Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir Read online

  The oleander stalks prick like barbed wire and my dress blacks will be sadly disheveled, but I manage to push myself through the tunnel of missing stones to the other side.

  I allow my innards to expand, shake out my outer coat, and gaze upon the moonlight grazing among the short grasses and tall monuments.

  “This is a cemetery,” I complain. (I am too young to be in such a place.)

  “Hmmm,” Miss Midnight Louise says thoughtfully, rubbing against my side.

  Kissing up will not cut any crypts with this dude.

  “So why are you here?” she asks.

  That was my question, but it has been forgotten. “I am hunting Big Game.”

  “You are always doing that, to hear you talk. I suppose you want a tender reunion with Butch and Osiris.”

  “Tender I will leave to you. Reunion, yeah.”

  “Follow me.”

  This is not what I had in mind, but I have almost no choice. I am still trying to figure out what Miss Midnight Louise is doing on the premises when I find myself past all the monuments and tomb-stones and crypts and other gruesome but ornate set dressings.

  I hear the tinkle of…a waterfall, I hope. Either that or the MGM Grand’s giant Leo the Lion statue is taking another untimely, three-story leak.

  There are walkways of flat stones, bowers of exotic plants, patches of clipped thick Bermuda grass, sandy pits…this is either a really nice golf course, or it is —

  A growl that sounds like marbles the size of basketballs being shaken together makes the ground vibrate.

  I freeze.

  “Do not worry,” Miss Louise purrs in that superior tone that makes me want to slap her whiskers off. “It is a friend of ours. Of mine, I should say.”

  “You have earth tremors for friends?”

  “Just Lucky, I guess,” she answers with a grin that would make the Cheshire Cat frrrrrow up.

  We round an outcropping of canna lily leaves and come face to face with this large black dude with a mug the size of a beach ball.

  Black panther, no doubt about it. Lean, mean, and counterculture, if domestication is the name of your game.

  A huge black paw lifts and hangs over Miss Midnight Louise.

  I gulp, then leap forward to knock her to safety.

  The looming paw does not descend, but Miss Louise swipes me again on the rear.

  “Ow! What was that for!”

  “Conduct becoming a male chauvinist porcine. I do not need protection from Mr. Lucky. Do you not recognize Butch from the Rancho Exotica? He is the one who shared his dinner with poor Osiris, thanks to me.”

  “Oh. Sorry, Mr. Butch. I mean, Mr. Lucky.”

  The paw lowers and tickles my ears, and my back and my everything.

  “Is this your poor old dad?” the black panther’s voice growls like thunder above me. “He was most valiant in your defense, although sadly ineffective.”

  “That is my dad. He wants to see you for some reason. I am sure he will update me shortly.”

  Well, what is a practical private eye to do? I am where I want to be, about to interview who I want to see. The only fly in the ointment is the odious Miss Louise, and telling her so would be highly self-destructive in present company.

  So I do the right thing, ignore the chit, and get down to the chitchat with the Big Boys.

  Saturday Night Stayin’ Alive

  Women in strip clubs that catered to men either had business in being there, or no business at all in being there. Women with no business at all being there attracted attention, all of it either bigoted (“dyke!”) or unflattering (“frigid freak”).

  Molina couldn’t afford attention and she couldn’t admit to her real business in being here at Saturday Night Fever — police business — so tonight she was a location scout for C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation.

  It gave her a professional payback to name-drop the hit forensic science TV show that uses Las Vegas as a backdrop for its high-tech and personal look at maggots, body parts, and implausible police procedure.

  Tonight, Molina was here on official business, and she was not alone.

  Visibly alone, yes. Actually, no.

  She glanced in the mirror behind the bar at Sergeant Barry Reichert, who usually did undercover drug detail. His dirt-biker ensemble and party-animal attitude fit right in at Saturday Night Fever.

  At the moment he was stuffing ten-dollar bills in about six G-strings at a prodigious rate, all the time getting paid back in information that was worth hundreds.

  Molina sipped her watered-down no-name whiskey and kicked back, despite the relentless overamped beat of music to strip by: loud, all bass, and brutally rhythmic.

