Hollywood Dead: Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective

by Rachel Graves

“Yes, really. So why don’t you tell me just what’s going on?”

  I’d gone through life assuming that becoming meddling and old was a female problem. I stifled the first words that came to mind and stuck with the truth.

  “I saw a woman sitting in a car with those plates outside my boyfriend’s house. He caught her, too, a few days later. She doesn’t stick around and it bothers me. Any chance the man who bought the car has a wife or a daughter?”

  “Well now, most men have a wife or a daughter. Some men have both.” He shifted in his desk chair and it made an awful squeak. Hands behind his head, belly sticking forward, he was every bit the picture of meddling.

  “If you give me his name, I can find out for sure. I just want to know what she’s after.”

  “I figured as much.” He shifted in the chair, coming forward, his hands clasped in front of him. “I thought about you. About this. Went over there in the employee break room and asked God what I should do. And you know what He said?”

  I shook my head, saying my own prayer that I didn’t reach across the table and smack him.

  “He said I should tell you what you want to know.” The man nodded as if I’d asked some question. Maybe he was nodding at God. “So even though it goes against my grain to give out information like this, and even though I think there’s something missing from your story, I’m going to give it you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, sounding sunnier than I felt.

  “R. T. Dollern,” he proclaimed, as if the name would magically answer every question in the world.

  “RT?”

  “I’m betting Randy Travis. He kinda looked like a Randy, but maybe Ryan, or Reggie. Reggie Travis would work.”

  I suspected he’d go on speculating, so I stood and interrupted. “Thank you, again.”

  “Now see here, missy, don’t you go telling old RT I sent you. I’d like to get another sale to him. Not a lot of men pay cash like that.”

  I promised him I wouldn’t and was down the road before he could utter his next equally annoying admonishment.

  Two hours of driving, passing people, concentrating on the road, but all I could really think about was how OPS had declared R.T. Dollern dead.

  22

  Ted’s garage door was shut so I parked down the street and hoofed it to the house. No sedan lurked in the growing gloom of twilight with a half-dead corpse for a driver. The thought spooked me just the same.

  Rudy had bought a car. OPS had declared him dead. The two facts didn’t jive. They had me on edge.

  I knocked before entering the living room, more out of politeness than anything else. William was probably up and I didn’t want to catch him coming from the shower. I shivered a bit at the thought. There were several men in my life that I wouldn’t mind seeing in that state—Ted, LaRue, hell maybe even Calvin would be worth a look but not William. I wanted to keep any thought of him as far away from sex as possible. Noble, romantic history aside, he was too cold for me.

  “Ted is in the other room,” William supplied as he shut the door.

  “Thanks.” I didn’t really mean it. He must have picked up on it, because he frowned. “I brought the paperwork for you.”

  He took it from me without a word and went toward the dining room table. I followed him and sat down, spreading my fingers wide. The surface was so polished I could see my reflection in the warm amber wood. I had memories of great meals here, the start of great sex, and a few other pleasant things.

  “Your heart is beating faster.”

  “Uh, yeah well, that happens.” I got up and walked into the kitchen then took an apple from the fruit bowl Ted had set out, more for an excuse to get away than because I was hungry.

  “You’ve looked these over,” William asked.

  Before I could respond, Ted walked into the room and I realized William hadn’t been asking me.

  “I have,” Ted told him. “Elisabeth’s seen them, too. You’re the last to know.”

  William made a dismissive noise and went back to flipping through papers. Ted either wasn’t bothered by William’s rudeness or didn’t notice it. He crossed the room and hugged me tightly, whispering “hi” in my ear. I told him “hello” back. We both knew we were saying more than that.

  “You look great.” He stepped back to admire my jeans and T-shirt ensemble like it was fresh out of Paris.

