Cat in a Neon Nightmare

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “We’ll have to ask her,” Molina said, “but first our team needs to have a go at Herbie.”

  Beat policemen often referred to suspects by childhood diminutives and Molina had adopted the habit. Infantalizing suspected perps reinforced their own shaky sense of control. Made the Bogey Man into Little Mikey. It was a self-deluding ploy, but must have served a purpose. The police were so often impotent when it came to the courts and defense attorneys. Only place to show muscle was on the streets.

  “Mr. Wolverton.” Su sounded as demure as she looked. “I’ve gone over your rap sheet. It’s pretty minor. I’m guessing that you’d want to cooperate with the police in a capital murder case.”

  “Capital murder?”

  “Well, it’s possible that the victim was held against her will in the hotel room. That would be kidnapping.”

  Wolverton’s frown aged him a decade. “I don’t think…Vassar, she was always a pretty savvy lady.”

  “You knew the victim then?” Su inquired as if making chitchat at a garden party.

  “Yeah, sure. She was a regular. Came and went all the time. Classy act from entrance to exit. But not my type,” he added, as if fearing admiration might be mistaken for obsession. “Too big.”

  Alfonso weighed in lazily. “It wouldn’t take much strength to push a tall woman over that chickenshit balcony. Those stiletto heels she had on? Would have made her unstable. Tippy.”

  “Look.” Wolverton licked his lips and eyed Su. “My job is to see people up to their rooms, drag in their luggage, turn on the air conditioner, get ice if they want it, show ’em which way the faucets turn. Then I’m outta there.”

  “Didn’t you forget something?” Su asked gently. Too gently.

  “What? What’d I forget? It’s my job, for chrissakes, not yours. I know my job.”

  “The tip.” Su brushed her middle finger over one of her exotically plucked brows. “You got good tips, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. Great tips. Everybody was happy with me. Why not? I am a happy guy.”

  “Most Happy Fella,” Alfonso put in a like a genial uncle. A little too like a genial uncle. Like a godfather.

  Herbie jerked his head, loosening taut neck muscles. “It’s a pretty good job. I meet some very interesting people.”

  “But you really get tipped for what you don’t do,” Alfonso insinuated. By now he was smirking like a fellow transgressor.

  Wolverton glanced at Su. “I don’t get it… ‘what I don’t do.’ ”

  Alfonso rested his forearms on the table and leaned inward, taking up more than half the surface, edging into Wolverton’s space.

  “A happy fellow, a good citizen, would report solicitation instead of profiting from it. Las Vegas ain’t no chicken ranch down the highway. That stuff is illegal here.”

  “Everybody does it. Why are you on me about it?”

  “Because you’re lying,” Su finally interjected. “What red-blooded male could forget what room Vassar went into and who was in it? The tip for placing her with a customer must have been big.”

  “Su,” Alfonso remonstrated, “you’re forgetting one thing. Maybe Herbie here isn’t a red-blooded male.”

  “Hey, I’m as red-blooded as any hunk of meat out there. But it’s a business, see. Faces come and go in Las Vegas like everybody’s on a merry-go-round. There’s no point in remembering something you’ll never see again. Besides, I dig girls, not guys. Why would I take inventory of just another john?”

  Alfonso leaned closer. “Haven’t you had any famous checkins?”

  “Yeah. Ah, Mel Gibson one time. And Rod Steiger before he died. But they didn’t want call girls, I remember that. Most other people are pretty anonymous.”

  “Why do you use Judith Rothenberg?” Su asked out of the blue.

  “Why not? Her girls are clean and classy. You never have trouble with a Rothenberg girl.”

  “Until now,” Sue pointed out. “It that it? Are you paid to keep quiet if anything goes wrong? Is Rothenberg taping your mouth and your memory shut?”

  “Naw, she wouldn’t have enough pull to make me risk my skin.”

  “Who would?” Alfonso asked.

  “Nobody. Nobody’s bribing me, I swear it. I got a good deal here. I make enough to get along, and if you don’t like how I get my biggest tips, face it; it’s just business in L.V. Even you guys have to hype yourself up to make a periodic hooker roundup, and then you go for the street types.”

