by Jim Butcher
“That shouldn’t be too hard,” she said, and slipped her arm through Genosa’s. “Joan wanted me to tell you that your prescription came in, and that she needs your help on the set.”
Arturo nodded with a strained but genuine smile. “And you are to escort me down to take my medicine, eh?”
“Via my feminine wiles,” Lara confirmed.
“Harry,” Arturo said.
“I need to make a quick call,” I answered. “I’ll be right behind you.”
The two of them left. Lara threw another look at me over her shoulder, her expression speculative. And hot. I mean, wow. If she’d crooked her finger, I think I would have been in danger of floating off the floor and drifting along behind her on a cloud of her perfume. Me and Pepé le Pew.
It took me maybe half a minute after they walked away before I was able to reboot my brain. After that, I ran a quick review of what had just happened through the old grey matter.
Pretty, pale, supernaturally sexy, and just a little scary. I could do the math. And I was willing to bet that Romany wasn’t Lara’s last name.
She looked a hell of a lot more like a Raith.
Son of a bitch. The White Court was here.
A succubus on the set. Strike that, the health-conscious kid sister made it two . . . succubuses. Succubusees? Succubi? Stupid Latin correspondence course. Or maybe she wasn’t one, because I hadn’t felt a thing like the attraction Lara Romany exuded when I was near little Inari.
It really hit me, then, that I’d wandered into a mess that might get me killed, regardless of how silly and embarrassing it sounded. Now I had to contend not only with pornography-syndicate conspiracies, but also a succubus of the White Court. Or maybe more than one, which for grammatical reasons I hoped was not the case.
So in addition to a feisty new Black Court partner in the war dance between the Council and the Vampire Courts, I also got angry lust bunny movie stars, deadly curses, and a thoroughly embarrassing job as my investigative cover.
Oh, and bean-curd pizza, which is just wrong.
What a mess.
I made a mental note: The next time I saw Thomas, I was going to punch him right in the nose.
Chapter Thirteen
After two or three tries, I got Genosa’s phone to dial out to Murphy. “It’s me, Murph. You get that information off the Internet?”
“Yeah. And then I talked to some people I know out there. I dug up some goodies for you.”
“Peachy. Like what?”
“Nothing that will stand up in a court, but it might help you figure out what’s going on.”
“Wow, Murph. It’s as if you’re a detective.”
“Bite me, Dresden. Here’s the deal on Genosa. He’s a dual citizen of the States and Greece. He’s the last son of a big money family that fell on hard times. Rumor has it he left Greece to avoid his parents’ debts.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. I continued searching through Genosa’s desk and found a big old leather-bound photo album. “I’m listening.”
“He wound up making and directing sex films. Did well investing the money, and he’s worth a little more than four million, personally.”
“Sex sells.” I frowned, flipping through the photo album. It was neatly packed with excerpts from newspapers, transcripts, and photos of Genosa on the set of a number of national talk shows. There was another of him standing beside Hugh Hefner and surrounded by a number of lovely young women. “That’s a lot of money. Is that all?”
“No,” Murphy said. “He’s paying alimony to three ex-wives out of some kind of fund set up to provide it. He’s got almost all of what’s left tied up in starting his own studio.”
I grunted. “Genosa’s under some serious pressure, then.”
“How so?”
“He’s only got about thirty-six hours to finish his movie,” I said. “He’s got one project done, but if he doesn’t get a pair of profitable films, he’ll lose the studio.”
“You figure someone is trying to run him out of business?”
“Occam thinks so.” I turned another page and blinked at the article there. “Damn.”
“What?”
“He’s a revolutionary.”
“He’s what?” Murphy asked.
I repeated myself redundantly again. “Apparently Arturo Genosa is considered a revolutionary in his field.”
I could almost hear Murphy lift a skeptical eyebrow. “A revolutionary boink czar?”
“So it would seem.”
She snorted. “How exactly do you get to become a porn revolutionary?”
