Cat in a Leopard Spot

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  He had her out the door before she ripped the glasses from her face, her own authoritative persona coming through the cover loud and clear.

  “No! And I don’t need these stupid props. Now have you got something to tell me, or what?”

  Max donned the glasses she thrust at him and shrugged. “Jest trying to help, ma’am. Like we do in Tennessee. You ever been to Tennessee?”

  “No. And we can talk here. What about Mandy? What was she afraid of inside there. Who?”

  Max leaned against the building to disguise his height and tamped his boot toe bashfully into the littered asphalt. “She was a real nice girl. New to town, like me. Maybe jest new to this place. She seemed…kinda nervous, though. A nice girl. I like to come to see the nice girls, not those hard city women.”

  “Really.” Molina was gritting her teeth at the hick act, so annoyed she couldn’t see straight. He hoped. “So you remember the date you saw Mandy?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It was a Sunday, couple weeks ago. And then a couple days later, they said she’d been killed, so I remembered. But I’ll never forget that girl.” Something in his tone, maybe the truth, riveted her for the first time. “She didn’t want to be here, but it was all she knew to do. I was new, too, so we talked a little. She said some guy had hassled her at Secrets, that’s why she was over here at Baby Doll’s. It wasn’t as classy a joint, but someone told her it would be safer here.”

  “But it was just the same. What’d she expect? Never mind. Okay, who hassled her at Secrets?”

  “I dunno. Some guy. Another guy named…Vince? Yeah, Vince scared him off. I never saw any Vince here, though.” Might as well give yourself an alibi while you’re at it.

  “You’re sure? Seventies sleaze disco kind of guy? Gold chains, greasy hair?”

  “Ma’am, we don’t have anybody like that in Tennessee, ’ceptin’ Elvis, of course, and he was seventies.”

  “I guess you’d know.” She gave him a disgusted once-over so speedy that she failed to recognize even Vince beneath the Elvis getup.

  He’d told Temple the truth: naked was the best disguise, especially if you were a naked embarrassment.

  “Like I said, I bought her a drink, she seemed to like to drink more’n dance, and we talked and she told me she didn’t feel safe here. Then she left sometime after her number. Never saw her go. Wish I had. I woulda seen her home.”

  “And held her hand, no doubt.” Molina snorted. She pulled out her notebook. “What’s your name and where can I reach you?”

  “Bobby Rae. Bobby Rae Dixon. You can reach me at the Alhambra Inn most nights. I do two shows, seven and eleven, but the eleven o’clock’s the one that really rocks.”

  “Oh, joy.” Molina finished jotting down the lies he had told her, then looked back at Baby’s Doll’s vacant, graffiti-smudged exterior.

  The parking-lot lights were bright and it was almost one in the morning. She probably had a full twelve-hour day of real work to put in ahead of her.

  Would she give up with the shreds he had given her, and leave Nadir to him?

  “Kin I see you to your car, ma’am?”

  She looked at him as if he was crazy. “Take my advice. You need to run for the boonies. I’ll find my car myself.”

  She stalked off, deflected by relentless southern redneck courtesy.

  He waited politely by the building, on watch until she got in her car and drove off. Not her real car, of course, without her license plates.

  He wondered where she had dug up the beater. She didn’t have a convenient network to tap into, as he did, because the last thing she’d want would be for anyone in her department to know she was out freelancing.

  “Razor’s edge, Lieutenant, ma’am,” he murmured in farewell. “Listen to Elvis. He knows that stuff.”

  Straightening, Max turned back to Baby Doll’s. Time to find out what Rafi Nadir was doing at the scene of the crime. Again.

  Chapter 30

  Ringed In

  Matt’s ringing phone dredged him up from the first deep sleep he had fallen into for a week.

  His bedside clock read 2:00 A.M.

  At first he heard only the blare of music and a vague party sort of clatter and chatter. It sounded like a TV movie frat-house scene.

  “Did you get my present?” a husky voice asked on a tone of unwelcome intimacy.

  “The worm.” He tried to make it sound like what he’d call her face to face if he had a chance.

  “For I am a worm,” she said, laughing, repeating the Good Friday antiphon.

  “No, just a very sick woman.”

