For a moment he seemed startled. “Elementary, my dear. TitaniCon was held at the New Millennium, which is where the CC does his act, so you might have seen him. You managed to keep Molina Junior from evil influences, remember?”
“That was the strangest thing. Her mother, particularly—”
“What about the esteemed lieutenant?”
“Oh, nothing.” Temple wasn’t about to describe TitaniCon’s dramatic denouement to Max, particularly since it put her archenemy Molina in a favorable light. If you considered personally tackling the perp a favorable light…and Temple did. At least she did when she or Louie managed it.
“Whoever the leopard is, the police think it killed the guy,” she concluded. “And you?”
“I think that there are loads of likely suspects, all of them able to walk on two legs. What I want to know is who you saw inside the place.”
“Oh. Oh! The wife. The widow now. Wow. What a weird woman. I think she was having herself surgically altered to look like a big cat.”
“This is a motive for murder?”
“Maybe her husband made her do it? Or maybe she wanted the ranch and the money?”
“Anyone else around the place?”
Temple grimaced. “It’s so hackneyed. The comely secretary. Thin and tall enough to pose as a straw. Snooty too. Let’s have her do it.”
“You don’t know anything about her?”
Temple shook her head. “I imagine Molina’s people are assembling dossiers on the dramatis personae.”
“If they haven’t been dazzled by the leopard at center stage.”
“Molina wouldn’t fall for that, would she?”
“From what I gather, the murder scene looked enough like an accident to confuse the issue. And most people have no idea of what performing leopards are about, or what they can and cannot do.”
“Which means?”
“The leopard was a pro. He was people-friendly. True, you can never fully trust a wild animal, especially one big enough to hurt or eat you, but he wouldn’t just go berserk and attack a person. Unless he’d been goaded into it.”
“Teased, you mean?”
Max nodded. “Animal instinct is powerful and rapid. These foolish people who keep big cats as pets always underestimate that a second’s worth of sheer instinct taking over could gravely harm a human.”
“Sounds like murder in the human kingdom too. You obviously think that Molina and company won’t investigate the leopard angle, or won’t investigate it well enough. Why not?”
Max grinned and drained the dregs of his long, potent drink. Rum and everything.
“Because my friends in camouflage, the animal-rights protesters, are going to tell all about the man in black they saw lurking in the desert before Van Burkleo died.”
“You! That’s right. You were out there. And you were on the scene. You’re a likely suspect.”
“And wait until the widow and the snooty secretary tell the police that you were there.”
“Oh, no!”
“Worried?”
“Only that Molina will have a nervous breakdown trying to decide which of us she’d most like to nail with murder.”
Chapter 23
Déjà Vu
Reno, as she called herself, was too short to be a stripper. Maybe five four on a good day and the right high heels.
She was in superb shape, though, especially for a relatively recent mother. And she made the most of it. Even at two in the morning.
He watched her from the smattering of audience: bored guys trying to decide how many dollar bills it was worth stuffing down her G-string to give them some reflexive kick, some nervous system surge that could be identified as erotic through the smoke and the sound and the booze and the damn emptiness of life itself.
Strip clubs were the most depressing places in the world when you stripped away the jacked-up sound, the rote sexy motions, the scent of money and sweat.
Max had donned Vince with the same professional dispassion and distaste that cops pull on latex gloves these days: it was a habit, it was useful, it was a protective device from the unnameable stains of life in the sleaze lane. One hoped.
Onstage, Reno grabbed her ankles in their four-inch-high heels, bent over, back arched, and showed where life began. And sometimes ended.
Max stared at Reno’s splayed high heels, so different from the high-fashion form Temple wore.
High heels were supposed to be sexy, and he supposed they were. The culture had seen to that. Yet there was a world of difference between Reno’s spikes and Temple’s high heels, and he’d have to be somewhere else to explain it to himself.
He glanced at the bar. Rick was there, waiting for Godot, or Ilsa, or Claude Rains. Rick was looking at Max…Vince…when he looked Rick’s way.
A bad sign.
Max slid off the armless chair, built for lap dancing.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the rolling gait of an overmuscled man heading his way.
He didn’t even look to see if it was Rafi Nadir.
He was out the door, in the still of the night. Around a corner. Another corner. Back in Dumpster Row, where the neon didn’t shine.
He had seen Reno arrive in a banged-up Toyota. His luminous watch dial, pure ‘50s, told him it was only 1:40 A.M. How much longer could Reno shake it for the dollar-bill fools?
He’d wait.
He heard the front door wheeze open, then hold the position. The bouncer looking for him.
After a while the muffled sound of music softened, then cut off.
Door closed.
Max edged around the building to the end of the parking lot that hosted Reno’s Toyota.
He moved into the scraggly brush edging the asphalt. Looming over it was a two-headed streetlight as sleek and sinister looking as the Martian ship probes in The War of the Worlds. But both lamps were dead, blind, only faint moonlight reflecting from their burned-out reflectors. They made an odd but apropos metaphor for the stripper club called Secrets and everybody in it. He settled into the shadows to wait.