  She could relax and (almost) be herself because tonight she knew where Rafi Nadir was: being tailed by a plainclothes officer who had reported him across town at another strip club. Purely a customer now, not a bouncer.

  She glimpsed her curdled expression in the mirror, as if she was drinking a whiskey sour.

  Didn’t want to think about why a man she had used to know hung out at strip clubs. Know? “A fellow officer” was the now-inoperative phrase. Another phrase followed, one even more painful to roll around in her head like ice in an empty lowball glass: an ex-significant other.

  Barry unglued himself and his wad from the bevy of off-duty strippers and lurched to Molina’s station at the bar.

  “Hey, casting director lady!” he greeted her with feigned quasi-drunken camaraderie.

  “Location scout,” she corrected him for whatever public they played to during even the most private conversation.

  “Whatever, babe.” He grinned. Barry Reichert enjoyed getting into a persona where he could play fast and loose with a ranking female homicide officer. That was almost living as dangerously as risking his sanity and life among the crystal meth set.

  Barry was an unstriking brown/brown: hazel-eyed, dishwater brown-haired, middle-American guy with scraggly coif, a five o’clock shadow aiming for midnight blue and missing by several shades, and scruffy casual clothes.

  Like all undercover officers, he absorbed his role. He was “in character” night and day, even when a slice of reality stabbed through on the knife of a cutting remark.

  Despite his apparent shaggy geniality, Barry reminded her of that walking immaculate deception, Max Kinsella.

  Molina tried not to let her distaste show. She was playing at undercover work now herself, and it was entirely different from anything she had done in police work before except for a brief, early stint as john-bait in East L.A.

  “Come on,” Reichert was cajoling, maybe only half kidding in his womanizing role, “you could use a guy like me, admit it.”

  “Using is one thing; liking it is another.”

  “Ooooouch!” He shook a mock burned hand. “I’d be great on camera.”

  By now everyone at the bar had lost interest in their interchange.

  Barry leaned so close she could smell his motor-oil cologne. “You getting any info?”

  “A little. And you?”

  He lifted her almost empty glass and sucked the remaining water and the ice filling it. “The girls are spooked.” He spoke so softly that he might have been whistling Dixie through his teeth. “These parking lot attacks are getting to them.”

  Molina nodded. Strippers weren’t dumb. They saw the axe from the first. “You see that man I mentioned?”

  Reichert’s shaggy yeti-like head shook. “No really tall guy like that here. You ever notice that guys who patronize strip clubs tend to be short? No? True. Must be compensation. For the height of what, I won’t say.” Grin. “As far as tall guys go, not even an Elvis in disguise either. Were you serious about that?”

  “I’m always serious, Reichert.”

  He grinned as if she had issued him a challenge. “So I heard. The Iron Maiden Lady of Homicide.”

  She didn’t react. Stoicism was the best defense. “Believe it. I don’t care how much you’re enjoying a break from the speed freaks, Reiche
rt, I’m after a killer here, maybe a serial killer. He won’t play the part, like you do, but he’ll mean business. So you keep at it. I’m sure those bills are burning a hole in your…pocket. Enjoy.”

  She pushed off the bar and headed for the door. Halfway there a drunken topless stripper collided with her.

  “Hey, who was that lady! Whatcha doin’ here?”

  “I’m a location scout.”

  “Location scout?”

  “For a TV show.”

  “Oh, a TV show. C’mon, you gotta be in the picture.”

  “No.” Molina pulled her arm away.

  “We’re all having our picture taken. It’s Wendy’s birthday. C’mon.”

  Molina didn’t have to “c’mon.” A bunch of strippers surrounded her, hanging off her shoulders and making her part of a topless chorus line.

  “That’s it, ladies,” a guy shouted over the noise,“get closer now. Smile.” The photographer backed up to include the whole impromptu row, the camera’s long telephoto lens obscenely erect given the atmosphere.

  Molina ducked her head, let the false hair fall forward over her face just as the camera flashed.

  “Sorry, ladies, I’m outa here.” She pulled away, the drunken one clinging.

