Temporary Monsters

Chapter 6

  I didn’t feel like getting out of bed the following morning, but I forced myself to get up and shower and put on clean clothes. The phone had started ringing almost immediately after Sandra left, and I promptly unplugged it. I kept the TV turned off and stayed away from the windows, too. That was probably overkill, but I thought it best to play it safe. I had done my own fair share of snooping, and I knew it wasn’t completely unheard of that some eager-beaver photographer might have my apartment staked out.

  I needed a break, and that made me think immediately of a break in the case. But I wasn’t on the case. The investigation into the death of Jimmy Logan, Hollywood wunderkind, was being led by the PIA with the Toronto Police taking up the slack. I was just a player in this particular piece, and it wasn’t a part I wanted. Unfortunately, the only way I could see of extricating myself was to do the very thing that could get me into more trouble – that could get me dead.

  I figured there would be less of a chance of that happening if I was wearing my gun. After putting it on, I peeked out my front door, verified there weren’t any reporters sleeping in the hallway, and headed downtown.

  To find a film shoot in the city all you had to do was follow the little orange cones until you came to the monstrous trailers that Sandra always called “the movie gypsy caravan.” It was a closed set that day, if only because everyone and their dog wanted to see where the late Jimmy Logan had been filming his final movie, or to get a quote from one of his no doubt grief-stricken co-stars.

  I made my way around the rubberneckers and reporters until I found a young woman who was wearing a headset and had a plastic card clipped to her shirt, identifying her as CREW. I showed her my own card and told her that I was investigating the death of Jimmy Logan. I tried to sound bored, thinking it would make me stand out from the rest of gawkers.

  “Are you with the police?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Is the director on set today?”

  She gave me an appraising look. “Is she expecting you?”

  “Nope. Just tell her the Fearless Vampire Killer would like a few minutes of her time.”

  The young woman looked at me a moment longer, then walked off. A few minutes later she came back and beckoned me with an imperious wave of her hand.

  “Follow me, please.”

  She brought me to an open area hemmed in by trailers. One of them, I noted, had Jimmy Logan’s name on it; a lick of police tape had been plastered across the door. Along one side of the clearing, a long table had been set up with coffee, donuts and various pastries. A broad-chested man in a muscle shirt was pouring coffee from a huge gleaming urn.

  I was escorted over to a tall, slender woman with wide, green eyes and a strained look on her face that might have been caused by the painfully tight ponytail her white-blonde hair had been pulled back into. She was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt that said I EAT UNION WORKERS. She scrutinized me with a look that said I had already wasted oodles of her time, and I had better get to my point, and fast.

  “Help you with something?” she inquired brusquely. She was holding a cinnamon-coloured cellphone and there was a small black address book open on her canvas director’s chair. “I’m kind of busy managing a crisis here.”

  “I’ll try not to add to your stress,” I told her. I held out my hand. “Felix Renn.”

  “Van Toren,” she replied. There was a slight huffiness in her tone, as if she was annoyed that I didn’t recognize her on sight. “I’m the conductor of this train wreck.”

  “Van,” I said. “Is that short for something?”

  “Yeah, my full name.”

  I grinned patiently and she softened... a little.

  “Vanessa,” she said. “But no one ever calls me that. Is that one of the questions you wanted to ask me?”

  “No. I... uh... I’m the one who...”

  “I know who you are,” she said, without rancour. “You killed my lead. Do you know how many times we had to go back and forth with his agent to get him on this picture?”

  “I don’t know. A lot?”

  “Not that much, actually. Jimmy Logan is – or was – going to be a hot item, but he wasn’t there yet. All actors make demands, even the little ones. It’s the way they convince themselves they’re in control.”

  “Did Jimmy Logan make a lot of demands?”

  “Not really. But it’s all about putting up a good front.”

  I nodded. Sandra had explained to me the power dance of actors and agents. With all the hair-splitting that goes on, it was a wonder that any movie ever got made.

  “He was supposed to be on set yesterday afternoon, and I was pretty fucking pissed off when he didn’t show up.” She ran her hands over her pulled-back hair and sighed loudly. “Why the hell couldn’t he have waited until the wrap party to OD?”

  “What do you mean he OD’ed?”

