Fade to Black (15 page)

The surf pounded rhythmically to his right, fifty yards away. Somewhere someone played a harmonica, and the notes carried eerily across the beach.

Hearing a car turn onto the street behind him, Eric stepped gingerly into a thin walkway stretching between two buildings. He peered around the corner at the approaching car. It was a police cruiser, flashing a spotlight into the faces of the couples sitting on the benches. The car stopped by one bench while the officer riding shotgun talked with the couple. The woman sitting pointed down the road Eric’s way, and the spotlight immediately swept in a wide arc toward him.

He turned and ran down the walkway to Speedway, and from there he zigzagged his way east, away from home, until he found himself in a back alley running parallel to Rose Avenue. He was less than a block from the Mexican restaurant where the red-haired prostitute had almost run him over last week. He made his way there and stopped in the construction site behind the restaurant parking lot. The red Corvette was there, he noticed.

Remembering all the dozens of chase sequences he’d seen in the movies, he knew that his best bet was to stay put and not panic. He looked around for a hiding place. Between the parking lot and the construction site was a Port-o-San, rising from the dirt like a snub-nosed obelisk. He went over to it and climbed inside.

The smell was nauseating, and he had to stand with his face against the vent to breathe, peering out at the side door to the restaurant, not sure what he was doing.

After close to ten minutes, the restaurant door opened and the prostitute stepped out. A man followed her out. They lingered by the door, talking. He looked around to make sure they were alone before kissing her. Her hand went to his knee and trailed upward until she was clutching his groin. He squirmed slightly, but pressed his legs together against the hand. Then they parted and the whore started across the lot toward her car. The man went back inside.

Eric found himself counting.

Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .

The girl smiled to herself, stopping in the parking lot to inspect her makeup. Fifty bucks and free food for a little frenching and a hand job in the back room. If every mark paid what the owner of the restaurant did, she thought, she could do all her work out of the car instead of having to spend half her nights thumbing the streets.

“Listen to the children of the night,” a voice called out from nowhere, heavy with a Romanian accent. “Oh, what lovely music they make.”

The girl stopped and looked around, trying to place the voice. When she saw nothing, she continued to her car and started to open the door.

Eric appeared before her from the cover of another car. He gestured with a courtly bow. He was Count Dracula.

“I believe we’ve met before, my child,” he said.

“What’s your act anyway, not that I care,” she said, struggling to hold up the façade. She cast a furtive glance over Eric’s shoulder toward the restaurant. She was frightened.

“Are you engaged this evening?” Eric asked her politely, enjoying his effect on the prostitute. This was going along better than the encounter with Marilyn. She was reacting perfectly. He forgot about the police.

She took a step back from him.

“Yeah,” she said nervously. “As a matter of fact, I’m late for another appointment. Maybe some other time . . .”

When Eric made it apparent that he wasn’t going to be put off, she broke away from him and broke into a run. He blocked her way back to the restaurant, so she plunged through the construction site and down the sidestreets Eric had just walked.

The neighborhood was deserted. She ran desperately, too frightened to scream. For three long blocks Eric remained steadfastly behind her, his cape snapping as he ran.

And then she noticed that the only footsteps echoing down the alleyway were her own. Without stopping her pace, she looked over her shoulder.

He was gone.

She slowed down, panting heavily from her exertion, still staring around her at the silent darkness, paranoid.

She was walking along a bank of garages facing a back alley, having circled around the last block, hoping to make her way back to the vicinity of the restaurant.

Hearing a rustling overhead, she looked up. Eric leapt down from the garage roof, landing in front of her and then springing upward with his arms extended in a Lugosi pose.

The girl raced beneath the outstretched arms and resumed her flight with renewed fear and vigor. Eric chased after her, making no effort to catch her. He planned to give her a few more minutes of terror, then leave her alone after asking her why she was so afraid of him if he was just a worm.

The alley was dark, and the girl didn’t see the toy truck on the asphalt until she ran into it. Tripping forward, her scream never made it out of her mouth. Carried by her momentum, she fell onto a white picket fence bordering the backyard she was running past.

By the time Eric came up behind her, the girl lay dead on the toy-strewn lawn. A jagged tip from the section of fence she had impaled herself on still projected from the side of her neck, surrounded by the ruptured flesh and blood trailing from the punctured jugular.

“I . . . I’m sorry,” Eric stammered, frightened out of his role. “I . . . I didn’t mean for it to . . .”

He crouched beside the woman, continuing to apologize until it registered in his mind that she was dead.

Dead.

Just like Aunt Stella.

The neighborhood remained quiet. Cars drove by several blocks away, and overhead air traffic jockeyed-for landing positions at L.A. International, but in the backyard it was silent. No lights went on in the house.

Eric stayed beside the corpse, staring with a numbed fascination at the wound on her neck.

It looked so strange, almost as if he really were a vampire and had imbedded his fangs into her.

Slowly, uncertainly, Eric extended his finger toward the wound.

He touched it, then withdrew his hand and stared at the blood on his fingertip.

Red. Wet. Sustenance for his kind.

He stuck his tongue out and gently licked the blood.

It was warm, salty.

He looked back at the body, his mind racing as he ran the tip of his tongue along the roof of his mouth.

