Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Intimidation.”

  “I know what it was. I want to know how to stop it.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Tried to keep between her and Letitia. Tried to grab a handlebar and tip the cycle over. Not much that worked.”

  “She’s just harassing you at this point, not doing any real damage.”

  “She did real damage her first time out.”

  Molina glanced at his side. Matt could feel the scar, the tightness, if he thought about it. He felt it when he made any major move. A razor slash, now a faint long, thin, white line, like a wound just before the blood wells to the surface and overflows.

  “She seemed to be taking something out on your producer,” Molina said finally. “Showing off to you and hassling the lady.”

  “Right. She doesn’t like me to associate with any females. That’s pretty clear.”

  “What sort of female is your producer?”

  Matt hesitated at the impossibility of summarizing Letitia. “Gorgeous black woman, maybe thirty, maybe three hundred pounds.”

  “Three hundred pounds. And this psycho chick was jealous?”

  “I don’t know if it’s jealousy exactly. It’s more like…possession. Yeah, I know that’s a form of jealousy, but Kitty O’Connor is more like a demon than a woman.”

  “Whoa! You are spooked. She’s a sick chick with issues, that’s all. I am not in the demon-exorcizing business and I think you’d know better than that by now.”

  Matt stuffed his hands in his pockets to keep the fists his frustration made from showing. “This O’Connor woman is a wasteland of spiritual desolation. You can’t reach her by any human means. So don’t call her a demon, although that works for me. Call her a psychopath.”

  “She hasn’t done anything you could even get a restraining order for. You can’t prove the slash.”

  “It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s what she might do to someone around me.”

  “Listen, this town is teeming with dangerous types. You have no idea what you’re brushing up against as you amble down the Strip on a Friday night. If the police are doing their job, and we mostly are, you and the tourists will never know.”

  Matt held his tongue for a while. It ached to pour out the strangehistory of Kitty O’Connor. If he could only tell Molina about her connection to Max Kinsella…. But Molina bared her teeth like a Rottweiler when any scent of Kinsella tainted the air. And those confidences weren’t Matt’s to share. Though he wasn’t still a priest, he was used to keeping the seal of the confessional, to keeping everybody’s secrets in their individual, sacrosanct boxes, like little coffins containing rotting lilies left over from the thousand natural wakes a human being holds for all past sins and uncertainties.

  All he could say was, “I know she was fanatically involved in the IRA. She would seduce wealthy men for money to buy weapons. I imagine she was downsized from her job during the recent seesaw of peace accords. I’d guess she’s an unemployed terrorist looking for a victim.”

  Molina nodded seriously, but her eyes narrowed. “We’re all taking that pretty seriously nowadays. How do you know about her international terrorism history?”

  Matt wasn’t about to blurt out, “Max Kinsella.” He flailed for a logical dodge that would still salve his Catholic conscience for truth at all costs. “Ah, Bucek. Frank Bucek at the FBI. He was in seminary with me. We’ve talked on the phone a little. He looked her up.”

  “Bucek looked her up for you when he couldn’t give me diddly?”

  “Fellow ex-priests…”

  “Fellow guys, you mean.”

  Before Molina could wind up some feminist rant, someone knocked on the door. “Bar call,” a man’s jovial voice caroled.

  Molina looked inquiringly at Matt.

  “Scotch on the rocks,” he finally thought to say. She yodeled a double order of same through the door.

  “Sit down.” She pointed to one of those round-seated wooden chairs with the bentwood backs that was stained so dark it looked like it had been sitting here awaiting him for decades. Probably had.

  Matt took the seat, though it was uncomfortable, and Molina finally sat in a matching chair placed before the dressing table.

  She shook her head at herself, her face as sharp-boned as Lauren Bacall’s in the time-spotted mirror. “Sometimes I expect Bogey to stroll in here asking about Maltese falcons. Those were the days: treacherous greedy crooks, psychopaths disguised as cheap hoods, and manipulative dames. Okay.” She scraped the chair legs on the concrete floor to turn her back to the mirror.

