Cat in a Neon Nightmare

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Liberation felt uplifting, like a good confession. Like saying the Apostle’s Creed and starting a whole new day, a whole new life.

  But one man’s liberation was often another’s loss.

  The snake had left Eden.

  Where was it slithering next?

  Chapter 25

  …Jailhouse Hard Rock

  “Okay,” Molina said, shaking the multivitamin energy drink-to-go on her desk.

  Breakfast.

  Everyone in the room was eating on the run, or on the meeting break: Alfonso, Barrett, Su, and Alch.

  Alfonso had a McDonald’s cholesterol special on his lap, sausage and cheese predominating. Barrett munched a sports nutrition bar. Su had coffee from the Office Urn of All Sediment and an Almond Joy candy bar. Alch, he went for a Weight Watchers bar, munching in time with Barrett.

  Molina eyed her troops, aware how their very differences, physical and psychological, made them good partners. Too good for this case that cut so close to her own bones. Yet she had to do her job. Or seem to.

  “I saw Rothenberg,” Molina announced. “Vassar was her girl, and Rothenberg believes that her girls are too mentally, physically, and socially healthy to off themselves, or to get offed. She won’t be yelling police incompetence if we just bury this investigation. Case closed?”

  “No way,” Su mumbled through three hundred luscious calories that would not put an ounce on her tensile little frame, Molina reflected. “A call girl dies. Chances are ninety-to-one it’s murder.”

  “No evidence,” Alfonso countered.

  Molina took a deep breath. It was now or never. Do her job or save her rear.

  “I don’t like that bellman with Alzheimer’s,” she said. “The kind of tips they get for playing matchmaker, I don’t believe he never noticed a thing.”

  “Lots of that sort of traffic at a big place like the Goliath,” Su said. “I doubt those women even remember the faces they saw the night before, and they get paid plenty.”

  “What do you suggest?” Alch asked Molina. Morrie always recognized when she was leading a horse to water.

  “Bring the bellman in. Sweat him. Let me know when you’re ready.”

  Alch nodded.

  Barrett spoke up. “Whatever the bellman says, there’s not a mark on her that wasn’t caused by hitting neon at eighty miles an hour. Some bruises, a lot of internal damage. She could have dived. But Rothenberg has a political stake in representing hooking as safe and sane.”

  Molina nodded, waiting for their respective partners to bow in.

  “It’s not good PR,” Alch offered, trying not to look lustily at Su’s half-eaten candy bar. “A dead call girl when you’re a national spokeswoman for hookers’ rights to choose? Rothenberg might know more. Maybe somebody was moving in on her operation. It’s pretty passkey. The girls are gung-ho about wanting to do what they do. An old-school pimp would be a wolf among sheep.”

  “Interesting,” Molina agreed. “Rothenberg’s bled the local media for all the feature stories she can get. She might be ripe for plucking, and her girls too. Vassar might have been approached first to change handlers.”

  “What if she went for the idea?” Su asked, sitting forward on a chair she already perched on like a sparrow. “What if she’d been recruited by someone else, and Rothenberg saw her libertarian utopia looking shaky? Would she kill to defend it?”

  “Even more interesting,” Molina granted. “And then there’s the string of deaths of near-apparent women of the night. You know which ones I mean?”

  “Yeah.” Alch burped. That Weight Watchers bar must have been heavy consumption for him. He shrugged apology, but was too jived on his idea to blush for his social sins. “First there was that woman’s body dumped at the Blue Dahlia parking lot. ‘She left,’ was painted on the neighboring car. Yours, as I recall, Lieutenant.”

  “You don’t have to remind me, Morrie.”

  “Right. Anyway, Su and I solved that one. Some weirdo had killed her for not being a shady lady, can you believe it?” he asked Alfonso and Barrett.

  “And there was that young stripper, Cher Smith,” Su put in. She was competitive with her elder, Alch, even though, or especially because, they were partners. “We lucked out when her killer tried to attack a strip-club costume-seller who was armed with pepper spray.”

  “Right,” Molina said too quickly.

