Cat in a Neon Nightmare Read online

  They were shooting the woman below now. From every angle, videotape and still camera. She was a featured player on Dead TV and soon she’d be a star on Grizzly Bahr’s stainless-steel autopsy table while he droned the dreary statistics of her internal organs and external injuries into a microphone for an audience of one. Himself.

  “Mine eyes dazzle,” Alfonso murmured, his hangdog countenance even droopier as they both blinked at the flashes illuminating the dead woman like heat lightning.

  “Huh?” Molina stared at him as if he were a stranger.

  He jerked her a weak grin. “ ‘She died young.’ That’s the rest of the line. Webster. Elizabethan playwright. Grim guy.”

  “Webster? I thought he was the dictionary guy. Elizabethan? You?”

  “You can’t help what sticks in your head in this job,” he said, shrugging. “There are a lot of pretty women in Las Vegas who die, and we gotta be there. ‘Pretty Woman.’ Roy Orbison. Greatest singer since Elvis.”

  Elvis.

  That was another subject Molina couldn’t stand, not since becoming involved with the Circle Ritz gang.

  Who would think that ditsy, sixty-plus landlady Electra Lark could have assembled so many usual suspects under the fifties-vintage roof of the round condo-cum-apartment building she called the Circle Ritz? Not only former resident magician Max Kinsella, Mr. Now-you-see-him, Now-you-don’t, was possibly involved in a murder, or three, but now, as of last night, so was Matt Devine, Mr. Altar-Boy Straight Arrow. Not to mention the object of their joint affections, Miss Temple Barr, who confused being a public relations freelancer with imitations of Nancy Drew! Molina just wished TEMPLE BARR, P.R., as her business card read, would decide which of the two apparently shady Circle Ritz men was on her personal Most Wanted list.

  And now Molina herself was involved with the whole crew both professionally, and, on unhappy occasion, personally.

  Involved. The word chilled her as many much harsher ones couldn’t. Speaking of which, there was a nasty task she couldn’t put off any longer.

  She took a last long look at the dead woman. This was as good as this Jane Doe would ever look before she was dissected like a frog princess, unless someone sprung for a casket funeral and they sutured and shined her up to surface beauty again, but Molina doubted anyone would bother.

  Molina’s eyes dazzled all right, but in Las Vegas that was just part of the eternal illusion for suckers to sop up and she wasn’t buying anything on face value.

  The woman lying on the neon net below, though, had indeed died young, and Molina was horribly, terribly afraid that it was her fault.

  Chapter 2

  Adam’s Apple

  Matt Devine dreamed of falling.

  It wasn’t pleasant.

  He woke up with a jerk, already sitting up. He was groggy, sandy-mouthed from rich food and too much wine and talk, and had to wonder where he’d been for the first time in his life.

  Remembering made him cradle his aching head in his hands.

  Vassar. An Eastern Protestant madonna. A call girl. Did that mean she was like a dog? You called and she came? Yes. That’s how demeaning the whole thing was. Buzz for a body. Pay for a person.

  He wondered if he was still a little drunk.

  Not that he’d been drunk last night…just high? High on anxiety.

  He’d tried to forestall one woman with another and had ended up feeling both had cheated him somehow.

  Trying to embrace the occasion of sin had become not…sin, just self-disgust.

  The phone rang.

  It was an hour of the morning when he was used to sleeping deep and hard, thanks to his night job. But he’d had the previous night off, so to speak, and had only hit head to pillow in the early morning hours. What time was it? Who could be calling him now? Didn’t matter. Drift away. Forget the night. Forget yesterday.

  The ringing drilled into his consciousness. Wouldn’t stop.

  He fumbled for the phone on his makeshift nightstand, giving his sluggish self mental marching orders. Lift the receiver, substitute a nagging human voice for the intermittent ring of the phone.

  Wait. Wake up, even if you don’t want to. If that’s not the phone, then it’s the…doorbell?

  Now he distinguished the mellow notes of the Circle Ritz’s fifties doorbell.

