“Snakes are very clean, Sam. Some of them only defecate once a year. So I wouldn’t worry too much.”
SuzieQ came towards us, Spiro Agnew around her neck. “Aw, sugar, there’s no call to get het up about my babies. See? I’m fixin’ to put this one back in his cage. And I’m sure Anthony Weiner is right around here somewhere. I’ll find him come hell or high water, now don’t you worry.” She opened the cage and deposited the white python next to the green boa.
“Why don’t you give me your key, SuzieQ,” I said, picking the cage up off the floor. “I’ll put these two upstairs while you keep looking.” I turned to Sam Koh. “I’m sorry about all this. But I doubt it will hurt your business. Horror fans are incredibly loyal and they love to spend money on their passion. In fact, once the videos of SuzieQ’s snakes getting loose end up on the convention sites, promoters will be begging you to host another one, and if you do, believe me, there’ll be no room left at this inn.”
26. PETER
Violet Tendencies didn’t need all the K&B purple. They were good. I mean, maybe I’d set the bar a little low, especially after seeing the wardrobe, but I didn’t expect them to be bearable, let alone good. I’d seen the movie version of Rock of Ages— don’t ask me why— and I guess I figured Ash Rowley for another Tom Cruise when it came to musical talent. He’s not. The guy can sing. I could have lived without the semi-nude potbellies on the drummer and bass player, and the thrusting purple codpieces in my face, but the hour went by pretty fast. With the bartender’s help and a Hurricane in place of the Pimm’s Cup.
Ash finished a song and walked off-stage, leaving the lead guitarist to act out some fantasy sex scene with the rhythm section involving lots of violet spikes and a really complicated riff. I wanted to stay and listen— I didn’t need to see the pseudo-sex but the guitar solo was sweet— but I needed to grab Ash before he got back on stage.
He was in his dressing room. He’d taken off his mask and was snorting a line of something out of one of his glove’s purple talons. I wondered what else he did with those things.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll fuck up your singing voice?” I asked.
He jumped. “Shit, man, don’t sneak up on me like that. What are you doin’ here? This is backstage, man, you groupies don’t belong here.” He wiped his face with a towel, then grabbed a purple pencil and began lining his lips.
“Not a groupie, Ash. A detective, remember? Derek Connors?”
“Oh. Oh yeah. He’s dead? That’s a fuckin’ shame. He was fuckin’ that chick on his show, wasn’t he? Not the chick he was married to, the other one, the older one. What happened, one of the chicks get pissed?”
“Actually, that’s what I wanted to ask you about. You guys were up for the same role in some new movie, weren’t you? A David Lynch film?”
“Yeah. They had a pin in three of us— Connors, Justin Passenger, and me. Takin’ fuckin’ forever to decide. Personally, I don’t think all the money’s in place. What? You think I killed Connors to get rid of the competition? Oh man, I want some of whatever it is you’re smokin’.”
“Well, it’s as good a motive as any in your business. Where’d you spend the day yesterday?”
I knew Derek and Connie had visited Ovsanna’s suite Friday night when Annie attacked Derek with the cheese knife. Connie said they’d spent the rest of the night in his room and she’d left him Saturday morning at ten to go back to her room to get ready for the convention. That was the last time anyone saw him until they opened the room for the photographer and found Derek’s body on the floor. Which was Saturday at six-thirty. Until the M.E. gave an approximate time of death, a lot of people were going to need alibis for a lot of hours.
“What was yesterday, man? You mean Saturday? Like, during the day? Shit, man, I was with a chick all day. Never left the room.” He reached for his mask. “I gotta get back on stage.”
“Hang on a minute. What’s the girl’s name? And what hotel are you staying at? I’m going to need a little more than ‘I was with a chick all day.’” As long as he still thought I was with New Orleans’ finest, I was going to do as much digging as I could.
“Shit, man, I don’t know her name. Cindy something. She was at the show Friday night. Climbed up on the stage, wiggled out of her panties and handed ’em to me; told me she’d wait at the bar to get ’em back. I got the Creole Cottage at the Olivier House right down the street. We spent the whole day in bed. Man, that girl could go. Good thing I’ve got plenty of medicinals, you know what I mean?” He started for the door.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. So you don’t know her name. She give you her number? Did she show up tonight? Maybe she’s here.”
