few seconds to get Edwin Edward’s fifteen feet of constricting muscles off my arm and into his cage. Just in time for Sam Koh to appear. His bowtie was hanging from one shirt collar. His hair looked like the guy with his finger in the electrical socket cartoon.
“Oh my God, oh my God, what’s going on? What’s everyone screaming about? Is someone else dead? Oh my God, my hotel! What’s happening?! What’s that snake doing in here?”
“Take a breath, Mr. Koh,” I said, blocking his view of Edwin as I ratcheted up my hearing so I could track the other two reptiles. Once Toto grabbed the cowboy hat, I lost track of the white python. The commotion was dying down and the crowd had started to scatter but the Nevilles were into “Brother John” and there was still a lot of noise to cut through. “There’s no one else dead. Your hotel is fine. SuzieQ was entertaining your guests and her snakes got away. We’ve already found this one and Suzie’s searching for the other two. In fact, I think I know where one is.” I could hear a slight hissing coming from the potted palm across the room. I called to SuzieQ and motioned over Sam Koh’s head for her to check the plant.
“I’m sorry I ever agreed to have this convention here, Ms. Moore. I know you’re the guest of honor and it’s been a privilege meeting you, but I’ll never book a horror convention in this hotel again. I mean, look at what’s happened. That woman committed suicide; there’s a dead body found in one of the rooms; and there’s snakes— snakes, for God’s sake— running loose in my lobby! This is worse than the Republican Leadership Conference with that Duck Dynasty guy and David Vitter. And that was beyond belief. There were people screwing in the fitness room, for God’s sake! I had to disinfect the treadmills!”
Make Me Dead: A Vampyres of Hollywood Mystery Page 10