Vampyres of Hollywood (4 page)

Maral always drives. I hate it.

Traffic in L.A. is…well, traffic in L.A. It reminds me of the last time I lived in Paris. In 1807 the streets of Paris were so gridlocked with carriages, drays, and vendors’ stalls that it was quicker to walk. Of course, in those days, I was young enough that I still got a kick out of shape-shifting. If I had to be somewhere in a hurry, I’d just slip into something with wings. A hawk was always my favorite, but never a bat. Nothing so clichéd. These days, transitions like that take a real toll on my body. Even the simplest attempt leaves me screaming with effort. And afterwards, coming back to human form while my body readjusts, well, the muscle spasms are crippling. I need two hours of deep tissue massage, which Maral is happy to provide. Yet another reason she’s more valuable to me Warm. My kind give lousy massages—we just don’t know our own strength.

I’ve also noticed that I never quite return to my original shape. Something is always just ever so slightly out of whack. Last time, I was left with a few small feathers on my back. Try explaining that at the waxing salon.

I never liked Paris. Even back then, the French had an attitude. I love the language and the culture, but oh my God, when you’re hypersensitive to scents like I am, you didn’t want to be around Parisians, especially before Baron Haussmann began modernizing the city and Belgrand installed the sewers.

Besides, Europe in general was dangerous for my kind. The Church kept a stronger grip on its believers in Europe than it did in the Colonies. The existence of my race had passed into legend, but so recently that many in the Church still maintained they knew the truth that gave rise to it. Publicly, they dismissed my kind as demons and devils, but among themselves, they feared us. They believed we were fallen angels.

We’re neither. Just another branch on the tree of evolution. Maybe not
Homo sapiens,
but…how about
Homo sanguineous
?

The Church made it hard for us when I was younger. The Jesuits, especially. They gave themselves a righteous title, Exorcists, but they were hunters, pure and simple. And there was nothing right about it. I can’t tell you how many of my ancestors and kin fell to the axes, the fires, or the stakes of an exorcism. That’s why I liked the Colonies. The earliest emigrants were too busy annihilating the natives to bring their superstitions with them. My kin in blood were free to roam the continent.

But these days, roaming in L.A. traffic makes me nuts. I’ve taken to scheduling 6:00
A.M.
breakfast meetings at the Peninsula hotel or 10:00
P.M.
dim sum at CHOW’s. Nobody blinks an eye. This is Hollywood. There’s nothing too odd for the natives to handle.

Maral handles the Lexus 470 SUV the way she does everything else: with grace and determination. Personally, I can’t stand to drive it; I’m always sure I’m going to back into something short and concrete. But it was a gift from the Japanese conglomerate that’s been wooing me and if I don’t drive it they lose face. They even outfitted the headrests with 9" video monitors. So, it’s comfortable, discreet, and fairly anonymous, and good for watching dailies while we’re stuck in traffic. And it makes Maral happy.

She pulled out of my parking spot and drove slowly through the busy lot. I love seeing all the activity when we’re shooting; let me tell you, there is nothing more depressing than a studio lot during hiatus season. Anticipation Studios, of which I own an 80 percent share, was currently shooting three movies, my own included. A sweet little MOW for Lifetime called
A Mother’s Love;
a low-budget Power Ranger rip-off—which I believe may be a redundancy—for kids called
Ninja Cyber Warrior,
though it might be
Cyber Ninja Warrior
when we release it; and mine,
Hallowed Night,
a harrowing twist on the Christmas legend, which I’d both scripted and was starring in. I’d initially thought about directing it myself, but Thomas DeWitte had foisted Neville Travis on me again. I’d used him for second unit on
Vatican Vampyres
and hadn’t been terribly impressed, but he’d made some semi-successful music videos since then and Thomas was championing him. His reputation would bring in the MTV audience, Thomas said. I should have checked him out more carefully, but I was deep in negotiations with the Japanese and I trusted DeWitte. Not anymore.

I’ve been working on the Japanese deal for about eighteen months now. A trio of Japanese industrialists has decided to invest in an American studio. A small studio, because they want to initiate their new digital technology and develop straight-to-computer, direct-to-cell-phone-and-PDA, low-bandwidth, high-def movies. I’m offering them 25 percent of my 80 percent of Anticipation. Their investment is worth close to $50 million in cash and technological investment, and this is the deal that will move Anticipation into the big league. It’s that or get swallowed up by one of the majors. If that happens, I lose creative control, and that’s not why I started this business.

“Where do you want to go?” Maral asked, jerking me from my musings.

“I want to go home, take a hot bath, and read Lee Child’s latest Jack Reacher novel, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. Mr. DeWitte needs a talking-to.”

Maral smiled. “He may still be out. You want me to call?”

