Virtual Virgin
Page 30

“Hop on,” Bez urged, jumping up to install himself next to the wall.
I looked up the grade and spotted parallel dark lines painted along the bottom of the wall opposite where we’d entered. Then I looked harder. The lines weren’t painted. They were fastened to the wall.
“This is an inclined elevator, like in the Eiffel Tower in Paris,” I exclaimed, mystified and charmed at the same time.
Not another step, Irma warned, this looks like the way to a fertility god’s bachelor pad. That imp Bez is always on the make.
I ignored her and sat next to “that imp.”
“I know only,” Bez said with a wicked leer, “to touch the magic button.”
His stubby thumb depressed a gold circle atop the seat’s inner arm. A buzz of bees, almost as soft as silence, accompanied us as the seat glided upward.
Howard Hughes invents again, Irma noted with a sigh, and shut up.
Quick huffed out his doggie disgust at the mechanical route and trotted up the incline well ahead of our conveyance.
Riding up the inside of a reconstructed ancient Egyptian pyramid passage was an experience I didn’t want to hurry. Bez grinned like the grown-up child he was beside me. I recalled that Karnak Hotel’s exterior concealed the top of an interior pyramid. Howard Hughes must have secretly constructed this inclined elevator so employees could sneak in and out of his top floor quarters without the resident vampire court far below the hotel’s bustling main floor suspecting anything.
When the elevator mechanism hushed and stopped, Quicksilver lifted his forepaws and leaned on the fake stone wall. Again, it swung inward, revealing the elevator door and foyer outside Howard Hughes’s most upscale lair.
Hesitating, I saw Bez gazing back down the illuminated slanted pathway. “If only they’d known about this when constructing the Great Pyramid at Giza.” A sigh ended his wish.
Once I moved into the foyer, I immediately faced the familiar double doors to Howard’s suite.
I knocked.
Theda Bara, the silent screen vamp CinSim, flourished open the doors still wearing her notorious Cleopatra costume, or lack thereof. It was actually more concealing than the similar outfit Bad Maria wore in her Whore of Babylon production number with the Seven Deadly Sins doing backup at the Metropolis nightclub.
Theda shrugged her disappointment at seeing me again, her A-cup metal bra shimmying at the gesture. How sad to think that female competition never died. Also metal bikini bras.
Howard awaited me in his cushy living room, his gaunt form attired in a burgundy brocade dressing gown. Its color tastefully echoed the clear plastic bag of blood suspended from the IV stand always at his side.
After forty years of afterlife as a vampire, he had the burned-out rock star look down pat. His rutted face seemed to have been caught in a fire in the wax museum on the way to the plastic surgeon’s office. Bald-doll wisps of dull hair framed those ruinous features. A shrunken head would not be an out-of-line comparison. His surviving body was scrawny to the point of lacking any muscle tone at all.
If this was my secret father I was going take an even-more-assumed name and hide out in Iceland for the duration of the twenty-first century.
“Delilah!” Howard exclaimed on seeing me. He waved the usual set of busty Playboy vampire nurses to his side. “See what my guests would like to drink. Water for the dog, I’m guessing. A good four-thousand-year-old red wine for our friend Bez, the god of luck and love. Perhaps a Shezmou three-zero-forty-one B.C.? And for the very modern Miss Street?”
His shaggy eyebrows elevated on a forehead terraced with frown lines and hovered there, awaiting my answer.
“I could probably use a good belt of plain scotch,” I admitted, taking a deep breath.
“Johnnie Walker black, neat, four fingers.” He waggled four of his. “With any luck, it’ll knock her on her ear so I can whisper sweet nothings in it, which is all I’m good for these days.”
He sighed. “I know drinking from the tap”—a long horny fingernail indicated his neck—“would be much more fun in my current incarnation, but the germs nowadays! Bedbugs, would you believe? In the twenty-first century? Not in my hotels, nor beds. And dust mites. Have you seen those monster faces close up? Uglier than anything in the grossest slasher film. Which, of course, you and I never watch, Delilah. What can I do for you?”
