Cat in a Neon Nightmare

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  So I nod him down to perch on my shoulder—Miss Louise is shocked to see me playing the diplomat between the species—and whisper a few sweet nothings in his feathered skullcap.

  He nods and takes off.

  “We might want to ask some follow-up questions,” she complains as his feathers disappear over the railing into the Great Beyond.

  “Do not worry. I got his room number. And he is not about to fly this berg, as his owner is in residence.”

  “So what do you make of it? A bird did it? A pretty bird?”

  “Well, a few other twentieth-floor pets than Blues Brother might take an illegal romp. What if a bigger Blues Brother, say a parrot, got loose? Say it landed on our victim’s shoulder, or even the railing nearby. Scared her right off her feet.”

  “You would call an Amazon parrot a ‘pretty bird’?”

  “I would call a vulture a pretty bird if it was big enough, and close enough. That is just a theory, given we know that Mr. Matt did not lay a hand on that lady’s, er, feathers.”

  “Get real, Gramps. I am convinced he could never kill her, or anyone, but I am not about to take odds that he did not give her feathers a real good ruffling earlier. I mean, the idea of the get-together was to get together.”

  “Gramps? Are you trying to tell me something, Louise?”

  “Nothing either of us would want to hear. So what have we got?”

  “A little bird who heard the dead woman talking to someone just before her fatal flight.”

  “ ‘Fatal flight.’ You should write for the tabloids, Pop. Who do you think we have here, Amelia Earheart?”

  “We have a room number where Mr. Matt met the call girl. We have a death the cops can’t get a handle on, because it took place in flight. We have a witness who couldn’t stand up in a court of law. And we may have a few more witnesses among the errant pet population of the twentieth floor. I propose we stake out this most interesting level and see what, or who, we turn up.”

  “A zoo!” Miss Louise responds with a delicate feline snort.

  But she does not offer any better ideas.

  Chapter 11

  Call Her Madam

  Alfonso and Barrett sat on Molina’s visitors’ chairs like the mountain and Mohammed finally come together in defiance of all laws of nature.

  The mountainously overweight Alfonso overhung his chair in a pyramid of sagging Big and Tall seersucker suit. He could have been suspended in air for all one could see/guess of a supporting underpinning.

  Barrett, on the other hand, was so leanly ascetic that he seemed to float above the steel-legged chair he perched on, angular elbows braced on angular knees, his putty-colored jeans and sport coat blending into the bland plastic shell that supported him.

  “We know whose stable she was in,” Alfonso announced as direly as a funeral director.

  “Not a ‘stable.’ ” Barrett’s pleasant tenor reminded one of “Mother MacCree” crooned in Irish pubs. “Too much like the fourth at Santa Anita. The deceased was working under Judith Rothenberg’s, er, sponsorship.”

  “Judith Rothenberg,” Molina repeated to buy time to hide her dismay. “She’ll want to make a federal case of it.”

  “She does run to the dailies at every opportunity,” Alfonso noted sorrowfully.

  “ ‘Vassar.’ ” Molina noted the dead woman’s pretentious working name. “I should have realized. Rothenberg still keep an office out on Charleston?”

  “Nope.” Barrett rustled through the pages in his card-crammed reporter’s notebook. “She’s in a strip shopping center now, rather appropriately. Near that new club, Neon Nightmare.”

  “Low profile, as usual.” Molina was being as humorous as she ever got at work. “Okay. I’ll handle this. Anything new?”

  “A bellman has narrowed the floors Vassar worked that night down to twenty through twenty-four, north side of the atrium.”

  “Figures,” said Molina. “Her head was facing the south side of the building. And how many hookers rotate through there a night that the bellman has caught such a solid case of Vague? Neon Nightmare, huh? Haven’t heard about it. Any connection with Vassar landing on a neon ceiling?”

  “It’s a semiprivate club,” Barrett said. “Part museum, part dance hall, and part theater.”

  “Isn’t ‘Nightmare’ a negative name for a business?”

