I was surprised the next morning when the outer gates at Castle Nightwine opened instantly for us and the squawk box recognized us. Apparently everybody knew our names at Hector’s place. Kinda like on Cheers.
“Miss Street and Mr. Dog,” came the cultivated voice over the microphone.
“Mr. Quicksilver, Godfrey. He has a name now.”
“Very good. Proceed to the main door and do scrape your shoes and paws on the welcome mat.”
Quicksilver had surprised me this morning with a natty coat under which not one half-were puncture or scratch lurked. Of course he’d kept me awake almost half the night with the sound of his relentless licking and grooming. Still, the results were worth it. He looked downright awesome now that his leather and silver collar had a Manhattan-tugboat-size chain for a leash.
We trotted up to the entry doors, which resembled the approach to a cathedral. Godfrey was his same dapper self, including the curled upper lip we knew and loved.
“Is the master in?” I asked, handing Quicksilver’s heavy-duty leash into Godfrey’s white-gloved hand.
“Mr. Nightwine is in,” Godfrey said carefully. He eyed Quicksilver with a certain camaraderie. “As to who is the master—?”
Words I loved to hear. I’d thought I knew enough now to squeeze Nightwine by his carnivorous balls, and I would find out just how much shortly.
The study was the same scarlet lamp-lit retreat, a place of cigar smoke, aged brandy, and leather-bound books. Daylight never penetrated here. Maybe Nightwine was a vampire. The surname was highly suggestive and anyone could be undead these days. Nowadays, playing pin the fang on the vampire was a better—and scarier—social game than guessing gender preferences used to be.
“I thought you’d be back,” Nightwine informed me in rotund syllables, like a judge. Or a parole officer.
“I thought you’d want that.”
“Miss Street, is it? Really and truly?”
“Yes. It is.” As much as a made-up name invented by a social agency could be real or true.
“You must understand that yesterday I thought you were using a pseudonym. I thought you might be a Lilith imposter playing some sort of con game.”
“That’s what Adam told Eve and look where it got him. Confining clothes and original sin. No fun fast.”
Nightwine was silent. So I spoke again.
“So her name was Lilith. Wasn’t Lilith the uppity woman Adam banished from Eden so Eve could get down with the snake and queer the whole deal? And then they both blamed Lilith?”
“That’s ancient legend. I deal in the present and the future. The fact is, as I now see, you are a stranger to Vegas and to my production company. You must understand. We’re talking copyrights here. I bought all rights to Lilith’s likeness and its reproduction. I have the same deal with all my corpses, living or dead. Lilith was unexpectedly . . . unique. Superb. A horror director’s dream. Alas, I’ve been given to understand she requested a genuine dissection.”
“Genuine? You mean you actually kill people onscreen?”
“Certainly not, that would be murder! But some are
freshly dead, yes. If they wish. We don’t kill them, we
don’t assist them in any way, they do it themselves. In
order for our agreement to be valid, they must use some
means that doesn’t leave disfiguring marks on the body.”
“Suicides still have to be investigated, just like murders. And autopsies performed and . . . ”
“Miss Street, as we have established, you are new to Las Vegas. You are also ignorant of its laws. Let us just say that certain statutes have been passed that allow for our use of such “talent,” as we call performers in the entertainment industry, and that all investigatory and legal procedures are followed. The order of those procedures may simply differ from the order elsewhere. Las Vegas has always accommodated the entertainment industry, Miss Street. It is one reason Nightwine Productions are located here rather than Los Angeles.”
Had I mentioned I wasn’t in Kansas anymore? I wasn’t even in Southern California’s LaLa Land — and I thought that was as weird as a place could get.
“I think I understand, Mr. Nightwine. If your corpse is a real corpse, it is . . . ah . . . fresh and free of the . . . um . . . imperfections of death?”
“We prefer to ‘dress’ our own corpses.”
“So the maggot in the nose was a director’s touch?”
“Lilith made such a beautiful corpse that the director went light on the maggots, bloating, and rot. Etcetera. Do sit down. I realize our modus operandi is a shock. I’m sorry. Some people are dying for a taste of fame, even if it’s posthumous.”
I sat. “But . . . she wore my blue-topaz nose stud.”
“And a dainty, poignant touch it was. Er, is, in your case. Like a tiny bejeweled tear. Exquisite.” His beady black eyes actually weltered in some fluid as he eyed my nose and its little glint of bling.
“Well, Hector, I’m not dainty and bejeweled or crying,
not to mention dead. I’m from Kansas and I’m somebody
else than this Lilith entirely. I am not a posthumous
person. Get it? I live, breathe, want answers.”
