Carole Douglas - Virtual Virgin

“You became mentally ill, an obsessive, phobia-ridden hermit,” I corrected him gently. “You were powerful enough to order legions of underlings to fulfill your every whim and weak-minded enough to be taken extreme advantage of.”

Howard leaned close, his faded pupils afloat in liquid. Tears, or just weak in the lamplight? “So they thought. In 1953 I created a nonprofit entity no one much noticed but it’s the only thing that bears my name today.”

“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I know. It’s a world-famous biomedical research facility that sponsors research from scientists across the globe. But you can’t have anything to do with it now.”

“Bah! Humbug, I would say, but that’s true. The basic research I wanted done there was to probe the genesis of life itself. However, to prolong my own life I had to explore the darker side of the street where scientific research meets what some would call quackery, or superstition. I secretly started another small company. I had a . . . last, lovely contact I could trust who had a head for business and even science. She was able to assemble a team of . . . shall we say . . . less reputable European doctors and researchers—”

“She? You hired a woman to head up your real dream team?”

“In the thirties I pretty much lived with Katharine Hepburn for four years, Miss Street.” Howard’s vampire strength made his knotted hands compress the sofa cushions as he threatened to push himself to his feet in anger. “Even Spencer Tracy couldn’t manage that at all.”

I held up my palms to lower the volume before something in his fragile, undead frame broke. “Hepburn was no cakewalk, I know that.”

He fell back into the cushions while his glaring nurses surrounded him, showing me the fangs he’d never let pierce that leathery hide of his because his aversion for germs had outlived his death too.

He rallied to snarl, “Privacy” at the carnivorous nurses. To me he said, “I hired whom I could trust. And . . . someday . . . that might be you.”

I wasn’t going to ask for trouble by saying this, but that job offer was no prize.

However, the identity of his long-ago secret henchwoman was a tasty appetizer for my reporter instincts. Say she was young at the time, something of a given with a chronic womanizer like Young Howard. Thirty, say. She could be alive at ninety today, by the usual methods, and certainly would be by unconventional ones.

So who could run a fledgling early fifties company formed for cutting edge biomedical research with a staff of eager researchers?

Nineteen fifty-three? Nazis!

I was so appalled I repeated the word aloud. And then said, “You hired ex-Nazis.”

Howard looked thunderous again. “And what was the federal government doing at the very same time? I ought to know. I had enough defense contracts with them.”

Bizarre movie titles that would describe the start-up scrolled through my mind. Mother Was a Nazi Organizer. I Led Three Reichs. Startime for Hitler.

Could this woman have been Vida? She was a proven entrepreneur in Corona. She would have been young and his type. Was the California setup a reward for her role in his escape clause from his disintegrating human life? First, she’d headed his new company; then she’d become vampire to bring him over to eternal life.

Howard was acting too coy about the woman’s identity. He’d been the kind to brag. If I could figure out which of his many women had worked for him, she might lead me to answers about my parentage.

“You’re not listening, Delilah.” He lifted a scrawny forearm to speed the drip of blood into his veins. “I know you need to find out the true story.” He cackled. “Finding a double of myself to play Dead Howard was easy on any skid row. Transferring me was the simplest matter. Can you guess?”

As fascinating as the process of becoming the late Howard Hughes, eternal entrepreneur was, only one detail in his saga could help answer my questions about paternity.

“You admit you’ve set up the perfect retirement plan, keeping your money and your life. Would it hurt to help a poor orphan resolve her issues?”

“All I can say is you surely have family somewhere, Delilah. Besides, I’m better now. Fresh blood, you know.” His shaking arm rattled his IV tube and stand. As it has been said, “all is vanity,” and Howard was vainer than most vampires. His need to talk about himself, though, may have given me a couple of hot clues to what I really wanted.

I slugged down some scotch. “So. Vida.”

Howard summoned the energy to elevate just one thin eyebrow. “The word means ‘life’ in Spanish.”

“The word meant ‘mistress’ in the forties when it came to Cesar Cicereau.”

“That Johnny-come-lately werewolf trash from France! They’d been hanging around Nevada for decades, trading with the native population. There were no wolves in England, an island kingdom, but the Continent crawled with them, therefore, werewolves as well. I would never allow myself to be bitten into a werewolf. All that hair, although I admit could use some.” His taloned fingernails ruffled the three visible coiled white hairs at his scrubs neckline.

“But werewolves are so impotent,” he went on. “Three days at ultimate power and then you sink back into common humanity. Might as well settle for one, er, major rising a month.”

His gaze shifted. Hughes avoiding plain talk with me? Did he indeed have protective feelings toward me? Paternal feelings?

More scotch, fast.

“My dear, you mustn’t gulp Johnnie Walker. Savoring is the secret of life. And undeath. Now, why are you so interested in this woman, Vida?”

“She’s apparently my mother.”

“Impossible! That would likely make that low-life werewolf Cicereau your father, a fate to be escaped at any cost. Oh.”

He snapped his fingers but lacked the strength to make sound as well as gesture. A nurse hastened to his side to produce an auditory snap.

“Mainline level, please,” Hughes croaked. “I’m suffering a terribly distressful thought.”

I waited while Howard gathered strength and spittle. “You can’t seriously suspect that unprepossessing frog might be your father?” he demanded finally.

“That’s a very biased way to refer to Frenchmen, Mr. Hughes. But you’re right. I don’t want to think that.”

Howard’s features squeezed into an expression of pleased calculation. “You came here hoping I had that honor. That you would inherit?”

“Please. You ‘died’ childless without a will more than thirty years ago. Your ‘heirs’ unto the third generation and their lawyers number about a thousand and your last asset is a plot of Vegas land that lost most of its value in the Great Recession and is owned by a bankrupt corporation.”

“You cared enough to look that up,” he said, smiling sideways at me like a shy suitor.

Ugh.

“I’m an investigator. I investigate.” I eyed his white-uniformed attendants. Real nurses wore colorful scrubs nowadays. “We need to speak privately,” I told them. “Could you run off and sterilize blood or something?”

Howard cooperated by nodding vigorously. “I haven’t been alone with a living single woman in years,” he told me. “You are so obviously after my money, Delilah.”

“Me expect to inherit from a vampire, especially one so careful about the purity of the blood he takes in? Never happen. Besides, I don’t want your blood money.”

“Then, what do you want?”

“Your guess on my parentage. Vida is more than vague about when her fertile and vampire years intersected. But I do know that someone had to turn you. I heard you had a beautiful woman made into a vampire to make the process more inviting. That was despicable, Howard, even in a life that used women like the tissues you relied on during your last live years to keep your fingers germ-free. There is still innocent blood on your hands.”