  “Nothing attracts the Goth crowd of hip youngsters these days like ‘negative.’ They offer a multimedia experience,” Alfonso put in. “Kind of like Cirque du Soleil shows, only built around neon and hip hop and acrobatics and magic and music. Small-scale stuff compared to the major hotel shows, but it’s got a market niche.”

  “ ‘A market niche.’ ” Molina couldn’t resist mocking the eternal sell that drove Las Vegas. “So does death. Okay. I’ll handle Rothenberg myself.”

  “Think she’ll raise a stink?” Barrett wanted to know.

  “Doesn’t she always? I’d rather have heard our dead girl worked for Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter than Judith Rothenberg.”

  “I hear you, Lieutenant,” Barrett said, snapping his notebook shut as if he wished it were crushing a bug. “Good luck.”

  Molina didn’t believe in luck: good, bad, or middling.

  Not even now that the one call girl in Las Vegas that Matt Devine happened to draw had turned up dead in a lethal endgame of stud poker.

  She found the bland off-Strip intersection where Neon Nightmare squatted unimpressively. The building was blacked out for the daylight hours: it looked like a huge version of the Mirage Hotel’s volcano surmounted by an elaborate neon image of a galloping horse, mane flying, that would blaze against the night sky when lit.

  Neon was odd stuff. The tubes that housed the magical, mystery gas were the lackluster dead-white of tapeworms until electricity charged through them like stampeding elephants. Then the colorless gases inside glowed against the dark like lurid chalk marks on the velvet painting of a Las Vegas night.

  Neon was mostly a historical display now, not part of the New Las Vegas, which was more about squeezing money out of tourists for theme park attractions rather than gambling. Fifteen bucks to ride an elevator fifty stories up in a half-size ersatz Eiffel Tower. Twelve bucks to ride a phony Venetian gondola through a hotel lobby. Fifteen bucks to view an art display you could see for eight bucks at an established museum.

  Such high-ticket prices were paying down the development costs of the multibillion-dollar new hotels that peddled culture instead of the crasser side of Las Vegas nowadays. It was still all about money, and so was a call girl operation, no matter what veneer of political correctness you slapped over it.

  Like the mob that had ruled Vegas once, vice had gone corporate. Judith Rothenberg had an “office” as well as an agenda.

  Molina was not impressed, but this time she was backed into a corner of her own making. If Matt Devine got painted into it by any unhappy conjunction of events, her career was history, like neon. And maybe in as blazing an inferno as the Mirage volcano.

  NEW WOMAN, was the name above the door and window. Molina snorted. There was nothing new about the world’s oldest profession but PR spin.

  She gritted her teeth and went in, prepared to play the politician she loved to hate on most working days.

  A young, anxious receptionist took her name. Molina did not give rank.

  “It’s been kinda…rough around here lately,” the girl confessed. A phone line on her machine blinked. “New Woman. Miss Rothenberg’s not in. I’m sure she’d be happy to speak to you. May I take a message?”

  She grimaced at Molina as she hung up, apologizing to a witness of an obvious lie, “You’re here about—?”

  “The death.”

  “Oh. From the media. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for Miss Rothenberg to get back to you—”

  “From the Metropolitan Las Vegas Police,” Molina was forced to admit. She had wanted to stay as low-profile as Rothenberg went for the high-profile.

  “Oh! I’d better
…talk to her on this one. Just a minute.”

  She leaped up, revealing a skirt that suffered from an awesome fabric shortage, and skittered behind the bland door that led to an inner office.

  A minute passed, then two. When the girl emerged, she assumed an air of authority that went badly with her beringed facial features and deep teal metallic fingernail polish. In Molina’s observation, the more piercings, the lower the self-esteem.

  She thought of her daughter Mariah’s pierced ears and hoped it would stop there, but there was no guarantee of restraint for the twelve-year-old aching to go on thirty-two, and physical puberty hadn’t even hit yet.

  “She’ll see you now.”

  Molina forbore comment and went into the office.

