Cat in an Orange Twist

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Around Maylords it does. That place is crawling with queers.”

  “Look. I’ve worked in the arts field and I don’t like you calling some of my friends names.”

  “I’ve been called a raghead.”

  “Didn’t like it, though, I bet.”

  “Most people say all sorts of things in their living rooms they wouldn’t say on the street.”

  “At least they know enough to keep it shut in public.”

  He pushed away the meatloaf dish, now only a bloody smear of ketchup. “I call a spade a spade. You don’t like it, don’t ask me questions.”

  “All you’re seeing at Maylords is that gay people are often very creative and they’re drawn to the decorative arts.”

  “Why are they so damn creative? Isn’t that labeling them in another way?”

  “Well, some observations hold true, by and large.”

  “Right. Only mine aren’t worth anything because I come flat out and say it, is that the idea?”

  “I didn’t come here to argue political correctness with you.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “The Maylords opening is my baby. I’m responsible for things going smoothly. I need to know if any more bad-news surprises are in store.”

  “ ‘In store.’ That’s good.”

  “So what do you think of that explosion of gunfire?”

  “Either sicko kids or a disgruntled former employee trying to throw a scare into the party. None of those shots was meant to hit anyone, or they would have. We were all in a freaking fishbowl.”

  “But those shots could have hit someone. Who’d take a chance like that?”

  “Someone who was drunk or high.”

  “Only one person could do all that shooting?”

  “With the right weapon, yeah. Or a gang of kids. I’m not the fuzz here, but I’m betting this was malicious mischief, not a gangland hit. So. Did you take this job because you’re still thinking I might be up to something illegal, or just because you wanted to see me again?”

  “No way! How would I know you were there? Running into you again was an accident.”

  “Most good things are.”

  “That’s a pretty negative view of life. And I’m not so sure this is a good thing. So are you going to be working security there all week?”

  “Maybe longer.”

  Temple raised her eyebrows. She’d heard via Max’s recent undercover work that the lovely and charming Rafi Nadir had hooked up with a “big outfit” that was going to earn him “real money.” This couldn’t have been Maylords.

  “You wouldn’t want to work for them full-time?”

  “With all the . . . uh, creative types running around? No way. I have a semiregular gig for another outfit, but it’s not working out the way they promised.” He picked up a square of unused paper napkin and began pleating it.

  His fingernails were completely clean, she noted with surprise. There was some core of self-respect there.

  “What else would you do? Doesn’t sound like police work—”

  He snorted at the mention and tore the folded napkin in half.

  “I suppose you could . . . I don’t know how official your leaving the L.A. police was, but maybe you could get into private investigation.”

  “Private dick? They’re such sleazy bastards.”

  Temple kept quiet, just lifted her hands with an I’m-off-the-subject gesture.

  Nadir’s eyes narrowed. “That’s what you think I am? So much for my saving your ass. Man, that’s low. A private dickhead.”

  “Maybe whatever you did to get taken off the force wouldn’t let you get a license or whatever anyway.”

  “Nah. I took myself off the force. I got tired of the political correctness do-si-do. Anyway, they never had anything on me.”

  “Boy, is this reassuring.”

  “Private cop stuff? I could do it in a heartbeat. If I was dumb enough to want to starve to death doing spousal surveillance.”

  “This is Las Vegas. I bet there’s a lot of higher-level private security work around here than strip joints and furniture stores.”

  “They all have computer degrees nowadays. And the big joints go to big firms.”

  “That’s why I pictured the lone operator. One man, one room, and one ex-stripper as a girl Friday.”

  “No wonder you’re always getting your nose in a vise. You don’t live in a real world, girl. ”

  “What’s my motive and opportunity for that?”

  He laughed softly. “So. You picked as much of my brains as you can stand for the moment?”

  “I wasn’t—”

  He stood up, held out a hand.

  Temple looked perplexed.

  “Your tray. I’ll bus it. Maybe that’d be a good job for me.”