  The less anyone dwelled on that recent episode the better she’d feel personally. The fact was that a mere civilian had lured and trapped the killer, pathetic as the murderer had turned out to be.

  “We’ve still got one outstanding,” Su noted unhappily, folding her candy bar wrapper into very tight, neat origami.

  Buddha bless overachieving third-generation Asian-Americans, Molina thought.

  “That’s the broad,” Alfonso said, Egg McMuffin sticking to his teeth, “they found in the church parking lot about the same time as the Blue Dahlia dame.”

  God bless old-time cops of whatever ethnic heritage who never let go.

  “Gloria Fuentes,” Barrett added with narrowed eyes, “was no shady lady. She was a retired magician’s assistant. Sure, they’re all legs and cleavage, but this lady was over the hill, pardon me. She’d been out of the performance game for years. Hell, her main magician, Gandolph the Great, had quit performing to sniff out fake mediums years ago. She was no spring chicken, and she died in a church parking lot, for Gawd’s sake, not in the parking lot of a trendy restaurant-nightclub like the Blue Dahlia, pardon me, Lieutenant, for your patronage.”

  “The Blue Dahlia hasn’t had any crime calls except that one,” Molina noted.

  “But that was a doozy. Murder One,” Barrett chortled.

  Yes, chortled. Molina turned to Alch, whose insight she could always depend upon.

  “ ‘She left,’ ” he intoned. “That was the phrase painted near the body in the Blue Dahlia parking lot, and that was the phrase that appeared during the autopsy of Gloria Fuentes’s body, like invisible ink finally showing up. I think those murders were connected.”

  “We nailed the Blue Dahlia perp,” Su objected, pulling a second Almond Joy from the pocket of her size-zero navy silk jacket.

  Alch’s salt-and-pepper head shook doggedly, like a wet Old English sheepdog’s. “I think they were connected, all right, but not necessarily by the same killer.”

  All jaws stopped munching.

  This was a radical suggestion.

  Molina bowed her head, or maybe merely nodded, at Alch.

  Encouraged, he went on. “Maybe it was a copycat killing. I mean, there we have it, in the Blue Dahlia lot, the phrase ‘She left.’ How basic can you get? Every woman who’s involved with an abusive man, what is her death all about? She left, he got homicidal. It’s predictable.”

  “We’ve never found a suspect for the Fuentes case,” Molina pointed out.

  “But,” said Alch, perching on the edge of his chair a lot more uncomfortably but no less eagerly than Su had on hers, “the same words turn up relative to Fuentes after the body’s in our custody. She left. Same old overcontrolling bastard’s complaint, only someone got into our system, into the morgue, mind you, to send that message. What did Gloria Fuentes leave? Anybody know? Anybody look into that?”

  “Lived alone, past sixty,” Su said.

  “You’re young,” Alch returned. “That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have had a man in her life.”

  “Or a child,” Alfonso said. “Sometimes a kid gets threatened and the mother gets drawn into something uglier than she’s ready for.”

  Amen, Molina thought.

  “Her ‘kids’ would have been out on their own, older than me,” Su said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Alch returned. “Kids are always kids to their parents. But I checked Fuentes out. She was single, had no known boyfriends, no known kids. Once she left the stage, she did a little magic act for civic groups around town, kids’ birthday stuff. She didn’t even have anyone to leave anything to in her will. It a
ll went, what there was of it, to some magician’s retirement home.”

  “Funny. She’d been a looker. Somehow she ended up alone,” Alfonso meditated, chewing his high-fat cud.

  “And dead,” Barrett said. “If this is a cold case, I say we look deeper. Fuentes may not have been a lady of the night, but you point out yourselves that the woman at the Blue Dahlia led a respectable life, she was just murdered like a stripper or a call girl. Maybe we got a killer who’s not too good at telling the difference.”

  “Gloria Fuentes,” Molina said meditatively, as if caressing the idea. Her troops would jump on that train of thought, she knew. “Alch is right. We haven’t dug deep enough into her lifestyle, present and past. The words ‘She left’ showing up on her body smacks of magic tricks.”