  “Oh? Then you’ll do as I say. Let me ask you, what are you wearing?”

  He also recognized the obscene phone-call ploy so often used by men against women that it had become a cliché.

  “I guess I’ll hang up, or just whistle into the phone.”

  “Oh, don’t hang up. Whistle, just whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad.”

  It was the second time tonight someone he had reason to loathe had called Matt their lad, and he was getting sick of it.

  “Listen, there’s a point where you push someone too far.”

  A pause. “Shall I tell you what Miss Temple Barr is wearing tonight?”

  A chill climbed his spine like ghostly fingers with long nails. Another thing to tell Kinsella: don’t drop in on Temple without expecting to be seen by your worst enemy. Kinsella wouldn’t like that, Matt warning him away from Temple. Matt didn’t mind.

  “Not necessary,” Matt said as coolly as he could manage. “I’ll wear your hellish ring, but not the way you think.”

  “Oh, really? Now you’re making this interesting. I will check up on you. Somewhere, sometime, some way. Thanks for making it interesting. But, then, you always do.”

  She hung up.

  He wiped a thin dew of sweat from his upper lip and remembered—tasted—a fresh burst of the corroding hatred he had once felt for his former stepfather.

  Matt had thought himself over such negative emotions.

  He had been wrong. Dead wrong. He should ask God for forgiveness, but he didn’t want to drag God into this. It might cramp his style.

  Chapter 31

  Elvis Leaves the Building

  Max leaned against the filthy exterior of Baby Doll’s and actually smoked one of his prop cigarettes.

  This was getting way too complicated. How could he get Molina off the night beat and back into her office where she belonged?

  Nail Cher’s killer, that’s how. And nail Van Burkleo’s killer while he was at it. This was getting to be too big a job even for Superman.

  A flare of smoke and music spat into the clean night air, the burst as shocking as the spray of a machine gun.

  When the single front door to Baby Doll’s slammed shut, Rafi Nadir was out in the darkness with Max.

  He stalked over.

  “You the PI who was bothering the customers and girls in there?”

  “Me? Man, I’m PE. Presley, Elvis, suh! Yes, suh, Colonel.” Max ran up a mock salute.

  “You sure are a moth-eaten Elvis, man, now that I look at you. Sorry. I’m the house police, and I heard some private dick was hassling the customers. You got another coffin nail?”

  “Shore.” Max tapped out a cigarette and provided a match for it, watching Nadir’s bloated features swell into focus while the match flame and the cigarette’s terminal ember flared. “Naw, I’m jest a country boy tryin’ to make a buck in the Big City. Quite some place.”

  Nadir leaned against the building, took a deep drag. “Yeah. Cheesy town. Nothing like L.A. In L.A. you got your black and your yellow and your Mexican side of town. Big-time. Not the so-called ’hoods they have around here. It’s an industry there, man. This place is like a studio back lot. All show and no go. All front and no real action behind it. Like, even the Mob’s gone corporate. Trading stocks instead of bullets. There’s no real action anywhere here anymore.”

  Max nodded. “I get yah.”

  �
�Well, I’ll be outa this penny-ante bouncer stuff soon. There’s still something goin’ on I can latch onto. Maybe make a big buck or two while I still know how to spend it. Aw, whata I care whether some PI is nosing around, asking about some hopeless stripper who got herself throttled?”

  “Throttled, huh? How’d you know that?”

  “Word’s all over the strip clubs. The stupid whores are wearing dog collars to deter the Strip-joint Strangler, can you believe it? Nobody’s more superstitious than strippers and whores. They all think luck is what’s gonna save ’em. You see that rotten PI around here, son”—Rafi Nadir thumped Max several times on the chest with a stiff forefinger—“you send ’im to Rafi Nadir for a talking-to. But only tonight. I’m gone after tonight. I got a brand-new gig. With a classy outfit. I’m on my way back up. That’ll show…whoever. When next you see me, I’ll be a customer with bucks to burn. I’ll be able to buy this place and use the profits to light my cigar.

  “Here.”

  Nadir stuffed a twenty-dollar bill in Max’s cigarette-cupping hand. “Here’s some money to burn, Elvis. You remember Rafi. You’re gonna hear about him again.”

