Howard awaited me in his cushy living room, his gaunt form attired in a burgundy brocade dressing gown. Its color tastefully echoed the clear plastic bag of blood suspended from the IV stand always at his side.
After forty years of afterlife as a vampire, he had the burned-out rock star look down pat. His rutted face seemed to have been caught in a fire in the wax museum on the way to the plastic surgeon’s office. Bald-doll wisps of dull hair framed those ruinous features. A shrunken head would not be an out-of-line comparison. His surviving body was scrawny to the point of lacking any muscle tone at all.
If this was my secret father I was going take an even-more-assumed name and hide out in Iceland for the duration of the twenty-first century.
“Delilah!” Howard exclaimed on seeing me. He waved the usual set of busty Playboy vampire nurses to his side. “See what my guests would like to drink. Water for the dog, I’m guessing. A good four-thousand-year-old red wine for our friend Bez, the god of luck and love. Perhaps a Shezmou three-zero-forty-one B.C.? And for the very modern Miss Street?”
His shaggy eyebrows elevated on a forehead terraced with frown lines and hovered there, awaiting my answer.
“I could probably use a good belt of plain scotch,” I admitted, taking a deep breath.
“Johnnie Walker black, neat, four fingers.” He waggled four of his. “With any luck, it’ll knock her on her ear so I can whisper sweet nothings in it, which is all I’m good for these days.”
He sighed. “I know drinking from the tap”—a long horny fingernail indicated his neck—“would be much more fun in my current incarnation, but the germs nowadays! Bedbugs, would you believe? In the twenty-first century? Not in my hotels, nor beds. And dust mites. Have you seen those monster faces close up? Uglier than anything in the grossest slasher film. Which, of course, you and I never watch, Delilah. What can I do for you?”
“You also assume I want something when I visit.”
“Well, everybody does.”
“Is that why you became so distrustful of your starlet dates back in the day?”
“My dates? My stars, Delilah, you’re interested in my dating life? Are you jealous? I certainly made the rounds of Hollywood.”
“I know all that. You gave casting couches a bad name. Why have you allowed the Inferno Hotel’s Christophe to corral all your old girlfriends as sexy CinSims in his Lust level at the Nine Circles of Hell?”
“He’s done that?”
“So I’m told.”
“What a power freak, as they say now. Merely mogul envy, my dear. Must be deficient. Trust me. They didn’t call my founding business Hughes Tool Company for nothing.”
I’d heard the emotionally stunted Hughes had been physically far from stunted, but before this topic gagged me, I had to settle another interesting oddity.
“They’re all brunet,” I added.
“I did have that weakness,” he said, gesturing a raven-haired nurse and her tray to me. His attempted wink turned into a blink. He was, after all, more than a hundred years old even by normal standards. As a vampire, though, he was an infant.
“However,” he added, “I never turned away a willing blonde. Jean Harlow. . . .” His voice and memory faded at the same time.
What an interview subject he’d make . . . except for the frequent fade-outs and the fact I was no longer a TV reporter.
“Think of me as an aviator who has crash-landed atop a volcanic mountain in the uncharted Pacific islands,” he rambled. “Would any reasonable man say no to the native girls who thought he was a god?”
“You don’t have to justify your past lifestyle to me, but it all seems compulsive and controlling and sad. Three wives, dozens of actresses as mistresses. You wanted to keep everything, but you didn’t want to commit to anything.”
His head leaned back as a nurse bent close, loosening the clamp on his IV tube so sterilized blood leaked into his delicate veins.
“Not my issue with money,” he mused. “There I anticipated many opportunities. Why should you care about my Hollywood hit list, Delilah? We are all so over.”
“You never had an heir.”
“No! And especially not the losers who showed up after my supposed death to claim they were my inheritors. Luckily, law firms are as eternal as vampires. My secret enduring estate is still well guarded while the public estate has dwindled into bankruptcy.”
I couldn’t help thinking that his life and afterlife was the reverse of that. “How did you manage to transfer your wealth along with converting to an undead lifestyle?”
