Love Bites (15 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

She didn’t go to bed. I could hear her from my room, mumbling to herself. She struck a match and I smelled something foul, like burning motor oil. And then she started that same praying again. In the ten years we’ve been together, I’d never heard her pray before last night. This sounded like an incantation. Maybe more hoodoo she’d picked up when she was home.

I never sleep with Maral, even after we’ve made love. She’s used to that. I explained early on that I can’t always control my transformations. There’s a constant danger that I might awaken in the middle of a change and need to feed. I’ve known too many vampyres who’ve awakened to find they’d drained their lover dead in their sleep.

She finished chanting and ran a bath. Whatever it was continued to burn; probably a candle. It was three o’clock before I heard her get in bed.

Two and a half hours later, she was up again. This time she was trying to be quiet. Whatever she was doing, she didn’t want me to know.

I slipped out of bed just as quietly and waited while she dressed and let herself out the kitchen door. From my window, I watched her unlock the Lexus hybrid. She was wearing black sweats and black running shoes, and she obviously didn’t want me to know she was leaving the house. She put the car in gear and coasted down the driveway before she started the engine.

I had a feeling she was going to the Sportsmen’s Lodge. She was hell-bent on getting rid of her brother’s friend, and I hadn’t been any help. What she thought she could do on her own I had no idea, but I couldn’t let her get into trouble. I was going to have to follow her.

I used a transformation I hadn’t used in years. It wasn’t easy. The older I get, the less I enjoy shape-shifting. It takes a real toll on my body. When I was younger, in the 1700s and 1800s, I loved using wings to get around Paris or Prague. I’d shift to a hawk or a falcon, anything but a bat. In those days, I thought bats were so clichéd. Theda Bara, one of my Vampyres of Hollywood, is Azeman, and they shift into bats every night. I couldn’t do it. Not then and not now. Especially not now, when every time I come back to my “human” form, something is slightly out of whack. Like fur hanging from my ears. Waxing is a real pain in the ass.

The original form of Clan Dakhanavar is the
dragul,
the dragon. That’s what I’d chosen in Palm Springs to go up against Lilith in her serpent outfit. God, she was hideous. A yellow-veined body with a scabrous scalp and a black forked tongue. It’s a good thing she didn’t survive. Once changed into a serpent, a vampyre can never change back. She would have hated giving up her Baby Jane makeup for good.

I couldn’t follow Maral as a dragon. Even in L.A. that’s asking a lot. And I didn’t know for sure where she was going; I didn’t feel like chasing the car as a dog.

I transformed into mist. It’s not quite as dramatic as smoke, but I wouldn’t be noticeable in the early morning cold. It was harder evaporating than it should have been, though. I’m really out of practice.

Maral turned left on Sunset, but instead of continuing to Coldwater and over the hill to the Sportsmen’s, she made a right on Hilgard and drove past UCLA into Westwood Village. Then she went left on Glendon and crossed Wilshire and made a left behind the high-rise office building and up the driveway to the Avco Cinema parking lot. She turned right at the top of the drive and drove through the open iron gates into the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary. If I hadn’t been mist, my jaw would have dropped.

Last night, holding her to calm her down, I’d had a vision of her at a grave site. Now, here she was again. Why?

The two of us had been here together before. I have friends buried here. Dean Martin, John Boles, Fanny Brice. Cassavetes and Capote and James Wong Howe. Swifty Lazar. Eva Gabor and Eve Arden. Maral came with me when Rodney Dangerfield died. It was the first time she’d seen a headstone with a joke on it. Rodney’s reads, “There Goes the Neighborhood.”

I’ve always loved Billy Wilder’s: “I’m a writer, but then nobody’s perfect.”

The last time we were here was for a service for Merv Griffin. I miss him. He always made me laugh. Doing his talk show was great fun because he just loved to gossip, especially during the commercials. His gravestone reads, “I will not be right back after this message.”

There was a single light on in the office. Maral parked down the lane from it, closer to Marvin Davis’s mausoleum. An old pickup truck with Montana license plates followed her in. It parked on the opposite side of the cemetery, closer to the Farsi-engraved headstones. Three men got out, dressed in plaid flannel shirts, jeans, and lug boots. Two down parkas and an orange hunter’s vest. Gardeners, maybe.

Whatever she was there for, Maral didn’t want to be noticed. She had opened her car door and was starting to get out when she saw the three men. Immediately she slid back down in her seat and quietly pulled the door shut. She sat staring at them, watching their every move.

