“That is only possible because half a millennium has passed since the dragon was banished. Do you remember by whom?”

“A holy cardinal,” I repeated her tale, “but Gargouille’s master this time was hardly holy or a cardinal of the Church.”

“How do you know?”

“A modern-day rock star? Decadence is the life-form’s middle name as well as lifestyle. Your day in the early-twentieth-century movies was far too genteel for that sort of thing.”

Caressa’s head thrust back on her scrawny neck. She laughed until I feared she’d shake it completely off.

“My day! The Roaring Twenties? Cigarettes, bathtub gin, gangsters, and the Black Bottom? Sex, drugs, and income tax cuts? We were debauched beyond words, my dear girl. Or could be, if so inclined.”

She had a point. People tend to think the “old days” were quaint antiques stored under dusty bell jars atop doilies when they were “modern” at the time.

“Don’t make such a face, Delilah! You’re still learning and may live long enough to benefit from it if you ask the right questions of the right sources. So. I think you know who harbored Gargouille’s ashes. Dragons never die. You have seen my distant cousin, Christophe, raise one. He must not yet be a murderer if he can do that. Yes, I knew he was raising Hell, if not dragons in Vegas, why else would I come here? Tell me all the rogue is up to these days besides making that modern cacophony on a stage?”

I sat on the ridiculous kiddie-size chair, reduced to mental sputtering.

I could hardly seethe on about an extorted kiss to a crone clearly a hundred years or so old. Wild youth. I could hardly confess my fears about violating the natural order by reviving my lover with a secondhand soul kiss when I sat with a creature whose natural order had long since been outlived.

Cousin Christophe?

Not a murderer. Yet. As I wasn’t. What a relief.

But a holy cardinal? Those guys were supposed to be celibate, although that didn’t always happen, particularly among the Medici popes.

Christophe? Celibate? The notion took my breath away. Cocaine never slept with his groupies. Could the sexy bastard possibly be holier than moi now that I was no longer virgin?

ONCE I’D HAD my eye-opening interview with Caressa Teagarden, I realized that while Rick dozed like Sleeping Beauty, I could continue bopping around town putting a whole lotta loose ends together.

Now that Cesar Cicereau had decided I was too much trouble to kidnap for a “Maggie” attraction at his Gehenna Hotel, I was only vulnerable to the odd freelance entrepreneur happening to recognize me and my signature bright blue eyes. Sunglasses and occasionally wearing my gray CinSim contact lenses fixed that. How lucky I was to live in a city where “fans“ turned themselves into duplicates of the black, white, and gray Silver Screen CinSims.

As Dorothy finally learned in The Wizard of Oz, there’s no place like home.

So that afternoon I was back at the Nightwine estate sitting in the carved Gothic chair across from Hector’s desk, swinging my feet because they didn’t quite reach the floor. I’m sure Hector liked all his visitors feeling about nine years old.

Only one question occupied me now: how best to catch and fix the film producer’s always fluttering attention.

A primmer Sharon Stone move seemed most efficient. I crossed my legs. I may not be a needle-thin femme fatale with the cool aplomb of a Hitchcock blonde but I’m not baked eggplant either.

The Fat Man perked up like a burp of morning java in the glass bubble atop a vintage coffee percolator.

“I have some complaints about the accommodations,” I drawled Bette Davis style.

A gasp of indrawn breath was his first, almost musical, reaction. Then came the lyrics.

“My dear Miss Davis. I mean, Street. The Enchanted Cottage has never served as a long-term domicile before but it is a full-scale replica of the film’s original set. You should be as cozy as a tick in a trachea in it.”

His figure of speech recalled serial killers who left insect “calling cards” in victims’ throats, so my own was fighting an automatic gag reaction. Hector no doubt cherished that as producer of the world’s many CSI: Crime Scene Instincts forensics TV shows.

It should be noted that “forensic” meant everyone-producer to viewers-could wallow in the ooky details of death and dying in the name of educational scientific entertainment. Just as everyone could ogle the provocatively clad contestants on the many reality TV dance shows in the name of supporting the arts.

“Exactly what do you find wanting in the accommodations?” Hector pursued. “Are the accessories too vintage or too modern? The cable channels too stuffy or too racy? Is the jetted tub too big or too small? The four-poster bed too soft or too hard? The morning porridge too hot or too cold?”

“That’s just it, Nightwine!” I stamped my dainty little foot-in my case a respectably large size 8-in its peep-toe forties pump.

Nightwine leaned his immense frontage as far forward as it would allow him to cop a foot fetishist’s view. I had pity and crossed my legs again, swinging the shod foot in question.

“The Enchanted Cottage is too accommodating,” I said.

“Too accommodating?” he demanded. “You live there virtually rent-free, safeguarded by the highest-tech security my estate can buy. Your meals and maid service are gratis. Your oversize dog can’t even make a deposit without a yard gnome whisking away any offending matter. How can a damn Enchanted Cottage be too accommodating? Hedy Lamarr and Dorothy Lamour never complained.”

“Sarong girls? You used the Enchanted Cottage to host CinSim starlets from the casting couches of the nineteen forties?”

Nightwine sniffed his indignation and clawed a fistful of crunchy black and white “wings” from a huge wooden bowl on his desk.

“I’m not talking CinSims, Delilah. I am speaking of the actual actresses.”

Hmm, Irma said. That would make our roly-poly bug-biting host and landlord a hundred years old. Or so.

I studied Hector’s face and beard under the purple velvet beret he affected today.

All visible hair was totally black; could be dyed. Plastic surgeons had been injecting fat into faces for decades. Given the oddly immortal cast of characters in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas and medical advances verging on the miraculous, Hector could well be an Extreme Senior Citizen.

“Anyway,” I said, shaking my head to refuse the wooden bowl he nudged toward me, “my point is that the cottage offers me no domestic outlet whatsoever. I’m complaining that you’re not making good use of me.”

Of course I’d meant to appeal to all his worst instincts, which were ninety-nine and forty-four hundredths percent impure. Ivory Snow detergent he was not.

“I have failed to make good use of you, Miss Street? Tut-tut. Shameless! How may I atone?”

I fluffed my hair and crossed my legs in the reverse order. I conjured a classic starlet pout by thinking of the Misses Lamarr and Lamour. Hedy Lamarr, I recalled, had made a luscious Delilah in a Technicolor epic named after both her and her leading mane, Samson. He still got top billing.

“I’m only asking for a bit part,” I said. “Nothing costly. Just that Lilith cameo you promised me.”

Hector Nightwine’s eyes grew so dark they made the clichéd “beady” obsolete. They seemed the utter absence of color, rather than any shade. But black is the result of all color, so that made sense. I guess a black hole was the other side of everything.

Anyway, both of Hector’s BB eyes glittered like lumps of coal that had just found Christmas stockings for the duration.

“Of course,” he whispered. “We film an autopsy each and every day for some CSI program somewhere on the globe. For your appearance, I suggest we simply reverse the direction in which the corpse faces. We can leave in the single maggot although it need not decorate a nostril. The little curve below your lower lip, perhaps.”