Leaning over, he lowered his mouth over the wound, sucking at the blood, then pulled his face away and felt it run down his throat, spill over his black lips and down his chin, smearing the makeup.

CHAPTER •
18

Mr. Berger had given Eric time off to tend to his aunt’s funeral, so he didn’t go back to work until two days after the death of the prostitute.

He’d thought the people he worked with would treat him better, at least out of sympathy for his aunt’s death, but it wasn’t the case.

As he got off the bus and came toward the rear gate, Horace looked at him strangely.

“What you doing here, Binny m’boy?” he asked, blocking Eric from coming in. “Huh, what’s the big deal!”

“Look, Horace,” Eric said impatiently, “I’m not in the mood for your games today and I don’t want to be late, so—”

“Late? Late?” Horace laughed, “Oh, Binny, you are such a crackup!”

“Knock it off,” Eric said flatly. “Let me through, damn it!”

Horace stopped laughing and looked at Eric stonily.

“Well, now I can’t rightly do that, Binford, seein’ as this entrance here is for employees only.”

Eric’s jaw sagged.

“You mean, I’m—”

“Yeah, boy. After a week here without you, Mr. Berger figured out things went so smoothly that—”

“But he can’t fire me!” Eric said.

“I don’t see why not,” Horace said.

“Binford!” Mr. Berger shouted. He was standing on the loading dock, arms akimbo, a foul expression on his face. “What the hell are you doing out there gabbing?”

“But, Mr. Berger—”

“But nothing! I’ve got a load of spots due at KEIS in forty minutes. Now you punch your ass in and get on that Vespa, pronto! Vacation’s over!”

“Yessir, Mr. Berger,” Eric said, glaring at Horace on his way through the gate.

Horace smiled back and stifled another round of laughter.

Eric made the delivery to KEIS with minutes to spare, then returned to the building and his cubicle, which was crammed with a backlog of work. Sighing, he sat down and began sorting through it all.

Richie and Bart came up on him from behind. Bart had the morning paper in his hand.

“Hey, Binford,” Bart said, flashing the paper. “Take a look at this!”

The front headlines touted
VENICE VAMPIRE STRIKES
!

“So what,” Eric said, turning his back to them, trying not to panic.

Richie circled around him, pointing at the article accusingly.

“Paper says there were a hundred Draculas at that marathon that night. Where were you, huh?”

“Where were you, Binford?” Bart repeated, rubbing it in.

Richie took up a length of used film off the floor and playfully wrapped it around Eric’s neck like a strangler.

“Hmmm,” he taunted once more.

“Cut it out!” Eric cried out, jerking the film away from his neck and hurling it away from him. He jumped down from his stool and walked away from his tormentors.

“What are you going to do, you little baby?” Richie sneered. “You little shithead!”

Eric turned around and stared at Richie.

“Keep on riding me,” he said, borrowing Elisha Cook, Jr.’s idle threat from
The Maltese Falcon.

During his lunch break, Eric remained back in his studio while the others left to eat.

He took the morning paper and read over the front page story carefully. It was a strange sensation. They were talking about him, guessing as to what had happened with the murdered girl. They had it all wrong. They were playing him up to be another Jack the Ripper, only with a new twist. They said he had lured the prostitute, identified as a runaway from a reform school in Kansas, down the back alley and then pushed her forcibly onto the fence, probably during a struggle. They had used bold print when describing how black lipstick had been smeared around the neck wound, as if the murderer had been seeking blood. There were related stories in the back pages, one giving a brief history of the Dracula legend, another bringing up a similar murder reported in Chicago the previous week and speculating as to a link between the two, and a third announcing a raid on a satanist cult in Hollywood by officers reacting to a tip called in in the wake of the killing. In another section, an article covering the annual meeting of Coyote quoted a spokesperson citing the Venice killing as another example of why prostitution should be legalized.

Eric tried to imagine all of the manpower that had gone into putting together the stories. So many people working on it, coming up with nothing but footnotes instead of leads. It had been an accident, totally unplanned, but even when they had mistaken it for murder, they hadn’t been able to implicate him. There wasn’t even any mention of the police car almost spotting him down near the beach. They probably didn’t want to own up to the fact that he had slipped through their hands, Eric thought.

But how did they know it was someone in a Dracula costume that had done it? Someone must have seen him chasing her. That had to be it, he figured.

Or was it Marilyn? What if she had called the police, saying he had tried to kill her, too? No, that couldn’t be the case. They’d have come for him by now. She hadn’t recognized him. How could she have? It happened so fast.

Eric was punching out his time card to go home just as Sam, the night watchman, came inside to punch in. He was in his mid-fifties, a watery-eyed closet alcoholic with a patronizing personality. Everybody’s buddy.

“Hi ya, Eric,” he called out.

“Oh, hi, Sam,” Eric replied dully.

Sam stopped before Eric and placed a gnarled hand on his shoulder. “Still sad about losing your aunt, aren’t you,” he said consolingly. “I know how it feels, Eric. Been more than a year and a half since my Ellie passed on, and I still miss her powerfully.”

“I’ll be all right,” Eric said. “Thanks for thinking of me, though.”

“Always think of your friends, that’s my motto,” Sam said.