Hard Case Crime: Money Shot (8 page)

“You okay?” he asked without looking at me.

I looked out the window at the tawdry, sun-bleached pawnshops and wedding chapels and tattoo parlors that we passed. “I’m fine.”

Malloy made a soft wordless noise and I realized that I wasn’t sure how to feel about him. I had never really been sure, but that cold, dead look I had seen in his eyes as he beat that thug stuck with me. Got under my skin. If I had seen hot rage or blood lust or something like that, I would have understood. After all, I knew what that felt like. If I could have beaten Jesse Black to death with my bare hands, I would have done it with a smile. But Malloy’s strange, chilly blankness was profoundly disturbing. It reminded me that I didn’t really know him. Malloy was all I had left of my old life, and I didn’t really know him at all.

“Gloves,” Malloy said, holding out one hand.

I peeled the latex gloves off my sweaty fingers and handed them over. Malloy crumpled them up and peeled off his own gloves, turning the last one inside out so my two and his left were neatly wrapped up inside the right. He pulled into a Burger King lot and parked far in the back, beside the dumpster and away from all the other cars.

“Want anything?” he asked, gesturing toward the restaurant.

I shook my head, queasy at the thought of eating after everything that had happened. My body still jangled with a kind of shaky, nauseous adrenaline hangover.

“Stay here,” Malloy said, taking off his jacket, unbuckling his shoulder holster and depositing the tangled rig in my lap. The gun was heavy. “I don’t want anybody to see you right now.”

I nodded and held onto the gun. It didn’t make me feel any safer.

I watched Malloy unbutton his blood-stained shirt and strip swiftly out of it, revealing thick, muscular arms and a white wife-beater undershirt that stretched taut over his hard, heavy gut. I had never met a man who actually wore an undershirt under a dress shirt. He had a Saint Michael medallion around his neck, a silver oval with a stamped image of a sword-wielding angel standing on a dragon. Malloy hadn’t really struck me as the religious type, but then again, being half Irish and half Mexican, he kind of had the Catholic thing coming at him hard from both sides. Being Italian myself, I could sympathize, even though all that was left of my Catholic upbringing was a fondness for short plaid skirts. I wondered how he explained working with godless harlots like me and my girls to kindly father so-and-so at confession. Never mind that whole beating-a-guy-to-death-with-his-bare-hands business.

“I’m gonna go get cleaned up,” Malloy said. “Give me your sweatshirt.”

He got out of the car and tossed his shirt and jacket, my sweatshirt, and the balled-up gloves into the dumpster. He put the original rental plates back on the car, then crossed the lot and went into the Burger King.

While I waited, I watched a trio of fat women herding a batch of squabbling children out of a minivan and into the restaurant. It seemed strange and surreal to me, the way the rest of the world just kept on going in the background of this madness.

Malloy returned all pink and clean. He reached into the back seat and grabbed a loud Hawaiian shirt out of one of the bags from Target. The shirt featured a bright, busy pattern of rainbow-colored parrots and tropical drinks. He pulled off the price tag and slipped the shirt on.

“Here,” he said, handing me another bag from Target. “I want you to change while I’m driving.”

“Why?” I asked, looking into the bag. It contained a matronly beige jersey tank dress, a lightweight pink cardigan and flat pink shoes. To top it off, there was a horrible pink cloth sun hat.

“In case anyone saw us at the Silver Spur,” he said, pulling a red baseball cap down snug over his silver buzzcut. The hat said
FBI—Female Booty Inspector.
“How do I look?”

“Like a tourist,” I said. It was almost impossible to believe this was the same man whose murderous, blank eyes had made me feel so cold.

“Perfect,” he replied, getting back into the car and pulling out into the light midday traffic.

“Turn right here,” I told him. “At this light.”

“We have a pretty good window to hit Eye Candy before the Vegas PD,” Malloy said, making the turn. “Zandora had the do-not-disturb sign up on the door so if nobody reports the racket we made, they might not find the bodies until she’s supposed to check out.”

