Neon Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  Meet Me, Delilah Street

  BOGIEMAN: A Delilah Street Story with Humphrey Bogart

  BUTTERFLY KISS: Midnight Louie and Delilah Street novella with Midnight Louie, feline PI

  MONSTER MASH: A Delilah Street novella with the Lon Chaney acting family

  FILM NOIR: A Delilah Street story with Cary Grant

  SNOW JOB: A Delilah Street novella with the Invisible Man

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

  Copyright

  MEET ME, DELILAH STREET

  DELILAH STREET, PARANORMAL INVESTIGATOR

  Birthdate: April 1

  Sign: Gemini with Virgo rising

  City: Las Vegas by way of Wichita, Kansas

  Mood: A little witchy

  Music: “Taking Care of Business”

  EVERYONE HAS FAMILY ISSUES, but my issues are that I don’t have any family. My fresh new business card reads Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, but my old personal card could read Delilah Street, Unadoptable Orphan.

  I grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and was supposedly named after the street where I was found abandoned as an infant. I’ve Googled and Groggled (the drinking person’s search engine) the World Wide Web for Delilah Streets. All I know is that not a single bloody one of them is to be found in Kansas. Whoever my forebears, they gave me the Black Irish, Snow White looks—corpse-white skin and dead-of-night black hair—that turn out to be batnip to vampires.

  My striking blue eyes are my best feature, but that only IDs me as the most wanted woman on the planet. Not that I’m vain about that, because the way I’m wanted is Dead or Alive. More on that later.

  Of course it is now the unlucky thirteenth year of the Millennium Revelation, What came after 2001 came and went were a slew of unexpected illegal-alien residents. The threatened religious apocalypse didn’t happen, but the turn of the 21st century brought all the bogeymen and women of myth and legend out of the closet and into human society.

  My unwanted orphan childhood is history now that I’m twenty-four and on my own. A jealous weather witch forecaster forced me out of a good reporter job covering the paranormal beat for WTCH-TV in Wichita, Kansas. Now I’m a freelance investigator in wicked, mysterious post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, which is crawling with daylight vamps and werewolf mobsters and celebrity zombies and who-knows-what else.

  I have a few driving ambitions.

  One is staying alive. Without turning vampire.

  Two, tracking down my missing spitting image to find out if she is a twin, double, clone, or even alive. Seeing her/me being autopsied on a CSI V: Las Vegas one rerun TV night in Wichita brought me to Sin City in the first place.

  Lucky me, she turned out to be the most desirable corpse ever featured on the internationally franchised show. Apparently, CSI corpses are the new It Girls.

  Bad news: This “Lilith Quince” supposedly had an early exit contract to kill herself, which would make her star turn as a CSI corpse into a reality TV dissection. Good news: You can’t believe anything you see and hear in the post-Millennium Revelation era, especially in its quirky and commercial capital city of Las Vegas. So Lilith could still be alive.

  Then there’s ambition number three: having my first serious relationship with non-vampire, fully human Ricardo Montoya, whom I met in Vegas’s Sunset Park just after I hit town and just before it hit me back, hard. And, yes, Ric—ex-FBI guy, a.k.a. the Cadaver Kid—is tall, dark, handsome, and Hispanic.

  I have other allies. One has heavenly blue eyes and is seriously gray and hairy. That’s my 150-pound dog, Quicksilver. He’s a wolf-wolfhound cross I saved from death at the pound. He returns the favor with fang, claw, and warm, paranormally talented tongue. I have a soft spot for dogs, especially since Achilles, my valiant little white Lhasa Apso in Wichita, died from blood poisoning after biting a vampire anchorman who was trying to fang me. Lhasas are long-haired little dogs with terrier grit who were bred to guard the ancient Dalai Lamas. Achilles’ ashes rest in a dragon-decorated jar on my Las Vegas mantel, so I haven’t given up the ghost on a reincarnation.

  Oh, yeah, where that mantel is might be of interest. I rent an Enchanted Cottage on the Hector Nightwine estate because he says he’s guilty about offing my possible twin on national TV. He produces the many worldwide CSI franchises, but the ghoulish Hector doesn’t have a conscience, more like a profit motive. He’s banking on my finding Lilith, or becoming her for his enduring benefit.

