by P. N. Elrod
“ Whew . What a wild private party on the penthouse level,” I complained. “Do not accept any of those slot machine invitations. It was ballistic.” They eyed me with mixed suspicion and envy.
Meanwhile, I noticed the Muzak filling the now-plummeting car. More of that sweet and impossibly sugary soprano voice. What was she singing now? “Send in the Clowns”? No need to get personal!
“Oh, that voice is unearthly,” a woman said as the elevator doors finally opened on the main floor.
Yeah! Probably a ghost.
At least I was back where I’d begun, even though my newly laceless shoes were useless after my catapult atop the elevator car. At least I was now wearing a silver charm bracelet dangling place-appropriate wolf heads.
I decided to restart my investigation on the main floor. First, a limping detour down the shopping wing brought me to a store called Two Cool Tootsie’s. My dressy spike heels were buckling sideways, so I charged a pair of Steve Madden leopard-print flats with a rose on the toes to Cicereau’s account.
Unfortunately, the gushing saleswoman took me for Cicereau’s latest moll, not an employee whose wardrobe had suffered in his service.
“Shame about your mangled Jimmy Choos,” she consoled me.
I’d explained I’d caught one high heel in an elevator door and broken the second while wrenching the first loose.
“Are you sure the boss will like you as well in flats?” she asked. “I hear he runs hot and cold.”
“Oh, Cesar is quite a runner, but he dotes on anything that reminds him of dead Big Cats,” I said. “That old Starlight Lodge hunting urge, you know.”
She shuddered as she rang up the new shoes. “I’ve heard what gets chased down at that place. Just stay on his safe side, honey. Cringing is good.”
Shod again, I cruised the main entertainment area with a fresh eye. The building’s gigantic wooden tree architecture mimicked soaring Gothic cathedral columns. No wonder the Hunchback had replayed his best scene here with me as a stand-in.
Tourists strolled leaf-patterned parquet paths around forest scenes of ferns and flowering plants and thick clustered trees. The scale made you feel as small and helpless as a chipmunk skittering near the trickle of hidden streams, hearing the rustle of bird life in the leaves above. Sensing silently stalking wolves in the shadows. At least I did.
I was glad to break into the brightness of a skylight-illuminated mountain village square with a half-timbered inn called the Huntsman’s Haven that broadcast scents of fresh-baked bread, beer, and bratwurst.
A Gypsy wagon and camp drew children to the tricolored wagon, ponies, and the music and color of juggling, knife-throwing, and fortune-telling attractions. I am not an outdoorsy girl. One enforced summer at a mosquito-ridden Minnesota camp during my group home days had been enough for me.
I really needed to check out the hotel’s theater stage. The Gehenna’s big contracted show starred Madrigal, the strongman magician, and his creepy pair of female fey assistants. Picture two-foot-high Barbie dolls with glitzy wardrobes, webs, and venom.
My captor had been an escapee from an old silent movie. Had the Gehenna been adding new attractions?
Sure enough. The slick marquee advertising Madrigal and his fey accomplices had a smaller satellite now, a film theater showing London After Midnight.
This was definitely a black-and-white silent film. As a vintage film junkie, I was drawn toward the marquee like a mesmerized bride-to-be of Dracula. This 1927 silent classic had been lost, burned in a fire in the sixties. How could London After Midnight be shown here?
Before I could get close enough to the booth to barter my shoes or my soul for a ticket … so much for refusing to carry a purse … a sinister figure, all in black, stepped into my path.
He wore a top hat over a clownish, frizzled, chin-length hairdo that framed a vintage gray face with popping eyes and an ebony-lipped mouth grinning to show every tooth filed into a point. I didn’t know whether to scream with laughter or fear, and aren’t those the yummiest theatrical moments of all?
Spotting me, he spun with a demonic grimace and lifted the arms of his calf-length cape … to display the bat-winged spines visible underneath.
Sinister or comic? Early films walked that very thin line.
“Wait!” I shouted, my voice lost in the echo chamber that is a casino concourse’s everyday clamor. Tourists love the sounds of crowds and action.
