Never Cross a Vampire Page 2

  “Whose idea was it to invite Mr. Lugosi tonight?” I asked Billings loud enough for the others to hear and tried to make it sound like the start of a thank-you-for-the-lovely-evening. Lugosi was at my shoulder listening, the quartet of fluttering capes in pursuit.

  “I don’t recall,” said Billings, playing with his fangs.

  “It was mine,” whispered the dark woman, her voice somewhat foreign, amused, and a little sleepy. She stared immodestly at my much-traveled neck and I pulled up my collar.

  “No,” interjected a lean vampire with a jagged nose and a too-small cape that choked his words into a crimson gasp. His accent was definitely more New York Jewish than Transylvanian.

  “No, no,” came in the Chinese vampire, billowing his broad cape and elbowing his way to the foreground. The cape was so long that he stepped on it and tripped forward into Lugosi.

  The tall dark vampire who had been looking at me earlier was the only one who didn’t try to take any credit.

  “Anybody oppose the invitation?” I tried, knowing no one would admit it in Lugosi’s presence but hoping vampire competition would emerge.

  “No, why?” asked the Chinese guy.

  “Because,” Lugosi said with a broad smile. “I like to be welcome. And I half-enjoyed our visit, but the sands of time fall relentlessly and the dawn approaches.” Lugosi pointed in the general direction of the dawn somewhere above the moldy ceiling. We headed for the stairs, the vampires behind us. I could feel the warm breath of the woman behind me, and I imagined her eyes on my not-too-clean collar.

  They escorted us up the narrow stairs, through the theater lobby and to the door, where hands reached out to pass me my coat and Lugosi his coat and Homburg hat.

  We exchanged thanks, well wishes, invitations, undying love, and promises to be pen pals before we opened the door.

  “Good night,” Lugosi said over his shoulder and stepped into the cold darkness with me behind. In the past week, temperatures had hit lows of 29 and highs of 40. I had a coat from Hy O’Brien’s Clothes for Him on Hollywood. The coat had been a bargain. I got it for only three bucks more than I had sold it to Hy for a month earlier.

  There was no sky and almost no light. Blackout conditions had cut off the street lights and most businesses didn’t keep a night light. They didn’t want the first Japanese bombs to land on their taco stands. We stood there for a few seconds, trying to adjust to the darkness, and then I started toward my car, but there were no footsteps behind me. I turned and made out Lugosi’s shape a dozen feet away.

  “My hat,” he whispered.

  At first I thought he had said, “My bat,” and considered the possibility that he had gone stark raving cuckoo, but he repeated it and I got it straight.

  “It’s in your hand,” I said.

  “And there is something in it,” he answered. My eyes were beginning to pick out little details now, like the trembling of his hands. I moved fast to his side and took the hat. I reached inside it and touched what felt like a sticky piece of cloth. I led Lugosi quickly to my car, got him in, and went around to get in on the other side. I started the engine and flipped on the overhead light. A lone car went down the deserted street, and we waited for it to pass before we looked down at the piece of black cloth I had pulled from the hat. The writing was in blood or a good imitation.

  “It says, ‘You were warned,’” I told Lugosi, who was recovering a bit from the shock. I flipped off the light. His face was hidden but I heard a sound like a laugh and then his familiar voice.

  “Worthy of a Monogram serial,” he said.

  “Well,” I said putting the car in gear. “We’ve got our list of suspects down to five. We’re making progress.”

  As I drove Lugosi back home, I kept him talking, about his life, his work, anything to get the world back to normal.

  “Once,” he said, “I had ambition.” I glanced over at him to see the light from passing cars cast dark shadows on his face. “I was in the National Theater of Hungary. I played Shakespeare. Can you imagine? I played Romeo. I was distinguished, yes. I was an officer in the Forty-third Royal Hungarian Infantry in the war. Wounded. I saw real death. And here a foolish trick makes me tremble.”

  “I’ve had better days myself,” I tried.

  “No, Mr. Peters, I live on hope. I have made less money than people think, have spent more than I should have on vanity and foolishness.”

  I was about to try to console him further when he laughed and elbowed me gently.