“Practice, practice, practice?” I guessed.
“Wiseass.”
I kept flipping pages, skimming the album. “He’s been interviewed in about thirty magazines.”
“Yeah,” Murphy said. “Probably with illustrious names like . . . like Jugs-A-Poppin and Barely Legal Lolita Schoolgirls.”
I thumbed through pages. “And People, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Today. He’s also been on Larry King and Oprah.”
“You’re kidding,” she said. “Oprah? Why?”
“Hang on; I’m reading. It looks like he’s got this crazy notion that everyone should be able to enjoy themselves in bed without going insane trying to meet an impossible standard. He thinks that sex is natural.”
“Sex is natural,” Murphy said. “Sex is good. Not everybody does it, but everybody should.”
“I’m the wiseass. You’re the cop. Respect my boundaries.” I kept reading. “Genosa also casts people of a lot of different ages instead of using only twenty-year-old dancers. According to a transcript of Larry King, he avoids gynecological close-ups and picks people based on the genuine sensuality of their performance rather than purely on appearance. And he doesn’t believe in using surgically altered . . . uh . . .”
My face heated up. Murphy was probably my best friend, but she was still a girl, and a gentleman just doesn’t say some words in front of a lady. I held the phone with my shoulder and made a cupping motion in front of my chest with both hands. “You know.”
“Boobs?” Murphy said brightly. “Jugs? Hooters? Ya-yas?”
“I guess.”
She continued as if I hadn’t said anything. “Melons? Torpedoes? Tits? Gazongas? Knockers? Ta-tas?”
“Hell’s bells, Murph!”
She laughed at me. “You’re cute when you’re embarrassed. I thought breast implants were required industry equipment. Like hard hats and steel-toed boots for construction workers.”
“Not according to Genosa,” I said. “He’s quoted here saying that natural beauty and genuine desire make for better sex than all the silicone in California.”
“I’m not sure whether I should be impressed or a little nauseous,” Murphy said.
“Six of one and half dozen of another,” I said. “Bottom line is that he’s not your average pornographic artist.”
“I’m not sure that’s saying much, Harry.”
“If you’d said that before I met him, I’d probably have agreed. But I’m not so sure now. I don’t get any nasty vibe off him. He seems like a decent guy. Taking some measure of responsibility. Challenging the status quo, even if it hurts his profits.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s no Nobel prize for pornography.”
“My point is that he’s applying some measure of integrity to it. And people are responding well to him.”
“Except for the ones trying to kill him,” Murphy said. “Harry, this is cynical, but people who choose a life like that draw problems down onto themselves sooner or later.”
“You’re right. That is cynical.”
“You can’t help everyone. You’ll go insane if you try.”
“Look, the guy is in trouble and he’s a fellow human being. I don’t have to love his lifestyle to want to keep bad things from happening to him.”
“Yeah.” Murphy sighed. “I guess I know this tune.”
“Do you think I could convince you to—”
The s
kin on the back of my neck went cold and clammy, tingling. I turned to the office doorway in time to see the lights in the hall flick out. My heart pounded in sudden apprehension. A shadowy figure appeared in the office door.
I picked up the first thing my hand found, Genosa’s heavy glass ashtray, and flung it hard at the figure. The ashtray rebounded off the inner edge of the door and struck whoever it was. I heard a voiceless gasp of air. At the same time something hissed past my ear. A sharp thumping sound came from the wall behind me.
I shouted at the top of my lungs and ran forward, but my foot tangled in the phone cord. It didn’t tug me into a pratfall, but I stumbled, and it gave the shadowy figure time to run. By the time I’d recovered my balance and gotten to the hallway, I couldn’t see or hear anyone.
The hall itself was dark, and I couldn’t remember the locations of either light switches or doors, which made a headlong pursuit less than advisable. It occurred to me that I made a wonderful target, leaning out of the door of the dimly lit office, and I slipped back inside, shutting and locking the door behind me as I went.
