Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I had better swing by Baby Doll’s on the way to Los Muertos, just in case. It is only a mile or two out of my way.

  Oh, my aching pads! When they slapped the tag “gumshoe” on Pls, they must have meant we pound so much pavement pursuing leads that our shuffling feet get so weary they end up sticking to the street.

  I am not sorry to leave the dimly heard hell-raising chorus within behind as I plod through the black-and-neon checkerboard of a Las Vegas night, wishing I had at least one of my two little dolls in my sights.

  No Dice

  Max circled the room like a wolf marking his territory. Secrets was doing business as usual, crowded with pleasure-seekers lost in their own vice of choice: booze, babes, or maybe just mind-shattering sound.

  The crowd was large and self-absorbed. Even the strippers seemed oddly isolated as they writhed onstage to the music they had chosen. Stripping had always struck Max as a solitary vice on both sides of the spotlights.

  He hadn’t bothered to disguise himself, not even with attitude. Still, his striking appearance barely registered on Secrets’s many employees and clients. Everything was expected, including boredom. Damn it, if Temple had tracked a killer here, he wanted the bastard to be aware of him, his presence. His threat.

  Even Temple didn’t seem to be here.

  Max sighed. He’d have to check the stripper dressing rooms to make sure she wasn’t backstage. That would draw out whatever testosterone troops guarded this place. At Secrets they would be fairly discreet.

  Rafi Nadir’s stint here must have been an aberration. This place’s pretensions to business class over coach wouldn’t support obvious muscle like him.

  Besides, Nadir had never worked here after the night Max had taken Cher away from him in the parking lot. Max had checked. He could have decamped out of shame at being outsmarted and outmuscled by someone as apparently easy as Max.

  Max wasn’t about to bet on shame being a big part of Rafi Nadir’s psychological makeup. Aggression, yes.

  Max scanned the entire scene like a panoramic camera, identifying the cast of dozens: the familiar bare figures of girls onstage or lap dancing at the tables, the lapdog circle of guys transfixed like risen mummies before the footlights. Instead of craving revivifying tanna leaves these zombies were shedding leaves of green bills into the teeny-weeny bikini bottoms of various strippers. Down the snatch.

  There was even the hard-boiled dame at the bar…a retired stripper, or maybe a club photographer. No camera, so she was some other hanger-on in the whole elegantly sleazy scene.

  The illusion he required: the instant perception by one and all that he belonged here, that he could go where he wanted with no one objecting.

  Max scanned the room again, 360 degrees, and found his course of action.

  He walked through the tables, past the obscenely boogying couples, behind the dazed wannabe studs playing hang-dog at the stage lip.

  Ducked into the glass-enclosed sound booth at the side of the stage.

  “Hey, DJ!” he addressed the slack-jawed youth at the console. “Bitchin’ job, man.” He flashed a hundred-dollar bill, dropped it onto the feedback dial. “I could use a sharp sound-meister like you at my new club down the Strip, X-treme Dreams. Meanwhile, play ‘Misty’ for me, huh? Double speed.” Max winked. “I gotta see a babe about a takeover bid.”

  Max was out of the noise-free zone and back on pulse-pounding time. He strode toward the door leading backstage as if he owned the place. His presence in the sound booth would have registered on the edge of everyone’s eyes. Once he visibly left a zone normally not intruded on, he could climb every mountain, plow through any door.

  Through the door. He held it shut with his body, listened, felt the pounding bass vibrate the wood, his metabolism.

  After an unchallenged minute, he moved down the dark hall and through a heavy velvet curtain that shivered to the heavy metal music.

  Another door.

  Here he knocked.

  And waited. Like a gentleman.

  This was where the women’s world began. Brass knuckles might get you through the hard-knock barriers of sheer muscle. Golden rings would get you through the silken curtains of sheer willpower.

  “Yeah?” A distracted feminine voice. Well, mostly feminine.