I changed into the ugly clothes while Malloy drove, slipping the dress over my tank top and slithering out of my jeans beneath. I had plenty of practice changing in moving cars. Back when I was a teenager, I would routinely leave the house in some nice pastel good-girl disguise. Then as soon as I was out of Mama’s sight, I would tease up my hair and wiggle into zebra-striped spandex, all in the back seat of a friend’s car on the way to check out some cute guy’s band at the Thirsty Whale.

While I got myself dressed up to match Malloy’s tourist duds, we headed over to Eye Candy.

That place was in a class by itself, rivaling the biggest casinos for over-the-top excess. Like Disneyland with tits. It had opened after I was out of the game, so I’d never had the chance to dance there. My girls either loved it or hated it. The competition between the Eye Candy dancers was brutal and unrelenting, but for girls who were tough, ambitious and could take the heat, the money was ridiculous. Me, I probably wouldn’t have lasted one song in a shark tank like that.

As we turned off the freeway, Eye Candy’s huge, sprawling complex shimmered, mirage-like up ahead, a pink neon oasis of
LIVE NUDE GIRLS
in the midst of dusty industrial nothing. It was astounding, a self-contained multi-level biosphere of calculated titillation and shameless indulgence, open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Once the marks were in, they basically never needed to leave. In addition to the massive main stage and six smaller go-go stages, there were also eight private VIP champagne lounges and six special fantasy rooms. There was a restaurant where you could be served overpriced steaks by beautiful girls in tiny cowgirl outfits. A sports bar where you could be served overpriced beer by beautiful girls in tiny bikinis. A cigar room where you could be sold overpriced cigars by beautiful girls in tiny g-strings. The only thing you couldn’t do there was sleep. Or actually get laid.

Personally, I never understood the appeal of places like that. Eye Candy was a well-oiled machine that existed, like everything else in Vegas, for one reason only. To empty wallets. And once those wallets were empty there were three convenient cash machines to help fill them up again. Eye Candy didn’t sell pussy. It sold the dream of pussy. It was an endless glittering tease, all fantasy with no real payoff. It seemed like a big waste of time and money better spent on an actual hooker, but hey, my girls cleaned up when they featured there so I couldn’t really complain.

Malloy didn’t want to valet park, so he drove right past the guy in the gold vest and around to the self-park area off to one side.

“Wait here,” he said, just like he had said at the Burger King. I was getting tired of waiting, but I was also deeply grateful not to have to interact with anyone.

I watched Malloy walk over to the door of the club. As he went, I was amazed to see his usual wary body language loosen and open up. His hard, thuggish face went all soft and friendly, split wide by a big dopey grin. By the time he hit the door to the club, he had become every guy in every strip club in history.

A neckless lug in a tight tux patted Malloy down while he held his arms up in an affable sort of gee-whiz posture. He was then greeted by a leggy brunette in tiny peppermint-striped booty shorts and a pink Eye Candy baby doll t-shirt. She took his money and stamped his hand and as I watched her smile at Malloy and count out his change, I felt a swift spike of jealousy that took me completely by surprise. There was absolutely nothing between me and Malloy, but I still hated that girl in that moment. Not for her tan, aerobicized abs or her tight, muscular ass or any of a million other reasons women hate each other in this cutthroat
Cosmo
world we live in. I hated her for her pretty, perfect face. Her smooth lips and her straight nose and wide, bright eyes. My fingers went up to the swollen contours of my bruised and battered mug and I suddenly wanted to go rampaging through the club with a baseball bat, smashing every pretty face in the place.

I didn’t. I waited.

Cars came and went. Men went in and out, both in groups and alone. Time passed and even though Malloy had chosen a shady parking spot, it still got real hot inside the car. I had all the windows down but there was no breeze at all. I peeled off the damp pink cardigan and fanned myself with a California roadmap.

About a hundred years later, Malloy came out. There was a fuchsia smear of lipstick on his unshaven cheek.

“Got it,” he said, handing me a sheet of paper, tossing the baseball cap into the back seat and starting up the engine. “Know anyone who can read Romanian?”

I looked down at the paper. It was a faxed copy of Lia’s handwritten note.

“How’d you get them to give this to you?”

“I didn’t,” Malloy replied as he pulled out of the lot. “I got lucky. While I was waiting in the office for the manager to show up and talk to me, I scrolled through the memory on the fax machine. Looks like they haven’t erased it in ages. They probably don’t even know how. Anyway, the fax from your office was still in there so I just reprinted it.”