  She decided that there was nothing she could say that would make her or him look better, so she handed him the tray.

  He glanced at the paltry little dishes. “You don’t eat much. Maybe I make you nervous. Wonder if there’s a career in that.”

  If so, Matt Devine was moving right into it.

  Auld Acquaintance

  “Look, man. It’s just that I really don’t want you hanging around my workplace. You know?”

  “I’m beginning to get that this isn’t a pleasant workplace to hang around,” Matt said. “You were ready enough to hang around my workplace a couple weeks ago . . . at three in the morning.”

  Jerome shrugged and said what Matt was starting to view as his mantra: “I guess.”

  “What changed since then?”

  “I figured out you weren’t gay.”

  “You did it faster than I did,” Matt said wryly. He meant it half-seriously. After sixteen years of religious celibacy, one was a little disoriented on the outside, to say the least.

  “Oh, come on! I should have known in seminary, except I had a lot of illusions then.”

  “Didn’t we all. Look. I don’t care about our common past. I’m concerned with what I’m hearing here and now about this place.”

  “You’re concerned about Janice.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that cute little redhead.”

  Matt didn’t bother correcting that vastly inaccurate summation of Temple. “Less Temple than Janice. We don’t have to stay here to talk. Don’t you get a lunch hour?”

  “Supposedly. Supposedly I was supposed to get a lot that I didn’t: a decent family; a religious education that didn’t screw me up, literally; a future.”

  Bitterness, Matt reflected, was the first refuge of many a depressed personality.

  “So now you want to spend time with me,” Jerome noted, bitterly. “So I can help you help the women in your life.”

  “There aren’t any women in my life. More like friends. I don’t get it. You were pretty anxious to talk to me outside WCOO a couple weeks ago.”

  “Yeah. ‘Mr. Midnight’ was gonna make it all right, like the billboard said. You’re not coming from the same place I am. Forget it.”

  “We did come from the same place, Jerome. That’s the point. Let me buy you lunch.”

  Jerome looked around, like Judas hunting eavesdroppers in the Garden of Gethsemene. That New Testament image gave Matt an idea.

  “We won’t patronize a restaurant,” he said. “I know another place. Nobody from Maylords would go there in a millennium.”

  “Oh? You got good at sneaking around since I last knew you?”

  “I got better at dodging reality. I recommend it from time to time.”

  Jerome’s teeth worried his already cracked bottom lip. His hair was the gray-beige color of cold coffee with artificial creamer that had been congealing too long. His beard was the same constant three-day growth favored by punk movie stars. Matt always wondered how they kept their fashionable five-o’clock shadows at just the right length to mimic a homeless man with an expiration date. The chic antigrooming fad mocked male vanity at the same time it celebrated it. Like most fashions.

&nb
sp; “Lunch somewhere discreet? Maybe,” Jerome was saying, not thrilled about the concession.

  “Jerry!” The voice was female harpy. Even Matt flinched.

  He turned to see the same willowy brunette who had harassed Janice at the opening advancing on him and Jerome.

  “You can’t deal with clients,” she informed Jerome when she was still twenty loud steps away. “I’ll handle this.”

  Matt waited until she was abreast of them and they were eye to eye. “You can’t handle this,” he told the woman Temple had called Beth Blanchard. “I’m not asking you to lunch.”

  Her incredulous but speculative glance flicked to Jerome at warp speed. That told Matt how well she knew the corporate culture at Maylords.

  “I’ll want those prints moved as soon as you get back,” Beth warned Jerome, tainting even his rare hour off.

  Matt met her eyes, unimpressed by her bullying personality. She finally looked away, then turned and clunked down the travertine main drag through the store.

  “I hope those aren’t Janice’s placements she wants changed,” Matt muttered as she stomped away.

  “They are. And Simon’s. Everything that Simon does she needs to undo.”

  “What is her problem?”

  Jerome just shrugged, which was his problem.

