“You took the food out of a panther’s mouth?”
“Well, it was sleeping, so I slipped into its cage and wrestled a big nasty bone with lots of meat on it through the bars and dragged it into Osiris’s cage. Then I was forced to wait while he devoured it so I could drag the evidence back into the tiger cage. I think it is best that the animals who run this death camp not know that I foiled their abuse of Osiris. In fact, if we cannot persuade your human friends to get Osiris out of there, one of us should return daily and feed him by the method I have devised.”
This causes me to frown, and frown harder.
My so-called “friends” are not exactly at my behest. In fact, I am the most undercover of undercover artists, and work best in subtle and mysterious ways.
How I am to stage-manage daily jaunts to this distant desert hideaway to feed a kidnapped leopard, lead Mr. Max Kinsella to said leopard, and still tend to my hunt for the lilac Siamese while working for the good of my Miss Temple?
It is more than I can solve in the next few minutes, so I follow Miss Midnight Louise’s example in berating my toe mats and chewing on both problems at once.
She, however, exhausted from her labors, has gone to sleep with her tail tip wrapped around the end of her little black chinny-chin-chin.
I foresee no such luxury for Midnight Louie.
Chapter 19
Sketched in Suspicion
“Sorry I couldn’t see you sooner,” Molina said.
She was rushing into her office where Janice Flanders had been waiting for—she checked her watch and stifled a word she wouldn’t want her daughter Mariah to overhear—twenty minutes.
“Everything exploded this morning,” she continued. “The caseload has been outrageous.”
“I know, Lieutenant. Don’t worry about me. I’ve been studying the portraits on your walls.”
Molina glanced up at the familiar frieze of mug shots and most-wanted posters.
“Trophies?” Janice asked, “or just generic crooks?”
“Some we nailed. So. What did you get at…what’s-its-name?”
“Secrets. Sounds more upscale than it is. I owe you thanks. I never would have visited a strip club otherwise. Neither would have Matt.”
“You took a date?”
“I took muscle.” Janice smiled. “Or thought I did. The star attraction ended up hitting on him.”
Molina shook her head. “From rectory to raunchy. You and I have a lot to answer for in the education of Matt Devine.”
“He did better with her than I did with the house muscle.” Janice leaned forward, the pencil in her left hand tapping the glass atop Molina’s desk. “I’ve made a find, I think. Remember the guy you had me sketch recently?” Janice glanced over the walls and frowned. “I don’t see his handsome face on your Wall of Infamy.”
“It’s a pending case.” She leaned down and reluctantly pulled the folder holding Janice’s all-too-lifelike portrait of Rafi Nadir. “This guy?”
Seeing her sketch again, Janice grabbed her upper arms as if cold. “I could redo that for you, better now. This is what blew me away. I met him. Last night. At Secrets. I guess he’s a bouncer there. Isn’t that the guy you’re looking into for something?”
“For something. So?”
“A stripper from the club was murdered. Not there, but she had worked at Secrets. And, listen, the hard time that guy gave me—”
“He came on to you?”
“Hardly! He implied I was a lesbian just for being in the club. I think he was going to call Matt gay, except that Reddy Foxx was all over him and usually her kind are pretty on target about gender preferences.”
Molina was ready for a good primal scream: what hath subterfuge wrought? She could picture it all too clearly: Janice and Matt bellying up to the bar in a strip club to interrogate a gin-slinger named Rick on her request, while Rafi Nadir, the guy she most wanted to separate from any part of her life or anybody she knew or who knew her…and Raf hassling them both. With only a ridiculously named stripper putting the make on Matt to stand between them and his territorial temper.
If it didn’t have the making of a first-class tragedy, it would be a surefire comedy.
“You had your hands full,” Molina commented in the neutral tone of voice she was so expert at falling back on: the noncommittal neutrality that masqueraded for police politeness. It was really just a darker shade of doubt, but most civilians and good citizens didn’t know that, though the bad actors knew it and didn’t care.
