Cat in a Leopard Spot

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  She opened the door the length of a gold safety chain, also scuffed.

  “I’m not going to ask how you managed to ditch Raf and still follow me home,” Reno said. “You’re just like the horse to grandmother’s house, Vince. You know the way.”

  “I’ve been here before,” he admitted.

  “How do I know you didn’t kill Mandy?”

  “Pretty dumb of me to come back.”

  “Maybe.”

  Her one eye that was visible though the door slit tilted to match the cynical slant of her head.

  She shut the door, hard.

  A moment later the chain latch slid and the door opened enough to admit him.

  Max dove into the stuffy atmosphere of food, cosmetics, and kid odors.

  “How’d you and Raf end up?”

  “We had words.”

  She nodded and went to the shabby upholstered sofa, sitting on the corner near a tilting end table.

  Max followed. “You were worried about one of us?”

  Reno shook her head. She slumped into the corner of the couch and lit a cigarette from a matchbook on the end table.

  “Moxie’s,” the cover read. Max had never heard of it.

  “So you’re Vince,” she said, narrowing her eyes through the veil of smoke she puffed out on her first draw.

  He shrugged.

  “I suppose that Mandy never noticed you were too bad to be true.”

  “Mandy was too drunk to notice much.” Max looked around, removed a stack of folded kid’s clothing from an armchair seat, and sat there. “That’s why I ended up getting her home.”

  Reno took another deep drag on her cigarette.

  “Why am I too bad to be true?” Max asked.

  She laughed. “Disappointed? Listen, I’ve been studying sleazy guys since I started stripping when I was fifteen. You’re just too perfect.”

  Max tugged at his stretch velour V-neck shirt. “I shop in all the worst places.”

  “That’s just it. To me, you’re a little too sleazy. But I’m an expert on sleazy guys, believe me. What are you? I don’t smell undercover cop.”

  He shook his head. “I’m nobody official, even unofficially.”

  She nodded, no longer interested in any particular label now that she’d pegged him. “So why’d you take Mandy home?”

  “Nadir was hassling her, and she wasn’t as good as you at handling him back.”

  “He’s all bark.”

  “You don’t think he killed her?”

  “Why?”

  “I interrupted him. He doesn’t like to be interrupted. And…I had to knock him down. It was too dark for him to ID me, but he wouldn’t like that. He didn’t know who I was or where I was from, but Cher—”

  “You remind me of that PI that saw me yesterday.”

  “PI?”

  She nodded. “Now that she’s dead, everybody’s interested in Mandy. Or Cher. That was her real name. You know why strippers take stage names?”

  “Privacy. It keeps the customers at a distance.”

  “Yeah, sure. But for another reason. Most of us, we hate our real names. We heard them yelled at us since we could crawl. Maybe a slap came with it, or just more yelling, or…if we were real lucky, daddy or stepdaddy with a little game to play.”

  Max nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “So Mandy didn’t like to admit to the name Cher. But she told you. Why?”

  “My honest face?”

  Reno laughed with him. “No, you got to her. She acted like she’d been visited by the angel Gabriel the next day. And she did exactly what you said and went to a different club the next night. She was even going to call that radio shrink you mentioned when she got time. She was real happy when she died.”

  Max closed his eyes.

  He heard Reno inhale on her cigarette like a sigh.

  “So it was mutual,” she said.

  When he opened his eyes she was snuffing the cigarette in an empty Gerber glass jar.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll tell you what I told the PI. No one would want to kill Mandy but a freak. She was so harmless. That’s why we took her in here, same reason you brought her home. You aren’t the only softie left in Las Vegas, Vince. Ginger and I were real fond of Mandy.”

  Reno teared up and looked away. “She was like a kid, still hoping things would turn out all right, just because. I guess she died quick.”

  He nodded. “The police had a couple other women strangled about the same time, but there were markers at those scenes that weren’t there in Mandy’s case.”

  “You do sound like a cop sometimes.”

  “This PI. Who put him on the case?”