  Someone is at his door.

  No. Go away.

  Come again another day.

  That’s the rain. Right? The rain is ringing his chimes?

  He’s so tired. Tired of himself and his problems. As if he were the only one in the world….

  Ring. Ring. Go away. Come again another day.

  It won’t.

  He rolled off the narrow bed, surprised to find himself still clothed.

  The door was many stumbling steps away. He was drunk on too little sleep, that’s all.

  Finally. He opened the door.

  Rain, rain, go away. Especially if your name is Molina.

  Carmen Molina. Lieutenant Molina. Mother Molina, pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

  “You look like hell,” she said.

  She didn’t capitalize it. He could always tell when people were referring to hell versus Hell. Not going there, just referring.

  “Look,” he said. “I normally sleep until at least noon. Night hours, if you recall? Whatever it is, I’m in no condition to talk to you right now.”

  “Tough.”

  She brushed past him like a Las Vegas Strip Rollerblader. Rude.

  Matt turned to find almost six feet of female homicide lieutenant adding no ambiance at all to his cozy fifties-vintage entry hall and adjoining kitchen. She wasn’t about to move any more than his heavy metal refrigerator was.

  “I’ll put some coffee on,” he said.

  “Good idea.” She had wandered into the living/dining room and was peeking into the bedroom.

  He was surprised to find her being so obviously nosy, so unmannerly, but police people must come to think the world owes them a peep. Still, she’d always treated him more like a human being and less like some seedy suspect before.

  He put a saucepan to boil on the stove top and pulled two mugs out of the cupboard, checking to see if dust or anything mobile had collected in them. Didn’t often have company for breakfast, like never.

  “Hot water and instant coffee? You’re still living like a transient,” her voice came from behind him. “Planning to leave town?”

  “The world is way too full of costly, trendy, one-task gadgets.”

  “You’ve still got Rectory-itis. Father Frugal. First you reject labor-saving domestic devices as effete, then you get devout Catholic grandmothers to come in and do it all for you free.”

  “You make frugal sound corrupt.”

  “Maybe it’s because I’m a cop and tend to think everything’s corrupt.”

  He turned. He’d never seen Molina with this particular edge and it wasn’t nice. “This isn’t a social call.”

  “We’ve got to talk, and you’re lucky I can’t afford to do it at headquarters.”

  “You can’t afford to do it here.” He glanced at the unit’s various walls and tugged at an earlobe.

  She got the message instantly, having forgotten that Matt was possibly or even probably being bugged by his stalker, Kathleen O’Connor.

  “Oh, shit!”

  Matt stared. Molina had always been a lady, for a cop.

  She motioned him into the hall with one finger, turning off the heat under the saucepan with the other. It was fascinating watching a cop play hausfrau.

  “You go get that book you loaned me from the car,” she told him. “I’ll watch the boiling water.”

  Her gestures shooed him out into the hall. Through the ajar door he glimpsed her conducting a rapid search of his rooms. Max Kinsella had been the last person to hunt for bugging devices. Matt found it interesting that Molina followed virtually the same path: under furniture, inside tabletop items like the phone, up in lighting fixtures, and dow
n in wall outlets.

  After about fifteen minutes she circled back to the door, did a double take, and zeroed in on something on his entry hall wall. The plastic-covered box for the door chimes.

  Last was lucky. She pulled out a tiny object that instantly explained the name “bug.” In another moment she had put it in one empty mug and drowned it in tepid water from the saucepan.

  Matt felt as invaded as if he accidentally swallowed a dead fly from his coffee cup. It’s hard to define the sense of revulsion you get from knowing that someone’s been listening to you every moment. And what was to hear? He lived alone, didn’t talk to himself, had only the occasional phone call or visitor. Sick.

  Molina nodded him inside again and rechecked a couple sites, as if finding the one bug implied an infestation.

  They mutually rejected the coffee without consulting. She walked into the living room, stood before the red sofa that was its biggest piece of furniture, and regarded it with her back to him, as if it suddenly was significant.