“Lieutenant? You seem a little distracted.”
Molina gazed into Janice’s on-the-level eyes, now showing a shred of concern. “Just too many unclosed cases on my mind. So. You want another crack at the illustrated man.” She pushed Janice’s sketch toward her.
“Right. Now that I’ve seen and heard him, I just hope somebody gets him for something. I’ll redo it gratis. Just for the lesbian crack.”
“You can’t believe anything you hear in a strip club. So that was it. A close encounter with the sketch subject. It must have been unnerving. Like seeing a ghost.”
“Like seeing a nightmare. I’m not used to these hard customers. Matt didn’t seem particularly worried, though.”
“He’s seen hard customers before.”
“As a priest?”
Molina permitted herself a smile. “No. Here. In Vegas.”
“That man I first sketched for him?”
Molina shrugged. “Unappetizing, but not particularly dangerous. Just mean.”
“His stepfather. Matt says he…stalked him.”
“Matt’s being hard on himself, as usual. He found him. For me, frankly. For himself too. Looking for a criminal isn’t stalking.”
Janice nodded. Molina could tell she was unconvinced, that she was thinking of a subject that had not come up, and probably wouldn’t. “That second sketch I did for him…”
“Second one?” Molina felt her nerve endings sit up and salute. Effinger was old news, an unsolved case that nobody really cared about. A minuscule serving of small potatoes at the biggest buffet in Las Vegas.
“The woman. The gorgeous woman.”
“Hmmm.” Molina made it sound like she knew all about it and wasn’t particularly interested. That’s how you got troubled witnesses to talk: you overreacted to the trivial and tiptoed around the crucial.
Janice fell into easy compliance. “She didn’t look like a criminal, but I suppose they don’t all come from Central Casting, like that Raf character at Secrets.”
Molina ached to shock Janice a little by revealing that Raf had been a cop. You couldn’t take anything for granted in the law enforcement game. Nothing. Including gorgeous women that Matt Devine wanted pretty pictures of. A self-indulgence? Someone he had a crush on?
“She wasn’t a redhead?” Molina had never thought of Temple Barr as gorgeous, but Janice was one of those stolidly average-looking women, like Molina herself, who might confuse pretty cute with pretty.
“No. A cross between Snow White and the Wicked Queen. Skin as white as snow, hair as black as coal, lips as red as blood.”
“Don’t recall any Most Wanteds of that description.” Molina’s smile put a period on her dismissal of the subject. She would certainly have to find out what that was all about. Probably under the pretense of getting Matt’s report on the outing at Secrets. Not here. Somewhere more social…
“Oh. I did get the other sketch you wanted,” Janice was saying, reaching into the large flat tapestry bag she’d leaned against her chair. “The bartender, Rick, took a bit of coaxing, but I think I got a pretty dead-on likeness.” She handed her sketch pad across the desk, opening to the top sheet.
Oh, my, yes. Max Kinsella as a dated lounge lizard. So “Vince” had been his cover persona when he charmed that doomed girl Mandy/Cher despite looking like yesterday’s Spanish omelette. Where did he get that tacky ’70s gold jewelry?
She wasn’t surprised, of course. She had sent him there to snoop. She just hadn’
t anticipated that he’d snoop in such an odious guise. Greasy hair curling at the ends. Ugh. Sleaze personified. Would the real Max Kinsella please stand up? No, cancel that. Would the real Max Kinsella please put his hands up and assume the position?
Unfortunately, in this case the sketch only proved he was on the job, on her orders.
Molina suddenly realized that Janice was watching her study the artwork.
“Almost too perfect as the very model of a modern lowlife, isn’t he?” Janice said. “I think that guy’s just playing at being a big man. If I were to say who would most likely have killed a woman, I’d pick him.” Her blunt-nailed left forefinger came down hard on Raf Nadir’s nose.
That was the last thing that Molina wanted to hear.
