Cat in a Leopard Spot Read online

  “Just old Leo,” Leonora reassured her.

  “Definitely not what we want at the Phoenix. The leopard and panther are…quieter, aren’t they?”

  “Of course.”

  “And, as I told your husband, we do have a wildlife consultant who will be in charge of the animals and exhibit. This is just a preliminary scouting expedition on my part, to decide whether we want to include a big cat or two. Or not.”

  “I understand. There we have two snow leopards. Very nice. Very expensive. Forty thousand apiece? Does that suit your budget.”

  “This is Las Vegas, Mrs. Van Burkleo. That is not exorbitant.”

  “A black leopard.”

  “Oh.” Temple stopped. The panther was sunning himself on some rocks beside a narrow waterfall that trickled into the moat far below. His muscled black coat shone like fresh tar in the light, and his big blunt head was far more massive than Midnight Louie’s. “He’s gorgeous. Is he like a leopard?”

  “The same thing, really, except for the coloration. Like golden retrievers and black Labrador retrievers. Black big cats used to be called pards, and the spotted big cat was named after the more golden lion—”

  “Leo-pards!”

  “Exactly. Yours for thirty, shall we say?”

  “Oh!” Temple tried to sound pleased. “And a plain—that is, regular—spotted leopard? Van von Rhine is a blond, and more partial to spotted leopards than the black ones.”

  “I quite understand. People identify with beasts, don’t they? I know I do. I am a lion person from start to finish. Besides the snow leopards, and it would be a shame to break up the pair, the only spotted leopard I have is still too new to be kept in an environment. You’d like to see it?”

  “Of course.”

  Leonora headed for a low set of doors built into the mountain that Temple had overlooked while gawking at the animal habitats, which were as impressive as any modern zoo’s.

  They left the heat and sunlight behind them as they entered a metal door after Leonora clacked a code into a keypad with her overgrown fingernails.

  Instantly, the air felt dank. Water pooled on the concrete floor.

  Temple inhaled the stench of animal hair and waste and raw meat.

  “The holding cages aren’t as aesthetic as the environments. You will need similar facilities behind the scenes for your animals at the Phoenix.”

  “Luckily, we have plenty of room for that.”

  Temple followed her guide past empty cages. She saw huge water bowls, and pieces of half-devoured meat of some kind she chose not to speculate about.

  Finally, she came to an occupied cage. A lithe leopard paced back and forth, its golden eyes burning in the eternal twilight of the cage area.

  “This one is…fresh,” Leonora said. “It’s a bit nervous. Cats like stable environments and he was just brought in.”

  “How long ago?”

  “I don’t know. A few days?”

  “Where is he from?”

  Leonora turned to stare at Temple. “I don’t keep the records. Cyrus’s secretary does. I see he has plenty of water. He should be calming down.”

  She moved toward the bars. The leopard suddenly brushed against that side, then turned and screamed at her.

  Temple jumped back three feet. The cry had been wild, furious, pained.

  Even Leonora retreated. “I don’t know what’s got into him. Perhaps homesickness for his former environment. If he doesn’t settle down, no one will want him and then what will we do with him, hmmm? Don’t be a bad boy!” She shook a predatory claw at the animal.

  It apparently read the same unspoken threat in her tone that Temple heard in her words, slinking to the opposite side of the cage, where it paced, back and forth, back and forth.

  “It looks kind of skinny,” Temple said.

  Leonora whirled on her. “The big cats are in superb condition. Not an ounce of fat, all muscle. Lean, as nature meant them to be. We do not keep them to grow fat and lazy, like house cats.”

  “Of course not,” Temple said hastily, wondering if she was overfeeding Louie on Free-to-Be-Feline. “He looks in peak condition. I’m sure we’d be interested in him. And the black one. But of course it is up to…Horst.”

  “Horst?”

  “Our animal guy. Consultant. I’m the scout, as I said. Horst will want to make the final decision.”

  Leonora nodded.

  Temple was already wondering if Max could do a believable Horst. Why had that name popped into her head? Van Burkleo would no doubt see right through a phony Horst. Who did they know who was German that they could trust? Maybe Max knew someone.

