Anno Dracula (15 page)

I admitted this was too easy. I started thinking about the case again, taking it apart in my mind and jamming the pieces together in new ways. Nothing made sense, but that was hardly breaking news at this end of the century.

Hovering like the Wizard of Oz between the throne-dais and the worshipper-space was a fat living man in a 1950s suit and golf hat. I recognised L. Keith Winton, author of ‘Robot Rangers of the Gamma Nebula’ (1946) and other works of serious literature, including
Plasmatics: The New Communion
(1952), founding text of the Church of Immortology. If ever there was a power-behind-the-throne bird, this was he.

‘We’ve come for Racquel Loring Ohlrig,’ announced Geneviève. I should probably have said that.

‘No one of that name dwells among us,’ boomed Khorda. He had a big voice.

‘I see her there,’ I said, pointing.

‘Sister Red Rose,’ said Khorda.

He stuck out his arm and gestured. Racquel stood. She did not move like herself. Her teeth were not a joke. She had real fangs. They fitted badly in her mouth, making it look like an ill-healed red wound. Her red eyes were puffy.

‘You turned her,’ I said, anger in my gut.

‘Sister Red Rose has been elevated to the eternal.’

Geneviève’s hand was on my shoulder.

I thought of Linda, bled empty in her pool, a spike in her head. I wanted to burn this castle down, and sew the ground with garlic.

‘I am Geneviève Dieudonné,’ she announced, formally.

‘Welcome, Lady Elder,’ said the LeFanu woman. Her eyes held no welcome for Geneviève. She made a gesture, which unfolded membrane-like velvet sleeves. ‘I am Diane LeFanu. And this is Khorda, the Deathmaster.’

Geneviève squared up against the guru viper.

‘General Iorga, is it not? Late of the Carpathian Guard. We met in 1888, at the palace of Prince Consort Dracula. Do you remember?’

Khorda/Iorga was not happy.

I realised he was wearing a wig and a false beard. He might have immortality, but was well past youth. I saw him as a tubby, ridiculous fraud. He was one of those elders who had been among Dracula’s toadies, but was lost in a world without a King Vampire. Even for California, he was a sad soul.

‘Racquel,’ I said. ‘It’s me. Your father wants...’

She spat hissing red froth.

‘It would be best if this new-born were allowed to leave with us,’ Geneviève said, not to Khorda but Winton. ‘There’s the small matter of a murder charge.’

Winton’s plump, bland, pink face wobbled. He glared at Khorda. The guru trembled on his throne, and boomed without words.

‘Murder, Khorda?’ asked Winton. ‘Murder? Who told you we could afford murder?’

‘None was done,’ said Khorda/Iorga.

I wanted to skewer him with something. But I went beyond anger. He was too afraid of Winton - not a person you’d immediately take as a threat, but clearly the top dog at the ALE - to lie.

‘Take the girl,’ Winton said to me.

Racquel howled in rage and despair. I didn’t know if she was the same person we had come for. As I understood it, some vampires changed entirely when they turned, burned out their previous memories and became sad blanks, reborn with dreadful thirsts and the beginnings of a mad cunning.

‘If she’s a killer, we don’t want her,’ said Winton. ‘Not yet.’

I approached Racquel. The other cultists shrank away from her. Her face shifted, bloating and smoothing as if flatworms were passing just under her skin. Her teeth were ridiculously expanded, fat pebbles of sharp bone. Her lips were torn and split.

She hissed as I reached out to touch her.

Had this girl, in the throes of turning, battened on her mother, on Linda, and gone too far, taken more than her human mind had intended, glutting herself until her viper thirst was assuaged?

I saw the picture only too well. I tried to fit it with what Junior had told me.

He had sworn Racquel was innocent.

But his daughter had never been innocent, not as a warm person and not now as a new-born vampire.

Geneviève stepped close to Racquel and managed to slip an arm round her. She cooed in the girl’s ear, coaxing her to come, replacing the Deathmaster in her mind.

Racquel took her first steps. Geneviève encouraged her. Then Racquel stopped as if she’d hit an invisible wall. She looked to Khorda/Iorga, hurt and betrayal in her eyes, and to Winton, with that pleading moué I knew well. Racquel was still herself, still trying to wheedle love from unworthy men, still desperate to survive through her developing wiles.

Her attention was caught by a noise. Her nose wrinkled, quizzically.

Geneviève had taken out her rubber duck and quacked it.

‘Come on, Racquel,’ she said, as if to a happy dog. ‘Nice quacky-quacky. Do you want it?’

She quacked again.

Racquel attempted a horrendous smile. A baby-tear of blood showed on her cheek.

We took our leave of the Anti-Life Equation.

* * *

Junior was afraid of his daughter. And who wouldn’t be?

I was back in Poodle Springs, not a place I much cared to be. Junior’s wife had stormed out, enraged that this latest drama didn’t revolve around her. Their house was decorated in the expensive-but-ugly mock Spanish manner, and called itself ranch-style though there were no cattle or crops on the grounds.

Geneviève sat calmly on Junior’s long grey couch. She fitted in like a piece of Carrera marble at a Tobacco Road yard sale. I was helping myself to Scotch.

Father and daughter looked at each other.

Racquel wasn’t such a fright now. Geneviève had driven her here, following my lead. Somehow, on the journey, the elder vampire had imparted grooming tips to the new-born, helping her through the shock of turning. Racquel had regular-sized fangs, and the red in her eyes was just a tint. Outside, she had been experimenting with her newfound speed, moving her hands so fast they seemed not to be there.

