Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“I don’t suppose many women go to these things. As viewers, I mean,” Janice said.

“I don’t suppose many ex-priests do either.” He pulled the heavy metal door open and waited for her to enter.

“On the other hand,” Janice said hopefully, “maybe we’re both wrong.”

Sound blasted out at them like construction noise: raw and blind, teeth-rattlingly vicious. An aural attack. It was also a fortunate distraction for the terminally self-conscious.

Janice rummaged in her purse until she plucked out a couple of tissues, quickly tearing them to pieces and handing him shreds to jam in his ears.

Even buffered, the music was painful. After that sensual assault, any visual shocks were minor.

Both of them fastened on the long oblong of the bar as an island of safety. Except…

“There are two!” Janice shrieked.

“What?” Matt pointed at his stopped-up ears.

Janice’s left hand raised, her first two fingers forked in a vee. Not V as in victory, but—

“Two bars,” she mouthed now, more than shouted.

Matt turned to assess who passed for bartenders on each side of the room. En route, his eyes slid off mostly naked women writhing to the deafening beat they could feel through their feet and teeth.

A medieval vision of hell, that’s all Matt could think of. Michelangelo’s painting on the Sistine Chapel wall, where the artist pictured his enemies damned and writhing under torture. Matt, on the other hand, hoped not to see one familiar face in this nightmare vision. Or to have one familiar face see him here.

He pointed toward the farther bar. There the man behind the shiny expanse was a mustached thirty-something, instead of the beefy twenty-one-year-old who manned the nearest strip of shining bottles and background mirror reflecting long bare legs executing extreme variations on the splits.

Janice and Matt climbed onto the plastic-upholstered barstools like flood survivors finding purchase.

She laid her sketch pad atop the droplet-dappled counter.

The man noticed them, ostentatiously finished swiping down the far end of the bar, then ambled over.

It was early enough that the place wasn’t crowded, Matt noted. Or maybe it never was crowded. There was something desultory about the atmosphere, despite the pumped-up music and sound system, the women bobbing and posing on the opposing bars, the one in the purple-white spotlight on the stage strutting to the beat. She was a hefty girl in a cheap version of the famous Marilyn Monroe white dress blown up by the subway grate.

Matt had to admit that he found photos of Marilyn Monroe engagingly earthy. She seemed to be mocking herself and the viewer even as she pouted and posed. From her to Jon-Benet Ramsey was one turn of the page backward. Sometimes all sexiness seemed an act the innocent put on to survive an anti-innocence world. That’s what you thought, even as they died of being pinup girls. All girls under the skin.

“Rick?” Janice inquired. Shouted really.

“Who’s asking?” Matt read the man’s lips.

“Janice.” She held out a hand.

He regarded it as a curiosity. “Yeah?”

“Lieutenant Molina sent me,” she mouthed, putting her hands to better use at her mouth like a megaphone.

Rick reared back, as if bitten. “Molina?”

“I’m here to get your description of Vince .”

Janice shouted every key word, punctuating the din, but the method seemed to work.

Rick nodded.

“Can we go somewhere quiet? ”

Rick shook his shaggy head. “Can’t leave my post.”

Like he was a soldier, Matt thought. Like his was an honorable profession.

“Okay. Tell me about Vince— ” Janice shouted.

The music, if it could be called that, ended as abruptly as an earth tremor, on a dissonant guitar twang drawn out to tortuous length.

Quiet hurt as much as cacophony. Maybe more.

Janice flipped back the cover of her sketch pad and held her pencil poised over the blank page. “I’m all ears, Rick.”

“Okay, but you gotta buy drinks.”

Matt was about to protest until he saw Janice’s anxious look. “Two scotch on the rocks.” He didn’t expect to get much in the way of fancy mixes, and that was the fastest highball he could think of. Matt shrugged his disavowal of his order at Janice while Rick turned away to clatter ice cubes into thick, ugly glassware and to pour a thin drizzle of whiskey over them.

The silence reverberated in their abused ears, in waves and pulses, sounding like the ocean in a seashell.

Even as Matt’s twenty-dollar bill was being scraped away, Janice was at work. “So. Coloring?

“Dark,” Rick grunted.

“Foreign?”

“Just dark.”

“Skin color?”

Rick shrugged. “Nothing unusual. I said not foreign.”

“Face shape. Long? Broad? Prominent cheekbones?”

“Just…regular.” Rick smirked at her busy pencil.

Matt slapped another twenty to the soggy bar top. “Molina said you’d cooperate. I bet if you don’t she’ll see no one wearing a badge cooperates with you or this place for a long time. Plus, there’s a tip in it.”

Rick tilted his head, droned rapidly. “Weird dude. Slouched over his drink. Looked like one of those guys who hands out private-dancer flyers on the sly on the Strip, except he was bigger. Narrow. Big but narrow. Not thick-necked muscle, if you know what I mean. Face was…angular, I guess you’d say. All sharp and asking things, you know? Eyebrows like question marks. Greasy hair. Moussed to death. Trendy clothes, if you’re from 1975. Velour jogging suit, open at the chest. Cheesy gold necklace. Lots of chest hair. If he’d been broader you’d call him an ape, but he was…sleeker. Slippery. Yeah, that’s it.”

“Nose?”

“Long, like he was. Eyes slanted like a cat’s. Eyebrows too, maybe. He looked like he was in a high wind all the time. That moussed-back hair just made him look more like he was running.”

“Good-looking?”

“Mandy seemed to think so, the way she hung off him. ’Course, she was drunk six ways from Sunday, as usual.”

“What on earth would make a girl get drunk in a place like this?” Janice muttered, her pencil flying, racing the deejay in the corner and his tape machine. She turned her pad to face Rick. “This close?”

He blinked. “Damn. You’re good. But the face was broader, beneath the eyes.”

“Broader cheekbones,” she said as her pencil made it so. “And?”

“Younger. Guy couldn’t have been much over thirty. I mean, he acted like the years of the world were on his back, but he wasn’t that blown.”

Janice’s forefinger softened the bags under the eyes, strengthened the nose.

“Yeah.” Rick nodded, getting interested despite himself. “And the mouth was more…mobile, not so tight. You take your fifties hood, and maybe put some, I don’t know, early Sean Connery behind him—”

While Rick talked, Janice’s pencil walked over the nubbly paper, changing, changing, changing. She presented the latest version silently.

Rick jabbed a stubby forefinger on the paper. “Eyes were funny. Out of it but in it, if you know what I mean.”

Janice nodded, her mouth tightening as she worked and reworked the sketch.

Matt had never seen her sketch so fast. She had taken her time with him, teased every little detail out of him. Now she was sketching in lightning time, and the results were just as good. Matt wondered if she had needed to spend so much time with him, or had just wanted to.

She smudged, corrected, erased, kept flashing the sketch at Rick like a challenge. Each time he met the dare by mentioning another specific, another modification.

It was like watching a duel, thrust and retreat, revise and represent. Back and forth. So fast he couldn’t keep track.