  Su jumped in with both size-four feet. “And Vassar could have ‘left’ too. We don’t know that she wasn’t dumping Rothenberg and all her principles.”

  Molina nodded, though she didn’t believe it. Rothenberg’s girls didn’t leave; they retired.

  She quashed a surge of triumph. Nasty as the neon ceiling death was, it was redirecting her detective’s attention to the one definitely magic-related death that had hit the town since Max Kinsella had left a year ago and come back last fall.

  If she had to hang out on a limb, that son of a…psychopath should too. And she might finally find a case that tied him to all the mayhem and murder in this town that was still floating loose.

  That would be worth her own personal and professional jeopardy, all due to the misguided impulse to help Matt Devine escape from between a rock and a hard place.

  Molina frowned, thinking of his particular problem. Kathleen O’Connor. She’d have to pursue that lead herself. None of them would be in this mess without that femme fatale operating just out of sight, sound, and reach of the law’s long arm.

  Maybe not even the Mystifying Max Kinsella.

  Chapter 26

  …Sudden Death Overtime

  “You may have wondered,” Temple said, “why I’ve called you all together.”

  “Two is ‘all’?” Max asked dubiously.

  Matt was too polite to question the obvious, but his expression of stubborn silence agreed with Max’s for once.

  “Well, Louie is here also,” Temple said.

  Everyone glanced at the large black cat that formed the only barrier between Max and Matt as they shared the small living room sofa. Given Louie’s size, it was a considerable separation.

  Louie, knowing he was being discussed as all cats do, did a tarantella move and extended his long black furry legs. Then he showed his claws, curved them artistically into the open-weave upholstery, and yawned, as if to say: I could rip this fabric to shreds, but I am being the little gentleman and am restraining myself for my Miss Temple’s sake. So you two guys better follow my example and keep away from each other’s throats, tempting as they may be.

  Temple eyed her gentlemen callers. She perched on the edge of the chair facing the sofa, her feet not quite touching the floor, as usual. She hadn’t seen these two men juxtaposed often, and here and now it was obvious that they were Night and Day.

  Max was Night, long and lean, attired in magician’s black from the hair on his head to raven-glossy black Armani loafers on his feet. Matt was Day, not as tall but more solid, blond from the hair on his head to the suede loafers on his feet. In a fashion parallel of the Civil War ballad of the brothers on opposite sides, one wore black and one wore blond, instead of blue and gray.

  Matt was more classicly handsome than Max, but Max had more presence.

  Neither one was in the least shabby. Okay, girl. Down. Speak, Lassie, speak! What are you trying to tell us?

  “I am not Nancy Drew, Miss Marple, or Jessica Fletcher,” Temple said. She was red, from her hair to her lucite-heeled Stuart Weitzman Dorothy-in-Oz scarlet pumps.

  “Great,” Max noted, glancing at Matt. “One’s underage and the other two are definitely overage, if not for you, then for me.”

  Temple and Matt blushed in concert.

  “Go on,” Matt encouraged her. He was a great facilitator.

  “But I am a mean hand with a ruler and a pencil, so I’ve resurrected my table of the unsolved murders I made before the Stripper Killer was caught, and I added Vassar.”

  Temple slapped the template in question down on the coffee table.

  “And I made copies.” She handed them, after a second’s hesitation, first to Max, then to Matt.

  Midnight Louie glared at her.

  “Sorry, boy. I do have an extra.”

  This she placed on the sofa by Louie’s large black paws. Her human companions shook their heads.

  “Hey!” Matt spoke first. “You not only added Vassar to the list of dead people, you put me in the suspect column.”

  “Along with Kathleen O’Connor. And Max is first in the list with the death that started it all at the Goliath, so it’s only fitting that you should finish up the list to date with Vassar’s death at…the Goliath. Anybody see a pattern here?”

  “Temple,” Max explained, “the karma of heading and finishing up the suspect list is lost on the suspects in question.”

  “This suspect list reflects both who we might think is responsible and who the police might, or do.”

  “Don’t use a euphemism,” Max growled. “You mean Molina. Say it.”