  She looked at her watch. Galloping Guccis, she had been here for two and half hours. Max must be fricasseed by now.

  “Oh, I must get back. Things to do. Thank you so much for such an informative meeting.”

  Leonora’s face had become the lordly mask of a dozing lion. She turned without comment to lead Temple into the sunlight and the fresh air.

  Behind them, the leopard screamed protest again.

  This time Temple didn’t jump. She just gritted her teeth and wished she had been a lion tamer in a previous life.

  Chapter 11

  Portrait of a Shady Lady

  Janice lifted an eyebrow when she saw the Probe in her driveway, but didn’t comment on Matt’s “new” old car.

  She looked like a schoolgirl with a sketch pad and a street-map guide to Las Vegas balanced on the crook of her right arm. She wore jeans for the first time since he had met her, and the arty earrings were gone. She noticed him noticing her outfit.

  “What does the respectable self-employed woman wear to a strip club?” she mused, arranging herself and her gear in the Probe’s front seat. “Something casual but nonconsensual? That’s what I concluded. What do you think?”

  “You don’t look like a stripper, in civvies or out.”

  “That was the idea, but how would you know?”

  “I’ve been backstage at some of the big hotel shows. I figure strippers don’t dress, or undress, much differently from showgirls.”

  “Were these topless showgirls?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “Well, the ones we see tonight will be. Maybe I should leave you in the car.”

  “I don’t think so, Janice.” Matt checked the rearview mirror for headlights. Nothing. Maybe Kitty the Cutter wasn’t infallible, after all.

  “What’s with the car?” Janice asked at last.

  “I’m trading my landlady for the Elvismobile.”

  “For this? Why?”

  “I like a low profile.”

  In the strobelike flash of a passing streetlight, he could see her eyebrows lift skeptically.

  “Okay,” she said. “Who am I to cavil with low profile? I’m racing out to sketch felons in a strip bar.” She squinted at the map under the rapid strafe of the next streetlight. “We need to turn left on Paradise.”

  He followed her directions religiously, trying to pretend he wasn’t nervous about going ever nearer to a long-forbidden zone. Once Matt had parked the Probe in the brightest section of the flat, featureless parking lot that surrounded Secrets like an asphalt moat, a material black hole of night, they regarded the building through the windshield.

  “Grim, isn’t it?” Janice said.

  “No windows, just that big winking neon sign and that little windowless door. It reminds me of an ugly mausoleum.”

  “Shabby. No advertising gimmicks outside. Like someplace you disappear into and never come out of.”

  “Apparently some woman did just that, or Molina wouldn’t want a sketch of a killer.”

  “You always call her that?”

  “Some woman?”

  “The lieutenant. No title, no first name?”

  “Almost always.” Matt wasn’t about to admit how deviously he used the lieutenant’s despised first name. Knowing someone’s secrets was definitely like holding a weapon. A weapon you didn’t give away to anyone else.


  “But not always.” Janice waited for more.

  “I guess always,” Matt said firmly.

  He recalled another secret he kept, and winced internally. Molina had custody of the opal-and-diamond ring Kinsella had given Temple in New York City. The elegant ring, instead of enhancing Temple’s finger, reposed in a plastic evidence baggie: found at the scene of another death, of a woman killed in a church parking lot. Matt wondered where the woman whose killer they were tracking tonight had been killed. Here? Or somewhere else? She hadn’t ever had an opal-and-diamond ring, Matt was willing to bet.

  Was the victim even a woman? Molina hadn’t said, and Matt had assumed stripper club meant dead stripper. He asked Janice, who shrugged her mystification. “I’m supposed to ask for a bartender named Rick to get a description of a guy named Vince. That’s all we mere translators need to know.”

  “Translator. An interesting description of the art of suspect portraiture.”

  “All portraiture is suspect. It’s filtered through the eyes of an artist. We make very unreliable witnesses.”

  “But you’re good at drawing out witnesses.”

  She nodded. “Ready? To be honest, I’ve never been to a strip joint before either.”

  Although a few cars were scattered around the parking lot, no one was coming out or going in when Matt and Janice approached the graffiti-etched door.

