Garter belts and silk stockings, Snow? You and Howard Hughes wish! It'll be a cold day in Hell.

Which I am really looking forward to making come true in your case.

But first I had to report to my boss, Hector Nightwine.

The black-and-white photograph of Cicereau with his teenage daughter occupied the huge center screen of Nightwine's media wall.

"Excellent," he gloated. "That copyright-stealing thug! Try to rip off my rights to Maggie, will he? I'll smear Cicereau's messy supernatural private life all over the world's television sets. Child murder is not popular anywhere, even these days."

"We have no proof," I pointed out.

He hauled out a pair of half glasses with iridescent frames, and then snapped off the enlarged image I'd taken from Cicereau's computer.

"Las Vegas CSI V is a fictional show," he said.

"You're as liable for being sued as anyone, and Cicereau might go farther than that."

Nightwine chuckled and grabbed a fistful of what looked like mixed nuts from a crystal bowl on his desk. "Have some?"

"I'm on a new diet."

My new diet was based on eating food that didn't try to crawl away on you.

"Tsk. You certainly don't need to lose an ounce. I managed to get some black-market footage of your act at the Gehenna."

"What!"

"You can never underestimate Maggie fans. I must watch them like a hawk. They were ready to burn a million DVDs and hustle them internationally. Naturally, I waited until their job was done and unofficially seized the lot. They'll go like hotcakes and Cicereau can't do a thing about it."

"Hector! I haven't given permission, and I never will."

"Who's to say it wasn’t really Lilith herself? I'd give you a generous cut, of course."

"I've gotten enough cuts in your service, thank you. No. Absolutely not, not if you want any more work out of me. And don't whine. I also want the recording of Rick and me in Sunset Park. The enlarged, close-up and personal version you made from the distant spy camera footage."

"Have mercy, Delilah. That is one of the best cinematic 'meets' ever, and I did the final cut on it. Let me keep a copy for my private collection."

"No."

Actually, I think he liked it when I put my foot down. He pouted instead of whining and slaked his congenital greed with three fistfuls of nuts. They crunched like walnuts, but I didn't like the jointed black leggy "crumbs" that fell to his desktop.

"Agreed on the recordings," he grumbled through his gluttony. "For a yummy-soft bit of female you drive a hard bargain."

"Back to the case," I said. "We don't know everything yet."

"Of course not, but I can go to script on this. The existence of a series of Inferno chip designs prove someone-if not Christophe himself-was keeping the concept alive all these decades. I love the hunky vampire prince getting whacked and someone else getting the Inferno hotel and casino off the ground decades later. A real weeper for the supernatural set."

"This is all still speculation, Hector. Christophe may not like that."

"I'll make the Inferno owner black, maybe a warlock, and call the place the…the Snake Pit. As for the true facts, what else is there to know?"

"There's got to be more to it, that sad hit and secret burial of two young lovers. Cicereau didn't banish all the vampires just by killing a couple of lovesick kids, even if one of them was his own. And why kill them?"

"He's a very, very bad man, and wolf?" Hector asked archly, cracking open a nut with his teeth and gobbling the wriggling white meat inside. "But I like it, Delilah. You think like a movie mogul."

So I started thinking like a screenwriter. I stared at the photo of Cicereau with the daughter who had come calling in my cottage mirror ever since Ric and I had found her body, but whose name I didn't even know. Yet. She deserved a name on a gravestone.

The shock of Cicereau's paternity had kept me from even noticing others in the group shot until I viewed them life-sized on Nightwine's seven-foot screen.

The three guys in pinstriped, broad-shouldered suits were obviously nameless bodyguards, two in fedoras. The young one with the slicked back dark hair and pencil-thin mustache had a roguish Clark Gable forelock falling onto his forehead. Close-up, I spotted a thin streak of silver running through it. One-two-three, woof! Sansouci didn't look a day older today, except for the heavier silver streak job. Hmm. He'd shown me a flicker of humanity. Him I might be able to deal with.

And since when had werewolves become so long-lived? It was much easier to off a marauding werewolf with silver bullets than to find a vampire's sleepy-time lair, dig him or her up by night, and then do the stake routine. Everyone figured that nowadays full-blooded werewolves were rare, shot to extinction all over the globe like the wolves themselves, rather than dying of old age. But what if they weren't?

At the photo's edge stood one of those tall, glam chorus-girl types as common to Las Vegas as palm trees and with about the same IQ I tended to notice them as much as I do the trees. But her clothes were a hoot.

She wore a long white crepe gown. Its huge forties shoulder pads sparkled with rhinestones. The neck was high…but a narrow open slit ran from the hollow of her throat to her waist, and I bet the back was wide open. The skirt was draped toward her left hip in the Grecian goddess style popular in that era, and a spangled dark crimson flower pinned it there. A matching exotic bloom nestled above her right temple amid her elaborately upswept dark hair.

That's when it struck me that a lot of women in the forties looked like the Black Dahlia, that I could do a great job of it myself. Hmmm. Samba, rumba, tango. Chichi Latin dances and clubs. I bet Ric would flip if he saw me in that getup.

Look at you! Irma interrupted. Used to avoid your own image in mirrors and dress only for work. Now you’re walking through mirrors and morphing into the Vamp of Las Vegas. You go, girl!

Hector too was gazing on beauty bare and having his own private thoughts, which he now said aloud.

"I've decided to launch a new spin-off," he announced. "Las Vegas CSI: The Vintage Collection. It'll unearth all the unsolved crimes of the Werewolf-Vampire War era, use the music of the period."

"That's such a rip-off of Cold Case," I pointed out. The crime show was in its umpteenth year.

Hector's huge shoulders shrugged off my comment. "I can do an extended miniseries too. Dead and Alive: The Making of Las Vegas. "

I turned to stare at him.

"Don't look so surprised, Delilah. Your vintage clothing, has inspired me. You dig up the past crimes; I film 'em. I could even cast you in some juicy bit parts."

I sure hated to hear the words "juicy bits" and me in the same sentence from Nightwine. Still, the role of Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, on and off the screen appealed to me.

"It'd pay way better than a non-speaking role." His rum-raisin-brown eyes gazed dreamily into the distance. "A cameo role would keep Lilith's image alive."

And such a role would perpetuate the obsession of the creeps who were out to capture, debase, and destroy her. No wonder she'd gone missing, if she wasn’t already really and truly dead, and I had my doubts. On the other hand, my doing this for Hector might draw out Lilith…I was curious about her. Surely she'd be curious about me. Meanwhile, Hector was screenwriting aloud.

"You'd be…the Black-and-White Dahlia, a misty, mysterious glamorous noir film dame glimpsed in distant shots, like Alfred Hitchcock always showing up as a passing extra in his films. All you'd have to do is look good, do some moody voice-overs, and float around."