“The toe story?”
“Yeah. The Armenian vampyre toe story. Something about your ancestors?”
“Oh. That toe story. You’ve got a good memory. Well, my clan was known for being very territorial. They guarded the three hundred and sixty-six valleys in the mountains of Ultmish Altotem near Mt. Ararat, and whenever a stranger appeared, they waited until nighttime when he was asleep and then sucked the blood from his toes until he died. One night, two men came into the area, and because they’d heard about the toe-sucking Dakhanavar, they slept alongside each other, head to toe, with each man’s toes tucked under his friend’s head. The Dakhanavar thought he’d found a fat, two-headed monster with four arms and no feet. He got so upset, he left the valley.”
I started laughing. I was a Beverly Hills cop parked in a car on a stakeout with a movie star vampyre whose great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather ate people’s toes for a living. If you put it in a screenplay, no one would believe it.
There was activity across the street. A couple came out of The Lair and walked next door to the vet hospital. I could see them through the glass. He talked to someone behind the counter. She sat on a bench with her head in her hands. It looked like it was going to be a long night for them.
“How did you know about this place?” I asked. “It’s pretty far off the beaten track for you.”
“Did you notice the Gelson’s on Hyperion?” She was talking about an upscale grocery store, one of a small, local chain.
“Don’t tell me. You own it?” This woman was worth more than I’d ever make in my life. What the hell was I thinking?
“No. I used to work there.” She was grinning.
“You worked in a grocery store? What did you do, cut the ribbon at the grand opening?”
“No, silly. In the thirties, Walt Disney had his studio there. Right there, on the corner of Griffith Park and Hyperion. My ‘grandmother’ worked for Walt in the animation department when she stopped making films. Talkies had come in, and truthfully, I was a little worried about my ability to make the transition, so I retired from acting for a few years. When I started again, it was as Anna Moore, my ‘mother.’ But before that I worked in Silver Lake, sometimes at Mixville on Glendale Boulevard.”
“I thought Mixville was the name of that bar down the street on Rowena. I passed it when I was scouting the neighborhood.”
“Right. It’s named after the studio that Tom Mix built so he could shoot his westerns. He had a whole western frontier town there, with an Indian village on the back lot. You should see me in Cupid’s Round-up.”
It was a lot to take in. I thought I’d come to terms with her being a vampyre, but the image of her making silent westerns in the twenties was definitely disconcerting. I pulled my eyes away from the street long enough to study her face for a few seconds. Hardly a line on it. And none of that blowfish ballooning of the cheeks that comes with Botox. She was a natural beauty. Well . . . if you buy vampyres as part of nature. I was beginning to.
I leaned across the gearbox and kissed her. This time her lips didn’t need warming.
“Shit,” she said, and pulled away.
Ovsanna had heard the woman coming out of the club. I couldn’t hear anything but Chad Kroeger singing “Into the Night” from a metallic blue F-150 that was driving by, but she heard Smooch’s girlfriend saying good night to someone inside the bar and asking him to tell Smooch to call her if he showed up.
“She sounds pissed,” Ovsanna said, “not worried.”
“Well, he’s a paparazzo, right? She’s probably used to him stalking celebrities at all hours. I mean, once they make a sighting, they don’t let up. Buckle your seat belt.”
The woman was parked half a block up the street, in a red Camaro. It wouldn’t be hard to follow her. I let three cars fall in between us and stayed back another two car lengths. She made a right onto West Silver Lake and then another right and a left and headed up into the hills. One of the cars stayed behind her, which was good for me. We went another half mile and a garage door opened. As I drove past, she was pulling in. The door closed behind her.
I made a U-turn and parked across the street.
The houses bordering the reservoir were pretty jammed together, but this one up in the hills was on a good-size lot. It was separated from the neighbors and partially hidden from the street by eight-foot-tall oleander bushes. I could barely see the second story above them. From what I could see from the street, the house only took up a third of the lot; the rest must have been landscaping. I wondered if she knew she was living surrounded by a lethal plant.