“Thinking of going vamp, Delilah?”
“You never know.”
“My nurses are very well paid.”
“You and Hugh Hefner.” Something in his expression tipped me off. “No! You’ve helped set Hefner up to follow in your fang marks?”
“Perhaps not under the same persona . . .” Hughes pursed his lips and looked smug.
“My biggest question is, why wait?” I said. “Why not make the change before you look like something from a horror film vault?”
“Looks are so common. Nowadays any obsessive cheerleader is getting nose jobs and Botox at sixteen. Besides, in my day, or the decade I purportedly died in, the seventies, the undead were only thought to exist in those horror films you mention. Even in my youth, I had always been original in my thinking and grandiose in my plans. I became the richest man in the world. Then I became eccentric.”
“You became mentally ill, an obsessive, phobia-ridden hermit,” I corrected him gently. “You were powerful enough to order legions of underlings to fulfill your every whim and weak-minded enough to be taken extreme advantage of.”
Howard leaned close, his faded pupils afloat in liquid. Tears, or just weak in the lamplight? “So they thought. In 1953 I created a nonprofit entity no one much noticed but it’s the only thing that bears my name today.”
“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I know. It’s a world-famous biomedical research facility that sponsors research from scientists across the globe. But you can’t have anything to do with it now.”
“Bah! Humbug, I would say, but that’s true. The basic research I wanted done there was to probe the genesis of life itself. However, to prolong my own life I had to explore the darker side of the street where scientific research meets what some would call quackery, or superstition. I secretly started another small company. I had a . . . last, lovely contact I could trust who had a head for business and even science. She was able to assemble a team of . . . shall we say . . . less reputable European doctors and researchers—”
“She? You hired a woman to head up your real dream team?”
“In the thirties I pretty much lived with Katharine Hepburn for four years, Miss Street.” Howard’s vampire strength made his knotted hands compress the sofa cushions as he threatened to push himself to his feet in anger. “Even Spencer Tracy couldn’t manage that at all.”
I held up my palms to lower the volume before something in his fragile, undead frame broke. “Hepburn was no cakewalk, I know that.”
He fell back into the cushions while his glaring nurses surrounded him, showing me the fangs he’d never let pierce that leathery hide of his because his aversion for germs had outlived his death too.
He rallied to snarl, “Privacy” at the carnivorous nurses. To me he said, “I hired whom I could trust. And . . . someday . . . that might be you.”
I wasn’t going to ask for trouble by saying this, but that job offer was no prize.
However, the identity of his long-ago secret henchwoman was a tasty appetizer for my reporter instincts. Say she was young at the time, something of a given with a chronic womanizer like Young Howard. Thirty, say. She could be alive at ninety today, by the usual methods, and certainly would be by unconventional ones.
So who could run a fledgling early fifties company formed for cutting edge biomedical research with a staff of eager researchers?
Nineteen fifty-three? Nazis!
I was so
appalled I repeated the word aloud. And then said, “You hired ex-Nazis.”
Howard looked thunderous again. “And what was the federal government doing at the very same time? I ought to know. I had enough defense contracts with them.”
Bizarre movie titles that would describe the start-up scrolled through my mind. Mother Was a Nazi Organizer. I Led Three Reichs. Startime for Hitler.
Could this woman have been Vida? She was a proven entrepreneur in Corona. She would have been young and his type. Was the California setup a reward for her role in his escape clause from his disintegrating human life? First, she’d headed his new company; then she’d become vampire to bring him over to eternal life.
Howard was acting too coy about the woman’s identity. He’d been the kind to brag. If I could figure out which of his many women had worked for him, she might lead me to answers about my parentage.
“You’re not listening, Delilah.” He lifted a scrawny forearm to speed the drip of blood into his veins. “I know you need to find out the true story.” He cackled. “Finding a double of myself to play Dead Howard was easy on any skid row. Transferring me was the simplest matter. Can you guess?”