“It just can’t be. Not two of you in the world. So . . . telegenic. If you’re not a sham, reneging on our deal, maybe you’re Lilith herself. Maybe she made arrangements with a cheap reanimator.”
“Cheap! I’m getting the impression that cheap is your style.”
“You can’t be real.”
I’d felt that notion often enough in my dreams to feel my legs quiver a little. The reporter’s credo: When in doubt, ask a hard question.
“Why not?”
“Well, we don’t make mistakes. We offer untold opportunities to our non-extra performers. We are in high demand as a corpse factory. Our players are either alive mimicking death, or truly dead, and we keep scrupulous books on that, as the deceased often bequeath their royalties to loved ones. Lilith had no one to leave anything to.”
“Right. Your corpses. Tell me about them—us, Hector.”
“Ah, merely that we’ve found that the hyper-reality of modern media often requires real people for corpses. It saves dough and camera time to dissect them . . . dead. It’s a last, spectacular way to make an impact as you, er, go.”
“Nope. Dream on, Hector. I’m not reanimated.”
“Ah. So. Then I would guess that you’re an obsessed fan of the show. Perhaps you’ve undergone massive plastic surgery to become my Maggie.”
“No scalpel has ever touched my lily-white skin.”
Bad choice of image. I watched a soupçon of drool decorate his plump red lips.
“What can I say?” Hector tried next. “The corpse in question said her name was Lilith Quince and she swore she had no family.”
“I don’t either,” I said. “That’s why I want to find her.”
“If she’s really still alive, I do as well.”
He’d knocked me speechless at last. What a cold-blooded—
“Her . . . and your Black Dahlia beauty,” he went on, “has made Lilith the most beloved corpse on the series. The popularity spike is already awesome after only a couple weeks. DVDs are selling like crazy. I’m even licensing ‘Maggie’ dolls and other tie-in merchandise via China.”
“Maggie wasn’t her name,” I said, confused.
Oh. I got it with a sinking stomach. The name memorialized the maggot emerging from poor Lilith’s topaz-studded nostril. Hector Nightwine was one money-sucking ghoul! Oops. He might actually be one.
“I am so sorry, my dear. None of us anticipated her popularity. Please. You look even paler than usual. Have some wine, a bit of food, perhaps during an unreeling of a vintage film? I am quite the cinéaste, you know.”
Maybe I know. Maybe I don’t want to know. The plate of scones he passed over his desk looked . . . half-baked.
“No, thanks.” Who knew where that stuff had been? “Cinéaste? That’s a perversion I haven’t heard of.”
Hector sighed, a gesture that shook his brocade vest like a bowlful of eels.
“It’s not a perversion. It means I am a gourmet of cinema. A devoted aficionado. One who appreciates the art of film on a deep and knowledgeable level.”
I appreciated the art of film; my vintage mania meant spending way too much on classic film DVDs. His “appreciation” meant he produced a global television series that gloried in women’s corpses literally littering the cutting room floor? I contemplated Lilith’s likely fate—though Nightwine’s initial suspicions about me being a reanimated version of a deal-breaker hinted she might not necessarily be dead—and mine. Funny, if I was so damn beautiful, why didn’t anybody ever offer me a home? I picture me at age ten: pale, skinny, and mop-haired. You don’t feel beautiful if nobody ever wants you. And then, all of a sudden, it looks like everybody wants you . . . dead. Vamps. TV producers. Nutso fans with a necrophiliac streak as wide as the Styx, the river that runs through Hell. Nightwine still frowned into his scones, which made crunching sounds like bones as he nibbled away on them.
“Twin is out?” he asked.
“Possible but unlikely.”
“I know! Clone?”
“In Kansas? We still use rainmakers. Besides, it would need to have been done in the twentieth century.”
“Not too far back. Lilith wasn’t a day over twenty-five.” He blotted crumbs from his over-colored lips with a crochet-bordered linen handkerchief. His currant-black eyes twinkled with a sudden thought.
“I do, of course, have samples of Lilith’s DNA. We don’t want any hanky-panky as to the identity of our corpses,” Hector conceded. “If yours matches hers, I suppose you’d be entitled to a small royalty.”
“I don’t want money.”
“But you admit you’re an orphan. She could have been lost kin.”
“I don’t want money from her . . . death.”
He licked his tongue against his teeth. It was over-colored too, and moved like a sea slug.
“Don’t be foolish, my pearl. You wouldn’t believe the crazies in this town who would snatch you and dissect you on camera and then sell a tape of it, Maggie is that popular. I must protect my investment. And you might be of some use. You were an investigative reporter, I believe.”
