Hector munched disgustingly, then spoke again, with his mouth full. "You do realize, my dear, what anyone who had been around then and was still surviving would be?"
"An old vampire?"
"Vilma Brazil," he mumbled between maggots.
"She is the old vampire?"
"More like the old vamp. A B-movie actress from the forties, when the difference between a mistress and a whore was as thin as cigarette paper. Alas, she is still legitimately alive, more's the pity. She wrangles CinSim wardrobes at the Twin Peaks. You'll not want the management to know what you're up to, but give her an ear and a few twenty-dollar bills and you'll hear plenty."
"Great." I stood.
"You're not staying for the main course? It's fit for a king."
"I eat like a bird."
Especially after dining with Hector Nightwine! He had a real future as a diet guru, through aversion training.
If I hurried, I might catch Vilma Brazil at the Twin Peaks.
Chapter Thirty
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 ringers.
"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.
Chapter Thirty-One
Deja-Vous outfitted me again and Dolly got me to the rambling wreck that was left of the 1001 Arabian Knights Hotel and Casino. Or so the mostly shot-out neon sign said. The name made me think of a cultural blend of Sinbad the Sailor and King Arthur's Round Table, but people were a lot less politically correct in the mid-twentieth century. The place sat on the bitter south end of the Strip below all the new high-flying hotels, where even the Johnny-come-lately hotels had not yet hung out their neon shingles.
It was true vampire time now, the dark of night lit by street lamps. Blowing sand beat a tattoo on the deserted hotel's shabby fifties-Moderne sign out front, still advertising Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme.
Right. Steve and Edie who?
This property was clearly condemned. The windows were boarded over and the entrance was marked: DANGER. ACCESS FORBIDDEN. Not to mention the forbidding razor-wire-topped cyclone fence surrounding everything.
I parked Dolly across the Strip at our old home away from home, the Araby Motel. Having lived briefly at the Araby Motel, I'd soon found a low-profile parking space for Dolly behind a Dumpster under a broken parking lot light. No reason she needed to associate with that broken-down dump. The Arabian Knights, not the Araby Motel. Maybe that was how the motel had been named, after its big brother.
I felt conspicuous as I crossed the wide street, but nothing much was happening down here. The sun had taken a dive behind the Western mountains. One of those faint twinkles in the foothills was Los Lobos. In an earthy flashback, Ric was sensuously edging my skirt waistband down past my belly button in some instant rewind in the sky and from the scrapbook of my memory.
Meanwhile, I was edging my laced-up oxfords, virginal white, over the glass-strewn sand that surrounded the Arabian Knights. The outfit from Deja-Vous was as authentic as it was ridiculous. The clerk, a pimply-faced punk, had winked, clicked his tongue, and noted that this getup was hot stuff among the geriatric set.
Right. White hose, white garter belt, and white cotton, waist-high, full-coverage panties-ick! I'd read that Elvis had gotten off on those but he was soooo over. My get-up was fifties kitsch, not to mention the dead-white uniform and the kinky little black bag.
But a reporter on the trail will suffer anything for a prime interview and Vilma had promised that I'd meet a mondo-big player from the vampire side of the WW-V wars if I played it right.
A mini-tape recorder was stashed under one the ridiculous steel garters…those things left welts on my thighs! Water-weight again. I had tucked a tiny notepad and pencil up my tight, short white sleeve. The whole outfit was undersized, with the blouse buttons straining to display my cleavage, but I'd been assured this was the exact right costume from the exact right film of the period.
The lobby was empty, dusty, and moth-eaten.
A shred of desert wind shuffled all the litter around. Gaming tables tilted on three-legged stands. Playing cards with their numbers sand-tattooed off laid false trails through the endless rooms.