Never Cross a Vampire (13 page)

“I don't know what's making the passion rise,” I answered, “and I don't care. I'm not going to look a gift vampire in the mouth.”

She took a small nip at my neck, but not enough to draw blood. I hoped she was teasing. Actually, I didn't know what the hell she was doing. My body told me to find out later. I tried to pick her up to carry her to my mattress-bed on the floor but my sore knee wouldn't take the weight. Must everything turn into a bad joke with me, I thought, and an echo answered fraud. I rolled her on the floor and time went for a long walk.

When we got up half an hour later, her black wig was still in place and she put her red silk dress on slowly while I sat on the mattress. I considered the fact that she was now closer to the gun than I was and decided that if I was going to be shot it might as well be like this.

“Do you come out of it now?” I said.

“There is nothing to come out of,” she purred.

“Are you the one sending dead bats to Bela Lugosi?” I said.

She looked at me with a smirk. It was a comely smirk.

“He is old and tired and forgotten,” she said. “It is the present that intrigues me. It is fresh blood. Like you.”

“Thanks,” I said, hoping she hadn't drawn blood from me without my knowing it. I resisted the temptation to examine my body. “I know where I've seen you before,” I said. “You look just like the vampire girl in
Mark of the Vampire
.”

She smiled knowingly, moving to the comfortable chair.

“You know the one,” I said, watching her face. “The one where Lugosi and the girl turn out to be fake vampires.”

A sharp look crossed her face, and she stood pointing her finger at me.

“You have been given much and yet you mock,” she said, walking to the door.

“Shall we make it same time next Halloween?” I said, still trying to shake her out of character, but it was no go.

“Perhaps we will meet again,” she said and went out the door.

I got up and followed her to be sure she was gone. She was. I had been truly vamped, seduced, and abandoned by a wacko of the first order. It had been great fun, but it was just one of those things. I didn't think I'd be calling Bedelia Sue Frye for further talks unless I had some reason to think she was my harasser instead of the neighborhood schizophrenic.

I put a chair under the doorknob, left the light on, and went back to bed with my gun at my side. The year was young, and I had two more Dark Knights to visit. I wanted to be alive to visit them.

CHAPTER SEVEN

M
y suit was dry by morning, or at least dry enough to put on after I ate a large blue bowl of Wheaties and listened to the 8:30 news. I wasn't sure whether we were winning the war, but the Chicago Bears had beaten the Pro All-Stars 35 to 24. An announcer told me Forest Lawn was celebrating its silver anniversary as a memorial park. Founded on 55 acres in 1917, he said, it had grown to 303 acres in twenty-five, years. I didn't see what they were so proud of. Mortality and westward migration were responsible. Then I found out that John S. Bugosi, head of the FBI in Detroit, had arrested a thirty-one-year-old stenographer in a local railroad ticket office for “engaging in spreading vicious propaganda.”

The sun was out, and the temperature was up to almost 50. The bruise on my head had turned tender and purple. My knee was stiff. It didn't hurt if I left it alone, but I couldn't bend it. I decided to visit an orthopedic surgeon I played handball with at the Y in the hope of instant, magical treatment before I went to Culver City for a look-see at the mysterious apartment visited by Camile Shatzkin. The ride to Doc Hodgdon's office on DeLongpre was uneventful: no dark Ford, no vampirelike creatures leaping on my hood. I kept my leg straight and respected its refusal to function. The radio crackled, but I listened to Our Gal Sunday tell someone named Peter about Lord Henry's escape from a fire.

Doc Hodgdon's office was in his two-story frame house in a residential area. Until a week ago I had thought he was a proctologist. Now I was glad he wasn't. I had no trouble parking. Walking, however, was another issue. I tried dragging my leg, hopping, and ignoring it. Hopping worked best, but looked silliest.

There were only three stone steps up, which I managed with circuslike dexterity, a grab at Doc Hodgdon's shingle with his name on it, and the help of two women who caught me as I was about to tumble backward down the steps. They looked like a mother-daughter set, with the daughter around fifty and both built like Broderick Crawford. They caught me under the arms and carried me through the door and alcove to the desk of Hodgdon's white-uniformed nurse receptionist, a twig of a creature with a mouth that a medium-sieve pea could barely enter whole.

The Brod Crawford ladies deposited me firmly and lumbered out like professional movers, leaving me to grab the desk to keep from falling.

“You have an appointment with doctor?”

“No,” I said. “I'm an emergency.”

“You need an appointment,” the nurse whistled.

“If I let go of this desk, I'll topple over like King Kong,” I explained reasonably.

She frowned and looked at the two patients who were waiting in what had once been a living room but was now an amber, many-chaired repository for Los Angeles's walking wounded. One patient was a chunky woman who had her face plunged into
Life
magazine. There was a heavy brace on her leg. The other patient was a fifteen-year-old boy with a burr of wild, uncombed brown hair on his head and his left arm in a heavy cast.

“You really have to have an appointment, sir,” the nurse repeated stubbornly.

“Would tears move you? Just tell the doctor it's Toby Peters, foretopman, and it's an emergency,” I said.

She got up reluctantly with both hands on the desk. Her plan may have been to demonstrate some massive hidden reserve of power gleaned from the Rosicrucians and whip the desk out from under me. She seemed to be considering this for a few seconds, then headed toward a door across the amber room. The fifteen-year-old looked at me with hostility.