  “No,” he said, “I try, but I can’t see myself as a tragic character. I’ve had good times. Let’s stop for a drink. I have to be at the studio at eight in the morning, but tonight, my new friend, we share a bottle and tell our life stories and fill them with lies and truth and romance.”

  We went to a little bar I know on Sprina. Lugosi mixed beer and scotch and I nursed two beers for an hour. He stood drinks for everyone and listened to the bartender tell us that he heard MacArthur had been wounded and Manila had fallen. Another guy with a black wig that tilted to the side added that he heard the Army was going to start taking cars away from civilians because there was a shortage of vehicles.

  Lugosi listened with a patient smile to the war gossip and the background jukebox playing Tommy Dorsey’s version of “This Love of Mine.”

  I thought my client was far away from thoughts of bloody messages, but he looked into the last drops of amber scotch at the bottom of his beer mug and said softly,

  “But first on earth, as Vampyre sent,

  Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent;

  Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

  And such the blood of all thy race …”

  His words trailed off and then came back as the record stopped. Lugosi’s voice rose slightly and the half-dozen guys in the bar and the barkeeper went silent.

  “Thy gnashing tooth, and haggard lip;

  Then stalking to thy sullen grave

  Go—and with Ghouls and Afrits rave,

  Till these in horror shrink away

  From spectre more accursed than they.”

  That pretty well killed the party. I got Lugosi home without any further conversation, promised to follow up on the Dark Knights, and left him in front of his door. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him for another day’s pay in advance.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Gunther Wherthman was a little over three feet tall, a genuine midget. At eight in the morning on January 3, 1942 he sat across from me slowly eating a poached egg. I could tell the time not from my watch, which was always an hour or two off, but from the Beech-Nut gum clock on my wall. I had received the clock in payment for returning a runaway grandmother to a guy who owned a pawn shop on Main Street. The job took ten minutes. Grandma was hiding in her closet.

  Gunther wore a dark blue suit with not a wrinkle showing and a dark blue tie with some discreet light blue stripes running at a slight angle. He smelled of toilet water and looked ready to go to work, which he was. Work, however, was in the boardinghouse room he lived in next to mine. There was little chance that Gunther, who made a modest living as a translator of German, French, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, and Basque, would meet anyone during the day except for me and our landlady, who would neither care nor notice what he wore.

  Gunther had talked me into the rooming house on Heliotrope in Hollywood after I had gotten him off a murder charge about a year earlier. The murder had been of a guy who played a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. Gunther, like most people under four feet tall in the Western world, had been in the movie. In fact, he had picked up a few dollars from time to time doing bit parts in movies that needed little people.

  One of his favorite movie jobs had been to simply walk back and forth at the end of a long corridor past another midget. The director’s idea was that no one would notice that the two men were midgets at that distance, and the corridor would look twice as long. Gunther had never bothered to see the movie.

  It was Saturday morning and I planned to work, bu
t first I gobbled an oversize bowl of Kix with brown sugar and drank a couple of cups of freshly brewed Schilling coffee I had picked up at Ralph’s for twenty-nine cents a pound.

  I discovered that Roosevelt was pushing for war plants to be moved away from the coast because they were vulnerable and that the Russians were holding the Germans sixty-five miles from Moscow in a place called Maloyaroslavets. Corregidor was preparing for a full-scale Japanese attack. Tony Martin had joined the Navy and Hank Greenberg had reenlisted. I found a photograph of Warner Brothers staging an air raid rehearsal. A bunch of sandbags surrounded Mike Curtiz, Dennis Morgan, Bette Davis, “George the Grip,” Irene Manning, and Chet, a worker I recognized from my days at the studio. I showed the photograph to Gunther, who put down his spoon, examined it politely, and nodded.

  “And this case is an important one?” Gunther said precisely, when his mouth was empty.

  “Well,” I answered, “it’ll pay a few bills, but I think it’s small time, which is just what I’ll be happy with. Dime-a-dozen case of a nut writing a few letters, pulling a few tricks. I’ll probably track him down in a few days, throw a scare, and earn my money.”