As fascinating as the process of becoming the late Howard Hughes, eternal entrepreneur was, only one detail in his saga could help answer my questions about paternity.
“You admit you’ve set up the perfect retirement plan, keeping your money and your life. Would it hurt to help a poor orphan resolve her issues?”
“All I can say is you surely have family somewhere, Delilah. Besides, I’m better now. Fresh blood, you know.” His shaking arm rattled his IV tube and stand. As it has been said, “all is vanity,” and Howard was vainer than most vampires. His need to talk about himself, though, may have given me a couple of hot clues to what I really wanted.
I slugged down some scotch. “So. Vida.”
Howard summoned the energy to elevate just one thin eyebrow. “The word means ‘life’ in Spanish.”
“The word meant ‘mistress’ in the forties when it came to Cesar Cicereau.”
“That Johnny-come-lately werewolf trash from France! They’d been hanging around Nevada for decades, trading with the native population. There were no wolves in England, an island kingdom, but the Continent crawled with them, therefore, werewolves as well. I would never allow myself to be bitten into a werewolf. All that hair, although I admit could use some.” His taloned fingernails ruffled the three visible coiled white hairs at his scrubs neckline.
“But werewolves are so impotent,” he went on. “Three days at ultimate power and then you sink back into common humanity. Might as well settle for one, er, major rising a month.”
His gaze shifted. Hughes avoiding plain talk with me? Did he indeed have protective feelings toward me? Paternal feelings?
More scotch, fast.
“My dear, you mustn’t gulp Johnnie Walker. Savoring is the secret of life. And undeath. Now, why are you so interested in this woman, Vida?”
“She’s apparently my mother.”
“Impossible! That would likely make that low-life werewolf Cicereau your father, a fate to be escaped at any cost. Oh.”
He snapped his fingers but lacked the strength to make sound as well as gesture. A nurse hastened to his side to produce an auditory snap.
“Mainline level, please,” Hughes croaked. “I’m suffering a terribly distressful thought.”
I waited while Howard gathered strength and spittle. “You can’t seriously suspect that unprepossessing frog might be your father?” he demanded finally.
“That’s a very biased way to refer to Frenchmen, Mr. Hughes. But you’re right. I don’t want to think that.”
Howard’s features squeezed into an expression of pleased calculation. “You came here hoping I had that honor. That you would inherit?”
“Please. You ‘died’ childless without a will more than thirty years ago. Your ‘heirs’ unto the third generation and their lawyers number about a thousand and your last asset is a plot of Vegas land that lost most of its value in the Great Recession and is owned by a bankrupt corporation.”
“You cared enough to look that up,” he said, smiling sideways at me like a shy suitor.
Ugh.
“I’m an investigator. I investigate.” I eyed his white-uniformed attendants. Real nurses wore colorful scrubs nowadays. “We need to speak privately,” I told them. “Could you run off and sterilize blood or something?”
Howard cooperated by nodding vigorously. “I haven’t been alone with a living single woman in years,” he told me. “You are so obviously after my money, Delilah.”
“Me expect to inherit from a vampire, especially one so careful about the purity of the blood he takes in? Never happen. Besides, I don’t want your blood money.”
“Then, what do you want?”
“Your guess on my parentage. Vida is more than vague about when her fertile and vampire years intersected. But I do know that someone had to turn you. I heard you had a beautiful woman made into a vampire to make the process more inviting. That was despicable, Howard, even in a life that used women like the tissues you relied on during your last live years to keep your fingers germ-free. There is still innocent blood on your hands.”
“Don’t say that!” Howard began wringing his cadaverous hands like the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth washing them in Shakespeare’s play. “I have even more money now. It could all be yours. All you have to do is think well of me, flatter me. You do resemble my fondest loves, but, of course, I can’t consider any carnal activities nowadays. Germs. You could be my virgin mistress.”
“Some things you can’t buy, even after death.”
Like really old people his moods shifted fast. “I can destroy you,” he threatened.
