Vampyres of Hollywood Read Online Free PDF

stuff on the murders. Buncha queens gettin’ crazy ’bout their upcoming slates—ain’t nobody above the line wants to leave the house to go to work.” No ordinary bum then; this guy knew what he was talking about. On closer look, I thought I recognized him from a nighttime soap, maybe twenty years ago. Dallas or Dynasty or one of those D shows.
    “Thanks for watching the car. And don’t drink on an empty stomach.” I handed him a five and got in the Jag.
    I took Beverly Glen to Sunset and made a right, avoiding the traffic on Little Santa Monica through Beverly Hills. Benny had been working the same location for at least seven years.
    I’d known him for ten. Since the first time he got busted. He grew up rich and white in Lenexa, Kansas, son of an entrepreneur who made it big in greeting cards and a mother who did charity work. All that business going on and nobody had much time for little Benny. Just plenty of weekly allowance and a lot of free time to spend it. Once he found out he could spend it on drugs, life got a whole lot better. By the time Mommy and Daddy figured out where their money was going, he’d fried his brain and pulverized a brand-new T-bird.
    They sent him to Betty Ford, the place to go in the mid-eighties, and when he was released he took up running. Not exercising, just running. You know, walk into a mini-mart, pick up a couple of items, stand in line until you get to the register, and then start running. Simple, neat, and usually no one bothered to chase him. Until the day he hit Mr. Kim’s on Western Boulevard near 6th. Mr. Kim must have run track back in Seoul, because by the time the uniforms got there he was seated on Benny’s back, bouncing up and down like he was riding a bull, beating Benny around the body with a frozen dinner. Kim got his groceries returned and Benny got five days in County Medical—in a cast for his broken ribs.
    Who knows what happened when he was inside, but when he got out he decided he’d follow in Daddy’s entrepreneurial footsteps, and so he started a publishing company. This involved selling maps to the stars’ homes from the side of the road. It wasn’t quite the greeting card business, but it was—technically—publishing.
    Why the hell anyone wants a map to a star’s home is beyond me. There’s not much to see. No one ever steps out of their house in Beverly Hills and when they do, they’re so hidden by iron gates and bougainvillea they might as well be invisible. You think if you park a tour bus outside his home, George Clooney is going to come out and wave? He’s a nice guy, but believe me, it’s not going to happen. And you’re not going to find Pamela Anderson with a pooper-scooper on her front lawn, either.
    Nonetheless, it’s a big business in L.A. And not just maps to a star’s home or a star’s former home or a former star’s home. No. That’s a little too common. How about the gas station where the son of Michael Ansara and Barbara Eden was found dead in his pickup truck? Or the cemetery where Robert Blake’s attorney committed suicide? Or the mobile home where Lani O’Grady’s life came to an end?
    This is where Benny comes in. Dead stars. Maps and tours. Not just tours to their homes, oh no, Benny does the graveyard tours where they’re buried and the “Check-Out Tours” where they took their final breath. I’d heard he’d once tried selling sheets that he swore Bob Hope had died in; someone got suspicious when they realized the sheets were polyester. Bob had much more class than that. I suppose if he could, Benny would walk the folks from Omaha down the halls of Cedars-Sinai to point out the hospitalized almost deads, too.
    According to O’Brien, he’s raking in the bucks.
    I made a right on Rexford. Halfway up the block I could see Biblical Benny lounging in a lawn chair on the curb, a metal sign reading “Death Star Maps” staked into the grass between the street and the sidewalk. Leaning against his lawn chair was