  “Mandy’s family, I guess. That’s what she said.”

  “She?”

  “Yeah. There are lady PIs. I gotta say, the ones I’ve seen before were these little old dames all curlicued and mascaraed. You know, fifty-something types with bleached hair. This one was plain and simple, looked like she knew her stuff.”

  “You get a name?”

  “Sure, but I’m not sure I believe it. Vince. Vince?”

  “It does have a certain sleaze factor, Reno.”

  She laughed and reached for another cigarette. “That it does. Serious lady. Not like you.”

  “How not?”

  “You’re relaxed. She was edgy. Didn’t really show it, but I know edgy. I think she knows her stuff, though, that’s why I talked to her. I want the creep who did Mandy to pay.”

  Max nodded. “What did she look like?”

  “Mandy?” Reno asked with exaggerated innocence.

  He waited.

  “Tall, real tall. If I were that tall I’d make twelve thousand more a year. But like I said, plain vanilla. See, that’s what’s wrong with you, Vince, you stand out. She didn’t. Except for those Bausch and Lomb eyes.”

  “Eyes?”

  “Seriously blue. Unreal.”

  Max nodded again. “A handicap for a PI if you don’t want to be remembered.”

  “Now, your eyes are—” Reno leaned forward through her own halo of cigarette smoke to study Max’s face. “Now, yours are blue, but nice quiet sky blue. If you toned down the rest of your image, you’d be pretty forgettable.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How do you know about these other women who were strangled? The PI didn’t mention that. You got an in with the cops?”

  “Yeah. I cheat.”

  “I believe you do.”

  “You have any letters of Mandy’s? Any information on her friends, where she came from?”

  “They never come from here, do they? Me neither. And I didn’t come from Reno, that’s for sure. No. The PI went through her things. You can too.”

  Max stood. “Did she take anything?”

  “Only notes. I see you don’t.”

  “I’m looking for things that aren’t worth noting.”

  Reno stood, sighed. “Well, that was Mandy, alive or dead.”

  “Not true,” Max said.

  “I guess we tried, huh?”

  He didn’t say anything more.

  “Not enough.” Reno turned and led him down the cramped hall.

  Chapter 26

  Polishing Off the Past

  Matt pulled off his gloves and stuffed them into the pockets of his down jacket. He felt like he had alighted from a time machine instead of a taxicab. The scene before him proved his problems were half a continent away. He savored the view: a snow-whited sepulcher of night in a city that counted wind chill factors instead of chips. Chicago. Safe at home. Kathleen O’Connor left behind in a lukewarm land of neon nightmares.

  He dodged dirty mounds of slush, giant steps taking him from the cab to the restaurant’s huge wooden double doors. His bare palm grasped icy wrought iron and pulled one door open. Outside, the weather was cold enough that the hot, rushed atmosphere inside Polandski’s felt as welcome as a warming house on a January ice rink.

  And it was already March in Chicago.

&nbs
p; He watched waiters dressed in embroidered vests over white shirts careen to and fro, overloaded serving trays hoisted above their heads like little islands of pottery perched on the crack of a tectonic plate.

  The constant balancing act was unnerving as the waitstaff sailed between tables crowded together, and crowded with customers. The noise level was a roar. To his chilled nostrils, the mingling scents of discreet sweat, hot sausage, and cold beer was narcotic.

  “Sir?”

  “I’m meeting someone.” Matt’s eyes panned the overpopulated room once more. It was embarrassing not to spot your own mother. “Mira—” What last name was she using now? He didn’t have the vaguest idea, even more embarrassing. He’d have to ask sometime.

  “Oh, you’re Mira’s son!” The woman hostess was as rosy cheeked as a grade-schooler in December, despite being in her sixties. “Right this way.”

  Her broad, embroidery-vested form tunneled a path through the chaos to a rear table for four.

  His mother sat there fiddling with her silverware and keeping an eagle eye on the service transpiring at adjoining tables.

