Anno Dracula (13 page)

T
he man who had married my wife cried when he told me how she died. Junior - Smith Ohlrig Jr, of the oil and copper Ohlrigs - hadn’t held on to Linda much longer than I had, but their marriage had gone one better than ours. They had a daughter.

Whatever relation you are to a person who was once married to one of your parents, Racquel Loring Ohlrig was to me. In Southern California, it’s such a common family tie you’d think there’d be a nice tidy name for it, pre-father or potential-parent.

The last time I’d seen her was at the Poodle Springs bungalow her mother had given me in lieu of alimony. Thirteen or fourteen years old going on 108, with a micro-halter top and frayed jean-shorts, stretch of still-chubby tummy in between, honey-coloured hair past the small of her back, an underlip that couldn’t stop pouting without surgery, binary star sunglasses and a leather headband with Aztec symbols. She looked like a pre-schooler dressed up as a squaw for a costume party, but had the vocabulary of a sailor in Tijuana and the glittery eyes of a magpie with three convictions for aggravated burglary.

She’d asked for money, to gas up her boyfriend’s ‘sickle’, and took my television (no great loss) while I was in the atrium telephoning her mother. In parting, she scrawled ‘Fuck you, piggy-dad’ in red lipstick on a Spanish mirror. Piggy-Dad, that was me. She still had prep school penmanship, with curly-tails on her ys and a star over the i.

Last I’d heard, the boyfriend was gone with the rest of the Wild Angels. Racquel was back with Linda, taking penicillin shots and going with someone in a rock band.

Now, things were serious.

‘My little girl,’ Junior kept repeating, ‘my little girl...’

He meant Racquel.

‘They took her away from me,’ he said. ‘The vipers.’

* * *

All our lives, we’ve known about the vampires, if only from books and movies. Los Angeles was the last place they were likely to settle. After all, California is known for the sunshine. Vipers would frazzle like burgers on a grill. Now, it was changing. And not just because of affordable prescription sunglasses.

The dam broke in 1959, about the time Linda was serving me papers, when someone in Europe finally destroyed Dracula. Apparently, all vipers remembered who they were biting when they heard the news. It was down to the Count that so many of them lived openly in the world, but his example kept them in their coffins, confined to joyless regions of the old world like Transylvania and England. With the wicked old witch dead, they didn’t have to stay on the plantation any longer. They spread.

The first vipers in California were elegant European predators, rotten with old money and thirsty for more than blood. In the early sixties, they bought up real estate, movie studios, talent agencies (cue lots of gags), orange groves, restaurant franchises, ocean-front properties, parent companies. Then their get began to appear: American vampires, newborns with wild streaks. Just as I quit the private detective business, bled-dry bodies turned up all over town as turf wars erupted and were settled out of court. For some reason, drained corpses were often dumped on golf courses. Vipers made more vipers, but they also made viper-killers -including such noted humanitarians as the Manson Family - and created new segments of the entertainment and produce industry.

As the Vietnam War escalated, things went quiet on the viper front. Word was that the elders of the community began ruthless policing of their own kind. Besides, the cops were more worried about draft-dodgers and peace-freak protesters. Now, vampires were just another variety of Los Angeles fruitcake. Hundred-coffin mausoleums opened up along the Strip, peddling shelter from the sun at five bucks a day. A swathe of Bay City, boundaried by dried-up canals, started to be called Little Carpathia, a ghetto for the poor suckers who didn’t make it up to castles and estates in Beverly Hills. I had nothing real against vipers, apart from a deep-in-the-gut crawly distrust it was impossible for anyone of my generation -the World War II guys - to quell entirely. Linda’s death, though, hit me harder than I thought I could be hit, a full-force ulcer-bursting right to the gut. Ten years into retirement, I was at war.