  “It’s my birthday,” she slurred,“you gotta say ‘Happy Birthday’.”

  “Happy Birthday Suit,” Molina muttered, making for the door.

  She wasn’t happy about being in a photo. These pro-am shutter bugs always haunted strip clubs, selling prints to regulars and the girls themselves, cataloguing offstage life and likely illegal activities.

  The whole scene had a stench that was almost smothering. She crashed through the door to the outside, suddenly understanding what prisoners must feel on release.

  Air. Black night. Bright constellations falling to the ground, like angels, and becoming neon signs. Another night on Paradise. On Paradise Avenue in Las Vegas, a long, straight row of strip clubs magnified to infinity.

  When you thought about the endless numbers of women who found a tawdry glamour and even self-esteem in flashing nudity at men, and the families they came from that made this strip-club life seem a far, far better thing than they had ever done…. Molina shook her head, though no one was there to see it.

  In another moment she herself didn’t see the gaudy neon tracks of signs narrowing into the distance like lonesome train rails. Her mind was back in the Valley Hospital room, watching a girl who called herself Gayla lying pale and lost in some monotone film nightmare produced by that low-budget pair of mind-numbers: pain and pain killers.

  The injuries from the attack Molina had almost witnessed in the Kitty City strip club parking lot were minor, but Gayla’s voice rasped from a near-throttling. Her knees had been skinned, her wrist sprained. All minor injuries in a major-trauma world.

  “Did you see or hear anything? Anyone?” Molina had asked.

  Gayla’s red-blond frizz of a hairdo had thrashed back and forth on the pillow.

  “No, ma’am,” she said, either reared in a household that taught children respect for their elders and authority figures…or that beat the hell out of them until everyone they met was a force to be reckoned with and kowtowed to.

  “No, ma’am. If I’da seen something I’da screamed. You know? I just sort of slipped and my throat was all tight, and my elbows and knees burned and someone was leaning over me.”

  “Someone. Tall, dark?”

  Gayla frowned. Every night she saw faces on the other side of the spotlights, all blurred and all Someones. “Dark. The hair. Maybe.”

  Maybe. Maybe Kinsella. Maybe…Nadir.

  “Were the eyes dark, or light?”

  “It was night.” Gayla finally sounded indignant enough to speak up for herself, for everything she missed really seeing as it was because life was nicer that way. “I couldn’t see eyes. I didn’t see face. Just something…dark coming at me and knocking everything out from under me. And breath. It was hot on my cheek.”

  “Breath. Did you smell anything on it?”

  “Wow. You know, when I was feeling sick there on the ground, it did seem my sense of smell kicked up. Like when you —”

  “When you what?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t. When?”

  “During…it.”

  “Oh. That.” Molina sighed. “So what was the smell in the parking lot?”

  “What? I wasn’t doing…it.”

  “The attacker’s breath. What did it smell like?”

  Gayla’s faced screwed into such exaggerated concentration that she winced when her muscles hurt from it. “Gum, I guess.”

  “Gum?”

  “Gum.”

  Molina chewed on that. Neither suspect was what she’d call a gum-chewing man. Unless he’d drunk something that often flavored gum.

  “The scent. Was it cinnamon? Spearmint? Fruity?”

  “I don’t know. For just a second I thought…maybe spicy, I don’t know.”

  Spicy. Did they put cinnamon sticks in anything besides hot Christmas punch? Or maybe it was breath mints! Any scents similar? Check it out. Check out every damn breath mint on the market.

  “But you didn’t see anything?” Molina pressed.

  “I told you, no!”

  “Did you sense how tall the man might be? He was behind you. He choked you, forced you down. Did he feel like a shadow of yourself? Not much taller, but stronger? Or did he come from above, like a tree, bearing down?”

  “Gee. I don’t know.” Her vacant, pale eyes, no color to speak of, like her opinions, her testimony, blinked rapidly. “I can’t say. It was like a…spike, driving me down. I just gave, without thinking about it. It was so sudden, I didn’t know anything else to do.”