“You also assume I want something when I visit.”
“Well, everybody does.”
“Is that why you became so distrustful of your starlet dates back in the day?”
“My dates? My stars, Delilah, you’re interested in my dating life? Are you jealous? I certainly made the rounds of Hollywood.”
“I know all that. You gave casting couches a bad name. Why have you allowed the Inferno Hotel’s Christophe to corral all your old girlfriends as sexy CinSims in his Lust level at the Nine Circles of Hell?”
“He’s done that?”
“So I’m told.”
“What a power freak, as they say now. Merely mogul envy, my dear. Must be deficient. Trust me. They didn’t call my founding business Hughes Tool Company for nothing.”
I’d heard the emotionally stunted Hughes had been physically far from stunted, but before this topic gagged me, I had to settle another interesting oddity.
“They’re all brunet,” I added.
“I did have that weakness,” he said, gesturing a raven-haired nurse and her tray to me. His attempted wink turned into a blink. He was, after all, more than a hundred years old even by normal standards. As a vampire, though, he was an infant.
“However,” he added, “I never turned away a willing blonde. Jean Harlow. . . .” His voice and memory faded at the same time.
What an interview subject he’d make . . . except for the frequent fade-outs and the fact I was no longer a TV reporter.
“Think of me as an aviator who has crash-landed atop a volcanic mountain in the uncharted Pacific islands,” he rambled. “Would any reasonable man say no to the native girls who thought he was a god?”
“You don’t have to justify your past lifestyle to me, but it all seems compulsive and controlling and sad. Three wives, dozens of actresses as mistresses. You wanted to keep everything, but you didn’t want to commit to anything.”
His head leaned back as a nurse bent close, loosening the clamp on his IV tube so sterilized blood leaked into his delicate veins.
“Not my issue with money,” he mused. “There I anticipated many opportunities. Why should you care about my Hollywood hit list, Delilah? We are all so over.”
“You never had an heir.”
“No! And especially not the losers who showed up after my supposed death to claim they were my inheritors. Luckily, law firms are as eternal as vampires. My secret enduring estate is still well guarded while the public estate has dwindled into bankruptcy.”
I couldn’t help thinking that his life and afterlife was the reverse of that. “How did you manage to transfer your wealth along with converting to an undead lifestyle?”
“Thinking of going vamp, Delilah?”
“You never know.”
“My nurses are very well paid.”
“You and Hugh Hefner.” Something in his expression tipped me off. “No! You’ve helped set Hefner up to follow in your fang marks?”
“Perhaps not under the same persona . . .” Hughes pursed his lips and looked smug.
“My biggest question is, why wait?” I said. “Why not make the change before you look like something from a horror film vault?”
“Looks are so common. Nowadays any obsessive cheerleader is getting nose jobs and Botox at sixteen. Besides, in my day, or the decade I purportedly died in, the seventies, the undead were only thought to exist in those horror films you mention. Even in my youth, I had always been original in my thinking and grandiose in my plans. I became the richest man in the world. Then I became eccentric.”
“You became mentally ill, an obsessive, phobia-ridden hermit,” I corrected him gently. “You were powerful enough to order legions of underlings to fulfill your every whim and weak-minded enough to be taken extreme advantage of.”
Howard leaned close, his faded pupils afloat in liquid. Tears, or just weak in the lamplight? “So they thought. In 1953 I created a nonprofit entity no one much noticed but it’s the only thing that bears my name today.”
“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I know. It’s a world-famous biomedical research facility that sponsors research from scientists across the globe. But you can’t have anything to do with it now.”
“Bah! Humbug, I would say, but that’s true. The basic research I wanted done there was to probe the genesis of life itself. However, to prolong my own life I had to explore the darker side of the street where scientific research meets what some would call quackery, or superstition. I secretly started another small company. I had a . . . last, lovely contact I could trust who had a head for business and even science. She was able to assemble a team of . . . shall we say . . . less reputable European doctors and researchers—”
“She? You hired a woman to head up your real dream team?”