“Naw, man, she was passed out when I left the hotel. But wait a minute. I got her picture. She was into takin’ selfies. Well, not selfies— she had to have me in there, you know. What’s your number, I’ll text ’em to you.”
I gave him my number and walked down the hall with him while he forwarded a half dozen shots of himself and the girl to my phone. He disappeared through the curtains onto the stage. I went back to the dressing room to study the pictures in the light.
Why someone takes a selfie with a guy’s head between her knees is beyond me. At least I could see her face in that one. It was hidden in a couple of the others. And now I’ve got a visual of what Ash’s codpiece is covering. Not gonna forget that anytime soon.
I opened the least explicit of the six he’d sent me and walked back outside. The bouncer was lounging against the wall, drinking an Abita Purple Haze. He choked when he saw the shot.
“Aw, Cindy baby. I knew she be fine, just didn’t know she’s dat fine. Oo ee, looka dat.”
“You happen to know Cindy baby’s last name?” I asked.
“Naw, don’t know dat. But if ya stick around long enough, she’s bound to pass by. She’s always here fer dance night. An’ I gotta say, it’s a pleasure ta watch her dance. I be lettin’ everyone in, just so I can get in der and watch myself. Ol’ Ash got hisself a live one.”
I gave him my card, in case Cindy showed up before Thursday. I was halfway down the block before I heard him yelling at me. “Hey, chief, what dis say? Ya ain’t even NOLA PD. Ya fuckin’ wi’ me?!”
I waved my hand and kept on walking.
I got back to the room around three a.m. Hungry. There’s only so much nutrition you can get out of the orange slice and cherry in a Hurricane. Drinking it on an empty stomach hadn’t done much for me, either. I needed to eat. Either that or toss. I called room service, and fell asleep on the couch waiting for the jambalaya to show up.
And had a doozy of a nightmare. Something was in the room with me, some manifestation of Ovsanna when she’s not Ovsanna, the actress and business woman, when she’s her cold-blooded vampyre self. This was like the Ovsanna I’d seen transform into a gargoyle-looking dragon the night I’d discovered she wasn’t human. The Ovsanna I’d seen shred some of the weirdest looking, nastiest creatures I didn’t know existed. At least it seemed like that Ovsanna. Like a vampyre. It was in a female form. But it was dressed like that woman I’d seen the first day of the con that I mistook for Ovsanna’s former assistant Maral. All in black. Sort of Goth. In the dream, the thing appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the room. And then it was on top of me. Pressing down on me. Going for my neck. I couldn’t breathe.
So— maybe a dream representing my unconscious anxiety about dating the leader of a clan of honest-to-God vampyres? That’ll take your breath away.
Whatever it was supposed to be, the sound it was making scared the shit out of me. A knocking sound, like its fangs were made out of wood and it was clacking them together in preparation for piercing me. I wrenched myself awake, grabbed my gun off the coffee table, and rolled off the sofa into a crouched position, ready to fire. At nothing. There was nothing there. No sounds either. It took me a full five seconds to realize I’d been dreaming. I mean, I think I was dreaming. It sure seemed real.
A second later the knoc
king sound started again. It was coming from the hotel room door. Room service. Feeling foolish, I slipped my gun behind the sofa pillow and let the guy in. “Hey, I’m sorry,” I said. “Have you been knocking for a long time? After I called you guys, I fell asleep.” I worked at sounding nonchalant. My heart was doing 200 beats a minute.
“No, sir. Just got here. Would you like me to put it on the table?”
He could have put it in the trash for all I cared by then. The nightmare had killed my appetite. In the state I was in, the jambalaya looked like some creature’s regurgitated innards. Now I really wanted to puke. “Sure, that’s fine.” I looked out the door. “You didn’t happen to see anyone in the hallway just now, did you?”