  Molina looked at this frail young woman. She was a willow, this girl. She would bend to any will stronger than hers, and every will was stronger than hers. That was why the attacker had picked her. He knew a beaten-down soul when he saw it. It was so unfair! Those whom life had already battered gave like reeds and took more battering.

  Molina reached to cover Gayla’s hand on the thin hospital blanket. “I’m sorry. We’re going to find the man who did this. Stop him.”

  Gayla nodded, looked like she believed her. Smiled a little. Sadly.

  “There’s always another, though,” she said. For the first time during the interview, she sounded very, very certain about something.

  Molina’s flashback faded, leaving her back in the Las Vegas night, standing alone on Paradise, not certain about anything except that she had to catch an elusive killer.

  Too bad that arresting either of the two leading candidates for the honor would be disastrous for either her career or her personal life. Or both.

  Asian Persuasion

  It turns out that I need an interpreter with the Big Boys. By allowing Miss Louise to check out their circumstances at the canned hunt club first, I have encouraged them to bond with her, not me.

  You would think that male solidarity would overcome a little exercise in charity like visiting the imprisoned, but no such luck. Mr. Lucky, the black panther, and Osiris, the leopard, now think that Miss Midnight Louie is the cat’s meow, and I am merely a tolerated hanger-on.

  At least I am allowed to eavesdrop.

  “So how plush a pad is this?” she asks.

  “Like the cemeteryscape up front,” Mr. Lucky says,“this is a fine and private place.”

  I do not think that he means to paraphrase a poet, especially a Cavalier poet, but he does. I refrain from pointing it out. This is not a poetry crowd.

  “You will get used to the funereal facade,” Osiris assures his new roommate. “It is a security dodge that protects all our hides, including that of our esteemed sponsor, the Cloaked Conjuror.”

  “An artful dodge,” I put in with admiration. “Hiding behind a cemetery is what you might call ironic, as his life is always in danger because his act reveals the ploys behind some of the most famous magical illusion
s of all time. That is why the Cloaked Conjuror must disguise his face and voice even on stage. Of course he makes enough moolah at it to challenge that casino known as The Mint for the title.”

  “I do not know about him,” Mr. Lucky replies with a hackle twitch. “That creepy leopard-spotted mask is insulting to the real thing, and his voice sounds like he is gargling rattlesnakes. I liked the Man in Black who stole us back from the ranch better.”

  “Mr. Max,” Mr. Lucky purrs in basso agreement. “I have heard of him often on the Big Cat circuit. It is a shame that he has retired from the magician trade nowadays. He was the best. We guys in black are pretty hard to beat.”

  “Hear, hear!” I put in, but am ignored, except by Miss Louise, who corrects me. “Gals in black, too.”

  “Speaking of gals in black,” I put in, hoping to be heeded for once,“I hear you two big guys are going to be working with a new female magician. How is that going?”

  “How does a pipsqueak like you know about our secret sessions?” Osiris growls.

  “I hear things others do not. It is my job. I am a private investigator.”

  “She does not wear black,” Osiris says,“this new lady. At least not all the time, although I commend the truly long fingernails she wears. As long as some human females’ high heels. Four inches, I would say.”

  “Awesome,” purrs Mr. Lucky, cleaning between his own four inch shivs.

  I try not to shudder, knowing that the evil Shangri-La and her light-fingered mandarin stage-shivs stole my Miss Temple’s ring as part of her so-called act three months ago. Besides, it is more important to know what Shangri-La is up to now.

  “So Miss Shangri-La is indeed joining the Cloaked Conjuror’s act?” I say idly.

  “And that kitten of hers.” Mr. Lucky lifts a paw the size of a catcher’s mitt and licks it cleaner than home plate.

  “You mean” — my breath catches in my lungs like a two-pound koi in the throat — “a piece of fluff about the size and weight of Miss Midnight Louise here, only pale of coat?”

  “She is a funny-looking feline,” Mr. Lucky says,“not a symphony in monotone like Miss Midnight Louise. Her eyes are an unnatural blue shade, her body is the pale liverish color of the pablum I am given when I am sick and off my feed —”