They weren’t gardeners. All three of them took their Peet’s coffee containers and their Maps to the Stars and spread out to read the markers on the graves. It was six thirty in the morning and these guys were fans. I’ll bet they drove all the way from Montana just to see Marilyn’s final resting place.

One of them went to the Sanctuary of Remembrance, and sure enough, the other two carried a potted poinsettia over to Marilyn Monroe. They took turns taking pictures of each other kissing her crypt.

Maral waited until they joined their buddy in the Sanctuary of Tenderness on the other side of the park. The sky was dark with rain clouds, and I wasn’t helping visibility much. That seemed to be what she wanted. She stole silently over to the enclosed garden where Carroll O’Connor and Jack Lemmon were interred. She had a gardener’s trowel in one hand. She looked up at the windows of the high-rise—probably to make sure no one was watching—waited until the men in the sanctuary had their backs to her, and then reached inside her sweatshirt and withdrew a black candle stub from her bra. It gave off the same rank odor I’d smelled coming from Maral’s bedroom earlier. Motor oil. And it looked like it had been rolled in red pepper flakes.

Quickly she dug in the space behind the stone that read, “Jack Lemmon in . . .” She deposited the remains of the candle in the hole and patted it over with the trowel. She was moving her lips as she dug. When I could have heard her clearly, back at the house, I hadn’t wanted to intrude. Now that I needed to hear her, I couldn’t. Mist is good for getting into places without being seen, but it’s not so good for eavesdropping.

I hung in the air while she got back in the car and then followed her through Westwood until I was sure she was heading back to the house. She was using hoodoo, all right. That red bag I’d seen when I’d held her could have been a mojo bag. She must have been to a cemetery before. I didn’t know enough about it to know exactly what she was trying to accomplish, but between the devil pod and the middle-of-the-night baths and the reeking candles, I wondered if her maw-maw hadn’t told her some spell to get rid of DeWayne Carter, the guy she’d brought back from the swamps. Fine with me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I waited until seven
A.M
. to call the Captain. I must have caught him in the shower; I could hear water splashing in the background. Telling the story over the phone was a little easier than doing it in person.

“It’s all over, Chief. You can call the media.”

“Hold on a minute.” The water stopped. “What are you talking about? The Cinema Slayer? You got him?”

“Yep. The Cinema Slayer took a run at Ovsanna Moore last night. He didn’t make it. He’s through running.”

“You’ve got him booked?”

“Nope. Not booked. Dead.”

“Dead? Jesus! What happened? You’re sure it’s him?”

“Sure as I can be at this point. He left a note in her mailbox announcing she was his target all along. Then he bragged about it when he grabbed her.” Ovsanna had insisted the two of us act out the story we were devising. That was making it easier to fabricate what I knew she’d be saying, too.

“What happened? Give me details.”

“She called me as soon as she found the note. She was out at her beach house in Malibu. I got there in time to stop him.”

“You shot him?”

“I shot him, yeah. Hell, yeah, I shot him. I didn’t have any choice. It was a righteous killing, Captain. There won’t be any trouble, believe me.”

“Are you all right? You need to talk to somebody?”

“I’m fine. I’m just glad it’s over. Hey, this town can get back to normal—whatever that is. And maybe the media will lighten up. I left my gun and my report on your desk. I’ll use my backup until the investigation’s over. He didn’t have ID, but Ovsanna thinks she recognized him—he was a paparazzo—so until the prints come back I’m going to do some digging. I’ll be around when Internal Affairs wants to talk.”

I was still slightly pissed that Ovsanna hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me she’d been attacked, even though it was before we’d spent any time together. Okay, so she didn’t know me that well to know if I’d stick around, but I’m a cop, for Christ’s sake. First and foremost, she should have known I’d protect her. I wondered if she’d told Maral.

I went out to check the trash cans, but they were empty, tossed on their sides like they always were after pickup. No animal hair left from under the gate. Too bad. I wanted to take a look at it again, show it to Ovsanna. Maybe it wasn’t coyote at all. Maybe it was wolf. Werewolf. If those fucking things had come anywhere near my house . . .

I needed to get an ID on the dead photographer. That much of what I’d told the Captain was the truth.

Ovsanna had gone online to some entertainment Web site and had printed a list of celebrity events happening that morning. I picked her up at her office and we drove down Wilshire to a fashion designer’s showroom/warehouse. Dennis Hopper was scheduled to appear; his artwork was being displayed along with pieces by Tony Curtis and Peter Falk. There were bound to be paparazzi there.