“So,” Molina said a few hours later, carefully unwrapping her salsa-sour cream—green chili burger. “I hope you don’t mind a quick meet at a fast-food place. I’m working late, and you go to work late, so…”
“Fine,” Matt Devine said, looking nervous.
He was probably nervous about spilling something on the front seat of her Crown Victoria, which was in pretty good shape for a cop car.
The silver motorcycle he sometimes rode leaned against the single parking-lot light pole like a particularly out-of-place prostitute, all sleek and platinum-silver-blond in a black-dye neighborhood.
It was 9:00 P.M. and the parking lot light rinsed Matt’s blindingly blond hair the albino shade of fiberglass-coifed Christmas-tree angels from a galaxy far away and long, long ago called East L.A.
She was a rat and no woman to use an unsuspecting schmuck (saint) like Matt for her larger purposes, but she had a daughter and a life to protect.
She found it uncanny that Matt had ordered the exact variety of Charley’s Old-Fashion Burger that Max Kinsella had: lettuce, blue cheese, and sun-dried tomatoes.
Maybe all men were California cheeseburgers at heart.
“I suppose Janice told you—” he said, nervously.
“She did. She showed me.”
“Vince.”
Molina nodded.
“I don’t know why he was there—”
“That’s my job.”
“—looking like that—”
“Maybe it’s his natural coloration.”
“—but I don’t think he’d kill anyone. Not a woman, anyway.”
Molina laughed. “Noble of you to defend him. You realize that if I put Kinsella away for murder one, our Miss Temple is one very unattached object.”
He stopped negotiating a surrender with the four-inch-thick burger and eyed her in the twilight. Hard. “Temple is no object, attached or not. You realize that if you did put Kinsella in irons your Miss Temple would do anything to prove him innocent—including petitioning for a retrial before the ink was dry on the conviction? If you could get one in the first place.”
“You want him out and about?”
“I want him paying for what he’s done, not what you might wish he had done. I admit it looks bad that he was at Secrets before that stripper was killed, but I bet Temple can clear him of having anything to do with the earlier deaths. We know who killed the ex-nun and dumped her at the Blue Dahlia.”
“But ‘we’ don’t know who killed the woman in the church parking lot soon after. You remember, the former magician’s assistant?” Molina kept her eyebrows raised in challenge.
“I understand what you’re saying. An ex-magician’s assistant could have been killed by an ex-magician like Kinsella. But he had no connection to her.”
“That we know of. And he had a connection to the dead stripper, Matt, because I sent him into that club.”
“You did? Why?”
She shook her head, ate a mouthful of bun and burger so she couldn’t answer until she had come up with a good one.
“He seemed to fancy himself an undercover operator,” she finally said. “I wanted him to tail somebody, and he ran into Mandy, actually born as Cher Smith, instead.”
“Poor Max.”
“Poor Max! Are we talking rival here or blood brother?”
“He’s not my rival. You know that Temple and Max are…reunited. There are no rivals where there’s no contest.”
“Poor Matt.”
But this time he had bitten off more than he could chew and was too busy to answer. Her comment lay as heavy as a cold French fry in a pool of congealed ketchup between them.
“Poor Carmen,” he finally said when he had finished chewing, looking amused.
“I guess the only one of us who isn’t ‘poor’ something is that blamed PR whiz.”
“Temple’s doing okay,” Matt said. Serenely.
She tried not to grit her teeth. There wasn’t a thing she could do with serene people.
“So.” She started all over again. “It doesn’t bother you that Kinsella was on the scene of the crime-to-be?”
“The scene where the victim of the crime-to-be had last been seen before dying. A lot of people must have been there that night.”
Molina nodded. She had come here to disarm any suspicions Matt might have had. Instead, he was developing some of his own.
“I just wanted to warn you,” she said.
“About what?”
“If it should turn out that Kinsella is as dirty as I think he is—”
“He’s no murderer. Quite the contrary.”
“If he were, he’d be out of your hair, Devine. Don’t you care?”
