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She coughs and says, “If you know so much about Hollywood, you tell me.”

I remember some of what I saw a couple of years ago when Samael was still Lucifer and he was in town dabbling in the movie business.

“Studio magicians. They had their own hoodoo team on staff.”

She points a finger at me.

“Finally, you’ve said something smart. They wiped the whole thing out of existence. Like none of it ever happened. But it did, and I knew that if the studio could do that to the story, they could do it to me.”

“So, you ran.”

“Fast too. Then I got cocky and did this to myself.”

Thivierge frowns again, hard enough that I think her pale face might crack.

She says, “What I don’t understand is, with all the studio did to bury the story, how it ended up in a police report.”

“It didn’t. In the report, Forever Yours, Forever Mine wasn’t a movie. It was in a love note. It looked like a woman’s handwriting.”

“It’s always something, isn’t it? All that money. All that magic and they miss a lousy note.”

“Love is a funny magic all its own. Maybe the last piece of the affair didn’t want to disappear.”

She gives me an appraising look.

“I didn’t peg you for a romantic.”

“Mom watched a lot of soap operas while she drank her martinis.”

Thivierge half-smiles at that.

“Samantha,” says Thivierge suddenly. “That was her name. Mommy, I mean.”

“Can you tell me anything more about her?”

Thivierge leans back and looks up, thinking.

“Who remembers these things? She was Samantha something-or-other. A pretty little thing. Probably came from money. She always had it but never seemed to do anything for it.”

“If they were together back then, it would put her somewhere in her sixties now?”

“That sounds about right.”

“Did anything change between them before he died?”

She raises her eyebrows.

“Lordy, did it. The Chris I knew was always into sex, drugs, and parties, but before the end, he added God and the Devil to the list. At first, I thought he’d turned into some kind of Jesus freak. But it was even stranger than that. It was almost a William Blake sort of thing. He saw something, heard something, or snorted something that changed him. I suppose he became a kind of visionary, in his own cheap way.”

Zadkiel. Her again. Now she’s connected to both Chris and Samantha. Was it some kind of love triangle? She wanted him to give up Samantha and when he wouldn’t she killed him?

I rub my hands together and blow on them, trying to get some circulation going. Thivierge looks amused at my discomfort.

I say, “Once Chris came down from on high, was he still hustling?”

“The hustling thing seemed to just fade away. Partly because he wasn’t working hard at it anymore and he’d stopped coming to parties. But mainly it was that his screwy visions scared people. You have to understand, this was around the same time as Jim Jones and other charlatans were hurting people. A lot of us became wary of anyone spewing screwy religious nonsense.” When she smiles, bits of frost crack at the edges of her mouth. “What I’m saying is that he was a lot more fun back when it was just parties and sex magic. Way back when, some of us would get in disguises and go with him and Samantha to that big porn the

ater on Hollywood Boulevard.”