How to Party with a Killer Vampire (20 page)

But I missed his undercover work that night.

The next morning I showered, dressed in black jeans, a white shirt, and a black leather vest, ate leftover bacon and a piece of toast, and washed it down with a latte. I pulled out the guest list Lucas Cruz had given me for the Vampire Wrap Party. After looking up a few of the guests’ addresses on my laptop, I Mapquested them and printed them out. The only address Cruz didn’t have was for the paparazzo party crasher, Bodie Chase. I wanted to talk to Cruz and find out what the connection was between Angelica and Chase. Did Bodie know something about Angelica’s flirtations—and think there was more behind that? A few Internet searches later I found his business ad: Hollywood Photos. It listed the types of photography Bodie offered: “Photojournalism, glamour/fashion/nude modeling photos, wedding photos, and Celeb for a Day,” which, the ad explained, meant Bodie would follow you around the City for a day and take pictures of you as if you were a celebrity. Wow.

I dialed the office number, hoping to get a secretary or someone who could give me his home address. The phone answered on the third ring, and a male voice said, “Hollywood Photos.”

“Yes, hi,” I said. “I’m looking for Bodie Chase. Is this his place of business?”

“Yeah,” the voice said, “but he ain’t here. Can I help you? I’m his partner, Robby.”

“Oh, well, I’m Presley . . . Chase, Bodie’s sister. I haven’t seen him in several years and wanted to come and say hello.”

There was a moment of silence, then, “I’m sorry, Presley, but your brother is deceased.”

“What? Oh my goodness,” I said, hoping I sounded convincing in my grief. “When did he die? How did it happen?”

“
Uh
, well, he was killed,” Robby said, in his slightly Southern drawl.

I tried to gasp. “You mean, like murdered?”

“Yeah, that’s what the cops are thinking.”

“I don’t believe it!” I said. “Do the police know anything?

Robby’s uncomfortable silence was the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

I paused for a moment, pretending to be overcome with grief, then took a deep breath and asked, “Robby, would it be possible for me to stop by his place and pick up a few things to remember him by?”

“He don’t got much. The cops took a bunch of his shit—I mean stuff—but I’ll look around the basement and see if they left anything behind.”

“That would be wonderful, Robby. Thanks so much. Do you have a key to his place?”

“Yeah, me and him were roommates.” He gave me the address. To my surprise, Bodie lived in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, one of the poorest sections in the City. For some reason, I expected him to live in a more upscale neighborhood. Didn’t paparazzi make big bucks snapping celebrity photos?

I hung up the phone, promising to be there within the hour. I gathered my things, told my cats to keep an eye out for any burglars, kidnappers, or mice—Cairo had caught a mouse a week ago and had brought it to me as a gift, which just made me wonder how many more there might be—then headed for the car.

Without stopping by the office to check in, I drove directly across the Bay Bridge to the Tenderloin, just north of Market Street. In the past, it had been referred to as Skid Row or “the Wino Country,” since many homeless, drug addicts, and alcoholics congregated in the area. My mother once told me the name Tenderloin came from the days of vice, graft, and corruption in the City, referring to the “soft underbelly” of society. It was an area, she said, “that upstanding citizens didn’t frequent.” Except for the occasional musical or play at the Golden Gate Theater, my mother rarely brought me here. When we had to pass through the area, she pulled me along so quickly I thought my arm would come out of its socket. She never talked about the place, except to say, “Walk fast, look mean, and don’t make eye contact.”

Today the area was home to an eclectic collection of residential hotels, alternative sexualities, fenced playgrounds, halfway houses, and Southeast Asian families, many of whom were refugees during the late 1970s. It also housed the Asian Art Museum, City Hall, the Supreme Court, and the Main Library. In spite of gentrification—and being designated as a historic district—it still harbored a reputation for strip clubs, dive bars, assaults, gangs, drugs, prostitution, and homicides. The City hadn’t ignored the area. There were plenty of social services, churches, and food programs. And for me there was a mystique about it, mainly because Sam Spade once enjoyed the nightlife in the Tenderloin.

But I wouldn’t want to be walking down a dark alley at night without a good, loud party horn and some Silly String, in case of attack.

Basically, I was scared to death of the Tenderloin.