* * *
She came clicking across the parking lot on her four-inch hooker heels. Swaggering.
Apparently a good night.
Halfway to the car, a pursuing shadow bolted from the dark hulk of Secrets and caught up with her, hard.
It spun her around.
“Reno.”
Max heard the name, heard everything, as the words hissed across the dry asphalt like a sidewinder snake.
“You want?”
“Had a good night.”
“Okay.”
“Not over yet.”
“It is for me.”
“You haven’t shared.”
She shook off the man’s arm. “You work here, like I do. You don’t get a cut.”
“I can take it any way you like.”
“Nothing!”
He reached for something: her, or where he thought the money was.
Reno’s arm struck out.
He backed up. “You—”
“You work here, just like I do. You don’t own anything about me.”
Max was easing over on silent shoes, but they were facing off and didn’t notice anything but their own anger.
“Your roommate thought the same thing, and look what happened to her.”
“Mandy? That mouse? She was dumb and sweet, but I ain’t. Let me be!”
By then Max was there.
“Trouble?” he asked.
They both rounded on him.
Maybe he had sounded too much like a cop.
“Get outa here!” the man warned.
The woman said nothing, especially not thank you.
Something hissed besides footsteps on dry asphalt. Something high and shrill.
A pop like a gun made everyone jerk, but nothing more happened.
Except that one of the dead streetlamps strobed into life again.
Thin blue light painted their faces a sickly color.
“You!” Rafi Nadir’s hand dropped its viselike grip on Reno’s elbow. “The cops sent someone in to get your mug down on paper. They must want you bad for something.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Max said, claiming Reno’s released elbow. “Now I’ll give you one. Call it a night before someone calls the vice squad. Do you want your face on the mug books?”
Nadir’s mouth worked. He was the kind who was always spoiling for a fight. Max was ready, though he didn’t look like it.
Nadir ignored him and addressed Reno. “This guy probably killed your roomie. Some white knight.”
She was staring at Max as if Rafi Nadir didn’t exist.
Before Nadir could get excited about being irrelevant, Max steered Reno to her car, took the fistful of keys from her hand, opened it and watched Nadir as she got in.
“I’ll see you at home,” he said affably.
In the slanted streetlight rays, her face looked hard, but curious. “You’re Vince.”
He shut the door on her, heard the oncoming scrape of shoes and turned to face Nadir, not so affably.
Reno started her car and drove away, leaving the two men plenty of room for…whatever.
“You’re not leaving,” Nadir said. “Not until that girl is long gone. I should call the police.”
“But you won’t.”
“I don’t need backup to deal with you.”
“What’s to deal with. I’m leaving, aren’t I?”
Nadir stared down the street. Reno’s beater was out of sight, out of hearing. He stepped back with an elaborate gesture of permission.
“Go ahead. But you gave me trouble with another stripper, and she ended up dead the next day. If anything happens to this one, it would look bad for you.”
“That works both ways, doesn’t it?”
Nadir stared sharply into Max’s face, puzzled by his calm, unsettled by the implication.
“I don’t ever want to see you at Secrets again,” he said.
“You won’t.”
Max turned and crossed the parking lot to the street beyond, where he had parked the Maxima two blocks away.
At first he listened for Nadir following him. When he was in the dark between streetlights he finally looked for him.
Nothing.
Max was free to move on to the next low point of the evening.
Chapter 24
Chuck Wagon
You would think Miss Midnight Louise was a casino owner showing off a new armored truck.
There we are gathered in the delivery area behind a wholesale grocery establishment far from the shake, rock, rattle and roll of the Strip, our only audience a circle of Dumpsters and our only spotlight the sickle moon-on-the-half-shell, peeking over the rippled edge of a corrugated roofline.
There is just me and Miss Louise. Oh. And the two noses with fungus among us, name of Golda and Groucho.
I cannot believe that I am out here of a chilly March night with my dearly beloved not-daughter, Midnight Louise, and two pieces of dandelion fluff that have been foisted upon me by my erstwhile assistant, Nose E.
“What did you say these two are?” I hiss at Louise as we all hunker down near ground zero, eyeing the object of our expedition.
“Yorkshire terriers.”
“Well, this is not Yorkshire anymore,” I say, inhaling a bit of desert sagebrush on the wind and exhaling it with an untimely sneeze.
“Shhhh!” Louise hisses back at me. “And you say they are noisy.”
I eye our objective: the truck.
It is big, white, and nondescript, in fact a refrigerator on wheels.
Miss Louise is trying to sell this anemic pumpkin on ice as our coach to the palace. Or our buckboard to the ranch.
“Think of it as a chuck wagon,” she urges. “Meals on wheels. You can snack on the way.”
“And freeze our tails off,” I growl. Then I look at Golda and Groucho. I realize that I am not sure if they have tails. “Ears off.” Do they have ears? “Noses off.” I know they have noses. Those I can see, those shiny wet-asphalt blobs dead center under the perky little red bows on their noggins. I think there are matching eyes behind the waterfall of silky gold and gray hair dangling from the bows.
