Dolly purred like a puma when I revved her out of the cottage’s carriage house and through the gate onto Sunset Road.
I think she approved that my get-up matched her DOB: Date of Birth to us crime reporters.
I’d freshened up at the cottage, putting in my gray contact lenses and running black lipstick over my original red. Moving among CinSymbiants and CinSims as either of them was a great disguise in Las Vegas. The hall mirror insisted on imprinting on my eyes as true blue, but my purse mirror told me I was passing as cinematic gray.
I left Dolly to the tender mercies of a parking valet who resembled a young Arnold Schwarzenegger and clattered solo into the Twin Peaks on my fifties spike heels. Where was Perry Mason when you needed him?
Where fashion made forties women look statuesque and stern and seriously sexy in a dominatrix way, fifties women had looked fussy and frivolous and French maidish in a Trixie way. That look suited me fine right now. Nothing like being underestimated for collecting lots of information.
The Twin Peaks had a CinSim transvestite revue. Now that’ll blow your mind. Velma, I discovered, was wardrobe mistress. I found her backstage sewing chorines of indeterminate gender into torn costumes and gluing marabou feathers back onto pasties and posing pouches. Good thing I was a hardened reporter.
“Vilma Brazil?”
“Yes, dahlink?”
She looked ninety the way it would look on silicone and bleach, kind of like your brain on speed: scrambled. But beneath the drawn-on eyebrows reaching for the sky and the frizzled platinum curls, her eyes were blackberry-bright and nicely avaricious.
I sat on a plain wooden chair in front of a mirror dusted with powder and glitter. Funny, my CinSymbiant-gray contacts never registered in a mirror. I faced my blue-eyed self and then forgot about it.
“If you have a tip for me,” I told Vilma, “I have a few tips for you.” I let the corner of a twenty-dollar bill play Peeping Tom out of my evening purse. Luckily, legal tender doesn’t change much through the decades.
The twenty disappeared down her cavernous cleavage. One thing will never let a girl down: silicone.
“Whatcha wanna know, baby doll?”
“I need to speak to a vampire.”
“Are you press, that it? You want, like, an interview?
“I am press, and, yes, I want an interview, but not with just any vampire.”
“Honey, any vamp is hard to come by in Vegas nowadays.”
“I need to speak with a vampire of the old school. One who was here during the Werewolf-Vampire Wars.”
“Shhh!” She looked around, as if even the wig stands had ears.
Well, the Big Bad Wolf from Little Miss Riding Hood had had great big ears. And eyes. And teeth. One wondered what else big he had.
“That’s so dangerous, dahlink,” she whispered to me. “If the WWs don’t devour you for it, the Vs would drink you dry.”
“Then there are still . . . Vs in Vegas?”
“Just a bloody few. All the Old Ones left; only a few young hotheads stayed behind.”
“How young?”
“Pre-Millennium Revelation, but only by a few decades.”
“All I need is one that witnessed the wars.”
“There is only one of that vintage and he’s kept under wraps so deep you could wear them on an Arctic expedition.”
He. The oldest living, sort of, relic of the wars. He’d be at least a hundred-something, young in vampire years. A kid in their terms.
“Where can I find him? How can I, um, interview him?”
Velma’s blood-shot old eyes were focusing hard on the poker hand of twenty-dollar bills that fanned through my fingers.
“There’s a way you might do it, but the odds of you getting out of there undead are pretty low.”
“Money talks, Velma honey. Now you talk to me.”
So she did.