  “Well, didn’t he?” She gave me a bland stare. “They said he was high as a kite and attacked a bunch of people.”

  I weighed my next words very carefully. “You heard what happened, right? About... Jimmy?”

  “What, that he was a vampire?” Van gave me that annoyed look again. “For God’s sake! Jimmy Logan wasn’t a vampire. He was playing a vampire.”

  “He was doing a pretty good job in the restaurant.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s not like it changes anything. I’ve still got a movie minus one of its lead actors. And my other one...” She cast a contemptuous look at one of the other trailers.

  “Eve Sutter,” I said, reading the name on the door. “She’s in this movie?”

  “She’s not here for the ambience,” Van replied tartly. “Although she might as well be. That’s all we have now without Jimmy. An $80 million pile of ambience. The studio’s going to freak,” she added with a groan.

  “Eve Sutter,” I said, trying to steer the conversation back on track. “Did she know Jimmy very well?”

  “Not that well. I don’t think they knew each other before they came to work on this picture. But they seemed to hit it off okay.”

  “Were they involved romantically?” I asked, hating the way I sounded, like a doctor taking a family history. 

  “No,” Van replied, “but they were sleeping together. She hasn’t been out of her trailer since she heard about Jimmy.”

  “Do you think she’d talk to me?”

  Van waved her arm in a gesture that said be my guest.

  I went over to Eve Sutter’s trailer. I had seen her in a handful of movies – horror flicks, mostly, like Jowls and The Iowa Beef Experience. She was pegged as the next “scream queen.” Jamie Lee Curtis sans the androgynous looks.

  I knocked on her trailer door.

  “Go away!” a high, trembling voice cried from inside.

  I turned the knob and walked in.

  The trailer was dark except for the aura of light coming off the bulbs that ran around the border of a large vanity mirror. Eve Sutter was sitting in front of it, her face buried in her freckled arms, hitching and sobbing. “Get out!” she growled.

  I ambled toward her, glancing at the clothes strewn about, almost tripping on a stiletto heel that looked long enough and sharp enough to skewer a wild boar. Moving around it, I stepped on something that crinkled under my foot. I reached down and picked up an empty blister pack, like the kind individual doses of aspirin come in.

  “Why won’t you leave me alone!” Eve’s voice rose stridently. It sounded like a jet turbine engine powering up. “Get OUT!”

  She whipped her head around and glared at me. I froze. Eve Sutter’s eyes weren’t as recognizable as Angelina Jolie’s, but I knew the ones I was looking at didn’t belong to her, or to any normal woman.

  Her eyes were yellow. And they were glowing. It was as if someone had installed a hurricane lantern in her skull. The light pouring out of her sockets caused the freckles on her face to stand out and cast harsh shadows from her nose and
lips. It was a terrifying sight, like a brutally carved jack-o’-lantern wearing a red wig. The effulgence bleeding out of her eyes waxed and waned. It made her hair seem to dance. But as I continued to stare, I saw that her hair was actually moving. It was sprouting out of her skin in silky strands that curled and twined in a crimson wave. It was like watching someone spontaneously combust, except instead of bursting into flames, Eve Sutter was bursting into hair.

  She rose from the vanity bench and faced me fully. She was wearing a green bathrobe with her initials embroidered over the left breast. She pulled the robe open with hands that were curving into claws, and I saw that her entire body was covered in a gloss of shiny red fur. She made a low, whining sound from the snout that was sprouting out of her face. Her lacquered lips stretched into a maniacal clown grin, and when she opened her mouth in a wide yawn I saw rows of sharp white teeth.

  Throwing back her shaggy red head, Eve Sutter gave vent to a wailing howl that echoed in my ears.

  I tried calling her name, but it was no use. She couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t retreat. I had come too close. If I turned around or even took a single step backward, she would be on me.

  I did the only thing I could, even though I knew it was a fruitless gesture. I took out my gun. I wasn’t packing silver loads because I hadn’t planned on running into any werewolves that day.

  Eve Sutter hunched down on her new, crooked hind legs, scrutinizing me and my little gun. I didn’t hesitate; I give myself that much credit. I aimed and fired and struck with all six shots. Eve Sutter went flying backward into the vanity, her body smashing the mirror while one flailing arm raked across the border of light bulbs, throwing us into darkness.