  Jerome was even more impressed with Matt’s new car than Temple.

  Matt hadn’t meant to make such a problematical statement, but being around the wishy-washy Jerome reminded him how important it was to follow your own druthers no matter the reaction.

  Jerry was a classic case of being everybody’s dogsbody.

  Matt zoomed them through the drive-by window at McDonald’s, then headed for his secret oasis in greater Las Vegas.

  Matt could see the fast food soothing the savage breast in Jerome. Neither of them had enjoyed a normal adolescence. Matt turned up the radio as they cruised toward his own favorite refuge.

  “Sorry to be a bitch,” Jerome said, cramming the soft fries in his mouth en route.

  Matt hated the word “bitch” whether it was applied to women or men, but he understood it was a password to a secret hierarchy.

  The parking lot at Ethel M’s candy factory had room enough for him to stash the Crossfire all by its (hopefully) unscratched lonesome under a shade tree.

  “A candy store?” Jerry asked, looking around.

  “A picnic site.” Matt grabbed his white bag and headed into the maze of curving walkways and exotic cactus.

  “It’s free,” he said when they were seated on an artsy bench. “One of the few things that still are in the New Las Vegas. I used to come here before the traffic roared outside the perimeter and shade was not an option.”

  “It must have still been desert then.”

  Matt nodded. “It’s been improved. Upgraded. Gotten comfortable and pleasant. I liked its old, thorny side better.”

  “Forty days and nights,” Jerome mumbled through his Big Mac.

  “God, it is so good to get out of that Maylords place.”

  “What’s so wrong with it?”

  “That bitch, for one thing.”

  “Why does the management tolerate someone like her? She causes nothing but dissension.”

  “And that keeps all our eyes on her and not on management. Haven’t you figured out group dynamics yet? Somebody’s got to be top dog; somebody’s got to be low man on the totem pole, usually me. Somebody’s got to be slave driver and draw all the anger away from management. She’s their whipping girl to my whipping boy, that’s all.”

  “She does a good job of whipping everyone. Janice is the stablest person I know, and she’s at the end of her tether.”

  Jerome nodded. “Cool lady. Knows her stuff. Bad news if you work for Maylords.”

  “Why? It doesn’t make sense. She and the others were paid for six weeks of training! That’s unheard-of. Then they’re treated like—”

  “Say ‘shit,’ Matt. We’re out of seminary. No one’s chalking check marks Upstairs on every word that comes out of your mouth. They . . . we . . . Maylords’s employees are treated like shit. Why are you surprised? Guess you haven’t worked much in the real world, and that radio gig of yours is another loner assignment. You don’t have to struggle and grovel like the rest of us. Again.”

  “This is about Maylords, not about seminary.”

  “They’re not that different, don’t you get it? I went from the frying pan into the fire. I always have. You just skated over the burning coals and took them for foot warmers. You always have.”

  “Why are you blaming me? Did I do anything then that aggravated you?”

  “Yes! You survived without getting your extremities dirty. Sorry. That’s not your fault. It’s just that what’s wrong with Maylords is what was wrong with seminary and you’re finally asking the right questions and it’s too late. For me. Not for you. So pardon me for being a bit self-involved.”

  “Go ahead,” Matt said, finishing his quarter-pounder. “I was dense about a lot of things. I don’t blame you for being mad. Just . . . clue me in. Unless you think I don’t deserve to know.”

  “It’s just that . . . man, I thought you always knew. I thought you were the one it worked for, and it was just me—screwup, ugly me—who didn’t get it right.”

  “It was dumb luck, Jerome. That, and my being so screwed up already that I’d learned how to glide through reality without really noticing. My fault. Not yours.”

  “Mea culpa.”

  Matt nodded. “My fault. We don’t need to put it in Latin anymore. What was I supposed to be so good at that you weren’t?”

  “Playing the secret power game. Man, I don’t want to go into this!”

