Love Bites

by Adrienne Barbeau

  “It has nothing to do with fear,” Ovsanna replied. “She’s pissed because you and I are . . .”

  “Are what?” I took the photo from her and slipped it back into the folder, set it down. “I haven’t even told you about my conversation with the Captain. He bought it. I think it’s safe to say the Cinema Slayer has been caught. So you’re not part of my job anymore.”

  Ovsanna stepped closer to me, with her hands at her sides and her face raised up to mine. “So what are we, then, Detective King?” I couldn’t swear to it, but she seemed to be offering her lips in a challenge.

  I met it. With my hands at my sides and my face bent to hers, I kissed her as deeply as I could. No electricity burn this time. Her lips were cool and pliant, and as she returned my kiss, I felt them warm just slightly. I felt them drawing me in, and I sucked on them as though I were the one lusting for blood and not her. Her breath was sweet. I don’t know what I expected, but when you’re dealing with vampyres . . . well . . . I read those books. Her breath could have been rancid. I wouldn’t have cared.

  “I think what we are,” I said when we finally ended the kiss, “is getting to know each other.”

  It was hard to leave Ovsanna, hard to leave those lips and that mouth, especially when she shoved me up against the wall and pressed every inch of herself against me. No fangs, no claws, nothing to worry about. But it was almost five o’clock and I had to track down this Vernon Cage, and I couldn’t do that if we were tearing each other’s clothes off in her office. I told her I’d call her around eight and drove over the hill to the Sportsmen’s.

  Traffic was at a standstill on Coldwater. I used the time to check in with my mother. She answered on the seventh ring.

  “I’m sorry, honey, I was up on the roof helping your father take down the reindeer. Have you eaten? I’ve got eggplant Parm on the stove.”

  “Yeah, Ma. I had lunch at the track.”

  “Not the sausage and peppers, I hope. That stuff will kill you. Did you win?” My mom loves the horses. And the casinos. If she’s not cooking, cleaning, taking care of the grandkids, or selling her movie memorabilia on eBay, she’s at Hollywood Park, gambling with the celebrities she used to cook for. Hanging out with Jack Klugman and Telly Savalas, when he was alive. She’s good at it, too, although I’ve always wondered about her system. She keeps an eye on the horses until the last second and whichever one pees last before the window closes, that’s the one she bets. “They’re lighter,” she says, “so they’re faster.” I’ll tell you this: She never loses. Between her business and her winnings, she cleared over a half mil last year. Bought herself a red Corvette.

  “Naw, I was talking to a witness on a case.”

  “MSNBC.com had a headline saying the Cinema Slayer is dead, but they didn’t give any details. What happened? Were you involved?”

  “Yeah, Ma, I think you could say that.” My mother’s been married to a cop for nearly fifty years; she knows not to ask too many questions.

  “Well, I’m glad you caught him and I’m glad you’re safe. Now, what’s happening with Ovsanna Moore? Are you spending New Year’s Eve with her?”

  “I don’t know, Ma. I haven’t even thought about it.”

  “They had a picture of the two of you on CNN last night. On that Show Biz Tonight show—the one where they spend twenty minutes out of the hour announcing what’s coming up next. Makes me crazy. I waited through two commercials ’cause they said her name, and then it was just a shot of you outside the Coroner’s office. I don’t think anyone knows you’re dating.”

  “I don’t know we’re dating, Ma. And I sure don’t want the family talking about it to anyone. All I did was invite her to Christmas Eve dinner.” Here come the sausage and peppers again.

  “Well, you be careful. I heard Kathy Griffith interviewing the paparazzi on Larry King Live and you’d be amazed at what some of them do to get a shot. Did you know some of those celebrities—well, the ones with no talent who only have careers because they’re in the magazines—did you know they get paid to show up at those places? Then they tell the photographers they’re going to be there, and they get a kickback from the photographers who sell their pictures. I don’t know, Peter, it’s not like it was before People magazine came along.”

  “Right. When all you had was Photoplay and Confidential. Ma, you were the first in line at the newsstand.”

  “Well . . . it’s still not the same. I saw a Bible the other day with pictures of Angelina Jolie and Bill Gates in it.”

