Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (19 page)

Matt studied the tables. Ebbing diners had been replaced by ranks of drinkers, who chattered now that the music was instrumental again.

No one who could have been Kathleen O’Connor in disguise or out of it remained in the room.

Matt left cash in the padded leather bill holder, got up, and followed Carmen’s exit through a narrow green velvet curtain spotted with fingerprints.

The short hall beyond led past a cigarette machine and the restrooms to a couple of closed doors. It smelled of cooking oil and spilled Coca-Cola.

Matt knocked softly at each door. The second produced a muffled “Come in.”

The room beyond wasn’t large but the huge circular mirror on a vintage dressing table reflected almost his full figure in the doorway.

He looked out of place in his khakis and lightweight navy nylon jacket. No fedora. No striped suit. No red carnation in his button hole.

Molina wasn’t sitting at the table but leaned against one of the pillars of drawers on either side.

“I’m going to kill you,” she announced.

“Not you, too.”

“My threat is serious. Do you know what you’ve done? My voice is creaky, the range is shaky. I can’t believe that a few weeks off could work such ruin.”

“You sounded great. Very Barbara Stanwick.”

“Yeah, thanks. She didn’t sing.” Molina shook her head. Her no-fuss bob wasn’t quite in period but somehow seemed to match the shabby nightclub ambiance. She pulled the blue silk dahlia from the side of her hair. It contrasted dramatically with the only visible makeup she wore, a dark-lipsticked ’40s mouth, but a moment later it lay on the pedestal like a crumpled blue tissue, frail and expendable looking, like a dead stripper.

Matt knew that the recent unsolved death of just such a blossom in the dust was gnawing at Molina’s professional and personal life.

“Odd,” he said.

“What?”

“We’ve both got similar problems.”

She arched her dark eyebrows that Temple always fussed could use a plucking. Matt saw them as a strong frame for the remarkable blue-zdahlia eyes that were her most memorable feature, as coolly hot as neon.

“You’ve got a killer who just barely eludes you,” Matt explained, “and I’ve got a killer I can’t quite manage to elude.”

“So what’s your nemesis up to now?”

“A nemesis is an avenger seeking justice. Kitty O’Connor isn’t that. She doesn’t even know me. She’s a…persecutor.”

“What’s she done now?” Molina looked like she should be lighting an unfiltered cigarette, but she wasn’t.

“She showed up where I work.”

“The radio station.”

“Yeah. I was leaving for the night, the morning, actually. About one-thirty, with my producer. And this figure came racing in on a Kawasaki Ninja, leather-wrapped from neck to toe. She charged us like a bull on that cycle, tore a necklace right off Letitia’s neck, then went roaring off flourishing it as a trophy.”

“Intimidation.”

“I know what it was. I want to know how to stop it.”

“What did you do then?”

“Tried to keep between her and Letitia. Tried to grab a handlebar and tip the cycle over. Not much that worked.”

“She’s just harassing you at this point, not doing any real damage.”

“She did real damage her first time out.”

Molina glanced at his side. Matt could feel the scar, the tightness, if he thought about it. He felt it when he made any major move. A razor slash, now a faint long, thin, white line, like a wound just before the blood wells to the surface and overflows.

“She seemed to be taking something out on your producer,” Molina said finally. “Showing off to you and hassling the lady.”

“Right. She doesn’t like me to associate with any females. That’s pretty clear.”

“What sort of female is your producer?”

Matt hesitated at the impossibility of summarizing Letitia. “Gorgeous black woman, maybe thirty, maybe three hundred pounds.”

“Three hundred pounds. And this psycho chick was jealous?”

“I don’t know if it’s jealousy exactly. It’s more like…possession. Yeah, I know that’s a form of jealousy, but Kitty O’Connor is more like a demon than a woman.”

“Whoa! You
are
spooked. She’s a sick chick with issues, that’s all. I am not in the demon-exorcizing business and I think you’d know better than that by now.”

Matt stuffed his hands in his pockets to keep the fists his frustration made from showing. “This O’Connor woman is a wasteland of spiritual desolation. You can’t reach her by any human means. So don’t call her a demon, although that works for me. Call her a psychopath.”

“She hasn’t done anything you could even get a restraining order for. You can’t prove the slash.”

“It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s what she might do to someone around me.”