I parked in a lot on a side street and gave the attendant an extra five to keep an eye on the Jag. It wasn’t the greatest neighborhood. Once we got closer to the showroom, Ovsanna and I split up. She headed for the front entrance, where they actually had a red carpet and TV crew waiting at ten in the morning, and I badged myself into a side door of the warehouse. I made my way to the front of the showroom and watched her through the window. She was wearing a red dress that looked like it was made out of wide strips of Ace bandage. It hugged every curve of her body, and believe me, that was a lot of hugging. “Yes,” I heard her tell the on-camera reporter, she’d worked with all three men at some time during her career, and she loved their artistry, on camera and on canvas. She waved at the photographers and came inside. None of the paps were the freelancers I was looking for; they must have been hired by the event planner to cover the show.

The showroom was pretty large. All along one wall there were mannequins posed like hookers, with their butts sticking out and tits exposed, wearing what I guessed were the designer’s clothes. They looked as though they’d been through a shredder. My mother could have designed something better, and she doesn’t sew. Live models, in the same shreds but without the flashing tits, stood like statues around the room. Occasionally they changed poses. That didn’t do anything to make the clothes more attractive. Who wears this stuff? I wondered. Waiters walked through the crowd, offering mimosas. Maybe that would help.

Each wall had one piece of art displayed. All Tony Curtis. All very colorful and fun. Peter Falk’s charcoal nudes lined a large hallway leading to doors that opened onto a loading dock. Dennis Hopper’s work hung on the exterior walls of the loading dock, which was where most of the activity was taking place. That’s where the bar and the DJ were. There were 150 people milling around, listening to hip-hop, eating miniature quiches and smoked salmon, and trying not to trip over a huge pile of garbage that had been left in the center of the dock. I’m serious. Right next to the bar was a heap of trash—a busted sofa, broken TV, empty paint cans, children’s toys, a cable box. Some maintenance man hadn’t done his job.

I scanned the crowd for paparazzi, saw a couple of flashes going off by the entrance to the dock. Dennis Hopper had just walked in. He didn’t stop for photographs, though, just pushed his way through the crowd to the pile of garbage, right where Ovsanna and I were standing. He had a baseball bat in his hand. He smashed it down on the paint cans. Flakes of dried paint scattered into the air. Then he hit the trashed TV and started crushing the large glass pieces of the monitor. By that time, the paparazzi were on him, pressing in front of me to block my view. I watched the bat swing over their heads while he continued to demolish whatever else was in the pile. For a full ten minutes. Then he walked through the crowd into the showroom, still carrying the bat. He never said a word.

The paparazzi stayed behind, photographing the remaining rubble. I looked at Ovsanna, who was grinning back at me. “It’s art,” she said. “I’m not sure Leonardo would agree, but Dalí probably would.” She tapped one of the photographers on the shoulder, and he turned around to face us. It was Johansson, one of the regulars. Pronounced with a
Y.

“Hey, Ms. Moore, Detective King, can I have a shot?” He lifted his Canon and I shoved it down again.

“Forget it, Yo. I’m working here. Take a look at this picture, tell me if you know the guy. I think he’s one of yours.” I showed him a Polaroid the crime techs had shot on the beach.

“I guess he’s not gonna be shooting at the Oscars anymore, is he? Ooh yah, that’s Smooch.”

“Smooch who?”

“Just Smooch. I don’t know his last name. He runs with Steady Eddie, though, and that pack. I think they’re over at the Celebrity Centre, waiting for Tom to make an appearance.”

I wondered if he’d used the word
pack
on purpose or if it was just his figure of speech. “Tom?”

“Ooh yah, at the Church of Scientology. He’s supposed to be meeting Kirstie Alley over there, give her some support while she films another fat commercial. I’m heading over there as soon as Dennis comes out and finishes demolishing the sofa.”

It didn’t make sense to expose Ovsanna to the scene at the Celebrity Centre, so I went west to Beverly Hills and dropped her off at her office, then headed east again to Franklin Avenue and the Manor Hotel, the replica of a seventeenth-century French castle that serves “the desperate few who are often the most neglected,” according to the Scientology literature. They’re talking about the celebrities.

It’s a beautiful building, built in 1929 by Thomas Ince’s widow. Tom being the guy who owned his own movie studio in the twenties and was rumored to have been killed by William Randolph Hearst while celebrating his birthday on Hearst’s yacht. Now that I thought about it, Charlie Chaplin was on the yacht that day. I’ll bet Ovsanna was, too. I’d have to remember to ask her; she probably knows the real story.