“In the thirties I pretty much lived with Katharine Hepburn for four years, Miss Street.” Howard’s vampire strength made his knotted hands compress the sofa cushions as he threatened to push himself to his feet in anger. “Even Spencer Tracy couldn’t manage that at all.”
I held up my palms to lower the volume before something in his fragile, undead frame broke. “Hepburn was no cakewalk, I know that.”
He fell back into the cushions while his glaring nurses surrounded him, showing me the fangs he’d never let pierce that leathery hide of his because his aversion for germs had outlived his death too.
He rallied to snarl, “Privacy” at the carnivorous nurses. To me he said, “I hired whom I could trust. And . . . someday . . . that might be you.”
I wasn’t going to ask for trouble by saying this, but that job offer was no prize.
However, the identity of his long-ago secret henchwoman was a tasty appetizer for my reporter instincts. Say she was young at the time, something of a given with a chronic womanizer like Young Howard. Thirty, say. She could be alive at ninety today, by the usual methods, and certainly would be by unconventional ones.
So who could run a fledgling early fifties company formed for cutting edge biomedical research with a staff of eager researchers?
Nineteen fifty-three? Nazis!
I was so appalled I repeated the word aloud. And then said, “You hired ex-Nazis.”
Howard looked thunderous again. “And what was the federal government doing at the very same time? I ought to know. I had enough defense contracts with them.”
Bizarre movie titles that would describe the start-up scrolled through my mind. Mother Was a Nazi Organizer. I Led Three Reichs. Startime for Hitler.
Could this woman have been Vida? She was a proven entrepreneur in Corona. She would have been young and his type. Was the California setup a reward for her role in his escape clause from his disintegrating human life? First, she’d headed his new company; then she’d become vampire to bring him over to eternal life.
Howard was acting too coy about the woman’s identity. He’d been the kind to brag. If I could figure out which of his many women had worked for him, she might lead me to answers about my parentage.
“You’re not listening, Delilah.” He lifted a scrawny forearm to speed the drip of blood into his veins. “I know you need to find out the true story.” He cackled. “Finding a double of myself to play Dead Howard was easy on any skid row. Transferring me was the simplest matter. Can you guess?”
As fascinating as the process of becoming the late Howard Hughes, eternal entrepreneur was, only one detail in his saga could help answer my questions about paternity.
“You admit you’ve set up the perfect retirement plan, keeping your money and your life. Would it hurt to help a poor orphan resolve her issues?”
“All I can say is you surely have family somewhere, Delilah. Besides, I’m better now. Fresh blood, you know.” His shaking arm rattled his IV tube and stand. As it has been said, “all is vanity,” and Howard was vainer than most vampires. His need to talk about himself, though, may have given me a couple of hot clues to what I really wanted.
I slugged down some scotch. “So. Vida.”
Howard summoned the energy to elevate just one thin eyebrow. “The word means ‘life’ in Spanish.”
“The word meant ‘mistress’ in the forties when it came to Cesar Cicereau.”
“That Johnny-come-lately werewolf trash from France! They’d been hanging around Nevada for decades, trading with the native population. There were no wolves in England, an island kingdom, but the Continent crawled with them, therefore, werewolves as well. I would never allow myself to be bitten into a werewolf. All that hair, although I admit could use some.” His taloned fingernails ruffled the three visible coiled white hairs at his scrubs neckline.
“But werewolves are so impotent,” he went on. “Three days at ultimate power and then you sink back into common humanity. Might as well settle for one, er, major rising a month.”
His gaze shifted. Hughes avoiding plain talk with me? Did he indeed have protective feelings toward me? Paternal feelings?
More scotch, fast.
“My dear, you mustn’t gulp Johnnie Walker. Savoring is the secret of life. And undeath. Now, why are you so interested in this woman, Vida?”
“She’s apparently my mother.”
“Impossible! That would likely make that low-life werewolf Cicereau your father, a fate to be escaped at any cost. Oh.”