“It’s me, Maral. Solgar will always see me. He has to.”
“Why?” Maral wondered.
“Because I am the Chatelaine of Hollywood.”
Ernst Solgar has been my lawyer for years. He’s also a vampyre. He’s heard every bloodsucking lawyer joke ever told, and passes them on to me via e-mail every once in a while. He’s a rather charming, affable man who could be anything from fifty to seventy—though he’s close to a thousand as far as I know—with a wild head of hair he pays a fortune to keep groomed and old-fashioned circular wire-framed glasses. The glasses must be an affectation. I’ve never known any vampyre who has trouble with his vision.
Ernst is Clan Obour.
The Obour have a single nostril and are without fangs. They take sustenance through a sucker-like opening on the tip of their tongue, but they need an open wound to feed on; they don’t have any way to puncture or slice their host. Not an effective design, if you ask me. Most of them carry a concealed kirpan to do the trick. Solgar has had the surgery that gives him a septum, but I make it a point of never allowing him to kiss my hand. Although he is much older than I am, he acknowledges my position as the Chatelaine of this city. In the Liver Noir, the vampyre bible, ownership of a city is clearly defined as belonging to the first to “inhabit, occupy or possess a township of greater than nine hundred and ninety-nine souls.”
Hollywood is mine. I came here when it was nothing but orange groves. When Samuel Goldwyn was still Shmuel Gelbfisz and before he became Samuel Goldfish, and Hollywood was actually a city in its own right. I inhabited, occupied, and possessed it. When it consolidated with the “City of Angels” in 1910, I became the de facto Chatelaine of the entire L.A. basin. The few vampyres then living in the city acknowledged me as their ruler and swore fealty. Over the decades, the occasional rogue vampyre or mongrel clan has attempted to muscle in on the city. They forget most of us learned our statesmanship in Caesar’s Imperium, the Borgias’ Roma, or the Medicis’ Florence. In my case it was the Paris Terror. I give them a little leeway in the beginning, but eventually those who don’t assimilate we destroy or, perhaps more correctly, we allow the city to destroy. Hollywood can be as lethal to a vampyre as it is to the Warm.
I could tell Solgar’s secretary was a fan from the way she jumped up to greet us. She led us down the long hallway where Ernst displayed his collection of Naïve art—he had two new pieces by Elke Sommer I hadn’t seen before—and into his office, which always looks to me like Pierre Deux on speed.
Solgar came to his feet and scuttled around the French Provincial desk to greet me, both hands held out in front of him in the traditional greeting—a subtle way to show he wasn’t holding a dagger in either hand.
“Ovsanna, Dakhanavar, a pleasure, a pleasure as always.”
“Solgar, Obour,” I acknowledged his name and clan.
I’m five foot six; Ernst Solgar is two inches shorter. Clan Obour didn’t get the height gene. He was wearing a dark blue silk suit that had to be handmade, probably from Savile Row. His shirt was Charvez from Paris and the loafers were Italian, most likely hand-stitched in Rome. Like most of his clan, his feet are tiny. He bowed over my hand but didn’t kiss it, and when he raised his head he nodded to Maral, who hovered by the doorway. She didn’t like Solgar; I’d yet to find a Warm who did. They instinctively distrust both the Obour and Nosferatu Clans and not without reason. In this town, most of them are agents and lawyers. I glanced over at her. “Maral, why don’t you give us a few moments here?” She nodded and slipped from the room without a backward glance.
Solgar & Solari had the penthouse suites at 9200 Sunset, the Luckman Building. Ernst’s office took up the entire east side of the building. Three of the walls were glass and the view out over the city was spectacular, even with the smog touching everything a sulphurous yellow. I stood by the window, taking in the view. Across the street three men were covering the billboard of HBO’s latest cancellation with an ad for a show that wouldn’t last the season. I think they lost their touch when they canceled Carnivàle.
“I have a problem, Ernst,” I said, reverting to the Armenian of my far-distant youth.
“I did not think this was social,” he replied in the same language, though his accent was atrocious. It’s hard to speak Armenian when you don’t have a tip on your tongue. “I was wondering when I would see you. The three dead were yours.” It wasn’t a question.