  The only thing Hector and I have in common is a love of vintage black-and-white films. The Enchanted Cottage is the setting from a 1940’s movie of that name, where an unattractive couple’s true love made them see themselves as the glamorous movie stars who played them. So the place is a mix of Ugly Duckling Central and Cinderella’s unhappy home. I also suspect it’s supplied with the gabby mirror from Snow White. Although it’s been mum with me, I see dead people in it.

  A shy (to the point of invisible) staff of who-knows-what supernaturals run the joint.

  The most complicated beings in my brave new world are the CinSims. Cinema Simulacrums are created when fresh zombie bodies illegally imported from Mexico are blended with black-and-white film characters. The resulting 3-D “live” personas are wholly owned entertainment entities leased to various Vegas hotels.

  Hector and Ric are sure the Immortality Mob is behind the brisk business in zombie CinSims, but can’t prove it. I’d like to help them both out, because I’m the classic crusading reporter who’s against human and unhuman exploitation, and because my own freedom is on the line from several merciless and downright repellent factions trying to make life after the Millennium Revelation literal Hell.

  Luckily, I seem to have some off-the-chart abilities simmering myself, involving the silver from mirror backings, the silver nitrate in black-and-white film strips, and reflective surfaces.

  And I have one more sorta sidekick…a freaky migrating, shape-changing lock of hair from the albino rock star who owns the Inferno Hotel, who goes by the names Christophe for business, Cocaine for the Seven Deadly Sins rock band, and Snow to his intimates, which I no way want to be.

  I made the mistake of touching the white lock of his hair Snow sent me as a sardonic bow to my Biblical namesake’s history in literally cutting off male power. It reminded me of Achilles’ long white hair… My touching that albino tress turned it into a morphing sterling-silver familiar that can play decoration or weapon. It has a permanent lock on my body no jeweler’s saw or torch can remove. I consider it a variety of talisman-cum-leech, not fondly.

  I’ve been called a “silver medium,” but I don’t aim to be medium at anything, most of all finding out who I really am and who’s been bad and who’s been good in my new Millennium Revelation neighborhood. When things go wrong, who ya gonna call? Me. Delilah Street.

  FRIENDS HOTLIST

  Ric Montoya, ex-FBI guy a.k.a. the Cadaver Kid

  Quicksilver, bipolar good dog.

  Hector Nightwine, landlord and TV producer

  Coroner Grisly Bahr

  Celebrity zombies:

  Nick and Nora Charles, and Asta

  Perry Mason

  The Invisible Man

  Sam Spade

  FRENEMIES HOTLIST

  Assorted humans, unhumans, and question marks:

  Lilith, a dead double for Delilah

  Snow, the Inferno Hotel’s albino rock star-owner

  Grizelle, Snow’s shapeshifter security chief

  The silver familiar

  Capt. Kennedy Malloy, Metro Police

  Playboy hotelier Howard Hughes, and minions

  ENEMIES HITLIST

  Werewolves:

  Cesar Cicereau, Gehenna Hotel mob boss


  Lunatics motorcycle gang

  Detective Half-were Haskell

  Vampires etc.:

  Sansouci, daylight vampire and werewolf mob muscle

  Karnak Hotel’s ancient Egyptian vampires

  El Demonio, demon Mexican drug lord

  THE FIRST TALE

  “BOGIEMAN,” INTRODUCES DELILAH Street’s Vegas of supernatural power brokers, like Snow, the albino rock star who owns the Inferno hotel, and such tourist attractions as film noir characters called CinSims (Cinema Simulacrums). Humphrey Bogart as gumshoe Sam Spade is one of them and his immortal form seems to have been…murdered. Can the actor affectionately known as “Bogie” really die?

  SAM SPADE’S SPLAYED BODY was a symphony in black and white on the hellfire-orange carpet of the Inferno Hotel.

  It had that pale and wan look down pat. His skin was ashen, his hair and beard stubble gray, his suit pinstriped in silver and dark charcoal, the nearby fedora a soft gray. Only his eyebrows and hatband were black.

  So. Who would want to kill Sam Spade?

  Who would want to kill Humphrey Bogart, for that matter?

