Never Cross a Vampire Read Online Free PDF

tumbling into Mrs. Lee’s lap.
    The Farraday Building had an elevator, and Jeremy Butler saw to it that the elevator went up and down, but there was nothing he could do to make it go up and down at a rate that most mortals found reasonable. I ran down the stairs, putting on my coat as I went and listening to the echo of my footsteps around me. On the floor below ours, the bookie was fumbling at the lock on his door. The phone was ringing on the other side and he was trying to get in before he missed a bet, but his eyes were bleary and the harder he tried, the more the lock resisted. I didn’t bother to greet him.
    Butler was still going at the wall with his second can of Old Dutch.
    â€œPerhaps I should just paint the whole wall?” he asked.
    â€œI think it looks fine,” I said. Interior decoration wasn’t my line, but the irregular patch of white he had worn into the gray wall made the lobby look like the set for a German horror movie.
    A neighborhood derelict was pressing his nose to the window of my car when I hurried into the alley. He pulled his gray-stubble face away when he heard me and plunged his hands deep into his pockets, pretending to admire the scenery of the alley, the piles of garbage, the empty cartons. He tried to look as if he were waiting for a streetcar and succeeded in looking as if he had been caught with his claw in the bird cage.
    I handed the guy a quarter, told him it was a nice day, and pulled out, heading the car up Hoover and across on Wilshire. Leib’s office was in Westwood, even closer to the station than mine. There was a chance the advance would beat me to the door. In my greed, I had neglected to find out who Faulkner had murdered and why.
    As I passed the shivering palms and the occasional people who had come to Los Angeles looking for what they couldn’t find further east and finding what they hadn’t looked for, I thought of the two times I had seen Faulkner. He had been laboring away at some project at Warners a few years earlier when I spotted him through the office window of a producer I was on a job for. Faulkner had looked sad and serious. His typewriter was giving him no fun. He was probably having even less fun today.
    I found a space a few blocks from the station and jogged over. A young balding uniformed cop I knew named Rashkow almost knocked me back down the stone stairs.
    â€œHello,” he said seriously.
    â€œHi, my brother in today?”
    â€œHe’s in,” Rashkow said, pulling his coat closed. “Just saw him. This is my last day.”
    â€œVacation?” I asked.
    â€œArmy,” he said. “I joined a week ago. The papers say things are going good, but I don’t know.”
    â€œI don’t know either,” I said. “Good luck. Win the war fast.”
    â€œI’ll try,” said Rashkow, adjusting his blue cap as he lumbered down the stairs.
    The damned war kept intruding on my life and profession. It was hard to concentrate on your career when all about you were losing their heads and blaming it on others.
    The desk sergeant, an old timer named Coronet, motioned me over and handed me an envelope.
    â€œJust came for you,” he said, without taking his eyes off two silent Japanese kids about twenty who were handcuffed together on the bench in a corner.
    â€œWhat’d they do?” I asked Coronet, whose hostility to the two took the form of a jutting lower lip and clenched fists.
    â€œWoman sitting behind them at the Loew’s heard them applauding Pearl Harbor during the newsreel and hissing Roosevelt,” Coronet explained.
    The two young men, both skinny and not sure whether to be scared or defiant, looked at Coronet and then at me.
    â€œThat’s a crime?” I said.
    â€œSure it’s a crime,” Coronet said without taking his accusing eyes from the pair. “We’re at war.”
    That didn’t answer my question, but I knew I would get nothing more