“I’ve got to do this myself,” I said to Ovsanna, who immediately started to protest. I overrode her. “We don’t know how this woman is involved, or how involved she is, but if she sees you and she’s got anything to hide, that’ll be the end of getting it out of her.”
“What if she’s a were, Peter? You’re going to need me.”
“You’ve got great hearing, right? If she’s got one of those collars laying around and she makes a move for it, I’ll let you know. If I can’t stop her before she turns into something nasty, you can come in and save the day. But if I remember correctly, it was my Glock that took her friend down. Without me, you could have been so much sludge on the beach. So I think I can handle it.”
I was getting pissed off. What? She didn’t trust me? I’m the man, for God’s sake. And a cop. And half Italian to boot. I ought to be able to protect my woman. At least as well as she can protect herself. Even if she isn’t only a woman. Even if she’s a vampyre.
And when did I start thinking of her as “mine”?
The oleanders had a wrought-iron gate dividing them. It was locked, but I could see through the bars. The house was a 1950s flattop with lots of glass, probably designed by Neutra or Schindler or one of those modernists who built so much of the area. It was on a slope up from the street. The landscaping around it was mostly ice plant. There was a name on the intercom mounted on the gate: Sauvage. I rang the bell.
“Yes?” There was no mistaking the voice, even with one syllable. This was the woman on Cyril Sinclair’s answering machine.
“Beverly Hills Police, Ms. Sauvage. I’d like to come up and talk to you.”
She didn’t respond. I turned to look at Ovsanna, who’d put the top down on the Jag and was sitting in the driver’s seat in the dark. I knew she could see me a lot better than I could see her. She nodded to let me know she’d heard the voice. A full minute passed and then the locking mechanism clicked open. I waved at Ovsanna and walked up the stairs.
I had to knock at the door. Another minute went by before she opened it. I looked at her neck, first thing. No collar. She’d taken off her jacket, and she had one of those long barbecue flame lighters in her hand. A faint stench wafted off her, like she’d stepped in dog shit. There were lit candles on the coffee table—one of those kidney-shaped fifties things—and a fire in the fireplace. The rest of the room was fairly dark.
She had company. They must have been waiting in the house before she arrived, although I hadn’t noticed any cars parked outside. There were women dressed in fifties outfits, standing together in small groups. They all had on gloves and pearls, and one was wearing one of those pillbox hats. One was stretched out by herself on an S-shaped lounger, in a poodle skirt and angora sweater. What the hell—some sort of costume party? I nodded to them, waiting for someone to speak, but no one made a sound.
“These are my ladies, Officer. I’m Madelaine Sauvage. Who are you and why are you here?”
I pulled out my badge. The women still hadn’t moved. In the dim light, it was hard to see the expressions on their faces. What did she mean, her ladies? Call girls? She wouldn’t admit it, would she—a Heidi Fleiss with a fifties fetish?
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, ma’am. In private?” I stepped farther into the room, and as I did, she moved a dimmer switch on the wall to my left. The swag lamp hanging above us lightened just a bit.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about the ladies, Detective, they can’t hear you. They’re all dead.”
My hand went to my shoulder holster.
“Actually, they’ve never been alive. They’re mannequins,” she said. “I collect them. They’re my dearest companions.”
She may not have been wearing a wolf collar, but she was definitely loony tunes.
“Would you like to meet them?” she asked.
She sniffed the air for a moment, as though she were smelling something for the first time. Jesus, I thought, there’s no way she couldn’t have noticed that odor before this. She stepped farther outside and sniffed again, her head turned toward my car. Then she came back in the house, closed the door behind me, and motioned toward the first group of figures. “These are Susan, Candy, and Kimberley. They’ve been with me the longest.”
Now that she’d raised the lights and I was closer to them, I could see their molded forms and plastic faces. Each one had a different style wig and different makeup. The one by the fireplace looked like Mamie Eisenhower; the one on the lounger could have been Annette Funicello.