  “A Bible? Did you buy it?”

  “Hell, no. They left out Charlton Heston.”

  There was a wedding taking place in the gazebo at the Sportsmen’s; the parking lot was jammed. I parked on the side and entered the hotel through the coffee shop. Lots of people taking advantage of the early-bird specials. Arlene was behind the counter, making a fresh pot of coffee. She’d replaced the chartreuse eye shadow with hot pink. It was eye-catching, that’s for sure. I ordered a chocolate milkshake to fight the lunch mistake and pulled out the photo of Vernon Cage.

  “That’s not a face you forget in a hurry,” she said as she dumped the old grounds into the trash beneath the counter, “even though I woulda liked to. Gave me the creepy-crawlies with that skin of his. And what’s with his neck?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you can’t tell from the picture, but he doesn’t really have one. His head just sits on his shoulders. Not very Christian of me, but, man, he was weird. I made Raoul bus his tables; didn’t want to get near him.”

  “So he’s been in more than once?”

  “Yeah, I think he’s staying here.”

  I tried to pay for the shake, but she wouldn’t give me a bill. I left five dollars on the counter and took the glass and the straw with me to the reception desk in the lobby. The place was lively with wedding guests. Lots of powder blue tuxes.

  The kid behind the desk recognized Vernon Cage right away.

  “Yes, sir, that’s Mr. Carter. Staying in room 105. I checked him in myself Tuesday night. Anticipation Studios arranged for his room.” He turned the computer so I could read the registration information.

  So Vernon Cage was DeWayne Carter. And DeWayne Carter was the guy Maral McKenzie had brought back from Louisiana to “help him get located out here.” Which meant Maral had lied to me when she saw the picture of Vernon Cage. I knew it.

  DeWayne Carter, aka Vernon Cage, was working for Ovsanna at Anticipation Studios in Santa Clarita. And he’d just become my prime suspect in the murder of Graciella de la Garza.

  And what part, I wondered, was Maral McKenzie playing in all of this?

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The same security guard who’d been on the gate the first time I’d gone to the studio—the day I’d found the body of one of Ovsanna’s special effects artists impaled on the wall of the makeup hut—was on duty again. He was older than dirt, but his memory was good; he recognized me and even called me by name.

  “How you doing, Detective King? Ever get that exhaust pipe fixed?”

  “That was my Christmas present to myself, Officer Gant. Not much gets by you, does it?” I reached across the seat and pulled Vernon Cage’s picture out of the folder.

  “That’s what they pay me for, sir. In fact, if you’re looking for Ms. Moore, she wasn’t on the lot today, and you just missed Ms. McKenzie. Pretty much everyone’s gone for the night.”

  “Maral McKenzie was here? You’re sure?”

  “Yes, sir, came in about an hour ago, looking for her car.”

  “What was she driving?”

  “She had Ms. Moore’s Lexus sedan, the hybrid. She drives that out here during rush hour because it’s got the HOV stickers on it. Ms. Moore’s a good friend of the Governator, and Arnold got them for her, even after the state stopped giving them out. Ms. McKenzie was looking for the fella that’s been driving her car the last couple of days. The Beemer.”

  I showed him the picture. “Is this him?”

&n
bsp; “Yep. He took off the same time as Ms. McKenzie, maybe thirty minutes ago. Burning rubber, he was. I hate to see people treat a nice car like that. He’s just asking for a head-on.”

  “You have a master list of all the cars with parking permits for the lot? I need the license number for that Beemer. And for the one Ms. McKenzie’s driving, too.”

  I tried reaching Maral on her cell phone while Officer Gant pulled the information I needed off a computer in the guard shack. She didn’t answer. I called Ovsanna at the office. I didn’t tell her Maral had been at the studio, maybe to warn her friend I was looking for him, but I did tell her that Vernon Cage and DeWayne Carter were one and the same and that Maral had lied to me when she’d said she didn’t recognize him in the photo.

  “I don’t know why she’d lie to you. She can’t be trying to protect him. I think she’s been using hoodoo on him, to get rid of him.”