“I got hit in the knee,” I explained.

He nodded.

“It really hurts,” I said.

He showed no sympathy.

“My shoulder's broke. Three places,” he upped me. “Pop truck hit me.”

“My brother hit me,” I said.

“My brother hit me,” the kid said, “I'd crush his face and walk on it.”

“We have different brothers.”

“My brother hit me,” the kid went on, enjoying the taste of fantasy, “I'd rip both his ears off and shove them.”

Doc Hodgdon came through the door in time to save me from further inventions of the youthful would-be Vlad the Impaler. Hodgdon was over sixty and had a head of white hair and a tan face to go with his lean body. I had only seen him in a YMCA sweat shirt and shorts before. At the Y, where he beat me regularly at handball, he looked athletic. Here he looked distinguished, like the guy in the Bayer aspirin ads. He strode over to me and took my shoulder firmly, helping me to his office while the twig nurse stood back as if my sore leg were contagious or I were taboo.

“What happened?” Hodgdon said quietly and with professional concern.

“His brother hit him,” the kid said with contempt, probably considering a new retaliation on his own brother for some future affront.

Hodgdon closed the door to his office behind us and helped me to the examining table. The office-examining room had once been a dining room: Now it held a desk, a table, a cabinet, and framed certificates on the wall. The curtained windows looked out on a well-mown lawn with a pair of lemon trees.

“Kid was right,” I said, squirming to get comfortable on the table.

Hodgdon rolled up my pants leg, probed, and fiddled with my knee. I gritted my teeth.

“Well,” he sighed, standing erect, “you'll never play the cello again.”

I held my tongue.

“It's not so bad,” he said. “It's sore and slightly out of joint. You slept on that sore knee when it was in a semi-locked position.” He demonstrated semilocked with his fingers intertwined. It looked like firmly locked to me.

“Should have X rays,” he said, “and rest.”

“I haven't got the time,” I said. “Isn't there something you can do to keep me going for a few days? It's an emergency situation. Life and death.”

Hodgdon turned and looked at me levelly.

“I can try to straighten it while it's sore,” he said, “but it would be painful and require a bit of guesswork on my part without X rays. If it worked, I could give you a shot to kill the pain and a knee brace. I suggest …”

“Do it,” I said.

“Okay,” he said and came to the table. Over his shoulder on the wall was a photograph of Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York. I met Dewey's little eyes and tried not to watch Hodgdon, who touched my knee again and took a grip over and under it. I knew his hands and arms were strong. They had sent little black handballs zipping past my head for three years. “Here we go.”

I yelled in surprise. Tom Dewey took it better. Pain I had expected, but not torture. My eyes filled with tears. When they cleared, I could see Doc Hodgdon bending my knee.

“I think you're in luck,” he said. He went to his cabinet, opened it, pulled out a huge hypodermic, and filled it with a clear liquid.

“Maybe I should give the knee a rest,” I said as he advanced, checking the liquid with a little spray into the air.

“It's all over,” he said, grabbing my thigh firmly. I met Dewey's eyes again. Hodgdon's fingers probed my kneecap, found a space and plunged the needle in. This time I bit my teeth.

“You should be feeling no pain and be able to walk in two or three minutes,” he said, placing the spent hypo gently in the sink. He opened the lower section of his cabinet and came out with an elastic hinged brace. It took him about ten seconds to get it on my knee. “Come back and see me in a few days. As soon as you can, give that leg some rest. That's all it needs now. And you can forget about handball for a month or so. I'll send you a bill.”

In three minutes I was walking through the office, past the chunky lady with the
Life
, the twig nurse, and the kid with the cast. I didn't look at them, but I was sure they were all shaking their heads in disapproval. I went out the door, down the steps, and to my car, amazed at how little my leg bothered me. I didn't think about it long. I was back on my way to Culver City and the secret rendezvous of Camile Shatzkin. That sounded like a good soap opera title, but I had no one to suggest it to.

The place I was looking for was just off Jefferson Boulevard, and the apartment I wanted was clearly marked by the lack of name. There was some mail in the box, but I couldn't see whom it was addressed to, probably “Occupant.” I rang the bell and got no answer. Then I tried the bell marked “Leo Rouse, Superintendent.” A nearby ring told me Leo Rouse's apartment was on the ground floor, and an opening door confirmed my brilliant observation.

Rouse was around sixty, with an enormous belly and an equal number of teeth and strands of hair, about six. He wore overalls and a flannel shirt and was gumming something ferociously.

“Mr. Rouse?” I asked through the closed inner glass door.

“Yeah?” he said.

“I'd like to speak to you.” I opened my wallet and showed him a card. He opened the door but didn't stand back to let me in.

“Mr. Rouse, my name is Booth, Lorne Booth, California National Bank.”

“Your card said you was Jennings from Blast-a-Bug Exterminators,” he said suspiciously.

I laughed.

“Got that card this morning from Jennings. They're doing an estimate on an apartment complex I have an interest in out in Van Nuys.”

Rouse cocked his head and kept chewing. I estimated six to twelve hours before he could get down, let alone digest, whatever carnivorous thing he was worrying into masticated submission.