  “Sorry. I need to speak to someone. Can anyone step out?”

  He had unconsciously lapsed into an English expression. It called to the women inside like a vodka martini to James Bond.

  “Yeah?”

  The woman opened the dressing room door a crack only as wide as the seam on a nylon stocking from a ’40s film noir. She was tall, rangy, tough. A trans?

  “Name’s Maximilian. I’m opening a new high-end place, X-treme Dreams, in a couple of months. Looking for talent.”

  “You’ve got nerve, coming here.” She eyed him up and down.

  He nodded. “X-treme Dreams will be a nervy club. I’m looking for ladies who don’t hold back.”

  Hoots and whistles erupted behind the gatekeeper.

  “Because then I don’t have to hold back on the perks.”

  More whistles.

  “You got a little redhead in there? Visitor?”

  “You looking for ET, Maximilian?”

  “Only if it stands for ‘Extreme Tensions’. I am looking for that little redhead, though, even if she’s passing as a blond. I have an emergency message from her mother, Molina.”

  He had to hope that if Temple was inside, she would hear and get his message.

  “We don’t have any little women in here,” door-babe said. “If your needs are that specialized —”

  “X-treme Dreams will encompass every fantasy, every female. But I want the full range. So if a little redhead happens to show, tell her to see Maximilian out front.”

  Max passed another hundred through the crack in the door that was neither too large or too small, but just right for the bill to be snapped up by a long pair of fingernails.

  He ambled out through the hallway, pausing in the door from the dressing room, in no hurry to join the crowd nodding and swaying to the music and the bumps and grinds.

  The lone woman at the bar looked about ready to slide off her barstool. She was obviously straight. Straight women found strip clubs boring. So did mature men, not that there were any on the premises.

  Max expertly resized up the crowd. No Temple out here, in any guise. No Rafi Nadir.

  So think outside the box, as they used to say in the thriving dot-com industry. Maybe the guy Temple was trailing was not Rafi Nadir.

  Epiphany.

  Maybe Rafi Nadir was not the killer.

  But the killer had to be here. Temple had been advised to be here by a source she apparently knew. Why wasn’t she?

  Max checked his watch, which he wore face-out on the inside of his wrist so he could consult it surreptitiously.

  Almost half past one.

  Something was wrong.

  A flash went off in the darkened club.

  For a moment Max took it for gunfire, not a camera.

  But the only sound was the rat-a-tat of the bass strafing the club through the sound system. Music that made the place sound like a war zone.

  Maybe it was: ground zero in the eternal war between the sexes.

  The darkness, the sound, the thronging customers, the late hour, it all reminded him of the thick, cloying fellowship of an Irish pub the moment before a terrorist bomb went off.

  Max felt the room reel. No, he was reeling.

  His fear for Temple, his unease that she wasn’t here, concluded that she had already left home before that warning phone call had come, that she might be on a collision course with his cousin Sean, who was only a ghost at this point and could hardly collide with anyone solid. In this weird retro-moment he realized that everything — his life, his love, his future — was out of his control…

  He crashed through the sound and the milling vacuous faces, heading for the door. The whole place was going to blow. Som
ewhere. He had to be there. If not here, where? Lindy. The name rang a distant bell. Temple had used it, long ago. Weeks? No. Months? Yes. What he would do outside, he didn’t know.

  Hear himself think, maybe.

  See a path leading to Temple.

  Realize who the killer was. Temple thought she knew, surely he could reason it out as well as she. Or could he? Did he care too much, as usual? He had to get out, away. Had to find Temple.

  If she wasn’t at Secrets, and the killer wasn’t, they were both somewhere too awful to imagine.

  Somewhere he didn’t know about, where Sean stood at the bar, waiting with a mixed drink of regret and excitement to hear about Max’s assignation with pretty Kathleen, the Irish revolutionary colleen.

  No matter who won the girl or the game or the day, the loser would shrug and grin and say “Next time.” That’s how it was sometimes with boys, with men, with brothers.