I looked at whatever had thumped into the wall behind me, and found, of all the stupid things, a small dart fixed with exotic-looking yellow feathers fringed with a tinge of pink. I tugged the dart out of the wall. It was tipped with what appeared to be bone instead of metal, and the bone was stained with something dark red or dark brown. I had the feeling it wasn’t Turtle Wax.
A poisoned blowgun dart. I’d been ambushed before, but that was pretty exotic, even for me. Almost silly, really. Who the hell got killed with poison blowgun darts these days?
A buzz of noise came from the dropped receiver of the phone. I picked up an empty plastic cigar tube from next to Genosa’s humidor and slipped the dart into it, then capped it before I picked up the phone.
“Harry?” Murphy was demanding. “Harry, are you all right?”
“Fine,” I said. “And it looks like I’m on the right track.”
“What happened?”
I held up the cigar tube and peered at the dart. The poisoned tip gleamed with its semi-gelatinous stain. “It was pretty clumsy, but I think someone just tried to kill me.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Get out of there, Harry.”
“No, Murph,” I said. “Look, I think it was just someone trying to scare me, or they’d have used a gun. Can you get to those records today?”
“If they’re matters of public record,” she said. “We’ve got the time difference on our side. What are you hoping to find?”
“More,” I said. “This whole thing stinks. Hard to put a puzzle together when you’re missing pieces.”
“Get in touch if you learn something,” Murphy said. “Magic or not, attempted murder is police business. It’s my business.”
“This time for sure,” I said.
“Watch your ass, Bullwinkle.”
“Always. Thanks again, Murph.”
I hung up and flipped through the next several pages of Genosa’s scrapbook, expecting nothing but more articles. I got lucky on the last few pages. He had big, glossy color photos there—three women, and I recognized two of them.
A subtitle beneath the first picture read, Elizabeth Guns. The photo was of Madge, Genosa’s first wife. She looked like she’d been in her mid-twenties in the picture and she was more or less nude. Her hair was enormous and stiff-looking, an artificial shade of deep scarlet. She probably had to take off her makeup with a Zamboni machine.
The next photo read, Raven Velvet, beneath a picture of a nearly Amazonian brunette I didn’t recognize. She had the kind of build that fairly serious female athletes can get, where the muscles are present, defined with obvious strength, but softened and rounded enough to look more pretty than formidable. Her hair was cut in a short pageboy, and at first I thought her features were really quite sweet, almost kind. But her expression was an unsmiling, haughty stare at the camera. Ex-Genosa two, I supposed. He’d called her Lucille.
The last picture was of the third former Mrs. Genosa. It was subtitled, Trixie Vixen, but someone had written across it in black permanent marker, ROT IN HELL, YOU PIG. There was no signature to tell who was responsible. Gee. I wonder.
I flipped through the album once more but didn’t see anything new. At some point I realized that I was delaying going down to the set. I mean, yeah, there were probably going to be naked girls doing a variety of interesting things. And I hadn’t gotten laid in a depressing number of months, which probably made it sound a little more interesting. But there’s a time and a place to enjoy that kind of thing, and for me in front of a bunch of people and cameras was not it.
But I was a professional, dammit. And this was the job. I couldn’t bodyguard anyone if I wasn’t close enough to them to act. I couldn’t figure out the source of the dark mojo without figuring out what was going on. And to do that, I needed to observe and ask questions—preferably without anyone knowing that’s what I was doing. That was the smart thing, the professional thing. Conduct covert interviews while icons of sensual beauty got it on under stage lights.
Onward. I screwed up my courage, so to speak, and slipped warily out of the office and down the dimly lit hall to the studio.
