Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (32 page)

“Do you have any idea,” Temple asked, “who might have killed that one stripper and attacked another one in the club parking lots?”

“Lots of ideas. Too many. It’s my job to watch these guys, but it’s a hard call. These places attract hustlers. Some of them are customers, but not usually, or self-appointed ‘freelance’ photographers or serious loose cannons. See that guy over there, who looks like he just left the orgy set of
Gladiator
?”

Temple nodded at the apt description. The man was a kind of Hugh Hefner clone, old and stringy but surrounded by busty Barbie dolls wearing attire stringier than he was. His white hair was combed forward into a Roman fringe designed to camouflage a hairline that had receded like the Tiber in a drought.

“The perfect suspect,” Lindy went on. “Wants those girls young enough to be his granddaughters hanging off of him by the dozen. Spends mucho dollars keeping that harem around him every time he comes in.

“After all the money he spends on the pleasure of their public company, you can picture him waiting in the parking lot and assuming one of them could be persuaded in giving him the pleasure of her private company.”

“And would she?”

“We’re strippers, not hookers. If an individual girl feels sorry for the old coot, that’s up to her. But most of ’em can’t wait to get out of here. They have lives like everybody else, kids, and boyfriends, husbands.”

“So Caesar in his would-be salad days over there really isn’t a good suspect?”

“Could be, but I doubt it. He’s here to bask in the public attention.”

“You ever run into a guy called Rafi Nadir?”

“Raf, yeah sure.”

“You
know
him?”

“Well, he never worked for me as a bouncer, if that’s what you mean. But he used to come in as a customer.”

“Why didn’t he work for you? He seems to have been associated with several clubs.”

“That’s the advantage of us running our own place. I’ve been retired from stripping probably almost as long as you’ve been alive, but I’ve seen it all. Raf was okay as a customer, but give him a smidge of authority and he’d get carried away. It just went to his head. He’d get overaggressive with customers who were basically pussycats, boss the girls around like he was the manager or something. I never gave him the chance to go into overdrive here, and he was fine.”

“You’re saying he was a petty tyrant, all bluster.”

“Unless things went really wrong. That’s the trouble with a guy like Raf, you can mostly count on him to be sound and fury, but then that one time…all bets are off.”

“If somebody he’d been pushing around, a woman, got away and then he ran into her alone again, would he be dangerous then?”

“Like in an empty parking lot? You’re asking could he have killed that Smith girl. If the right ‘wrong’ chain of events came up, yeah. But ordinarily, no. That’s my take. I could be wrong.” Lindy lit another cigarette off the glowing butt of the last one.

The smoke was making Temple’s eyes and throat clog, but she could hardly ask an expert witness to give up an addiction. So she blinked hard to clear her contact lenses and eyed the room again.

She wasn’t sure what she would turn up if she visited the strip clubs, but something would be better than nothing. She already had a new angle on Nadir: all bark and less bite. This from a woman who had made it her career to size up men in a New York minute.

Nadir was Molina’s bête noir, but there were always two sides to a story. Despite his trashy background, he might not be a killer.

Did Molina think so also? Is that why she let him escape the compromising circumstances, and therefore had to let Max go too? Or was she simply too desperate to risk bringing Nadir in? If he knew she was in town, he could find out about her. He probably would. A man of bluster would not want to leave the past alone. And then he would eventually hear about Mariah. Temple pictured Nadir demanding parental rights, and shuddered.

“You okay?” Lindy said after a hacking cough subsided. “I said I thought Rafi could be less dangerous than he looked, not more.”

“I was thinking about something else. Who do you think killed Cher Smith?”

“Oh, hard to tell. Someone who just ran across her, I think. Stinking luck. If she hadn’t been in that parking lot at that exact time, if he hadn’t happened to have been there. That’s the kind of crime it usually is. He probably propositioned her and didn’t think she ought to go turning him down. She probably panicked instead of kneeing him and running. Sniffled or tried to scream. That’s how these things happen. He panics and is afraid she’ll tell.”

“So if he’s afraid, the killer, there must be somebody he’s afraid of.”

“Besides the cops?”

“Yeah. If it’s all one thing leading to another, escalating. Maybe he’s a pillar of the church, or just married. But he’s got somebody to answer to.”

“Don’t we all?”

“Do you?”

“No. But I worked at getting this way a long time, honey. This is all we old broads have to show for the struggle. No one much bothers with us anymore.

“Now. When do you want to become the little G-string girl? I have to get one my suppliers to fork over some of her wares.”

“I could sell them for her. I mean, I’d need to look legitimate.”

“That’s already your problem, Temple. You look way too legitimate to be in here.”

“You’re right. I don’t want to attract undue attention in the clubs.”

“Coming in with quick-change stuff will help that. But you need to lose that red hair. Can you get a wig with a kind of hippie bandeau around the forehead, like retro flower child? If you look slightly street-person you can come and go as you please.”

The idea of a wig hunt perked Temple right up. Not only was it an instant disguise, she always liked to see herself as other than she was. It was her version of the human potential moment, or her long-buried theatrical urges coming out.

The right wig and not even Max would spot her! Maybe.

“When do I get the costumes?”

“I’ll get ’em if you can give me a hundred down. Then, whatever you sell you get to keep.”

“Down and done,” Temple said, slapping palms with Lindy before digging in her tote bag.

“You didn’t say why you want to do this.”

“Oh, research for an upcoming job.”

“PR work certainly gets into weird areas.”

“Certainly does.”

