Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

When it came to vampires, I didn't believe in "oddly enough."

"Abandoned hotels just sit here for years in Las Vegas?"

Hector shrugged and leaned back while the salad course was placed in front of him.

I could swear that some of the black olive slices were moving. Wriggling, sort of. That didn't stop Nightwine from holding forth.

"In 1967 Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu at the Aladdin Hotel. By nineteen seventy-four, Elvis was dead. By nineteen eighty-five the Aladdin was a dying hulk. By two thousand, it had been bought, razed, and resurrected, if a bit shakily. By 2007, it was revamped as Planet Hollywood."

"You're saying the vamps-"

"In this case it is just an expression. Although, given the blood-sucking done in Hollywood… Las Vegas is about nothing if it is not about decay and resurrection."

Speaking of which, my own plate of greens had been placed before me. From his position by the sideboard, Godfrey winked. My salad appeared to host no black olives, moving or not.

"No doubt," Nightwine said, his fork chasing down an escaping olive, "the property is tied up for eternity. One thing the vampires are masters at: they know how to protect what's theirs in legal perpetuity."

Which meant they never gave up.

Neither did I. "I need to talk to someone who was around at the time of the Werewolf-Vampire Wars."

"You and sixteen hundred tabloid reporters."

"I work for you, Hector. It would pay you to help me out more than some scummy scandal-seeker."

"My dear Delilah! You have just put us on first-name terms. I'm so…flattered. If you're not going to eat your blanched maggots, do let Godfrey bring the plate to me."

And here I took them for sliced almonds!

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.

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.

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.