“I do care. That’s why I don’t need to rise if someone else falls. You have chili on your chin.”
“What!”
“Here’s a napkin.”
“I don’t want a damn napkin, I want an understanding.”
“You’ve said before that your nailing Kinsella would force Temple to turn to me, but you’re wrong.”
“About Kinsella being nailable?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you can charge him with something serious. But that wouldn’t force or free Temple to do or be anything other than she is. And she’s committed to Max Kinsella. I’ve come to terms with that. Isn’t it time that you did? You can’t use her, and you can’t use me.
“Poor Carmen.”
He handed her a paper napkin.
Chapter 20
Feast
He lay sated.
Relieved.
The cub had come, playful, pushing its tiny paws between the bars of his lair.
All black, the same midnight color he had seen in some adults and fellow performers of his kind.
It was tiny, the cub, and for a moment his hunger was so sharp he had considered…
But it danced away before he could think any more about his hunger, his huge, black hole of hunger, gnawing at every thought and every instant like nothing he had felt before.
Where were the kind ones? Who brought food and water and reward?
Where were the two-legs he relied upon for everything?
Two-legs there were here. He had seen them shoveling food into the other cages, the aroma massaging his huge nostrils like his mother’s tongue, creating a sense of want and fulfillment at the same time that he had not felt since his cub days.
Mother. She would feed him. Where was she, the constant presence, warm and purring as loud as a two-leg’s machine?
But now he was not hungry. He heard an echo of his mother’s purr within himself.
The cub he had spared, that he had been too hunger-dulled to threaten, had come back. Dragging meat! Food. Fresh.
It had struggled to push the trophy between the metal poles of his container with its tiny forefeet. Then it had sat and watched him eat. Asking nothing for itself. A very well-behaved cub! No pulling and fighting with it, small as it was.
He had eaten and eaten, and then gnawed bare bone. Eaten a great deal for a single sitting, as he had heard the Forepaws had done in the Far Place before meeting the two-legs. Feasting. You did not understand a feast until you had known want. Until you had known hunger gnawing at your innards like a predator, like a
tiger or a lion at its meal.
But he didn’t need to think of more meals yet. Now he was full. Sated. Lazy.
He dozed, his eyes shut, his purr an echo of his mother’s crooning.
When the sharp bite nipped his shoulder again, his muscle twitched, that’s all.
A fly. An irritating fly when life was so good.
Odd that the cub had come into his territory after he had eaten and was feeling drowsy. A brave cub. To enter his lair and wrest the naked bone away, through the tall shafts of iron grass.
A brave, strong cub. Where had it come from? He had heard no mewling of young here, just the snarls and cries of the old and forsaken….
He felt himself slump over on his side. On the side where he had been bitten. Again. Perhaps he would wake up with the two-legs he knew and trusted. Perhaps the food would come often from now on, as before, and this last vision was just the uneasy milk-dream of a besotted cub. A small spotted cub. No. Black. Solid black. Of the kind they call panther. White teeth, red tongue like fresh meat, heart of lion.
If he saw the cub again, he would share some of his meat with it. His head felt as big as an elephant’s. He tried to prick his ears, but they lay limp, dulled by the buzzing of a thousand tsetse flies.
* * *
The smell is odd. There is none.
No. There are traces of odor, but faint, like the scent the two-legs leave.
His head lifts. He now lies on grass.
No.
He lies on the short grass the two-legs line their lairs with.
It smells like the water in the pool in his home lair, pungent, sharp, not of blood and bone, but of nothingness. That smell had been all around his home lair, and his slowed heart begins to pound faster in the happy excitement of recognizing the familiar.
He is in his home lair again! Inside the two-legs’ lair, as he had been allowed now and again. For flashes from their machines, when they praised him like purrs. Good boy. Handsome boy. Osiris. Yes.
He pushes himself upright on buckling paws. Gets to his legs, wobbles like a cub. Good cub. He is still full.
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