  Chapter 32

  Animal Wrongs

  “You look tired, Lieutenant.”

  Morey Alch’s voice floated over Molina’s head like a dampened volcano of rumbling concern.

  “What are you, my mother?” she growled back. He didn’t retreat.

  He stood at her office door, knowing enough to keep his distance. He usually knew better than to get her back up by suggesting she was doing too much. Today he was right: she was too pooped to overreact.

  “We’ve got a lot of cold cases to solve,” she went on mildly. “And then this nutso leopard killing—”

  “Definitely nutso. You eyeball that woman?”

  “I think it’s a woman.”

  Alch had poured two mugs of coffee—overbrewed sludge—at the big urn near the door. Now he nodded and transversed the long, narrow office walking like a man on a tightrope. He set one mug down at her place before settling at the other side of her desk. His own white mug was artfully decorated with dried-coffee drips of various lengths and intensity. He tossed her packets of creamer and sugar and ripped into his own duo.

  Molina sighed. “You and Su getting anywhere on the likely suspects in that case?”

  “Besides the leopard, you mean.” He looked up quizzically from his coffee ritual.

  She laughed, as he had intended. “Right. The Leopard Man did it. You ever see those old black-and-white movies when you were a kid? You know, the African cult that dressed up in leopardskins and clawed their victims? Am I hallucinating, or does this Van Burkleo case smack of jungle drums, my friend?”

  “The White Zombie,” Morey declaimed. “Movies like that. Great stuff. The leopardmen in those movies wore these, uh, you know, gloves, with claws in the fingertips. Reminds me of my trip to England. Me and the wife, before…well, before. Anyway, I got into the Black Museum at Scotland Yard. Only me. Only pros. Don’t let spouses in, which was just as well. Anyway, they got Jack’s letters there. The Ripper. And they had all these confiscated weapons, and I’ll never forget, a Freddy Krueger glove.”

  “Freddy Krueger Goes to Blighty?”

  Alch sipped and nodded. “This crude canvas glove with razors for fingernails. Thing is, the Brit coppers found blood on the blades. Human blood. Never found who it came from, though, or who wore the gloves. Said it was time a little censorship got put into play.”

  “That’s the trouble.” Molina sipped, shook her head. “There is no such thing as ‘a little’ censorship. So what did you find out about Maison Van Burkleo, overlooking the animal-rights activists for now?”

  Molina stopped him before he could answer by looking steadfastly over his shoulder. “Come in, Su. We’re comparing notes.”

  Merry Su paused at the coffee urn, shook her head and minced past it on high chunky heels, those Minnie Mouse oversized Mary Janes so popular with the young and kicky set. Temple Barr would look ludicrous in those gunboats, but somehow the equally petite Su didn’t. She dragged a side chair next to Alch’s.

  “That stuff’ll kill you,” she pronounced, drawing a bottled water from the low-slung bag at her side with as much slow satisfaction as if it were a gun. “You’d be better off drinking straight whipping cream and cyanide, given the chemicals in those innocuous packets. Corporate murder.”

  “Alch was just about to run through the Van Burkleo suspects,” Molina said.

  “Before Morey does his old professor act,” Su said, “I’d like to raise an issue. We all know that the animal people are right and Van Burkleo was probably running a high-dollar hunt club there.”

  Nods. “That’s not our jurisdiction,” Molina pointed out.

  “I know. But…if the leopard didn’t do it, like animal-amok stuff, what about who used to own the leopard? Maybe somebody found out and didn’t like where it had ended up, playing pincushion for some would-be he-man bow-and-arrow hunter. If my Bichon ever ended up like that, I’d go hunt some two-legged game myself.”

  Alch, taking notes, stopped on a pen point. “Your what? A bison?”

  “Bichon. Bee-shown B-i-c-h-o-n. My Bichon Frise.” Bee-shown freeze-ay.

  Alch was awe-stricken. “My God, it’s a hairstyle as weird as her eyebrows,” he told Molina.

  “It’s a dog, dummy.”

  “That’s verbal abuse,” he noted with both tongue and pen.