The bizarre figure vanished behind a clot of fanny-pack-wearing sightseers.
I froze.
“Don’t you look sooo darling, dear?” A grandmotherly tourist in a Jimmy Buffett T-shirt, Bermuda shorts, and varicose veins intercepted me.
“Love your vintage rag-doll look and Hello Bad Kitty shoes. Are you one of those living statues? You can’t fool me! Where’s the bratwurst bingo line?”
I wordlessly pointed in the direction farthest from where I was standing, and the troop of seniors trekked on past.
But my freaky vampire vision had disappeared just as I’d been about to put a few bizarre pieces together. I was beginning to feel like Alice in a Wonderland of horror films. Since when had Cesar Cicereau’s Gehenna Hotel and Casino been anything but an old-style establishment with only one miserable Peter Lorre CinSim on site?
Since before Sansouci had been sent to get me. And where was the handsome nondog, anyway?
I sighed, audibly, surprised when a monocled English gentleman in a tweed suit, bearing a silver-headed cane, stopped to address me.
“Pardon me, miss. Perhaps you can help me catch and unmask a foul vampire. I’m a Scotland Yard detective, but I’m quite lost among all these odd, loud, milling people.”
Would Sherlock Holmes hesitate? Could I throw him Sansouci?
He was all in subtle shades of gray from his eyes to his lips to his tweedy Norfolk jacket, another CinSim, yet not another CinSim if you knew the film. The vampire had been the detective in disguise. Lon Chaney had played a role within a role.
The scales were falling from my eyes (and also from the trilling woman’s voice above all the Vegas hotel hullabaloo).
I needed to get to Cesar Cicereau, fast, which meant I had to snag a conventional elevator ride to the penthouse level. I streaked through the crowd, watching the top-hatted vampire offering to escort a troop of local Boy Scouts into the wood. Not good.
In the concourse in front of the elevators, people were pushing toward every lit Up arrow, chattering and checking their fanny packs for cash and credit cards.
The melee was so huge and loud that the haunting singer could no longer be heard. No one even noticed the Hunchback of Notre Dame grinning down at me as he swung back and forth against the bank of elevators like the weight on a grandfather clock’s pendulum.
* * *
At last I’d battled my way into an up elevator all the way to Cesar Cicereau’s forty-third-floor penthouse. And he was the one who wanted this appointment.
A carved wood tree design on the mirrored elevator car walls made riders feel claustrophobic, as if their reflected image and the frame of trees extended into infinity. Since I’d been known to mirror-walk, I kept a firm grip on myself to avoid being drawn into Wereworld.
The elevator opened on the foyer to Cicereau’s penthouse.
This high, the soprano was coming in loud and clear, singing “My Blue Heaven.” I rather doubted it, having visited here before.
Two half-were bodyguards bracketed the elaborately carved wooden doors to Cesar Cicereau’s personal lair. They had frozen at man height in transition to wolf. I imagined the chatty wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood” would look like them—hairy, predatory beasts with snouts like crocodiles standing on two shoeless feet but otherwise clad.
These weren’t the fully human Cicereau pack members who usually faced the public. These were Cicereau’s paw-picked bodyguards, the weres who never fully reverted to human for some reason, like the half-were biker gangs on the Vegas streets.
In fact, I wished I were
facing a tormented, self-hating werewolf like the Larry Talbot persona actor Lon Chaney Jr. had pioneered. The 1941 classic horror film The Wolf Man portrayed the title character as all angsty dude, with my devoted CinSim and all-around character actor, Claude Rains, playing his father figure.
But, no, it was the big boss I needed to see. No one half human.
“The boss is expecting me,” I said.
The guards eyed me for a long moment.
My adventures had finally made me look the part of the accused witch and Gypsy girl, Esmeralda. I was rumpled and bruised, with my ballerina-length taffeta skirt as ragged and bedraggled as my shoulder-length hair.
Their elongated lips curled. “The boss don’t entertain skags like you.”