  “Thanks.” He’d changed already, from khakis and a polo to those great jeans and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled back. He looked this way when we went out together, casual but polished. I’d caught the scent of his soap, a clean smell with a hint of spice. He’d come home and showered, changed into something that looked good and worked on his hair, forming the blond tips into spikes. I noticed something different about those spikes and had to ask.

  “Hair cut?” I guessed, sorry that William was there and I couldn’t run my fingers through it.

  “Gina said I was getting shaggy. And she wanted to talk about boys when we were alone.”

  “Oh. Shit.” Gina was looking for advice from Ted, not just talking with me later. Whatever was going on with her had to be big. I stepped back from him to lean on the counter, positive this was a bad thing.

  “You disapprove of your sister’s habits?” William asked, suddenly part of our private conversation.

  “I disapprove of the guy she’s dating. There’s something not right about him, and he won’t come clean. I’m trying to decide if I want to ask a friend to put a stop to it actually.”

  “Which friend?” Ted asked, leaning opposite me.

  “Marie.”

  He cringed. “A little early to start killing people over it, isn’t it?”

  “What makes you think she’d start with killing?”

  “It’s what she does.”

  William gave us a look. I didn’t have any desire to recap my life for him so I kept my mouth shut.

  “Marie is a vampire, an old one, who doesn’t think the rest of us are people,” Ted clarified for him.

  William gave a short nod—maybe he was agreeing with Marie’s sentiment, maybe he was just nodding to show he got it. “If I might change the subject?”

  “Sure.” There wasn’t much more for me say about the Jeremy situation.

  “I’ve disabled the listening devices. We’re no longer being monitored.”

  “Well that’s handy.” Disabling bugs was a pretty useful skill. It was nice to know that he had it, and time to show off some skills of my own. “I got the dirt about the car out front. It’s used, was just sold to an R.T. Dollern. The guy who sold it remembered the sale because he paid in cash.”

  “Of course,” William said.

  “Cash doesn’t leave a trace so it’s fairly standard,” my boyfriend explained. “Anything else?”

  “No, just that Rudy Dollern somehow came back from the dead to buy a car and then got a woman to sit out in front of your house in it.”

  “Dollern died in his sleep,” William read from the file. “If the records are to be believed.”

  “Shouldn’t they be?” I asked.

  “Died in his sleep doesn’t make a lot of sense.” Ted headed over to the table to see the file himself. “From what I saw, he was physically healthy. If OPS had killed him they would have listed it that way.”

  “Maybe he died in his sleep of natural causes,” I tried.

  “It is rather rare for a healthy man younger than thirty to die in his sleep, don’t you think?”

  William’s voice reminded me of a rather obnoxious English teacher I’d had once so while I agreed, I just pointed to the line. “Okay, then what does this mean?”

  “They don’t know. They just have a body,” Ted told me.

  “Or the files have been corrupted,” William suggested.

  “Are the files corrupted often?” OPS was big bad, the spookiest of government agencies. Something told me they didn’t get hacked every day.

  Both men stayed silent, apparently not willing to offer the odds.r />
  “Okay, what about other options? His sister was pretty protective of him. Could she have switched him, alive, for a body of someone like him, dead? I mean, the car was bought by a guy…”

  “Possible, but not probable,” William disagreed. “The sister could have taken his place somehow—a magical transfer, if not a physical one.”

  “Either of them do spellwork?” I didn’t remember that from their records.

  “No,” William said.

  “Then we’ll put that in the possible but not probable column as well.” I smiled in triumph but William didn’t look.

  Ted shook his head at the two of us. “What else do we know about the owner of the car?”

  “Not much, according to the sales guy, he was a little standoffish, but that was it.”

  “So it could have been a woman,” William said.

  “No. The guy was sure it was a man.” I shook my head.

  “People tend to be sure of what they expect to see,” Ted said gently, like he didn’t want to correct me. “Put the right woman in the right clothes, don’t let anyone stand too close, and you’ve got a man.”