  Madams certainly weren’t what they used to be.

  Judith Rothenberg looked more like a New Age guru, with her mane of coarse, grayed long hair, makeup-free skin, frank sun-wrinkles, and Southwestern-style turquoise jewelry.

  Molina showed her shield.

  “A lieutenant. I’m impressed. I expected the usual tag team of male detectives. They always love to visit my shop.”

  Molina was well aware of the male fascination with ladies of the evening, which was why she’d come here instead. That, and the terrible fix she was in over Matt Devine.

  “This a priority case,” Molina said, not underestimating the habitual expression of skepticism Rothenberg employed with police officers of any rank or gender.

  “One dead sex-industry worker? Who would care? I’m grateful for the pull of your corporate masters, the hotels.”

  “You should be. You and your girls make a hell of a lot of money off the hotel trade.”

  “We call them women.”

  “Whatever you call them, they’re call girls. I am not working vice here. I am not interested in your cynicism. I am not interested in the shining career path of the victim. I’m interested in her death, and how it happened. Any insight?”

  “Vassar wasn’t accident-prone, or suicidal.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know my employees. That’s the point of them working for me instead of a pimp.”

  “So what was Vassar’s personal background?”

  “It was all in her working handle. She was a Vassar graduate who decided to freelance instead of struggling up a ladder with a glass ceiling in some corporation run by greedy white men.”

  “Hooking was an improvement?”

  “When you work for me it is.”

  “What about her family? Where was she born?”

  “I don’t know any of that, and I don’t keep records on my employees. It only provides ammunition for the police and the moral vigilantes.”

  “And you say you ‘know’ your employees?”

  “Enough to do business. Their pasts are their property. I know their present state of mind. That’s enough. I don’t take on women with abuse or control issues.”

  “Aren’t those the women who could most use a compassionate pimp?”

  “I am not a pimp. I’m an office manager. My point is that ordinary, well-balanced, well-educated women should be free to pursue whatever line of work they find most rewarding. That corporate ladder-climber often finds she has to sleep her way up a rung anyway. For nothing.”

  “Somehow I thought you operated more like a dorm mother.”

  “No. We are all involved in a business enterprise. A business that should be legitimatized.”

  “Never happen in Las Vegas and the rest of the real world. A few Nevada counties that okay operating ‘chicken ranches’ don’t make a trend.”

  “That doesn’t mean I can’t keep working at it. My employees are never coerced, they are drug- and disease-free—that I make sure of—and they’re not alcoholics. They are working women in the sex industry. I pay them well, and it would be even more if I didn’t have to maintain a legal fund to defend them from harassment by the puritanical authorities. Are you puritanical, Lieutenant?”

  “Probably. By your standards.” Molina couldn’t help smiling. “You enjoy cop-baiting, don’t you?”

  “I enjoy harassing back a society that harasses women from the git-go, yes.”

  “I’ve read the print interviews with you. I know your position. Prostitution should be legal, regulated, and an upstanding profession. Prostitutes should either be free agents, or represented by a ‘manager’ like yourself, who provides a ‘support system.’ How you are not a parasite like any street pimp, I don’t know.”

  “First, I’m the same gender as my workers. There’s no male domination involved. Second, I do pay and protect my employees. To the wall.”

  “I know you’ve done jail time in support of your ‘principles.’ ”

  “Principles with quotes around them, Lieutenant? Your bias is showing.”

  “Not as much as your receptionist’s thong.”

  “You are a puritan.”

  “No, I’m a working woman too, and women who flash their sexuality make it harder for all of us.” Molina waved her hand. “Your receptionist is a billboard for your business, I understand that. But you’ll never convince me that anyone using their sexuality for gain, money, or advancement isn’t acting out personal issues.”

  “What issues is someone like me acting out?”

  “Well-meant late sixties liberalism. You know, I rather agree with you. If there’s going to be a sex industry, and there always has been, better it be under the control of the workers, not the middlemen. But you are one.”

  “I’m not exploitive.”