“Skags like me can save his hairy ass. Tell him Delilah Street is calling.”
They reared back as one recognized me. He clawed at his buddy’s furry forearm to impart a fearsome message.
“This is the dame who killed that Frankenstein dude who plunged out the boss’s windows.”
“He was dead to begin with,” I pointed out. “Unless you yearn for the same condition, either let me pass or announce me. I won’t touch a hair on your matted bellies, but Cicereau wants to see me.”
Their handlike forepaws clawed at their shaggy, upright ears as the soprano reached the top of her four-octave range and held the note for an eternity. I could see the fur around their jaws was scabbed with blood. The high-pitched sound of music really did torment the poor misbred creatures.
“Please,” I added.
My alto-pitched voice must have been soothing. They panted in doglike relief and opened the doors for me. Or maybe nobody here said “please” without begging for his life.
“Forty-three stories, dude,” one whispered to the other behind my back. “A wild-woman. Almost as merciless as the boss.”
That was a bad rap, but any reputation in this town can’t hurt. The creature I’d tricked into that suicidal leap had already torn apart several tourists and even a few werewolves. Like the real Frankenstein’s monster, he had been more of a victim of his makers than bad to begin with. I’d done what was necessary to save lives, even supernatural half-lives. That didn’t mean I wasn’t sorry I’d had to do it. Hopefully, this assignment would have a happier ending, but I doubted it.
I knew the suite’s layout from my previous visit, especially the paired guest bathrooms bracketing the entry hall like guard wolves, so that welcome and not-so-welcome guests could clean off blood and gore, coming and going.
Inside, I felt nervous. Outside, I acted like the Girl Who Had Offed Frankenstein’s Monster. Inside, I was just another mob hireling.
Cicereau sat ensconced on a lavish spread of Swedish modern furniture, all woodsy and leather. He was wearing furry earmuffs and clutching an icepack to his head. The moon was recovering from being full, but Cicereau still looked like he had a hunting hangover.
I’d considered the Hunchback of Notre Dame a grotesque figure at first, but Cicereau, although totally human in his nonwerewolf form, was a sort of human toad whose broad, rapacious face lacked half the intelligence I’d seen glimmering in the mostly mute Hunchback’s one eye.
“Street. So you’re really here,” Cicereau crowed. “And so is the screeching siren I want you to eliminate. About now the sound of your scream after my men hurl you through the window would be worth the momentary overriding of the screaming Mimi in my hotel.”
“Wronged women do seem to have it in for you,” I commented. “I need some information before I wrap up this case.”
“Really? You plan to wrap up something besides your own life and career?”
“You recently invested in some new CinSims, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but none who sang. My accountants say I need to up the main-floor attractions. I’m old-school. I think a couple thousand rooms, a big theatrical show, a shopping mall, a bunch of bare boobs here and there, and a casino crammed with gaming tables and machines should do for the stupid tourists.
“And do you know what those CinSim things cost? They’re leased, like freaking vending machines. What a racket. Worse than that freaking supernatural soprano. You pay over and over for the product, like any sucker who visits Vegas. Not Cesar Cicereau. I figured out how to beat the Immortality Mob at its own game.”
“Let me guess. You leased the Man of a Thousand Faces.”
“Well, that’s exaggerating what the dead dude has to offer, but yeah, that particular deal was attractive. The CinSim people assured me that this Lon Chaney actor would be a freaking chameleon. At least ten for the price of one.”
“I’ve never heard of a CinSim being leased to play multiple roles. It could turn the actor underneath the characters schizophrenic.”
“Stop the schmancy-fancy words. ‘CinSim’ is hard enough for my electronic dictionary. I’m experimenting with the Gehenna’s tourist attractions, okay? I happen to think this CinSim craze isn’t here to stay, but I’ll try something now and then if it seems to fit my theme. I mean, this guy is the whole freak show put together: the Hunchback, the Phantom, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, whatever. He’s got the monster chops down, and I like that.