“You’ve been checking up on me.”
“Yeth,” he admitted with a lisp as he bit into a dark purple plum from his desktop bowl. Nightwine was always eating or drinking something. Euww.
“And then”—His glance was as encompassing and lewd as when he mentioned his beloved black-and-white movies—“I’ve had a chance since your last visit to scan all of my security tapes from Sunset Park the first day you visited. And the day after.”
He paused as though to allow me time to tremble in my boots. Never gonna happen. It was too hot here for boots. I was wearing my forties purple platform sandals that made me six feet tall, for courage.
He reached out a plump forefinger and pushed the horns on the bronze sculpture of a bull on his desk.
I heard a mechanical whirring sound and turned as one section of paneled library shelves slid away to reveal a wall of television monitors. The central flat-screen one was huge, seven feet or so.
Nightwine lifted a remote control sporting about a hundred luminous buttons and pressed one. What was he doing, showing me a soap opera in progress?
Oh. It was Ric’s face maybe two feet high and it was fine. He was making love to . . . my hair, and I was writhing into his body like a mink in heat as the image drew back at the clicking command of Nightwine’s remote control.
The camera panned down to document our totally compromising positions and lingered suggestively on the operative prong of the dowsing rod shaking and dragging my hands as it plunged toward the ground. Who did this guy think he was? Alfred Hitchcock?
This wasn’t just a security tape made by an automatic camera. Nightwine fancied himself a director. He’d taken control, captured every moment of the lost time when Ric and I had found the dead bodies and I’d channeled their last, lascivious, live moments.
I felt a flush sweep up from my chest over my cheekbones. God, we looked hot. Nightwine thought so too, or he’d have never stepped in to “direct” this routine surveillance moment personally. The original must have been an uninspiring long shot.
“This is when I realized that my Lilith,” he said, “is worth far more alive. I could sell this . . . outtake . . . for hundreds of thousands.”
“You’re telling me that I’m a live dead sex symbol? You don’t understand. That footage is not what it looks like.”
“I do understand, Miss Street.”
The remote chattered like a chicken. I was treated to a rapid run-through of the police scene the next day, the bodies in their excavated tomb, even me wandering over to the dog area to adopt Quicksilver.
“Perhaps you may be disinclined to believe it,” Nightwine droned on in his prissy, pseudo-Brit diction, “but I actually am agoraphobic. I dread crowds and open spaces. I could use a . . . leg woman.”
He leaned over his desk to eye my gams. I thought they were fairly okay too, hence my vintage shoe collection. Now I wished I’d worn leg warmers.
“You see, Miss Street, I am a victim of extreme success. I have so many spin-off franchised CSI shows that even an army of writers can’t come up with sufficiently provocative scripts. So I mine the murders of yesteryear. Obscure ones, of course. Unsolved, as a matter of fact. You show more than a seasoned reporter’s skills on my tapes. You have . . . something extra. And so does the most interesting Mr. Montoya. I agree that this cozy footage of you two is more than an idle turn-on for any passing voyeurs.”
Ugh! Was he talking about himself? Yes!!
“I suspect that you are gifted as your equally attractive but lamentably absent ‘sister’ was not. You’re a medium, my dear.”
“Me? Ridiculous. I’m a reporter. I live and die by cold hard facts.”
“I live and die by cold hard bodies. If you do indeed have a direct line to the dead, I want you to develop these skills. I want to know who those entwined corpses were. I want to know who killed them, and why. I want them to be the centerpiece of a Las Vegas CSI episode. I’ll pay you well for any results you can . . . dig up. How you pay Mr. Montoya is your own business, but he is clearly an accessory before the fact.”
I took a deep breath. So deep I felt a sharp pain in my side. Okay. I was alive. Unlike Lilith. Or unlike Lilith was presumed to be. I was also alive enough to really covet that footage of Ric and me, those close-ups of Ric’s face while he held me. No one in memory had ever held me like that. No one had ever looked like that while holding me.
“I’ll work for you,” I said. Briskly. “I’ll solve this case. And then I want those tapes. All the tapes of me and Ric, everything. No copies left.”
“Not even one weensy one for my personal collection?”
“Not even one, Nightwine.”
“You’ll live on site?”
“Right.”
How bad could it be? Besides, I could see that Lilith/me needed heavy security. And I didn’t want Quicksilver exposed to any more werewolf gangs. He looked at me in a way no living thing ever had either. Except Achilles. I wasn’t going to lose Quicksilver too, by God.