  “Oh man, don’t tell me that stuff is real, too. What else do you know that I don’t? Are you buddies with Santa Claus?”

  Ovsanna didn’t have any other ideas about what was going on, and as far as she knew, Maral had gone home to hide out from future werewolf attacks. She hadn’t seen her since she’d slammed her office door.

  I put out a citywide on Maral McKenzie’s BMW, the one DeWayne Carter was driving, and called the manager at the Sportsmen’s Lodge to ask him to alert me if Carter showed up there. It was eight o’clock; I needed to get back on the road and down to Silver Lake to stake out the bar where Smooch’s girlfriend expected to meet him.

  You could live in L.A. all your life and not realize there’s an actual lake in Silver Lake. I didn’t. I’d been on the force almost a year before I saw the water from the window of a witness’s hillside apartment. It’s a man-made reservoir, built in 1906 and divided into two sections. The lower section was named after Herman Silver, a member of L.A.’s first Board of Water Commissioners, but the upper section still retains the original name of the neighborhood, Ivanhoe. Seems the Scotsman who founded it was a big fan of Sir Walter Scott’s novel. The streets are named after his characters.

  It’s a pretty interesting area. Sort of East Greenwich Village with day care meets the barrio and bohemia. Big alternative music scene, lots of same-sex marriages, and plenty of tats, but a real family neighborhood, too. Every other block has a preschool on it.

  I called Ovsanna on her cell to see what she was driving. My old Jag is too recognizable to the paparazzi, and if The Lair was their hangout, I didn’t want to take the chance someone would see me. She had her Lexus SUV. I figured we could sit in that behind her tinted windows and wait for Smooch’s girlfriend to arrive.

  I changed my mind when I saw the layout. The bar was on Rowena Street (yep, a character in Ivanhoe) with a Japanese-Peruvian restaurant on one side and an acupuncture clinic on the other. There was only one entrance in the front, and the door in the back opened onto a six-foot-wide walkway that wrapped around both sides of the building and fed back onto Rowena. Anyone using either exit would be seen from the street. A yoga studio stood next to the restaurant, and an emergency veterinary hospital bounded the clinic. Between the foot traffic and the valet for the restaurant, I wasn’t going to be able to park on that side of the street and maintain my surveillance.

  Across the street, however, was Armando’s Automotive Repair, “Specializing in Imports.” I saw a 1980 diesel Mercedes, a mid-90s Toyota Avalon, a beat-up Honda Civic, a Volvo station wagon, an honest-to-God Studebaker, and a Chevy Impala—imported from TJ, was my guess. They were parked haphazardly in an open lot next to Armando’s closed-up, lime green garage. My ’67 Jag fit right in. The only lights in the place were attached to the street side of the garage; the lot was dark. As long as I had the top up and we stayed low in the seats, we wouldn’t be seen.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Peter called me twice as I was driving to Silver Lake, once to ask which car I had and once to tell me to park on Herkimer Street across from the schoolyard. I know the area pretty well, although it’s changed a lot since the sixties when I used to visit there with Anaïs Nin and her husband, Rupert Pole. Rupert’s half brother was Eric Lloyd Wright, Frank’s grandson, and he designed a really wonderful arts and crafts house for Anaïs, all redwood and glass and stone. She and Rupert had masquerade parties there, sometimes once a week. I spent a lot of nights sitting in a costume on the terrace, watching the lights beyond the garden and listening to Rupert play the viola.

  Peter was waiting with the engine running when I got there. I parked the car and slid into the Jag, and he actually leaned across the seat to give me a kiss. Nothing passionate, just a greeting, really, but it was nice. Obviously we’d moved past his initial fear that he’d get fried. He drove to Rowena, made a right, and parked halfway down the street in the outdoor lot of an auto repair shop, facing The Lair. It was five after nine.

  “Good evening,” I said. “What are we doing?”

  “What we’re doing is sitting here until the woman in the pictures in Cyril Sinclair’s loft shows up, assuming she’s the same woman who left the message on his answering machine to meet him here. His sweetie with the gravelly voice. Have you been in there? Do you know what it’s like?”

