Cat in a Leopard Spot

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  And to think she owed it all to Max Kinsella.

  In the mirror, her upper lip curled at the thought. She began to see and feel the downside of her disguise. Calling these contact lenses “soft” seemed an understatement. She’d had to cram the viscous floppy shapes into each eye, which went against every admonition to avoid touching and injuring an eye she’d heard in childhood.

  She didn’t feel them, though. She blinked. Brown. She looked so different. Why hadn’t she thought of color-changing contact lenses long ago? Maybe because she’d never needed glasses, never thought about it.

  She turned away from the mirror. Turned back. She wondered how hard it had been to get brown contact lenses. Most people who used contact lenses to change or enhance their eye color went for exotic shades. Like violet. Or like Max Kinsella’s magician green.

  When she had gotten older and entered a non-Hispanic world, every now and then a stranger would comment on her vivid blue eyes. They considered it a compliment, but by then she’d been conditioned to disown her own eye color, or discount it. Don’t it make your blue eyes brown, she mentally paraphrased the title of a song made popular by Linda Ronstadt. Latina Linda, despite the last name. Unlike any other woman in the country, she had always wished she could make her blue eyes brown. Now she had.

  She finally examined her entire image in the mirror.

  Her clothes were the same standard-issue, nondescript private-eye getup that she’d worn to Reno’s apartment and to Secrets.

  But the eyes made all the difference.

  That was how Kinsella could eel in and out of one persona and another. One right touch could totally skew an identity.

  She gathered her bag, pregnant with the Beretta in its portable black leather paddle holster. Dolores was in the living room watching TV. Mariah was in her bedroom playing makeup with her friend Yolanda.

  Carmen made it to the kitchen without Dolores looking at her. Two adolescent tiger-striped cats skidded across the countertop, stopping to sniff the foreign scent of contact lens solution on her fingers.

  They regarded her with wide yellow eyes, oblivious to the revolution in her appearance.

  She gave them each a chuck on the chin and called good-bye to Dolores. “Yolie’s parents will come for her at nine P.M. I’ll be back…late.”

  “Fine.” Dolores was used to late-night duty at the Molina household. She was happy to get away from her own teenage houseful, Carmen thought.

  What was next on her agenda? A strip club called Kitty City, chasing a lead she had unearthed at Secrets. Not just strippers moved from club to club. Or bouncers. A nervous little itch jigged in the pit of her stomach, one she hadn’t felt for a long time: knowing she was on the trail of a murderer, sensing she was getting closer, knowing that she might encounter Rafi Nadir and would have to fool him with her Hispanic eyes. Undercover, and hunting. Funny that Rafi Nadir hitting town had forced her to remember what homicide detail was all about.

  Max was tempted to bring the Elvis impersonator out of the closet again tonight, but having been seen in that guise by Molina once, he didn’t care to pull off a repeat performance.

  And Molina would be out there somewhere. Hopefully trying out her brand-new eyes in another direction.

  He smiled at Rafi Nadir’s twenty-dollar bill, flashed at ersatz Elvis in a moment of braggadocio. It lay on his bureau top in a plastic baggie, ready to be dusted for fingerprints or checked for suspect serial numbers, if necessary.

  Max doubted that would ever be necessary. Nadir was the stripper killer and would go down for that, not theft or counterfeiting or any lesser offense. Molina would owe him big-time for that, and then maybe she’d cooperate with him instead of blocking his every move.

  He had decided to dress conservatively tonight: suits went to strip clubs too. Not many, and not to the fringe ones. More to the upscale clubs called New Orleans Nights that fronted billboards picturing James-Bond-level ladies in designer evening gowns. Guys from those places could slum.

  So he put on a gray sharkskin suit. He didn’t like gray. Liked black and white. Or rainbows.

  Fascinating, Nadir working part-time at Rancho Exotica. More than that. Strange. Or not so strange. They hunted helpless animals at Rancho Exotica. Nadir hunted helpless women at the strip clubs.