  “You think Rudy’s sister was trying to pass for him?” It made sense, the over-protective Ruby stepping in to save the day. If Rudy wasn’t really dead, she could’ve hidden him away somewhere. She might be stalking Ted, trying to catch the killer before he got to her brother.

  “More than possible,” William declared, holding up the file photo. I hadn’t taken much notice of it but Ruby was not the most graceful female figure. She also didn’t look like the woman I’d seen out front. I pointed that out to them and received a lecture on OPS disguise techniques that lasted far too long.

  “Okay, okay, so it’s either Ruby, in disguise, or Rudy, who isn’t dead. What do we do now?”

  “Nothing,” Ted said. “Well, maybe I’ll walk you home.”

  “Wait, nothing?”

  “I’ll question Agent Dorset tonight. There’s a chance he knows more about Rudy’s death,” William put in. “But you will do nothing.”

  “Excuse me?” I tensed, almost wanting him to start a fight.

  “He’s right. We wait. If the person in the car is a threat, waiting will force them to act. If they aren’t, we haven’t lost anything.” Ted did his best to diffuse the situation.

  “But you’re not going to check into this? To investigate it? You’re just going to sit and wait?” I demanded.

  “We talked about this.” Ted turned me away from William, pulling me almost into the other room. “It’s not like the people you deal with. It’s a psychological game. Going on the offensive will force whoever it is into something unpredictable. Unpredictable usually means stupid and bad. Trust me.”

  I trusted him, but I didn’t think he was right. I glanced over at William, wishing he would say something. If one of them would be just a touch irrational about this, I could pounce on that. They were both extraordinarily calm.

  “You can’t reason with someone like this.” I tried to make them see sense. “This person tortures their victims.”

  “So did I,” Ted replied. “We’ve played this game before; we know how it works. Waiting and acting normal is a thousand times worse for whoever is out there than panicking and going out guns blazing.”

  “Fine,” I said, meaning anything but. “So we do nothing.”

  “Not nothing.” Ted struggled to make peace. “William checks out what Dorset knows and I get you home.”

  His smile was contagious but his mood wasn’t. I hadn’t put on my gun this morning, hadn’t thought there was any need. I knew better now.

  The walk back to my car was frosty. By the time we got to my place and sat on the couch, my feelings had thawed. I was worried about him, about us, about the way things were. I wanted him to see things my way, to do things that would keep him safe. Unfortunately, there was no way I could talk about the latest political scandal or how the polar ice caps were melting with that on my mind.

  After five or six stalled attempts, Ted finally asked, “Would it help if you just yelled at me?”

  I let my mouth hang open for a second while I tried to come up with something to say.

  “You’re sitting there, not really making conversation so I figure you’re pretty upset. I’m trying to think of some way to let you get over it so we can get on with the night.”

  “Get on with the night?” I suspected his plans for the night didn’t involve musicals.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “How can you be so damn calm?” I shouted and then immediately burst out laughing. He’d asked if it would help if I yelled and I yelled. The idea was pretty laughable.

  He raised his eyebrows at me. “That’s it? Only one little sentence? Come on, I’m risking my life here—ignoring good sense, not taking your advice. Don’t you want to yell a little more?”

  “No,” I sounded stubborn but I was grinning, too. “Not now anyway.”

  “You sure? Don’t even want to shout a little?” He moved closer to me on the couch.

  “No.” I stuck out my lip, trying hard to pout.

  “What if I want to hear you shout?” His question came with a lecherous grin as he put his hand on my thigh.

  “Well, you’ll need to get to work then.” My grin was almost as naughty as his. By the end, we both shouted.

  23

  Ted fell asleep a few minutes after we finished. Our intimacy erased every thought from my mind that wasn’t about him. The moonlight accented the heavy circles under his eyes, and the darkness there. Gina was coming over, so I should kick him out but he needed to rest. I stayed close to him, watching him in his sleep. Keeping him safe made me feel better, but it couldn’t last. When someone knocked at my door, I got dressed and went to see my sister.