  “It’s just one big room with a square bar taking up most of the center space. Decorated like a riverbank, with a mural of boulders on one wall and trees on the other. The bar’s made out of rough-hewn logs and there’s a long stone shelf, like a table, running the length of the back. Tree stumps for bar stools. They stayed true to the theme. They serve some of the drinks in tin cups and some in canteens. Not much light.”

  “Well, that doesn’t matter. Neither one of us could go inside without being recognized.”

  “I could, you know.” I looked at him with a straight face.

  “Are you kidding? You’re Ovsanna Moore. They’d know you in a second. Especially if any of them are photographers. This chick’s boyfriend and his buddies tried to kill you last night, remember? And from the message she left him, I think she’s the one who put him up to it. Maybe she’ll be wearing one of those collars.”

  “You’re forgetting what I am, Peter. With a little effort I could get into shape and fly down that exhaust vent on the side of the building. Microchiroptera can fit through a quarter-inch screen.”

  “Microchiroptera?”

  “Bats. Microbats, to be specific. If I turned into a megabat, I’d be able to see better, but I might not be able to get in through a small space.” And I’d have to get waxed afterwards. Now I was smiling.

  “Jesus, no bats! Watching you change into a dragon was bad enough. At least they’re not real. I’ve been envisioning you naked in my bed, I don’t want to see you turn into a bat. Besides, you don’t even know what this woman looks like.”

  “Well, that’s true. You’d have to describe her to me.” I shifted in my seat so I could face him while he kept his eyes on the bar across the street. We were scrunched down so we wouldn’t be visible, and it wasn’t extremely comfortable. So much for the luxurious Jaguar. “Now, let’s get back to this envisioning me naked in your bed. Is that part of the getting to know each other you were talking about?”

  He laughed and kissed my hand and motioned me to look across the street. “That’s her,” he said. An attractive blonde had just parked her car and was walking towards The Lair. I could see her clearly in the neon lights of the Japanese restaurant. It was the woman I’d had the image of when I tore the talisman off the boxenwolf at the beach, the one playing video games. She looked like an older Anna Torv, probably in her late thirties, with an athlete’s body, long legs in boot-cut jeans, with camel color high-heeled boots and a cropped black velvet bubble jacket over a gauzy white tuxedo-front shirt. No collar. Unless she had a talisman in her Kooba bag, she wasn’t a boxenwolf. I said to Peter, “You should use me on stakeouts all the time. I’ve got great eyesight and I could probably tell you where this woman buys her clothes.”

  She’d told Cyril nine thirty, but she
was early. She stopped in front of the entrance to the bar and scanned the street, searching for him, most likely. She opened the door, stepped inside, and disappeared out of sight for a full minute, then returned to the front sidewalk. After ten minutes of waiting outside, she walked back into the bar. It was nine twenty-five.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “We wait. Sooner or later she’s going to decide he’s not coming. She may even realize she hasn’t spoken to him since she asked him to do whatever it is she mentioned on the answering machine—attacking you is my guess—and maybe she’ll go to his house to check on him. I hope not. I hope she goes to her house instead. I need as much information about these people as I can get. We’ll follow her, wherever she goes.”

  We sat and stared at the bar. It was all I could do to keep my hands off him. I wanted to straddle him right then and there. I wouldn’t have minded the gearshift bruising my leg or the steering wheel pressed into my back, as long as we could have picked up where we’d left off in my office.

  But we were tracking a pack of werewolves, and I needed to behave.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Once the woman walked back into the bar, I figured we had at least a half an hour before she gave up waiting. The only thing that kept me from jumping Ovsanna’s bones right there in my sweet old Jaguar was the thought that I was dealing with something that might not be human. I don’t mean Ovsanna, I meant the paparazzo werewolf’s girlfriend. Maybe she didn’t have a collar on and maybe she wasn’t one of those boxenwolves Ovsanna described, but I sure as shit believed she was behind the attack, and that had to make her something supernatural. I was finding out there was a lot more to choose from in the monster category than I’d ever seen at the drive-in. For all I knew, a duck could walk out of that place and it might be her. I kept my eyes on the door and asked Ovsanna to tell me the toe story.