  Gunther didn’t ask for details. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and climbed down to clean up the meal while I helped myself to another bowl of Kix and made a mental note to pick up a few boxes of Wheaties, which were on sale for ten cents. Life, I thought, could be so simple.

  My back hadn’t given me any trouble for weeks. My sinuses were backed up as they had been for years by my crushed nose, but aside from a few headaches there was no trouble. The bone chip in the little finger of my left hand had shifted, but a few aspirin had helped me to forget it. I had had no migraine since November. The world was full of promise and hope, if you discounted the war.

  I had eaten breakfast in my undershirt, not from any desire to offend Gunther, but to preserve the thin veneer of respectability that clung to my shirt, tie, and jacket. With a tight budget, I couldn’t afford cleaning, and I sure as hell couldn’t borrow a shirt from Gunther.

  I kicked the mattress I slept on into the corner, got dressed, promised Gunther I’d pick up some Rinso and Horlick’s malted milk, and went out the door and down the stairs as quietly as I could to avoid our deaf landlady, Mrs. Plaut, whose conversations would reduce an FBI agent to creamed spinach.

  The newspapers had stopped printing the weather in case it might help the Japanese invasion plans. I had guessed that the day wouldn’t be much warmer than the one before, and I had been right. Being right had simply meant bringing my coat with me. I had only a lighter-weight suit to change into, and that was even dirtier than the one I was wearing.

  With twenty bucks of Lugosi’s thirty left after groceries, gas, and an Old Nick candy bar, I drove downtown trying to decide whether to call Carmen and ask her to go to the Pantages with me that night after her shift behind the cash register at Levy’s Grill. The Pantages was running a complete showing of Ball of Fire at 1:30 for defense workers and insomniacs. I was still considering the possibility when I got to the Farraday Building and parked in a spot I know in an alley behind a garbage can. There was always a chance that someone might mistake my heap for discarded scrap, but I risked it.

  The lobby of the Farraday was deserted except for Jeremy Butler, the former wrestler, present poet, and landlord, who was using his considerable muscle and a can of Old Dutch cleanser to get some scribbling off the gray wall next to the building directory. The scribbling was vaguely obscene, but some people thought the directory was even worse. We had a bookie posing as a smoke shop, a half-mad doctor who specialized in treating cases he didn’t report, a baby photographer who was even uglier than me and who never carried a camera, a con man named Albertini who changed the name of his company every week (this week it was Federal Newsprint, Ltd.), and a variety of others including Sheldon Minck, DDS, and Toby Peters, the far side of the detective business.

  “How’s business, Toby?” Butler said. His sleeves were rolled up for the task, and his arms bulged under fields of black hair.

  “Got a client,” I said pausing to try to read what he was erasing but having no luck. “Bela Lugosi. Say, you’re a poet. You know a poem that starts ‘But first on earth as Vampyre sent’?”’

  “It’s not the beginning,” Butler said, attacking what looked like the remnants of an anatomical drawing. “It’s by Lord Byron. He was screwy about vampires. A lot of poets like that stuff. I even wrote a vampire poem.” He stepped back to examine his efforts, didn’t like what he saw, and went back to the wall with cold determination.

  “It was published in Little Bay Review last year,” he said.

  “Terrific,” I answered and started to move into the darkness and toward the stairs, but his voice, grunting with each scrub, came at me with the poem. I stopped politely to listen.

  “Whatever happened to yellow?

  Did it bleed to green and mellow

  to almost white from the gentle bite

  of a grass-leaf vampire?

  Yellow is seen

  as the lack of green

  by those who have never known

  the dying moan

  of a fire engine

  or a grasshopper’s life fluid.

  “Yellow spins in men,

  void not null

  weightless though heavy.

  I play myself in string quartets;

  But I can hear

  only two instruments of fear

  in the present tense

  echoing yellow.”

  And then, without a pause, “If I get my hands on the son-of-a-bitch who did this to my wall,” he said evenly, “I’ll make him pay.”

  “I’m sure you will,” I said and headed for the familiar Lysol-smelling stairwell. Jeremy devoted his life to poetry and staying just ahead of the filth that would inevitably inherit the Farraday Building. Only a poet or a monster would have taken it on, and Jeremy was both. I didn’t understand a word of his poem, and I didn’t worry about it. The whole case had become too literary for me.