  “We don’t do that,” Alfonso said softly. “We don’t mess with any of that. We are homicide detectives, Herbie. I don’t think you get how big this case is.”

  Sweat was glistening on his forehead now, Molina noticed, but the boyish blue eyes remained bulging and defiant.

  It wasn’t treats that made this dog go; it was threats. Someone had scared the shinola out of him.

  Su’s narrowed eyes announced the same conclusion.

  “She’s got it,” Alch murmured with satisfaction.

  “Got what?” Barrett asked, annoyed. “This guy responds to force. Look at how Alfonso’s got him crowded half off his own chair. As nice a job of creeping intimidation as I’ve seen in a while.”

  “Exactly,” Molina said. “So what force is big enough to shut him up even when facing that kind of intimidation?”

  “Money,” Alch said. “A lot of money.”

  “Someone with more force,” Barrett said.

  “Right, Barrett.” Molina threw Alch an also-ran smile. “This guy has seen Godzilla. Otherwise he’d be squealing like Randy the Rat. Money wouldn’t keep him mum on a murder case, if we’ve got one.”

  “And he’s scared enough to make me think we do,” Barrett said.

  Now Su was leaning into the table, but only slightly, her shoulders tilted, her air just a trifle big sister. “You were the only one, Herb. The only one to peek into the room where Vassar’s assailant waited. I know a big tip wouldn’t keep you from making the guy. I know you called Vassar to that room, that you take your job seriously and you wouldn’t want anyone messing with some classy lady you had sent up to her death.”

  “Shuddup!” Wolverton clapped his hands over his ears. “I didn’t see no monster lurking behind that door. Nothing to remember. An ordinary guy, all right! I forget faces like that eight days a week. One ride up and down in the elevator and I couldn’t remember my own mother’s mug. You don’t know what it’s like. Faces, faces, hands, hands, bags, bags. Even hundred-dollar bills get to look like ones. I’m telling you the truth. Nothing registers.”

  “Except johns who want high-dollar suites,” Alfonso pounced, “so they can abuse high-dollar call girls.”

  “Maybe, but I read the paper too. You guys didn’t find any marks of violence on the body. Maybe the woman fell, huh? Maybe she just fell.”

  “Or jumped,” Su put in.

  Herb Wolverton jumped at the suggestion. “Yeah. Who knows how these broads really feel about what they do? I mean, sometimes I gotta tote and haul for some arrogant prick that makes me feel two inches tall. It goes with the territory, but the turf can be pretty mean. I shrug it off, but someone like Vassar, whose services are more…personal. It might get sick, you know what I mean? She might…get driven into something she hates herself for. So, yeah. She could have jumped. But I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

  “And you don’t know where you weren’t, because you can’t remember the room number she went into on her last visit, or a thing about the looks of the guy who opened the door.” Alfonso’s tone was scathing.

  “No. I can’t.” Wolverton was not caving into anything, intimidation or angst.

  “The mob, do you think?” Barrett asked Molina on the other side of the window glass. “Vassar could have been some godfather’s favorite, and it could have gotten ugly, like Wolverton says. He doesn’t look like a guy who’d cross organized crime.”

  “Organized crime is so corporate in this town nowadays,” Molina objected. “And if he’d had the bad luck to really tread on som
e old-time neanderthal toes, he’d be buried in the Mojave by now.”

  “Yeah.” Alch stood and turned his chair back to face the two-way mirror. “It doesn’t make sense: Wolverton ‘forgetting’ every detail and still being here to not tell the tale. Something scared him, and it wasn’t mob, or muscle. It was worse.”

  “I agree,” Molina said, standing too. She caught both their glances and didn’t let go. “Your partners did a great interrogation job, but they’re up against something that’s got this guy whammied. We’ll watch his bank account for a bribe, see if he does anything unusual. Or if…he really does have a lousy memory.”

  The men filed out, discouraged, meeting their partners in the hall for mutual head-shaking.

  Molina went next door, shut it, and confronted Herb Wolverton.