  “Maybe not, but that’s an individual thing. Who’s to say your successor wouldn’t be? Wherever money exchanges hands for things people are forbidden to do, by civil law or social mores, corruption, brutality, and exploitation creep in.”

  “So you give up individual freedom to avoid the misuse of it? We’re all screwed then.”

  Molina shrugged. “Life’s a struggle. So tell me about Vassar.”

  “Tell me how you found out her name.”

  “Easy. The hotel staff. She wasn’t exactly a stranger at the Goliath. Did she really attend Vassar College?”

  “Attend? She graduated. Sex-industry workers aren’t the dumb bunnies they’re stigmatized as.”

  “So why did she come West and start hooking?”

  Rothenberg leaned back in her chair, the usual low-backed clerk’s model that gave her office a proletariat air. “I don’t cross-examine my employees. I would guess that she was sufficiently good-looking that she was going to enter some field where her looks would be an advantage. Maybe she wasn’t thin enough for modeling, or talented enough to dance or act. That’s how I get a lot of my employees.”

  “She seemed plenty thin to me, except it looked like she’d had silicone and collagen enhancements. Before or after she worked for you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t subject these women to physical examinations.”

  “But their looks play a big factor in whether you…represent them, or not.”

  Rothenberg shook her head and smiled. “The employee suits the venue. For the big hotels, yes; looks are paramount. But I have employees in less elevated outlets. Some are successful, if not as highly paid as the five-star hotel workers, because they’re kind and sympathetic. Many of my employees function as much as counselors as sex partners. Wealthy men, for obvious reasons, require less shoring up of their egos.”

  “Counselors? Please!”

  “It’s true. A lot of people are very screwed up about sex.”

  “I see the results of that every day. The lethal results. Back to Vassar. How’d she become your employee?”

  “Heard about me. I’ve become a little notorious.”

  Molina grimaced at the understatement. Through the years Judith Rothenberg had tormented the law enforcement personnel and governing bodies of three cities, even enduring long jail terms on behalf of her “principles,” but she was always set free by some judge. Police had learned to lay off her. She had a doctoral de
gree and excellent lawyers and wasn’t about to be pushed around as easily as street-side madams.

  And, too, the police recognized that Rothenberg hookers were less likely to be drawn into the violent eddy of street crime. The woman did protect her own, and her business did operate more as a legitimate enterprise. Which drove the Moral Majority crowd nuts, because it did seem to prove that prostitution could be a “clean” business.

  “She could have fallen,” Rothenberg said out of the blue. “I don’t see Vassar getting into any tacky situation. She was extremely savvy. She would ‘phone home’ instantly if anything seedy seemed to be happening.”

  “Phone home. That’s just it. We didn’t find a beeper or cell phone anywhere near the body.”

  Rothenberg leaned forward, her modest chair squeaking in protest. “No phone? All our workers have phones, and every one of them has an emergency number programmed in. All they have to do is press a button, and we know who and where, if not why.”

  “And then the Hooker Police go rushing to the rescue.”

  “Something like that. I do have my own security.”

  Molina had seen the bodyguards accompanying Rothenberg to court on the TV news. She favored high-profile muscle, like retired wrestlers. She knew how to direct a media circus.

  “So Vassar didn’t sound any alarms that night.” At Rothenberg’s shaking head, she went on. “Maybe the phone is still lost in that neon jungle at the Goliath. One of her shoes almost came off in the fall.”

  Rothenberg nodded.

  Molina suddenly realized that her fears were not valid. Rothenberg would not cry murder, because everything was invested in her belief that sex for sale could be safe and civilized.

  “Frankly,” Molina went on, “the evidence is pretty overwhelming that no foul play was involved. There isn’t an inappropriate mark on the body that couldn’t be explained by a fall. The Goliath is the only Vegas hotel that has that dangerous central atrium design. She would have had to be leaning over the edge, but that neon ceiling is pretty fascinating from above. Still, I find it hard to believe that the woman was simply admiring the view and plunged to her death.”