Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (20 page)

But there were always hordes of swordsmen after Errol Flynn as Don Juan or as Robin Hood, and a dalliance with a wanted man always backfired on the woman, even if her ankle was armed. Molina was not invulnerable, just professional.

She was not strong enough to risk, but he didn’t dare tell her that.

“I can’t. I can’t involve any woman in this who might be the object of Kitty’s murderous attention.”

“Hmm,” said Molina. Carmen. Looking lazy and contemplative, looking pretty luscious, as a matter of fact, maybe because of what she was thinking. He was thinking it too. Where had his friendly neighborhood earth mother gone? Luscious? He must be deranged.

Matt set the half-full glass of scotch on the small table near the wall. He had to be on live radio in under two hours.

“I just came here for some professional advice.”

Her eyes suddenly focused in points like acetylene torch flames.

“Professional. From the mouths of babes. That’s it, Matt!”

“What?”

“You need a professional. Someone Kitty wouldn’t even notice. A pro.”

“With a gun?”

“No! Listen. This is Las Vegas.
Las Vegas
. You get yourself a six-hundred-dollar-a-night room at the Oasis. The Goliath. Whatever. You tip everyone in sight, and you ask the bellman to send up some private entertainment. Tip him a hundred.”

“Carmen!”

“Listen. I know this town. A hundred. You can afford it to save your virtue for the right wrong girl, right? Okay. For that you’ll get a thousand-dollar call girl. She’ll be beautiful, intelligent, gorgeously dressed, consider herself a sex industry professional, not some cheap, downtrodden hooker. She’ll argue her right to sell her services with such sophistication that you won’t have an answer. You’ll tell her your problem, not about Kitty the Cutter but your personal history. She will
love
helping you out. She considers herself a mental-health field worker and, besides, you’re not hard to help out. You will walk out of there much poorer, but not what Kathleen O’Connor wants: an innocent man. You will have endangered no one. The call girl will vanish from the hotel as she always does, with a great story to entertain another john. You will be absolutely…adequate, right? You will have taken advantage of no one, as talking to one of these awesome sexual entrepreneurs will convince you. They are nobody’s victims, believe me, and consider themselves worth every c-note. It’ll be
Pretty Woman
all over again, only with this strange role reversal all the way through. Make sense?”

“Carmen. No.”

“Why not? It’s brilliant. It’s a scam. You out-sting the stinger. Why not?”

“Because…it’s a sin.”

“So is caving in to a sexual blackmailer. So…confess it afterward. You believe in absolution, don’t you? Don’t you have to?”

“Yes. But —”

“‘Yes, but’ are the two most dangerous words in the language. Do it or pay for not doing it. Wait to see which innocent woman will pay. Maybe Temple Barr. This Kitty doesn’t sound blind, just demented.”

Matt fingered the key ring in his pocket, feeling the hard cold, gold circle of the snake ring spinning against his skin. He remembered how it had appeared in his apartment, with the equivalent of an Alice in Wonderland note:
Wear me.
The controlling Miss Kitty clandestinely invading his space again, claiming his attention.

It reminded him of Molina’s cold-blooded investigative strategy in keeping the whereabouts of Temple’s ring secret. In then sharing its whereabouts with him so he became complicit in her cruelty. He wanted to protest their conspiracy of silence he had only broken when Temple had figured it out. To accuse her, excuse himself.

But the damage had been done. To Temple, not to Kinsella, whom Molina really ached to hurt, nor to him, who had been the stooge, the patsy.

Temple’s ring was recorded history now. The ring Kitty O’Connor had forced him to install on his keyring was still a secret, still an issue, still lethal.

Still the eternal threat, the Worm Ouroboros, wanting to slip onto a finger like greased lightning and burn him, and never, ever come off.

…and Revamp

“I’ll think about it,” Matt said. He already had, far too long. “I suppose it’d be easy to lose Kathleen if I dodged into a megahotel.”