  Only, with Sean, there was no next time.

  Max threw his shoulder into the heavy external door as if breaking into somewhere instead of out of his own head.

  The night should have felt cool, crisp. Like in Londonderry, like in Minneapolis, like in Wisconsin…like where he grew up and could never go home to again.

  This air was still, warm, heavy.

  Still Las Vegas.

  Max lunged for where he thought he might have left his car, almost drunk on panic and guilt and memories.

  “Wait,” the voice ordered. “Hold it right there.”

  It spoke with bullets for quotation marks.

  Final Jeopardy

  Matt had given up and thrown himself on the heavily brocaded comforter to watch CNN when someone knocked at the door. Lightly.

  He jumped up, trying to punch the mute or power button and instead sending the huge television screen into paroxysms of alien images, ending with an apparent pay service for triple-X-rated movies.

  Oh my God. This was not what he wanted to see.

  He managed to fumble the buttons until the hotel service screen, innocuous, came up, and went to the door.

  Maybe the bellman hoping for another sucker tip.

  He unlocked the chain and the dead bolt and opened the door.

  He’d been expecting the leather-strapped female who’d dominated the screen for a few frantic moments.

  She was…well, she was not that.

  “You rang?” she said.

  “Actually, you knocked.”

  “But you rang first.” Her smile was slow and perfect. “I’m Vassar.” She eased over the threshold and Matt was closing (closing!) the door behind her like a good host before he knew it.

  “Better lock it again,” she said over her shoulder. Her mostly bare shoulder. “This is Las Vegas. Besides, we don’t want to be interrupted by anything but room service.”

  She walked to the window like a big cat prowling its territory.

  He took in her clothing: gauzy designer something, both expensive and vaguely provocative, though he couldn’t say why he knew it was either.

  She was tall. Not quite tall enough to be a model. Instinctively, Matt realized that women as short as Temple (five foot aught) did not end up as high-class call girls. No doubt something she would bewail as another inequity of la vida squata.

  And this woman was blond, a creamy, caramel blond that must have come from the fairy-godmother fingers at a very expensive salon because it was too shiny and silky and unnaturally natural a color with its fine highlights to be anything but solid gold in the bleaching department.

  He applauded his foresight in dressing well for the job.

  “Sunset on the Strip,” she murmured.

  He came over, surprised. The sun was indeed sweltering in the west like melted butter. Everybody below threw long shadows and there were a lot fewer of them now.

  “Where’d they all go?” He answered his own question. “Moving indoors to gamble with dice and cards instead of ultraviolet rays.”

  “Speaking of which” — she cast him a sidelong glance — “do you want to troll the casinos? Eat dinner?”

  “Uh, no. I mean, we can eat dinner, but…here.”

  “Oh.” She eyed him disconcertingly.

  He couldn’t imagine what she was thinking. All he had in mind was avoiding public places. That would eliminate the slim chance that Kitty O’Connor had somehow followed him here and would spot him, even though he’d spent three hours getting here to ensure no one followed him.

  “I ordered champagne, if that’s all right.” He gestured to the footed wine cooler, designed like a temple brazier.

  “Oh.” She ankled over to the bottle.

  This was the first woman Matt had ever seen “ankle.” She moved as fluidly as a fashion model, all the action in her hips, shoulders and ankles. It was a strut, a stuck-up strut, but as much a strut as any stripper’s more obvious locomotion.

  Vassar, huh?

  The waiter had opened the champagne, thank God, although on second thought Matt decided to keep God out of this.

  The flutes were etched in frosted designs, like lace embedded in ice. Matt poured carefully, anxious not to agitate the expensive wine, anxious not to regard his guest too closely.

  Her fingernails were long, longer than Temple’s, and flashed a subtle metallic sheen.

  “Some men,” she said after an appreciative sip that indicated his hotel bill would rise by two or three hundred dollars, “think a woman brings them luck at the gaming tables. You’d be amazed how much of my time I spend on my feet, bringing luck.”

