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 clich��d "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."

"And of course leave the clothes off? I don't think so, Hector. I hate typecasting. I don't want to play the usual naked lady on a stainless-steel autopsy table. I want to play an onlooker, a witness."

"But Lilith was-"

"A one-of-a-kind corpse, Hector. Hard to achieve in these days of media overkill. You don't want to dilute the 'Maggie' brand, do you? I recall you saying when you first broached this idea to me that my resemblance to your most famous corpse should be hinted at, should be taunting, haunting, an echo, a face in the misty night, a familiar refrain..."

"Like in that great classic novel and song and 1944 film Laura! Yes, of course. Director Otto Preminger's eternally enchanting tale of a beautiful dead girl with whom the investigating detective falls in love. Wonderful resonance! Brilliant. Lilith is 'my' Laura. How could I have not seen it?"

He had gone where I'd led. Waft a whiff of necrophilia over the media barons in these decadent post-Millennium Revelation times and you were a genius. I was ashamed to recall that Snow had suggested this very scenario of getting myself onto Nightwine's CSI V autopsy set. Now it was working like a charm.

"Do I need to do anything but show up?" I asked.

"What? Ah, no. Yes. I-I-I'll send fresh 'sides' to the cottage for you to study tonight. You can't think I'd use you as a mere underpaid extra? Of course I'll give you a few trifling lines. That way you'll earn my CSI minimum of six hundred fifty-eight dollars and sixty-three cents a day for a speaking bit role, my dear girl."

He beamed over his fistful of munchies. "Even a teensy bit part will help make you eligible for an AFTRA card, if you so desire, Delilah." He chuckled until his velvet gut shook like a bowlful of earthworms. "Then you'll be able to hold old Hector up for real dough when I want you for a spare shot."

Not my ambition. I was taking a risk even by letting Hector play on the notion that the "Maggie" corpse was possibly alive and well and on the CSI set. I could end up a kidnap target of Dead Celebrity profiteers again, but the film bit might also flush out Lilith in more than my mirror, from which she'd been absent recently.

AFTER LEAVING HECTOR'S office, I engineered a secret flying visit to the Inferno and Ric in the bridal suite.

He was still sleeping like a baby, except for a totally hot smudge of five o'clock shadow the nurses couldn't-or wouldn't-tame. I stroked the back of my fingers over his soft/rough cheek.

The color was returning to his Latino complexion. He was still so dead to the world after Helena 's visit... I couldn't help remembering that well-fed vampires in their caskets always had a sinister healthy glow in the lushly colorful Hammer films.

HECTOR'S "SIDES," OR dialogue pages, caught up with me about six that evening at the Enchanted Cottage after I got back from sitting with Ric.

Godfrey brought the pink-colored papers to the cottage on a silver salver, alongside a tiny crystal glass of Madeira. They included two pages of wordless action and two freaking pages of monologue.

"It's a good thing a former TV reporter is a fast study," I grumbled to Godfrey, "or I'd never memorize this in one night."

"The master quite adores the idea of a teasing reappearance of a Lilith look-alike on CSI V," Godfrey said. "The Las Vegas version is his foundation show. I took the liberty of scanning the monologue before I came here and modifying a few rough edges. It's a good bit. I grew up speaking lines by masters like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Anita Loos."

"You wrote it, Godfrey?"

"I 'massaged' it. Master Nightwine has the big ideas. I finesse the execution."

I hoped he didn't mean "execution" literally, not with modern CSI shows sometimes using authentic corpses nowadays.

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