Dancing With Werewolves (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Nowadays a whole encyclopedia could occupy a disk the size of my little fingernail, and here I sat again in the Clark County Library looking at late twentieth-century microfilm of mid-twentieth century personalities and events.

But that’s when Las Vegas was founded, in the post-World War II world of exploding prosperity and post-Prohibition mob expansion. I found it sad that banning liquor had spurred a drunken binge of organized crime in all areas of vice: gambling, prostitution, and racketeering. And the baby-booming Las Vegas founded by visionary psychopath Bugsy Siegel was at the heart of it all, where mobster and middle class met, each legitimizing the other.

Of course, like all visionaries, Bugsy had been punished for it: he had been found dead in 1947 of several bullets to the head at the age of forty-one. The thirties and forties and fifties were the era of drive-by shootings on an epic scale, like the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. So they’d shot up Bugsy’s pretty-boy face through his living room window.

I unreeled the early history of Las Vegas. First came the El Rancho Grande and the Last Frontier. The 1948 founding of Bugsy’s beloved Flamingo Hotel was the turning point. The first hotel-casinos were small, upgraded motels three hundred miles from Los Angeles and an endless drive from the rest of the country, but they were an adventure destination for those lost souls in search of glamour. Only a few years later a successful animator named Walt Disney would create an adventure destination for the whole family called Disneyland.Bugsyland had always been an adult playground, saturated with sex, booze, and gambling. And it had been worth fighting over.

I vaguely knew that the East Coast Italian Mob of Mobs, the Jewish mob (from whence Benjamin aka Bugsy Siegel), and other mobs, chiefly Chicago, which was Irish, met, maneuvered, kissed Judas cheeks and rubbed out each other in Las Vegas.

But I’d never heard of the French mobs until now. The Italian-Irish-Jewish mob triad made sense. All resulted from the massive influx of European immigrants through the Golden Door mentioned in the poem beneath the Statue of Liberty. The French had given the U.S. that Amazonian artwork and its defining image—not masses of refugees. Why would a French mob, small and superior, figure in the founding of Las Vegas?

So little was said of it that I had to literarily read between the lines of microfilm. The word “Inferno” in one article riveted my attention, though. “Monsieur Reynard, chevalier of France, has announced his plans to build a lavish hotel-casino called the Inferno, complete with Folies Bergère-style bare-breasted chorines, along the highway already occupied by El Rancho Vegas, the Last Frontier, and the late Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo hotel-casinos. French investment would indeed add luster to the thriving desert strip of nightclubs. Some have compared the future Inferno to Montmartre’s Moulin Rouge in Paris.”

I got it. The naughty French had invented the can-can and the topless chorus girl at the Moulin Rouge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Why wouldn’t they exhibit an interest in such a wide-open site of American adult entertainment as early Las Vegas? Even today, Nevada was the only state in the Union to legalize houses of prostitution.

But a French mob? It defied imagination. Weren’t the French far too refined to resort to machine guns and blood and guts . . . ? Well, yes, except during their own late-eighteenth century bloodbath of a Revolution. American gangsters had come up with the Tommy gun, the Thompson sub-machine gun. The French had come up with a really big butcher’s cleaver, the guillotine, a hundred-and-fifty-years earlier. French.
Christophe.
Could it be—? I finally found Reynard’s first name. Christophe. And Reynard, if I remembered my convent-school French, meant “fox.”

So why was there no further reference to the Inferno for seventy-some years?

A few more turns of the microfilm reel made all that clear.

The Jeanne d’Arc Day massacre.

St. Joan had been the French peasant girl who’d led the French king’s forces against the invading English in the fourteenth century, a peasant girl turned God’s own general, then martyr and saint. She’d been bound and burned at the stake as witch. Historically, the French had it in for werewolves. It was the English who burned witches—and Joan—at the stake, not the French. Centuries later, the French delegation to Las Vegas was found massacred on May 30, 1946—the day Jeanne d’Arc died in 1431 and, after she was
finally
canonized in 1920 as a Catholic saint, her feast day—literally torn apart on the site of Sunset Park. I needed to find out much more about this little-known fact of the city’s history.

Much as I hated to, I had to defer to Hector Nightwine’s encyclopedic knowledge of Las Vegas and its history. When I got back to my Enchanted Cottage, I was forced to make an appointment through Godfrey. Dinner was decreed.