I wouldn’t have come here if I’d taken his moods seriously, although he was probably right.
A deep growl to my right drew my gaze, and Howard’s.
Quicksilver was stationed by the IV stand, black lips drawn back from white fangs, his major canines poised to cut the tubing.
His eye whites showed as he turned a questioning look my way. To bite or not to bite.
“Get that monster dog away from my blood line!”
“Now I can destroy you,” I noted. “Your so-called bloodline is what I’m asking about. Am I in it?”
Howard’s teeth were chattering, his eyes pinned on Quicksilver’s teeth. For a huge dog Quick had a grip as delicate as a Chihuahua’s.
“All those women, Howard, those flattered, suckered devoted starlets and actresses. Never a pregnancy, never a hidden birth, an abortion? Birth control was more primitive then. You favored actresses who looked like me.”
A smile trembled around his chattering teeth. “It had not escaped me, but parentage is not possible, Delilah. There were two or three attempts to claim my paternity before you were even born. I was, ironically, sterile long before I became . . . senile.”
I nodded Quicksilver to back off now that Howard was sharing his most intimate secrets. Maybe. When I maintained silence he went on.
“Syphilis.”
For a wild moment I thought of Madrigal’s fey assistant, Sylphia.
Howard confused my continuing silence for ignorance. “Syphilis was the AIDS of the centuries preceding the nineteen eighties.”
I knew what it was. I had just gone stone cold at any possibility that my “inheritance” from Hughes might be that devastating venereal disease. It would certainly explain most of his mental and physical degeneration over the decades.
“Yes,” he went on, “any genuine heir of mine would bear that inescapable curse. My nurses can take a sample of your blood right now. A DNA test comparing yours with mine would settle the issue. It’s unlikely, but I’m willing if you are.”
I eyed the nurses lingering in the archway to the next room. Two were edging nearer, heavy lipstick clinging to their bared fangs and scary-large syringes drawn from their side uniform pockets like ever-ready revolvers from
a cowboy star’s hip-slung holsters. I imagine they were on a diet of Shez’s bloodwine and welcomed any crack at the real thing, even through the intervention of a needle.
Quicksilver produced his bigger fangs and they stopped, eyeing Howard.
“Not necessary,” I told him. I definitely did not intend to submit my blood sample to one more vampire in this town. “I’ll take your word that you paid for the sins of your youth early, with interest.”
His skeletal hand waved off the attendants again.
“So you had to turn vampire,” I noted when we were alone. “It stopped your deterioration. Your life was really screwed up from the beginning, wasn’t it?”
“Not my fault, say the shrinks. It’s a kick to talk to a thorough researcher like you who sees the whole picture.”
“You’re like Elvis, Howard. So many exaggerations have been written about your life . . . and death . . . that the truth is still out there.”
“Elvis did not have the foresight to fake his death and live on as a vampire.”
“Elvis was surrounded by vampires at the end, as were you.”
“Ah, human vampires. A minor variety compared to the actual thing. I did do some good in my life.”
“What about the nest of unreformed vamps you’re sitting atop?”
“They’d be up here to stake me and my attendants in a second and take over the overworld as well as the underworld, except for you and your handsome lover, Ricardo Montoya. And your big dog too.”
Rumors abounded that Hughes had been bisexual, but his tone when he mentioned Ric had been more envious than lustful. Once he’d been the handsome young adventurer and he’d owned the skies, the most money, and the most beautiful women in Hollywood.
“Why thanks to me?” I asked.
He leaned toward me, looking alarmingly like a reviving mummy whose case had just been cracked.
“Shezmou!” he cackled. “You freed the demon god who can cast them all into hell. Shezmou is the only thing left on this earth they fear. It’s why I installed a workshop for him adjoining my suite in addition to that silly little enterprise you talked him into opening on the Strip. His presence is my guard dog. Nice puppy,” he crooned at Quick, earning an operatically sustained growl that made him grin, showing not great teeth.
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