“My Creations,” I agreed.
“Killed in the old ways.”
“There was another today.” I filled him in on Eva’s bloody death and the police investigation, headed up by King. As I spoke, I pressed the fingertips of my left hand on the window, then breathed on it. Four perfectly blank ovals appeared on the glass. To complete the set I pressed my thumb alongside them. “A detective wants my fingerprints for elimination purposes.”
Solgar rubbed the glass clean with a gossamer-thin silk handkerchief as he bobbed his head quickly. “I can take care of that.”
“His CSIs are working in my FX hut. I need the police off the lot as soon as possible. I have some potential investors coming in on Saturday.”
Solgar’s head bobbed again. “I can take care of that, too. We have friends on the force. I think the right words to the right people in the department will suffice.”
“There may be issues with Maral…and her previous problem,” I said.
“I will ensure there are no issues.”
“Thank you, Ernst.”
“Always a pleasure to be of assistance, Chatelaine.” He came and stood alongside me and we looked out across our city in silence. There are perhaps two hundred vampyres in the city and between us we know them all, maybe ten times that number in the United States, not counting the new-made Creations. Probably twenty vampyres in L.A. were born, not made, and Solgar and I are two of those. The numbers of the vampyre clans have been gradually falling since the end of the First World War; there has not been a vampyre birth in eighty years, and even the number of Creations is down. As Chatelaine, I grant permission for Creations in this city. I’d authorized less than half a dozen this past year, and one of those was mine. To lose three Creations in less than three weeks could only mean one thing….
“I believe there is a Hunter in town, Ernst.”
His face twisted in an ugly mask, jaw briefly unhinging, tongue curling and uncoiling, flickering in the air. Blood flooded under the skin of the open tip and its color changed from pink to purple-red as it engorged. Hunters were abominations, vermin to be destroyed.
“And I think he’s targeting me. Has anyone else lost a Creation recently?”
The Obour’s face reassembled itself. He patted his damp chin with the handkerchief. “Rudy lost one of his to a drowning accident in a pool in Palm Springs a couple of months ago, but drink was a contributing factor, and Tod Browning lost another to a skiing accident in Big Sur. One of his newly mades went headlong into a tree and impaled himself on his Magfire 12s.”
“Magfire 12s?”
“Slovakian skis. Very nice. Very fast. But it was an accident, I’m sure.”
“Anyone we know with aspirations to rule Hollywood?”
“Everyone wants to rule Hollywood, you know that, but I do not believe that anyone is prepared to challenge you just yet. There are some Strigae newly arrived from Italy, but they’re in New York and, from what I hear, may not survive there much longer. They’ve managed to irritate some of the Ch’Iang Shih.”
New York belongs to the Chinese clan. The Italian Strigae have never gotten over the fact that they’d lost the city twenty years earlier. The Ch’lang Shih would have them for breakfast. Literally.
“Here’s what I would like you to do for me, Ernst,” I said, turning to face him. “Get the police off my back, give me some breathing space. I’m going to conduct my own investigation.”
He bowed. “It will be done. But this detective you mentioned, Peter King, I know him by reputation. He got a commendation for bravery when he pulled a boy
out of the river. I don’t think he’s the brightest, but he’s tenacious and has an excellent arrest and prosecution record. If we back him off, he might get suspicious. And the last thing you need is a suspicious cop on your case.”
“He’s no fool, I know that. I want him to investigate. If he’s as good as we think, he’ll soon come to the conclusion that I’m innocent, but, more important, he might also discover the identity of the killer. And lead me to him.”
“It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, Chatelaine. You know he might also discover your true self,” Solgar suggested.
“I’ll deal with that when the time comes. Police officers have accidents every day.”
“Aaah, the famed Dakhanavar streak of brutality.”
“There’s nothing brutal about protecting my clan. Call it a mother’s instincts.”
Chapter Twelve
VAN NUYS
5:00 P.M.