  “My name is Molina. Lieutenant. You know something we should. So whatever you’re afraid of, be more afraid. We’ll be on your case too. You owe money, you’re afraid of goons. Be more afraid of us. You owe Mr. Big a favor, you’re afraid of a grave in the sand. Be more afraid of us. There’s something else out there that gives you the heebie-jeebies. It’s not anything to worry about. Worry about us.

  “That’s it. You can go now. Back to the Goliath and the happy fellah job. If you really want to.”

  Wolverton took a few moments to think over standing up. When he did, his eyes took in her Amazonian measure.

  He edged to the door, and Molina opened it.

  He looked up, and up, at her.

  And then he made his last stand.

  “Vassar was about your size, Lieutenant. And she’s dead.”

  He scurried into the hall. Molina stepped out to watch him run the gauntlet of her unhappy homicide detectives.

  He avoided eye contact and hastened to push the elevator button, visibly fidgeting while it creaked its way to their floor.

  Something, or somebody, really bad had scared him.

  That was her first thought. Her second was that it had scared him enough to “forget” a face as movie-star memorable as Matt Devine’s. Good luck for Carmen Molina. A puzzle for Lieutenant C. R. Molina. It would be intriguing to see whether self-interest or professional curiosity won this game of cat and rat.

  Chapter 42

  Wake-up Call

  “Okay, honey,” Ambrosia was crooning into the mike as if the gray foam sound-muffler was toasted meringue ready to be eaten, “here’s a little something to cheer you up.”

  The upbeat anthem of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” percolated over the radio speaker as Matt stepped into the studio and closed the door.

  Right now he was trying to converse with Leticia Brown between the raindrops…during the three dead-mike minutes that a song or commercial break would take before she had to get back on the air as Ambrosia and talk to the people.

  “I can’t believe it,” she repeated as she stared at him. This had been her mantra during their tête-á-tête through the previous song too. “That she-witch is really dead? Like melted? Tall pointy hat and all?”

  “Melted away. Out of my life anyway, and anybody else’s. Forever.”

  “You almost sound disappointed.”

  “Sorry, you mean.”

  “No, I say what I mean. I’m not like those poor uncertain souls who call you and me. You sound dis-ap-point-ed.”

  “Why would I be disappointed?”

  “A body can get used to being persecuted, you know. That’s not uncommon. At least someone’s paying you attention. That’s better than being invisible. If you know what I mean.”

  “I do. It’s called ‘playing the victim,’ and it’s common to oppressed people. You believe I was doing that?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is you’re entitled to a little meanness after all the spite and spit that was aimed at you. Celebrate your freedom, boy! Wiggle you ass like the football players do in the end zone. Spike a football. Stomp an ant. Be not nice.”

  Leticia shook her shoulders in what Matt had seen described as a “Watusi” dance move. Given her three-hundred Spandex-draped pounds and the fact that she always wore heavy shoulder pads no matter the outfit, she did look a bit like a linebacker for the Amazon Large League.

  “Any man’s death diminishes me,” he quoted John Dunne.

  “That was no man, honey. That was an e-vil wo-man. I never play anything that downer for my dear little lambs, but there is a song about women like that. That is the worst species of demon on earth.”

  “No mercy?”

  “No mercy. Be a little human for once. Gloat like the rest of us.”

  She suddenly leaned into the mike and cooed to it as if to a baby. “Now isn’t that better, sweetie? Sadness should run away to the corners of your vision like raindrops on a windshield. Is it all better now?”

  “Better,” the listener repeated.

  Who dared argue with Leticia/Ambrosia? Darn few.

  Her smile was a union of Cheshire cat and Crest Whitestrip as Matt backed silently out of her domain. It would be his cocoon and his hot seat soon enough. He glanced at the schoolhouse clock on the wall: time writ big and simple, boiled down to Big Hands and Small Hands and the slender, restless Second Hand.

  He wondered if you had a secondhand conscience when you were supposed to take pleasure, or relief at least, in another person’s passing.

  The listener’s voice coming over the speaker was a woman’s now. Women always sounded a little breathless and young on speaker systems. The microphone exaggerated higher vocal tones, and had since the talkies had come in and made a falsetto of matinee idol John Gilbert. Remember him? Not much.