Given my suspicions about Nightwine’s menu—the man had a ghoulish interest in murder, death, decomposition, and dissection, but then, so did a huge proportion of the American reading and viewing public—I agreed with a sigh. I would take the diet books’ advice and eat “healthily” before dining out.

Something told me to dress for dinner. I riffled my vintage clothes rack and found an early fifties cocktail dress. Its black satin portrait neckline filled with a pricey rhinestone Weiss necklace from the same era as soon as I shimmied myself into its tight sheath skirt. I topped it off the look with a close-fitting black velvet cocktail hat that ended with a pompon of shiny blue-black cock feathers at my right temple. Just right for a human sacrifice. Black satin wrist-length gloves sported a rhinestone button at each wrist, and a three-inch wide rhinestone bracelet from my collection complemented the Snow necklace.

Man, I would accept this Weiss necklace if offered, even from Snow. It would bring at least six hundred dollars on eBay. Too bad Snow’s decorative devices kept morphing and never added to my permanent collection. I guess Snow was like that, raining, freezing, and melting on my parade, all the time.

Godfrey welcomed me at the manse’s front door.

“Very chic,” he said, eyeing my get-up. “A bit past my heyday, but otherwise quite appealing. Somehow the fifties are so depressingly dedicated to . . . corsets.”

Godfrey’s era was the no-underwear-to-speak-of thirties of bathtub gin and speak-easies, but corsets would appeal to the expansively overflowing Nightwine, for sure.

It struck me that a freelance investigative reporter had to be a woman of many faces. And figures.

The Nightwine dining room rivaled Hearst Castle for expansiveness, with only us two at opposite ends of the endless table. The soup course was a beef consommé that didn’t look yucky or make me think of yak blood, so I tried it.

“Now,” Nightwine said, “what do you need to know?”

“Nothing much. Only who founded Las Vegas.”

“Who? Or. . . what?”

“I like that ‘or what’? Intriguing, to say the least.”

He sank back into his own bulk, happy to be speaking and not moving, except for his right, fork-filled hand.

“The vampires,” he said, “never had a chance.”

“Not
my
impression of vampires.”

“Poor creatures. It’s a matter of time zones.”

“Pacific Coast time is hard on vampires?”

“I’m speaking of more personal time zones,” Nightwine said. “Werewolves by nature are 24/7 creatures. The vamps are handicapped by their daily twelve hours of sleep during daylight hours. When it came to days of the month, werewolves could do 26/31 without losing half of every twenty-four hours to casket time. That’s why werewolves are still a force in this town and vampires are on Skid Row.”

“Christophe?”

“You think he’s a vampire, my dear?” Hector smacked his lips. “Very tasty.”

“Christophe?” I asked, amazed. Hector hadn’t yet shown any sexual preference besides dead or alive, and edible. Come to think of it, vampires might fit his double bill to a T as in, yes, Tasty.

Hector regarded me soulfully. He dabbed his beard and mustache with his napkin as if mourning any tidbits that had escaped his voracious maw.

“I was praising the oxblood soup you seem to be enjoying as well.”

Oxblood soup!
I pushed away the shallow dish, trying to be a polite guest and not gag. “I don’t do raw.”

“
Tsk
. You’ll miss out on many delicacies.”

“You can have my share.” I decided to stick to salad for the rest of the meal. “So you’re saying werewolves are still a power in Las Vegas? That’s not common knowledge, and the only werewolves I’ve seen so far are those wretched half-weres and some pretty ordinary folks who like to dance and have a good time, then go for a four-footed midnight ramble in the mountains. If they run down anything and eat it, they aren’t any worse than two-legged hunters and probably need the calories more.”

“The half-weres you’ve seen are veterans of the Las Vegas Werewolf-Vampire War back in the forties and fifties of the last century. It’s not in the history books, of course. Only the mob was here and they were the third leg on that triangular struggle. Some of the werewolves suffered vampire bites during the hostilities and found themselves frozen in a half-changed state. They also got the vamps’ immortality but were shunned by the pure werewolves. So today they are about as low as most of the remaining vampires on the Vegas totem pole. No. Your Christophe is not a player from the old days, if he is a vampire. Why do you think so?”