In the best tradition of inappropriate nicknames, John Trueblood is called Little John. He stands six foot eight. He claims he’s a pure-blooded Chumash and I’ve never argued with him about it. He played basketball at Folsom State. Not the college, the prison. He got out with a G.E.D. and a body covered in permanent ink. Started riding with the Ventura chapter of the Hell’s Angels, hitting the California tattoo conventions, and ended up on the extreme wrestling circuit fighting as Bloody Jack Baron, Kill Gore Trout, Doctor Savage, and Slippery Jim. He’s got a tat for each name. When Hyam the Horrible crushed his testicles with a misplaced kick to the groin he changed careers and opened a tattoo parlor on Ventura Boulevard, where he specializes in bikers and servicemen. There’s a sign on the window: “No Minors. No Women. No Musicians. No Exceptions.” I’ve never asked him why.
Little John has a secret vice, which is how we met. And it’s not what you think. He collects movie memorabilia, and he specializes in B movies. He’s one of my mother’s best customers; he even sends her Christmas cards.
They met at Rock & Shock in Worcester the year my mother decided to do the autograph convention circuit; that was the year she paid cash for her red Corvette, so I guess it was a good year. When she met him, Mom didn’t see a six-foot-eight tattooed behemoth with the sides of his head shaved and the hair in the center gelled into six-inch spikes; she saw a comrade in arms, a fanboy who knew Creature from the Black Lagoon, Them!, and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! And he saw a mother figure with great merchandise. Their friendship was sealed when Little John put the fear of God into a Goth who was questioning the authenticity of a signed Dwight Frye as Renfield in a Dracula photo. Whatever John said did the trick; the guy bought Frye as Renfield and as Fritz in Frankenstein, too. Little John knows everything there is to know about horror.
I figured if anyone could tell me what the deal was with Ovsanna Moore, it would be Little John.
I don’t think I look like a cop. The gun isn’t obvious, nor is the badge, and I don’t wear rubber-soled shoes. But the moment I stepped into the darkened waiting room of Little John’s tattoo parlor, I heard the murmur pass to every guy in the place. There were four bikers in full regalia, two marines, a wrestler whose name I couldn’t remember, two blond-haired muscle-bound boys who screamed Aryan Brotherhood from whatever closet they were still in, and a trio of shaven-headed bodybuilders straight from Venice Beach who looked so much alike they might have been brothers but probably weren’t. The men were sitting on hard plastic chairs staring intently at a TV set bolted to the wall behind a mesh screen. The bodybuilders high-fived each other every time Magnum punched out a bad guy on some beach in Hawaii.
Miss See was behind the counter. She’s a tiny Asian woman of indeterminate heritage and equally indeterminate years who had managed Little John when he was wrestling. Word was she’d kept difficult wrestlers in line with a Taser. Her reputation alone was enough to keep the waiting room orderly. I once asked her if she knew any martial arts. “Of course,” she said. “I protect myself. I have black belt in Mossberg.” Then she pulled out a twelve-gauge pump-action Mossberg riot gun from under the desk.
“Detective King,” she said loudly, just in case anyone in the room hadn’t made me. The black unlit cigarette tucked in the corner of her lip didn’t move.
“I need five minutes with Little John.”
She glanced at the clock, then at the tiny TV monitor under the counter that allowed her to see into the back room where he worked. I leaned over to see what she was seeing. A skinny-shanked older man was climbing off the table; I wasn’t sure, but it looked like he’d just had Dale Earnhardt tattooed on his butt. “He just finish.”
“How have you been, Miss See?”
“You tell your mama stop sending my boy her catalogues. She getting lot of money out of him.”
“I didn’t know my mother produced catalogues.”
“Every month,” Miss See snapped. “And every month he buy.” She leaned forward, enveloping me in her cloying perfume that made me think of rotten eggs. “This month he buy Lil Dagover’s white nightgown, complete with certificate of authenticity.”
I nodded blankly. I had no idea who Lil Dagover was.
A huge hand caught the back of my neck and turned me around. “She starred in the original 1919 version of Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari.” Little John’s voice belonged to a pre-pubescent teenage boy, but there was no one sitting in that room who was going to make a joke of it. He was wearing his basic biker’s costume—scuffed motorcycle boots with the toes showing metal underneath, leather trousers, and a leather vest over a completely hairless chest. Maybe there was some truth in his Indian heritage after all, with his high forehead, ridged cheekbones, and razor-thin lips. His Mohawk wasn’t gelled this time, just pushed back off his forehead with a tribal head-band.