“That’s Janelle and Eve over there, Emilie is by the stairs, and Ivy is reclining in the lounger. I love the way her poodle skirt takes up the whole seat. Don’t you?” As she spoke, she walked over to the figure by the stairs and adjusted the martini shaker in its hand.
I didn’t know which was weirder—Ovsanna and the werewolves or this chick with her baby boomer dummies.
“Ms. Sauvage—,” I started.
“It’s Savage, Detective. I pronounce it Savage, even with the u. I like what it implies. Don’t you?” She sat on the square-backed purple sofa and patted the seat next to her. I’ll be damned; she was coming on to me. Didn’t say much for her romance with Smooch.
“Have you lived here long, Ms. Sauvage?” I pulled out my notebook and stayed standing.
“Years and years. Since the fifties.”
She didn’t look that old. Either she was lying or she had a great plastic surgeon. Or Ovsanna was right about her being a were.
“And you’re a friend of Cyril Sinclair, is that correct?”
“Yes. Cyril gave me Kimberley. She was my very first companion. He’d used her in a photo shoot and he didn’t want to throw her away. She’s beautiful, don’t you think?” She got up and approached the mannequin in the middle of the threesome, straightening the Peter Pan collar and pulling up one of the gloves. She adjusted the head so it was staring straight at me. “She used to work at Saks, but the salesgirls there were so jealous, she left. Cyril was lucky to find her.”
No contest. Much weirder than Ovsanna and the werewolves.
“Why do you ask about Cyril? Is he in some sort of trouble?” There was curiosity in her voice, but no concern. Maybe she wasn’t his girlfriend after all.
“Do you know where he was last night?”
She kept her back to me, fussing with the dummies. “Probably out chasing movie stars. That’s what he does for a living, you know.”
“And you, Ms. Sauvage? What do you do for a living?”
“Oh, a little of this and a little of that. I was an executive assistant for Mick Erzatz when he was running WorldWide Talent. That’s how I met Cyril. The agency hired him to shoot some of their celebrities’ publicity stills.”
Mick Erzatz was a little creep of a guy who’d been one of the most powerful theatrical agents in Hollywood. He wasn’t anymore.
“Mick Erzatz hasn’t been at WorldWide since that scandal in the late nineties. What have you been doing since?”
“I told you, Detective, a little of this and a little of that. I’m an events planner. I put people together, organize entertainment, things like that. I still work for Mick on occasion. I’ve been helping him get the performers for his New Year’s Eve party.” She took a hat off one of the dummies, pulled down a veil that had been tucked inside the crown, and put it back on the mannequin so the veil covered her eyes. “Eve is very shy. She doesn’t like it when people look at her.”
“Did you have anything you were organizing last night? Anything that Cyril Sinclair might have been a part of?”
“No.”
“So last night you weren’t with him?”
“Well, I didn’t say that. I had a drink with him at The Lair early in the evening, and then I came home to rearrange the ladies. I just found that pencil skirt Susan is wearing at an antique shop yesterday and I couldn’t wait to see it on her. I think it’s perfect for her, don’t you? She’s the only one of the girls who can really pull it off.” Finally, she turned to face me. I couldn’t read anything in her expression. “Why are you asking about Smooch?”
“We found a body on the beach last night. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but we think it’s Cyril Sinclair.”
Her eyes widened for a split second, but then she smiled. “Oh, that’s not possible, Detective. I would know if something had happened to Smooch. We’re very simpatico. You must have the wrong information.”
I’ve never had to do a next-of-kin notification—I work in Beverly Hills, after all, not East L.A. Our murder rate is 0.00 times the national average. And Madelaine Sauvage, pronounced Savage, wasn’t Cyril Sinclair’s next of kin. But even so, her reaction was totally wacky. I’d just told her her boyfriend was dead and she’d blithely denied the possibility. Of course, she also talked to full-size Barbies. I didn’t know if she was truly nuts or if she knew something I didn’t.
It took me a moment to come up with an answer.