  “Children.” Molina leaned her head on her hand. “Su makes an interesting point. But, as I understand it from the animal-rights people, and I believe they know the chapter and verse on this, the animals that Van Burkleo offered to target shooters—okay, target mis-shooters—were either raised for it, like the hooved animals, or the big cats were obtained from private owners who couldn’t handle them or caring for them anymore, or zoos who had old or excess animals they needed to get rid of.”

  “Zoos?” Su was steaming now. “Zoos would sell their animals to outfits like Van Burkleo’s?”

  “Why do you think the protesters were out there in the desert?” Alch pointed out. “They had something legit to protest.”

  “I’m told,” Molina put in, “that in some parts of the country some zoo board members actually own canned-hunt ranches. Cozy, huh?”

  “That does it.” Su was surefooted now. “The killer could even be a zoo employee who learned that an animal he, or she, tended had ended up there. That leopard is a beautiful animal. Did you see it before they took it away?” She looked at Alch. “Shooting it would have been a sin.”

  Molina was surprised. “I hadn’t thought about the condition of the leopard. Su, since you’re a bee-shown freeze-ay expert, call the guy over at Animal Oasis, what’s his name?”

  “Kirby Granger.”

  “Granger. Right. Call him and get a statement on the leopard’s age, state of health, probable source, that kind of thing. Maybe Van Burkleo planned to keep it as a personal trophy, if it was that fine a specimen.”

  “Specimen! “Su huffed.

  “I had no idea you were a cat lover,” Alch put in slyly, “from your attitude to certain black members of that species.”

  “I’m not. I’m a dog lover. But a beautiful animal is a beautiful animal, especially if it’s an endangered species.”

  “Passions would run high,” Molina agreed. “Alch, you seem to have an affinity for the widow. See if you can get the leopard’s provenance out of her.”

  Molina felt pleased with herself. Su was a good choice to handle the gruff Animal Oasis founder, and Alch had a way with women that wasn’t obvious, but was effective. Precisely because it wasn’t obvious.

  He was even now twinkling at her, aware of how she was dividing and conquering the sources.

  “I expect you to make some real headway with Leonora Leopard-Lady, Morey.”

  Alch promptly pulled out a narrow notebook and flipped through with the satisfaction of a thorough man.

  “Okay
. The wife. The widow now. I’m sure you’ve been wondering about—”

  “I heard. The wife-turned-widow.” The obvious always made Su impatient, and nothing was more obvious than Leonora Van Burkleo. “You don’t need to go far to run her down. What a freak!”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Alch did a patented old duffer act of riffling his notebook pages and looking out from under his shaggy eyebrows. “I’d say that gals who pluck their eyebrows to resemble a pair of broken chopsticks are, uh, a hair on the freakish side themselves.”

  Su’s exotically shaped brows lifted, lowered, and took flight, simultaneously. “Lieutenant, we have sexual and ethnic harassment here, all at once.”

  “Go after the perps, not each other,” Molina advised. “You know Alch wouldn’t say a word about your eyebrows if he didn’t love you like a paternalistic sexist pig.”

  “Oink,” Alch contributed.

  Su laughed. “It’s a fashion thing, Morey. How can a mere man get it?”

  Molina had to admit that Su’s eyebrows were the most elaborate and striking she had ever seen…with the odd exception of the brows drawn on the forehead of that vanishing lady magician, Shangri-La. Who had nicked an opal-and-diamond ring Max Kinsella had given to Temple Barr, in Manhattan, no less. Which very same ring Molina had found a couple weeks later at the church parking-lot death scene of a former magician’s assistant…another unsolved case. Not to mention the dead professor at UNLV and a third man falling dead at the New Millennium Hotel to match the earlier ceiling deaths at the Goliath and the Crystal Phoenix Hotels, one almost a year ago.

  “Did I say something, wrong, Lieutenant?” Su’s face sobered.

  “No. I’m just thinking about our case load. So, Morey. You were about the enlighten us about the widow Van Burkleo.”

  “Like I said, inquiring minds want to know, is it nature or is it human error? Since Leonora Van Burkleo’s appearance is so noteworthy, I tried to find out if she had it done to her. On purpose.” He waited, trying not to look at Su’s on-purpose eyebrows. “The answer is a resounding, if puzzling, yes.”