“All right.” Hector punched another button on the remote. The wall of living images vanished again behind a gilded façade of book spines.
“There’s more you need to know, Miss Street, more of the facts about underground life, and death, in Las Vegas that bear upon your investigatory efforts,” he told me. “There’s a thriving illegal traffic in the dead. Ask your Mr. Montoya if you can keep your mouths off each other long enough. Ah, I once was young myself, but it was so long and thin ago. The dead and the undead are being revived and employed: ghosts, zombies, vampires, and who-knows-what other supernatural creatures. They are being leased to the Vegas hospitality, entertainment, and sex industries by a mysterious consortium that makes the fictional and demonic Wolfram & Hart look angelic.“I’m especially concerned about a related issue: some of the resurrected dead have even been peeled off the silver screen, the black-and-white movies whose images were filmed on silver nitrate. Do you know what travesties like this mean, Miss Street? They’re taking Bogey out of Casablanca, Bette Davis out of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and selling their soul-less selves as cheap tourist attractions. Some are even being prostituted.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Godfrey?”
“Wonderful actor. Classic portrayal. Surely you recognized him from My Man Godfrey? William Powell in the title role. Nineteen thirty-six. Perhaps the greatest screwball comedy ever made. A socialite played by Carole Lombard picks up a Depression-era hobo during a scavenger hunt. He becomes her family’s servant, also their therapist. He’s really a wealthy man and, of course, there’s a romance. Powell was Dapper Personified in that part. I am honored to have him running my household. You would not believe what nasty, demeaning use such a fine vintage performance could be put to in the local brothels had I not snapped up Godfrey for my major domo.”
I gasped. Godfrey was already a pal and my inside man at Castle Nightwine. He did not deserve servitude as mâitre d’ in a brothel!
“I see you feel a bit of my pain, Miss Street.”
“How can someone rip off vintage film characters?”
“Ah. By exploiting a long-misused population among the dead. Can you guess?”
I couldn’t and shook my head. This was a lot of reel life to absorb, especially when I still didn’t fully trust the source.
“You see . . .” Nightwine said, leaning back almost half-horizontal in his reclining leather chair.
The extreme position made my nerve endings jump. I didn’t like seeing even Nightwine in such a vulnerable position, although I understood it was calculated to earn my trust: harmless old grandfather leaning back to tell grandbaby a story.
“Zombies, my dear,” he announced.
“Not my favorites.”
“No one’s favorites, or they wouldn’t have been abused as slave labor for so many centuries in so many corners of the earth. They are the secret behind the construction of the pyramids, you know.”
“The pharaohs used zombie labor?”
Hector nodded somberly. “That was in primitive times. Today the technique of overlaying a cinematic character on a zombie began forty years ago as part of an experimental ‘black’ project backed by a beloved kiddie animation movie company. Now it’s a common, if concealed, reanimation project taken over by the immortality mob gone rogue. No one, nothing, is sacred or safe. Supernatural thugs of all descriptions harry anyone, including those who ask questions, as you have been doing.”
“The immortality mobs?”
“That’s what I call them. They came up in the usual mob businesses. Murder, Incorporated. Racketeering. Running supposedly-victimless crime kingdoms.”
“You mean drugs, gambling, and sex for sale?”
“Exactly. But once the Millennium Revelation occurred, it literally opened up a whole new field for the mobsters: grave-robbing on a massive scale. Then they hijacked the film reanimation technology, cornered the market, and put their new slaves to all sorts of low uses for entertaining gullible tourists. Philistines!”
“Who are these mobs?”
“Their kingpins are hidden, naturally, but there are three major corporate forces in Las Vegas today. They’re called the Triad. The Magus, Gehenna, and Megalith hotel-casino consortium, offensively adding up to a classic Las Vegas brand name, M-G-M. Then there’s the Babel, Bedlam, and Brighton group known as the “killer Bs. And the Thebes, Delphi, and Byzantium, the tri-cities. A new wild-card player is the Inferno, currently the hottest single hotel-casino on the Strip.”
I was blinking by then because I was new in town. It was an international playground, and none of these names meant much to me. All we had in Kansas were a few Indian casinos and the occasional reanimated medicine man.
“Don’t you worry, my dear. You need have nothing to do with these yobbos. All I have in mind for you is some genteel Nancy Drew, Brenda Starr level sleuthing and reporting.”
Nancy Drew? Brenda Starr? Hector was from the Stone Age.
The Ice Age, my friend Irma’s interior voice kicked in, but humor the lascivious old slug. You’ll be working again and maybe you’ll learn more about Lovely Lost Lilith.
Maybe? I damn well would.