"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 soupcon 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.

"You're not staying for the main course? It's fit for a king."

"I eat like a bird."

Especially after dining with Hector Nightwine! He had a real future as a diet guru, through aversion training.

If I hurried, I might catch Vilma Brazil at the Twin Peaks.

Dolly purred like a puma when I revved her out of the cottage's carriage house and through the gate onto Sunset Road.

I think she approved that my get-up matched her DOB: Date of Birth to us crime reporters.

I'd freshened up at the cottage, putting in my gray contact lenses and running black lipstick over my original red. Moving among CinSymbiants and CinSims as either of them was a great disguise in Las Vegas. The hall mirror insisted on imprinting on my eyes as true blue, but my purse mirror told me I was passing as cinematic gray.

I left Dolly to the tender mercies of a parking valet who resembled a young Arnold Schwarzenegger and clattered solo into the Twin Peaks on my fifties spike heels. Where was Perry Mason when you needed him?

Where fashion made forties women look statuesque and stern and seriously sexy in a dominatrix way, fifties women had looked fussy and frivolous and French maidish in a Trixie way. That look suited me fine right now. Nothing like being underestimated for collecting lots of information.

The Twin Peaks had a CinSim transvestite revue. Now that'll blow your mind. Velma, I discovered, was wardrobe mistress. I found her backstage sewing chorines of indeterminate gender into torn costumes and gluingmarabou feathers back onto pasties and posing pouches. Good thing I was a hardened reporter.

"Vilma Brazil?"

"Yes, dahlink?"

She looked ninety the way it would look on silicone and bleach, kind of like your brain on speed: scrambled. But beneath the drawn-on eyebrows reaching for the sky and the frizzled platinum curls, her eyes were blackberry-bright and nicely avaricious.

I sat on a plain wooden chair in front of a mirror dusted with powder and glitter. Funny, my CinSymbiant-gray contacts never registered in a mirror. I faced my blue-eyed self and then forgot about it.

"If you have a tip for me," I told Vilma, "I have a few tips for you." I let the corner of a twenty-dollar bill play Peeping Tom out of my evening purse. Luckily, legal tender doesn’t change much through the decades.

The twenty disappeared down her cavernous cleavage. One thing will never let a girl down: silicone.

"Whatcha wanna know, baby doll?"

"I need to speak to a vampire."

"Are you press, that it? You want, like, an interview?

"I am press, and, yes, I want an interview, but not with just any vampire."

"Honey, any vamp is hard to come by in Vegas nowadays."

"I need to speak with a vampire of the old school. One who was here during the Werewolf-Vampire Wars."

"Shhh!" She looked around, as if even the wig stands had ears.

Well, the Big Bad Wolf from Little Miss Riding Hood had had great big ears. And eyes. And teeth. One wondered what else big he had.

"That's so dangerous, dahlink," she whispered to me. "If the WWs don't devour you for it, the Vs would drink you dry."