  For a moment, in the small mirror on the bureau-top accessory chest that had belonged to Gandolph, Cher’s naked, defiantly frightened eyes peered at him through black holes of heavy eyeliner and mascara. A drunken deer in the spotlight. She’d been as easy to run down and throttle in the parking lot of that strip club as an aging, domesticated lion was to shoot at thirty feet in the dusty, fenced arena of a canned-hunt ranch.

  Max found himself savagely knotting the conventional tie around his own throat. He hadn’t worn a tie in years, but doing a double Windsor was like riding a bicycle…or a Hesketh Vampire. You never forgot how. He had slicked back his hair into a Wall Street sheen and donned tiny rimless glasses like a stockbroker. He looked like a comfortably-off nerd who needed help with women.

  A pigeon.

  That was the way to go into strip clubs if you were a man and wanted to learn something.

  The woman at the bar was using the mirror behind it to check out the crowd, but her eyes kept pausing on herself.

  Stop it! Molina told herself. This was not amateur night, even though she was posing as a PI, and even though she considered most of them amateurs.

  She had to get past the oddity of her own appearance. It’d been too long since she’d done undercover work. Donning a micro-miniskirt and a bustier hadn’t thrown her on the last case. Maybe because she’d done the standup trashy tart role in L.A. vice years ago. Maybe because it was such a far cry from her daily administrative civvies these days. Totally out of character. But this, this brown-eyed woman in the mirror was too close for comfort.

  For concentration.

  No doubt Kinsella had wanted to throw her off her stride, get her out of his hair. There. That thought had got her adrenaline flowing. Whatever he wanted, he would get the opposite.

  She swept her eyes over the mirror from left to right, ignoring the naked ladies, concentrating on the men. This place attracted tourists in short-sleeved shirts, a few businessmen in light-colored, lightweight suits, sans ties, punk kids just past twenty-one in sports clothes. No truckers, few jeans.

  No one here looked like Rafi Nadir.

  She’d tied a narrow scarf around her forehead to pull her hair back, just in case.

  She really did look different, dammit.

  Eyes back on the suspects.

  One in particular. Nobody had zeroed in on this candidate, because the profile was all wrong. This one wasn’t obvious, like Rafi. But sometimes obvious wasn’t right.

  Then, a dark head came cruising into view behind her. It was like sighting a shark fin in the water. She tensed, willed herself invisible.

  Instead of this shark going for the gaudy, subtropical fish schooling at Kitty City, they headed for him: blondes, redheads, black women in platinum-white wigs.

  Molina glimpsed green dollar bills waving as Kitty City’s strippers converged on the bait. “Chum,” they called it in the ocean fish-baiting game. At a strip joint, any guy with cash to wave around attracted an attractive crowd.

  This guy was pushing through the tide to the bar, promising drinks all round.

  She breathed out. He was just another celebrating good-time Charlie, not a bouncer coming on the job. He wasn’t who she’d thought he might be….

  The girls surrounding him sank to seats along the almost empty bar, putting him into high relief, like an outcropping of rock marooned by the ebbing tide.

  Her eyes wanted to bug out past the veiling contact lenses.

  It was Rafi Nadir.

  Molina’s eyes darted to her own reflection in the mirror, this time not transfixed by how different she looked to herself.

  This time they were objective, keen, nervous. How different did she really look,
to Rafi Nadir? Enough?

  “Scotty,” Max said. “Just call me Scotty.”

  “As in ‘Beam me up’?” she asked through the smoke she breathed into a kind of holographic lace veil in front of her face.

  “As in Hartford the Third.”

  She raised wire-thin-plucked eyebrows.

  She was exactly the kind of woman you expected to meet in a strip joint. Not a stripper, but some kind of hanger-on. Probably an ex-stripper. Her smoky contralto voice vibrated through a buxom, inverted-triangle frame. She wore a glitzy jogging suit that hid most of her skin. She had found his slumming Yuppie persona unusual enough to merit personal attention.

  “I bet they don’t call you Scotty,” she said, eyes narrowed to filter out her own smog. “I bet they call you Scott.”

  Max shrugged with what he hoped looked like embarrassment. He had lost the art of embarrassment a long time ago. As long as he looked like a babe in Toyland, women would talk to him. Strippers had a maternal streak, and when they talked, they bared more information about themselves than they did skin on stage.

