Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

Shades, sideburns, poufed and sprayed black hair. Who could see beyond the cartoon to the face beneath the icon’s mask?

He would get a lot of attention, yes, but it wouldn’t be hard to talk to people.

He slouched into the joint as if he were used to going everywhere in this weird getup. Bell bottoms, boots, and mod-pattern shirt.

“Got a gig down the Strip yet tonight, Elvis?” the bartender asked.

“Naw, I did a couple of the fringe casinos. That’s it. Tourist stuff mostly.” He grabbed a fistful of peanuts and stuffed his craw. “Came here to meet a girl.”

“We got ’em.”

“Not that way. Friend of mine. Good little peeler. Sometimes goes by Delilah.”

“Had ’em, seen ’em, not any here now.”

“Or…Mandy.”

The bartender stiffened, then shook his shaggy head. He looked about two weeks off of Wine Bottle Row himself, and now he looked scared. “I only been working here a couple of weeks.”

Max laughed at his own accuracy. “Anybody here who might have seen her a couple weeks ago?”

“You’re not the only one who’s asking. Maybe you two should get together.”

Max turned in the direction the guy’s single eye that focused was looking.

Maybe…not.

If he had gone for the over-obvious, Molina had settled for same old, same old. Worn jeans, weathered jean jacket, black turtleneck sweater, suede red, white, and blue shoulder bag big enough to tote a revolver. He spotted, and admired, the chipped polish on her fingernails. A nice touch. More makeup than the usual nil, but applied slap-dash.

She looked like a weary, low-rent PI who was used to trailing unfaithful husbands to motels roaches wouldn’t rent.

Right now she was talking to a blowsy stripper who should have retired two decades ago, making notes with a stubby pencil on a cocktail napkin while nursing a Bloody Mary.

Max wished he had a camera.

“You ever take on freelance muscle?” he asked Wino Willie over his shoulder while he watched Molina shout her questions over the noise of the taped music. He could just about read her lips.

“Yeah. The bouncers come and go as much as the girls do. Guess they’re all bouncers.” He cackled.

“Guy named Raf.”

“Yeah. I seen him.”

Max spun around, engaged at once. “Yeah? Big guy. Well, thick guy anyway.”

Willie was nodding his head on his stringy neck. “Now that you mention it, this Raf first showed up the night of the Incident.”

“Incident?”

Willie shrugged as he swabbed a filthy wet rag over the cigarette-blistered Formica bar top. “I guess you’re askin’ made me remember. Mandy. Second night I was on. Girl got herself killed in the parking lot.”

“They don’t ‘get’ themselves killed. Someone does it for them.”

“You know what I mean. Didn’t catch her name, but this Raf guy ducked out before the police came. Forgot about him. Round this place you remember the girls and forget the guys.”

“I guess.” Max/Elvis leered toward the stage where the black overhead spotlight was painting somebody fluorescent purple-white in all the right places.

Molina had moved on and was talking to a burly young bouncer with a pool-cue scar on his upper lip.

The music was as loud and even fuzzier than the sound system at Secrets. The strippers here all moved in a dream, matching the sparse clientele.

A bit of energy burst through the door, and several sets of eyes flicked its way, Max’s among them.

He almost dropped the prop cigarette he had been twirling through his fingers like a baton.

Rafi Nadir.

Max panned to Molina. She wasn’t wearing sunglasses after dark, naturally.

Elvis was.

He swiveled off the barstool and ambled in her direction. This would be the greatest magic trick of his career. Nothing to do but head her off, get rid of her, and keep Nadir to himself.

“Hi, uh, ma’am?” Sound like a rube.

She turned to find him slouched behind her, sticking a fresh cigarette behind his ear like a ’50s hood.

“Yeah?”

“Guy at the bar says you was askin’ ’bout Mandy?”

“Yeah.”

“I had some words with her. Guess she was the girl who got killed. Guess you’re one of these PIs?”

“Yeah.”

Max looked around, shifted his engineer-booted feet. “Don’t wanna talk here, you know? You got a car?”

“Yeah.”

“We kin go there?”

“Why should I? I don’t know you know anything.”

“I knew Mandy. Sort of. That’s more’n most here. She was new, like me. Guess I lasted and she didn’t.”

Molina looked impatiently around the place. She had a plan that didn’t include a hick Elvis who wanted to croon in a car.

Nadir was leaning over the bar, cadging a genuine drink from Willie.

“I sing real purty,” Elvis promised, with a wink.

“Get real. Or is that against your religion?”

“Hey, the King was real. He was jest misunderstood.”

“Aren’t we all.”

She was turning away, toward Rafi Nadir.

Nadir was turning away from the bar, smudged glass in fist, ready to survey the scene.

Elvis caught her arm, spun her back to face him, feeling an instant tightening of bicep under the denim jacket. Not big, but hard. She worked out.

“No, listen,” he said. “I feel real bad about Mandy. Dyin’ and all that.” Max had never sounded more sincere, maybe because it was easier to say the truth in another guise. “Mandy…she loved Elvis. Like a kid, you know. That’s why she talked to me, told me what she was afraid of.”

“Afraid of?”

Molina jumped on the bone he threw her like a cop on a clue.

Rafi had his drink in hand was swaggering toward mid-room. Toward them.

“Can’t we talk here?” she wanted to know.

“No!” Elvis’s edge of hysteria overlaid an air of Kingly command. “It’s gotta be outside. Mandy was afraid of something inside.”

“All right.” Frowning, Molina started for the door, her trademark laser blue eyes refracting the reflected rays from the lurid black light.

Nadir was looking their way, attracted by the motion.

Elvis swooped his extradark aviator shades from his face. Max braced for Molina to recognize him in the second before he pushed the glasses onto her nose. But she was distracted by the unwanted shades.

“What are you doing?” Her arm went up out of reflex, hard.

He blocked it with his forearm, a careless bump. “It’s bright out there, ma’am. Those big parking-lot lights. You wear Elvis’s shades. They’re a protection. He had bad eyes, you know. Too many bright lights. You don’t wanta let ’em bright lights get you. I’m a performer, I know. You ever see me do the King over at the Alhambra Inn?”

He had her out the door before she ripped the glasses from her face, her own authoritative persona coming through the cover loud and clear.

“No! And I don’t need these stupid props. Now have you got something to tell me, or what?”

Max donned the glasses she thrust at him and shrugged. “Jest trying to help, ma’am. Like we do in Tennessee. You ever been to Tennessee?”

“No. And we can talk here. What about Mandy? What was she afraid of inside there. Who?”

Max leaned against the building to disguise his height and tamped his boot toe bashfully into the littered asphalt. “She was a real nice girl. New to town, like me. Maybe jest new to this place. She seemed…kinda nervous, though. A nice girl. I like to come to see the nice girls, not those hard city women.”

“Really.” Molina was gritting her teeth at the hick act, so annoyed she couldn’t see straight. He hoped. “So you remember the date you saw Mandy?”

“Yes, ma’am. It was a Sunday, couple weeks ago. And then a couple days later, they said she’d been killed, so I remembered. But I’ll never forget that girl.” Something in his tone, maybe the truth, riveted her for the first time. “She didn’t want to be here, but it was all she knew to do. I was new, too, so we talked a little. She said some guy had hassled her at Secrets, that’s why she was over here at Baby Doll’s. It wasn’t as classy a joint, but someone told her it would be safer here.”