  I was sure when I got to my office door that Shelly Minck was inside and that there was little chance he’d know a poem about vampires.

  I eased through the tiny waiting room, trying not to disturb the dust, and made my way into Shelly’s office. He was working on a fat woman who gave out low “argghh’s” the entire time she was in the chair whether Shelly was working on her or not. His chubby fingers danced over the instruments, and he cleaned each one on his dirty once-white smock before he plunged it into the woman’s mouth. Sweat poured from the fat at Shelly’s neck, as it always did when he worked, and he paused between searches, probes, and seizures to take a puff at the cigar that he kept perched on his instrument tray.

  “Hi, Shelly,” I said, looking over his shoulder at the fat woman’s decaying mouth. Her frightened eyes caught mine, and I tried not to grimace.

  “Toby,” he said, “I was hoping you’d come in today. You want to go in with me on a London-type bomb shelter? I can get it for two hundred eighty-five dollars, install it in my yard.”

  He pulled something small and bloody out of the fat woman’s mouth and her “argghh” went up a few decibels.

  “You’re all right, Mrs. Lee,” he said, examining the object curiously. “It was just a … a piece of something.”

  “What good would a bomb shelter do me in your yard?” I said. “I don’t think the Japanese are going to give us enough warning to get me from Hollywood to Van Nuys if they attack.”

  “Mrs. Lee,” he said, turning his eyes, myopic behind thick lenses, on his patient. “Do you think you and Mr. Lee, if there is a Mr. Lee, would be interested in half-interest in a bomb shelter? A heavy bomb could destroy all the work I’ve been doing on your mouth.”

  “Arrgghh,” said Mrs. Lee, with terror in her massive eyes.

  “She said yes,” Shelly said, looking for an elusive instrument as he pulled at his cigar.

  “I think she said no,” I said.

&nb
sp; Shelly shrugged, found a sharp instrument, tested it on his finger, and turned to Mrs. Lee, who drew back as deeply into the chair as she could.

  “Relax,” grunted Shelly, “it’s clean.”

  I didn’t want to watch. I went into my office and closed the door. The sound of Mrs. Lee’s “argghh” shook my hinges, and I tried to ignore her by looking at the picture on the wall of my dad, my brother, me, and Kaiser Wilhelm, our dog. It was a photograph out of antiquity and it always soothed me and inspired me to new heights of provocation against the brother with whom I had been battling since the day I was born.

  My mail didn’t have much to offer besides an ad that said I could have dinner and hear Paul Whiteman at the Florentine Gardens for $1.75. That would be four bucks plus gas and a tip if I took Carmen. The Pantages was fifty cents, and we could pick up a couple of tacos for another dime each. If Lugosi paid me for another day, we could even have a couple of beers. Such were the plans of your well-known man-about-town.

  There was an interesting message on the spindle on my desk. Shelly’s hand was unmistakable and the number illegible, but I thought I recognized the name.

  “Shelly,” I yelled through the door when there was a lull in Mrs. Lee’s agony, “is this message from Martin Leib?”

  “Right,” he shouted back.

  Leib was a starched-collar, no-nonsense, old-timer lawyer with consulting contracts at the major studios. I’d worked with him once and knew if he was calling me it wasn’t sentimental or to have a drink and tell tall stories. I found his number in the directory and called. He answered on the second ring.

  “Peters,” he said softly. “Your call came just as I was going to call someone else to handle this. I have a job for you, similar to the last one. Client accused of murder. Warners would like to keep things quiet until everything is clear. On my end, I can contain publicity for a few days at most. I need an investigation quickly and some solid information about what the police have and are doing. Can you handle it?”

  If I told Leib I had a job and a client, he would say “Fine” and hang up. Besides, why couldn’t a detective have two clients at a time? True, it had never happened to me before, but it came at a point when I could use all the help from capitalistic sources I could muster. Bela Lugosi’s crank was intriguing, but a murder case for Warner Brothers was possibly big money.