“What I don’t like,” Cicereau said—leaning forward and pointing at me with the kind of big, dark, stinky cigar familiarly called “a wolf turd”—“is that girly high-pitched yammering whining like a bitch in heat all through my hotel. Her you get rid of, and I don’t care how. Right?”
* * *
“Cicereau seems a bit confused about his CinSims,” I pointed out after I’d washed off the cigar stink in the entry-area powder room and joined Sansouci in the hall outside the kingpin’s suite.
“Cicereau hires people to know about things that confuse him.”
“Do you smoke?” I asked.
“Only after sex,” he joked. “Listen. Just do the job and don’t overthink ole Cesar. He doesn’t.”
“Listen,” I answered, leaning my hands on a brass railing related to the one I’d almost been tossed off earlier. “That woman has the purest, clearest vocal tone I’ve ever heard and is on perfect key. You can’t say it doesn’t move you. If I could sing like that—”
“If you could sing like that you’d be on Cicereau’s death list.” Sansouci looked up. “Besides, your job is to send her back where she came from. She’ll still be singing somewhere.”
I sighed. “I probably can do that, but something’s wrong about Cicereau’s SinCims purchases. Can you get me some info off Groggle?”
“Me? Look up something for you on a computer? Do I look like a male secretary?”
“I’ll write it down for you. If you can read.”
“I can read you. You’re pretty desperate.” He handed me a pencil stub and a Gehenna matchbook from the Hell’s Kitschen Lounge.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “I need a full report—pronto, puppy—from you on these two names, just like you were a private dick.”
“I sort of am,” he said with a gigolo gleam.
“I’ll warn you that they’re dead guys.”
“Bros.” The undercover daylight vampire nodded sagely as he pocketed his makeshift notebook. “This’ll be an intriguing change of pace.”
“And I’ll need to know all about who they were, on and off the silver screen.”
“You want a freaking book?”
“I think I’ve read part of it, but I need more. You know how to print out from online, don’t you? You just flex your fingers and hit PRINT .”
“Five-finger exercises are second nature to me. Where’ll you be?”
“In the deepest pit backstage of the hotel theater, entertaining the creep who set her ”—I looked up to where the encompassing voice seemed to be ensconced—“haunting us .”
* * *
Was I aching for a reunion with the Hunchback of Notre Dame? Hell, no! I was hoping for a rendezvous with the Phantom of the Opera, though.
That was who had drawn the mysterious voice down from CinSim h
eaven.
I might welcome a bit of Internet intervention and detailed info from Sansouci … who would make an admirable private secretary, but I’d basically determined that the Gehenna’s troubles were due to the eternal triangle. Man, woman … man.
You just had to picture the key elements as monsters, movie monsters.
Meanwhile, I was developing as extreme an allergy to sopranos as Cesar Cicereau. That we should have something in common was disgusting.
I had barely arrived back on the main floor, when Sansouci put the make on me again.
“Your printout, madam.”
“That’s an iTouchOften screen.”
“Works for me.”
I reached for it, but he held it behind his back, as if in a game.
“This really means something to you,” he charged. “Not just the what and the how, the assignment and the pay, but the who and the why.”
“Maybe. I doubt an ancient vampire like you could understand.”
“Maybe if you knew my what and how and who and why, you would.”
“Maybe that’s a too unhuman place for me to go.”
He considered, then shrugged.
“How do exploring the dark, deep crevices of the human heart, soul, and mind work for you?” I asked.
“My ’hood.”
“Forgive me if I don’t think that you have the depth.”
“Try me.”
I needed an assistant. I could use some muscle and I could provide the missing “soul.”
“Is that main-floor maze through the woods populated by anything but naive tourists?” I asked.
“Cicereau was aiming at a walkway of fairy-tale victims.”
“Fairy-tale victims?”
“You know. Toothsome females in supine positions, like Sleeping Beauty.”
“And Snow White in her crystal coffin?” I wondered.
Sansouci grimaced. It didn’t look anywhere near as bad on him as it did on the Hunchback. “She had that Lilith look he likes.”