But Junior was terrified. I had to break the spell.

‘It’s like this,’ I said, setting it out. ‘You both killed Linda. The difference is that one of you brought her back.’

Junior covered his face and fell to his knees.

Racquel stood over him.

‘Racquel has been turning for weeks, joining up with that crowd in the desert. She felt them taking her mind away, making her part of a harem or a slave army. She needed someone strong in her corner, and Daddy didn’t cut it. So she went to the strongest person in her life, and made her stronger. She just didn’t get to finish the job before the Anti-Life Equation came to her house. She called you, Junior, just before she went under, became part of their family. When you got to the house, it was just as you said. Linda was at the bottom of the swimming pool. She’d gone there to turn. You didn’t even lie to me. She was dead. You took a mallet and a spike - what was it from, the tennis net? - and made her truly dead. Did you tell yourself you did it for her, so she could be at peace? Or was it because you didn’t want to be in a town - a world - with a
stronger
Linda Loring? She was a fighter. I bet she fought you.’

There were deep scratches on his wrists, like the rips in his shirt I had noticed that night. If I were a gather-the-suspects-in-the-library type of dick, I would have spotted that as a clue straight off.

Junior sobbed a while. Then, when nobody killed him, he uncurled and looked about, with the beginnings of an unattractive slyness.

‘It’s legal, you know,’ he said. ‘Linda was dead.’

Geneviève’s face was cold. I knew California law did not recognise the state of undeath. Yet. There were enough vampire lawyers on the case to get that changed soon.

‘That’s for the cops,’ I said. ‘Fine people. You’ve always been impressed with their efficiency and courtesy.’

Junior was white under the tear-streaks. He might not take a murder fall on this, but Tokyo and Riyadh weren’t going to like the attention the story would get. That was going to have a transformative effect on his position in Ohlrig Oil and Copper. And the PSPD would find something to nail him with: making false or incomplete statements, mutilating a corpse for profit (no more alimony), contemptible gutlessness.

Another private eye might have left him with Racquel.

She stood over her father, fists swollen by the sharp new nails extruding inside, dripping her own blood - the blood that she had made her mother drink - onto the mock-mission-style carpet.

Geneviève was beside her, with the duck.

‘Come with me, Racquel,’ she said. ‘Away from the dark red places.’

* * *

Days later, in a bar on Cahuenga just across from the building where my office used to be, I was coughing over a shot and a Camel.

They found me.

Racquel was her new self, flitting everywhere, flirting with men of all ages, sharp eyes fixed on the pulses in their necks and the blue lines in their wrists.

Geneviève ordered bull’s blood.

She made a face.

‘I’m used to fresh from the bull,’ she said. ‘This is rancid.’

‘We’re getting live piglets from next week,’ said the bartender. ‘The straps are already fitted, and we have the neck-spigots on order.’

‘See,’ Geneviève told me. ‘We’re here to stay. We’re a market. Consumers.’

I coughed some more.

‘You could get something done about that,’ she said, softly.

I knew what she meant. I could become a vampire. Who knows: if Linda had made it, I might have been tempted. As it was, I was too old to change.

‘You remind me of someone,’ she said. ‘Another detective. In another country, a century ago.’

‘Did he catch the killer and save the girl?’

An unreadable look passed over her face. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s exactly what he did.’

‘Good for him.’

I drank. The Scotch tasted of blood. I could never get used to drinking that.

According to the newspapers, there’d been a raid on the castle in the desert. General Iorga and Diane LeFanu were up on a raft of abduction, exploitation and murder charges; with most of the murder victims undead enough to recite testimony in favour of their killers, they would stay in court forever. No mention was made of L. Keith Winton, though I had noticed a storefront on Hollywood Boulevard displaying nothing but a stack of Immortology tracts. Outside, fresh-faced new-born vampires smiled under black parasols and invited passersby in for ‘a blood test’. Picture this: followers who are going to give you all their money
and
live forever. And they said Dracula was dead.

‘Racquel will be all right,’ Geneviève assured me. ‘She’s so good at this that she frightens me. She won’t make get again in a hurry.’

I looked at the girl, surrounded by eager warm bodies. She’d use them up by the dozen. I saw the last of Linda in her, and regretted that there was none of me.

‘What about you?’ I asked Geneviève.

‘I’ve seen the Pacific. Can’t drive much further. I’ll stay around for a while, maybe get a job. I used to know a lot about being a doctor. Perhaps I’ll try to get into med school, and requalify. I’m tired of jokes about leeches. Then again, I have to unlearn so much. Mediaeval knowledge is a handicap, you know.’

I put my licence on the bar.

‘You could get one like it,’ I said.

She took off her glasses. Her eyes were still startling.

‘This was my last case, Geneviève. I got the killer and I saved the girl. It’s been a long goodbye and it’s over. I’ve met my own killers, in bottles and soft-packs of twenty. Soon, they’ll finish me and I’ll be sleeping the big sleep. There’s not much more I can do for people. There are going to be a lot more like Racquel. Those kids at the castle in the desert. The customers our bartender is expecting next week. The suckers drawn into Winton’s nets. Some are going to need you. And some are going to be real vipers, which means other folk are going to need you to protect them from the worst they can do. You’re good, sweetheart. You could do good. There, that’s my speech over.’

She dipped a fingertip in her glass of congealing blood and licked it clean, thinking.

‘You might have an idea there, gumshoe.’

I drank to her.