Cat in a Leopard Spot

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “So. Any suspicious characters around that strip club? Secrets.”

  “‘Suspicious characters.’ That is so NYPD. You crack me up.”

  “Sorry. Why’d Cher leave the last club she appeared at?”

  Reno shrugged, her face buried in the child’s hair, then looked up. “She didn’t say. I only saw her for a few minutes the day she died. She was all high on some guy she met named Vince. Said he might look out for her. I guess he played white knight when the bouncer got overeager.”

  “The bouncer?”

  “Guy named Raf. Likes to throw his weight around. Most of us don’t take guys like that seriously. All show and no go, but Cher was a scaredy-cat.”

  “Maybe she was right.” Molina made a point of writing down the names of the men. Vince was new; Raf, of course, was not.

  “This Raf been at the club long? What does he look like?”

  “We called him our man from the Iranian secret police. Iranian Secrets police in our case, I guess.”

  “What do you mean ‘Iranian secret police’?”

  “Oh, Raf, our bouncer, just has that dark and dangerous look. Kinda foreign, but I don’t think he is. Kinda dominating. Then there was this Vince guy that came in. He was dark and dangerous looking too, but Cher was jazzed on him, oh, boy. He gave her money for nothing, after all. No dancing, no sex. Got her thinking about hair-dressing school, my gawd, can you believe it? Standing all day and no money in it? At least hookers get paid for standing around. And their blow jobs are over a lot faster. And then this guy tried to talk her into calling some counselor. For someone who looked like sleaze on a skateboard he sure acted like Mr. Goody Two-shoes.”

  Molina nodded. Straight arrows, even cops, could fixate on reforming hookers and strippers. Probably unconscious libido.

  “She say what this Vince looked like, anything identifying?”

  “Tall, dark…you fill in the blanks. She offered to sleep with him for nothing, but he wasn’t interested. Gay, you think?”

  “Maybe. Maybe just a do-gooder, like you say. Or a do-badder setting her up. No address, no way to get in touch with him again?”

  “She didn’t say. She did say he tangled with Rafi. Raf. That’s short for Rafi. I ask you, what kind of name is that?”

  Molina held back a smile in answering a woman who’d named her daughter Trifari. Trif? “Foreign maybe, like you say. Middle-Eastern, I’d bet.”

  “Oh! Don’t tell me about those guys! Control freaks, and it’s all okayed by their religion or whatever. Anyway, that’s why Cher was switching clubs that next night. That she…died. Didn’t want to run into Rafi again at Secrets.”

  “You’re free to do that?”

  “Yeah. Not at the hoity-toity clubs, but at places like Secrets, it’s just who shows up. We move around. Get a wider clientele that way. More bucks. Poor Mandy. She coulda used more bucks. I hate to say it, but she was born to be somebody’s victim. Was it a nut case, do you think? Or that guy Vince?”

  “Murder like this? Night. A woman alone in a strip club parking lot. It could be anybody.”

  Molina read between the ancient lines. Despite Reno’s hard-nosed survival attitude and her genuine desire for a better life for her daughter, she would be putty in the hands of any controlling guy who threw a little money, time, and attention her way before taking over her life. Like the late, mostly unlamented Cher, little Trifari was in a race for her future with her mother’s abusive background. Would conditioning or maternal instinct win?

  Molina hoped Reno was one of those women who, even if she couldn’t stop being a victim in her own life, at least could draw the line at that happening to her kids.

  Some did it, and they deserved a medal. Most didn’t, and they deserved what they got: another generation reared for heartbreak.

  Molina nodded at the little girl. “Why did you name her Trifari?”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “I do. Much better than Tiffany.”

  “Yeah. That sucks. Like anyone from where I came from would ever have anything from Tiffany’s. But they might have some Trifari, huh?” She leaned back against the sofa, grabbed her knees, grinned like a teenager.

  “I had this aunt, too, only she didn’t care about grammar. But she let me try on her jewelry when I was a kid. And some of it, the glittery stuff, had this little tag that read ‘Trifari.’ I always swore I would get me some of that someday.”