  I moved nimbly back to the trailer door. I knew the shots wouldn’t make any difference. I could have fired six thousand bullets and it would have had the same effect, which is to say none. I glanced quickly over my shoulder and saw those eerie yellow eyes squinting at me with rage.

  I stumbled out of the trailer, down the short flight of stairs, and into the broad-chested man. His Styrofoam cup of coffee was held up between us, and it splashed all over him. He looked down at his stained shirt, then to the smoking gun in my hand, then to the open trailer door. He dropped the crumpled cup and grabbed me roughly by the back of the neck.

  “What did you do?” He screamed into my face, hot spittle spraying my cheeks. Eve Sutter’s bodyguard, I presumed. “What did you DO?”

  I tried to say something, but he kept bouncing me up and down like a yo-yo. I felt my gun slip out of my fingers.

  The broad-chested man dropped me rudely on my feet and yelled over my head.

  “Evie! Are you in there? Are you okay? Answer me!”

  Evie was in there, but she was far from okay. She and okay weren’t even in the same time zone.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw her shaggy form materialize in the doorway. I felt my neck slip out of the big guy’s grip the way the gun had slipped out of my fingers. I stepped discreetly to the side.

  Eve Sutter looked like a fireball with fangs. Her auburn fur glowed like burning copper in the sunlight. Her triangular ears twitched as her head barely cleared the top of the doorway. She took a tentative step forward. Then another. Then she leaped high into the air and landed on the broad expanse of her bodyguard’s chest.

  The big man tried to push her away, but Eve clawed her way around to his back, moving as smoothly as an eel through water. When he reached back to pull her off, there was a crunch, like the sound of someone biting into a lollipop, and the bodyguard began to scream. He pulled back a hand minus a couple of fingers. He stared wide-eyed at the severed digits, and twin jets of blood squirted into his blanched face. He let out a final, quavering shriek, then fell over in a dead faint.

  I stared into the furry face of the werewolf formerly known as Eve Sutter. Despite the glowing yellow eyes and the blood that dripped from her muzzle, she was still a thing of beauty. You were almost willing to let yourself be mauled to death by her, just as long as you were allowed to watch it happen.

  “What in the hell is going on here?”

  Eve and I both turned our heads in unison. Van Toren was staring at us with a stern expression. The girl with the headset was standing behind her. She managed to keep her composure for about half a second, then bolted. Van came toward us, waving her hand at Eve.

  “I didn’t ask for this! Who made this! I’m not paying for this!”

  Eve threw back her head and a long, mournful howl issued from her throat.

  She leaped at Toren, back legs kicking off the pavement. The director let out an eep! and went running into her own trailer, slamming the door behind her. Eve threw her shoulder against the door, howled again, and started tearing strips off the metal with her long black claws.

  I stumbled over to the craft service table. The whey-faced server was gawking at the short work Eve Sutter was making of the director’s trailer. He jumped when I snapped my fingers in front of his face.

  “Is this silver?” I held up a glimmering cake server. It wasn’t sharp, but I thought I could make it work.

  The server gave me an incredulous look. “Are you kidding?”

  I dropped the cake server. Eve howled again. It was different this time, and I thought, She got inside the trailer. I turned around and saw something I wasn’t expecting.

  Eve Sutter lay at the foot of the stairs leading up to the director’s trailer. I came over slowly, hesitantly. I picked up my gun on the way, reloaded it, and pointed it at her motionless body. She twitched, and I jumped back, steadying the gun with both hands. But it was only her fur, drawing back into her body, parting like a red sea and leaving her freckled skin bare and exposed... and bloody.

  I could see where I had shot her. I took off my coat and draped it over her body, as much to remove the view from my sight as to shield her nakedness. I crouched down and picked up her wrist, feeling for a pulse – I found none.

  I heard a creaking sound and looked up at Van Toren peeking out her trailer door. “Is it safe?” she asked timidly.

  I glanced back down at Eve Sutter’s limp wrist. I turned it over and saw something on the back of her hand – a blue mark. It wasn’t as smudged as the one I’d seen on Jimmy Logan’s hand. I could make out a picture of a butterfly and a single word written across its wings.

  Chrysalis.