To celebrate the Bicentennial Year, I’d moved from Poodle Springs, back into my old Los Angeles apartment. I was nearer the bartenders and medical practitioners to whom I was sole support. These days, I knocked about, boring youngsters in the profession with the Sternwood case or the Lady in the Lake, doing light sub-contract work for Lew Archer - digging up family records at county courthouses - or Jim Rockford. All the cops I knew were retired, dead or purged by Chief Exley. I hadn’t had any pull with the D.A.’s office since Bernie Ohls’ final stroke. I admitted I was a relic, but so long as my lungs and liver behaved at least eight hours a day I was determined not to be a shambling relic.

I was seriously trying to cut down on the Camels, but the damage was done back in the puff-happy ’40s when no one outside the cigarette industry knew nicotine was worse for you than heroin. I told people I was drinking less, but never really kept score. There were times, like now, when Scotch was the only soldier that could complete the mission.

* * *

Junior, as he talked, drank faster than I did. His light tan suit was the worse for a soaking. It had been worn until dry, wrinkling and staining around the saggy shape of its owner. His shirtfront had ragged tears where he had caught on something.

Since his remarriage to a woman nearer Racquel’s age than Linda’s, Junior had been a fading presence in the lives of his ex-wife and daughter (ex-daughter?). I couldn’t tell how much of his story was from experience and how much filtered through what others had told him. It was no news that Racquel was running with another bad crowd, the Anti-Life Equation. They weren’t all vipers, Junior said, but some, the ringleaders, were. Racquel, it appears, got off on being bitten. Not something I wanted to know, it hardly came as a surprise. With the motorcycle boy, who went by the name of Heavenly Blues but liked his friends to address him as ‘Mr President’, she’d been sporting a selection of bruises which didn’t come from taking a bad spill off the pillion of his hog. For tax purposes, the Anti-Life Equation was somewhere between religious and political. I had never heard of them, but it’s impossible to keep up with all the latest cults.

Two days ago, at his office - Junior made a pretence of still running the company, though he had to clear every paper-clip purchase with Riyadh and Tokyo - he’d taken a phone call from his daughter. Racquel sounded agitated and terrified, and claimed she’d made a break with the ALE, who wanted to sacrifice her to some elder vampire. She needed money - that same old refrain, haunting me again - to make a dash for Hawaii or, oddly, the Philippines (she thought she’d be safe in a Catholic country, which suggested she’d never been to one). Junior, tower of flab, had written a cheque. His new wife, smart doll, talked him out of sending it. Last night, at home, he had gotten another call from Racquel, hysterical this time, with screaming and other background effects. They were coming for her, she said. The call was cut off.

To his credit, Junior ignored his lawfully married flight attendant and drove over to Linda’s place in Poodle Springs, the big house where I’d been uncomfortable. He found the doors open, the house extensively trashed and no sign of Racquel. Linda was at the bottom of the kidney-shaped swimming pool, bitten all over, eyes white. To set a seal on the killing, someone had driven an iron spike through her forehead. A croquet mallet floated above her. I realised he had gone into the pool fully-dressed and hauled Linda out. Strictly speaking, that was violating the crime scene but I would be the last person to complain.

He had called the cops, who were very concerned. Then, he’d driven to the city to see me. It’s not up to me to say whether that qualified as a smart move or not.

* * *

‘This Anti-Life Equation,’ I asked Junior, feeling like a shamus again, ‘did it come with any names?’

‘I’m not even sure it’s called that. Racquel mostly used just the initials, ALE. I think it was Anti-Life Element once. Or Anti-Love. Their guru or nabob or whatever he calls himself is some kind of hippie Rasputin. He’s one of them, a viper. Khorda. Someone over at one of the studios -Traeger or Bob Evans or one of those kids, maybe Bruckheimer - fed this Khorda some money on an option, but it was never-never stuff. So far as I know, they never killed anyone before.’

Junior cried again and put his arms around me. I smelled chlorine on his ragged shirt. I felt all his weight bearing me down, and was afraid I’d break, be no use to him at all. My bones are brittle these days. I patted his back, which made neither of us feel any better. At last, he let me go and wiped his face on a wet handkerchief.