There were a surprising number of people there. It was an enormous room, but it still looked busy. There were a couple of guys on each of four cameras, and there were a few more on hanging scaffolds that supported the stage lighting. A crew was working on the lighted set, which consisted of a bunch of panels made to look like an old brick wall, a couple of garbage cans, a trash bin, some loading pallets, and random bits of litter. Arturo and the beflanneled Joan were at the center of the activity, speaking to each other as they moved around placing cameras to their liking. Colt-legged Inari drifted along behind them marking positions on a chart. The notch-eared puppy followed her clumsily around, a piece of pink yarn tied around his neck and one of the loops of Inari’s jeans. The puppy’s tail wagged happily.
I was supposed to be doing the assistant thing after all, so I walked over to Genosa. The puppy saw me and galloped headlong into my shoe. I leaned down and scratched his ears. “What should I do to help, Arturo?”
He nodded at Joan. “Stick with her. She can show you the ropes as well as anyone. Watch, ask questions.”
“Okeydoky,” I said.
“You’ve met Inari?” Arturo asked.
“Bumped into her already,” I said.
The girl smiled and nodded. “I like him. He’s funny.”
“Looks aren’t everything,” I said.
Inari’s laugh was interrupted when her pants beeped. She reached into them and drew out an expensive cell phone the size of a couple of postage stamps. I scooped up the puppy and held him in the crook of one arm, and Inari untied his makeshift lead and handed it to me before walking a few steps away, phone to her ear.
A harried-looking woman in sweeping skirts and a peasant blouse came half running across the studio floor, straight to Joan and Arturo. “Mr. Genosa, I think you’d better come to the dressing room. Right now.”
Genosa’s eyes widened and his face went pale. He shot me a questioning glance. I shook my head at him and gave him a thumbs-up. He let out a slow breath, and then said, “What is happening?”
Joan, behind him, checked her watch, rolled her eyes, and said, “It’s Trixie.”
The woman nodded with a sigh. “She says she’s leaving.”
Arturo sighed. “Of course she’d say that. Shall we, Marion?”
They left, and Joan scowled. “There’s no time for that prima donna.”
“Is there ever?”
Her frown faded, replaced by simple weariness. “I suppose not. I just don’t understand the woman. This project means as much to her future as to everyone else’s.”
“Being the center of the universe is a big job. Maybe it’s weighing on her nerves.”
Joan threw her head back and laughed. “That must be it. Let’s get moving.”
“What’s fi
rst?”
We went to one of the other sets, this one dressed up like a cheap bar, and started going through boxes of random bottles and mugs for a more detailed appearance. I set the puppy down on the bar, and he waddled up and down the length of it, nose down to the surface and sniffing. After a few moments I asked, “How long have you known Arturo?”
Joan hesitated for a second, then continued dressing up the set. “Eighteen or nineteen years, I think.”
“He seems like a nice man.”
She smiled again. “He isn’t,” she said. “He’s a nice boy.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “How so?”
She rolled one shoulder in a shrug. “He lives on the outside of his skin. He’s impulsive, more passionate than he can afford to be, and he’ll fall in love at the drop of a hat.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “But he makes up for it. He cares about people. Here, you get that top shelf. You don’t need a stepladder.”
I complied. “Soon I’ll move up to putting stars and angels on the tops of Christmas trees. Me and that yeti in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
Joan laughed again and answered me. Her words became indistinct and toneless, like the teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. My heart began to race, and a stab of both food hunger and lust went through my stomach on its way to the base of my spine. My head turned of its own volition, and I saw Lara Romany enter the studio.
She’d done her hair up in a style belonging to ancient Greece or Rome. She wore a short black silk robe with matching heels and stockings. She slid over the floor with a kind of fascinating, serpentine grace. I wanted to watch without moving. But some stubborn part of me shoved my brain into an intellectual cold shower. She was a life-draining vampire. I’d be stupid to let myself keep on reacting that way.
I tore my eyes off of her, and realized that the puppy had come to the edge of the bar near me. He was crouched, his eyes on Lara, and was growling his squeaky little growl again.
I looked around, and kept my eyes from moving back to her only by an effort of will. Every man in the room had become still, eyes locked onto Lara as she walked.