“No, sir. Well, maybe Mr. Passenger. His door was closing as I came around the corner, but I didn’t really see him. Other than that, nope. Didn’t see anyone. Somebody making noise? There’s plenty of people from the convention still partying downstairs.”
“That’s probably what it was.” I figured the tip and signed the charge slip. Walked him to the door. The halls were empty. “Good night,” I said, and threw the deadbolt behind him. Then I waited a minute to give him time to leave, walked back to the table, put the lid on the food, and carried the tray to the door. I unlocked the deadbolt, opened the door just wide enough to set the tray on the floor in the hall, and closed and locked the door again.
If it wasn’t a dream and that thing came back, the safety chain wasn’t going to do me much good.
I slipped it on anyway.
27. OVSANNA
Derek’s death was the headline story for every Sunday paper’s online edition. Right next to not one, but two videos of Annie reacting to the news. One was obviously shot with an iPhone. The other looked like it came from a news crew. Probably my buddy from the Bill O’Reilly Show. They both looked like a performance to me, but then I know her pretty well. I’m sure she was suffering some pain at Derek’s loss; just not to the extent her on-camera hysteria would indicate.
Well, if nothing else, she relegated Ann Coulter’s latest insanity to the bottom of the webpage. Coulter had just made another hate-filled, ridiculous-beyond-belief statement naming the politicians she’d like to see beheaded by terrorists on live television. I swear, if I ever go back to draining strangers…
Peter knocked on the door. He was early. He’d taken over Monk’s task of escorting me to and from the convention, but I didn’t have to be downstairs to start signing for another hour. I opened the door with a question in my eyes.
He was wearing a pale blue denim shirt that was so soft he’d either washed it a thousand times or spent a lot of money on it. He looked tired. He looked tired, but oh so sexy. I didn’t care why he was early. I wanted to jump his bones.
He stood in the doorway, smiling at me. “Are you hungry?”
That was why he was early? “You must be tired,” I said, “you know I don’t eat…”
“I wasn’t thinking about breakfast.”
We never made it to the bedroom. We did get the door closed. I took my time unbuttoning that soft denim shirt. He was faster pulling my dress over my head. The clothes dropped to the floor. He backed me up a few more steps, our lips pressed together, and we followed them down. The last clear thought I had was that I should be careful not to let blood drip on the carpet.
Making love with Peter is like nothing I’ve experienced before; at least not that I remember. Lord Byron had his moments, but that was so long ago it’s all rather vague. I seem to remember technique, handsome young men, and the knowledge that I was one in a long line of romantic liasons— which didn’t necessarily dampen my enjoyment, but certainly bore little resemblance to this— what to call it?— experience with Peter.
Thomas DeWitte and I had been lovers for about four minutes when I was going through my ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have someone take care of me for a change’ stage. He never knew I was vampyre. He once commented on how hot his cock must be because I felt so cool inside in comparison. I smiled and agreed. It was fine with me if his ego came up with an explanation that put paid to his curiosity. Thomas preferred young boys, anyway. Young boys who preferred the S & M scene. Once I realized I wasn’t the one making the welts on his Mickey Rourke ass, I kissed him good-bye and relegated him back to his role as Head of Development at Anticipation. It was a job he excelled at— until he was butchered by another of my ex-lovers and a member of my clan, Rudy Valentino.
Maral and I were lovers, before I turned her to keep myself from killing her. Like Peter, she was Warm. Like Peter, she knew what I was, and like Peter, she let me feed on her. That’s where the similarities ended. As I said, making love to Peter is like nothing I’ve experienced before.
He pinned me to the floor with his hands on my wrists above my head. Stared into my eyes. I held his look and saw such desire there that my own increased a hundredfold. “Stay still,” he said, “don’t move.” Very gently he took his hands from my wrists and brushed his fingertips across my cheeks, over my lips, and down my neck. When they touched my breasts, he replaced them with his tongue, and I was gone. Holding still was sublime torture. My breath caught. I couldn’t obey any longer. I pressed my head against the floor. My back arched upward to meet his tongue. My mouth opened in a silent gasp. And he continued down my body.