  “And you did.” Molina nodded at the child.

  “Yes, I did.” Reno slid into a kiddish singsong. “Mommy sure did, precious baby.” She hugged and rocked the little girl, stealing raspberry kisses while the child giggled.

  Molina could have felt a lot of things at witnessing this mother-with-child scene: skepticism, anger, sorrow. Instead she just felt helpless. It was a feeling she hadn’t indulged for years. Not until Rafi Nadir had recently turned up in Las Vegas.

  Belated rage literally straightened her spine. Reno wasn’t just a struggling single mother from a rotten background, she was a link in safeguarding Molina’s own daughter from the past, and the future.

  “So Cher was a basket case. Why would anyone strangle her?”

  “She was there? She was easy? Maybe that’s what it comes down to.” Reno’s grip on Trifari tightened until the child fussed in protest. “That’s why I don’t let any man live with us. Too many of them try things with little girls.”

  Molina nodded. No argument. Every woman these days knew a woman whose child had been molested, and most molestations happen within the charmed circle of family and acquaintances. Those just were the odds, plain and simple. The only certain odds in Las Vegas related to domestic abuse.

  “About this new guy, Vince. New at the club?”

  “I’ve never seen him, but Rick had. He’s one of the bartenders.”

  “How about this theory? Say someone Cher knew or met at Secrets got big ideas, or was mad at her. Suppose that person followed her to the new place and killed her there to keep everyone from thinking about any suspects from Secrets?”

  “You suppose. That’s your job. Me, I don’t know. Could be someone from Secrets.”

  “Who?”

  “What guy, you mean?”

  “Strangling isn’t the average woman’s choice of attack. It helps to be taller than your victim. Was Cher a tall girl?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact. Here. I’ve got a photo.” Reno rooted in the drawer of the end table that seemed more useful for holding the stuffing in the couch side than putting things on. “One of the club photographers took this.”

  Molina took it in turn, a five-by-seven horizontal group shot of whatever girls at Secrets happened to be around. They stood in a ragged line, arms around each other like cheerleaders, most of them wearing only G-strings and the grinning expressions of the happily smashed.

  “It was Senegal’s birthday. We all hung around after and broke balloons and sang ‘Happy You-Know.’ That’s Cher there.”

  Molina stared at a face slightly blurred by booze and movement. “She looks pretty tall. Five eight, nine maybe.”

  “You got a great eye.” Reno nodded, both impressed and suddenly sad. “Cher was about that. I know because she was always bitching about having to wear high-heeled boots. Said men like women who weren’t as tall as they were. What do you think?”

  “From the photo, five nine.”

  “No.” Reno was grinning like a girlfriend at Molina. “I mean, do men like tall women? You oughta know.”

  Molina, surprised, said, “I doubt it. Too many guys are nervous about women anyway. I’d say short girls have it all over us tall ones.”

  “Kinda what I thought. That was Cher’s problem. She felt like a horse and acted that way. Turned guys off. And, she was drunk as a skunk most of the time. She wasn’t stripper material. Had to drink to do it. Probably had to drink to do sex too. I think there was, you know, in her family.”

  Molina nodded, making aimless marks in her notebook. Scratch a stripper a
nd find a depressing life story. “What other guys hung out at the club?”

  Reno curled up in the couch’s slightly soiled corner. “Too bad you can’t interview the police. They went over all this with me.”

  “Did they?”

  “Oh, yeah. Two of’em. Over and over, everything.”

  Molina felt a rare, secret satisfaction. “You remember their names?”

  “No, just detectives. Like you. Notebook, the whole deal. Only with IDs.”

  “So what’d you tell them?”

  “Just about the usual suspects. They were interested in the photo guy. I noticed you wrote his name and address down from the stamp on the back of the picture. And there’s the deejay, Tyler. Just a kid, underage, but I didn’t tell the cops that. Loves music, likes to watch naked girls dancing. All pimple-faces do. And he doesn’t have to pay for it.”