“I hope that’s true, Ms. Sauvage. Anything’s possible. We were just working off a Polaroid. I’ll tell you what, would you mind coming down to the Coroner’s office to see if you recognize the person we found?”
“Now?”
I nodded.
“All right. Just give me a minute to change.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
I couldn’t stay in the car any longer. As soon as the woman had opened her door, I smelled the same scent I’d smelled in my backyard when the werecreature attacked me. Pungent and feral. Either he was close by or I’d been wrong when I said that stench couldn’t be female. Either way, Peter was in more danger than he knew. That werewolf on my property hadn’t been a boxenwolf. There’d be no collar lying around to warn him.
Peter had left the gate ajar. I stepped inside and stood hidden in the darkness against the oleander. The front door was open. I could see Peter standing inside the entrance. The rest of the living room was visible through the windows that ran the length of the house. It was dark inside. Not a problem for my kind.
The woman had company. A living room full of women.
I let my senses sharpen and concentrated on listening to them. Smooch’s girlfriend said, “They’re all dead,” and immediately I was by the front door, my fangs dropped, my claws in place. She closed it, but not before I got a much stronger whiff of that shitty odor. She had to be a were, there was no doubt in my mind. Maybe the other women, too; the only human I smelled in that room was Peter. I moved next to the window so I could watch them all. If she started to shift, he wouldn’t stand a chance.
She seemed to be making a pass at him. She motioned for him to sit beside her, and when he didn’t, she began fondling the other women in the room. They weren’t responding, either. I looked more closely at them. No wonder they didn’t smell human—they weren’t real. She was using dummies as decorations. Like the life-size fashion dolls we’d used in France in the 1700s. Only these were dressed like Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Ms. savage Sauvage wanted a minute to change. I walked over to the window and tried to see Ovsanna in the car, through the bushes. No luck. The street was completely screened from the house. The gate was opened wider than I’d left it, though. Ovsanna must be eavesdropping close by. She just didn’t trust me to take care of myself, did she?
The stench in the room grew stronger, making my eyes water. I turned around to search for the source, and there w
as Sauvage. She was changing, all right. Right in front of me. And fast. The buttons on her tuxedo shirt popped off. Her nipples retracted and her bra hooks pulled open as her breasts flattened into a massive lupine chest. Her boots were already on the floor—trust a woman to take care of her shoes—and she was ripping out of her jeans. But instead of a bikini wax, I was staring at the hairy haunches of another werewolf. A big mother of a werewolf—not one of those boxenwolves we’d seen on the beach; this thing was huge—misshapen and grotesque, like the werebeasts I’d seen fighting Ovsanna and her vampyres in Palm Springs. Madelaine Sauvage’s aging cheerleader face morphed into the nastiest snout I’d ever seen on an animal, with pitted yellow canines dripping green slime. She had bulbous, twisted, hairy nostrils. I didn’t know whether to shoot or puke.
She didn’t give me a choice. She was on me before I could get to my gun. Her teeth tore through my leather shoulder harness, and my backup piece, the .32 S&W, went flying across the room, shattering the front window. Huge shards of glass blew back at us, but Madelaine—or whoever she was—took most of it on her right side, the side crushing me to the ground. I kept my eyes open long enough to see Ovsanna push through the dangling fragments of glass, and then I squeezed them shut, wrenched my head to the left, and came back with all the power I had to head-butt the damn werewolf woman on the side of its skull.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
I was through the window and into the room before the glass stopped falling. Peter was partially pinned under the werebeast, his leather jacket spiked with glass slivers and his gun gone. He was smashing into her with his head and bleeding from cuts on his face and neck.
Peter’s head butt sent the beast scrabbling away from both of us, but it left Peter dazed on the floor. He rolled on his stomach and used the coffee table to support himself as he tried to stand. I launched myself over him as the creature charged at me, raking my claws across her belly in midair. The coffee table flipped when she landed. Lit candles went rolling across the floor. One of them landed at the feet of a mannequin, and her crinoline caught fire.
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