“What, and give him the chance to put makeup on his bruises? Just drive.”

She slowed as we neared the front gates. The guard recognized the car, raised the barrier, and waved us through.

I sighed; I’d mention it tomorrow. It’s probably against human nature to confront the boss, but how does the guard know I’m not stealing company property in the back of the Lexus? He’s supposed to stop all cars entering and exiting the lot, check the driver’s license, and pop the trunk. He’s also supposed to run a mirror under the chassis. Our version of homeland security. And now, especially with these three murders, we’ve got to be even more careful.

Maral caught my look and said, “I’ll take care of it tomorrow. I’ll re-emphasize the security measures and hire another guard for the daytime shift.”

“Thanks. And make sure that Travis idiot is barred from the lot.”

“Already done.” Maral grinned. “Security escorted him to his trailer, watched him clear out his desk, walked him to his car, and waited for him to leave. The name on his parking spot has already been painted over. Took us thirty minutes tops.”

“Stick with me,” I told her, “and you’ll end up running this studio.” I was not entirely joking.

Maral gunned the engine and we shot out onto Stanford Avenue, heading for the freeway. On a good day at 5:00
A.M.
the studio is fifty minutes from the office. At one o’clock in the afternoon, we were looking at an hour and a half. “Oh, I wouldn’t want that,” she said. She was serious.

“Why not?”

“I’d hate to end up fighting with you.”

“I don’t blame you. You’d lose.” I ran my finger down her arm.

She glanced sidelong at me, her huge gray eyes hooded with what might have been lust. “You always win, don’t you?”

“Always.”

BEVERLY HILLS
11:45
A.M.

Greed and stupidity.

That’s how most criminals are caught. Forget the high-tech CSI/SVU stuff—Vincent D’Onofrio kneeling on the floor to chart the exact trajectory of a quarter-inch blood spatter on a burned-out halogen bulb found only in one corner of the Cloisters. That kind of stuff helps keep Dick Wolf’s research staff busy, but it’s not the truth.

The truth is, most criminals are stupid. Don’t forget,
America’s Dumbest Criminals
is a documentary.

You don’t believe the story about the bank robber who called Triple A when he locked himself out of his getaway car? Or his compatriot who handed a teller his stickup note written on the back of an envelope with his return address on the front? They’re true. Stupidity and greed. Criminals have it in spades.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear that Benzedrine Benny, aka Biblical Benny, had had his new maps on the street before the killings hit the news. What bothered me is that he’d had them
printed
before the last killing took place. B.B. is stupid and greedy, but I’ve never known him to be psychic.

I knew he wasn’t the killer. There’s no way he could have gotten near any one of the victims. Benny doesn’t have a close relationship with soap and water; his smell alone would have sent the vics screaming for bodyguards. These murders were up close and creative. Benny’s thought processes are taxed making change for a ten.

But he knew something. Or he knew someone who knew something. Either way, it was more than I knew, and whatever it was, it would bring me one step closer to the killer and further out of the sinkhole this case was fast becoming.

Hollywood is a one-company town. Anything that screws with the company screws with the town. We’ve got three dead celebrities and suddenly nobody wants to show up for work. Productions are shutting down. Every talking head on every news channel has a theory, a comment, an observation, a quip, and a quote. Arnold is screaming up in Sacramento. We can’t afford to lose more films to Canada or Australia or Europe.

And the celebs are absolutely freaked. Gavin de Becker can’t hire enough staff to answer the phones at his security service. Homeboys from East L.A. are camping out at the Beverly Hills Hotel, standing guard outside the bungalows with their Ingrams. After the third murder,
Soldier of Fortune
magazine did a direct mailing to every member of S.A.G. with an ad offering “Bodyguard Specialists. European and Middle Eastern Trained.” There was a discount if you hired in bulk.

The stars who can’t afford to hire a shooter are buying the firepower themselves. Most of them can’t operate a TV remote, you think they’re going to know how to shoot a .50-caliber Desert Eagle? That’s what they’re buying, for Christ’s sake. It’s got to be in excess of .357 Magnum, and it’s got to be nickel plated and ivory handled to boot. Either that or “the cute little one that will fit right in my purse. Does it come in platinum?” That’s a direct quote from a well-known model-turned-singer to my brother-in-law who owns a gun shop in Venice. She wanted something to match her watch and her dog’s collar.

No-Pants was waiting right where I’d left him. He’d put down
Fevre Dream
and had a copy of
Daily Variety
in his hands. This guy must have a library card. I handed him the six-pack of Corona I’d bought from Young.

“Mexie, huh? Good choice for a hot day.”

“Enjoy it. Anything interesting in the trades?” You can’t live in Beverly Hills as long as I have and not know the lingo.