“Use a phony name. Pay cash at the front desk like a big winner. Take one room there and then call down and change it. Find something wrong. Somebody smoked in a nonsmoking suite, that kind of thing.”

“You’ve got some tricky ideas.”

“Not me. Everybody I’ve ever arrested. So.” Molina’s wild-blue-yonder gaze softened with scotch and satisfaction. “You gonna take my professional advice?”

“I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

He stood, took one last sip of the very fine scotch and left.

In the hall he could hear the trio killing time until Carmen’s next set with jazzy crescendoes. He kind of liked this place, right here. Alone in the hall, between the dressing room and the stage, the public. Ignored, invisible.

He moved along, wove through the clotted round tables, arranged to be intimate and now in the way.

It was a weeknight. He had dragged Carmen in for a half-empty house, but she probably appreciated warming up with only chairs to hear her rusty voice. Most of the chairs were empty now.

So was the parking lot when he pushed open the big door with the round porthole window. Round windows seemed so decadent, as if blocking out a sinister subaquatic world.

He homed on the familiar tilted shape of the Hesketh Vampire, appreciating its sleek lines from a distance, savoring a fondness you’d feel more for a horse than a vehicle.

A nondescript black car sat between the faded white lines a few spots away. That was all. Matt knew the staff parking lot was on the other side of the building. This lot was for customers and, a few weeks ago, the dumped body of a dead woman.

He winced a bit to recall her. Killed for not being quite Catholic enough in someone else’s warped view, when he might be killed for being too Catholic.

Why dumped here? Because the killer had associated The Blue Dahlia with nightlife and corruption.

He reached in his pants pockets for the cycle keys, eyed the waiting helmet, almost craving its anonymity, its implied safety.

A small click in the night.

Maybe the touch of a high heel on the asphalt.

Maybe the snick of a switchblade.

Maybe the mechanism of an opening car door.

Maybe all three.

Matt whirled to face the dark car with its windows black-tinted like a limousine’s. It was a boxy, anonymous vehicle. He couldn’t even name the model and maker.

It looked like a cut-rate hearse to him.

Someone was stepping out of it.

Stepping out with my baby…

A woman.

…a face in the misty light…

No, not Laura from forties film noir…just Kathleen. Kitty. Any haunting songs written for such a common name or nickname? Only raucous Irish ditties and a soulful Celtic ballad or two.

I’ll take you home again, Kathleen…

She wore something long, dark, and glittering. It hung from rhinestone straps on her shoulders. She was done up like a disco prom queen. Her high heels clicked on the pavement as she approached. Scarlet rhinestones dripped like blood from her earlobes. Not rhinestones maybe, rubies…

She clutched not a gun but a small, bejeweled purse shaped like a kumquat. The innocuous bag was more suggestive, more chilling. What was in it? A folded razor? A tiny automatic pistol? A lipstick case? A vial of poison? Or of holy water?

“Don’t be in such a hurry,” she said. “The Midnight Hour is still a lifetime away.”

He was alone this time. He didn’t have to worry about her hurting anybody else. He moved toward the motorcycle again. It could outrun any car.

“You’ve come here before,” she called after him, softly as a song. Her voice still held the faintest musical lilt of Ireland, a siren’s lure. “I was wondering why.”

He didn’t pause.

“Actually, I was wondering
who
.”

He turned, stopped, spoke. “What a small world you occupy, Kathleen O’Connor. There is not always a why, or a who. Sometimes there’s a what. Not for you, though. You’re hooked on whys and whos. That’s what makes you so ignorant.”

“
Me!
Ignorant? I’ve lived all over the world, visited casinos that make Las Vegas look like Disneyland for the double-wide set. I’ve drunk the finest wines, worn designer jeans that cost more than that whole damn motorcycle —”

“Impressive,” Matt said without stopping or turning.

“If you really want to be impressed, maybe you should peek in the backseat of my car.”