Temple spun off the bar stool and passed through the dim and mostly empty club into the dazzling daylight of the Strip. Strip was sort of the key word in Las Vegas: a town that would strip you of your money and your clothes as soon as look at you, and it often did if you were stripped.

Why did she want to do this?

Because she needed to do something to hold off the tightening noose Molina had thrown around Max. Now she could see how quickly his conscience had led him into a quagmire, how much it would suit Molina’s hidden and public agenda to arrest Max for Cher Smith’s death. They were engaged in a secret duel to the death. A referee was desperately needed.

Max had said the homicide lieutenant was driven by the desire to protect her daughter at all costs. Temple didn’t share that maternal fierceness, but she’d seen it before. It was considered a noble urge, but it also could be blinding and dangerous.

Temple had her own to protect, though not a kid, decidedly not a kid. Max had always done everything he could to protect her. It was time she returned the favor. Her conviction about that was very…fierce.

So, c’mon, mama. Let’s see who can nail whom first.

The House of Midnight Louise

It is a long hike over to the Crystal Phoenix and along the way I have plenty of time to brood about Karma’s usual mystic mutterings.

I must admit that I have had an itchy-twitchy feeling that has nothing to do with psychic channeling and everything to do with plain old instinct.

I am worried about my little doll.

You will observe the startling new use of the plural.

Miss Temple, in my opinion, has been lower than a polecat at a limbo contest of late.

I know that she is worried about Mr. Max. And Mr. Matt. And Miss Lieutenant Ma’am C. R. Molina. In some cases she is worried about the sanity and safety of the persons in question. In others — well, one — she is worried what the person in question might do to threaten the safety and sanity of the others.

And I know Miss Louise. She is not one to miss an opportunity to tweak my tail. Yet here I have proceeded, completely tweakless, for almost half a day. Is it possible for a hardnosed dude to miss abuse? I do not think so. But it is possible to deduce that Miss Louise may not be absent of her own free will, because she would never choose to loiter around a spooky old mansion when she could be persecuting me with her presence.

I must proceed logically. Miss Temple is relatively safe with Mr. Max for the night. That is to say, she is safe from anyone other than Mr. Max, and she apparently thinks that is an all right place to be.

So I must first make sure that Louise is missing in action, and then return to the scene of the crime and decide how to find and spring her from Los Muertos. If I did not cross her trail in the house during my previous visit, she might be held prisoner someplace secret and inaccessible, of which that joint has as many such places as a slab of Swiss cheese has mouse holes. What? You thought they were air bubbles?

The Crystal Phoenix’s showgirl Big Bird is fanning its neon tail feathers three stories high as I approach. I avoid the sweeping entrance drive and veer around to the side, where the lights are low and the tourists are utterly absent.

I do not expect to be seen, but still dart from palm trunk to palm trunk.

Imagine when I find one of my refuges already occupie.

He growls and I hiss. We face off. It is too dark here to tell exactly what our opponents are, other than natural enemies.

I swipe the air and snag a shiv on a hairy bit of coat.

The growl deepens.

“Listen,” I say. “I am just minding my business. I suggest that you mind your own business and we go our separate ways.”

I head forward and bump brows with something knee-high to a dump truck.

“I will go right, and you will go left,” I suggest.

“No dice. I go right.”

“Fine.”

We move again. Right into each other.

“Uh, do I go to my right, or your right?”

Oh, great. A Ph.D. candidate. A Doctor of Phoology. “You go to your right and I will go to my right.”

We move, dancing in the dark. We stub our toes on each other’s hangnalls.

Apparently the tree trunk is no longer between us.

“I demand satisfaction,” my invisible partner grumbles.

“Fine. There is a floodlight out behind the service entrance. There is also a pretty big Dumpster near it that should offer plenty of satisfaction.”

“I mean a duel. Face to face.”

“You have not sized me up yet.”

“It does not matter. You have stepped on my toes.”

I realize that the doofus means that literally. I have stepped on his toes — and he on mine — and he wants me to fight him over it.

I shrug in the dark. A gumshiv expects frequent challenges to defend his…masculinity.

I head forward again and this time do not run into anything, although I do hear the click of large nails alongside me all the way to the back of the building.

As the broad fan of light thrown by the security bulb grows nearer, I glance sideways to check out my companion. For all I know, I could be accompanied by a stork in tap shoes.

No such good luck. My sparring partner, I finally see, is a Great Dane. Must weigh about one-twenty.

“What is a purebred like you doing loose in Las Vegas?” I ask.

“I have run away from home.”

“There is not much in the way of single-family housing on the Las Vegas Strip.”

“I live at a hotel.”

“I did not know that the hostelries around here encouraged dogs on the premises, unless they were greyhounds and running at the track that day.”

“This is not a people hotel. That is why I ran away. It is a nasty segregationist institution. I am making a political statement.”

The way he says “segregationist institution” I know he has gotten that phrase from someone else. From their brain to his lips.

“What is the name of this joint?”

“They call it the Animal Crackers Inn. You can see that even the name is denigrating. It implies that all animals are crackers.”

“Never assume ill will when idiocy could be a cause. You know that people have a disgusting weakness for cute names when it comes to animal-related businesses. It is nothing we of the superior species should take personally, unless we wish to waste our time on human foibles.”

“Foibles?”

“Ah, quirks.”

“Quirks?”

Why do I think this guy’s brain cells have also run away from home, without him?

“It is their problem!” I say. “My problem is why a big bozo like you has a hair-trigger temper. My shivs need sharpening but I prefer a less lofty target. Not that I could not slice the nose hairs off King Kong if I had a mind to.”