  Sweat was beading Jerome’s hairline, and Matt guessed it wasn’t from that actionably hot McDonald’s coffee he was drinking. Matt sipped his Fresca, glad he had chosen cool over hot. Or was that a habit?

  “All I want to know about is Maylords,” Matt said into a lengthening silence. “We don’t need to discuss seminary days. We’re both beyond that.”

  “No! That’s the point. I’m still the same old asshole I was then. St. Vincent’s, Maylords, it doesn’t matter. I was cast in my one role and here I stay, for eternity. I guess you could call it Purgatory, or Hell’s more like it. At least you get out of Purgatory, or you did. I’m still there.”

  “Maylords is a secular institution, a store. They sell furniture for inflated prices. Okay, maybe that’s a little shabby, but it isn’t a sin. Maylords isn’t a religious institution.”

  Jerome snorted. “It’s still the same subterranean game: top dogs and underdogs, corruption and coercion. Hell, they all oughta be the mafia.”

  “So something crooked is going on at Maylords.”

  “Let me count the ways!”

  “The nameless security forces—”

  “Are window dressing. It’s a game. The management thinks it’s the CIA.”

  “Furniture isn’t getting ripped off?”

  “Please! The markup is horrendous. The stuff is worth one-fifth of what they charge wholesale, and nothing on the black market. They act like everyone and his brother is hot to make off with it, of course, but that’s just because the big cheeses like to play policemen.”

  “So you’re saying the management ego is fantasizing a theft ring to add to their sense of importance?”

  “Yeah. People in power fantasize a lot, but I guess you’ve never been in power, except for wearing a collar and an odor of sanctity.”

  “You don’t know what I did after seminary, Jerome, and you sure don’t know what I did in seminary, that’s clear. Do we have to settle that old stuff before you can talk about what’s happening at Maylords? Because I’m ready to cast guilt with you stone for stone. Quit tiptoeing around the past. What’s your issue? Why can’t you just tell me what’s going on . . . then or now?”

  “ ‘Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.’ ”

  “I’m not that pure anymore, and I
’m not sure I want to be, if that’s what keeps me from seeing the devils all around. Tell me about the devils, Jerome. I know they’re out there now. I had one on my own case for the last few months.”

  “The devils are the people you know best, the ones you trust, that’s the worst part of it.”

  Jerome rolled his waste paper tightly into the white bag, got up, and walked to a refuse container.

  He dropped the bag inside with the panache of someone making a gesture far beyond the simple act he was performing to the naked eye.

  Matt waited on the bench. Ethel M’s cactus garden had nothing in common with an old-time confessional, but Matt was sure it would serve.

  Mum’s the Word

  “I do not see,” Miss Midnight Louise observes, “why we have to trek eighty miles to the north side of town when all the criminal activity we are investigating is taking place in trendier parts south and west.”

  “We are not hunting perps up here, we are after witnesses.”

  “And what would witnesses be doing so far away from the scene of the crime?”

  “The same thing we are, hunting.”

  It does not help that we are conducting this conversation in the back of a beer truck hurtling over some of the city’s most potholed streets.

  “Just because I have a cushy job as house detective at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino does not mean I have forgotten my streetwise ways,” she says. “We are heading right into gang territory.”

  “Yes, but at least we have not been rendered shivless by some misguided human. Midnight Inc. Investigations fears nothing human.”

  “I am not talking about the Crips and the Bloods and the Hell’s Angels biker gangs, Pop. I am talking about the Wildspats and the Shivmasters and the Distempers that operate up here. There are even the K-9 Packers and the Hydrophobias. Remember what happened the last time you tangled with an escapee from the Coyote nation. Those dog dudes give no quarter.”

  “I am not looking for small change, kit. Besides, I have snitches up here.”

  Louise leaps down from a beer crate to sniff the piss-yellow puddle on the truck floor. “At least you could have found a dairy truck to hijack. This stuff smells as bad as hairball spit-up before it’s been laundered by a bile factory.”