  “Did Kinsella check the doorbell unit?”

  “No,” he said.

  He could sense her smile even from behind. “But I didn’t see everywhere he went and everything he did,” he added.

  “Isn’t that always the case with Mr. Kinsella?” She turned, and her face was as expressionless as he’d ever seen it. “For once I’m not interested in that slimeball. He’s not a suspect. You are.”

  “Me? What could I have done?”

  “That’s a very good question. You might as well sit down.” She gestured to his own sofa as if she was the hostess and he was a guest, an unwanted one.

  Matt sat.

  Molina didn’t. She began pacing back and forth the length of the long red sofa. She reminded him of a big cat in a cage. She was a tall woman, and she wasn’t slight. Not fat, just there. She was wearing one of the dark pantsuits she favored, even in summer, a look-alike for a man’s business suit. She never carried a purse, as if that sniffed of patent leather Mary Janes and other girly images. He knew there was at least one firearm on her plain-Jane person, and probably latex gloves, maybe a ChapStick, a nail file, and some keys, but that was about it, except for a shield and an ID tag.

  Her dark hair was thick, straight, and cut chin-length, a non-style designed to affront any professional stylist. Maybe she wore some lip gloss. Maybe. Matt smothered a smile. She reminded him of a lot of nuns who’d had to give up wearing the habit and had settled on a “uniform” quite like this. It was a way of dampening sexuality, and Matt could see that a female homicide lieutenant would want to do that. It certainly made her look like she meant business, every day, every hour, in every way.

  Only now it was 8 A.M. in his living room and he was apparently her business.

  “What’s this about, Carmen?” he asked. They knew each other’s history. Didn’t much talk about it, but they had a few things in common: growing up Catholic, serving as role models, working in “helping” professions that encouraged or enforced a code of behavior.

  “Lieutenant.” She articulated the word like a machine gun shooting staples.

  Okay. This was official. Then he didn’t have to go out of his way to be a friendly neighborhood snitch.

  “Is this about Kinsella?”

  “Screw Kinsella!” She didn’t shout. She spoke in a low, intense tone that was much worse. Carmen, using casual language? The never-part-time mother who didn’t want her preteen daughter growing up anything but a good girl? “I don’t give a flying…fig…for that lowlife at the moment, count my blessings.”

  She had pronounced “fig” with such intense articulation that Matt thought the obscenity it stood in for at the last moment would have been less harsh.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, spreading his hands, the classic gesture of the poor soul who was without a clue. “Something very bad has obviously happened—”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Ah, not at work. I had the night off.”

  “So where were you?”

  So this was about him, not Max Kinsella. Matt tried to shift his mind and emotions 180 degrees.

  “Don’t rehearse an answer,” she pushed. “Just tell me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I’m the police!”

  “If this is an official interrogation, then there might be reasons why I shouldn’t ‘just tell you.’ Do I need a lawyer?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out. This is off the record. You could tell me you offed Jimmy Hoffa and I wouldn’t have a shred of evidence.”

  “Unless you were wired.” Matt eyed her encompassing outfit with a certain wariness.

  She paced again for a few seconds, then stopped front and center. “Look. I’m trying to help you. I tried to help you before, remember? I don’t need evasions now. I need the absolute truth. Where were you last night?”

  “Truth is never absolute,” he began.

  “Enough with the hair-splitting. You want to search me?” She stopped again, spread her arms.

  “Good Lord, no.” The idea was completely alarming. “I just don’t understand…I’m still half asleep. You’ve completely changed. I don’t get it.”

  “I’m not wired. Just being here is putting my career on the line. I’m trying to help you…yes, and me too. I need the truth. I need to know. Where were you last night?”

  “Doing what you told me to do.”

  “Oh, God.” She put a hand to her mouth. “Where were you doing it?”

  “At the Goliath Hotel.”

  Her breath came out in a huff. And then all her tensile energy sifted away like flour into a bowl. She sat on one of his gray cube tables. “Take me through it, step by step.”