I parked in the Civic Center lot and felt safe enough walking along Market toward the Mason Street Hotel, where Bodie had apparently lived. Dodging pigeons on the sidewalk, I passed an eclectic collection of pawnshops, strip bars, and knockoff stores that alternated with Indian food restaurants, “gentlemen’s clubs,” yogurt shops, and the ubiquitous Starbucks. The pedestrians ranged from businesspeople in suits holding cell phones to ragged homeless people pushing grocery carts full of junk. One guy was urinating against an alley wall, between a barber college and a hostel, while another slept on the doorstep of a “Cameras, Wigs, and Loans” shop. I dropped a few dollars into empty paper cups along the way, enjoying the cleverer signs soliciting money—WIFE’S BEEN KIDNAPPED. NEED $1 FOR RANSOM; NEED MONEY FOR ALCOHOL RESEARCH; I KNOW WHERE BIN LADEN IS HIDEN [sic]. NEED MONEY FOR AIRLINE TICKET AND FLAMETHROWER; and WHY LIE? NEED BEER.

 

The Polk Hotel was squeezed in between a Laundromat–donut shop and a Salvation Army store. From the outside, it appeared to be two rooms wide and six rooms tall, but I had a feeling it ran deep. Before I entered, I thought about something sad—the day my first kitten ran away when I was seven—and hoped the tears forming in my eyes would last at least until I spoke with the hotel manager.

I pushed open the once-glassed door that had been replaced with a wooden slat and iron bars. The door chimed inside the empty lobby, which was about the size of a large closet. A built-in, unmanned desk, flanked by a wall of pamphlets on one side and a worn leather couch on the other, greeted residents and visitors. I wondered how many “social visits” had taken place on that couch, and I shuddered.

As if the door chime weren’t enough, there was a bell on the desk. I rang it several times, taking in the musty odor of God knew what—burned food, unwashed clothes, rat droppings....

“Yeah?” A woman appeared from behind a shabby curtain, one of those Indian Madras wall hangings like my mother used to decorate her sixties parties. She wore a loose tie-dyed T-shirt over her ample bosom, gray high-water sweatpants, and her nails were painted black and white and decorated with tiny jewels. Her hair had been colored one too many times, in five too many shades, and ranged from gray roots to brown, red, and blond streaks. She could have been forty, but she looked sixty, no doubt in part due to the cigarette that hung from her magenta-colored lips. I had a feeling alcohol, drugs, and the absence of a good skin care lotion had done the rest of the damage to her lined, blotchy face.

“Hi,” I said, almost forgetting about my fake tears. “I’m Presley Chase. Bodie’s sister?”

She looked me over. “Yeah, sorry for your loss. You here for the rest of his stuff? I think Robby got it out of the basement.”

I blinked, trying to hold back my surprise. Robby must have told her.

“Yes, that’s right. The police didn’t take everything?”

“Not much to take. Robby found only one box. He took it up to the room. You can get it from him.”

“Thanks.”

“Elevator don’t work. Stairs are over there.” She gestured with her cigarette. “Three B. Third floor. On the right.”

I thanked her and made my way to the stairs. The smells grew more intense as I climbed each step. Marijuana. Clorox. And something that smelled like a dead animal.

My stomach lurched.

By the time I reached 3B, I was out of breath—not from the stairs but from the shallow breathing I’d done to keep from inhaling all the toxins I was sure were swirling around my nose. I knocked. No response. I knocked again, louder and longer.

The door opened to a man in a wife-beater T-shirt and boxer shorts, white socks but no shoes, and a five o’clock shadow. “You must be Bodie’s sister,” he said, looking me over.

I glanced at his boxers.

He chuckled. “Oh. Sorry. Didn’t know you’d get here so fast. Just a sec.”

He closed the door, then returned in less than fifteen seconds wearing a pair of jeans. He opened the door wide. “Come on in.”

Did I dare? How safe was I in this place with a stranger whose roommate had been murdered? He could easily have been the killer.

“
Uh
. . .” I looked around for . . . what? A quick exit?

“Come on,” he insisted. “I won’t bite. And I’ll leave the door open. How’s that?”