“Nah, just more stuff on the murders. Buncha queens gettin’ crazy ’bout their upcoming slates—ain’t nobody above the line wants to leave the house to go to work.” No ordinary bum then; this guy knew what he was talking about. On closer look, I thought I recognized him from a nighttime soap, maybe twenty years ago.
Dallas
or
Dynasty
or one of those
D
shows.

“Thanks for watching the car. And don’t drink on an empty stomach.” I handed him a five and got in the Jag.

I took Beverly Glen to Sunset and made a right, avoiding the traffic on Little Santa Monica through Beverly Hills. Benny had been working the same location for at least seven years.

I’d known him for ten. Since the first time he got busted. He grew up rich and white in Lenexa, Kansas, son of an entrepreneur who made it big in greeting cards and a mother who did charity work. All that business going on and nobody had much time for little Benny. Just plenty of weekly allowance and a lot of free time to spend it. Once he found out he could spend it on drugs, life got a whole lot better. By the time Mommy and Daddy figured out where their money was going, he’d fried his brain and pulverized a brand-new T-bird.

They sent him to Betty Ford,
the
place to go in the mid-eighties, and when he was released he took up running. Not exercising, just running. You know, walk into a mini-mart, pick up a couple of items, stand in line until you get to the register, and then start running. Simple, neat, and usually no one bothered to chase him. Until the day he hit Mr. Kim’s on Western Boulevard near 6th. Mr. Kim must have run track back in Seoul, because by the time the uniforms got there he was seated on Benny’s back, bouncing up and down like he was riding a bull, beating Benny around the body with a frozen dinner. Kim got his groceries returned and Benny got five days in County Medical—in a cast for his broken ribs.

Who knows what happened when he was inside, but when he got out he decided he’d follow in Daddy’s entrepreneurial footsteps, and so he started a publishing company. This involved selling maps to the stars’ homes from the side of the road. It wasn’t quite the greeting card business, but it was—technically—publishing.

Why the hell anyone wants a map to a star’s home is beyond me. There’s not much to see. No one ever steps out of their house in Beverly Hills and when they do, they’re so hidden by iron gates and bougainvillea they might as well be invisible. You think if you park a tour bus outside his home, George Clooney is going to come out and wave? He’s a nice guy, but believe me, it’s not going to happen. And you’re not going to find Pamela Anderson with a pooper-scooper on her front lawn, either.

Nonetheless, it’s a big business in L.A. And not just maps to a star’s home or a star’s former home or a former star’s home. No. That’s a little too common. How about the gas station where the son of Michael Ansara and Barbara Eden was found dead in his pickup truck? Or the cemetery where Robert Blake’s attorney committed suicide? Or the mobile home where Lani O’Grady’s life came to an end?

This is where Benny comes in. Dead stars. Maps and tours. Not just tours to their homes, oh no, Benny does the graveyard tours where they’re buried and the “Check-Out Tours” where they took their final breath. I’d heard he’d once tried selling sheets that he swore Bob Hope had died in; someone got suspicious when they realized the sheets were polyester. Bob had much more class than that. I suppose if he could, Benny would walk the folks from Omaha down the halls of Cedars-Sinai to point out the hospitalized almost deads, too.

According to O’Brien, he’s raking in the bucks.

I made a right on Rexford. Halfway up the block I could see Biblical Benny lounging in a lawn chair on the curb, a metal sign reading “Death Star Maps” staked into the grass between the street and the sidewalk. Leaning against his lawn chair was a hand-written sign with the legend “BIBAL STUDIES” in shaky capitals. Obviously this man of the Lord had no access to a dictionary. Or a Bible.

Benny’s younger than I am, but you’d never know it by looking at him. He’s got pasty red skin and long gray hair, yellowed from a lifetime of nicotine, with teeth and nails to match. His hairline’s receding, so his head looks like a skullcap with a ponytail attached. He’d grown a beard since the last time I’d seen him, as in “Biblical Benny, the Christian Prophet,” and I swear to God he looked like he was wearing a priest’s cassock. I’d no doubt it had probably been stolen from the Good Shepherd Catholic Church on Bedford. It had to be 104 degrees outside and he was wringing sweat out of his beard.

He stared at me as I got out of the car, squinting into the sun.

“Can I help you, brother? You wanna see dead stars or share the Word of God? Jesus loves you, you know.”

“I’ve always suspected that, Benny.”

“Ah, a voice of authority. A voice of confidence.” He shaded his eyes with his hands and tried to focus. “A hard man, an arrogant man.” Recognition finally set in. “Ah, Detective Peter King, Beverly Hills’s finest.”

“Your brain may be toast, Benny, but your memory’s still good.” I squatted down beside him, upwind. This was one prophet who hadn’t been cleansed. “I hear you’ve been saved.”