  “I don’t suppose many women go to these things. As viewers, I mean,” Janice said.

  “I don’t suppose many ex-priests do either.” He pulled the heavy metal door open and waited for her to enter.

  “On the other hand,” Janice said hopefully, “maybe we’re both wrong.”

  Sound blasted out at them like construction noise: raw and blind, teeth-rattlingly vicious. An aural attack. It was also a fortunate distraction for the terminally self-conscious.

  Janice rummaged in her purse until she plucked out a couple of tissues, quickly tearing them to pieces and handing him shreds to jam in his ears.

  Even buffered, the music was painful. After that sensual assault, any visual shocks were minor.

  Both of them fastened on the long oblong of the bar as an island of safety. Except…

  “There are two!” Janice shrieked.

  “What?” Matt pointed at his stopped-up ears.

  Janice’s left hand raised, her first two fingers forked in a vee. Not V as in victory, but—

  “Two bars,” she mouthed now, more than shouted.

  Matt turned to assess who passed for bartenders on each side of the room. En route, his eyes slid off mostly naked women writhing to the deafening beat they could feel through their feet and teeth.

  A medieval vision of hell, that’s all Matt could think of. Michelangelo’s painting on the Sistine Chapel wall, where the artist pictured his enemies damned and writhing under torture. Matt, on the other hand, hoped not to see one familiar face in this nightmare vision. Or to have one familiar face see him here.

  He pointed toward the farther bar. There the man behind the shiny expanse was a mustached thirty-something, instead of the beefy twenty-one-year-old who manned the nearest strip of shining bottles and background mirror reflecting long bare legs executing extreme variations on the splits.

  Janice and Matt climbed onto the plastic-upholstered barstools like flood survivors finding purchase.

  She laid her sketch pad atop the droplet-dappled counter.

  The man noticed them, ostentatiously finished swiping down the far end of the bar, then ambled over.

  It was early enough that the place wasn’t crowded, Matt noted. Or maybe it never was crowded. There was something desultory about the atmosphere, despite the pumped-up music and sound system, the women bobbing and posing on the opposing bars, the one in the purple-white spotlight on the stage strutting to the beat. She was a hefty girl in a cheap version of the famous Marilyn Monroe white dress blown up by the subway grate.

  Matt had to admit that he found photos of Marilyn Monroe engagingly earthy. She seemed to be mocking herself and the viewer even as she pouted and posed. From her to Jon-Benet Ramsey was one turn of the page backward. Sometimes all sexiness seemed an act the innocent put on to survive an anti-innocence world. That’s what you thought, even as they died of being pinup girls. All girls under the skin.

  “Rick?” Janice inquired. Shouted really.

  “Who’s asking?” Matt read the man’s lips.

  “Janice.” She held out a hand.

  He regarded it as a curiosity. “Yeah?”

  “Lieutenant Molina sent me,” she mouthed, putting her hands to better use at her mouth like a megaphone.

  Rick reared back, as if bitten. “Molina?”

  “I’m here to get your description of Vince.”

  Janice shouted every key word, punctuating the din, but the method seemed to work.

  Rick nodded.

  “Can we go somewhere quiet?”

  Rick shook his shaggy head. “Can’t leave my post.”

  Like he was a soldier, Matt thought. Like his was an honorable profession.

  “Okay. Tell me about Vince—” Janice shouted.

  The music, if it could be called that, ended as abruptly as an earth tremor, on a dissonant guitar twang drawn out to tortuous length.

  Quiet hurt as much as cacophony. Maybe more.

  Janice flipped back the cover of her sketch pad and held her pencil poised over the blank page. “I’m all ears, Rick.”

  “Okay, but you gotta buy drinks.”

  Matt was about to protest until he saw Janice’s anxious look. “Two scotch on the rocks.” He didn’t expect to get much in the way of fancy mixes, and that was the fastest highball he could think of. Matt shrugged his disavowal of his order at Janice while Rick turned away to clatter ice cubes into thick, ugly glassware and to pour a thin drizzle of whiskey over them.