  Instead I found Jo wearing an outfit that matched mine—jeans and shirt, except that it didn’t match since her jeans were skin tight, making her legs look a thousand miles long and her sleeveless shirt was cut in a deep V that would make my breasts spill out like over ripe fruit.

  “Anything going on?” Jo dumped a plastic grocery bag on my counter.

  “Not really. What’s this?”

  “Drinks for me, beer for you.” She tossed one my way. “I wanted to get out of the house.”

  “Any special reason why?” It was a Mexican beer that usually came with lemon. With Jo being a vampire, I figured I couldn’t fault her for not knowing enough to bring them.

  “Samuel is moping around because he screwed up. Jean-Laurent is annoyed because he wanted to get rid of Samuel but you made him promise he wouldn’t. Calvin’s trying to make peace and poor Douglas is just so lost.”

  “Not the happiest bunch.”

  “Nope. Did it actually matter to you that Samuel lived?” She sounded genuinely curious.

  Should I go with a serious yes, or a long logical argument? She distracted me by popping open something that looked like a beer bottle but most certainly didn’t hold beer.

  “Yes, it mattered.” I forced my eyes away from the contents of her drink, trying not to stare. “What is that?”

  “Bottled pig’s blood. Don’t tell Maman or Jean-Laurent, but I don’t mind it.”

  “Why can’t I tell them?”

  “Liking bottled is considered trashy. Sort of like going soft on your servants.” She pulled us back to the point.

  “There’s a difference between going soft and not killing someone.”

  “Not really—not in vampire culture,” she corrected.

  “Oh, like you really have a culture. You’re not some oppressed minority.”

  “Hey, I’m oppressed,” she said, looking anything but.

  “Really? How?”

  “I can’t adopt children.”

  I hadn’t realized that and I suspected it a lot mattered to Jo.

  “The baby shower thing at Burgundy and Blues is tomorrow. I sort of wanted to be distracted,” she admitted.

  “Uh-huh. And everything else?”

/>   “I wasn’t lying. They’re all, you know, being weird. But it’s not that terrible, just not distracting enough.”

  “How can I distract you then?”

  “Hmm, you could tell me who’s in the bedroom?” A slow smile spread across her face.

  “As if you don’t know,” I smirked.

  “How is the most heterosexual gay man in town?”

  “Amazing, decadent,” I started, but then reality hit. “And sadly, asleep.”

  Jo laughed loud enough that I almost missed the knock on the door. She didn’t though, pointing through the giggles.

  “That’s something distracting, Gina can’t get into the bedroom, okay?”

  Jo opened her mouth to say something but I raised a finger to cut her off. I’d heard her advice about my relationship with Ted before, and I didn’t have time to hear it again tonight. Gina didn’t usually bring up serious talks. Whatever the circumstances were I was going to listen. I let my sister in with a smile.

  Gina plopped down on the couch. She looked at me the exact way she had when she was seven and demanded to know if Santa Claus was real.

  “I was going to ask you alone but if Jo’s okay with it, I’d be just as happy to get two opinions.”

  “Go for it.” Jo sang from the kitchen, her head buried in the fridge as she put away the rest of the drinks.

  “What’s sex like?”

  I coughed, nearly choking on my beer, so Jo spoke first.

  “Painful, messy, and annoying.”

  “What?” I shouted at her.

  “Well, for the first year I had sex, that’s what it was. Then I got pregnant and my husband didn’t bother me so—”

  “Okay, that is not what sex is supposed to be like.” I turned to Gina, doing my best to mimic some after-school special. “It’s fun. It makes you feel really good, and really close to the person you’re with.”

  “Nope, sorry, don’t buy it, Gina.” Jo didn’t care about the after-school special talk. “There’s no guarantee the guy you pick is going to know what gets you off, or that he’ll care. You’re just as likely to end up numb or finishing things off yourself afterwards.”