‘The police are fine people,’ he said. He got no argument from me. ‘Poodle Springs has the lowest crime rate in the state. Every contact I’ve had with the PSPD has been cordial, and I’ve always been impressed with their efficiency and courtesy.’

The Poodle Springs Police Department were tigers when it came to finding lost kittens and discreetly removing drunken ex-spouses from floodlit front lawns. You can trust me on this.

‘But they aren’t good with murder,’ I said. ‘Or vipers.’

Junior nodded. ‘That’s just it. They aren’t. I know you’re retired. God, you must be I don’t know how old. But you used to be connected. Linda told me how you met, about the Wade-Lennox case. I can’t even begin to imagine how you could figure out that tangle. For her, you’ve got to help. Racquel is still alive. They didn’t kill her when they killed her mother. They just took her. I want my little girl back safe and sound. The police don’t know Racquel. Well, they do... and that’s the problem. They said they were taking the kidnap seriously, but I saw in their eyes that they knew about Racquel and the bikers and the hippies. They think she’s run off with another bunch of freaks. It’s only my word that Racquel was even at the house. I keep thinking of my little girl, of sands running out. Desert sands. You’ve got to help us. You’ve just got to.’

I didn’t make promises, but I asked questions.

‘Racquel said the ALE wanted to sacrifice her? As in tossed into a volcano to appease the Gods?’

‘She used a bunch of words. “Elevate”, was one. They all meant “kill”. Blood sacrifice, that’s what she was afraid of. Those vipers want my little girl’s blood.’

‘Junior, I have to ask, so don’t explode. You’re sure Racquel isn’t a part of this?’

Junior made fists, like a big boy about to get whipped by someone half his size. Then it got through to the back of his brain. I wasn’t making assumptions like the PSPD, I was asking an important question, forcing him to prove himself to me.

‘If you’d heard her on the phone, you’d know. She was terrified. Remember when she wanted to be an actress? Set her heart on it, nagged for lessons and screen tests. She was - what? - eleven or twelve? Cute as a bug, but froze under the lights. She’s no actress. She can’t fake anything. She can’t tell a lie without it being written all over her. You know that as well as anyone else. My daughter isn’t a perfect person, but she’s a kid. She’ll straighten out. She’s got her mom’s iron in her.’

I followed his reasoning. It made sense. The only person Racquel had ever fooled was her father, and him only because he let himself be fooled out of guilt. She’d never have come to me for gas money if Junior were still giving in to his princess’s every whim. And he was right - I’d seen Racquel Ohlrig (who had wanted to call herself Amber Valentine) act, and she was on the Sonny Tufts side of plain rotten.

‘Khorda,’ I said, more to myself than Junior. ‘That’s a start. I’ll do what I can.’

* * *

Mojave Wells could hardly claim to come to life after dark, but when the blonde viper slid out of the desert dusk, all four living people in the diner - Mom and Pop behind the counter, a trucker and me on stools - turned to look. She smiled as if used to the attention but deeming herself unworthy of it, and walked between the empty tables.

The girl wore a white mini-dress belted on her hips with interlocking steel rings, a blue scarf that kept her hair out of the way, and square black sunglasses. Passing from purple twilight to fizzing blue-white neon, her skin was white to the point of colourlessness, her lips naturally scarlet, her hair pale blonde. She might have been Racquel’s age or God’s.

I had come to the desert to find vampires. Here was one.

She sat at the end of the counter, by herself. I sneaked an eyeful. She was framed against the ‘No Vipers’ sign lettered on the window. Mom and Pop - probably younger than me, I admit - made no move to throw her out on her behind, but also didn’t ask for her order.

‘Get the little lady whatever she wants and put it on my check,’ said the trucker. The few square inches of his face not covered by salt-and-pepper beard were worn leather, the texture and colour of his cowboy hat.

‘Thank you very much, but I’ll pay for myself.’