  The silence reverberated in their abused ears, in waves and pulses, sounding like the ocean in a seashell.

  Even as Matt’s twenty-dollar bill was being scraped away, Janice was at work. “So. Coloring?

  “Dark,” Rick grunted.

  “Foreign?”

  “Just dark.”

  “Skin color?”

  Rick shrugged. “Nothing unusual. I said not foreign.”

  “Face shape. Long? Broad? Prominent cheekbones?”

  “Just…regular.” Rick smirked at her busy pencil.

  Matt slapped another twenty to the soggy bar top. “Molina said you’d cooperate. I bet if you don’t she’ll see no one wearing a badge cooperates with you or this place for a long time. Plus, there’s a tip in it.”

  Rick tilted his head, droned rapidly. “Weird dude. Slouched over his drink. Looked like one of those guys who hands out private-dancer flyers on the sly on the Strip, except he was bigger. Narrow. Big but narrow. Not thick-necked muscle, if you know what I mean. Face was…angular, I guess you’d say. All sharp and asking things, you know? Eyebrows like question marks. Greasy hair. Moussed to death. Trendy clothes, if you’re from 1975. Velour jogging suit, open at the chest. Cheesy gold necklace. Lots of chest hair. If he’d been broader you’d call him an ape, but he was…sleeker. Slippery. Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Nose?”

  “Long, like he was. Eyes slanted like a cat’s. Eyebrows too, maybe. He looked like he was in a high wind all the time. That moussed-back hair just made him look more like he was running.”

  “Good-looking?”

  “Mandy seemed to think so, the way she hung off him. ’Course, she was drunk six ways from Sunday, as usual.”

  “What on earth would make a girl get drunk in a place like this?” Janice muttered, her pencil flying, racing the deejay in the corner and his tape machine. She turned her pad to face Rick. “This close?”

  He blinked. “Damn. You’re good. But the face was broader, beneath the eyes.”

  “Broader cheekbones,” she said as her pencil made it so. “And?”

  “Younger. Guy couldn’t have been much o
ver thirty. I mean, he acted like the years of the world were on his back, but he wasn’t that blown.”

  Janice’s forefinger softened the bags under the eyes, strengthened the nose.

  “Yeah.” Rick nodded, getting interested despite himself. “And the mouth was more…mobile, not so tight. You take your fifties hood, and maybe put some, I don’t know, early Sean Connery behind him—”

  While Rick talked, Janice’s pencil walked over the nubbly paper, changing, changing, changing. She presented the latest version silently.

  Rick jabbed a stubby forefinger on the paper. “Eyes were funny. Out of it but in it, if you know what I mean.”

  Janice nodded, her mouth tightening as she worked and reworked the sketch.

  Matt had never seen her sketch so fast. She had taken her time with him, teased every little detail out of him. Now she was sketching in lightning time, and the results were just as good. Matt wondered if she had needed to spend so much time with him, or had just wanted to.

  She smudged, corrected, erased, kept flashing the sketch at Rick like a challenge. Each time he met the dare by mentioning another specific, another modification.

  It was like watching a duel, thrust and retreat, revise and represent. Back and forth. So fast he couldn’t keep track.

  “That’s it,” Rick suddenly conceded. “It’s him.”

  “Vince.” Janice nodded satisfaction as she squinted her eyes at the sketch pad. “Wouldn’t like to meet him in a dark pizza parlor.”

  Matt, who’d hardly glimpsed the results of the last ten minutes of rapid-fire exchanges, leaned close to see as Rick’s hand swept the twenty under Matt’s fingertips into his custody.

  A blast of resumed music made Matt’s heartbeat stop, then start again with great, galloping thuds. But it wasn’t the music that unnerved him. Even done up as Marlon Brando on Prozac, Max Kinsella was recognizable to anyone who had reason to know and fear, or maybe even love him.

  Thank God he was here with Janice, and not Temple.

  “Think I’ve got it?” Janice said, shouted over the music, smiling. She leaned back to rub her neck.

  Someone else leaned in to see the finished sketch.

  “Wow. You’re good,” she oozed at Janice. “I don’t see this guy here, though.”