fun in my current incarnation, but the germs nowadays! Bedbugs, would you believe? In the twenty-first century? Not in
“You also assume I want something when I visit.”
“Well, everybody does.”
“Is that why you became so distrustful of your starlet dates back in the day?”
“My dates? My stars, Delilah, you’re interested in my dating life? Are you jealous? I certainly made the rounds of Hollywood.”
“I know all that. You gave casting couches a bad name. Why have you allowed the Inferno Hotel’s Christophe to corral all your old girlfriends as sexy CinSims in his Lust level at the Nine Circles of Hell?”
“He’s done that?”
“So I’m told.”
“What a power freak, as they say now. Merely mogul envy, my dear. Must be deficient. Trust me. They didn’t call my founding business Hughes Tool Company for nothing.”
I’d heard the emotionally stunted Hughes had been physically far from stunted, but before this topic gagged me, I had to settle another interesting oddity.
“They’re all brunet,” I added.
“I did have that weakness,” he said, gesturing a raven-haired nurse and her tray to me. His attempted wink turned into a blink. He was, after all, more than a hundred years old even by normal standards. As a vampire, though, he was an infant.
“However,” he added, “I never turned away a willing blonde. Jean Harlow. . . .” His voice and memory faded at the same time.
What an interview subject he’d make . . . except for the frequent fade-outs and the fact I was no longer a TV reporter.
“Think of me as an aviator who has crash-landed atop a volcanic mountain in the uncharted Pacific islands,” he rambled. “Would any reasonable man say no to the native girls who thought he was a god?”
“You don’t have to justify your past lifestyle to me, but it all seems compulsive and controlling and sad. Three wives, dozens of actresses as mistresses. You wanted to keep everything, but you didn’t want to commit to anything.”
His head leaned back as a nurse bent close, loosening the clamp on his IV tube so sterilized blood leaked into his delicate veins.
“Not my issue with money,” he mused. “There I anticipated many opportunities. Why should you care about my Hollywood hit list, Delilah? We are all so over.”
“You never had an heir.”
“No! And especially not the losers who showed up after my supposed death to claim they were my inheritors. Luckily, law firms are as eternal as vampires. My secret enduring estate is still well guarded while the public estate has dwindled into bankruptcy.”
I couldn’t help thinking that his life and afterlife was the reverse of that. “How did you manage to transfer your wealth along with converting to an undead lifestyle?”
“Thinking of going vamp, Delilah?”
“You never know.”
“My nurses are very well paid.”
“You and Hugh Hefner.” Something in his expression tipped me off. “No! You’ve helped set Hefner up to follow in your fang marks?”
“Perhaps not under the same persona . . .” Hughes pursed his lips and looked smug.
“My biggest question is, why wait?” I said. “Why not make the change before you look like something from a horror film vault?”
“Looks are so common. Nowadays any obsessive cheerleader is getting nose jobs and Botox at sixteen. Besides, in my day, or the decade I purportedly died in, the seventies, the undead were only thought to exist in those horror films you mention. Even in my youth, I had always been original in my thinking and grandiose in my plans. I became the richest man in the world. Then I became eccentric.”
“You became mentally ill, an obsessive, phobia-ridden hermit,” I corrected him gently. “You were powerful enough to order legions of underlings to fulfill your every whim and weak-minded enough to be taken extreme advantage of.”
Howard leaned close, his faded pupils afloat in liquid. Tears, or just weak in the lamplight? “So they thought. In 1953 I created a nonprofit entity no one much noticed but it’s the only thing that bears my name today.”
“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I know. It’s a world-famous biomedical research facility that sponsors research from scientists across the globe. But you can’t have anything to do with it now.”
“Bah! Humbug, I would say, but that’s true. The basic research I wanted done there was to probe the genesis of life itself. However, to prolong my own life I had to explore the darker side of the street where scientific research meets what some would call quackery, or superstition. I secretly started another small company. I had a . . . last, lovely contact I could trust who had a head for business and even science. She was able to assemble a team of . . . shall we say . . . less reputable European doctors and researchers—”
“She?
“In the thirties I pretty much lived with Katharine Hepburn for four years, Miss Street.” Howard’s vampire strength made his knotted hands compress the sofa cushions as he threatened to push himself to his feet in anger. “Even Spencer Tracy couldn’t manage that at all.”
I held up my palms to lower the volume before something in his fragile, undead frame broke. “Hepburn was no cakewalk, I know that.”
He fell back into the cushions while his glaring nurses surrounded him, showing me the fangs he’d never let pierce that leathery hide of his because his aversion for germs had outlived his death too.
He rallied to snarl, “Privacy” at the carnivorous nurses. To me he said, “I hired whom I could trust. And . . . someday . . . that might be you.”
I wasn’t going to ask for trouble by saying this, but that job offer was no prize.
However, the identity of his long-ago secret henchwoman was a tasty appetizer for my reporter instincts. Say she was young at the time, something of a given with a chronic womanizer like Young Howard. Thirty, say. She could be alive at ninety today, by the usual methods, and certainly would be by unconventional ones.
So who could run a fledgling early fifties company formed for cutting edge biomedical research with a staff of eager researchers?
Nineteen fifty-three?
I was so appalled I repeated the word aloud. And then said, “You hired ex-Nazis.”
Howard looked thunderous again. “And what was the federal government doing at the very same time? I ought to know. I had enough defense contracts with them.”
Bizarre movie titles that would describe the start-up scrolled through my mind.
Could this woman have been Vida? She was a proven entrepreneur in Corona. She would have been young and his type. Was the California setup a reward for her role in his escape clause from his disintegrating human life? First, she’d headed his new company; then she’d become vampire to bring him over to eternal life.
Howard was acting too coy about the woman’s identity. He’d been the kind to brag. If I could figure out which of his many women had worked for him, she might lead me to answers about my parentage.
“You’re not listening, Delilah.” He lifted a scrawny forearm to speed the drip of blood into his veins. “I know you need to find out the
As fascinating as the process of becoming the late Howard Hughes, eternal entrepreneur was, only one detail in his saga could help answer my questions about paternity.
“You admit you’ve set up the perfect retirement plan, keeping your money
“All I can say is you surely have family somewhere, Delilah. Besides, I’m better now. Fresh blood, you know.”