The building was originally called the Chateau Elysée, and everybody who was anybody in the thirties and forties stayed there: Gable, Gershwin, Bogart, Cary Grant, Errol Flynn. It’s seven stories high, has a couple of restaurants, a theatre, a gym, a screening room, and a garden room that seats four hundred people. I went to a wedding there once. Freaked me out a bit, but nobody tried to convert me.

There were a few people standing on the front steps whose job that might be, but when they saw my badge, they ignored me. Johansson had beaten me to the location. He was talking to half a dozen photographers who were lined up behind a thick velvet rope on the sidewalk leading up to the building. Another thirty or so jostled for position behind a similar rope on the opposite side. Steady Eddie was in the smaller group. He had his back to me. He turned when Johansson pointed. His nose was covered in bandages.

“Eddie. Oh, Eddie,” I said, “don’t tell me it was you? Last night on the beach?”

He backed away from me a few steps, his hands going to his nose. His mustache was gone; the doctors must have had to shave it off when they worked on him. I could see now why he’d worn it. His upper lip looked like a baboon’s ass.

“What do you know?” he asked, alarm showing in his eyes. “Did I do something wrong?” It was hard to understand him with his nose closed up, but he didn’t sound defensive, he sounded frightened. I grabbed one of his yellow suspenders and pulled him toward a side alley. He trotted along beside me until we were out of sight.

“Okay, what’s going on, Eddie? What happened to your nose?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know. I woke up this morning and it was broken, and my face was ripped open. Someone must have attacked me last night, but I blacked out. I don’t remember.”

“Someone must have attacked
you
? How about you attacked someone, Eddie? Huh? Someone famous? You don’t remember that?”

He backed away from me again, his hands up in protest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I can’t even find my camera. Did someone take pictures? Have you got my camera?”

“I don’t need pictures, Eddie, I was there. Last night, on the beach in Malibu. You attacked Ovsanna Moore. You and your buddies. Does that jog your memory?”

“Oh no. Oh no. Ovsanna Moore? Oh no, I don’t remember that. Oh, please, I’m telling you the truth. Are you sure it was me?” Sweat appeared on his bald scalp and trickled down his nose.

“It was you all right, Eddie. You had your collar on. I know what you are, Eddie, you can drop the charade.”

“I . . . I . . . You know about my collar? You know about that?” His face had gone pale. He slumped down the wall and sat on the ground, staring up at me. “It’s not a charade. You’ve got to believe me, I don’t remember anything from last night. What did I do to her? Did I hurt her?” Blood started leaking through his bandages. I didn’t want him to stroke before I found out what I needed to know.

“Calm down, Eddie, you’re gonna have a heart attack. Yeah, I know about the collar. I guess I don’t know how it works exactly, because I figured you’d know what I was talking about, but you really don’t, do you?”

“I don’t. I swear I don’t. I don’t remember being on any beach. I don’t remember seeing Ms. Moore.”

“What the fuck, Eddie? Why do you use it if you don’t remember what happens when you do?”

“I remember how it feels, that’s all. It feels great, Detective King. Suddenly I’m powerful and fast and strong. I can feel my muscles. And I’m free! I can do anything. Run and hunt—it’s all instinct. No money worries, no fighting for the sleaziest shot of Lindsay or Jesse James and the Nazi girl. It’s a fantastic high. Except I didn’t remember about Ms. Moore. Is she all right? Did I hurt her?”

“You were tracking her, Eddie. You and a pack of your buddies. The only reason she’s okay is because I got there and ran you off. But one of the other guys with a collar wasn’t quite so lucky. You recognize him?”

I flashed the snapshot in front of him and watched his eyes roll back in his head. Luckily he was sitting down. I slapped his face a couple of times, which couldn’t have felt good with the broken nose, and finally got him to focus. Yes, he said, he knew him; his name was Cyril Sinclair, and he was one of the regular paparazzi working the L.A. scene. Everyone called him Smooch. Eddie didn’t know Smooch well, but he had his address on a business card in the camera case Eddie’d left in his car. I helped him up and we walked around the corner to where he was parked. Tom and Kirstie must have left already, because the crowd had dispersed. It didn’t matter. I didn’t need to talk to the other photographers. Without any wounds to help me identify them, I wouldn’t know who else might have been on the beach. Eddie didn’t remember them being there. And if their talismans worked like Eddie’s, they wouldn’t remember, either.