Writing popular fiction

the leggy young woman and finally nodded. "I accept these conditions, naturally."
    "Be off, then," Jessie said.
    At the door of the suite, Slavek turned back to them and said, "I think it was much better when we kept to ourselves, when you people didn't even know, for sure, that we existed."
    "Progress," Blake said, with a shrug.
    "I mean," Slavek said, "there's much less risk of a stake through the heart nowadays—now that we understand each other—but the romanticism is gone. Blake, they've taken away the thrill!"
    "Take it up with city hall," Brutus said. He wasn't in the best of moods today.
    "It's seven years now since my kind of people entered real commerce with your kind—and things get worse every day. I don't think we'll ever like it the way it is now." Slavek had taken on the brooding tone that so many middle-European bloodsuckers adopted when in a musing mood.
    "The maseni have learned to live with
their
supernatural brothers—and vice versa," Blake reminded Slavek.
    "But they're different," the Count insisted. "They're alien to begin with. It was a natural thing for them to establish contact with their supernatural world. But they forced this on Earth; it isn't a natural condition here."
    "I hope not," Blake said. "If relations between the flesh and the spirit worlds, here on Earth, become as easy as they are on the maseni home world, I'll be out of a job."
    "You exploit other people's problems," Slavek said.
    "
Solve
other people's problems," Blake corrected.
    Grimacing to express his distaste, Count Slavek left the suite in a swirl of black cloth.
    At the same moment, Renee Cuyler's tears changed abruptly into anger, as he had expected they would. The woman ran at him, screaming, clawing with her well-minicured nails, kicking, biting, slapping.
    Jessie pushed her away and, when he could not settle her with words, settled her with three narcotics pins in the abdomen. She slumped down on the thick carpet and went to sleep. She snored.
    "Jesus, what a bore!" Brutus growled. He had no compunctions about using the Lord's name in vain or otherwise, though Blake had never heard him use it otherwise. He padded to the sofa, jumped onto it, curled up with his big, hairy paws hanging over the edge of the cushions. "It's one infidelity case after another, these days," he complained.
    "Boring but safe," Blake said. He went to the vidphone, punched out the number of their office and waited for Helena to answer it.
    "Hell Hound Investigations," she said, almost five minutes later.
    "You're a poor excuse for a secretary," Blake said.
    She blinked her long-lashed, blue eyes, pushed a strand of honey yellow hair away from her face. "Yeah, but I'm stacked," she said.
    He could see her swelling bosom in the vidphone screen, and he could not argue with her. He said, "Okay," and he sat down, a bit overwhelmed by mammary memories. "We've got Renee Cuyler safe and sound. I want you to call her husband and send him over here." He gave her the address of the hotel, and the suite number.
    "Congratulations," she said, smiling. She had ripe lips and very white teeth. She should have made commercials for unnatural sex acts, Blake thought. "Oh," she said, "You've received four calls this morning from a potential client."
    "Who?"
    "Galiotor Fil," she said.
    "A maseni?"
    "With that name, what else?" she asked.
    "What's he want?"
    "He'll only talk to you."
    Blake thought a moment. "Ill be back in the office in an hour and a half, if you get to Roger Cuyler right away. If this Galiotor Fil can be there, I'll talk to him."
    "Right, chief," she said.
    He winced and didn't have a chance to reply before she snapped off, her perfect face and better bosom fading from the screen.
    "Looks like you got your wish—for something interesting to happen," Blake told the hell hound.
    Brutus climbed off the couch and shook his head, his ears slapping against his skull, and he said, "Did I hear right? A maseni for a customer?"
    "You heard right."
    The hound said, "That's a first. What problem could a maseni have that his own people couldn't solve, that he'd need a human detective for?"
    "We'll know in an hour or so," Blake said. "Let's get our equipment out of the closet and ready to go, before Mr. Cuyler gets here to collect his wife."
    Brief Outline
    Background
. The date is 2000 A.D., with all the scientific and social advancement that date implies. But two things have changed Earth more than any scientific revolution ever could. First, mankind