“Listen, this town is teeming with dangerous types. You have no idea what you’re brushing up against as you amble down the Strip on a Friday night. If the police are doing their job, and we mostly are, you and the tourists will never know.”

Matt held his tongue for a while. It ached to pour out the strangehistory of Kitty O’Connor. If he could only tell Molina about her connection to Max Kinsella…. But Molina bared her teeth like a Rottweiler when any scent of Kinsella tainted the air. And those confidences weren’t Matt’s to share. Though he wasn’t still a priest, he was used to keeping the seal of the confessional, to keeping everybody’s secrets in their individual, sacrosanct boxes, like little coffins containing rotting lilies left over from the thousand natural wakes a human being holds for all past sins and uncertainties.

All he could say was, “I know she was fanatically involved in the IRA. She would seduce wealthy men for money to buy weapons. I imagine she was downsized from her job during the recent seesaw of peace accords. I’d guess she’s an unemployed terrorist looking for a victim.”

Molina nodded seriously, but her eyes narrowed. “We’re all taking that pretty seriously nowadays. How do you know about her international terrorism history?”

Matt wasn’t about to blurt out, “Max Kinsella.” He flailed for a logical dodge that would still salve his Catholic conscience for truth at all costs. “Ah, Bucek. Frank Bucek at the FBI. He was in seminary with me. We’ve talked on the phone a little. He looked her up.”

“Bucek looked her up for you when he couldn’t give me diddly?”

“Fellow ex-priests…”

“Fellow guys, you mean.”

Before Molina could wind up some feminist rant, someone knocked on the door. “Bar call,” a man’s jovial voice caroled.

Molina looked inquiringly at Matt.

“Scotch on the rocks,” he finally thought to say. She yodeled a double order of same through the door.

“Sit down.” She pointed to one of those round-seated wooden chairs with the bentwood backs that was stained so dark it looked like it had been sitting here awaiting him for decades. Probably had.

Matt took the seat, though it was uncomfortable, and Molina finally sat in a matching chair placed before the dressing table.

She shook her head at herself, her face as sharp-boned as Lauren Bacall’s in the time-spotted mirror. “Sometimes I expect Bogey to stroll in here asking about Maltese falcons. Those were the days: treacherous greedy crooks, psychopaths disguised as cheap hoods, and manipulative dames. Okay.” She scraped the chair legs on the concrete floor to turn her back to the mirror.

As she braced her elbows on the matching pillars, Matt was startled to see in the mirror the black velvet curtain of her dress part in back from neck to waist. She couldn’t have been wearing, well, anything under it. This was not something he wanted to think about here and now, or anywhere at any time, really.

A knock at the door.

“Enter!” Molina called out grandly.

The barman came in carrying one of those small, round, scuffed brown trays that have held drinks since Methuselah was a wine steward.

“Thanks, Steve.” Molina watched him set the tray on the opposite drawer pillar like an offering. “I love to impress company with my lavish backstage perks.”

Steve, a toothy guy with receding gray hair, grinned. “Courtesy of the management. We’re glad to have you back.”

He winked at them both in the mirror as he left.

“They pay you for this?” Matt asked suddenly.

“Yeah, they pay me for this.” Molina sounded indignant. “I wouldn’t do an amateur gig. Lots of cops moonlight. This is less conflict of interest than most.”

“I didn’t mean…what I meant is they’re happy to pay to have you back.”

She leaned forward to hand him a lowball glass richly amber with about three ounces of scotch. He sipped. Johnnie Walker Black. Very happy to have her back.

He sipped again, feeling tension drain down his arms like a blood-letting. “This is the first time I’ve felt out of that woman’s reach for two weeks.”

Molina lifted her own glass in a distant toast. “Happy to hear that. What’s the reason?”

“A bodyguard?” he said, laughing.

“You aren’t kidding.” She crossed her legs.

The motion would have been coy in another woman clothed in floor-length vintage black velvet, but now it simply revealed the small, lethal-looking gun attached to her ankle by some industrial-strength black holster of nylon webbing.

Matt almost choked on a quarter ounce of scotch too good to spray on the concrete floor. “Do you always do that?”

“Always,” she said. “Nobody’s going to die because I was in a Luby’s Cafeteria with my gun in the car.”

He nodded, remembering the case, another massacre in a public place by a single psycho gone ballistic. And that brought them back to Miss Kitty. “I can’t carry a gun. I can’t shoot her. So that makes me a perpetual victim?”