  As she braced her elbows on the matching pillars, Matt was startled to see in the mirror the black velvet curtain of her dress part in back from neck to waist. She couldn’t have been wearing, well, anything under it. This was not something he wanted to think about here and now, or anywhere at any time, really.

  A knock at the door.

  “Enter!” Molina called out grandly.

  The barman came in carrying one of those small, round, scuffed brown trays that have held drinks since Methuselah was a wine steward.

  “Thanks, Steve.” Molina watched him set the tray on the opposite drawer pillar like an offering. “I love to impress company with my lavish backstage perks.”

  Steve, a toothy guy with receding gray hair, grinned. “Courtesy of the management. We’re glad to have you back.”

  He winked at them both in the mirror as he left.

  “They pay you for this?” Matt asked suddenly.

  “Yeah, they pay me for this.” Molina sounded indignant. “I wouldn’t do an amateur gig. Lots of cops moonlight. This is less conflict of interest than most.”

  “I didn’t mean…what I meant is they’re happy to pay to have you back.”

  She leaned forward to hand him a lowball glass richly amber with about three ounces of scotch. He sipped. Johnnie Walker Black. Very happy to have her back.

  He sipped again, feeling tension drain down his arms like a blood-letting. “This is the first time I’ve felt out of that woman’s reach for two weeks.”

  Molina lifted her own glass in a distant toast. “Happy to hear that. What’s the reason?”

  “A bodyguard?” he said, laughing.

  “You aren’t kidding.” She crossed her legs.

  The motion would have been coy in another woman clothed in floor-length vintage black velvet, but now it simply revealed the small, lethal-looking gun attached to her ankle by some industrial-strength black holster of nylon webbing.

  Matt almost choked on a quarter ounce of scotch too good to spray on the concrete floor. “Do you always do that?”

  “Always,” she said. “Nobody’s going to die because I was in a Luby’s Cafeteria with my gun in the car.”

  He nodded, remembering the case, another massacre in a public place by a single psycho gone ballistic. And that brought them back to Miss Kitty. “I can’t carry a gun. I can’t shoot her. So that makes me a perpetual victim?”

  Molina nodded while she savored her drink. “This ought to oil the old pipes for the next set. You are keeping me up late tonight, Mr. Midnight.” She twisted to check a small clock on the dressing table.

  “No problem. I’m not due at work for a couple of hours.”

  She glanced at his glass. “Can you drive —?”

  “I had a heavy meal.”

  “Then enjoy. I imagine you haven’t enjoyed much lately. Back to your…bête noir? Is that better than ‘nemesis’? Here’s the deal. Here’s what every woman with an abusive ex on her tail finds out. Nothing and nobody can help you. If you were a woman, I’d advise you to get a gun and shoot the guy the next time he showed up. No, I wouldn’t. I can’t. But that’s the only defense they’ve honestly got, a lot of them. I am so damn sick of picking up the phone and hearing some woman was blown away in the parking lot of her office, or a grocery store, or a fast-food joint, or a day-care facility, or a school by some maniac man who can’t let go because he can’t live without a victim. />
  “And it’s always just when the woman finally gets a little starch and tries to get away, when she’s defending her kids where she couldn’t defend herself, when she’s being a heroine instead of a whipping girl, and then they kill her.

  “Enough about my job frustrations. Now, about yours. Your job is to foil this woman. You can’t give her what she wants.”

  “That’s what Letitia said.”

  “Letitia.”

  “My producer.”

  “Oh, right. The Lane Bryant black Venus. You know, this Kitty woman is nuts. She really wants you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No.” Molina leaned forward, elbows on her knees, a hoydenish posture for the elegant gown. She sipped premium scotch. “She’s dead serious about that. She wants you untouched by any woman. Weird. It’s not an uncommon attitude among abusive men, but women aren’t usually so…macho.”

  “That biker outfit was plenty macho.”

  “Why you?”

  Matt wanted to shout, Because she can’t torment Max Kinsella. She can’t even find Max Kinsella.