  Of course he looked at those bare, long-toed feet, and at the thin-soled, impossibly high-heeled thin-strapped shoes that decorated them. Temple would have wanted a thorough description the way Molina wanted a postmortem. Think about the shoes, not Molina and postmortems. They were pale, iridescent snakeskin constructed like a futuristic airport. He’d better leave Temple out of this as well as God. Both of them would be equally wroth with him on this one.

  “Tough job,” Matt said.

  She smiled at him. Gorgeous. Just gorgeous.

  “You want dinner?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” Another delaying tactic. It would be better to get to know her first. Wouldn’t it?

  She ambled over to the burlwood desk to skim the heavily padded room service menu, like she knew just where it was. She knew just where it was. She’d been at the Goliath many times, maybe in this very room many times.

  He was beginning to feel yucky about this as well as guilty, but remembered that Molina had assured him that she would be “clean.”

  “What do you feel like having?”

  “I don’t know. You pick. Surprise me.”

  She raised a pale eyebrow. “A gambler, after all,” then lifted the phone receiver and ordered very specific dinners without glancing at the menu again.

  What a pro. She’d been here, done that many times before. And that was exactly what he needed. Wasn’t it?

  After Vassar hung up the phone, she swaggered over to the seating area near the window and arranged herself in one of the upholstered chairs. Her legs crossed higher on the thigh than he would have thought anatomically possible, revealing that her dress’s fluttering skirt was split up the side as far as the mind of man could go.

  A shame to waste such a show on a fraud. For the first time, he wondered if he could do what he had to do. He didn’t see her as a person, a woman, but as an exotic variety of show horse, all artificial arched neck and instep, all exaggerated gait and overdressed mane and tail, all unreal.

  She leaned back, lifted her elbows and supported her neck with her interlaced fingers.

  Matt was able to observe from this new posture that her armpits were preternaturally bare of hair. No doubt permanently removed.

  None of this was a turn-on, and he knew he had such a button, because it had been triggered a time or two.

  “You’re very unusual,” she said.

  “The feeling is mutual.”

  She laughed, the first genuine re
action he’d seen. “I’m not unusual…. What name do you go by?”

  He hesitated long enough for her to continue, “John would do, but it’s a bit predictable.”

  “Thomas,” he said quickly, voicing his doubt.

  “Thomas. That’s better. It may not be your real name, but it’s obviously significant to you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “People are never good at making up totally unrelated things about themselves. There’s always a clue. A psychological tic. Thomas. Thomas Crowne Affair, maybe. Thomassss…Wolfe? Thomasss…Mann. Thomasss — what?”

  “Merton,” he said without thinking.

  “Ummm. I knew it would be an author. I didn’t know it would be such a good author.”

  “You know about Thomas Merton?”

  “Know? I’ve read him. Along with Proust and Genet and a lot of very depressed Frenchmen and women.”

  “Your name — women in your field often take geographic names.”

  “So. You have experience with women in my field.”

  “No! No, I don’t. I’ve just observed.”

  “I went to Vassar, yes. Graduated. Observed.” She slid onto her tailbone, revealing an impossibility: yet more leg.

  My God, the woman was a stork! He sipped more champagne. Obviously, he needed to be tipsy. He noticed her glass was empty and got up to refill it.

  Outside the sky was the color of a Maxfield Parrish print, that heavenly, morning-glory blue that is fading fast to green and will soon flash a fringe of yellow before dousing itself in the utter dark of night.

  “I’m glad to see you enjoying something,” she said, heavy emphasis on the something.

  “Nature’s hard to beat.”

  “And you don’t think I’m very natural.”

  “I never said —”

  “‘Natural’ is not an advantage in my line of work. Or in this town. I love both of them. What’s the matter with being unreal? Is reality that great a trip?”

  “Reality, usually no. People, though. Authenticity is —”