  This woman caller also sounded hesitant, unused to dialing radio programs.

  “I guess I can ask for a song dedicated to someone,” she said.

  “Ded-i-cated to the one you love.” Ambrosia quoted the old song, talking the melody in perfect rhythm. Rappin’.

  “It’s for someone named…Vassar.”

  Matt’s heart stopped for one too many times in the past few days.

  “Vassar,” Ambrosia echoed. “A classy lady, I take it.”

  “Very classy.”

  “School friend?”

  “You could say that. She’s…dead now.”

  “Aw, sorry, honey child. Well, I think I can find a song that’ll talk to the both of you, even now.”

  Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” came over the speaker, but Matt barely heard it after automatically identifying the tune and the lyric.

  He was busy doing a mental post-mortem on the voice of the woman who had requested a song in Vassar’s name. Was there anything of Kitty O’Connor in it? No. It was a softened American accent, friendly but monotone, with still a sobered bounce beneath the syllables. Someone really in mourning. For someone named “Vassar.”

  Matt headed posthaste for Mike’s tech booth.

  “Who is that? Where’d the call come from?” he asked.

  Mike eyed the rectangular gray screen on the telephone and shook his ear-muffed head. “Cell phone or pay phone, no caller I.D. on this one. Or maybe he knew the code to turn off the originating number. Oops, gotta fade and then it’s your two hours on the air, dude.”

  Matt backed out of the booth, silently shutting the door.

  Somehow he had known that this call would be haphazard, untraceable. At least the request hadn’t been phoned in by Elvis from who-knows-where. Two stars to the right and straight on to morning. Elvis had always been a Lost Boy, if not Peter Pan himself.

  Leticia was already standing, pushing back the studio chair, making way for him.

  “I like that,” she said. “Ending my show on a sad note but with an upbeat tune. Paradox is what they call it. Makes for good tension on radio and in the thee-ay-ter. Miss Carole King. What an album Tapestry was. We are Woman, hear us roar. At least now and then. Here. I kept it warm for you.”

  She wasn’t kidding. Leticia pushed the leatherette-upholstered chair his way. He knew the surface would be obscenely hot fr
om her overflowing bulk.

  Cocoon or womb? Sometimes Matt wondered which better described his show and his nightly workplace.

  He donned his headphones and sank onto the chair, spun it to face the mike. No music. His show had no music to face, only faceless voices, the music of the night. Lone wolves howling in the dark.

  Oh, wait. He had theme music. He waited for it to fade, and then only his voice conducted the orchestra of regret and fear and pain and hope that came cascading over the airwaves every night but Monday. The Midnight Hour. His. Two hours actually, it had become so popular. Would someone crash his party tonight now that the name of Vassar had been invoked? But Kitty O’Connor, the only one with nerve enough to masquerade on live radio, was dead meat now. Wasn’t she?

  With Kitty officially dead, Leticia didn’t linger after her show to protect him.

  She headed home.

  Matt fielded calls and touchy ethical questions and borderline schmaltz, his mind only half on his job. No one claiming to be Vassar phoned in. Not even anyone pretending to be someone else who could easily be Kitty O’Connor. Not even a bad Elvis impersonator. For a moment he wondered if Elvis was a rock-’n’-roll Gospel guardian angel who had vanished once Matt’s personal demon was dead.

  Whoa! Such speculation was not solid theology. And Elvis had faced plenty of his own demons, especially one falsely-named Colonel Tom Parker who had outlived him as obscenely long as he had plundered Elvis’s earnings and his artistic soul.

  Kitty O’Connor as an Irish Colonel Parker, now that was a thought!

  Meanwhile Matt had tired, sad, earnest voices to answer. He did the best he could while still caught in his own tired, sad, earnest confusion.

  At last the two hours were finally over.

  He could go home knowing that Kitty O’Connor would never trouble his life, work, or mind again. At least not in person.

  The parking lot was deserted except for Mike’s souped-up Honda Civic and his own bland white Probe. Lights shone unwaveringly. No distant motorcycle throb threatened the night.