  “I’m also saying that I’m no expert, but given what’s happened, I think we better get our acts together and figure out the who, what, where, when, and why of these deaths and what Kathleen O’Connor is up to before we’re all finessed onto Death Row.”

  “She’s my problem,” Max said, glowering. “I knew her first.”

  “You mean in the Biblical sense, I assume,” Matt added.

  Temple chalked up one point for the mild-mannered ex-altar boy.

  “In every sense,” Max said, not sparing Temple the truth.

  His glower did not diminish. His arms remained crossed on his chest, a classic posture of self-containment. Max hated being here with her and Matt, Temple knew, and with Midnight Louie. He hated group anything, which at least made him a very unlikely candidate for an orgy. He was the original lone wolf and had gotten too used to it, certainly for their communal needs now, and maybe for his own good.

  “You’re not the issue here,” Temple said, catching Max’s eye. “Matt is.”

  “Only because Kathleen can’t find me.”

  “Is that ego, or analysis?”

  “Analysis.” Max glanced at Matt, not unsympathetically. “Look. She’s following a classic pattern. It’s older than Devine here, and it’s older than me.” He uncrossed his arms to prop them on his knees and lean forward, speaking only to Temple, as if he had to justify himself and the past only to her.

  “Here’s how it goes down with the likes of Kathleen O’Connor, even when you’re both seventeen. You meet her. You think it’s chance, and later you see that she put herself in your path. With you,” he added as an aside to Matt, “the introduction was shocking, but she’s older now, and hasn’t time to waste. So you got the razor to the gut, a flesh wound, so you’d know she could inflict any kind of wound she wants, when she wants, on whom she wants.”

  Temple frowned now. “So she was always a psychopath?”

  “A shrink would probably argue that label,” Max said. “More like a sociopath with a heavy case of narcissism.”

  “What’s the difference?” Temple wanted to know.

  Matt answered. “Both a psychopath and a sociopath lack a conscience. They don’t feel hurt, so they hurt, just to see what happens to people who do feel. A narcissist is always trying to prove the world stupider than she is. In a way, a narcissistic sociopath is worse than the average psychopath. She can pass in normal society.”

  “Where’d you learn that?” Max asked, sounding impressed.

  “Confession,” Matt said shortly. “They’re expert manipulators, and they love to manipulate all that’s solid and sacred.
”

  “ ‘Solid and sacred,’ ” Max mocked. “Wouldn’t go over in a personals ad.”

  “Cut it out, guys!” Temple said. “This woman has ruined both your lives. You want to snipe at each other, or get her?”

  “Get her,” Max said without hesitation.

  Matt temporized. “ ‘Get,’ sounds so hostile. She needs help.”

  “You need help, can’t you see that?” Temple exploded. “That’s what she’s done to you. She’s made you into a murder suspect, and you’re worried about her, for heaven’s sake.”

  Max’s frown was back. “Temple’s right. It’s the same pattern. Half a lifetime ago, while I was dallying with Kathleen on the riverbank, my cousin Sean was walking into an IRA death trap. And you, ex-Father Devine, once suggested that might have been deliberate manipulation on Kathleen’s part: seducing me and killing Sean at one and the same time, killing one man…boy, really…and condemning the other to permanent Purgatory because of it.”

  “Purgatory?” Temple asked.

  The two men were staring at each other, ignoring her, speaking the same language for once. Catholic. Guilt. Only for one it was the Irish and the Troubles and for the other it was the Polish and the family dysfunction.

  “It must have been hell for you,” Matt said, “given how I feel about Vassar’s death, and she wasn’t a relative, an innocent, or anyone I even knew.”

  “Still is.”

  Matt’s mouth tightened. “Then Temple’s right. We have to find this woman, stop her.”

  “All we know about her today,” Temple put in, “is that she ran across Matt several months ago somehow and can’t let go. How? And why?”

  “Simple,” he said. “Talk about poetic justice. My hunt for my stepfather drew her attention. I distributed these photos of him with my contact information. That’s when she showed up here at the Circle Ritz, by the pool when I was working out. She thought I was a contract killer looking for him.”