  “He ever bother any of the girls?”

  “All he knows how to bother people yet is by playing his tapes too loud, although you can’t possibly do that at a strip club. Naw, he’s a good kid, and the bartenders and bouncers, they’re just regular guys. You’d be amazed how boring it is to be around women shedding their clothes after the shock wears off. That’s why we move so much from club to club. I just don’t see any of these guys going berserk and offing a girl. Why?”

  “You like the idea of an outside stalker better?”

  “Yeah. Maybe it was her old man. Stepdad. Those are the kind who can diddle their own kids and then get mad when the kid grows up and goes off and lets someone outside the family do it. Maybe it’s that Hannibal freak, huh? Most of the guys who come to strip clubs are pussycats. That’s why we love doing it, putting a smile on their pussycat faces while they stuff our G-strings with cash money.”

  Trifari started banging a plastic assembly toy on the floor, and Reno jumped down to take it away. “Come on, honey. Save that toy for next time.”

  Molina had noted down the names of Secrets’ male workers. The detectives’ reports would cover all of them.

  “Only one guy from Secrets came anywhere near Cher away from the club,” Reno said as she straightened up. “That guy she met her last night there.”

  “The day before she was murdered.”

  “Right.” Reno shivered as she sat again to sip strong, cooling coffee. “I think I know how to take care of myself. I’ve been at this a long time. Too long. But the money’s good and I come and go when I want, and I’ll be free days to go to my little girl’s school stuff when she’s older. When she’s in the school play, right, little star? If I hold up.” She laughed. “I look pretty good for my age, don’t I?”

  Molina smiled. “I don’t know. What’s your age?”

  “Guess.”

  “Twenty-eight or nine?”

  Reno preened. You could almost see a spotlight on her. “Add ten, honey.”

  “Really?” Molina was honestly surprised. Reno was in great condition.

  “I get in another ten years, I’ll have this kid in junior high and a nest egg for college. Then I can do nails at the Goliath or something.”

  If, Molina thought, shutting her notebook, nobody ever caught her in a parking lot alone.

  Chapter 5

  Magic Act

  The widening vee of seats unfurled like a fan. The audience filled the seats, a hydra-headed monster in miniature. Tiny pale faces glimmered beyond the spotlights like pearlescent fingernails.

  From the front-row red-velvet chairs that curved into a smile to match the stage’s dark, grinning lip, the seating section lifted and expanded, making the faces dim into distant painted figures on a Chinese vase.

  Most of the audience could never know that, to the performer, the seating section of a theater resembled a chasm, in time as well as in space. The spectators themselves became ignored attractions, mere curiosities, creatures trapped beyond the invisible “fourth wall” that every stage possessed: a cellophane curtain, a psychic force field.

  The audience, by virtue of its assembly and its conspiracy of silence, its expectation of witnessing something, was not a mass of individuals anymore, but that ancient Greek-chorus embodiment of society at large. It was also the same thumbs-up, thumbs-down monster that had circled the gladiators in a Roman coliseum.

  That ancient Roman audience had expected blood.

  This contemporary Las Vegas one merely thirsted after amazement.

  But even modern times were quickly reaching the point where blood was the only amazement left. At least in live performance.

  And this performance was designed to amaze. The man who moved in the laser shafts of spotlights that raked the dark stage like dueling light sabers was tall, dark, and masked in sinister spots that resembled arcane tattoos in the theatrical lighting.

  Unlike an actor, he could shatter the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience. That didn’t mean they were any more intimate to him, that ocean of whitecap faces bobbing gently now and then to cough or address a seat partner.

  Such signs of inattention were not encouraged.

  The man stepped into the upright coffin behind him, a carved and polished box fit for a vampire. A red velvet curtain lowered over it.

  The masked man stepped through a breakaway back panel just as the curtain whisked up again to reveal an empty box.

  He stepped through to confront an eerily similar figure to himself, a man in black everything, except for the mask. This man’s face was painted black. The smell of greasepaint hovered like a halo over the almost mirror images.