  But he couldn’t. He did have a few clues as to why he was the designated Kinsella stand-in, though.

  “She likes to corrupt priests.”

  “You know the answer then.”

  He nodded. “Letitia laid it out for me, too.”

  Molina sipped. Her electric blue eyes were softening to the color of natural blue topaz, Virgin Mary Blue, mild and misty. “You need an understanding woman who will remove that which Miss Kitty covets.”

  “Who won’t get killed for the honor,” Matt added drily. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

  “I don’t think so. She’s nervous. That’s why she’s darting around, threatening these women. Once the deed is done, you’re worth nothing to her. The whole house of cards falls down. Anticipate her, disarm her. Hell, sleep with her then, if you want to. It would kill her.”

  “Carmen. I’m not like that. I don’t do these things lightly.”

  “That’s where she’s got you! You want to be got, cling to your odor of sanctity. You want to live, do what you must.”

  “‘And do it well.’”

  “Huh?”

  “A quote from a songwriter you’d never sing. Well, maybe you would.” Matt took a deep, burning swallow of scotch.

  “Any candidates to predate Miss Kitty?” Molina probed, perhaps a bit too curious.

  “Nobody I’m willing to endanger,” he said shortly, swallowing without the benefit of scotch, the afternoon’s interlude in the Circle Ritz hallway returning on aching waves of might-have-been.

  “No volunteers?” she pressed. Matt noticed that her lipstick had left a red half-moon on the edge of her glass, decided through a veil of pleasant haze that they were both relaxing too much, discussing things too dangerous to act on. Guns and sex and psychosis. “A good-looking guy like you?

  “Janice? Letitia?” She left one name hanging until he thought he’d strangle on it. Why had he ever thought Molina might become an ally? She was a policewoman. She always needed to know the full story.

  “No woman strong enough to risk.”

  “Ah.” She leaned back, elbows braced on the twin pillars of the dressing table, the drink glowing topaz against the black of her gown.

  Molina?

  God, he must be drunk.

  But the idea started caroming through his brain. She was armed and dangerous. She just said she thought he was good-looking. Lots of people did, but Molina saying it…thinking it.

  If he was caught in some sexless limbo because of his religious past, she was a single mother in a man’s world. What kind of personal life did she have? Did she dream, as Janice did, of an Invisible Man who would come through her window, a puppet with no strings attached, like Errol Flynn on a rope, and go away leaving no traces, no obligations, no guilt, like a dream?

  But there were always hordes of swordsmen after Errol Flynn as Don Juan or as Robin Hood, and a dalliance with a wanted man always backfired on the woman, even if her ankle was armed. Molina was not invulnerable, just professional.

  She was not strong enough to risk, but he didn’t dare tell her that.

  “I can’t. I can’t involve any woman in this who might be the object of Kitty’s murderous attention.”

  “Hmm,” said Molina. Carmen. Looking lazy and contemplative, looking pretty luscious, as a matter of fact, maybe because of what she was thinking. He was thinking it too. Where had his friendly neighborhood earth mother gone? Luscious? He must be deranged.

  Matt set the half-full glass of scotch on the small table near the wall. He had to be on live radio in under two hours.

  “I just came here for some professional advice.”

  Her eyes suddenly focused in points like acetylene torch flames.

  “Professional. From the mouths of babes. That’s it, Matt!”

  “What?”

  “You need a professional. Someone Kitty wouldn’t even notice. A pro.”

  “With a gun?”

  “No! Listen. This is Las Vegas. Las Vegas. You get yourself a six-hundred-dollar-a-night room at the Oasis. The Goliath. Whatever. You tip everyone in sight, and you ask the bellman to send up some private entertainment. Tip him a hundred.”

  “Carmen!”