Her voice wasn’t musical anymore, but raw, as metallic as a zipper slowly opening, grating. Kitty was sure that what she was about to reveal was raunchy but irresistible.

Matt knew it was a mistake not to resist, but her voice had become so smugly threatening…

He turned. Kitty O’Connor cut a sophisticated figure in the blue-green parking lot glow. The car behind her was a shiny black box. He remembered sensing it as a hearse. Whose hearse?

He started toward it, she spinning and clicking on those high heels to reach it first, as if now they were in a race. Her staccato steps reminded him of Temple, but he didn’t want even her name crossing his mind in the presence of Kitty O’Connor.

The woman had paused by the back door on the driver’s side of the four-door sedan to unlatch the hard little jeweled bag. She brought out something black and oblong. A remote control. The car’s rear window opened with a can-opener whirr.

It sliced open on a band of red hair. Matt’s heart stopped, but the window kept descending until a third of the way down. He saw frightened eyes and a duct-taped mouth, like a robot’s featureless silver orifice pasted onto a human face.

Matt’s heart throbbed like a jungle drum as he recognized not the fractured face but the mane of red hair: the teenaged fan from last night at the radio station parking lot.

The window was rising again like a dry dark tide, obscuring the terrified eyes and obscenely cheerful red hair. Had Kitty chosen the girl because she had been there, or because her hair was red?

“She’s just an —” he began.

“Innocent bystander?” Kitty tucked the remote control back into her purse as casually as if it was a cigarette case. “My favorite kind. Besides, I don’t buy your assumption that anyone is innocent. Even you.”

“I never claimed I was.”

“You claimed you were a good priest.”

“A good priest isn’t innocent. A priest needs knowledge of evil.”

“You must be an even better priest now,” she said, slithering forward like vamp on a nighttime soap opera.

“A priest needs knowledge of evil,” he repeated, “like a seductress needs a touch of innocence to be believable. Seducing me won’t work.”

“Just remember the girl in the backseat. Next time she might be somebody you really know.”

He choked back his anger at her constant threats, her theatricality. Did she need to be the star of her own show this much? Apparently. And what did that tell him about her?

“Relax,” she was saying. “I’ve planned a quiet evening for just the two of us. And” — her dark head jerked over her shoulder toward the closed window — “she can’t see us. No one inside the car can see out except the driver. Aren’t you wondering who the driver is?”

He hadn’t considered that. If Kitty was not alone tonight, if she had a hostage, she might also have an accomplice. An accomplice was needed for what? Chauffeuring? Ferrying captives…carrying bodies?

“A quiet evening —?” he repeated to gain time.

“Sure.” She walked around to the car’s front passenger side.

He heard the heavy metal door open, then Kitty began unloading objects onto the car’s long black hood. Two champagne flutes. A silver ice bucket. A green bulbous bottle of Perrier-Jouët twined by painted art nouveau flowers.

“Come here,” she said.

He didn’t, of course.

“Come here or I’ll have to get my petite straight razor from my purse and attempt to cut that poor child’s duct tape off.”

She poured one tall flute too full of champagne, and waited.

He moved in her direction, around the front of the car, wondering if her anonymous driver had orders to run him down.

But the engine stayed dormant and only the bubbles in the long tall glass moved.

They spun frantically for the lip of the glass, pearly strings and ropes twirling up like deep sea divers trying to outrun the bends. Bubbles, tiny bubbles of frantic, tiny final breaths.

A tearful bound girl trapped in a stranger’s car with her mouth taped, breathing anxiously through her nose, fighting for each breath as congestion clogged her sinuses and nostrils.

“Let her go.”

“No.”

“Let her go, or I go.”

“You wouldn’t. You couldn’t.”

He shrugged, walked away, turned his back on the bubbles.

“You don’t dare risk it,” her hoarse whisper called after him.

He heard furious heel clicks, rapid, angry.