  “It’s kind of personal.”

  “No, Matt. It isn’t.”

  She nailed him with her police look, with the one personal attribute that was utterly riveting, her Blue-Hawaii-intense eyes. How did a Latina woman come by that Anglo-Saxon imprimatur? He guessed he’d never know.

  “I did exactly as you said,” he began, fascinated that the statement made her wince. “I burned and dodged all up and down the Strip to lose any tail. To lose Kathleen O’Connor, the bane of my existence, the woman who wants my supposed virtue.”

  “What do you mean ‘supposed’?”

  “Only that chastity isn’t a much-valued commodity anywhere but in the Church, and even there nowadays it’s proved to be a pretty tawdry concept, sometimes a matter more of hypocrisy than dogma.”

  “So you shouldn’t feel so bad about having to ‘lose’ it to save everybody you know from a vengeful stalker.”

  “I shouldn’t, but I do. Think Mariah.”

  She looked away, as if her hard-nosed act had cracked a little, maybe a lot.

  “Believe me,” she said, “I don’t want to eavesdrop on your psycho-social-sexual-spiritual struggles. I just need to know where you went, and what you did. And when.”

  “I got to the Goliath about…before seven. It was still light. I didn’t check the time. I had the night off, didn’t I?”

  “Boys night out,” she murmured.

  “I did everything you said. Took a room with cash. Changed at the last minute as if I were a superstitious gambler worried about the number. Tipped the bellman a hundred bucks for my lowly single bag.” Matt decided not to mention splurging on expensive new clothes for the occasion; it made him sound like a total hick. “Asked if he knew some entertaining young ladies.”

  “And—?”

  “Worked like a charm, Lieutenant. You sure know Las Vegas. Within ninety minutes there was this vision in my doorway. She was everything you said. Beautiful. Sophisticated. Smart. Dressed like a movie star at the Oscars. Downtrodden? Hardly. She was willing to hit the tables, but settled for dinner in the room. She ordered, knowing the hotel menu, and it was as expensive as she was.”

  “Good dinner?”

  “Best I ever had.”

  The interrogation had become a bitt
er point/counterpoint, each side elaborately not quite acknowledging a certain collaboration.

  They were in this together, Matt thought with a queasy feeling, as much as he and Vassar had ever been. A tacit accommodation.

  “And—?”

  “We talked.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “We did. You were right. She was a total professional. Proud of her role in the sex industry. No way was I going to ‘exploit’ her. Why do you need to know all this? You want to arrest the poor woman?”

  “If only I could.”

  “Well, I’m glad she’s out of your jurisdiction, then. She really was terribly bright. I’m politically incorrect enough to feel she could have had a better job, didn’t have to be doing what she was doing, but she was having none of that. I was insulting her to question her profession. And myself.”

  “Did you explain your particular situation?”

  “Yeah. She was fascinated. Liked the idea of being the one to ‘minister’ to such a newbie. Acted like a shrink. Freaked me out.”

  “So—?”

  “Isn’t there a name for this, Lieutenant? Prying into other people’s intimate affairs?”

  “Yeah. It’s called ‘need to know.’ Trust me. I don’t like this any better than you do. Cut to the chase. You ate, you talked, you took care of business, and then what?”

  “I left. Left fifteen hundred-dollar bills on the marble shelf in the bathroom, fifteen feet long. The shelf, not the fifteen hundred-dollar bills. I was worried about underpaying, so I probably went overboard. Could have saved four or five hundred maybe. What do you think?”

  “Don’t sound so bitter. It doesn’t become you. What time was it?”

  “Too late? Oops. Bitter again. I don’t know. I deliberately didn’t wear a watch. Didn’t want to know what time the cock crowed. I went out through the casino to the Strip. It was still dark, but a stiletto of light outlined the mountains in the east. It made me think of those thin tall heels she wore, and the snakeskin thongs that held them on.”

  “Snakeskin stilettos. Tools of the trade.”