  She tapped her cigarette ash, as long as a mandarin’s fingernail, into one of those black plastic bar ashtrays with jagged edges to hold cigarettes. They look like dead roaches with legs in the air.

  “I have a son about your age,” she said, surprising him. She looked like she’d been around, but not that old. “Name’s Lindy.”

  “Your son’s?”

  “Hell, no! Skip the ‘y’ endings, kid, after twenty. You’ll get taken a lot more seriously. My name’s Lindy.”

  “Oh. Well, you certainly look like you know your way around this…scene.”

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “I just meant—” Max stirred the skinny striped plastic straw around in his water-and-hint-of-scotch. “I’m kinda here looking for someone.”

  “Look, Scotty.” She was violating her own rule and leaned near to put her hand on his arm and her smoky, raspy voice in his ear. “You don’t belong here. Whatever you’re looking for, or looking to forget, go on to some hotel on the Strip.”

  “Do you belong here?” he returned.

  Her eyes widened with a touch of flattered youthfulness. “Oh, God. Sure I do. Not here, precisely. I’m just visiting the scene of the crime.” She glanced at the stage, nostalgically, even a bit coquettishly. “Used to dance up there myself.”

  Max tried not to smile; he’d figured as much.

  “But now I run my own club. Les Girls.”

  That he hadn’t figured.

  “No sense letting the guys get all the dough when we girls show all the go.”

  He laughed, but made it apologetic.

  She patted his arm. “Now, who you lookin’ for? Some girl you got a crush on?”

  “No. Some guy who got a crush on some girl. A bouncer named Rafe. Something like that. This, uh, girl I met at one of the Strip hotels you were advising me to go back to, she said he’d been…stalking her, I guess.”

  “And you’re going to put a stop to it, huh?”

  “No.” He shrugged, apologetically again. “I thought I’d offer him some money to leave her alone.”

  “You got it with you?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m a fish out of the water, but I’m not shark bait.”

  Lindy rolled her eyes, displaying bloodshot whites. “Young man.” She sighed again. “That girl isn’t worth getting your face pushed in for.”

  “I can do some pushing back.”

  “Maybe. Only guy I know who bounces, and he bounces around from club to club, is Rafi. Like Rafe. That sound right?”

  Max nodded slowly. “Where would he be bounced to now?”

  “Don’t know, hon. I heard he was quitting this racket. No loss, from what I also heard. You might check with my ex, Ike. He runs Kitty City. He’s the type who’d like Raf’s style.”

  “And what is Raf’s style?”

  Lindy made a fist and moved it toward Max’s face. “To the moon, Alice. To the moon.”

  “That was all bluff,” Max objected. “Ralph Kramden never hit Alice.”

  “Hey! You know The Honeymooners? I thought only us old folks did.”

  “Everything old is new again. Cable TV”

  “Not everything. Watch yourself around Raf. That guy was always trying to get something back. Those kind are dangerous.”

  “What was he trying to get back?”

  “Money? A woman? Something.”

  Max nodded. He didn’t see Molina as the kind of woman a man would auger into the ground for. Or over. Must have been money. Nadir seemed very hung up on money.

  “Take care of yourself.” She patted his arm again, then bore down as she propelled her weight off the barstool and into the smoky, sound-soaked distance that makes such hot, sweaty, crowded places into a negative image of reality.

  Max felt touched. Nobody had patted his arm since Miss Rosenblatt in fourth grade. The return to innocence was refreshing, especially in a strip club.

  Miss Rosenblatt would have fainted dead away if she had seen Max walk into Kitty City. Luckily, a dead faint was probably all that she was up to nowadays, as she would be confined to coffin and only rolling over in her grave in protest.

  Kitty City enjoyed being a strip club: dim, loud, crowded and filled with milling almost-naked girls. Several mirrored balls turned overhead, strafing the clientele with bullets of bright, glancing light.

