Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (4 page)

Temple remained silent, studying her table, studying Max. He seemed to be talking and thinking on autopilot. Too little on his mind, or, more likely, too much.

Whichever it was, he was not about to share his deepest inner concerns with her.

Max mysterious was one thing: this was a given with a man who had made his living as a magician for so long. Max unable, or unwilling, to be forthcoming with her was something else. Someone else.

“Anything more I should know?” she asked suddenly.

He started slightly. That was also so unlike Max, showing surprise. “Know?” He was confused, playing for time while the cobwebs cleared.

“Any more suspects I haven’t listed here, like this Nadir guy?”

“Oh. No. Except for the amorphous Synth.”

“Rafi doesn’t sound too sinister,” she said, lettering it in.

“He goes by Raf.”

“As in raffish?”

“As in you wouldn’t want to win this bozo in a raffle. If you cross his path, stay away from him, Temple. He’s major breaking news in the local disaster department, especially for women.”

“Yet you let him get away from the scene of the last crime before the police got there.”

Max’s face froze as if she had said something astounding.

“Scene of the crime? How did you —?”

“I was there, remember? At Rancho Exotica.”

“Oh, right, at Rancho Exotica.”

That’s when Temple realized that there had to have been another scene of the crime where both Max and Rafi were present, but she hadn’t been.

“Apparently he’s as eager to dodge Molina as you are,” she said, probing now.

Again Max tensed, right on the name, which Temple had dropped the same way some people would toss a grenade into a garden party: casually, but with oh-so-lethal intent. The bombshell was the name Molina. Homicide Lieutenant C. R. Molina, lady cop, lady blood-hound when it came to Max and his vague past and all-too-often suspect present.

“Let’s face it,” Max said, deciding to hide behind humor, “what red-blooded man wouldn’t want to dodge Molina? Except maybe Matt Devine.”

Now Max was dropping his own grenades. Temple tried not to feel the spray of psychic shrapnel. When had their consultation become a chess game?

When the name Rafi Nadir had come up.

The one man Temple had ever seen who frightened Max. Excepting Matt, and that was a very different kind of fear.

Why? Who was Rafi Nadir, really?

And why wouldn’t Max tell her a damn thing about him?

Feral Foul

As everybody knows, the world-weary private eye must sometimes tread on the dark side of danger.

Mean Streets R Us.

By us I mean the old-time guys: Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Travis McGee. We are a breed apart. We are not afraid to get our digits dirty, our eyes blackened, our whiskers wet, or our ears wiped.

You can knock us down, but not out.

Okay, sometimes you can knock us out.

But not off.

Anyway, having observed my Miss Temple struggling to make sense of the string of murderous events that have dogged her teeny-tiny high-heeled footsteps since we met, I decide to take action.

It was nice of her to share her deductive reasoning with me. I truly enjoyed our consultation over Sunday morning coffee. We make a good team. She is the cream in my coffee, and I am the caffeine in her cream. She is sugar. I am spice. But she can be feisty, and I can be nice when it suits me.

However, when it comes to ferreting out information from the lower elements, there is no way that I will allow my Miss Temple to dirty her tootsies with a walk on the wild side. I will go this part of the case alone.

I am not even taking my usual “muscle,” the spitting-mad Miss Midnight Louise, who is my would-be daughter. I say that there are a lot of black cats in this hip old world (despite wholesale attempts to eliminate our kind since the Dark Ages, no doubt why they call it that), and we cannot all be related. Though even a macho dude like myself must admit that there are times when you cannot beat a seriously enraged dame for effective backup.

The successful operative will stick at nothing to get results.

Still, sometimes it is best not to show up in the company of a girl. She might be mistaken for your mother.

So it nears my namesake hour when I slink solo into a neighborhood where even the pit bulls and housing developers do not go.

This is the north side of town where the abandoned houses and cars are all older than the Nixon administration. “Run-down” would be a high compliment in this area, and run down is what careless intruders usually get.

I pass a few rats the size of Midnight Louise scurrying in the opposite direction.

One stops to hiss in amazement at my presence, and at the fact that I am heading in the direction that he and his cohorts are fleeing like the, er, plague.

I hiss back. His claws scrape the cracked asphalt like dry leaves as he skitters out of sight.

I shrug my coat collar up around my neck to keep the wind from picking all my pockets. It also looks as if I am making a fashion statement instead of just having the hair on the back of my neck at permanent attention.

The effective operative does not wish to look scared into a new hairdo.

Either somebody is fitfully beating on a hollow tin drum…or the trash cans are rocking in the wind. Or somebody is trying to stuff a body in ’em. Or, more likely, pull one out for supper.

I did mention that this was a rough crowd. Of course now you cannot see a soul, not even a rat.

That is how I know I am just where I want to be.

I sit down to survey the place, casually clipping my toenails in the light of the only working streetlight within six blocks.