“The so-called career as a rock star suits the vamp lifestyle. He’s pale as death but as arrogant as all get-out. And he hypnotizes his slavish groupies and turns them into mindless zombies. He’s got more brides than the social register.”

“Do I detect a soupçon of jealousy?”

“No!” But I felt a bit hypocritical saying this while basking in the glitter of Snow’s vintage necklace. “From what you’ve said, if he is a vampire, he’s challenging the social and business order that’s been mainstream in Vegas for almost seven decades.”

“Do you think he could?”

“Sure. He’d have the nerve. Whether he’d last. . . .”

“My conclusion exactly.”

“Meanwhile, I’m more worried about whether I’ll last. You know that the Las Vegas Metropolitan police consider me a suspect for the murder of one of Christophe’s groupies. I can’t solve the murders at the park across the way if I’m being held for Murder One myself. I appreciate your . . . producing . . . Perry Mason to spring me from custody, but I’m hoping I won’t need a trial lawyer.”

“Can’t your FBI friend help you?”

“
Ex
-FBI. Besides, he’s out of the country. I want to plough ahead on your assignment before Detective Haskell has me sent to the penitentiary.”

“Haskell!” Hector grew so agitated he pushed away his blood-soup bowl. “That bastard has done everything possible to interfere with my true-crime investigations. I think he’s on somebody’s payroll.”

I’d never seen Hector Nightwine lose his Rhino of the Jungle cool before.

“So where do I go to get to the bottom of these forties murders?”

“The werewolf-run Triad is the Magus-Gehenna-Megalith.”

“No. I don’t want to find the anointed kingpins. I want the malcontents. Where are the vampires who lost the Werewolf-Vampire war? You can’t kill ’em, after all. They have to be somewhere.”

“I told you. They were driven out.”

“They just left Las Vegas?”

He shrugged those massive shoulders. “Oh, there’s one old wreck of a hotel they’d tried to make the flagship of their Triad. It’s deserted now. Steve Wynn is rumored to be interested in buying the property. Oddly enough, a deal has never gone through for all these years.”

When it came to vampires, I didn’t believe in “oddly enough.”

“Abandoned hotels just sit here for years in Las Vegas?”

Hector shrugged and leaned back while the salad course was placed in front of him.

I could swear that some of the black olive slices were moving. Wriggling, sort of. That didn’t stop Nightwine from holding forth.

“In 1967 Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu at the Aladdin Hotel. By nineteen seventy-four, Elvis was dead. By nineteen eighty-five the Aladdin was a dying hulk. By two thousand, it had been bought, razed, and resurrected, if a bit shakily. By 2007, it was revamped as Planet Hollywood.”

“You’re saying the vamps—”

“In this case it is just an expression. Although, given the blood-sucking done in Hollywood. . . Las Vegas is about nothing if it is not about decay and resurrection.”

Speaking of which, my own plate of greens had been placed before me. From his position by the sideboard, Godfrey winked. My salad appeared to host no black olives, moving or not.

“No doubt,” Nightwine said, his fork chasing down an escaping olive, “the property is tied up for eternity. One thing the vampires are masters at: they know how to protect what’s theirs in legal perpetuity.”

Which meant they never gave up.

Neither did I. “I need to talk to someone who was around at the time of the Werewolf-Vampire Wars.”

“You and sixteen hundred tabloid reporters.”

“I work for you, Hector. It would pay you to help me out more than some scummy scandal-seeker.”

“My dear Delilah! You have just put us on first-name terms. I’m so . . . flattered. If you’re not going to eat your blanched maggots, do let Godfrey bring the plate to me.”

And here I took them for sliced almonds!

Hector munched disgustingly, then spoke again, with his mouth full. “You do realize, my dear, what anyone who had been around then and was still surviving would be?”

“An old vampire?”

“Vilma Brazil,” he mumbled between maggots.

“
She
is the old vampire?”

“More like the old vamp. A B-movie actress from the forties, when the difference between a mistress and a whore was as thin as cigarette paper. Alas, she is still legitimately alive, more’s the pity. She wrangles CinSim wardrobes at the Twin Peaks. You’ll not want the management to know what you’re up to, but give her an ear and a few twenty-dollar bills and you’ll hear plenty.”

“Great.” I stood.