I asked carefully, “And when did these other vampires begin disappearing?”
“Right after our first book club discussion. Another friend vanished before the next bridge night. Then, when I suggested a French-themed potluck, nobody came over at all! That got me so scared that I went out to each person’s apartment—and no one was home. Some apartments were entirely empty. It’s not natural, I tell you!”
“And how often did you have these get-togethers?”
“Not as often as I’d have liked, but I tried.” His eyes were large. “Only four or five nights a week, but I was open to suggestions. And now my friends are all dead!” He moaned. “I should have done more.”
I tried to reassure him. “When I come back to do the stakeout, I’ll check with the landlord, try to get a look at the empty apartments.” I glanced at my watch. “Don’t worry, Sheldon. I’ll get to the bottom of this, and you’ll be able to sleep easy all day long.”
The sharpened stakes and mallets on his doorstep were a definite sign of mischief, possibly left by a group of teenage vampires with too much angst for their own good. But there was also the possibility that the missing neighbors had slipped away for their own reasons.
If I did find the answers I suspected, I wasn’t sure Sheldon would want to know.
Chapter 6
Though it might not seem a manly sort of place for a private detective to frequent, a beauty salon is a great place to pick up information. I’m not obsessed with fashion. I’ve never had a manicure, certainly not a pedicure. I don’t buy my clothes because of photos I see in Vogue: Undead. I’m not too hard on the eyes, and Sheyenne still gives me that look now and then; I hope she does for a long time to come.
But a lot of basic things change after death, and there’s a difference between looking pretty and simply maintaining yourself. Being “well preserved” takes on a whole new meaning, and it’s a constant battle to stop the onset of decay.
In the month since coming back to life, I’d been getting weekly treatments at Bruno & Heinrich’s Embalming Parlor, the zombie equivalent of a beauty salon. The proprietors—emaciated identical twins—were obsessive stylists who realized they had no talent whatsoever for interacting with warm-blooded human beings, so they became morticians by trade. After the Big Uneasy, Bruno and Heinrich had found their true calling in life.
When I arrived for my 3:00 appointment, Bruno—or maybe it was Heinrich—greeted me with a ghastly smile. “Felicitations, Mr. Chambeaux. I’ll be handling you today.” He rubbed his fingertips together; he wore a fresh coat of matte-black nail polish. “The usual, sir? Or do you have special plans this week? We could do something more radical, more edgy.”
“Just the usual,” I said.
Bruno—yes, it was Bruno, I decided—looked disappointed. “Someday we’ll get you out of your rut, sir. We could all do with a bit more flamboyance.”
“Not all of us,” I said. “Just top off the embalming fluid, check the hair and makeup, cover any discolorations.”
“As you wish, sir.”
When the physical body doesn’t regenerate very well, little bits of daily damage begin to add up. Once you start to slide down that slippery slope, there’s no getting back up again.
I had seen far too many people, both naturals and unnaturals, who let themselves go downhill, and I had no intention of turning into one of those decrepit necrotic shamblers who stagger around like drunken sleepwalkers with bad hemorrhoids and can’t carry on an intelligent conversation. I wouldn’t be effective at solving cases if I had pieces falling off me here and there.
Bruno gestured me toward a side room. “We’ve reserved your private chair, sir. I know you don’t like to be disturbed during the process.”
It’s true that I like the private embalming chair, where I can mull over my cases while the embalmer does his work. But because I had just reviewed the files that Sheyenne had dumped on my desk, not to mention Sheldon Fennerman’s predicament, I wanted more interaction. No telling what I might pick up if somebody happened to drop a juicy tidbit. “I’ll be more sociable today, Bruno. Why not put me among the ladies?”
Bruno’s artificially darkened eyebrows rose like ravens taking wing. “I’m sure they’d love that, sir. They talk about you after you’re gone, you know.”
Apparently, zombies can blush when the situation calls for it, because I felt a definite warmth in my cheeks. “Well, why make them wait? Now they can talk about me to my face.”
In the brightly lit main salon, three makeup-plastered undead women reclined in their chairs while Heinrich flitted from one to the next, chatting and smiling while his clients gossiped in raspy cackling voices. The trio had been in their early sixties in human years, after which they’d added a few hard undead years. All three had the sinewy, rough look of heavy smokers, heavy drinkers, and heavy flirters. Heinrich did his very best, though the women still looked as if they had graduated from the Bride of Frankenstein School of Cosmetology.
“Well, look who’s decided to join us today, honey,” said the first, whose name was Victoria (“want to be my Vic-tim?” she had once said in a creaky attempt to be sexy). Zombie cougars on the prowl.
“He looks delicious,” said the next, Cindy. (“Rhymes with sin, heh, heh.” Well, not really.) “It’ll be wonderful to have some masculine company here, instead of just us girls.” She looked up quickly at Heinrich. “No offense, of course.”
“None taken, love. My masculinity’s not in question.”
I eased myself into the chair while Bruno began to gather the tubes and tanks of fluid.
The third woman leaned over in her chair: Sharon (“I don’t need clever wordplay to get a man”). “Got any plans, Dan? I’ll be finished here long before these other ladies are ready for a public viewing. They need a lot more work done than I do.” The other two looked at her with glares like wooden stakes, but Sharon ignored them. “You and I could go out for lunch or cocktails . . . or just someplace for an afternoon delight.”
“Sounds tempting,” I said, feeling no interest whatsoever, “but my caseload is killing me. Mysteries to solve, bad guys to catch.”
“Oh, you’re not still obsessed with your dreary murder, are you?” Cindy-rhymes-with-sin gave a flippant toss of her head.
I wanted to get the bastard who had killed me, but more importantly I needed enough answers to be sure Robin wasn’t in any continuing danger. What if the murderer had other targets on his list? And who had poisoned Sheyenne?
“Tragic,” Victoria said. “I think about you every time the girls and I go to the Basilisk nightclub.”