  “Matt!” She leaped up when she belatedly saw him, smiling.

  “Mom.”

  They hugged over an intervening wooden captain’s chair.

  “You look great,” Matt told her, pulling a heavy chair over the rough-tiled floor to sit at right angles to her. She had posted herself to see the door, but the intervening traffic had made him invisible.

  “It’s these fancy clothes.” She modestly touched her fingertips to the shoulders of the aqua blue blouse he had bought her for Christmas.

  But it wasn’t just the blouse, or the blue topaz earrings, also a gift from Matt. Her hair had been cut and fluffed into a cloud of blond intermixed with gray, a totally natural effect that somehow seemed expensively colored. God was still the best hair stylist around.

  She looked at least ten years younger than her fifty-three years. Matt noticed that adjoining diners were still eyeing them speculatively after overhearing their greeting. He didn’t look over thirty himself, so mental math was being frantically done at all the surrounding tables, much to Matt’s amusement. If they only knew his history, and hers.

  “You look,” he said, sincerely amazed, “like a new woman. Is it the new job?”

  “Partly.” Her expression as she glanced around mixed caution and pride. Her voice lowered. “Serving as hostess at a famous place like this requires a little more maintenance than I needed at Thaddeus’s Café in the old neighborhood. The Polandsky is a big tourist attraction. We even get movie stars in. Kevin Costner.”

  “Well, you look fit to escort a movie star, Mom.”

  She settled back to study him as only mothers can while a waiter brought menus and filled their heavy, stemmed water glasses.

  “You look a little tired, Matt. Is it those late hours at that radio job of yours?”

  “No, Mom, it’s traveling for these speaking engagements. The luncheon address I did today was over at two P.M. but I was there until four answering questions and meeting underwriters.”

  “What group was it again?”

  “The supporters of Wendy’s Way, a group of national shelters for runaway girls.”

  She shook her head, which only improved her hair-do. “Poor girls. They don’t have family support like in the old days. Now it has to be all out in the open.”

  Matt held himself back from pointing out that her family didn’t support her much in the old days, other than making her feel ashamed. His mother might look like a modern woman, but a lot of old assumptions still lingered beneath the flashy renovation.

  “A table for four?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “Your cousin Krystyna is coming along later. I hope that’s all right? She has a late class. Studio arts, she said.” Mira sipped her water, then eyed him over the reading glasses, framed in indigo metallic, she had slipped on to skim the menu. “Boyfriend, too,” she mouthed, rolling her eyes.

  “You don’t like Krys’s boyfriend?”

  “He’s like all the young men these days. Odd.” Then she took off the glasses and smiled. “I’ll tell you what to order. I know the chef’s best dishes. I like your jacket.” She eyed him while he shrugged out of the bulky down jacket to reveal an amber velvet blazer.

  “I wore it at Christmas at Uncle Stash’s, remember? After living in a desert climate, this cold calls for clothes with a warm feeling.”

  “Cold! It’s spring here.”

  “In Las Vegas, it’s summer practically.”

  “Are you going to keep living in that awful city?”

  “It’s no more awful than Chicago.”

  “It’s the Sodom and Gomorrah of the U.S.”

  Matt laughed. “The city’s reputation is exaggerated. It’s only like…Ninevah.”

  “So the speech went well.”

  He nodded. They always went well. “And I was well paid.”

  “Shouldn’t you be donating your services, if it’s for charity?”

  “The point is these are fund-raisers. They expect to pay for a well-known speaker to get donors to contribute.”

  “A lot different from your last job.”

  “Not really. I just talk to a larger audience than I ever did at the crisis hotline, and I get paid a lot more.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Earning money for what looked like doing nothing was as suspect a notion as living in Las Vegas to his mother’s generation and place.

  “So what should I eat?” he asked, bewildered by creamed herring appetizers, kielbasa and borscht, varieties of knedle, or dumplings. He hadn’t eaten “Polish” since he had entered the seminary.

