Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“Right. Now that I’ve seen and heard him, I just hope somebody gets him for something. I’ll redo it gratis. Just for the lesbian crack.”

“You can’t believe anything you hear in a strip club. So that was it. A close encounter with the sketch subject. It must have been unnerving. Like seeing a ghost.”

“Like seeing a nightmare. I’m not used to these hard customers. Matt didn’t seem particularly worried, though.”

“He’s seen hard customers before.”

“As a priest?”

Molina permitted herself a smile. “No. Here. In Vegas.”

“That man I first sketched for him?”

Molina shrugged. “Unappetizing, but not particularly dangerous. Just mean.”

“His stepfather. Matt says he…stalked him.”

“Matt’s being hard on himself, as usual. He found him. For me, frankly. For himself too. Looking for a criminal isn’t stalking.”

Janice nodded. Molina could tell she was unconvinced, that she was thinking of a subject that had not come up, and probably wouldn’t. “That second sketch I did for him…”

“Second one?” Molina felt her nerve endings sit up and salute. Effinger was old news, an unsolved case that nobody really cared about. A minuscule serving of small potatoes at the biggest buffet in Las Vegas.

“The woman. The gorgeous woman.”

“ Hmmm .” Molina made it sound like she knew all about it and wasn’t particularly interested. That’s how you got troubled witnesses to talk: you overreacted to the trivial and tiptoed around the crucial.

Janice fell into easy compliance. “She didn’t look like a criminal, but I suppose they don’t all come from Central Casting, like that Raf character at Secrets.”

Molina ached to shock Janice a little by revealing that Raf had been a cop. You couldn’t take anything for granted in the law enforcement game. Nothing. Including gorgeous women that Matt Devine wanted pretty pictures of. A self-indulgence? Someone he had a crush on?

“She wasn’t a redhead?” Molina had never thought of Temple Barr as gorgeous, but Janice was one of those stolidly average-looking women, like Molina herself, who might confuse pretty cute with pretty.

“No. A cross between Snow White and the Wicked Queen. Skin as white as snow, hair as black as coal, lips as red as blood.”

“Don’t recall any Most Wanteds of that description.” Molina’s smile put a period on her dismissal of the subject. She would certainly have to find out what that was all about. Probably under the pretense of getting Matt’s report on the outing at Secrets. Not here. Somewhere more social…

“Oh. I did get the other sketch you wanted,” Janice was saying, reaching into the large flat tapestry bag she’d leaned against her chair. “The bartender, Rick, took a bit of coaxing, but I think I got a pretty dead-on likeness.” She handed her sketch pad across the desk, opening to the top sheet.

Oh, my, yes. Max Kinsella as a dated lounge lizard. So “Vince” had been his cover persona when he charmed that doomed girl Mandy/Cher despite looking like yesterday’s Spanish omelette. Where did he get that tacky ’70s gold jewelry?

She wasn’t surprised, of course. She had sent him there to snoop. She just hadn’t anticipated that he’d snoop in such an odious guise. Greasy hair curling at the ends. Ugh. Sleaze personified. Would the real Max Kinsella please stand up? No, cancel that. Would the real Max Kinsella please put his hands up and assume the position?

Unfortunately, in this case the sketch only proved he was on the job, on her orders.

Molina suddenly realized that Janice was watching her study the artwork.

“Almost too perfect as the very model of a modern lowlife, isn’t he?” Janice said. “I think that guy’s just playing at being a big man. If I were to say who would most likely have killed a woman, I’d pick him.” Her blunt-nailed left forefinger came down hard on Raf Nadir’s nose.

That was the last thing that Molina wanted to hear.

“So,” Molina said a few hours later, carefully unwrapping her salsa-sour cream—green chili burger. “I hope you don’t mind a quick meet at a fast-food place. I’m working late, and you go to work late, so…”

“Fine,” Matt Devine said, looking nervous.

He was probably nervous about spilling something on the front seat of her Crown Victoria, which was in pretty good shape for a cop car.

The silver motorcycle he sometimes rode leaned against the single parking-lot light pole like a particularly out-of-place prostitute, all sleek and platinum-silver-blond in a black-dye neighborhood.

It was 9:00 P.M. and the parking lot light rinsed Matt’s blindingly blond hair the albino shade of fiberglass-coifed Christmas-tree angels from a galaxy far away and long, long ago called East L.A.

She was a rat and no woman to use an unsuspecting schmuck (saint) like Matt for her larger purposes, but she had a daughter and a life to protect.

She found it uncanny that Matt had ordered the exact variety of Charley’s Old-Fashion Burger that Max Kinsella had: lettuce, blue cheese, and sun-dried tomatoes.

Maybe all men were California cheeseburgers at heart.

“I suppose Janice told you—” he said, nervously.

“She did. She showed me.”

“Vince.”

Molina nodded.

“I don’t know why he was there—”

“That’s my job.”

“—looking like that—”

“Maybe it’s his natural coloration.”

“—but I don’t think he’d kill anyone. Not a woman, anyway.”

Molina laughed. “Noble of you to defend him. You realize that if I put Kinsella away for murder one, our Miss Temple is one very unattached object.”

He stopped negotiating a surrender with the four-inch-thick burger and eyed her in the twilight. Hard. “Temple is no object, attached or not. You realize that if you did put Kinsella in irons your Miss Temple would do anything to prove him innocent—including petitioning for a retrial before the ink was dry on the conviction? If you could get one in the first place.”

“You want him out and about?”

“I want him paying for what he’s done, not what you might wish he had done. I admit it looks bad that he was at Secrets before that stripper was killed, but I bet Temple can clear him of having anything to do with the earlier deaths. We know who killed the ex-nun and dumped her at the Blue Dahlia.”

“But ‘we’ don’t know who killed the woman in the church parking lot soon after. You remember, the former magician’s assistant?” Molina kept her eyebrows raised in challenge.

“I understand what you’re saying. An ex-magician’s assistant could have been killed by an ex-magician like Kinsella. But he had no connection to her.”

“That we know of. And he had a connection to the dead stripper, Matt, because I sent him into that club.”

“ You did? Why?”

She shook her head, ate a mouthful of bun and burger so she couldn’t answer until she had come up with a good one.

“He seemed to fancy himself an undercover operator,” she finally said. “I wanted him to tail somebody, and he ran into Mandy, actually born as Cher Smith, instead.”

“Poor Max.”

“Poor Max! Are we talking rival here or blood brother?”

“He’s not my rival. You know that Temple and Max are…reunited. There are no rivals where there’s no contest.”

“Poor Matt.”

But this time he had bitten off more than he could chew and was too busy to answer. Her comment lay as heavy as a cold French fry in a pool of congealed ketchup between them.

“Poor Carmen,” he finally said when he had finished chewing, looking amused.

“I guess the only one of us who isn’t ‘poor’ something is that blamed PR whiz.”