Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“But it was just the same. What’d she expect? Never mind. Okay, who hassled her at Secrets?”

“I dunno. Some guy. Another guy named…Vince? Yeah, Vince scared him off. I never saw any Vince here, though.” Might as well give yourself an alibi while you’re at it .

“You’re sure? Seventies sleaze disco kind of guy? Gold chains, greasy hair?”

“Ma’am, we don’t have anybody like that in Tennessee, ’ceptin’ Elvis, of course, and he was seventies.”

“I guess you’d know.” She gave him a disgusted once-over so speedy that she failed to recognize even Vince beneath the Elvis getup.

He’d told Temple the truth: naked was the best disguise, especially if you were a naked embarrassment.

“Like I said, I bought her a drink, she seemed to like to drink more’n dance, and we talked and she told me she didn’t feel safe here. Then she left sometime after her number. Never saw her go. Wish I had. I woulda seen her home.”

“And held her hand, no doubt.” Molina snorted. She pulled out her notebook. “What’s your name and where can I reach you?”

“Bobby Rae. Bobby Rae Dixon. You can reach me at the Alhambra Inn most nights. I do two shows, seven and eleven, but the eleven o’clock’s the one that really rocks.”

“Oh, joy.” Molina finished jotting down the lies he had told her, then looked back at Baby’s Doll’s vacant, graffiti-smudged exterior.

The parking-lot lights were bright and it was almost one in the morning. She probably had a full twelve-hour day of real work to put in ahead of her.

Would she give up with the shreds he had given her, and leave Nadir to him?

“Kin I see you to your car, ma’am?”

She looked at him as if he was crazy. “Take my advice. You need to run for the boonies. I’ll find my car myself.”

She stalked off, deflected by relentless southern redneck courtesy.

He waited politely by the building, on watch until she got in her car and drove off. Not her real car, of course, without her license plates.

He wondered where she had dug up the beater. She didn’t have a convenient network to tap into, as he did, because the last thing she’d want would be for anyone in her department to know she was out freelancing.

“Razor’s edge, Lieutenant, ma’am,” he murmured in farewell. “Listen to Elvis. He knows that stuff.”

Straightening, Max turned back to Baby Doll’s. Time to find out what Rafi Nadir was doing at the scene of the crime. Again.

Chapter 30

Ringed In

Matt’s ringing phone dredged him up from the first deep sleep he had fallen into for a week.

His bedside clock read 2:00 A.M.

At first he heard only the blare of music and a vague party sort of clatter and chatter. It sounded like a TV movie frat-house scene.

“Did you get my present?” a husky voice asked on a tone of unwelcome intimacy.

“The worm.” He tried to make it sound like what he’d call her face to face if he had a chance.

“For I am a worm,” she said, laughing, repeating the Good Friday antiphon.

“No, just a very sick woman.”

“Oh? Then you’ll do as I say. Let me ask you, what are you wearing?”

He also recognized the obscene phone-call ploy so often used by men against women that it had become a cliché.

“I guess I’ll hang up, or just whistle into the phone.”

“Oh, don’t hang up. Whistle, just whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad.”

It was the second time tonight someone he had reason to loathe had called Matt their lad, and he was getting sick of it.

“Listen, there’s a point where you push someone too far.”

A pause. “Shall I tell you what Miss Temple Barr is wearing tonight?”

A chill climbed his spine like ghostly fingers with long nails. Another thing to tell Kinsella: don’t drop in on Temple without expecting to be seen by your worst enemy. Kinsella wouldn’t like that, Matt warning him away from Temple. Matt didn’t mind.

“Not necessary,” Matt said as coolly as he could manage. “I’ll wear your hellish ring, but not the way you think.”

“Oh, really? Now you’re making this interesting. I will check up on you. Somewhere, sometime, some way. Thanks for making it interesting. But, then, you always do.”

She hung up.

He wiped a thin dew of sweat from his upper lip and remembered—tasted—a fresh burst of the corroding hatred he had once felt for his former stepfather.

Matt had thought himself over such negative emotions.

He had been wrong. Dead wrong. He should ask God for forgiveness, but he didn’t want to drag God into this. It might cramp his style.

Chapter 31

Elvis Leaves the Building

Max leaned against the filthy exterior of Baby Doll’s and actually smoked one of his prop cigarettes.

This was getting way too complicated. How could he get Molina off the night beat and back into her office where she belonged?

Nail Cher’s killer, that’s how. And nail Van Burkleo’s killer while he was at it. This was getting to be too big a job even for Superman.

A flare of smoke and music spat into the clean night air, the burst as shocking as the spray of a machine gun.

When the single front door to Baby Doll’s slammed shut, Rafi Nadir was out in the darkness with Max.

He stalked over.

“You the PI who was bothering the customers and girls in there?”

“Me? Man, I’m PE. Presley, Elvis, suh! Yes, suh, Colonel.” Max ran up a mock salute.

“You sure are a moth-eaten Elvis, man, now that I look at you. Sorry. I’m the house police, and I heard some private dick was hassling the customers. You got another coffin nail?”

“Shore.” Max tapped out a cigarette and provided a match for it, watching Nadir’s bloated features swell into focus while the match flame and the cigarette’s terminal ember flared. “Naw, I’m jest a country boy tryin’ to make a buck in the Big City. Quite some place.”

Nadir leaned against the building, took a deep drag. “Yeah. Cheesy town. Nothing like L.A. In L.A. you got your black and your yellow and your Mexican side of town. Big-time. Not the so-called ’hoods they have around here. It’s an industry there, man. This place is like a studio back lot. All show and no go. All front and no real action behind it. Like, even the Mob’s gone corporate. Trading stocks instead of bullets. There’s no real action anywhere here anymore.”

Max nodded. “I get yah.”

“Well, I’ll be outa this penny-ante bouncer stuff soon. There’s still something goin’ on I can latch onto. Maybe make a big buck or two while I still know how to spend it. Aw, whata I care whether some PI is nosing around, asking about some hopeless stripper who got herself throttled?”

“Throttled, huh? How’d you know that?”

“Word’s all over the strip clubs. The stupid whores are wearing dog collars to deter the Strip-joint Strangler, can you believe it? Nobody’s more superstitious than strippers and whores. They all think luck is what’s gonna save ’em. You see that rotten PI around here, son ”—Rafi Nadir thumped Max several times on the chest with a stiff forefinger—“you send ’im to Rafi Nadir for a talking-to. But only tonight. I’m gone after tonight. I got a brand-new gig. With a classy outfit. I’m on my way back up. That’ll show…whoever. When next you see me, I’ll be a customer with bucks to burn. I’ll be able to buy this place and use the profits to light my cigar.

“Here.”

Nadir stuffed a twenty-dollar bill in Max’s cigarette-cupping hand. “Here’s some money to burn, Elvis. You remember Rafi. You’re gonna hear about him again.”