  Its clients took the mental barrage like a Fifth Avenue mob would take ticker tape during a parade, with festive disregard. The place had a Mardi Gras look and feel. The girls (strippers were always “girls” no matter their age) and the men mixed it up like old, bawdy friends. The clients were as loud and disorderly as the taped raunchy rock music, and seemed to enjoy competing with it. Even the deejay guy in the glassed-in soundproof booth seemed to be having a good time.

  And…so did Rafi Nadir.

  Max bellied up to another sopping-wet bar and ordered another watered-down drink as costly as a pound-can of R-12 Freon. He was glad this place was crammed with customers, and probably always was. People tended not to bother remembering faces in joints like this until they’d seen you for the ninth or tenth time.

  Rafi Nadir was the center of a bouquet of centerfold girls, obviously a visiting ex-worker, not on the job.

  He wore a loose white shirt with sleeves rolled up and buttoned at the elbow over khaki pants. Something about his demeanor, the pale shirt, his dark, overblown good looks, the way he accepted the strippers’ attention as his due reminded Max of Libya’s Khadafy, one of the more sinister international figures, and that was going some these days.

  Face it: to brush shoulders with Rafi Nadir was to loathe Rafi Nadir. He gave the word “lowlife” a new definition. No wonder Molina was having nightmares about this creep showing up in her life. No wonder she wanted him as far away from their daughter as a serial killer.

  If Max managed to get enough on him for a murder rap, he’d be bailing Molina out of a pretty rough corner. She’d hate it, and he’d love it.

  And Max was close. Nadir was out of control, not drunk, but high on some apparent good fortune. The twenties were diving into the surrounding G-strings like South Sea Islanders seeking pearls.

  Men drunk on their own importance are only a half-step away from walking off a cliff. Max just had to watch Nadir, follow him, and he’d catch him deciding to force another stripper in a parking lot into early retirement…He might even be the one who had killed Gloria, Gandolph’s old assistant. No telling how many stripper murders they could wrap him up in.

  While Max was weaving happy endings, just as he was ready for a fadeout on Cher’s smiling transparent face on high in the best black-and-white Hollywood tradition, he saw something unpleasant in the mirror.

  She was tall, she was dressed like an aging flower child, she was talking to a guy at the other end of the bar who looked as much like a regular as anyone here tonight. And she glanced in the mirror at herself as if noticing a stranger, t
hen her eyes ran down its length as fast and smooth as fingers whisking a run off a piano keyboard.

  Max hunched over his drink, turned to the guy on his left, put his right hand with the clumsy college ring on it in front of his face, almost knocking his phony glasses off.

  They made a perfect triangle: He and Molina at opposite ends of the bar and Rafi Nadir at the apex in the middle of the room, holding forth amid his harem, perfectly placed to spot either one of them, should the fates permit. Rafi Nadir on top of the world, which in this instance was a pyramid. A pyramid scheme, so to speak.

  Molina’s ears, feet, and—now that she had sat down at the bar—butt were killing her. But the eyes felt fine, except for the burning irritant of secondhand smoke.

  But that was Las Vegas. No way would smoking be banned.

  “You related to any of the girls?” Don, the regular, was asking.

  She was relieved that she wasn’t being mistaken for one of the girls, but miffed that he thought she might be somebody’s mother. Or big sister maybe.

  “No. I’m a PI, just following up some leads.”

  “Oh.” He was a stocky blond in JT10: jeans/T-shirt/tennies. Roofer, but harmless enough. Roofing was your number-one occupation for transients with crime in mind.

  “You’re not kidding?” he asked. “About the PI part?”

  “Who’d kid about that?” She glanced in the mirror again. This guy was dry; time to sink another well, but no good candidates presented themselves.

  Then she noticed that Rafi was gone.

  She stood up, scanning the mob. “Look, Don, I’m slowing down your action by sitting here. Thanks for the info.”

  “I didn’t tell you much—”

  “More than you think.” Bystanders always did.

  She knew from five minutes with Don that Kitty City girls tended to stay put here, that it was always this busy, that Rafi was a familiar figure around the place, and now—that he was gone.

  She rose and headed for the strippers’ dressing room.

  Nobody noticed her as she beat her way through the heavy black velvet curtains at the side of the stage, then went down the hall, through the women’s john, and into the long, ugly, bare room behind it.