An hour later I was late for the convention. We were in the shower, ostensibly so I could get ready, but with Peter soaping my back and his hands slipping between my legs, it didn’t seem likely I’d be ready any time soon. Not for the convention, at least. I thrust my hips against him, arched my back and turned my head to meet his lips. No fangs, just sucking kisses that left me barely conscious for the second time in an hour.
There was a ringing coming from outside the shower door.
It took me a second to realize it was the hotel phone on the wall beside the sink. I pulled my mouth away and bent over to reach for it, as Peter slid inside me and held me to him without moving.
I answered, stretching the coiled cord taut, and stood pressed against Peter as we listened to Matty’s voice yelling through the phone— and through the walls. He was calling from the hallway outside the suite. He’d been pounding on the door, but neither of us had heard him. Not that we would have paid any attention if we had. I put the receiver on the toilet top and put the phone on speaker.
“Ms. O,” he yelled, “we got a situation! I’m trying to find Detective King. Any chance you know where he is?”
“I do. He’s here. What’s happened? What do you need Peter for?”
“Well, it ain’t good. But it’s not the kinda thing ya wanna hear over the phone, ya know what I mean? Not fer nothin’, but ya better come to the door.”
“Give me a minute, Matty. Peter will be right there to let you in.”
Peter slipped away from me with a kiss on my neck. He grabbed a towel from the stack under the vanity and wrapped it around his waist as he headed into the living room. I stood under the water briefly and then stepped out of the shower to dry off. My clothes were on the living room floor where we’d dropped them. Peter had closed the adjoining door behind him so I walked naked to the bedroom and took the hotel robe from the closet. If Matty hadn’t figured out we were lovers by now, there wouldn’t be much question after Peter let him in.
Both men turned to look at me as I entered the room. The expression on Peter’s face said the news was a lot worse than Matty’s ‘it ain’t good’.
“Justin is dead.”
“What?”
Peter continued, “The maid found him in his bed this morning when she went in to service the room.”
“What happened? His heart?”
“I’ll tell ya, Ms. O, it sounds to me like—”
I wasn’t going to let him finish. “It couldn’t have been drugs. Justin Passenger doesn’t do drugs. I know that for a fact.” I’d spent eight weeks with him on location for Satan Gone Bad. He was into Yoga, organic food, and meditation. Didn’t drink. Never even took an Ad
vil when he fractured his wrist doing the slide-into-purgatory stunt.
“Not for nothin’, Ms. O, but I swear to Christ, I think one a those damn snakes took a bite outta him. Sam Koh’s hysterical, blamin’ SuzieQ for lettin’ ’em get loose last night.”
“Wait a minute,” Peter said, “there were bite marks on the body? Was the snake in the room?”
“Nah. Listen, I don’t know much. The maid went runnin’ to Sam Koh and Sam came runnin’ to me. I told him to shut the maid up and get Sgt. Cyphers on the horn, and I came runnin’ up here. I haven’t even seen Mr. Passenger’s body. All’s I know from Sam Koh is Justin was laid out on the bed and dead to the touch. And Sam said he saw bite marks. Sam’s on a rampage to find SuzieQ and get her and her snakes outta here. I’d better go see if I can calm him down.”
He turned to leave, with Peter following him.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I want to see the body before Cyphers gets there and tells me I’ve got no jurisdiction.”
“He’s going to tell you a lot more than that if you walk in wearing only that towel.”
Peter recovered his clothes from the floor. I changed into jeans and a Rag & Bone tee. We got to Justin’s room just as two of Sgt. Cyphers’ officers used a key card to gain access. Peter caught the door before it closed and we walked in like we belonged there.
We didn’t get very far.
Justin had a mini-suite, the same layout as Peter’s. Matty, as promoter, paid for the celebrities’ airfares and hotel rooms for the three nights of the convention. I knew Sam Koh had given him a rate on a block of rooms, but I had insisted that my series’ stars get preferential treatment when it came to handing out the keys. Justin’s was on the third floor, down the hall and across from Peter’s.
Make Me Dead: A Vampyres of Hollywood Mystery Page 11