  And, legally, could either one of them be murdered?

  Here’s the deal. This is Las Vegas, after all. I live and work here. Delilah Street, PI. That’s PI as in Paranormal Investigator. Lucky me.

  A lot in Las Vegas in 2013 is unlucky, including the pervasive presence of all the unhumans released by the Millennium Revelation. Instead of Apocalypse Now at the Turn, we got Apocalypse Now and Forever. The 2000-year millennium didn’t bring the vaunted end of the world, but the end of the world as we knew it. All the legendary bogeymen and women of history and myth showed up, maybe not exactly as advertised in our nightmares, but there. Witches and werewolves and zombies, oh, my!

  Sam Spade sprang from the black type on white paper Dashiell Hammett had rolled through his manual typewriter almost ninety years ago. Humphrey Bogart had been a human actor, but dead for almost sixty years, since 1957.

  Add a little high-tech enterprise to exploit the new supernatural population, and you had what lay before me, either dead or merely unplugged: one of the fabulous Las Vegas CinSims.

  The CinSim that lay immobile on the carpet was an amalgam of character and actor that had been moving and “living” until person or persons unknown—or unpersons unknown—had driven a corkscrew from the Inferno Bar into its all-too-solid chest.

  And there was yet a third persona present, last but not least. That would be whoever’s resurrected dead body had been the medium upon which the silver screen icon, Humphrey Bogart, who played Sam Spade in the 1941 film classic, The Maltese Falcon, had been recreated.

  The corkscrew spiraled into the dead man’s chest, but was an ordinary mortal weapon capable of killing a CinSim? That’s short for Cinema Simulacrum, and this town was teaming with them. They had been reanimated, certainly, but were they capable of dying? Of being murdered?

  And why was I standing here contemplating all these unknowns?

  Because besides being Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, I’m a silver medium. I have an unexplained affinity for any kind of silver…the sterling kind in jewelry, mirror backings, mercury glass, and the silver nitrate that was used in black-and-white film strips, from which the CinSim personas are stripped.

  CinSims are the billion-dollar baby of a literal Industrial Light and Magic post-Spielberg special effects company. They exist by the mating of a complex copyright network that leases the Silver Screen characters to entertainment venues, and of the grave-robbers employed by the Immortality Mob to provide the flesh-and-bone “canvas” on which the animated effect is achieved.

  Smuggling zombies into the U.S. is against the law. Once they get here and disappear into their CinSim overlay, they’re just hard-to-trace illegal aliens, like ordinary live border-crossers.

  It’s no coincidence that most of the zombies are imported from Mexico.

  CinSims are one of latter-day Las Vegas’s most enduringly popular attractions—wouldn’t you like to shoot the breeze with John Wayne as the Ringo Kid or Bette Davis as Jezebel?—and the city’s most morally ambiguous creations.

  I knew and liked a lot of CinSims around town, and the feeling was mutual. Yeah, CinSims have feelings, which almost nobody bothers to find out. They make terrific snitches. Everyone treats them like trained dogs it’s safe to talk in front of. We get along because I treat them like real people. So I mourned Sam Spade/Humphrey Bogart, even though we’d never met.

  “Okay, Miss Street. There’s not much to see. What do you think?” The voice was brusque. This bizarre case, the first dead CinSim ever, had brought out the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s captain of homicide, Kennedy Malloy. “Getting any useful ‘vibes’ off the so-called body?” her surprisingly lilting voice asked.

  Kennedy Malloy was not a man. Yeah, I thought that too when I first heard the name. I first heard the name from my sudden personal interest and sometimes professional partner, Ricardo Montoya, ex-FBI guy and secret dowser for the dead. He was good at dowsing a lot of things, including me. Ric was the zombie expert, but he was consulting in Juarez. Malloy had been a professional pal of his until I came along and snagged the benefits. She still was his friend. And no friend of mine.

  “You’re supposed to have this rapport with the CinSims,” she was saying now, a trim blond with hazel eyes and the hard-edged moxie of women moving up in a man’s profession.

  “Usually they’re alive,” I said. “Or at least moving and talking, like the motion pictures that spawned them.”