“How you doing, Little John?” I had to tip my head back to look in his face.
“Good. You tell your mama to keep sendin’ the catalogues.” He turned to the room where everyone had turned away from Magnum and was regarding us—well, me—suspiciously. “This here is Detective Peter King,” he announced in his little-boy voice. “A good cop and a good man. He’s the one pulled that kid out of the river a couple years ago. Now he’s in charge of the Cinema Slayer case. He’s a friend of mine.”
The room warmed considerably. I got a couple of nods from the beach boys and one of the bikers stuck out his hand.
Little John motioned me into the back room and shut the door. He flicked off the camera, probably annoying Miss See no end. The walls were covered with drawings, transfers, and photographs of tattoos, ranging from the simple to the extraordinary, from the intricate to the excruciating. He had a gallery of the work he’d done on clients over the years. Shoulders, backs, ankles, biceps—all decorated with ink. It took me a few seconds to realize I was looking at a smiley face needled on someone’s penis.
Little John bustled about, cleaning up after his last appointment, getting ready for the next. Every available inch of his skin was covered in tattoos, designs flowing into patterns, shapes morphing into letters, into animals, into creatures. Like that painting Astral Circus by Venosa. Some of it was crude and blotchy, but a lot was vivid and pristine. I briefly wondered what his penis looked like and then quickly shut that thought down.
“So I guess you’re not here for some ink.”
“Not this time. Looking for a little information—”
“Aw, Peter, I’m no stoolie—,” he began, face falling.
“On a movie star.”
He brightened up. “Well, that’s different. My specialty. Who?”
“Ovsanna Moore.”
Little John’s face morphed into mush—I swear he was in love. “The Scream Queen. Third-generation Hollywood royalty,” his high-pitched voice went higher. “I’ve got her grandmother’s gloves from Birth of a Nation. I’ve got a letter her mother sent to Senator McCarthy refusing to attend a hearing, and I’ve got Ovsanna’s costume from Tell Me What You’ve Seen.” He stopped suddenly. “Why are you asking?” Then the color ac
tually drained from his face. “Don’t tell me…don’t tell me something’s happened to her?” This huge tattooed monster was on the verge of tears.
“She’s fine,” I said quickly. “Her name’s popped up in an investigation. I just wanted a little background.”
“Well, you won’t find anything nasty. She’s a sweetheart, does a lot of charity work, funds a couple of theatre scholarship programs. If you buy her signed photo online the money goes right to Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang.” He went over to his battered metal filing cabinet and produced a photograph. It showed Little John standing beside—well, towering over—the diminutive Ovsanna Moore. It was signed in silver ink: “To Little John, my ‘biggest’ friend.” Her signature was an ornate loop.
“Very nice.” I handed it back to him. This wasn’t what I had come here to find. “Any scandal, any dark secrets, addictions, husbands, lovers?”
“Nah, not Ovsanna. She’s blameless. No scandal, no addictions, no husbands. I think she’s got some old boyfriends that she’s still friendly with, even after they split.”
My antenna went right up. No one—not even the Pope—is that blameless. “What’s the story with her assistant?”
“Ah, now there’s the secret! You discover that and the National Enquirer will give you a pension. No one knows. Maral McKenzie’s been with her for about ten years. There’s talk that they’re gay or bi, but no one knows anything for a fact and they never say a word. There’re some reporters who come right out and ask, too, but Ms. Moore just smiles and keeps her mouth shut. Part of the mystery.”
In my job mysteries usually turn out to be nothing more than dirty little secrets. “Hmm, pity. I thought there might be some angle there.”
The big man frowned. “Not your worst thought.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Little John went rooting through his cabinet again. “I’ve got something here…. You know about the guy her assistant killed, right? The one in the house on Mulholland: the Canyon Killings. It was just before she started working for Ovsanna. Girl woke up and found a guy standing over her with his pants around his ankles. She never gave him the chance to explain before she sliced him up real good.”
Vampyres of Hollywood Page 8