Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

She didn’t feel them, though. She blinked. Brown. She looked so different . Why hadn’t she thought of color-changing contact lenses long ago? Maybe because she’d never needed glasses, never thought about it.

She turned away from the mirror. Turned back. She wondered how hard it had been to get brown contact lenses. Most people who used contact lenses to change or enhance their eye color went for exotic shades. Like violet. Or like Max Kinsella’s magician green.

When she had gotten older and entered a non-Hispanic world, every now and then a stranger would comment on her vivid blue eyes. They considered it a compliment, but by then she’d been conditioned to disown her own eye color, or discount it. Don’t it make your blue eyes brown , she mentally paraphrased the title of a song made popular by Linda Ronstadt. Latina Linda, despite the last name. Unlike any other woman in the country, she had always wished she could make her blue eyes brown. Now she had.

She finally examined her entire image in the mirror.

Her clothes were the same standard-issue, nondescript private-eye getup that she’d worn to Reno’s apartment and to Secrets.

But the eyes made all the difference.

That was how Kinsella could eel in and out of one persona and another. One right touch could totally skew an identity.

She gathered her bag, pregnant with the Beretta in its portable black leather paddle holster. Dolores was in the living room watching TV. Mariah was in her bedroom playing makeup with her friend Yolanda.

Carmen made it to the kitchen without Dolores looking at her. Two adolescent tiger-striped cats skidded across the countertop, stopping to sniff the foreign scent of contact lens solution on her fingers.

They regarded her with wide yellow eyes, oblivious to the revolution in her appearance.

She gave them each a chuck on the chin and called good-bye to Dolores. “Yolie’s parents will come for her at nine P.M. I’ll be back…late.”

“Fine.” Dolores was used to late-night duty at the Molina household. She was happy to get away from her own teenage houseful, Carmen thought.

What was next on her agenda? A strip club called Kitty City, chasing a lead she had unearthed at Secrets. Not just strippers moved from club to club. Or bouncers. A nervous little itch jigged in the pit of her stomach, one she hadn’t felt for a long time: knowing she was on the trail of a murderer, sensing she was getting closer, knowing that she might encounter Rafi Nadir and would have to fool him with her Hispanic eyes. Undercover, and hunting. Funny that Rafi Nadir hitting town had forced her to remember what homicide detail was all about.

Max was tempted to bring the Elvis impersonator out of the closet again tonight, but having been seen in that guise by Molina once, he didn’t care to pull off a repeat performance.

And Molina would be out there somewhere. Hopefully trying out her brand-new eyes in another direction.

He smiled at Rafi Nadir’s twenty-dollar bill, flashed at ersatz Elvis in a moment of braggadocio. It lay on his bureau top in a plastic baggie, ready to be dusted for fingerprints or checked for suspect serial numbers, if necessary.

Max doubted that would ever be necessary. Nadir was the stripper killer and would go down for that, not theft or counterfeiting or any lesser offense. Molina would owe him big-time for that, and then maybe she’d cooperate with him instead of blocking his every move.

He had decided to dress conservatively tonight: suits went to strip clubs too. Not many, and not to the fringe ones. More to the upscale clubs called New Orleans Nights that fronted billboards picturing James-Bond-level ladies in designer evening gowns. Guys from those places could slum.

So he put on a gray sharkskin suit. He didn’t like gray. Liked black and white. Or rainbows.

Fascinating, Nadir working part-time at Rancho Exotica. More than that. Strange. Or not so strange. They hunted helpless animals at Rancho Exotica. Nadir hunted helpless women at the strip clubs.

For a moment, in the small mirror on the bureau-top accessory chest that had belonged to Gandolph, Cher’s naked, defiantly frightened eyes peered at him through black holes of heavy eyeliner and mascara. A drunken deer in the spotlight. She’d been as easy to run down and throttle in the parking lot of that strip club as an aging, domesticated lion was to shoot at thirty feet in the dusty, fenced arena of a canned-hunt ranch.

Max found himself savagely knotting the conventional tie around his own throat. He hadn’t worn a tie in years, but doing a double Windsor was like riding a bicycle…or a Hesketh Vampire. You never forgot how. He had slicked back his hair into a Wall Street sheen and donned tiny rimless glasses like a stockbroker. He looked like a comfortably-off nerd who needed help with women.

A pigeon.

That was the way to go into strip clubs if you were a man and wanted to learn something.

The woman at the bar was using the mirror behind it to check out the crowd, but her eyes kept pausing on herself.

Stop it ! Molina told herself. This was not amateur night, even though she was posing as a PI, and even though she considered most of them amateurs.

She had to get past the oddity of her own appearance. It’d been too long since she’d done undercover work. Donning a micro-miniskirt and a bustier hadn’t thrown her on the last case. Maybe because she’d done the standup trashy tart role in L.A. vice years ago. Maybe because it was such a far cry from her daily administrative civvies these days. Totally out of character. But this, this brown-eyed woman in the mirror was too close for comfort.

For concentration.

No doubt Kinsella had wanted to throw her off her stride, get her out of his hair. There. That thought had got her adrenaline flowing. Whatever he wanted, he would get the opposite.

She swept her eyes over the mirror from left to right, ignoring the naked ladies, concentrating on the men. This place attracted tourists in short-sleeved shirts, a few businessmen in light-colored, lightweight suits, sans ties, punk kids just past twenty-one in sports clothes. No truckers, few jeans.

No one here looked like Rafi Nadir.

She’d tied a narrow scarf around her forehead to pull her hair back, just in case.

She really did look different, dammit.

Eyes back on the suspects.

One in particular. Nobody had zeroed in on this candidate, because the profile was all wrong. This one wasn’t obvious, like Rafi. But sometimes obvious wasn’t right.

Then, a dark head came cruising into view behind her. It was like sighting a shark fin in the water. She tensed, willed herself invisible.

Instead of this shark going for the gaudy, subtropical fish schooling at Kitty City, they headed for him: blondes, redheads, black women in platinum-white wigs.

Molina glimpsed green dollar bills waving as Kitty City’s strippers converged on the bait. “Chum,” they called it in the ocean fish-baiting game. At a strip joint, any guy with cash to wave around attracted an attractive crowd.

This guy was pushing through the tide to the bar, promising drinks all round.

She breathed out. He was just another celebrating good-time Charlie, not a bouncer coming on the job. He wasn’t who she’d thought he might be….

The girls surrounding him sank to seats along the almost empty bar, putting him into high relief, like an outcropping of rock marooned by the ebbing tide.

Her eyes wanted to bug out past the veiling contact lenses.

It was Rafi Nadir.

Molina’s eyes darted to her own reflection in the mirror, this time not transfixed by how different she looked to herself.

This time they were objective, keen, nervous. How different did she really look, to Rafi Nadir? Enough?