Molina nodded while she savored her drink. “This ought to oil the old pipes for the next set. You are keeping me up late tonight, Mr. Midnight.” She twisted to check a small clock on the dressing table.

“No problem. I’m not due at work for a couple of hours.”

She glanced at his glass. “Can you drive —?”

“I had a heavy meal.”

“Then enjoy. I imagine you haven’t enjoyed much lately. Back to your…bête noir? Is that better than ‘nemesis’? Here’s the deal. Here’s what every woman with an abusive ex on her tail finds out. Nothing and nobody can help you. If you were a woman, I’d advise you to get a gun and shoot the guy the next time he showed up. No, I wouldn’t. I can’t. But that’s the only defense they’ve honestly got, a lot of them. I am so damn sick of picking up the phone and hearing some woman was blown away in the parking lot of her office, or a grocery store, or a fast-food joint, or a day-care facility, or a school by some maniac man who can’t let go because he can’t live without a victim.

“And it’s always just when the woman finally gets a little starch and tries to get away, when she’s defending her kids where she couldn’t defend herself, when she’s being a heroine instead of a whipping girl, and then they kill her.

“Enough about my job frustrations. Now, about yours. Your job is to
foil this woman
. You can’t give her what she wants.”

“That’s what Letitia said.”

“Letitia.”

“My producer.”

“Oh, right. The Lane Bryant black Venus. You know, this Kitty woman is nuts. She really wants you.”

“Thanks.”

“No.” Molina leaned forward, elbows on her knees, a hoydenish posture for the elegant gown. She sipped premium scotch. “She’s dead serious about that. She wants you untouched by any woman. Weird. It’s not an uncommon attitude among abusive men, but women aren’t usually so…macho.”

“That biker outfit was plenty macho.”

“Why you?”

Matt wanted to shout,
Because she can’t torment Max Kinsella. She can’t even find Max Kinsella
.

But he couldn’t. He did have a few clues as to why he was the designated Kinsella stand-in, though.

“She likes to corrupt priests.”

“You know the answer then.”

He nodded. “Letitia laid it out for me, too.”

Molina sipped. Her electric blue eyes were softening to the color of natural blue topaz, Virgin Mary Blue, mild and misty. “You need an understanding woman who will remove that which Miss Kitty covets.”

“Who won’t get killed for the honor,” Matt added drily. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

“I don’t think so. She’s nervous. That’s why she’s darting around, threatening these women. Once the deed is done, you’re worth nothing to her. The whole house of cards falls down. Anticipate her, disarm her. Hell, sleep with her then, if you want to. It would kill her.”

“Carmen. I’m not like that. I don’t do these things lightly.”

“That’s where she’s got you! You want to be got, cling to your odor of sanctity. You want to live, do what you must.”

“‘And do it well.’”

“Huh?”

“A quote from a songwriter you’d never sing. Well, maybe you would.” Matt took a deep, burning swallow of scotch.

“Any candidates to predate Miss Kitty?” Molina probed, perhaps a bit too curious.

“Nobody I’m willing to endanger,” he said shortly, swallowing without the benefit of scotch, the afternoon’s interlude in the Circle Ritz hallway returning on aching waves of might-have-been.

“No volunteers?” she pressed. Matt noticed that her lipstick had left a red half-moon on the edge of her glass, decided through a veil of pleasant haze that they were both relaxing too much, discussing things too dangerous to act on. Guns and sex and psychosis. “A good-looking guy like you?

“Janice? Letitia?” She left one name hanging until he thought he’d strangle on it. Why had he ever thought Molina might become an ally? She was a policewoman. She always needed to know the full story.

“No woman strong enough to risk.”

“Ah.” She leaned back, elbows braced on the twin pillars of the dressing table, the drink glowing topaz against the black of her gown.

Molina?

God, he must be drunk.

But the idea started caroming through his brain. She was armed and dangerous. She just said she thought he was good-looking. Lots of people did, but Molina
saying
it…thinking it.

If he was caught in some sexless limbo because of his religious past, she was a single mother in a man’s world. What kind of personal life did she have? Did she dream, as Janice did, of an Invisible Man who would come through her window, a puppet with no strings attached, like Errol Flynn on a rope, and go away leaving no traces, no obligations, no guilt, like a dream?