“What did you tell the manager when you saw him?” I asked. “When the cops find out that Zandora is dead, won’t you be in trouble for asking about her?”

Malloy shook his head.

“Nah,” he said, turning onto the freeway. “I just asked if Zandora was there. I said I wanted to talk to your models about you, that I was investigating your disappearance. The manager said Zandora wasn’t in till the night shift and told me to come back later. I thanked him and left. Anybody see you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Hope you’re right,” Malloy replied. “I got a bad feeling this is gonna get pretty ugly.”

“Do you trust Didi?” Malloy asked me, pulling off the freeway and into the quiet streets of Burbank.

I had been asleep for most of the ride back from Vegas. Well, maybe asleep wasn’t the right word. Dazed, out of it, shell-shocked and incapable of processing everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. I hadn’t noticed the sun going down and felt disoriented to wake and find it fully dark outside. Malloy had gotten another cheap suit jacket out of the gym bag back in Vegas and at some point during the ride he must have taken it off and used it to cover me. It was warm and smelled like him, cigarettes and supermarket aftershave. I pulled it tighter around myself, bunching it up under my chin.

“Of course I trust Didi,” I said. “I’d trust her with my life.”

He nodded and took the turn into the car rental place across from the Burbank Airport. I huddled inside his big jacket as I waited outside the office. When he pulled around front in his own SUV, he got out, walked around to the passenger side and opened the door for me.

“Thanks,” I said.

He punched some buttons on his cell phone, slipping on a hands-free rig as he pulled out of the rental place.

“Didi?” he said into the mike. “Malloy.” He paused. “Yeah I know.” He looked at me and then back at the road. “It’s terrible. Listen, Didi, I’d like to talk to you about the case. Tonight. Get a pen.”

He gave Didi his address just as we turned the corner onto his block.

“Twenty minutes,” he said and ended the call.

Malloy’s place was one of those little rundown fifties-era bungalow complexes in a so-so neighborhood, just off Hollywood Way. He drove past twice to make sure there was no surveillance before he pulled into the alley behind the complex and let me out, leaving the engine running.

“Go on,” Malloy said, unlocking the door to his apartment and ushering me inside with one hand on the small of my back. “I’m gonna go park the car.”

Inside his place it was immaculate and generic, like an IKEA showroom or a midrange hotel. No personal photos. No funny magnets on the fridge. No clutter of mail or books or DVDs. There was a sturdy gray couch and a black leather chair. A modest television in the corner and a blond wood coffee table with nothing on it. The kitchen was to the left through a doorless arch. It was narrow and yellow and very clean. At the far end, beneath the window, was a small aluminum table with a clean glass ashtray and a single chair. There were two closed doors, probably leading to the bedroom and bathroom.

It felt strange standing there alone in someone else’s apartment. It made me miss my own little house.

Malloy returned a few minutes later.

“Make yourself at home,” he said, setting his gun and shoulder rig on the coffee table. “But stay away from the windows.”

“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t sit down. I just pulled Malloy’s jacket tighter around myself.

There was a moment of awkward silence. I wondered suddenly who the last woman he’d brought to this apartment might have been.

“You want something?” Malloy asked, walking into the narrow kitchen and pulling open the fridge. “Water or a Diet Coke or something? I don’t have any hard stuff.”

“A Coke would be fine,” I told him, thinking the caffeine might do me some good. Sharpen up the dull edges. “I don’t drink the hard stuff anyway.”

He looked back at me with a can of Diet Coke in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.

“You quit?” he asked.

“Never really started,” I replied.

Malloy came back into the main room, handing me the can and twisting open the bottle of water for himself. He downed nearly half in one slug and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, then touched the split in his lower lip with his thumb.

“I quit,” he said.

Before I could think of anything to say about that, there was a rapid knock on the door. It was Didi. Malloy peered out through the blinds and gestured for me to step back through the archway and into the kitchen before he opened the door.

“Lalo,” Didi said, throwing her arms around his neck and squeezing him tight. “God, can you believe this?” She let him go and then wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s a fucking nightmare.”