While sharpening my shivs, I regard a street in ill repair that cuts like a rusty knife through what amounts to one big empty lot.

Islands of trash thrust up from the flat desert landscape here and there. I recognize articles of furniture missing stuffing and upholstery, and large black-green garbage bags big enough and lumpy enough to hold sufficient dead bodies to populate a zombie movie, and maybe a sequel or two. Broken amber-colored empty bottles exhale the sour stench of beer so flat it is looking for a singing teacher.

However, my connoisseur’s sniffer notices something else among the odors of decay: the whiff of fish. Oh, it is not the delicate, scaly scent of freshly caught fish, such as you find at the edge of a koi pond, but the odor of the canned stuff they sell in the stores. Being that my old man was once the mascot on a Pacific Northwest salmon boat, I prefer to catch my own, but it is clear that the pre-caught kind of fish is here to catch something else.

I rise and swagger over to the nearest hummock of trash.

It is not long before I am close enough to notice something familiar jammed in among what is left of somebody’s Tia Evita floral reclining chair. I spot the familiar crosshatching of thin gray metal wires.

Normally such sights give me a chill of apprehension, but tonight I emit a soft purr of satisfaction instead. Everything is as bad as I had hoped it would be.

In not too long a time, I shall be at the mercy of the most fearsome street gang this old town has ever seen.

What I do to keep my Miss Temple out of danger and in arch supports.

Midnight Consultation

Max stretched, pushed Temple’s compilation of dead people aside, and consulted the watch on his right wrist as his long arms folded around her.

“Almost the witching hour. We could tune in Mr. Midnight for a bedtime treat.”

“Listening to a bunch of strangers whine about the personal lives they don’t have? Not me.”

“You’re not a fan?”

Temple yawned pointedly. “Who can stay up that late anymore?”

“You’re right. I should let you get your beauty sleep.”

“Since when have you ever done anything you ‘should’ do? Max, what’s the matter?”

“What isn’t the matter? Listen, Temple. You stood by me like, I don’t know, like the brave little drummer girl, when everyone thought I was a cad and coward and a murderer.”

“Everyone?”

“Well, mostly Molina, but she carries a lot of weight. It’s not fair for me to ask this, but you might have to do it again.”

“Stand up to Molina?”

“Always. I mean, stand by me.”

“What’s happening?”

“I can’t quite tell. Can’t quite say. I don’t know what to think. I know.” He laughed ruefully. “That’s not like me. This is getting too much like Northern Ireland. Foes and friends mixed together in one bloody stew. You start to question friends, you start to sympathize with foes, and the upshot is almost always betrayal and death.”

“Max! You’ve never talked this way before.”

“I’ve never been here, in this precise position before.” His hands touched her shoulders, then his thumbs reached up to caress her cheeks. “You’re sharp. You’re nobody’s fool. You might hear some things about me. Don’t believe them. No matter who they come from. I know. You’ve done it before, but it’ll be worse now. What I’ve found is worse.”

“The Synth?”

“No, nothing that exotic! Something down-home and downtown. Just remember, if I’m suspect, it might be because other people are more suspect.”

“People? Or person? Is it this Nadir guy?”

Temple watched her stab in the dark ricochet off the wary expression in Max’s blue eyes, like a stone skipping across one of her native state’s vaunted ten thousand lakes, never quite connecting with anything, defying gravity, just defying. Everything.

She was close, but still too far away.

“Does it have something to do with Molina?”

“It always has something to do with Molina,” he answered, laughing bitterly. “Try to keep it between us, Temple. Can you?”

“I always have,” she said, no longer certain she could.

DOD: Domesticated or Dead

No sooner I have applied myself to sniffing around the silver mesh than I sense a change in the air.

I do not hear a thing, mind you. Yet the empty space surrounding me has suddenly become not so empty. It cannot be rats. Rats cannot retract their shivs, so they always announce themselves, like Miss Temple in her high heels. Also, rats cannot refrain from chittering when excited, and the gang I expect knows how to keep its lips zipped tighter than a leather bustier on Pamela Anderson.

I flick a nail at the pungent glop of fish before me, then say right out loud, “Sucker bait. One bite and boom! You are in stir.”

I turn to regard my audience. Gack. Imagine a ragtag road show of
CATS!
with the entire cast recruited from a feline
West Side Story
.

These dudes are lean, edgy, and ravenous. Their shivs nervously scrape the cracked asphalt. Their whiskers are broken and twitching. I spot one poor sod who was in a rumble with a car. His untended broken leg sticks out at such a bizarre angle he can only walk on his knee. I notice a duke’s mixture of ragged ears — some neatly notched — and crooked tails, not to mention fresh and festering wounds. As for coats, this crowd looks like it has just come from the Ragpickers’ Ball. Exiting through a shredder.