I stepped inside and quickly took in the place, searching for anything I could use as a weapon if needed. Two beds on opposite sides of the room, one covered in a filthy, matted
Star Wars
comforter, the other an unzipped sleeping bag that had more stains than an auto mechanic’s driveway. No bathroom. No mirrors. No objets d’art. But the walls were filled with enlarged photographs. I recognized a blurry Jennifer Aniston, a Madonna with her hand over her face, and a Britney Spears flipping off the person taking the photo.

A single box the size of a microwave oven sat on top of the
Star Wars
bed, marked “Bodie’s junk.”

“That’s not his best work,” the man said, indicating the photos on Bodie’s side of the room. He extended his hairy hand, nails bitten to the quick. “I’m Robby Aplanalp, by the way. I’m a photographer too.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, hoping I still had a little bottle of antibacterial gel in my car to cleanse my hand when I returned.

“Sorry about your bro,” he said.

I said nothing, not wanting to complicate the lie. Instead I asked, “I wondered if I could ask you some questions about why Bodie was so interested in Angelica and Jonas.”

“No idea,” Robby said. He looked sincere, shaking his head. “I could tell he was on to something, but we didn’t share stuff like that.”

“What about Spidey, the young man who was killed?”

Robby shrugged. “I don’t think he even knew that kid.”

I decided to get to the point. “Robby, do you have any idea who killed him?”

“Hell, everybody,” Robby said with a laugh. “Nobody likes us photojournalists. They call us paparazzi and say it like it’s a bad word. But we’re just trying to make a living like everybody else, you know.”

I glanced around the hotel room. This didn’t look much like a living.

He read my thoughts and sat down on his sleeping bag bed. “Most people don’t really get what we do. They think it’s all about the money. Sure, we want to make the big dollars for our snaps, hoping they’ll appear in
People
or
Buzz
, or even on ET and TMI. And believe me, the payoff is huge for the right snap. But it’s not just that.”

“It doesn’t seem to be about the glamour either,” I said.

“Maybe we don’t live the glamorous life that celebs do, but being on the fringe, we enjoy it almost as much as if we were living it. Voyeurs, they call us, among other things. But you know, it’s really about the thrill of the chase, the adrenaline of getting up close and personal with these stars. Celebs forget. They wouldn’t be stars without our getting their faces out to the public.”

And getting in their faces, I thought. “So you do it to be close to the dream, even though you aren’t really living it?”

“Pretty much. Plus the camaraderie among us photographers—even though we are in competition. We’re all going after that dangling carrot that will get us a house in the hills, a Maserati, and a yacht in the Caribbean. Like Denny O’Connor. He’s one of the top paparazzi in LA. A few years ago, he got a hundred and fifty large for a snap of Bennifer—Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez—
after
their breakup. That’s the big score we’re all after. The money shot. Can you imagine how much a rag would pay to get that first photo of the Brangelina breakup?”

“It sounds about the same odds as playing the lottery,” I said. I nodded toward the box on Bodie’s bed. “Do you mind if I look through his stuff?”

“Nothing much there, but be my guest. Cops took his cameras, film, all that shit—er, stuff. I’d forgotten about the box in the basement until you called. It’s mostly pictures he couldn’t sell. But it’s yours if you want it.”

The box was too big to cart to my car, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to bring it back with me anyway, if it was contaminated with rat poop and whatnot. Instead, I opened the cardboard box and sifted through the papers and photos, placing them on the bed after looking at each one.

Robby had been right. There were mostly rejects—photographs that were out of focus or unusable in some other way. There were even a couple of nudes with blacked-out faces. I didn’t recognize half the people, but others looked familiar, in spite of being obscured by hats, newspapers, hands, and big bodyguards. When I reached the bottom of the box, I found a dirty manila file folder, unmarked. I pulled it out and peeked inside, hoping I wasn’t about to inhale some kind of lethal mold.

It was filled with legal forms. I held it up.

Injunctions?

“What’s this?” I asked Robby.

He squinted, then said, “Oh yeah. Restraining orders. He’s got a bunch of them. The latest one was for that Jonas Jones guy who’s been filming that vampire movie over on Treasure Island. Bodie found out where he was staying in the City and started following him, hoping to get a picture. He had a hunch that guy was going to be a hot commodity as soon as the movie came out.”

“Why was it buried at the bottom of the pile?” I asked.