  She happily took him on a verbal tour of the menu before recommending the cucumber salad and chicken Polonaise. And she urged him to try the beer sampler, a specialty of the house for tourists. She would have a Stinger cocktail.

  Matt supposed he was a tourist here with his own mother as much as any out-of-towner. His head began to spin from the noise and the heat and the long day, not to mention his mother’s whip-lashing values: old-school Roman Catholic Polish Chicago with glittering bits of rez biz grafted on. She’d be ready for Sin City yet.

  After they ordered, the waiter soon brought a tipsy tray of miniature glass beer steins filled with an array of ales colored like precious topaz from shades of palest yellow to dark amber. There were twelve in all, but each only offered about four swallows.

  Matt decided to work his way from dark to light, picking up one of the silly steins. His mother looked sophisticated behind the sleek sculpture of her martini glass while Matt played with baby steins.

  “To Chicago,” he said, raising his Lilliputian lager.

  “Chicago.” She set down her glass after a genteel sip and rearranged her silverware. “I’m thinking of selling the two-flat.”

  Matt felt ambushed by a slap of raw emotion. He had a love-hate relationship with the old duplex he had grown up in, he realized in an instant of confused emotion. Its beloved, old-fashioned familiarity was forever married to his stepfather’s brutality.

  “Where would you live?” he wondered.

  “A small apartment. Between the old neighborhood and here. There’s plenty of public transportation, and Krys keeps pushing me to drive more in the city. It’d be easier to keep up, and I could use the retirement investment money.”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  Her lips tightened. “The family can’t see it. But it’s time to move on.”

  “I have,” he pointed out.

  She grinned shyly at him. “Have you ever! I hate to say it, but ever since you left the priesthood, your life seems to be on a magic carpet ride…speeches, radio shows. What about that girl you mentioned?”

  “Girl?”

  “You know. In Las Vegas. The one you liked a lot.”

  Matt downed a small stein of slightly red beer. “She’s still there. We’re still friends.”

  “Nothing more?”

 
“No.”

  “But when you were here at Christmas it sounded more serious than that.”

  “Did it? Maybe you just thought so. Or I did. I’m traveling too much to settle down now anyway.” He hoped that didn’t sound as much like an excuse to his mother as it did to him.

  Her face had sobered, reading what he wasn’t saying. “Well, she wasn’t Catholic anyway.”

  As if that would make him feel better about losing Temple.

  His mother was leaning over to one of the vacant chairs and lifted a smart new navy purse off it. Looked expensive. She unclasped the gilt catch and brought out an oversized business envelope stuffed with papers.

  “These are copies of the legal papers on the purchase of the two-flat. You know, from your father’s family’s lawyers. It’s got the firm name on it, and a lawyer signed for them. I thought if you had time to look into things—”

  “You could do it more easily from here, Mom.”

  She hesitated. “But I’m a woman. They never take a woman as seriously as a man at these big law firms. And you’re famous. Sort of. And…I can’t do it, Matt.” She looked away.

  She meant that she was ashamed.

  “It’s fine. I’ll do it.” He put his hand over hers, was surprised when her other hand suddenly clasped it, as warm and dry as hot-water-bottle-heated sheets in winter. They had never been demonstrative at home under Cliff Effinger’s despotic rule. Had never showed emotion so as not to trigger his rages.

  Yet there had been comforts in that cold home, and Matt found himself wanting to go take final photographs of the old place before it was sold, even as part of him wanted to see it torn down board by shingle by rafter.

  “You sure you want to find out who my real father was?” he asked. “He died in Vietnam, after all. The family lawyers made plain you would get that two-flat and that was all. There’s no advantage in it.”

  “A photo maybe, huh? A name. I don’t want money. Never did. I want a memory.”

  He looked away.

  He was the product of a one-night stand between innocents on the brink of war. How many others like him lived in forgotten, bitter corners of the world? He was lucky he had been born in America of ethnically similar parents, that his mother’s unwed status had only resulted in an abusive stepfather and social discomfort, not utter ostracization.