  “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” the intruder murmured.

  “My God, what are you doing here?” The magician’s mechanical voice sounded even hoarser than normal. “My bodyguards—”

  “You have fifteen seconds.” The other man flashed his wrist to show the sickly green luminescent dial beneath his pushed-up matte-black sleeve. “Where can we meet privately?”

  “Here? Now?”

  “Eleven seconds.”

  “Damn you…my dressing room. Go now! I’ll keep the bodyguards out. If anyone sees you—”

  “They won’t. Six seconds.”

  “This whole stage section turns. How will you—?”

  “Not your problem.”

  The mechanism beneath them jerked into action.

  “My act—”

  The magician turned to face his audience as his simple hiding place spun into view. He was literally beside himself. He glanced at his unwanted doppelgänger. Gone!

  Underneath the mask, his jaw tightened. This interlude had been the real magic trick.

  His pulse still staccato, he stepped aside, swept a dark arm to indicate the false wall, bowed as applause hit him like a tidal wave.

  Sweat trickled under the spandex false face he wore.

  Below the stage, Max amused himself after he had wiped off the camouflage paint by trying on the Cloaked Conjuror’s spare mask. He spoke softly through the tiny built-in microphone. “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

  He sounded like a robot gargling tinfoil. He contemplated resuming his performing career in some exotic disguise. But he liked performing magic with a bare face. A magician deceived to the degree that he was able to seem sincere. Since the Cloaked Conjuror’s whole shtick was revealing the devices behind magical illusions, he didn’t need to show his face. He wasn’t there to convince but to debunk.

  It was magical deconstructionism, like an artistic or literary movement. What had the art of legerdemain come to, feeding on its own destruction? Entropy as entertainment.

  Or was he just jealous? Max regarded his masked, expressionless feline face in the mirror. His own cover was blown, his career lost. Magic had been his first passion; revenge his second. Temple his third. The first was history now. The second was strangely dormant after eighteen years. Eighteen years, longer than Sean had lived…As for Temple, their passion was bound and gagged by the fallout from the second.

  Through a tinny speaker mounted under the ceiling, he could
hear the music, the Cloaked Conjuror’s disguised vocal croakings, the applause that sounded as mechanical and distorted as the magician’s voice.

  It was like eavesdropping on another, unreal world. One he had once lived in intimately.

  Was he just jealous? Not if dreams are only in your head.

  He wasn’t used to being confined alone with his own thoughts. It felt like being penned in a well-lit confessional, waiting eternally for some unknown person in the other confessional to finish his business and the small window beyond the pleated white linen to slide open so the man hidden behind the curtain could wait for Max to say “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  Lord! He was going back to his earliest childhood at his grandmother’s church. The Catholic Church did open-air confessions now, in large, well-lighted rooms with no hint of claustrophobia.

  Max had to wonder if his childish hunger to escape the small dark room where he enumerated his failings to the hidden listener had first interested him in escapology and magic tricks. Yet the king of escapology, Houdini, hadn’t been Catholic but Jewish. Escape that fact.

  The dressing room door creaked. Max leaped up to confront his visitor with his borrowed face.

  “I’m fine,” the husky computer-disguised voice of the Cloaked Conjuror rasped from outside the open door. “Just keep anyone from entering, okay?”

  The door opened only enough to admit his muscular form. He was a bit too thickset to perform the most agile illusions, one reason he’d turned to unmasking unreality, probably.

  He knew what the magical community said of the debunkers: failed magicians. Those who can, do; those who can’t, criticize.

  The Cloaked Conjuror turned on Max the moment the door was shut and dead-bolted.

  “I can’t believe you! Right onstage. You could have ruined my act. Are you crazy? My bodyguards could have thought you were an assassin. Are you suicidal?”

  “I can’t believe you,” Max charged back in an eerie, altered, amplified tone of voice. “Right in the public print. Telling the world that death threats forced my retirement. That’s not true. Why in the name of Harry Houdini would you mention me at all in that interview? Are you crazy? Suicidal?”