Love Bites (19 page)

CHAPTER FORTY

The same security guard who’d been on the gate the first time I’d gone to the studio—the day I’d found the body of one of Ovsanna’s special effects artists impaled on the wall of the makeup hut—was on duty again. He was older than dirt, but his memory was good; he recognized me and even called me by name.

“How you doing, Detective King? Ever get that exhaust pipe fixed?”

“That was my Christmas present to myself, Officer Gant. Not much gets by you, does it?” I reached across the seat and pulled Vernon Cage’s picture out of the folder.

“That’s what they pay me for, sir. In fact, if you’re looking for Ms. Moore, she wasn’t on the lot today, and you just missed Ms. McKenzie. Pretty much everyone’s gone for the night.”

“Maral McKenzie was here? You’re sure?”

“Yes, sir, came in about an hour ago, looking for her car.”

“What was she driving?”

“She had Ms. Moore’s Lexus sedan, the hybrid. She drives that out here during rush hour because it’s got the HOV stickers on it. Ms. Moore’s a good friend of the Governator, and Arnold got them for her, even after the state stopped giving them out. Ms. McKenzie was looking for the fella that’s been driving her car the last couple of days. The Beemer.”

I showed him the picture. “Is this him?”

“Yep. He took off the same time as Ms. McKenzie, maybe thirty minutes ago. Burning rubber, he was. I hate to see people treat a nice car like that. He’s just asking for a head-on.”

“You have a master list of all the cars with parking permits for the lot? I need the license number for that Beemer. And for the one Ms. McKenzie’s driving, too.”

I tried reaching Maral on her cell phone while Officer Gant pulled the information I needed off a computer in the guard shack. She didn’t answer. I called Ovsanna at the office. I didn’t tell her Maral had been at the studio, maybe to warn her friend I was looking for him, but I did tell her that Vernon Cage and DeWayne Carter were one and the same and that Maral had lied to me when she’d said she didn’t recognize him in the photo.

“I don’t know why she’d lie to you. She can’t be trying to protect him. I think she’s been using hoodoo on him, to get rid of him.”

“Oh man, don’t tell me that stuff is real, too. What else do you know that I don’t? Are you buddies with Santa Claus?”

Ovsanna didn’t have any other ideas about what was going on, and as far as she knew, Maral had gone home to hide out from future werewolf attacks. She hadn’t seen her since she’d slammed her office door.

I put out a citywide on Maral McKenzie’s BMW, the one DeWayne Carter was driving, and called the manager at the Sportsmen’s Lodge to ask him to alert me if Carter showed up there. It was eight o’clock; I needed to get back on the road and down to Silver Lake to stake out the bar where Smooch’s girlfriend expected to meet him.

You could live in L.A. all your life and not realize there’s an actual lake in Silver Lake. I didn’t. I’d been on the force almost a year before I saw the water from the window of a witness’s hillside apartment. It’s a man-made reservoir, built in 1906 and divided into two sections. The lower section was named after Herman Silver, a member of L.A.’s first Board of Water Commissioners, but the upper section still retains the original name of the neighborhood, Ivanhoe. Seems the Scotsman who founded it was a big fan of Sir Walter Scott’s novel. The streets are named after his characters.

It’s a pretty interesting area. Sort of East Greenwich Village with day care meets the barrio and bohemia. Big alternative music scene, lots of same-sex marriages, and plenty of tats, but a real family neighborhood, too. Every other block has a preschool on it.

I called Ovsanna on her cell to see what she was driving. My old Jag is too recognizable to the paparazzi, and if The Lair was their hangout, I didn’t want to take the chance someone would see me. She had her Lexus SUV. I figured we could sit in that behind her tinted windows and wait for Smooch’s girlfriend to arrive.

I changed my mind when I saw the layout. The bar was on Rowena Street (yep, a character in
Ivanhoe
) with a Japanese-Peruvian restaurant on one side and an acupuncture clinic on the other. There was only one entrance in the front, and the door in the back opened onto a six-foot-wide walkway that wrapped around both sides of the building and fed back onto Rowena. Anyone using either exit would be seen from the street. A yoga studio stood next to the restaurant, and an emergency veterinary hospital bounded the clinic. Between the foot traffic and the valet for the restaurant, I wasn’t going to be able to park on that side of the street and maintain my surveillance.

Across the street, however, was Armando’s Automotive Repair, “Specializing in Imports.” I saw a 1980 diesel Mercedes, a mid-90s Toyota Avalon, a beat-up Honda Civic, a Volvo station wagon, an honest-to-God Studebaker, and a Chevy Impala—imported from TJ, was my guess. They were parked haphazardly in an open lot next to Armando’s closed-up, lime green garage. My ’67 Jag fit right in. The only lights in the place were attached to the street side of the garage; the lot was dark. As long as I had the top up and we stayed low in the seats, we wouldn’t be seen.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Peter called me twice as I was driving to Silver Lake, once to ask which car I had and once to tell me to park on Herkimer Street across from the schoolyard. I know the area pretty well, although it’s changed a lot since the sixties when I used to visit there with Anaïs Nin and her husband, Rupert Pole. Rupert’s half brother was Eric Lloyd Wright, Frank’s grandson, and he designed a really wonderful arts and crafts house for Anaïs, all redwood and glass and stone. She and Rupert had masquerade parties there, sometimes once a week. I spent a lot of nights sitting in a costume on the terrace, watching the lights beyond the garden and listening to Rupert play the viola.