“These two will be frozen Vienna sausages before we even get out of Vegas,” I say. “Noses on ice are worth nothing.”
“The unit is not fully refrigerated. They do not wish to deliver ice cubes, merely keep the fresh meat from spoiling.”
“This is my aim exactly. I wish to keep the fresh meat from spoiling, namely us.”
Midnight Louise shakes her head as if to dislodge a flea in her ear: me.
“Look, Pops. Do not tell me it cannot be done, because I have already done it and anything I can do you can do better.”
“Darn tootin’,” say I before I can think. I am about to head out to the ranch on a chuck wagon with climate control with one setting: chilly.
“And,” Midnight Louise adds with a glance at our two canine partners, “I did not even have earmuffs for my trip to and fro.”
So it transpires that we all hunker down behind a Dumpster and wait until men pushing carts of raw meat come out of the building. They open the double doors at the truck’s rear and start loading. It is interesting that this delivery van only operates under dark of night. Miss Midnight Louise has scouted the delivery service for Rancho Exotica, decided that we need trackers, no matter how minute, and that we can rescue the leopard and clear it of murder with the mere use of our wits and the Yorkie’s miniature noses. I am not convinced of any of it.
“How do we get in the truck undetected?” I wonder in a soft growl.
“I will distract the men just before they finish loading. You three hop in and hide. I will come in last. On arrival they will unload and then take each cartful away. That is when we debark.”
“These two will never debark.” I jerk my head over my shoulder at the twins, who have been mum as ordered, but not without as much fidgeting as a human two-year-old would do.
It goes just like she wrote. Well, almost that way, not counting hitches. And there are plenty of hitches. When the last cart is almost unloaded, Midnight Louise creeps around to the front of the truck and there emits an unearthly scream. In other words, she sounds like a puma in heat. I thought she had been surgically prevented from engaging in such tasteless displays. So much for modern birth control methods.
The two men hesitate, scratch their heads, look around the side of the truck.
Miss Louise leaps atop the truck’s hood and we hear the sweet sounds of claws scratching painted metal.
The men run around to the front of the truck.
“Come on!” I order the twins. “Eats ahoy.”
I hear their tiny nails making mouse tracks behind me as we race to the truck’s gaping back doors.
I am ready to leap up into the icy heart of darkness when I hear an objecting squeak behind me.
“Mr. Midnight!”
I pause to regard the speaker: Golda. Or Groucho. They all look alike to me. “What?”
“We cannot leap that high.”
“Oh, for Bast’s sake…that is what you get for having pushpins for legs.”
Meanwhile, there is screaming and cursing coming from the front of the vehicle. Louise is doing the screaming. She is a strong girl, but I do not know how long she can hold the attention of two cursing teamsters without incurring severe bodily harm.
Nothing for it but lowering myself to their level.
I bend down, bare my incisors and canines, squint my eyes shut in distaste, and bite down on dog hair until I have pincered a scrawny bit of loose skin along with it.
I leap into the truck, one Yorkie dangling from my mouth like a mouse wearing a Brigitte Bardot wig. I deposit it behind a huge slab of meat.
I bound down, get another mouthful of Yorkie toupee and vault upward again, my pads kissing chill aluminum flooring. This one I hide behind a stack of semifrozen mackerels.
Then I lay me down
to sleep behind what would be a standing rib roast, were it cooked, and prepare for a cold, bumpy ride, also waiting for Midnight Louise to pounce down beside me.
The sound of a few last items being tossed into the truck makes me cringe. It is dim enough in here that a few extra carcasses aren’t going to show much, but I do not want post-flattened Yorkie when we arrive at the ranch.
Suddenly it is as black as midnight. The double doors slam shut; the latches fall to.
Trapped until arrival.
And where is Louise?
Could something have happened to her?
Naw.
I am not going to worry about it.
I have enough to worry about.
A yip from one side of the area is echoed by a sneeze from the other.
Oh, great. Nasal congestion. Just what a sniffing-nose dog needs.
I may be riding on one nostril and a prayer tonight.
The truck jerks into gear. I try to sense if we roll over any impediments.
Naw.
Midnight Louise is one tough kitty-cat. She will be fine.
She will be high, dry, and dogless, safe in the city, while I roll toward the Great Nothing in the company of two toy terriers and a truckload of fresh meat designated for the gullets of seven-hundred-pound Big Cats.
The only thing that is going to eat Midnight Louise is knowing that she missed the boat to fun and adventure in greater Las Vegas.
Who has chosen the better part, I ask you?
I, ah, I ah…ask…ah…you…ask…as…ah CHOO!
Chapter 25
Guilt-Edged Invitation
When Max knocked on the scuffed apartment door he wasn’t surprised to hear a muffled radio or television blare through the hollow-core wood.
It was 3:00 A.M. and strippers would be just winding down, counting the night’s take, getting out of their thongs and tassels.
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