  “Listen. I know this town. A hundred. You can afford it to save your virtue for the right wrong girl, right? Okay. For that you’ll get a thousand-dollar call girl. She’ll be beautiful, intelligent, gorgeously dressed, consider herself a sex industry professional, not some cheap, downtrodden hooker. She’ll argue her right to sell her services with such sophistication that you won’t have an answer. You’ll tell her your problem, not about Kitty the Cutter but your personal history. She will love helping you out. She considers herself a mental-health field worker and, besides, you’re not hard to help out. You will walk out of there much poorer, but not what Kathleen O’Connor wants: an innocent man. You will have endangered no one. The call girl will vanish from the hotel as she always does, with a great story to entertain another john. You will be absolutely…adequate, right? You will have taken advantage of no one, as talking to one of these awesome sexual entrepreneurs will convince you. They are nobody’s victims, believe me, and consider themselves worth every c-note. It’ll be Pretty Woman all over again, only with this strange role reversal all the way through. Make sense?”

  “Carmen. No.”

  “Why not? It’s brilliant. It’s a scam. You out-sting the stinger. Why not?”

  “Because…it’s a sin.”

  “So is caving in to a sexual blackmailer. So…confess it afterward. You believe in absolution, don’t you? Don’t you have to?”

  “Yes. But —”

  “‘Yes, but’ are the two most dangerous words in the language. Do it or pay for not doing it. Wait to see which innocent woman will pay. Maybe Temple Barr. This Kitty doesn’t sound blind, just demented.”

  Matt fingered the key ring in his pocket, feeling the hard cold, gold circle of the snake ring spinning against his skin. He remembered how it had appeared in his apartment, with the equivalent of an Alice in Wonderland note: Wear me. The controlling Miss Kitty clandestinely invading his space again, claiming his attention.

  It reminded him of Molina’s cold-blooded investigative strategy in keeping the whereabouts of Temple’s ring secret. In then sharing its whereabouts with him so he became complicit in her cruelty. He wanted to protest their conspiracy of silence he had only broken when Temple had figured it out. To accuse her, excuse himself.

  But the damage had been done. To Temple, not to Kinsella, whom Molina really ached to hurt, nor to him, who had been the stooge, the patsy.

  Temple’s ring was recorded history now. The ring Kitty O’Connor had forced him to install on his keyring was still a secret, still an issue, still lethal.

  Still the eternal threat, the Worm Ouroboros, wanting to slip onto a finger like greased lightning and burn him, and never, ever come off.
/>   …and Revamp

  “I’ll think about it,” Matt said. He already had, far too long. “I suppose it’d be easy to lose Kathleen if I dodged into a megahotel.”

  “Use a phony name. Pay cash at the front desk like a big winner. Take one room there and then call down and change it. Find something wrong. Somebody smoked in a nonsmoking suite, that kind of thing.”

  “You’ve got some tricky ideas.”

  “Not me. Everybody I’ve ever arrested. So.” Molina’s wild-blue-yonder gaze softened with scotch and satisfaction. “You gonna take my professional advice?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

  He stood, took one last sip of the very fine scotch and left.

  In the hall he could hear the trio killing time until Carmen’s next set with jazzy crescendoes. He kind of liked this place, right here. Alone in the hall, between the dressing room and the stage, the public. Ignored, invisible.

  He moved along, wove through the clotted round tables, arranged to be intimate and now in the way.

  It was a weeknight. He had dragged Carmen in for a half-empty house, but she probably appreciated warming up with only chairs to hear her rusty voice. Most of the chairs were empty now.

  So was the parking lot when he pushed open the big door with the round porthole window. Round windows seemed so decadent, as if blocking out a sinister subaquatic world.

  He homed on the familiar tilted shape of the Hesketh Vampire, appreciating its sleek lines from a distance, savoring a fondness you’d feel more for a horse than a vehicle.

  A nondescript black car sat between the faded white lines a few spots away. That was all. Matt knew the staff parking lot was on the other side of the building. This lot was for customers and, a few weeks ago, the dumped body of a dead woman.

  He winced a bit to recall her. Killed for not being quite Catholic enough in someone else’s warped view, when he might be killed for being too Catholic.

  Why dumped here? Because the killer had associated The Blue Dahlia with nightlife and corruption.