Peter was waiting with the engine running when I got there. I parked the car and slid into the Jag, and he actually leaned across the seat to give me a kiss. Nothing passionate, just a greeting, really, but it was nice. Obviously we’d moved past his initial fear that he’d get fried. He drove to Rowena, made a right, and parked halfway down the street in the outdoor lot of an auto repair shop, facing The Lair. It was five after nine.

“Good evening,” I said. “What are we doing?”

“What we’re doing is sitting here until the woman in the pictures in Cyril Sinclair’s loft shows up, assuming she’s the same woman who left the message on his answering machine to meet him here. His sweetie with the gravelly voice. Have you been in there? Do you know what it’s like?”

“It’s just one big room with a square bar taking up most of the center space. Decorated like a riverbank, with a mural of boulders on one wall and trees on the other. The bar’s made out of rough-hewn logs and there’s a long stone shelf, like a table, running the length of the back. Tree stumps for bar stools. They stayed true to the theme. They serve some of the drinks in tin cups and some in canteens. Not much light.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter. Neither one of us could go inside without being recognized.”

“I could, you know.” I looked at him with a straight face.

“Are you kidding? You’re Ovsanna Moore. They’d know you in a second. Especially if any of them are photographers. This chick’s boyfriend and his buddies tried to kill you last night, remember? And from the message she left him, I think she’s the one who put him up to it. Maybe she’ll be wearing one of those collars.”

“You’re forgetting what I am, Peter. With a little effort I could get into shape and fly down that exhaust vent on the side of the building. Microchiroptera can fit through a quarter-inch screen.”

“Microchiroptera?”

“Bats. Microbats, to be specific. If I turned into a megabat, I’d be able to see better, but I might not be able to get in through a small space.” And I’d have to get waxed afterwards. Now I was smiling.

“Jesus, no bats! Watching you change into a dragon was bad enough. At least they’re not real. I’ve been envisioning you naked in my bed, I don’t want to see you turn into a bat. Besides, you don’t even know what this woman looks like.”

“Well, that’s true. You’d have to describe her to me.” I shifted in my seat so I could face him while he kept his eyes on the bar across the street. We were scrunched down so we wouldn’t be visible, and it wasn’t extremely comfortable. So much for the luxurious Jaguar. “Now, let’s get back to this envisioning me naked in your bed. Is that part of the getting to know each other you were talking about?”

He laughed and kissed my hand and motioned me to look across the street. “That’s her,” he said. An attractive blonde had just parked her car and was walking towards The Lair. I could see her clearly in the neon lights of the Japanese restaurant. It was the woman I’d had the image of when I tore the talisman off the boxenwolf at the beach, the one playing video games. She looked like an older Anna Torv, probably in her late thirties, with an athlete’s body, long legs in boot-cut jeans, with camel color high-heeled boots and a cropped black velvet bubble jacket over a gauzy white tuxedo-front shirt. No collar. Unless she had a talisman in her Kooba bag, she wasn’t a boxenwolf. I said to Peter, “You should use me on stakeouts all the time. I’ve got great eyesight and I could probably tell you where this woman buys her clothes.”

She’d told Cyril nine thirty, but she was early. She stopped in front of the entrance to the bar and scanned the street, searching for him, most likely. She opened the door, stepped inside, and disappeared out of sight for a full minute, then returned to the front sidewalk. After ten minutes of waiting outside, she walked back into the bar. It was nine twenty-five.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We wait. Sooner or later she’s going to decide he’s not coming. She may even realize she hasn’t spoken to him since she asked him to do whatever it is she mentioned on the answering machine—attacking you is my guess—and maybe she’ll go to his house to check on him. I hope not. I hope she goes to her house instead. I need as much information about these people as I can get. We’ll follow her, wherever she goes.”

We sat and stared at the bar. It was all I could do to keep my hands off him. I wanted to straddle him right then and there. I wouldn’t have minded the gearshift bruising my leg or the steering wheel pressed into my back, as long as we could have picked up where we’d left off in my office.

But we were tracking a pack of werewolves, and I needed to behave.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Once the woman walked back into the bar, I figured we had at least a half an hour before she gave up waiting. The only thing that kept me from jumping Ovsanna’s bones right there in my sweet old Jaguar was the thought that I was dealing with something that might not be human. I don’t mean Ovsanna, I meant the paparazzo werewolf’s girlfriend. Maybe she didn’t have a collar on and maybe she wasn’t one of those boxenwolves Ovsanna described, but I sure as shit believed she was behind the attack, and that had to make her something supernatural. I was finding out there was a lot more to choose from in the monster category than I’d ever seen at the drive-in. For all I knew, a duck could walk out of that place and it might be her. I kept my eyes on the door and asked Ovsanna to tell me the toe story.

“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?”