Benny nodded vigorously. I moved a bit farther away in case something jumped from his beard to my suit. “I found Jesus,” he said. “You can, too.”

“I’m not looking for Him right now, Benny. Right now I’m just looking for information.” I lifted one of the Death Star Maps from the cardboard box at his feet. “How’s business?”

“Booming,” he said gleefully. “Them recent killings are bringin’ in a lot of tourists. They all wanna see where the murders took place.” He glanced at a cheap Mickey Mouse watch on his arm. It was missing the minute hand. “I’m bookin’ deluxe tours right and left.”

“Deluxe, huh? What makes them deluxe?”

“Well, it’s everything in the Regal tour, you know, the graveyards, the homes, and the check-out spots, plus the top ten sex spots.” He saw my blank look. “The places the stars go to get their rocks off. Man, don’t you read the paper?”

“What about Jason Eddings, Mai Goulart, and Tommy Gordon? You’ve got their check-out spots on your tour?”

“Sure do,” he announced proudly.

“And you’ve even got them on your map.” I’d opened one and checked.

“Yes, sir. We’re right up-to-date at Death Star Maps.”

I folded the map over and slapped it down into Benny’s lap with just enough force to make him jump. “A bit too up-to-date, Benny. You had these maps printed before Tommy Gordon died.”

He started to shake his head.

“Don’t talk,” I said, “listen. I said I want information and you’re going to give it to me. You don’t want to lose your vendor’s license, do you?” Then I realized he probably didn’t have a vendor’s license. “Or maybe this entire box of maps? Nice clean, newly printed maps.”

“Hey, you can’t do that—”

“I can do just about anything I want, Benny. Including ordering up a psych evaluation for a Jesus freak I happen to find stretched out in the road in the middle of Rexford Drive. Ten days in a psych ward: you don’t want to do that again, do you?”

“Aw, man. Don’t even talk about that.” His eyes were rolling around his head like marbles in a pinball machine. “You don’t want to know what they did to me the last time I was in there.”

“It’s your call, Benny. Nobody hears what you say except me. Where’d you hear about the dead stars?”

“I got a friend at Anticipation Studios.”

“The horror film outfit?”

“Yeah, she works there. She told me about the dead stars. I just put them on the maps. I didn’t realize until later that one of them wasn’t dead when she told me.”

“And you didn’t think to bring this to the attention of the police?”

Benny looked at me as if I was mad. No one volunteered information to the police…not unless there was a reward.

“Who’s your friend at the studio?” He started to shake his head. I sighed. I was hot and tired. I flipped out my handcuffs. “Okay, no problem, let’s go downtown and continue the conversation. It shouldn’t take more than a day or two. And when we’re finished the IRS will want to talk to you. And they’re mean bastards. They got Capone.”

“Eva Casale, she’s in the effects department. We do a little business together.” He pulled out a box from under the lawn chair and opened it. Inside were tiny medicine bottles filled with what looked like…blood. I reached in and lifted one out to hold it to the light. The polluted L.A. sunlight turned the bottle crimson and black. It
was
blood!

“What the fuck are you doing, Benny?”

“No, it’s not real blood, man. It’s prop blood.”

I opened the bottle and sniffed. It smelled familiar but I couldn’t place it. It wasn’t blood; real blood smells of copper and old meat—it’s not an odor you ever forget. “Prop blood?”

“Yes, prop blood. As used in all the famous movies. This particular blood was used in
Bonnie and Clyde
. Eve gets it by the gallon and I rebottle it, slap a label on it, and sell it to the tourists. I make up stories about which actor used it in which flick. They eat it up. Somethin’ to take home to the neighbors. Put it on the mantle, use it at Halloween to scare the kiddies.”

I held up the bottle between thumb and forefinger. “How much?”

“Ten bucks a bottle. Split fifty-fifty with my special effects girl.”

“This Eva Casale. How well do you know her?”

“Oh, I know her. In the biblical sense, too, if you know what I mean.” He gave me a slow wink, just to make sure that I did.

“You’re shitting me. She sleeps with you?”

“We don’t do a lot of sleeping, if you get my drift.”

I got his drift and the image that popped into my head came straight from Rob Zombie.

“Benny—no offense now—but why would anyone want to sleep with you? Or do anything intimate with you?”

Benny had the grace to look embarrassed. “Well, the thought did cross my mind. But she’s a religious person. And she knows I spread the word of God, and the Good Book says that you should love your neighbor…so that’s what she does. She does a lot of loving.”

There’s someone for everyone, right? Sounded like Benny had found himself a whack job who just happened to be working in a studio where at least one of the vics was a regular player. If this woman was nuts enough to sleep with Benny, she could have done the murders herself. If nothing else, she knew about a murder before it happened. And she didn’t know enough to keep it to herself. So, at the very least, she was an accessory.