  “I’m giving you two hours. You’ll have to deal with the various entities that ‘own’ the remains. They came out like maggots the minute this was called in. Then we cart this…‘star stuff’ away. We’ll call the metropolitan waste department. I don’t see what an autopsy could do. The body’s already long dead. It’ll stink soon, for sure. And burial doesn’t seem necessary.”

  Behind her, Nick Charles—like Sam Spade another Dashiell Hammett creation—known as the Thin Man for the title of his first novelistic case, clucked his teeth.

  “It isn’t nice for a public servant to disrespect discriminated-against minorities,” he said.

  Malloy spun on him. “A bleeding-heart like Street here can go all gooey over this character running out of film, but you CinSims have no civil rights in this town or this country. You’re all copyrighted and leased entertainment entities.”

  “At least,” Nick Charles said in his slightly soused but shrewd way, “somebody cared enough to copyright us. I don’t see a Kennedy Malloy Barbie in your future, captain.”

  I swallowed a giggle. Nick Charles was from back in the day—the nineteen-thirties—when a smart comeback was all the rage, and he still had them in…er, spades.

  “I go for a gutsy modern dame,” he commented to me as the captain stomped away, “but one with a clever lip on her as well as looks, like my much missed and esteemed spouse, Nora. And also the likes of you, my dear Miss Street.”

  “Thanks, Nicky.” What a shame hotel leasing arrangements had split up as classic a noir couple as Nick and Nora Charles. Nick was a natty cinematic symphony in black tie and black-and-white all over. I sighed as I regarded the possible corpse. “Did you know this CinSim?”

  “Not personally. He was attached to the Club Noir in the hotel’s Lower Depths. Circle One. We are all chained to our particular ‘entertainment venues,’ you know.”

  I did know. All SinCims have an internal chip that keeps them from wandering away from their home hotel or bar…or brothel.

  Nicky went on after a graciously swallowed hiccup. “I can’t leave this bar for the life of me. Not that I mind.” He took another tipsy sip from the martini glass perpetually in hand.

  “The life of me” was an ironic expression coming from his pearl-gray lips. I was maybe the only mortal who knew that the CinSims craved more freedom. A fortunate few had film histories that helped them avoid detection, so they could ditch their chip and s
kip out on their home assignment. Like the Invisible Man, a pal of Nicky’s, and therefore of mine.

  I was particularly fond of Nick Charles, not only for his jazz-age detective history, but because his “cousin”—both played by the same long-dead actor, William Powell—was my boss’s “man Godfrey” from another film of the thirties. My boss was Hector Nightwine, producer of the Las Vegas and beyond-set CSI: Crime Scene Instincts TV series that had been the rage since God made maggots and a profit motive.

  It still astounded me that various versions of roles played by the same actor had been resurrected as utterly individual SinCims. Even now, as we contemplated the death of this Sam Spade incarnation, I remembered that Humphrey Bogart was alive in some Hemingway novel made into film at a hotel down the Strip.

  “I would have never given up Mary Astor,” Nicky mused, speaking of the actress who played The Maltese Falcon’s femme fatale. “A good-looker and really classy dame. What’s a little deception between film noir lovers?”

  That’s when it occurred to me. A CinSim could have offed Sam Spade. Say, the woman who loved him…whom he’d turned in to the police in The Maltese Falcon. Say that greedy kingpin, Gutman, the “Fat Man” from the film. A lot of them were alive and semi-well in Las Vegas these days. Who was to say cinematic loves and hates didn’t transfer with their portrayals?

  But the prime problem was who had been killed: the zombie body, the film character applied over it, or the actor who’d originated the film role?

  Only God can make a tree, but these days, man could make, and remake, anything. Including original sin, the first murder of a CinSim.

  I DIDN’T RELISH INTERVIEWING the interested parties leaning against the bar with its fire-lizard aquarium base that resembled a scene of capering devils in Hell.

  I recognized the lawyer for the Immortality Mob from the way he clutched his faux crocodile briefcase. He was overdressed for Vegas’s dessert climate in a gray sharkskin suit and vintage Op Art tie. The Incorporated FX and Magic Show technician who fine-tunes and places the CinSims lounged beside him, long-haired, laid-back, and wearing tattooed blue jeans.