“That depends on how cooperative you are,” I said.
“What Marshal Blake means, is if we get enough information from you, there won’t be a need to trouble the head of the Church of Eternal Life.” Zerbrowski was still smiling and pleasant. I guess I was bad cop for the day. That worked for me.
“I know what she meant,” the vampire said. He moved to one side of the open door and was careful to keep his hands where we could see them. Jack Benchely, human, had a record. Minor stuff. A few drunk and disorderlies, an assault charge that started out as a domestic disturbance call. Nothing too serious, and all of it involving too many drinks and not enough common sense.
When we were inside, he shut the door and went to the couch. From a coffee table that had almost as much crap on it as the backseat of Zerbrowski’s car, he fished out a cigarette and a lighter. He lit up without asking if we minded. How rude.
There were no other chairs in the room, so we stayed standing.
Again, rude. Though the place was so messy that I wasn’t sure I’d have taken a seat if it had been offered. There was so much clutter that you expected it to smell stale, but it didn’t. It did smell like the inside of an ashtray, but that’s not the same thing as dirty. I’ve been in houses that looked spotless, but still reeked of cigarettes.
Being a nonsmoker, my nose isn’t dulled to it.
He took in a big drag on the cig and made the tip glow bright. He let the smoke trickle out through his nose and the corners of his mouth. “What do you want to know?”
“Why’d you leave the Sapphire early last night?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It was after eleven. I don’t call that early.”
“Okay, why’d you leave when you did?”
He looked up at me, eyes narrowed as smoke oozed past them. “It was boring. The same girls, same acts.” He shrugged. “I swear that strippers were more fun when I could drink.”
“I bet,” I said.
Zerbrowski said, “What time did you leave exactly?”
Benchely answered. We asked the usual questions. What time? Why?
With whom? Was there anyone in the parking lot that could verify that he got in his truck and didn’t linger in the parking lot?
“Linger,” Benchely said, and he laughed. Laughed hard enough to flash fangs. The fangs were as yellowed from nicotine as the rest of his teeth. “I didn’t linger, officer. I just left.”
I debated on whether I could tell him to put out his cigarette in his own house, and if he’d do it if I asked. If I ordered him and he didn’t, we’d look weak. If I grabbed the cig and smushed it out, I’d be a bully. I tried to hold my breath and hoped he’d finish it soon.
He took another healthy pull on the cig and spoke with the smoke coming out of his mouth. “What did I miss? One of the other vamps get out of hand with a dancer? One of the other upstanding church members trying to frame me for it?”
“Something like that,” I said softly.
He fished an ashtray out of the mess. It was an older one, pale green ceramic, with upturned sides and a tray of cig holders in the middle, like dull teeth. He stubbed out his cig and didn’t try to hide that he was angry. Or maybe five years dead wasn’t enough time to learn to hide that well. Maybe.
“Hell, it was Charles, wasn’t it?”
I shrugged. Zerbrowski smiled. We hadn’t said yes, we hadn’t said no. Noncommittal, that was us.
“He’s a member of their damn club, did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t volunteer it,” I said.
“I’ll bet he didn’t. Damned hypocrites, all of them.” He ran his hands through his hair, made the thickness of it stand up even more.
“Did he tell you that he’s the one that recruited me for the damn church?”
I fought the urge to share a glance with Zerbrowski. “He didn’t mention that,” Zerbrowski said.
“I’d tried to quit drinking. I tried just quitting, twelve steps, you name it, I tried it. Nothing worked. I’d lost two wives, more jobs than I could count. I’ve got a son who’s nearly twelve. There’s a court order against me seeing him. Isn’t that a hell of a thing, my own son?”
Zerbrowski agreed it was a hell of a thing.
“Moffat was at the club one night. He made it sound so easy. I would have to stop drinking, because I couldn’t drink anymore. Simple.” He reached for another cigarette.
“Can you wait until we’re gone for that?” I asked.
“It’s the last vice I got,” he said. But he stuffed the cig back in its pack. He kept the lighter in his hands, playing with it, as if even that was a comfort. “I’m what my counselor calls an addictive personality. Do you know what that means, officers?”
“It means that if you can’t drink, you’ve got to be addicted to something,” I said.
He smiled, and really looked at me for the first time. Not just like I was a cop come to hassle him, but like I was a person. “Yeah, yeah, my counselor wouldn’t like that definition, no siree she would not. But yeah, that’s the truth. Some people are lucky, and it’s just they’re addicted to drinking, or smoking, or whatever, but for those of us who are just addicted to being addicted, anything’ll do.”
“The blood lust,” I said.
He laughed again, and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I can’t drink liquor but I can still drink. I still like to drink.” He slapped the lighter down on the table, and both Zerbrowski and I jumped. Benchely didn’t seem to notice. “Everyone thinks you get to be pretty when you’re made over. That you get to be suave and good with the ladies just because you got a pair of fangs.”
“You get the gaze with the fangs,” I said.
“Yeah, I can trick ’em with my eyes, but legally that’s not a willing feed.” He looked at Zerbrowski as if he represented all the laws that had held him down all his life. “If I use vampire tricks, and she comes out of it yelling force, I’m dead.” He looked at me, and it wasn’t exactly an unfriendly look. “It’s considered sexual assault, as if I slipped her a date rape drug. But I’m a vampire, and I won’t see trial. They’ll give me to you, and you’ll kill me.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. It was true, though they’d amended the law so that you had to have more than one count of gaze-induced blood taking to execute someone. That’s what they called it, gaze-induced blood taking. The far right was crying that it was letting sexual predators loose on our communities. The far left just didn’t want to agree with the far right, so they’d help push for the change in the laws. Those of us in the middle just didn’t like the idea of a death warrant being issued on the say-so of one date who woke up the next morning with a bad case of buyer’s remorse.
“I don’t have the money to throw around that the church deacons do,” Benchely was saying, “I’ve got to get a woman to donate her blood throughcharm. ” He said the last word like it was curse. “I know drink ruined my life, but I am a hell of a lot more charming when I’ve had just a few drinks.”
“That’s not usually true,” I said.
He looked at me. “What isn’t true?”
“A lot of drunks think they’re charming drunk, but they aren’t.
Trust me, I’ve been the only teetotaler at a lot of parties. There is nothing charming about a drunk, except maybe to another drunk.”
He was shaking his head. “Maybe, but all I know is that I’m reduced to feeding off the church. The church makes taking blood as tame as it can. Something that should be better than sex, and they make you feel like you’re at one of those places where you only get your food after you’ve listened to the sermon. It makes the food taste bad.” He picked up his lighter again turning it over and over in his hands, until the gold of it swirled in the dim light, shining.
“Nothing tastes good when you have to swallow your pride with it.”
“Are you saying that Moffat, a deacon of the church, misrepresented what life would be like after you became a vampire?” I tried for as casual a question as I could make it.
“Misrepresented, not exactly. More like he let me come in believing all the stuff in the books and movies, and when I talked about it like it would be that way, he didn’t tell me different. But it is different, real different.”
If you were Belle Morte’s line you spent eternity with people lining up to donate. If you were from some of the bloodlines that gave power, but not beauty or sex appeal, then in a country where using vampire tricks was illegal, you were screwed. The only vamp I knew well that was descended from a line like that was Willie McCoy. I had never wondered what Willie, with his ugly suits and uglier ties and slicked back hair, did for food. Maybe I should have.