Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

The shock of Cicereau's paternity had kept me from even noticing others in the group shot until I viewed them life-sized on Nightwine's seven-foot screen.

The three guys in pinstriped, broad-shouldered suits were obviously nameless bodyguards, two in fedoras. The young one with the slicked back dark hair and pencil-thin mustache had a roguish Clark Gable forelock falling onto his forehead. Close-up, I spotted a thin streak of silver running through it. One-two-three, woof! Sansouci didn't look a day older today, except for the heavier silver streak job. Hmm. He'd shown me a flicker of humanity. Him I might be able to deal with.

And since when had werewolves become so long-lived? It was much easier to off a marauding werewolf with silver bullets than to find a vampire's sleepy-time lair, dig him or her up by night, and then do the stake routine. Everyone figured that nowadays full-blooded werewolves were rare, shot to extinction all over the globe like the wolves themselves, rather than dying of old age. But what if they weren't?

At the photo's edge stood one of those tall, glam chorus-girl types as common to Las Vegas as palm trees and with about the same IQ I tended to notice them as much as I do the trees. But her clothes were a hoot.

She wore a long white crepe gown. Its huge forties shoulder pads sparkled with rhinestones. The neck was high…but a narrow open slit ran from the hollow of her throat to her waist, and I bet the back was wide open. The skirt was draped toward her left hip in the Grecian goddess style popular in that era, and a spangled dark crimson flower pinned it there. A matching exotic bloom nestled above her right temple amid her elaborately upswept dark hair.

That's when it struck me that a lot of women in the forties looked like the Black Dahlia, that I could do a great job of it myself. Hmmm. Samba, rumba, tango. Chichi Latin dances and clubs. I bet Ric would flip if he saw me in that getup.

Look at you! Irma interrupted. Used to avoid your own image in mirrors and dress only for work. Now you’re walking through mirrors and morphing into the Vamp of Las Vegas. You go, girl!

Hector too was gazing on beauty bare and having his own private thoughts, which he now said aloud.

"I've decided to launch a new spin-off," he announced. "Las Vegas CSI: The Vintage Collection. It'll unearth all the unsolved crimes of the Werewolf-Vampire War era, use the music of the period."

"That's such a rip-off of Cold Case," I pointed out. The crime show was in its umpteenth year.

Hector's huge shoulders shrugged off my comment. "I can do an extended miniseries too. Dead and Alive: The Making of Las Vegas. "

I turned to stare at him.

"Don't look so surprised, Delilah. Your vintage clothing, has inspired me. You dig up the past crimes; I film 'em. I could even cast you in some juicy bit parts."

I sure hated to hear the words "juicy bits" and me in the same sentence from Nightwine. Still, the role of Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, on and off the screen appealed to me.

"It'd pay way better than a non-speaking role." His rum-raisin-brown eyes gazed dreamily into the distance. "A cameo role would keep Lilith's image alive."

And such a role would perpetuate the obsession of the creeps who were out to capture, debase, and destroy her. No wonder she'd gone missing, if she wasn’t already really and truly dead, and I had my doubts. On the other hand, my doing this for Hector might draw out Lilith…I was curious about her. Surely she'd be curious about me. Meanwhile, Hector was screenwriting aloud.

"You'd be…the Black-and-White Dahlia, a misty, mysterious glamorous noir film dame glimpsed in distant shots, like Alfred Hitchcock always showing up as a passing extra in his films. All you'd have to do is look good, do some moody voice-overs, and float around."

"I'm not Hitchcock and I doubt you are, either."

"Who could be? He was the master of nuanced black-and-white film suspense and even managed to do some fairly interesting things in color. And, Delilah, I could hire your dead-dowsing swain as a consultant. Might reduce those pesky out-of-town trips of his, hmmm? Keep him here in town more."

Okay. How did Nightwine know about Ric's trips? The charming vintage cottage dial-phone must be tapped! Fine. Ric and my calls would be all-cell phone all the time from now on.

But Hector's grand vision had hit a nerve with my reporter's instincts.

Everybody accepted Las Vegas as a fantasy destination, as larger than life. Nobody had reexamined the city and its tawdry criminal past since long before the Millennium Revelation, when the addition of supernatural to the landscape had seemed like just another entertaining Vegas excess.

A Cirque du Soleil for creatures of the night.

"You don't have to okay the whole vision just now, Delilah."

I could hear Hector crunching contentedly on something disgusting behind me.

"If you reveal their past to the public," I turned to point out, "every shady human and unhuman in town will be out to get you. Me. Us."

"Just keep looking at what's going on, what went on, and you'll find something I can use on my shows."

"Or…something really, really bad will find me."

Nightwine shrugged and smacked his lips.

"Every modern girl's looking for Mr. Right."

Carole Nelson Douglas' nonfiction and fiction writing has received more than 50 nominations and awards. After a career as a feature writer/reporter and editor for the St Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, she moved to Texas to write fiction full time. More than 40 novels later, many of her books have appeared on mystery, fantasy, and romance bestseller lists.

A graduate of the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, she was a finalist in Vogue magazine's Prix de Paris writing competition (won earlier by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis) and earned degrees in English literature and Speech and Theater, with a minor in philosophy. While working in journalism, she was the first woman elected to the executive board of The Newspaper Guild's Twin Cities local, the first woman show chairman of the local's annual Gridiron Show, and the first permanent woman member of the St. Paul Pioneer Press's Opinion Pages and Editorial Board.

She was also the first woman to reinvent the Sherlock Holmes world from a female viewpoint with Good Night, Mr. Holmes, a New York Times Notable Book of 1991 and winner of American Mystery and Romantic Times magazine awards.

All of Douglas 's novels use a mainstream matrix to blend elements of mystery or fantasy with contemporary issues and psychological realism. A literary chameleon with an agenda, Douglas has reinvented the roles of women in a variety of fiction forms.

Currently she concentrates on the Irene Adler suspense novels and something a bit different. Douglas's 13-book contemporary Midnight Louie mystery series features a hard-boiled feline P.I. in Las Vegas, whose part-time, first-furperson narration satirizes the rogue male detective of American detective fiction. ("You never know what madness and mayhem you'll find in Douglas 's mysteries," said the San Francisco Chronicle, but you can count on it to be "wild, witty, and utterly irresistible.")

The series has won readers and awards for addressing contemporary issues. Although the typical Midnight Louie outing is witty fun, noted Mostly Murder, it also covers a "multitude of serious and topical issues," such as sexual addiction and obsession, monogamy, celibacy, sexual responsibility and familial responsibility versus sexual need and personal need, theology, stalking, sanity and insanity, honor and commitment, and the keeping of vows and trusts. "No small accomplishment for a thoroughly entertaining mystery with occasional chapters 'written' by an anthropomorphic tough-guy private-eye cat" with a Damon Runyonesque writing voice, the reviewer concluded.